GETTYSBURG 1863

During the first three days of July 1863, 160,000 Confederates and Union soldiers fought a gigantic battle in a small corner of the south-eastern Pennsylvania countryside, at Gettysburg. The bloodiest battle in all of North American history.

In the eyes of contemporaries, the stakes were enormous: to determine the future — united or fractured — of the United States of America. Had its outcome been different, the face of the world would undeniably have been changed.

This battle, the product of several weeks of a military campaign conducted at a relentless pace and an impromptu encounter between General George G. Meade's Army of the Potomac and General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, is known to every American citizen — if only through the address delivered there by Abraham Lincoln on the following 19 November, a few unforgettable phrases that became the founding words of modern American democracy.

The circumstances in which it was fought, the context, the course of events, the outcome, and the unparalleled scale of the losses would ultimately concentrate the essential weight of the conflict's mythologised memory — to the detriment, in particular, of other major battles and the dozen or so great "duels" fought by the two armies between 1862 and 1864.