'Pride Was Repelled By Sterner Pride'

In Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), the historian Allen C. Guelzo quotes the nineteenth-century English Liberal statesman Richard Cobden, who asked, “If the United States go wrong what hope have we of the civilized world in our turn?” Guelzo replies: 

“Preventing that wrong turn was what the preservation of the Union was about. Emancipating American slaves would remove the cause of that wrong, and make the Union worth preserving. But neither of them would be possible without the triumph of the Union armies. And Gettysburg would be the place where the armies of the Union would receive their greatest test, and the Union its last invasion.”

 

The question and Guelzo’s answer are always worth pondering. Are Americans willing to stand with the Union troops on Cemetery Ridge during Pickett’s Charge? This “greatest test” came on July 3, 1863, the third day of battle. The northernmost incursion by Confederate forces, into southeastern Pennsylvania, was repulsed, marking what came to be called “the high-water mark of the Confederacy.” Total estimated casualties in a single afternoon: 51,112 killed, wounded, taken prisoner.

 

Guelzo uses Herman Melville’s “Gettysburg: The Check” (Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 1866) as his extended epigraph and the likely source of his title: “God walled his power, / And there the last invader charged.” Melville’s rendering of Pickett’s Charge is a powerful reminder for every American, Southerner or Northerner:

 

“He charged, and in that charge condensed

  His all of hate and all of fire;

He sought to blast us in his scorn,

            And wither us in his ire.

Before him went the shriek of shells-

Aerial screamings, taunts and yells;

Then the three waves in flashed advance

  Surged, but were met, and back they set:

Pride was repelled by sterner pride,

  And Right is a strong-hold yet.”