Gettysburg National Military Park

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought over three days in the first week of July 1863, when General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia collided with Major General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac in the rolling farmland south of the Pennsylvania borough. The engagement began almost accidentally on July 1 when Confederate forces moving toward Gettysburg encountered Union cavalry along Chambersburg Pike. By afternoon, fighting had engulfed the ridgelines north and west of town, and the Union forces fell back to Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill south of the borough.

July 2 brought the war’s most desperate fighting. Confederate attacks on the Union left — through Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, and up the rocky slopes of Little Round Top — came within yards of collapsing the Union line. The 20th Maine Infantry’s bayonet charge down Little Round Top under Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain held the extreme left flank and has become among the most celebrated actions in American military history.

On July 3, Lee ordered a frontal assault against the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. Pickett’s Charge — nearly 12,500 Confederate soldiers advancing across three-quarters of a mile of open field under devastating artillery and rifle fire — broke against the Union line at the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy.” The Confederate army withdrew southward on July 4, leaving behind roughly 51,000 combined casualties, the largest of any engagement fought in the Western Hemisphere.

The battlefield is one of the most comprehensively preserved in the world. The Museum and Visitor Center, opened in 2008, houses the Gettysburg Cyclorama — a 360-degree painting of Pickett’s Charge measuring 42 feet tall and 377 feet in circumference — along with thousands of artifacts and an immersive film narrated by Morgan Freeman. Auto tour routes wind through the battlefield’s most significant positions, and ranger programs interpret the fighting from both Union and Confederate perspectives.

Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address here on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, where 3,512 Union soldiers are interred.