Good morning, it’s Tuesday, July 2, 2019.
On this date in 1863, in the fields outside the Pennsylvania village of Gettysburg, two great armies were poised to smash each other. The day before, Confederate commanders A.P. Hill and Richard Ewell had driven Union brigades back through the town, meaning that the way the battle lines were drawn, Robert E. Lee’s Southerners actually held the northern and western position of the battlefield.
The first day’s fighting had been inconclusive. Lee was fighting his first major battle without Thomas“Stonewall” Jackson, who had been mortally wounded at Chancellorsville. Stonewall Jackson was not an easy general to replace, which Ewell revealed on the first day by declining Lee’s“discretionary order” to attack a federal position called Cemetery Hill. Believing, erroneously, that too many Union troops were defending it, Ewell waited.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ar...or_140694.html