Noon-6PM EDT Wed: Live Broadcast of Pickett's Charge Commemoration from Gettysburg

On Wednesday, Breitbart News will be airing the only live broadcast in the nation from Gettysburg from noon to 6 p.m. EDT from “The Angle” on Cemetery Ridge, commemorating Pickett’s Charge.

Breitbart News will partner with Next News Network (N3), and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon will host the broadcast and interview esteemed historians and caretakers of the historic battlefield as part of Breitbart News’ continuing coverage of the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg. The Tea Party Patriots and the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) will sponsor the broadcast.

Guests will include: Historian Jeff Shaara; Bob Kirby, the Superintendent of Gettysburg National Park; Allen Guelzo, the author of Gettysburg: The Final Invasion; Peter Carmichael, Director, The Civil War Institute; Rod Gragg, the author of the llustrated Gettysburg Reader; Garry Adelman of the Civil War Trust; Troy Harmon, a battlefield guide and author of Lee’s real plan at Gettysburg; Jim Hessler, a battlefield guide; Dave Cleutz author of Fields of Flame and Glory; and Wayne Motts, CEO, National Civil War Museum.

The commemoration of Pickett’s Charge will begin at noon. At 3 p.m. EDT, there will be a battlefield march for 10,000. Guests and historians will then conclude the programming by offering reflections, commentary, and insights for the last hour with Bannon.

Pickett’s charge has often been called the “high tide” of the Confederacy. It was the furthest north that the Confederate army of Northern Virginia made it during the war and represented the last, best hope for Southern victory. The Union Army, which had so often ran from Lee’s Army, held to their positions and valiantly stood their ground and cut the massive Confederate line to pieces.

Maj. Gen. George Pickett led 12,500 men into the buzz saw of the Union center, most notably Cemetery Ridge, and suffered staggering casualties. The mile-long Confederate line had to charge over open ground into vicious cannon and small arms fire, sustaining a nearly 50 percent casualty rate. The Army of Northern Virginia would never recover.

Allen Guelzo, the historian who will join Bannon on Breitbart News’ broadcast, wrote in “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” which has become a New York Times bestselling book:

Lee and his men had given what Porter Alexander later called “the best we had in the shop” right down to the handsome young lieutenants, moving bravely and impossibly to the attack, singing “Dixie” under waving swords and snapping flags, and they had, in the end, not been able to roll the stone to the top of the mountain after all.

William Faulkner wrote perhaps the most famous account of Pickett’s charge in the American and, especially, the Southern mind in Intruder in the Dust:

It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. 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… This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.

On Sunday, there will be a live reenactment of Pickett’s Charge with 20,000 re-enactors, and Breitbart News will have 8 hours of programming on Sunday, which will follow six hours of programming on Wednesday. Breitbart News also broadcast over 6 hours of the opening ceremony of the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg last Sunday.

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