It's 12:18, July 3, 2019. In about 42 minutes from now . . . at 1 PM, 156 years ago . . . . will begin the largest exchange of cannon fire in North America and set the stage for the defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg.
This video . . . . part of the "
Unsolved History" series . . . . does a pretty good job of analyzing why Pickett's Charge failed.
Gettysburg Pickett's Charge
It places most of the blame on Lee's failure (actually Longstreet's failure) to clear away the fencing on either side of the Emmitsburg Road which at the time was a two-foot deep sunken road. Their theory is that the fencing posed a severe obstacle which caused the Confederate infantry to hit the dirt instead of making the final charge.
So why did Confederate commanders fail to clear the fencing?
What troops would have done so?
I did find reference to the Confederacy creating an engineer regiment in 1864, but I did not find any reference to "engineers" in Longstreet's Corps. Unlike today's Army where each division is assigned an engineer battalion and a corps is assigned an engineer brigade, Longstreet's Corps doesn't appear to have had any. From what I did find, it was the Union that most employed engineers as "sappers" . . . to dig saps, tunnels, emplace mines, etc, during sieges. Great examples of this can be found at Vicksburg and Petersburg. We also know that engineers were used to emplace pontoon boats, repair bridges and build things.
But were there specific troops assigned to clear away battlefield obstacles in front of an advancing line? I don't think so.
So, if Longstreet's Corps had no dedicated engineers to clear the way for the infantry, whose job was it?
Could it have been the job of skirmishers?
According to this source
The Evolution of Skirmish Tactics in the U.S. Civil War the answer is no. Clearing obstacles was not a doctrinally assigned mission for skirmishers. Emphasis on "doctrinally." Could they have been tasked to do it? Of course.
Were skirmishers deployed in Pickett's Charge? Yes, at least some were, according to Sergeant Major Tom Elmore in his civilwartalk post
here.
So if there were no special troops assigned to clear obstacles and the skirmishers probably weren't doing it, how did commanders expect to cross the fences?
I did find this reference to clearing obstacles in the front in a
"DRILL FOR DUMMIES" review of the School Of The Battalion.
and I did find in
Scott's Infantry Tactics, Vol III Evolution Of The Line Article 8,
Link description of "how to pass a defile." (Interestingly, there were places where the fencing had fallen or been pushed over and Confederate infantry did stream through . . . making them vulnerable to concentrated Union artillery.)
Clearly then, commanders understood in at least a doctrinal sense, that the way forward might be impeded and commands would be needed to control the line.
Since I can't think of many examples where fencing proved to be an obstacle . . . .
could it be that Confederate unit commanders on the 3rd of July, 1863, didn't think about it much at all?
Could it be they simply assumed their men would figure it out?
(Note: There is a previous post on this subject from several years ago here:
Why wasn't the fence on the Emmittsburg Rd. cleared before Pkt's Charge?