Following on the charge of the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment on day two of the great battle, a charge whiche destroyed the regiment as a cohesive unit, suffering the highest casualty rate of any American unit (82%) but which stopped the Confederate advance, the stage was set for Day 3.
General Lee thought one audacious move would win the battle and possibly the war.
He ordered 12,500 of his troops, under General Pickett and two other junior generals, to cross a mile of open field and then storm the slight rise of Cemetery Ridge and the steeper slopes of Cemetery Hill.
The results were the Charge of the Light Brigade writ large. The same ~40% casualty rate but amounting to 5100 of the rebels versus the 270 of the 670 attacking British in the Crimea nine years earlier.
One of the Northern officers said of Lee's soldiers as they were first hit with cannons and then by rifle fire
That's what I thought of when watching Tesla, that moan rising from the short-sellers, audible above the storm of the market."They were at once enveloped in a dense cloud of smoke and dust. Arms, heads, blankets, guns and knapsacks were thrown and tossed into the clear air. ... A moan went up from the field, distinctly to be heard amid the storm of battle."—Lt. Col. Franklin Sawyer, 8th Ohio
Since I started typing the stock is up another $8.70, $308.25 last, +$53.57 (+21.03%).
About Pickett's Charge, called the high-water mark of the Confederacy—though the term would more accurately describe the prior day's charge by the Northerners—the historian Shelby Foote said:
Gettysburg was the price the South paid for having Lee. The first day's fighting was so encouraging, and on the second day's fighting he came within an inch of doing it. And by that time Longstreet said Lee's blood was up, and Longstreet said when Lee's blood was up there was no stopping him... And that was that mistake he made, the mistake of all mistakes. Pickett's charge was an incredible mistake, and there was scarcely a trained soldier who didn't know it was a mistake at the time, except possibly Pickett himself, who was very happy he had a chance for glory.
And for the Tesla shorts, they can always imagine it is 3:59 pm on a beautiful fall day and the market hasn't closed and they can go back to a time when the margin clerks haven't yet entered the fray....William Faulkner, in "Intruder in the Dust", said that for every southern boy, it's always within his reach to imagine it being one o'clock on an early July day in 1863, the guns are laid, the troops are lined up, the flags are out of their cases and ready to be unfurled, but it hasn't happened yet. And he can go back in his mind to the time before the war was going to be lost and he can always have that moment for himself.-Shelby Foote in Ken Burns' "The Civil War"
The comparison kinda makes this stock market stuff seem a bit sordid doesn't it.
