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This is the scene of Pickett’s Charge which occurred on the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Over 12,000 soldiers of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia marched three-quarters of mile from Seminary Ridge across the open fields toward the Union position along the low stone wall. Almost from the beginning the Union artillery began a relentless barrage on the advancing Confederates. As they neared the Union line, the southerners met a hail of lead and iron from the Army of the Potomac commanded by General George G. Meade. South of the Angle men from Pickett’s brigades, bunched and disorganized, briefly breached the Union line but were hurled back by a determined Union counter attack. North of The Angle, the Confederates, decimated by canister and musket fire, never made it to the wall. Of those who began the assault, perhaps half returned to Seminary Ridge unscathed. On the following day, July 4, 1863, the battlefield was silent and the two armies gathered the wounded and the dead. The skies grew gray and darkened. A steady rain, whose symbolism has long been noted, began.
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