Cemetery Ridge at Sunset #12468

The Story

A Union cannon at sunset in the Bloody Angle stands overlooking the scene of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg National Military Park. The Confederate lines were in the dark distant treeline across open land filled with small farms, all of which were destroyed during the battle. The buildings in no man’s land between the lines were being used as sniper positions by the Confederates. Some Union forces were ordered forward to remove them by burning the buildings. Interestingly, none of the buildings and farms were ever rebuilt after the battle.

On the third and final day of the battle of Gettysburg, it was across this mile-wide field that Pickett’s Charge moved toward the Union line where this cannon stands on Cemetery Ridge. The high water mark of the change was exactly here, at a low stone fence with a bend in it called the Bloody Angle. The Confederates made it here but only for a moment before falling back with heavy losses. Their final charge had failed.

Under a beautiful evening sunset over a hundred and fifty years later, the sheer hell that clash created on Cemetery Ridge on that day is seriously hard to imagine. The day afterward, the Confederates began to move south out of the Gettysburg area and back into Virginia.

Incidentally, many of the cannons preserved on Civil War battlefield parks are the actual tubes used during the war, mounted on replica gun carriages. The place of a cannon’s manufacture is often molded into the metal around the mouth of the barrel, the business end.

Location: Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania.