Okay, so, while Americans go about enjoying the 4th of July as our Independence Day, just how do other nations perceive the UTTER GREATNESS OF EAGLELAND BOO RAH!
Well, on the bright side, they see us teaming up with lions to shoot zombie Hitlers...
Thank GOD we have Chris Evans giving us America's Ass...
Oh CMON we're not all about pizza and hamburgers and cursing every other word... (realizes I'm grilling bacon cheeseburgers for dinner this 4th) Oh SONOFABITCH...
I'm sure the Europeans are going to be more accurate when describing Americans!
We're LOUD?! WE'RE LOUD?!?!? OH CMON... and again with the food! We got our food from YOU peeps! /cries
I have, right here, the actual Honest To God reason for the Civil War:
DONUTS WITH RED WHITE AND BLUE SPRINKLES are SERIOUS BUSINESS, ROBERT DOWNEY JR!!!!!!!
...okay, back to the history lesson.
On this day at Gettysburg, General Lee decided on an all-out attack at the Union center. Believing the Northern forces would be too spread out and reinforcing the flanks he had attacked on Day Two, he wanted to send as massive a number of troops he could - three divisions - to break the Union line altogether.
Problem was distance. It was pretty much a half-mile march across open terrain, and there was no damn way any army would last long crossing that space.
Look at that: that's what 14,000 men had to cross facing 10,000 guns in a near-perfect defensive position...
Lee planned on a massive artillery barrage as a means of softening up the Union lines before he sent his divisions across. It didn't work: Confederate artillery overshot the Union defensive positions along Cemetery Ridge leaving most of those troops and their own cannons intact. And the South didn't have enough artillery to ensure they could take enough Union positions out.
And somewhere before 3:00 PM, Pickett's Charge - along with Trimble and Pettigrew's divisions - marched across that open field.
It ruined the Confederate army: over 60 percent of those divisions were killed, wounded or captured. Generals like Lewis Armistead were killed. Troops and officers Lee could not replace were gone forever.
Instead of a decisive Confederate victory - and one that could garner European recognition and support - it was a decisive Union victory. Combined with the loss that same day of the key city of Vicksburg - which meant the Mississippi River was under full Union control - it signaled that the Southern states would not, could not win their war to preserve their way of life (i.e., agrarian plutocracy driven by slave labor and King Cotton).
And yet they kept fighting for two more years of civil war... and a hundred years of Jim Crow segregation and lynching... and another fifty years fighting the civil rights laws of the 1960s and today... /headdesk
