The battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, fought over three days between July 1 and 3, 1863, has assumed a distinct significance in the history of the Civil War and of the United States. Historians now mark the battle (along with the simultaneous fall of the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Mississippi) as the turning point of the war. Textbook accounts often convey a sense of the battle as a single, straightforward event: a desperate, heroic, and (for the Confederates) doomed struggle that determined the ultimate outcome of the war. This consensus appears in textbook descriptions and numerous military explanations of the battle.

But the fighting at Gettysburg looked very different to different observers. Privates in the ranks saw the battle differently than did generals; Southerners understood the battle in profoundly different ways than their northern counterparts; and civilians both experienced and received a story of the battle that was different still. Finally, those who fought in the battle on July 3 recorded it differently than those who visited the battlefield weeks later, and depictions from the immediate aftermath of the battle read quite differently than those created years or decades later.

When the Civil War began in April 1861, both the Union and the Confederacy expected a brief and relatively bloodless struggle. But rather than a short, glorious fight, the war had become, by 1863, a protracted and massively destructive conflict with no clear end in sight. In the summer of 1863, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee abandoned the South’s generally defensive strategy and launched an invasion of the North in the hopes that a decisive victory on northern soil would force Abraham Lincoln’s administration to sue for peace. On July 1, 1863, Lee’s advance army encountered Union cavalry outside the quiet Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg.

What began as a limited fight between Lee’s advance units and some dismounted northern cavalry quickly mushroomed into the largest and most destructive battle in U.S. history. The vast majority of the 150,000 men who fought on one side or the other in the battle were not professional soldiers; two years earlier most had been farmhands, clerks, schoolteachers, and shopkeepers. Many had enlisted during the excitement of the first months of the war. By the end of July 3, 1863, more than 50,000 of these men were dead or wounded. The sites of the battle have become infamous for the ferocity of the combat that took place there, among them the Peach Orchard, the Wheat Field, the Devil’s Den, and Little Round Top.

On July 3, Lee, believing that a massive charge could pierce the weakened Union line, sent some 12,000 Confederate soldiers against the center of the Union position in an attack that has become known as Pickett’s Charge after the commander who led it. Union forces armed with dreadfully accurate rifled muskets and superior artillery decimated their ranks, and brutal fighting in close quarters ultimately forced the Confederates to turn back. Only half of the attacking rebel troops returned; losses in some units ranged as high as 80 percent. The climactic assault became synonymous with the futile sacrifice of frontal attacks during the Civil War. The retreating Confederate wagon train carrying the wounded from Gettysburg stretched fourteen miles. The battle of Gettysburg could have decisively ended the Civil War in 1863, but it failed to do so as the Union army failed to pursue the Confederates back across the Mason-Dixon line. However, it has remained in the historical record as one of the decisive battles in the conflict.

Fully aware of the magnitude of the battle and its significance to the course of the war, participants and observers tried to depict what they had witnessed. There was a large audience for those descriptions: citizens north and south wanted to know what had happened and what the battle had been like. Families of soldiers engaged in the fighting wanted to know what had happened to their loved ones. Those attempts to describe the battle employed a variety of different methods to express the reality of the battle. Some of those attempts are presented here.