Pickett's Charge

These are places somebody grew corn, and now their name's carved into stone all over the country.

And then on July 3rd, Pickett's Charge.

12,000 men walking across open ground toward the middle of the Union line into massed artillery and rifle fire.

In the open.

They threw the windows open, not for the air, but for the smell.

When Lee left, he left 259 men in that building who were too broken to move.

One of them was Colonel Waller Patton, the great-uncle of George Patton, the World War II one, whose lower jaw had been destroyed by artillery during Pickett's charge.

He lingered there for weeks.

I said, I want to do

Pickett's Charge.

Right.

And I want to do it from like Lee's perspective.

There's a lot of history that is connected with World War I that is there.

It was a tank training ground right there on the fields of Pickett's Charge.

Eisenhower was, you know, stationed there during the First World War.

There

are a lot of locals who served in the Second World War.

The National Cemetery has soldiers who were killed on D-Day that are buried there.

It's also another thing that people don't know is right there on the fields of Pickett's Charge, there was a German POW camp that they built right there on the field.

So the history that we have and the artifacts that we have go beyond just the Battle of Gettysburg.

First, what is wrong with you? What is broken in you that you would go defile a monument? It's so frustrating.

But when you used to be able to be out there all night long, like we would see the sunrise, you know, you'd go out and walk Pickett's Charge at sunrise.

And, you know, they say you never walk alone.

And I have had so many interesting experiences there over the years.

It really is.

I mean this is – I mean, this is up with like Pickett's Charge about how stupid this whole idea was.

Senior officials from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey, which make up the new formed Mecca Alliance, have decided to meet with Iran.

And where do they meet with Iran? They met him in Saudi Arabia.

He's supposed to be totally unreadable.

But after the Battle of Gettysburg, he exchanged a series of letters with Davis Davis ended up sending Lee a letter and enclosed within it a copy of the Charleston Mercury, which was one of very few number of newspapers that had been critical of Lee's Gettysburg performance, including Lee's decision to attack on July 3rd in the attack known as Pickett's Charge.

Now, so he's got this critical newspaper from his president, and the president's inviting Lee's sort of response to those criticisms.

And Lee said that the comments from the Charleston Mercury fell harmless.

So Northern Papers transformed the July 1 Union defeat into the consequence of overwhelming Confederate numbers.

And it just simply was the case that there were more Confederate troops at Gettysburg on July 1st, at least for the battle, than there were Union troops.

Southern papers treated the catastrophe of July 3rd, this is the failure of Pickett's Charge, they treated it not as the fault of Robert E. Lee for making the decision to attack, but rather it's the result of It's just the Union having more soldiers and the defensive advantage that the Union had on higher ground.

That's what explains it away.