Fight for the Summit

Fight for the Summit. July 2-3, 1863. , Culp's Hill, occupied by Union troops all three days of the battle, was 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 Cofederate soldiers battling for the hill. , One Union soldier recalled, "The whole hillside seemed enveloped in a blaze." The line of monuments to your right and left indicate the position of the Union defenders while Confederates assaulted up the wooded slopes to your front. After seven hours of combat, the Union line held firm. The fighting here foreshadowed a new kind of war. On the battlefields of 1864 and 1865 shovels and trenches proved to be as important as bullets and bayonets., (captions) , The fighting on Culp's Hill was the most sustained of the entire battle, lasting nearly seven hours on July 3 alone. "I cannot describe what I saw. It was too horrid," recalled Sgt. Lorenzo R. Coy of the 123rd New York. "Truly I thought as I passed over the field none but demons can delight in war.", Brigadier General George S. Greene graduated second in the West Point class of 1823. The oldest Federal general at Gettysburg, he mustered out of the army in 1866. He died in 1899, at age 97., Artist Edwin Forbes traveled with the Army of the Potomac during the Gettysburg Campaign. In this panting, he captured the formidable nature of the breastworks built by Union troops on Culp's Hill.