Noah Andre Trudeau subtitled his magnificent book on the Battle of Gettysburg “a testing of courage.” Courage on both sides—Union and Confederate—was displayed on all three days of the battle, but none more than on the second day, July 2, 1863. While Pickett’s Charge on July 3 is better known, the day before ranked below only Antietam in terms of the number of casualties. On July 2, beginning around 4:00 p.m., Confederate armies under the direction of Gen. James Longstreet launched en echelon attacks on the Union fishhook-shaped line that stretched from Little Round Top at the southern end of Cemetery Ridge to Cemetery Hill, then bending to Culp’s Hill at the northern end of the ridge. Several times during these attacks, the Union line softened and nearly broke, but at the end of the day the Confederate attacks petered out as men on both sides lay dead and wounded throughout what historians called the “valley of death.” 

Prior to the Confederate attacks, Union Gen. Daniel Sickles, a “political general” who commanded the Third Corps at Gettysburg, decided on his own to move his corps forward from positions at the base of Little Round Top to higher ground at the Peach Orchard forming an L-shaped salient. This movement left a gap in the Union line and left Little Round Top and Big Round Top undefended. As Stephen Sears notes in his history of the battle, Sickles’s corps was now open to attack from both flanks and his extended line was stretched thin and therefore vulnerable.

Confederate commander Gen. Robert E. Lee attempted to take advantage of Sickles’s movement and position by ordering the en echelon attack. The historians Scott Bowden and Bill Ward, in their award-winning study of the battle Last Chance for Victory: Robert E. Lee and the Gettysburg Campaign, explained the essence of such an attack: “Unlike a simultaneous attack, where the entire line moved forward at the same time, an attack en echelon was designed to begin at one end of the line and, by progression, move along the line with each successive brigade taking up the assault.” The strength of such an attack, Bowden and Ward further explained, “was that it offered attacking generals with battlefield initiative and flexibility the opportunity to exploit enemy mistakes and follow up their own successes.” The attacks, wrote Shelby Foote in his magisterial history of the Civil War, were to proceed from left to right up the Emmitsburg Road, “gathering strength as it rolled northward.”

Sickles’s corps was hit next and pushed back in the Peach Orchard under assaults by Gen. William Barksdale’s Mississippians. Sickles lost one of his legs to Confederate artillery. In tough fighting, Confederate troops overran the Peach Orchard, but still more blood would be spilled in the Wheatfield, which changed hands a dozen times over the course of three hours. Barksdale’s troops, Bowden and Ward note, “had completely wrecked or shattered 13 Federal infantry regiments in combat that Gen. Longstreet called the ‘best three hours’ fighting ever done by any troops on any battlefield.”

Lee’s forces appeared to be winning the day. Relentless attacks now opened a “gaping hole” in the center of Cemetery Ridge. More than a thousand men of the 11th Alabama looked to exploit the gap. Union Gen. Winfield Hancock saw what was happening and ordered the 262 men of the 1st Minnesota Regiment to attack the Alabamans. Led by Col. William Colvill, the 1st Minnesota troops attacked and were slaughtered, suffering 80 percent casualties (dead and wounded), but the attack bought time for Hancock to order more reinforcements, and the Union line held.

As the evening of July 2 wore on, Confederate troops led by Gen. Jubal Early launched one more dangerous assault up the steep rise of Cemetery Hill. The historian Allen Guelzo notes that Early’s attack on Cemetery Hill for a brief moment gained enough ground “to have compelled an immediate Federal evacuation.” The capture of Cemetery Hill would have changed the course of the battle. There would have been no disastrous Pickett’s Charge the next day. Union forces would have lost the high ground and perhaps the battle. The course of the Civil War would have been altered much to the advantage of the Confederacy. But the attack sputtered as night fell on Cemetery Hill. Union forces remained in control of Cemetery Ridge.

Guelzo describes the second day of the battle as a series of “agonizingly near misses” for Lee’s army. Bowden and Ward wrote that “the fighting on July 2nd had come as close as possible to breaking apart . . . [the] Army of the Potomac without actually doing so.” Trudeau opined that “in retrospect, it was the day on which Robert E. Lee came closest to achieving the ‘concert of action’ he believed to be necessary for victory.”

Pickett’s Charge on July 3, 1863, may be more famous, but the butcher’s bill for July 2 was about ten thousand Union casualties (dead, wounded, missing, captured) and around eight thousand Confederate casualties, for a total of approximately eighteen thousand. As we approach another anniversary of that momentous battle, it is clear that both armies met the “test of courage.”