For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position … and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet … and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time …

— From “Intruder in the Dust” by William Faulkner

One hundred forty years ago today, General George Pickett and his gallant men made their tragic charge up Cemetary Ridge, thousands of men died uselessly (half of his division), and the Confederate cause began to unravel.

The fall of Vicksburg to Grant the next day would sunder the South, and these two events in early July, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi, would lead inexorably to the defeat of the rebellion.