Preserved.

 On this date, at this hour, in 1863, approximately 11,500 Confederates under James Longstreet's command stepped off from Seminary Ridge to begin Pickett's Charge against the center of George Meade's Union army on Cemetery Ridge.

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 Armistead 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 than 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; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim. 

William Faulkner, from Intruder in the Dust

The description of Pickett's Charge from Ken Burns', The Civil War ...

From Smithsonian Magazine ...

A little over ten years after the start of the Civil War, in July 1871, Gen. George Meade spoke to a reunion of Union Army veterans in Boston.

“Comrades of the Army of the Potomac,” he began, “The first thing I shall do, which we ought to do…is to return our thanks to the Great Being who, in His infinite mercy, has allowed us to be here, to enjoy the pleasures of this meeting, who has blessed us and spared us through all the dangers of the war.”

Reconciliation; unification; a re-examination of the whys and wherefores of the greatest conflict in American history: All of these would be themes of later Civil War reunions and observances, leading up to the current 150th commemoration. What those veterans celebrated in the first major anniversary of the war was the simple fact that they had made it through alive.

“There was a desire among soldiers on both sides to bring moral clarity and purpose to what they had just experienced,” says Peter Carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. “We cannot forget that especially for Northern soldiers their celebration of Union meant something deep to them. They went to war to preserve the Union.”

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