Last week, our office traveled on a staff ride to what is perhaps the most well-known Civil War battle site, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  The staff ride is a military custom and training tecnique whereby lessons from history can be used and applied to the future.  Staff rides have been traditionally used to train military officers by studying historical battles.  Doubtless, staff rides have been used by generations of warriors. In the late 19th century, the German Army used the concept of the staff ride to help train its general officers who studied battles from the Napoleonic wars to better understand what happened, why, and how those lessons could be learned and applied to future battles.  Staff rides were widely adopted by the United States Army to train officers at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School.  These Army officers often studied Civil War battles such as Gettysburg, Antietam and Petersburg to learn lessons that might be applied in the future. 

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1-3, 1863.  It was the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, resulting in nearly eight thousand dead and more than twenty-seven thousand wounded between North and South in just three days.  Gettysburg was in many ways the turning point of the war.  Approximately five months after the battle, on November 19th, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg where he delivered his famous address. 

Our two days in Gettysburg were spent following the major points of the battle from the fighting that occurred on the first day of the battle north of the town of Gettysburg to the union defensive line that formed on the second day and which saw so much intense fighting in places like Little Round Top, Devil's Den, the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard near the left end of the Union lines and Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill to the right of the Union lines and on to Pickett's Charge on the final day of battle in which Confederate forces were repulsed from an assault near the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge.