The Battle of Gettysburg

Before the Battle of Gettysburg, the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania was "of no importance and no consequence: like Waterloo (where Napoleon was defeated) it was illuminated by the sheer war. The essence of war is accident," Arthur C. Danto writes eloquently, in an otherwise bloodthirsty apologia of an essay titled "Gettysburg."

The battle itself happened as a kind of accident. The commanding Confederate general Robert E. Lee had happened upon the town on July 1, 1863, when fellow General James Longstreet rode up beside a stationary, horse-backed Lee and espied through his binoculars the gathered Union soldiers between the town's two great ridges. Longstreet proposed going around and behind, cutting the Union off from reinforcements that could move in from D.C. "No," said Lee, "the enemy is there and I am going to attack him there." Those words and that decision proved famous, fateful, and fatal.

The Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point of the war, the battle in which it became clear that Union forces would prevail. 50,000 men lost their lives on the battlefield that day, the bloodiest in the entire war.