Sixteen Casualties Per Second

Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg is well known. Perhaps because it constituted "The High Water Mark of the Confederacy" it is widely considered to have been the most costly charge of the war.

Conventional estimates of the number of men who made up the mile wide attack line vary around thirteen thousand. remarkably few authorities venture to estimate the number of casualties and many simply echo Robert E. Lee's terse comment "The task was too great." John Michael Priest departs sharply from tradition in his meticulously documented study of the charge that is entitled Into the Fight. He calculates that 13,155 men marched towards Cemetery Ridge that afternoon, and that the divisions under George E. Pickett, James Johnson Pettigrew and Isaac Trimble suffered 8,399 casualties during the hour long assault. If the estimate is accurate, the brave Southern men who crossed the field fell at the rate of about 2.33 per second.

Almost exactly one year after Pickett's Charge at 4.30 in the morning of 2nd June 1864, Gen. George Gordon Meade's Army of the Potomac at Cold Harbour, Virginia, launched a charge across a six mile front. About thirty thousand men, three times as many as Lee sent against the centre of Meade's line on 3rd July 1863, went forward. many of them had pinned their names and addresses on their uniforms, hoping that their bodies would be identified and sent home after the powder smoke had cleared from the battlefield.

Most of the Union casualties in 1864 at Cold harbour were suffered during a hellish ten minutes of butchery during which 7,000 to 10,000 men were felled by Confederate fire. In sterile mathematical terms that means that as many as 16.6 men fell every second, compared to 2.33 per second rate of casualties during Pickett's Charge.

George E. Pickett was on the field that June morning and in some small way he saw his shredded division avenged terribly.

The above article first appeared in the ACWS Newsletter, Winter 2007