No succor could be given. The Confederates were massing their artillery on Seminary Ridge. The Union legions were burrowing and planting new batteries.
Fifteen thousand helpless, wounded men lay on the field through the long hours of the night.
At ten o'clock a wounded man began to sing one of the old hymns of Zion whose words had come down the ages wet with tears and winged with human hopes. In five minutes ten thousand voices, from blue and gray, had joined. Some of them quivered with agony. Some of them trembled with a dying breath. For two hours the hills echoed with the unearthly music.
At a council of war Longstreet begged Lee to withdraw from Gettysburg and pick more favorable ground. Reinforced by the arrival of Pickett's division of fifteen thousand fresh men and Stuart's Cavalry, he decided to renew the battle at dawn.
The guns opened at the crack of day. For seven hours the waves of blood ebbed and flowed.
At noon there was a lull.
At one o'clock a puff of white smoke flashed from Seminary Ridge. The signal of the men in gray had pealed its death call. Along two miles on this crest they had planted a hundred and fifty guns. Suddenly two miles of flame burst from the hills in a single fiery wreath. The Federal guns answered until the heavens were a hell of bursting, screaming, roaring shells.
At three o'clock the storm died away and the smoke lifted.
Pickett's men were deploying in the plain to charge the heights of Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand heroic men were forming their line to rush a hill on whose crest lay seventy-five thousand entrenched soldiers backed by four hundred guns.
Pickett's bands played as on parade. The gray ranks dressed on their colors. And then across the plain, with banners flying, they swept and climbed the hill. The ranks closed as men fell in wide gaps. Not a man faltered. They fell and lay when they fell. Those who stood moved on and on. A handful reached the Union lines on the heights. Armistead with a hundred men broke through, lifted his red battle flag and fell mortally wounded. The gray wave in sprays of blood ebbed down the hill, and the battle ended. Meade had lost twenty-three thousand men and seventeen generals. Lee had lost twenty thousand men and fourteen generals.