The Desperate Gamble

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think ‘This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago….'”

– William Faulkner

Lewis B. Armistead

“Confederate General Lewis A. Armistead created one of the most familiar and stirring images in all of American history when he led his Virginia brigade to the forefront of the immortal charge by Pickett’s division at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. Shouting to his men as he strode to certain death with his hat carried on the tip of his sword, Armistead passed into American legend that hot afternoon. He remains perhaps the best known of the brigade commanders in the storied Army of Northern Virginia because of that final vivid episode of his life.

Armistead’s route to Gettysburg had carried him across North America as an Old Army officer. ‘I have been a soldier all my life,’ he wrote in 1861, and he gave up what little he had managed to accrue of means when he left the U.S. Army.
The regiments of Armistead’s brigade had seen combat near Richmond in 1862, but every man looking across the fields near Gettysburg could tell that July 3 would be deadly beyond imagining. While instructing his chief surgeon that he would ‘have much to do,’ Armistead revealed his forebodings: ‘Doctor, all Hell is going to turn loose here within fifteen minutes. The slaughter will be terrible.’
When the moment to begin the charge arrived, Lewis Armistead strode in front of his men and gave the order that would be fatal to so many of them. ‘He was an old army officer,’ a lieutenant wrote, ‘and was possessed of a very loud voice.’

Casualties dropped steadily out of the ranks as the Virginians came under artillery fire, but they fell in horrible windrows once in musketry range. As the attackers approached the low rock fence where Federal soldiers waited, Armistead turned to the commander of the 53rd Virginia Infantry and said, ‘Colonel, double quick.’ The colonel shouted for a renewed advance but almost at once fell severely wounded. At the wall, Armistead called out to his men: ‘Come on, boys, give them the cold steel! Who will follow me?’

The General’s hat eventually slid down the cold steel shaft of his sword, and he carried it forward that way, the sun glinting off his bare and balding head. Next to the Federal guns, Armistead went down, mortally wounded in the leg and arm, leaving a handful of survivors to ebb away from the high-water mark and begin a long painful retreat back to Virginia.”

– Robert K. Krick