Historic Gettysburg Victory Order: Issued July 4th, 1863

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Day 2: The American Civil War

By Fleischer's Auctions

Apr 25, 2026

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• Lot Description

  GETTYSBURG VICTORY ORDER ISSUED IN THE FIELD ON 4 JULY 1863

   

  Printed document signed in print by Maj. Gen. George G. Meade. Head Quarters, Army of the Potomac, 4 July 1863. General Orders No. 68. One page. 6 3/8 x 6 1/2 in.

   

  Exceptionally rare field-printed General Order issued by Major General George G. Meade on the day after the Battle of Gettysburg, congratulating the Army of the Potomac for what would be understood, almost immediately, as one of the most consequential Union victories of the Civil War. Composed and distributed in the immediate aftermath of the three-day struggle, the order stands among the earliest official printed declarations of the army’s triumph over Lee’s invasion of the North.

   

  Issued from headquarters on 4 July 1863, General Orders No. 68 opens in language at once formal, martial, and deeply resonant: “The Commanding General, in behalf of the country, thanks the Army of the Potomac for the glorious result of the recent operations.” Meade continues by praising the army for having repelled “an enemy superior in numbers and flushed with the pride of a successful invasion,” declaring that the Confederate force had been “utterly baffled and defeated.” The order is among the most eloquent contemporary official responses to the battle, commemorating not merely the strategic result, but the endurance, sacrifice, and “heroic courage and gallantry” of the Federal army under the most arduous conditions.

   

  The text looks simultaneously backward and forward: backward, in its solemn recognition that the exertions of the army “will be matters of history to be ever remembered,” and forward, in its insistence that “our task is not yet accomplished.” That phrase would prove revealing. Lincoln himself would later take issue with Meade’s language and, more importantly, with the Army of the Potomac’s failure to press more aggressively upon Lee’s retreating forces. Yet whatever the President’s frustrations in the days following Gettysburg, the order remains an extraordinary contemporary witness to the scale on which the victory was already being understood. The battle’s significance as a decisive turning point of the war was recognized at once, and Meade’s language, with its invocation of memory and historical consequence, would find a striking later parallel in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

   

  Examples of this battlefield-issued printing are of the utmost rarity. Fewer than a dozen examples are recorded, surviving in several variant field printings, a circumstance entirely consistent with the exigencies of wartime production. The use of portable tabletop presses by both Union and Confederate armies made rapid dissemination possible near the front, but such hurried production inevitably introduced minor typographical differences between impressions. A later and more formal Washington printing of General Orders No. 68 also exists in annual bound compilations of orders, though it is distinct from the present field-printed issue and has often been confused with it. The present printing belongs to that far scarcer and more evocative class of ephemeral battlefield documents: those produced not as retrospective records, but as instruments of immediate command, morale, and commemoration.

   

  [Civil War, Union, Confederate]  [Manuscripts, Documents, Letters, Ephemera, Signatures, Autographs] [Gettysburg, Little Round Top, Culp's Hill, Pickett's Charge, Devil’s Den] 

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