It is altogether fitting and proper that we do this...

 

“The world will little note,

 nor long remember what we say here,

while it can never forget what they did here.”

It was 162 years past on this day before Independence Day when Confederate Generals Robert Lee and James Longstreet issued the infamous orders to General George Pickett – make that July Third charge across one mile of open fields to engage the perceived “weaker center” of the Union lines. About 15,000 rebel soldiers engaged Federal Forces in what is known today as Pickett's Charge. We don't have exact causality numbers, but certainly over one-third of Pickett's men lay dead, dying, or with significant wounds on that Gettysburg killing field, all within a couple hours from the start of this aggressive rebel action.  And the Union forces suffered greatly too, with smaller but very significant casuality figures, a number perhaps three-quarters of whatever the rebel casuality number really was on this day.

Most historians still place the number of casualties at more or less 53,000 over those first three days in July 1863 during The Battle of Gettysburg. But a few seemingly more rational folks now suggest the true causality numbers at Gettysburg may actually exceed 75,000, this when considering the uncounted collateral human damage suffered in early July. It is interesting that the Civil War Era after-action bean counters did not consider or count those soldiers with significant wounds who likely died months or years later as a direct result of Gettysburg wounds or disease.

When Blue union forces and Gray rebel forces left Gettysburg, the deplorable conditions left for area civilians to deal with is not typically mentioned... safe food supplies gone or very significantly dwindled, clean water is now questionable or unavailable, and human and animal carnage left where they fell or at best then placed in very shallow battlefield graves. Seems obvious to the most casual observer that an uptick in related disease must have been true in the Gettysburg, PA area general civilian population over the ensuing months and years... women, children, disabled, and the aged must have been greatly suffering.

“...these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation,

 under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,

 and that government of the people, by the people,

 for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Gettysburg Address

POTUS Abraham Lincoln

November 1863