Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Gettysburg
Fought over the first three days in July 1863, the battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was
the turning point in the long, bloody War Between the States, or Civil War. Knowing that his outnumbered
troops could not win a long, drawn-out war against the richer, more populous, industrialized northern
states, Confederate general Robert E. Lee (1807-70) attempted to carry the war to the North. After a
series of victories against inferior Union commanders, Lee took his seventy-five thousand seasoned troops
through the rich Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and into Pennsylvania. He hoped to outflank the Union
Army, then drive south and take Washington, DC, demoralize the enemy, and quickly end the war with
European recognition of the Confederate States.
More by accident than design, a party of Confederate scouts, said to be looking for shoes, encountered
a patrol from the Union's Army of the Potomac. They met at the small town of Gettysburg, a crossroads
for a railroad line and a dozen roads leading to all points of the compass. After this initial accidental en-
gagement, commanders on both sides poured troops into the town, with the Union soldiers arriving first
and in sufficient force to take the high ground that would prove to be of decisive importance in this long,
ghastly battle. A brilliant commander who had reluctantly left the United States Army when his home state
of Virginia seceded from the Union, Lee knew victory would clear the way for a swift strike at the nation's
capital. He had the confidence of a general whose armies had outfought those of the Union at nearly every
turn.
For three days, the fighting was fierce, often hand to hand. Against wave after wave of Confederate
infantry charges, the Union forces held their ground until Lee was forced to withdraw from the field. Tens
of thousands died on both sides, and Lee's army, dealt an almost fatal blow, limped back toward Virginia.
The failure of the Union commander to pursue the bedraggled southerners and finish them off was a con-
troversial decision that may have prolonged the war for several more years of bitter fighting, ultimately
reducing the South to smoldering ruins.
With the Union victory, Confederate hopes for recognition and assistance from Europe withered
overnight. Lee's best army, having lost its aura of invincibility, would never again be able to withstand the
massive Union advantages in manpower, supplies, and wartime production.
Little Big Horn
One of those present at Gettysburg was an ambitious, twenty-three-year-old “boy gen-
eral” whose cavalry held off the Confederate reinforcements under one of Lee's ablest generals, Jeb Stuart.
That Union cavalryman was George Armstrong Custer (1839-76). Hailed for his performance at Gettys-
burg, Custer would achieve a kind of immortality for his part in another bloody disaster, the Battle of the
Little Big Horn, also called Custer's Last Stand. An eccentric egotist, Custer wore black velvet uniforms
he had designed himself and shoulder-length blond hair; the Indians called him “Long Hair.”
After witnessing the slaughter by whites of great herds of buffalo as the railroads moved west, the
Plains Indians attempted a defiant stand to retain the lands they had been guaranteed under peace treaties
made—and broken—by the federal government. When Custer led a band of prospectors into the Black
Hills of South Dakota and found gold, prompting a gold rush for Indian lands, the scene was set for a
showdown between the Plains Indians and the “pony soldiers.”
Ignoring the advice of scouts who reported the large numbers of Indians gathering against him near
the Little Bighorn River valley in Montana, Custer divided his command and ordered an attack. Without
making proper reconnaissance, Custer was sure that his troopers could handle the thousand Indians he ex-
pected. On June 25, 1876, hopelessly outnumbered by more than three thousand Sioux warriors, his entire
command was slaughtered in about half an hour of fighting.
Word of the battle, which reached back East as the nation was celebrating its centennial, prompted
calls for massive retribution against the Indians. This battle, one of the few Indian victories in their three-
hundred-year struggle against the inexorable European invasion, made Custer a revered American folk
