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Rh importance. His army was composed of the very flower of the Southern troops, and in order to strengthen it and prepare for the invasion of Pennsylvania, he had drawn Longstreet's corps from North Carolina, when it was greatly needed for strengthening Bragg, and enabling him to take the offensive against Rosecrans, and also for preventing the disaster which overtook the Confederates at Vicksburg. By their defeat at Gettysburg, the Confederates suffered as heavily in morale as in material, and from that time onward, to the close of the war, the invasion of the North was not again possible. In all its aspects the battle of Gettysburg is entitled to rank as one of the great and decisive battles in the history of the nineteenth century.