However late Stuart was in arriving, the Army of Northern Virginia was still glad to see him. As he rode along the York Pike into Gettysburg, “such joyful shouts as rent the air I never heard” and “the cavalry for once was well received.” Lee, however, had grown increasingly “uneasy & irritated by Stuart’s conduct,” recalled George Campbell Brown and “had no objection to [Brown] hearing of it,” which was surprising for “a man of Lee’s habitual reserve.” In time, descriptions of an epic confrontation between Lee and Stuart surfaced, mostly for the purpose of showing that Robert E. Lee himself pointedly held Stuart responsible for the Gettysburg battle. But there is no contemporary description of such a meeting, despite its inflation in subsequent retellings to a level with the return of the Prodigal Son. Although it is safe to say that Stuart may have reported directly to Lee after his arrival in the late afternoon of July 2nd, the few descriptions we have of Stuart that evening place him “at the vidette-post nearest” the “Infantry” or Ewell’s corps, near Rock Creek. As for Henry McClellan, Stuart’s chief of staff, his only comment on Stuart’s arrival in Gettysburg (in his 1893 biography of Stuart) was to describe, laconically, how “for eight days and nights, the troops had been marching incessantly,” and “on the ninth night they rested within the shelter of the army, and with a grateful sense of relief which words cannot express.”21
There were other voices beside those of the generals to be heard at Gettysburg that night. Some came from sergeants calling company rolls to find out who was still available to answer. In the 19th Massachusetts, roll calls were the cue for the battle’s first laments: John was killed before we fired a shot or I saw Frank throw up his arms and fall just after we fired the first volley or Jim was shot through the head or George was killed by a piece of shell, while we were firing. The names went on into the empty air, and “strong men sobbed.”22
Much louder and more numerous were the sounds that came from the throats of thousands of mangled and dying men left to lie, immobilized with smashed legs, internal hemorrhages so massive that they had scarcely more than the strength to wail, or so crazed with shock that they took to stumbling about in the dark. “You would hear some poor friend or foe crying for water, or for ‘God’s sake’ to kill him,” remembered Louis Léon of the 53rd North Carolina, or “some of your comrades, shot through the leg, lying between the lines, asking his friends to take him out, but no one could get to his relief, and you would have to leave him there, perhaps to die.” Henry Blake in the 11th Massachusetts bitterly condemned “the chief portion of the ambulance corps” for sticking to “safe positions” through the night; it was the ordinary soldiers who made up small details from each regiment to gather up canteens to “succor their wounded comrades” and who “bore the suffering to the hospitals in blankets and upon muskets, and rails.” Occasionally, “squads of rebels … upon a similar mission” would wander into Union picket lines, but they were usually released, as if some kind of unspoken contract had come to prevail. One Confederate who was stopped by Blake’s pickets said, “I am your prisoner, if you say so; but I am giving water to all that ask for it.” They let him go.23
All across the darkened ridges, and especially across Devil’s Den, the peach orchard, and the Emmitsburg Road, men with “lighted lanterns … passed to the front and scattered over the valley, seeking out the wounded,” and as the Confederates did likewise, the “space between the two armies” became filled with “wandering jets of light.” Over on the other side of Culp’s Hill, William Swallow found “both banks of Rock Creek lined with wounded Confederates washing and tying up their wounds,” while others were compelled to fight off the unwanted attentions of local livestock who had been turned loose to wander by the fighting. A lieutenant in the 118th Pennsylvania was surrounded by “a number of stray hogs” who “commenced rooting and tearing at the dead men around me,” and when “one hog of enormous size … attempted to poke me,” the lieutenant had the presence of mind to jam “my sword into his belly, which made him set up a prolonged, sharp cry.”24
The miserable condition of the wounded and dying in Civil War battles has always been one of the first of the war’s horrors to demand both recoil and reproach. In an age without any knowledge of sepsis, and only the crudest of surgical tools and techniques, any wound could be a ticket to death from infection alone. “We had no clinical thermometers; our only means of estimating fever was by touch,” admitted Philadelphia surgeon William W. Keen. “We had no hypodermatic syringes” and so “the mouth and the bowel were the only avenues for the administration of remedies.” The wounds themselves were made all the more horrible by the weaponry that inflicted them, for while the rifle musket might fall considerably short of its reputation for accuracy, the weight of the unjacketed lead rounds it fired (between .45 and .69 caliber) were heavy enough that when they did strike a human target, the damage would almost always be life-threatening. A little powder and a lot of lead, was the rule in the British Army, shoot them once and shoot them dead. One Union soldier remembered “a soldier named Scottie who received as severe a wound as I have ever known”—a slug struck “him at the base of the jaw, broke those bones and drove the fragments and his teeth out of his mouth” and “as he breathed his cheeks seemed to meet, as there was not anything to keep them apart.”
Wounds to the arms and legs could be treated by amputation, as a preemptive strategy to head off the onset of gangrene and blood poisoning. But men with wounds to the chest, and especially to the abdomen, were often simply set aside, to be made as comfortable as possible as they slowly died. As a result, nearly 15 percent of the wounded would die, which was more or less equivalent to what the British Army endured in the Crimean War. “Wounds of the abdomen involving the viscera were almost uniformly fatal,” wrote Surgeon Keen. “Opium was practically our only remedy and death the usual result.” He could not remember “more than one incontestable example of recovery from a gunshot wound of the stomach and not a single incontestable case of recovery from wounds of the small intestines.”25
None of this was helped by the sketchy field hospital arrangements. The Crimean War had brought the first great revulsion against the inadequacies of military medical services; five years later, Henri Dunant was so unhinged by the spectacle of the battlefield of Solferino in the North Italian War of 1859 that he set in motion the creation of the first Red Cross organization. No news of this arrived in time to prepare the American armies for the Civil War. There were little over a hundred surgeons in the U.S. Army in 1861, presided over by a geriatric veteran of the War of 1812, and not until 1862 was a military ambulance corps authorized for the Army of the Potomac.
But even if they had paid better attention to the improvements in care developed as a result of the Crimean and North Italian wars, there was still the lead ceiling formed by the limitations on medical knowledge, and by the improvised conditions of medicine on a battlefield. It was the first task of regimental, brigade, division, and corps medical staff to select likely sites for field hospitals; their best choices were often an old stone barn or a grove of shade trees.26 Overall, some 160 different places in Gettysburg and across the surrounding landscape were pressed into service as “hospitals,” some of them churches, still others houses, many of them farmhouses and barns, but some just “out-of-doors, where … surgeons have placed themselves to receive the wounded.” The 11th Corps fixed its corps hospital at the Adams County almshouse on July 1st, only to have to abandon it almost as soon as it was set up; eventually, the 11th Corps settled on a farm owned by George Spangler near Powers Hill, with a large stone-and-timber bank-barn. Four crude operating tables were put up, and during the day between 700 and 1,000 wounded men arrived, propped up against stalls and cribs, or carried out when dead to make room for more. Still more “were lying with but feeble, or in most cases no shelter … against the sides of the barn, and in an orchard adjoining the sheds.” A Confederate hospital, set up for the wounded of Rodes’ division in the barn of David Shriver’s 150-a
cre farm on the Mummasburg Road, overflowed with “the wounded and mangled,” having only “a couple of impromptu tables for operating purposes,” and only three surgeons to treat 760 wounded men.27
Hospitals set up in the town had better cover, but because they lay between the two armies, they were also more likely to be hit by stray shells. The Washington Hotel, which had been taken over by the medical officers of the 1st Corps, was seized by the Confederates on July 1st, but being filled with Union wounded gave it no exemption from friendly fire. “Two shells struck it, pieces of one taking off the thumb of one of Dr. [James L.] Farley’s attendants” and the other perforating the rear wall of the hotel and exploding, but “without doing any personal damage.” Nor were the conditions any less haphazard than those in the barns. A soldier from the 12th Massachusetts was carried into the house of Pennsylvania College president Henry Baugher (along with “twenty or more of us lying in the hallway and lower rooms”) where “shells were frequently bursting around the grounds, the fragments crashing against the walls of the building and tearing the limbs from the trees in the yard.”28
The great enemy of the surgeon was time. Joe Hooker’s original campaign orders had cut down the size of the trains accompanying the Army of the Potomac to two wagons per brigade—over the protests of the Army of the Potomac’s chief medical officer, Jonathan Letterman, who could see that this would require limiting precious medical supplies. And sure enough, the battle began with only barely sufficient supplies of “dressings, chloroform, and such articles,” and for “several days … we were obliged to skirmish around the country to get something for the wounded to eat.” The surgeons of James Barnes’ 5th Corps division had to place the wounded “in long rows, with no reference to the nature or gravity of their injuries, nor condition or rank,” and in the dark, “opiates were administered to alleviate pain, and water supplied to appease their thirst” until daylight would enable them to begin inspecting, sorting, operating.
Others tried to labor by whatever meager light they could find: an artilleryman in Clark’s 1st New Jersey Artillery remembered his bivouac near a stone barn where “a dozen or more surgeons were at work at the amputating tables by candlelight, and all night.” The Confederate medical officers were just as shorthanded, and caught just as much off guard. In their hurry, the surgeons in Powell Hill’s corps “had hardly opened our battlefield supplies” before the wounded began to arrive, and there was no alternative but to improvise with nearly anything as an operating table—“doors laid on barrels,” wrote one Confederate surgeon, “or any box we could lay hold of.” The 800 or so Confederate wounded who crowded into the Lutheran seminary and the white-pillared main “edifice” of Pennsylvania College took up space “in the Library, and in the halls of the Societies, as well as in the recitation rooms, chapel, and student rooms,” where they used “volumes of old German theologians” as pillows.29
Dealing with other people’s wounds could be nearly as traumatic as receiving them oneself. Shell can blow parts of a body to hanging shreds or rupture internal organs; solid shot can mangle or sever body parts; lead rifle bullets could smash and splatter, trailing ooze; and wounded men can lose control over bodily functions and even over their sanity. The amputations came off the tables in a gruesome tumble, as “the red, human blood ran in streams from under the operating tables, and huge piles of arms and legs, withered and horrible to behold” dropped off onto the ground and were, at intervals, carried away. A Vermont officer saw “by the door” of one field hospital “a ghastly pile of amputated arms and legs, and around each of them lay multitudes of wounded men, covering the ground by the acre, wrapped in their blankets and awaiting their turns under the knife.” Carl Schurz was unnerved to see “the surgeons, their sleeves rolled up to the elbows, their bare arms as well as their linen aprons smeared with blood, their knives not seldom held between their teeth, while … around them pools of blood and amputated arms or legs in heaps,” were collecting sometimes “more than man-high.” One 3rd Corps surgeon “performed at the least calculation fifty amputations,” fourteen of them at one stretch “without leaving the table.”
The surgeons sometimes developed a protective layer of professionally bleak humor to cope with this, although even then some of them cracked under the strain. (Schurz had seen how a “surgeon, having been long at work, would put down his knife, exclaiming that his hand had grown unsteady, and that this was too much for human endurance—not seldom hysterical tears streaming down his face.”) A soldier’s comrades, or the musicians and ordinary soldiers dragooned into duty as bearers and nurses, could often be more undone by the sight of wounded men than dead men. An officer in the 3rd Corps who volunteered on the night of July 2nd to assist with the wounded was “appalled” by the “prostrate men, their groans, and piteous appeals for help.” Men screamed “in a state of delirium … as if upon the battlefield.” But what finally drove him to run away was “a man I was about stepping over,” who “sprang to his feet, shook in front of me a bloody bandage he had just torn from a dreadful gaping wound in his breast, and uttered a hideous laughing shriek which sent the hot blood spurting from his wound into my very face.” A Pennsylvania College student, Horatio Watkins, was brushed back by “a rebel soldier” with a bandaged head, “insane from his wound,” who “raised his hands, tore wide open his eyes, and turned towards me.”
Eyes of men thinking, hoping, waiting
Eyes of men loving, cursing, hating
The eyes of the wounded sodden in red
The eyes of the dying and those of the dead.30
For those civilians left in the town, the experience of Confederate occupation followed no consistent or predictable theme. The rebel soldiers were not shy about helping themselves to the stockrooms of Gettysburg’s stores, although (unlike Jubal Early’s earlier foray on June 26th) the looting was as much about asserting a sense of power as it was from a prescribed agenda of occupation. Joseph Polley of the 4th Texas let himself into a store “on the main street of the little town” and discovered “a lot of … cloth gaiters such as ladies wear.” Even though he had “as little idea what I wanted them for” as he might for a “grindstone,” he “selected a pair of No. 3’s and brought them away.” If they served no other purpose, they could be sold to the sutlers for spot cash. Deserted houses and stores were considered fair game for breaking and entering, and several members of the 33rd Virginia’s pioneer detail helped themselves to a “large farmhouse,” where they found “several barrels of flour, a smokehouse full of bacon, a springhouse full of milk and butter,” and even a table set “with the dishes on it … If we did not live well for two days,” one of the detail smirked, “I don’t know a good thing when I see it.” Army bureaucracy also asserted itself: the press of the Republican Star and Banner was used to print a fresh supply of blank army forms. At least Daniel Klingel had the acid satisfaction of returning to his farm and finding the rebels who had broken into his house to make off with a pan and some flour all dead, sitting around what had been their fire. “They had a pan, with a portion of cake remaining in the pan, showing that the explosion of a shell had killed the four men while they were enjoying their meal.”31
But not even houses whose occupants had stubbornly decided to stay and hold on to their property were free from threats and theft. From their cellar, Leander Warren and his mother heard “several Confederates in our kitchen going through the cupboard. They took everything there was to eat, leaving us with almost nothing.” Confederates “stole everything eatable” around Alexander Cobean’s farm, “took all the cured meat and killed the cattle in the fields for fresh meat.” Horatio Watkins, who had taken shelter with several fellow students in the cellar of a house, heard “some of the wandering rebels” try to break into the cellar. When he tried to persuade them that there was nothing there worth their effort, “one of the band” popped out with the old pickpocket’s ploy, What time is it? Watkins knew what he wanted: Four o’clock. No, the rebel replied, What time of y
our watch? It’s broken, Watkins countered again. Let me see it, the rebel demanded, and finally Watkins had to bring out his watch, which the rebel promptly appropriated. One part of the population in which the rebels showed an entirely different interest was the handful of Gettysburg’s blacks who had stayed in the town. The McCrearys’ “old washerwoman,” Elizabeth Butler, was flushed out of hiding in the town, along with several others who were marched out Chambersburg Street, “going back to slavery.” At least for the McCrearys’ “Old Liz,” the story had a happier ending; she slipped away into Christ Lutheran Church, “climbed up into the belfry,” and hid there for two days.32
Houses on the south side of the town offered other attractions than looting. “The Rebs occupied the whole part of the town out as far as the back end of my house,” complained John Rupp, who owned the tannery at the foot of Baltimore Street. After building a barricade across the street, the rebels “occupied my porch” and used that nook to keep up a spray of fire on the Union soldiers on Cemetery Hill. Other houses allowed rebel riflemen to mix business and pleasure. Harry Handerson was amused to find “the majority of my company” sitting down to “a generous meal” in a house facing Cemetery Hill, while “at each of the front windows a couple of men were occasionally exchanging shots with the enemy.” After a while, the shooters came downstairs, “being relieved at intervals by their comrades and retiring to join in the feast until their turn once more came around.”
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 50
