Fight for the Summit

Culp's Hill, occupied by Union troops all three days of the battle, formed the critical right flank of the Union defense line. At mid-morning on July 2, elements of the Twelfth Corps arrived to reinforce the hill, including the 1,400-man brigade of George S. Greene. That night, his New Yorkers, along with reinforcements from the First and Eleventh Corps, successfully fought off 4,700 Confederates and held the upper summit. Before sunrise, fighting resumed with 22,000 Union and Confederate soldiers battling for the hill, and after seven hours of combat the Union line held firm. The fighting there was the most sustained of the entire battle, lasting nearly seven hours on July 3 alone, and it foreshadowed a new kind of war in which, on the battlefields of 1864 and 1865, shovels and trenches proved to be as important as bullets and bayonets.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania · United States