Did General Lee Command His Troops to Attack

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One of the bloodiest battles ever to happen on American soil is known as picket’s charge. There is a lot of controversy on why general lee ordered 13,000 American soldiers take a suicide mission. General lee was the unions strongest general and maybe the best general in the entire civil war. The debated topic is why would general lee make such an unorthodox decision because the results were the slaughtering of his army. General lee commanded that the 5,000 men that Pickett’s men were to line up in the woods and get ready to charge up cemetery hill. Hood and Mclaws troops had suffered to many casualties so their units were given the day off. Other confederate divisions helped the attack so that the massed up around 14,000 men. The army’s began with both sides firing cannons at each other for more than two hours. According to &, m. t. (2008, July 3), “more than 100 guns shook the hill from crest to base.” Though most of the cannons shot missed they still provided some support for the confederate army. Though the cannons did not make much of a difference the confederates started to run low on ammunition. Longstreet then gave Pickett the order to charge. The battle was a complete annihilation of the confederates. According to “civil war sources”(n.d.), of the 14,000 men that started the charge on the few that are left run back to the whence they came from. General believed that his men could win this fight. According to Thompson (2007), “ he thought he could win because the weakest point in the union defense was in the very center. Second He had the decision of dividing up his cannon power or putting it all together for one big attack, and last of all Lee thought that his army was the strongest on the earth and they could do anything that he asked.” General only realized what damage he had done to his entire army when the fight was over. According to Pickett’s
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