July 1, 1863
On July 1, 1863, the lead elements of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia moved toward Gettysburg in the belief that much-needed shoes for rebel soldiers (who often marched barefoot) were being protected by local militia. Confederate Gen. Henry Heth of Gen. A. P. Hill’s Third Corps soon found out that instead of militia, he faced the seasoned veterans of Gen. John Buford’s First Division of the Union Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac. Buford engaged Heth at Herr’s Ridge and applied a tactic called depth-in-defense, in which a smaller force engages a larger number of troops and fights them long enough to slow their advance, then falls back and deploys in a new line of defense. Buford’s goal was to slow the Confederate advance until Union infantry could arrive and engage the enemy on equal terms.
Buford held off the Confederate advance long enough for Union infantry to arrive, with Gen. John Reynolds First Corps positioning on McPherson Ridge and Gen. Oliver Howard’s Eleventh Corps defending the area just north of Gettysburg. The initial Confederate assaults down the Chambersburg Pike were repulsed, but at great cost to the Union First Corps, as General Reynolds became the first general killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. The Confederate Second Corps, under Gen. Richard Ewell, then began a massive assault from the north, with Gen. Robert Rodes’s division attacking from Oak Hill and Gen. Jubal Early’s division attacking across the open fields north of town, crashing into Howard’s Eleventh Corps, crushing the left flank of the Union line. At the same time, Confederate Gen. Dorsey Pender’s Division struck the First Corps, who had fallen back to Seminary Ridge. Their attack was so ferocious that the weary men of the First Corps began to give ground, and when the Eleventh Corps line collapsed around four p.m., the entire Army of the Potomac was retreating through the town of Gettysburg. They took up good defensive positions on Cemetery Hill and waited for additional attacks. Despite discretionary orders from General Lee to take the heights “if practicable,” General Ewell chose not to attack. Historians have debated ever since how the battle might have ended differently if he had found it practicable to do so.
Just over 9,000 Union soldiers were casualties on the first day’s action; of those, slightly more than 3,000 were taken prisoner. For the Confederates, total casualties reached 6,500. To put this into perspective, in 12 hours of fighting, there was a combined causality rate of 1,292 soldiers per hour, which means that for every minute of fighting, 22 men were killed, wounded, or captured.