by Jack Heart, via Veterans Today
It was a sweltering hot July day in 1863 at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Union Army of the Potomac and heretofore never defeated the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had been locked for the previous two days in what is still the bloodiest battle in America’s history. On the first day, the Army of Northern Virginia had missed a golden opportunity to take the battlefield stronghold on Cemetery Ridge from the soundly beaten and demoralized Army of the Potomac when the normally aggressive General Richard Ewell inexplicably chose not to attack.
Now the Union army was firmly entrenched all along the ridgeline. General Robert E. Lee, arguably the greatest military strategist since Napoleon himself, decided the enemy position was vulnerable at a low point in the ridge. His Union opponent General George Meade had anticipated this and made it known to his subordinates in a war council the night before.
At two o’clock that afternoon, Lee gave the order to his right-hand man General James Longstreet to attack. Longstreet had been opposed to the attack from the beginning and been urging Lee to execute a flanking maneuver that would force the Army of the Potomac to withdraw from its position on the ridge in order to protect Washington DC.
With a nod, because he could not bring himself to speak the terrible command, Longstreet gave the order to General George Pickett. Twelve thousand five hundred men advanced over three-quarters of a mile on undulating open terrain in a line that began over a mile long into a hailstorm of metal.
Although the Confederates had pounded the Union position for over an hour with almost a hundred and seventy heavy cannons, their fire had been ineffective, and Longstreet knew it. The line of advancing men would shrink to a half-mile as they closed ranks around their fallen comrades. Only half the men would make it, some even taking the position, only in their weakened strength to be driven off it by a Union counterattack. Their furthest point of advance would come to be known as the High Water Mark of the Confederacy.
The Confederates would never recover. Until what has become known as Pickett’s Charge, they had been winning the Civil War handily. The Battle of Gettysburg was their coup de grace; an invasion of the North. If they had emerged from it victorious, as all logic says they should have, there was nothing to stop them from sacking Philadelphia and forcing the Union to sue for peace.
Lee, who had previously been labeled by other generals as ‘The King of Spades’ because of his penchant for digging fortified entrenchments to preserve the lives of his men, had recklessly squandered the cream of Southern manhood by launching a suicidal assault on an opponent of equal strength in a heavily fortified position. Military historians still struggle attempting to explain the great general’s violation of the first rule of tactics, which long ago had been established by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz that such a position may only be assaulted when the attacker has at least a two to one numerical superiority.
Instead of the Union begging the Confederacy for peace President Abraham Lincoln, who had done everything he could to instigate the war short of fighting in it himself, like a vulture made a crowing political speech over the rotting corpses of the men who died there. The speech would come to be known as the Gettysburg Address. It made the war about something it never was; freeing the slaves. Almost none of the valiant men who died there even owned slaves and Ewell had been lobbying Jefferson Davis, the president of the South, to free them anyway because he needed more men to fight in the Souths badly outnumbered army.
No one with a fully functional brain who hasn’t been indoctrinated on the divisive rhetoric of their own hidden masters believes the South would not have freed their slaves within ten years. They certainly would not have promised them forty acres and a mule then reneged in order to force them into rapidly industrializing cities to work in an alien environment in the sweatshops of oligarchs for a quarter of the pay the White man would get. The Black ghettos of New York, Detroit, Philadelphia and all the rest of the Northern cities bear mute but irrefutable testimony that this is exactly what the North did with the slaves it “freed,” despite the endless prattling of useful idiot academics…
The men from the Army of Northern Virginia who perished that hot July day knowingly marching right into the maw of death were by the very definition of the word heroes. But history is written only by the victor, and in this case, the victor was an avaricious empire that had begun centuries before on the filthy streets of London. The Spanish American War, whereby the empire would absorb the Spanish Empire, World War one and two, whereby the empire would attempt to break the back of the German people and bankrupt the French would all follow in succession.
