On this date in 1863 ...

Show the Victor of Gettysburg some respect!!

 

As for the Lost Cause, much of that comes from Jubal Early deflecting the blame from the Sons of Old Virginia. It had to be Longstreet's fault. He couldn't even give the order to start the Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Advance.
Yeah, because Longstreet knew it was a stupid idea to slowly march a mile uphill in an open field against a covered and dug in force.

 

I found out 10 years later that I forced my dad to walk up Big Round Top during a gallbladder attack. He never let on at the time, knowing I really wanted to see it.

 

Went to Gettysburg three weeks ago. Little Round Top was closed.

 

Yes, they just did some structural work and updating. The West Point Battery (Hazlett's battery) was put back in place and Warren's original binoculars were on display yesterday and it is close to being ready to reopen.

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If only today's internet historians could actually understand like the people who were ACTUALLY FUCKING THERE.

 

The most important day of the year in American history is August 16, 1777 when General Stark and the Green Mountain Boys tenderized Burgoyne and British so badly that they surrendered 3 months later in Saratoga. First major win of the Revolution ... "Turning Point of the Revolution" ... that created a domino effect and without 8/16/1777 we'd be sipping tea at 4 o'clock every day and there'd be no New York Yankees or Pittsburgh Steelers or Frisco and Felicia or Amanda Gorman's poetry or Jason Whitlock's chicanery.

 

so Benedict Arnold was right?

 

Oh, IDK. Canada and Australia and lots of other countries that didn't fight England eventually became independent. I suspect the same would have been true for the US, just not in 1781. I also think duct tape would have been invented even without the space program.

A lot of people who woke up alive on 7/3/1863 didn't have another morning on this earth, that's for sure.

"General, I have no division."

 

"It took a dozen blunders to lose the battle of Gettysburg, and I committed a good number of them" -- Gen. Richard Ewell, Army of Northern Virginia.

 

This was at Little Round Top yesterday.

 

Let's not forget the insane story of Union General "Devil" Dan Sickles who, in the 1850s, murdered the boyfriend of his young wife in broad daylight across the street from the White House...and got acquitted on a then-novel defense strategy (temporary insanity).

Sickles, a Tammany Hall Dem Congressman before and after the war lost his right leg at Gettysburg....and then lived to be almost 100.