Three Days at Gettysburg: A Reasoned Leadership Analysis Part 1

The First Shots and the First Mistakes: How July 1st Began

In fifth grade, my teacher was Mrs. Carter. At the end of every school year she handed out certificates, personal recognition awards for each student based on something that defined them that year. Some kids got “Most Creative.” Some got “Best Sense of Humor.” I got “Civil War Buff.”

I wore that like a badge of honor, because by the time Mrs. Carter handed me that certificate, I felt as if I already earned it. When our class reached the Civil War unit, I was not learning the material. I was already teaching it to the other kids, at least to anyone willing to listen to a ten year old go on about brigade commanders and battle movements. I had been watching films like Gettysburg, the 1993 film based on Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, for years by that point. I had dressed as a Union soldier for events, attended reenactments with my family, and could walk anyone through the three days of the battle in more detail than most adults could manage. Side note: If you are an avid reader and history enthusiast, the Killer Angels trilogy is something I cannot recommend highly enough. Read all three books, you will not regret it.

That passion never left me. Decades later, I still find myself returning to Gettysburg the way some people return to a song or artist they cannot stop listening to. There is something in those three days that called to me and I couldn’t get enough of it.

What I am doing in this series is something I could not have done as a ten year old with a (pseudo) certificate and a Union soldier costume. I am going back to a battle I thought I already understood and looking at it through two analytical frameworks from Reasoned Leadership that have fundamentally changed how I see leadership decisions, whether in a conference room, a locker room, or a Pennsylvania field in the summer of 1863. The Adversity Nexus and Epistemic Rigidity have given me a new lens for something I have been staring at my whole life, and what I am finding is equal parts fascinating and humbling.

Before I go any further, I want to add a disclaimer… entire books, excellent ones, have been written about each individual day at Gettysburg. Scholars have spent careers analyzing single decisions made in single hours of the battle. I am not trying to replace or compete with any of that. I am not writing a book(s), though maybe I should. What I am doing is selecting specific moments from each day that serve as the clearest examples of these frameworks, the decisions and hesitations that the Adversity Nexus and Epistemic Rigidity illuminate most clearly. If a moment or series of moments does not make it into this series, it is not because it was unimportant. It is because after a reexamination of the battle it produced more leadership material than six articles could ever tell.

With that said, let me explain the two frameworks briefly for anyone reading this without prior exposure to them.

The Adversity Nexus is a seven-stage cyclical model describing how individuals, organizations, and even civilizations move through predictable patterns of challenge and response. Stage 1 is adversity itself, which creates genuine desire for change. Stage 2 is where that desire fosters the emergence of real leaders. Stage 3 is where those leaders drive growth. Stage 4 is where growth produces abundance. Stage 5 is where abundance shifts the focus toward protecting what has been gained, prioritizing safety over continued progress. Stage 6 is where excessive safety breeds stagnation, where vision is lost and maintaining the status quo becomes the primary objective. Stage 7 is where stagnation inevitably returns the cycle to adversity. The framework’s central argument is that comfort does not create excellence. Adversity does. And the most dangerous moment in any leader’s arc is not when things are hard. It is when things have been going well for long enough that they stop questioning their own assumptions.

Epistemic Rigidity is the cognitive inflexibility that prevents people from updating their beliefs even when the evidence demands it. It operates through a wheel of interlocking biases including the Einstellung Effect, which is the tendency to reach for familiar solutions even when better ones are available; Confirmation Bias, which filters incoming information to confirm what we already believe; Motivated Reasoning, which constructs justifications for what we already want to do; the Einstein Effect, which describes the undue authority we grant to respected sources including ourselves; Anchoring Bias, which causes initial information to disproportionately shape all subsequent judgments; and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which produces overconfidence in proportion to the gaps in our actual knowledge. These biases do not operate independently. They reinforce each other, and the result is a leader whose picture of reality drifts further from what is actually in front of them while feeling increasingly certain they have it right.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s dive into Day 1 of The Battle of Gettysburg…

July 1, 1863: The Battle Nobody Planned

The Army of Northern Virginia entered Pennsylvania in late June 1863 on the back of one of the most remarkable military runs in American history. Under Robert E. Lee, this army had defeated larger, better-supplied Union forces at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. It had done so through audacity, through the aggressive initiative of its commanders, and through a fighting culture that trusted boldness over caution. By any reasonable measure, it was operating at Stage 4 and Stage 5 of the Adversity Nexus. It had moved through adversity, produced extraordinary leaders, driven remarkable growth, and arrived at a position of genuine military abundance.

Lee’s decision to invade the North in the summer of 1863 was a product of that abundance, and it is where the Epistemic Rigidity begins to show its teeth. His strategic rationale was not unreasonable on its surface. A decisive Confederate victory on Northern soil could break Union political will, potentially encourage foreign recognition of the Confederacy, and relieve pressure on war-exhausted Virginia. But the reasoning that produced the invasion was already being shaped by the cognitive architecture of Stage 5. Lee was not interrogating the assumptions underneath his plan. He was moving forward on the confidence that his army’s extraordinary record justified the risk, and that record had become a cognitive anchor so heavy that the warnings underneath it were barely registering.

The most glaring of those warnings was the absence of J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalry. Stuart, tasked with screening the army’s movements and providing intelligence on Union positions, had taken his cavalry on an unauthorized ride around the entire Union army. He was gone for the crucial days leading up to and through the opening of the battle, leaving Lee effectively blind in enemy territory. An army moving through Pennsylvania without cavalry intelligence is an army operating on assumption rather than information. That should have been treated as a serious operational problem requiring immediate resolution. Instead, Lee pressed forward. His Motivated Reasoning told him the campaign’s momentum justified it, and his Confirmation Bias had already loaded his mental picture of the situation with expectations of success rather than genuine assessment of risk.

George Gordon Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomac, had been promoted to the job for exactly three days when the battle began. He had inherited a demoralized army with a recent history of defeat and command instability, no time to assess his forces or build relationships with his corps commanders, and an enemy already in motion on his own soil. If Lee was operating from Stage 5 abundance, Meade was operating from Stage 1 adversity, pure and immediate, with everything uncertain and nothing comfortable. That distinction matters enormously for what follows.

Heth’s Advance: Confidence Mistaken for Intelligence

On the morning of July 1, Confederate Major General Henry Heth marched his division east along the Chambersburg Pike toward Gettysburg. He had received permission from A.P. Hill the night before, with the casual instruction not to bring on a general engagement. Heth believed he would find militia, light resistance, perhaps shoes. His advance was not preceded by meaningful reconnaissance. He was operating on assumption layered over assumption, each one a product of the cognitive environment Lee’s army had built across two years of success.

This is Stage 5 of the Adversity Nexus expressing itself at the division level. The abundance of the army’s record had filtered down through the command culture to the point where a division commander could march toward an unknown force in enemy territory without treating the intelligence gap as a serious variable. The army had beaten whatever it ran into for so long that beating whatever it ran into had become the operational default assumption.

The primary Epistemic Rigidity driver for Heth was Confirmation Bias. He wanted shoes. He had been told the road was probably clear. Every piece of information he chose to weight confirmed what he expected. Reports of Union cavalry in the area existed and were discounted. The absence of Stuart’s intelligence, which should have signaled genuine operational uncertainty, was treated as a minor inconvenience rather than a warning requiring caution. The Einstellung Effect compounded this: the Confederate approach to most situations in this period had been forward movement and aggression, and Heth reached for that familiar solution without examining whether it fit the situation in front of him.

What Heth encountered was not militia. Brigadier General John Buford had ridden his Union cavalry division into Gettysburg the evening before, immediately read the terrain south of town, and understood exactly what it meant. Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top, whoever held that high ground would hold the battlefield. Buford deployed his troopers on the ridges west and north of town specifically to delay any Confederate advance long enough for Union infantry to arrive and claim those positions. He was not operating from abundance. He had a genuine problem, assessed it accurately, and responded to what was actually there.

When Heth’s lead brigades hit Buford’s dismounted troopers armed with breech-loading carbines, they ran into a fight they had not prepared for. By mid-morning, Union infantry from John Reynolds’ First Corps was arriving on the field. Reynolds himself, one of the most respected officers in either army, was directing the placement of troops when he was killed by a Confederate bullet. The fight that was supposed to be a quick reconnaissance was pulling in entire corps from both sides, growing by the hour into something neither commander had planned or wanted.

Lee at Seminary Ridge: Abundance Meeting Reality

Lee arrived on the field during the late morning and watched the battle develop from Seminary Ridge. What he saw was a growing engagement producing Confederate success. The Union forces were being pushed back, and by early afternoon the Confederate pressure from two directions was overwhelming the Union First and Eleventh Corps. From a purely tactical standpoint, things were going well.

But Lee was watching an accidental battle unfold on ground nobody had selected, against an enemy force of unknown size, without cavalry to tell him what was coming up behind the Union forces he could see. His original orders had been explicit: do not bring on a general engagement until the army is concentrated. That order had already been violated by the time he arrived. The question now was what to do about it.

This is where I find Lee’s Stage 5 positioning most revealing. A leader operating with clear eyes and full cognitive flexibility at that moment would have been asking hard questions. What is actually in front of us? What is behind the Union forces we are pushing? Where is Meade and how fast is he moving? Is this the ground we want to fight on? Lee was asking some of those questions, but his Motivated Reasoning was already shaping the answers. The Confederate momentum felt like the opportunity he had come north to find. His Confirmation Bias was weighting the evidence of Union collapse heavily and the evidence of Union resilience lightly. His Anchoring Bias, built on two years of his army performing brilliantly in exactly these kinds of fluid situations, told him the momentum was meaningful and should be pressed.

He committed to the engagement.

What July 1 Actually Produced

By nightfall, the Army of Northern Virginia had won a significant tactical victory and positioned itself inside a strategic trap.

The Confederate army had driven two Union corps through Gettysburg and off the fields north and west of town. Thousands of Union prisoners had been taken. By any conventional measure of a day’s fighting, it was a Confederate success. But the high ground south of town, Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Culp’s Hill, was in Union hands and hardening by the hour. The window that had existed in the late afternoon was gone. And across the following two days, the Army of Northern Virginia would spend catastrophic amounts of men and energy trying to take by assault what could have been occupied by pursuit on the afternoon of July 1.

This is the Safety Paradox of the Adversity Nexus stated in military terms. Lee’s Stage 5 confidence drove a commitment to an accidental engagement on unfavorable ground. He was not operating from a clear read of what was actually in front of him, because Epistemic Rigidity was not allowing an accurate update of the situation.

The Union army, by contrast, was operating from the cognitive clarity that genuine Stage 1 adversity tends to produce. Buford read the ground accurately because he had no abundance of success to cloud his assessment. Hancock improvised aggressively because the existential nature of the situation cut through the cognitive noise that accumulates in comfortable organizations. Meade, three days into a command he had not sought, was making decisions from necessity rather than assumption.

July 1, 1863, was not a series of individual leadership failures that happened to occur on the same day. It was a collision between two armies at completely different stages of the Adversity Nexus, and the army that should have won decisively walked away from the day holding a tactical victory and a strategic disaster.

The next two days would make that disaster permanent.

Next in the series: Article 2, “The High Ground and the Hesitation: Ewell’s Failure at Cemetery Hill,” takes a deeper look at the specific moment that defined Day 1 and what the Adversity Nexus and Epistemic Rigidity reveal about why the most important decision of July 1st was a decision not to act.

This article is part 1 of the 6-part series Three Days at Gettysburg: A Reasoned Leadership Analysis