Southerners will always remember that chance. If only Ewell had pressed the fight on the left, late on the first day of Gettysburg, and taken Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill, everything would have turned out differently. If Stonewall Jackson had not died from the wound he received at Chancellorsville only a couple months earlier, he would have commanded that corps, and not Ewell--and Jackson would have pressed the fight until he had won all that high ground, even if the Devil himself had stood in his way.
After the first day, the Union forces occupied Cemetery Ridge, and that put an end to Confederate hopes. But the South would probably have won Gettysburg that first day if Jackson had been there--the Union right had been broken, and the rout was on. It was because the Confederate left paused, late on that first day, that the Union forces were able to fortify the high ground, and after that the Southerners' prospects of victory evaporated.
The war will never truly be over, at least in the imagination of anyone who appreciates the valor of the Confederate forces. No one can point to any finer infantry in all the history of warfare. Even if they had no shoes, blisters, dysentery, painful wounds, no food of sleep during the past couple days, and were filthy and exhausted from an all-night forced march in pouring rain, they still fought like all hell when called upon. Courage and dedication always deserve respect, whatever the cause men are fighting and dying for.
