Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The Confederate wounded were the lowest in the priorities of the 106 Federal medical officers who stayed behind the Army of the Potomac to supervise the care of the wounded and dying. A number of Confederate medical personnel remained with their wounded after the withdrawal: Dr. Simon Baruch (the father of the famed financier Bernard Baruch) was ordered, along with two other Confederate surgeons, “to remain behind at the Black Horse Tavern field hospital” with 222 “seriously wounded men” and 10 orderlies, and spent six weeks working hand in hand with the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission. Baruch’s patients were the happy ones, by contrast with the wounded cluttering the halls and classrooms of Pennsylvania College. “All the rooms, halls and hallways were occupied with the poor deluded sons of the South,” and “the moans prayers, and shrieks of the wounded and dying were heard everywhere.” Between 500 and 700 wounded Confederates were jammed in with “five of our surgeons” and “no nurses, no medicines, no kinds of food proper for men in our condition, our supply being two or three hard crackers a day with a small piece of fat pork, with now and then a cup of poor coffee.” Amputations took place on the college portico because the air inside had become “impregnated with the peculiar and sickening odor of blood and wounds.” Not until July 16th was a temporary general hospital on the York Pike, next to the railroad line, laid out under the supervision of Dr. Henry Janes (a Vermont regimental surgeon who had been in charge of post-Antietam hospital organization), and not until July 22nd were Union and Confederate wounded finally moved there.7

  Camp Letterman, as Janes named it, developed into a hundred-acre village of cots and tents, with its own morgue and cemetery, and served more than 3,000 wounded men before it was finally closed in November. But even at their best, the hospitals and the medical knowledge of the day could only provide the most painfully basic services; in some cases, they could not even keep adequate track of who the wounded were. James J. Melton, a private in the 7th Ohio, was wounded “in the head … and afterward taken to a hospital.” But being “unable to give any account himself … he is supposed to have become deranged and wandered away … since which his friends have heard nothing from him.”8

  Gettysburg attracted far greater numbers of a less useful breed of visitor. As early as July 5th, “hundreds from the country around … came down in their wagons to see the sights.” By the beginning of August, people were coming to visit the Evergreen Cemetery and picnic on Little Round Top, despite the “dead horses, shallow graves, cartridge boxes etc.” Others “wanted relics,” although the line between relic hunting and outright looting quickly disappeared. John Mumma Young, a student at the college, was approached by two local boys who had dug up a Confederate officer’s body to cut “the buttons and lace” from his uniform, and then sell them. The Army of the Potomac’s provost marshal general, Marsena Patrick, was infuriated at how intent the locals were “to Sweep & plunder the battle grounds” for things they could sell back to the army. Since abandoned equipment and weapons on the battlefield were, abandoned or not, still government property, Patrick and his officers warned “citizens visiting the battle-field … against carrying away” blankets, rifles, swords, wagons, horses, or what-not. Finally, by July 11th, Patrick was forced to ask for reinforcements in the form of Pennsylvania militia to cope with the scavengers, and he commissioned his assistant quartermaster, the aptly named Henry Boyden Blood, to begin scouring the countryside “in search of Govt property.” Blood quickly made himself more hated than the rebels had ever been. Nathaniel Lightner, who lived on the Baltimore Pike, called him “the meanest man in the world,” especially after Blood arrested Lightner for selling “two or three dollars’ worth of things” to a relic hunter from New York. Blood’s diary is full of glee at arresting “one or two citizens” a day “for taking govt. property,” at uncovering “two Wagon loads” of purloined equipment “in One small hut,” searching “several houses” on the Mummasburg Road and finding “about 50 guns, one horse, one wagon and other property.”9

  The idea that the battle offered commercial possibilities took particularly quick root among farmers whose properties had been trampled over, crops and orchards destroyed, and who were now staring ruin in the face. The solution: to charge exorbitant prices for every possible service that could be rendered to the soldiers and the tourists. “The people of Gettysburg came sneaking back and expressed their gratitude for the saving of their homes from destruction by charging wounded officers five dollars each for carrying them back two miles to the … hospital,” railed a soldier in the 20th Connecticut, “and five cents a glass for cool water for the parched and fevered lips of wounded soldiers.” Much as they might explain that this was “to compensate for what an enemy has stolen from you,” it made no good impression on soldiers—or newspaper reporters—to be charged “from $.60 to $1.00 a loaf for bread, and $.25 a quart for milk, and all things in such proportion.” It did no good, either, to be told that at least “the Gettysburg women were kind and faithful to the wounded and their friends,” because there were all too many voices raised to identify the women as the “lineal descendent of some original Hessian” or as “dumpy” and “lukewarm” for wanting “a dollar for a gallon of milk, and half dollar for a cruet of vinegar.” And it did not take long for the Army of the Potomac to become convinced that “these Dutch farmers” are nothing but “tight-fisted miscreants” who “turned to with all their souls to make money out of their defenders.”10

  The deepest cut came from Lorenzo Crounse, the New York Times’ correspondent in Gettysburg. On July 9th, the Times ran an article by Crounse that accused Gettysburg’s people of being “so sordidly mean and unpatriotic, as to engender the belief that they were indifferent as to which party was whipped.”

  In the first place the male citizens mostly ran away, and left the women and children to the mercy of their enemies. On their return, instead of lending a helping hand to our wounded, and opening their houses to our famished officers and soldiers, they have only manifested indecent haste to present their bills to the military authorities for payment of losses inflicted by both armies … Their charges, too, were exorbitant—hotels, $2.50 per day; milk, 10 and 15 cents per quart; bread, $1 and even $1.50 per loaf; twenty cents for a bandage for a wounded soldier! And these are only a few specimens of the sordid meanness and unpatriotic spirit manifested by these people, from whose doors our noble army had driven a hated enemy.

  Twenty Adams County clergy signed a riposte to Crounse which appeared in the Adams County Sentinel on July 11th. But that only gave Crounse another opportunity to flog “the unpatriotic and illiberal conduct of many citizens of Gettysburgh” in the pages of the Times. Maybe, added one Massachusetts soldier, the good Dutch farmers of Gettysburg could find less opprobrious employment “in burying the rebel dead, which they will be obliged to do, or go visiting for a year or two.”11

  The dead did indeed present a problem—the single biggest problem of all for post-battle Gettysburg. The armies had lingered only long enough to perform the most perfunctory burials, and that meant that the fields in and around the town remained encumbered with corpses, many of which had been decomposing rapidly for three or four days in the humid July heat, “swollen to twice their original size.” Men sickened and vomited. “I have been over the battlefield,” Thomas Bradbury of the 17th Maine wrote in his diary on July 6th. “I never saw such a sight … thousands upon thousands lying dead and wounded and piled on top of another.” Artillery casualties were the worst in appearance, since, as a weary soldier in the 150th New York saw, “canister showed the human form torn and disfigured beyond description.”

  In one case I noticed the hand, now stiffened in death, still clasped against the protruding entrails where the jagged fragment of a shell had torn open the abdominal cavity. In another instance I remember the whole front of the chest of a large man had been literally torn away, exposing to view its interior, including the heart and lungs … All were bloating and blackening in the July heat.
/>
  These images could not be blotted out simply by averting the eyes. The stench of decay was inescapable and, wrote John White Geary, “horrible and beyond description … My very clothes smell of death.” In the town, people found the “stench from the battle-field … so bad that every one went about with a bottle of pennyroyal or peppermint oil,” and “every window … was fastened down tight, all the doors kept shut; so it was stifling.” Nor were the corpses exclusively human: one correspondent “counted twenty-eight dead artillery horses” where John Bigelow and the 9th Massachusetts Artillery had made their last stand in the Trostle farmyard. Jenny Jacob “counted seventeen dead horses that had been killed by the storm of shells … around Gen Meade’s headquarters,” and there were “thirty dead horses” around Woodruff’s battery beside the Bryan house. The effort to bury dead horses was beyond the time or patience of the burial details, so the carcasses were piled together and burned. “Here and there, great girdles of fire blazoned the slopes, telling of slaughtered animals slowly consuming.” As “awfull” as Antietam was, wrote John Chase to his father, “it was not a circumstance to this one.”12

  What made this worse was that those whom the armies actually had buried kept coming back. Franklin Sawyer, the colonel of the 8th Ohio, wrote on July 5th that “large details of our corps are made up to bury the dead,” but all that the dead got was “a trench about seven or eight feet wide and about three feet deep—for there is no time for digging deeper.” So many “were buried … so near the surface that their clothing came through the earth.” And not only clothing. Henry Eyster Jacobs remembered that “the Union dead on the field of the first day’s battle were covered with only a few inches of soil,” so that “as the rain washed away the soil … portions of the body protruded.” One Presbyterian minister whom Jacobs obligingly guided over the battlefield was so overwrought by the shallow trenches in which the Confederate dead had been thrown that he came back the next week “with a shovel, and covered one of these trenches that was most repulsive.” Piles of amputated arms and legs were tripped over by the unwary. “In consequence of the earth washing away by rains, the dead bodies, bones, skulls &c. are protruding and look offensive,” complained the Philadelphia Inquirer, and by the end of summer, “the arms legs and skulls of those buried project from the ground,” and “in many instances hands & feet are sticking through.”13

  Just as New York and Pennsylvania sent their state militias into the Gettysburg Campaign, they also sent their state agents with the armies to look after the welfare of state volunteer regiments. In the summer of 1863, the role of New York’s state agent fell to John Seymour and his deputy, Theodore Dimon. One of Dimon’s principal responsibilities was administering “pecuniary aid in the expense attending the exhumation, disinfecting, coffining and transportation of” New York’s battle fatalities “to their former homes.” Given the staggering number of New York dead at Gettysburg—over a quarter of the dead were New Yorkers—Dimon wanted neither to shoulder the expense of transporting a thousand bodies nor leave them “buried like a dead horse, when in another year all marks … would be obliterated by the owner of the soil.” Dimon’s alternative was the creation of a national cemetery for all the Union dead—created jointly by the states whose soldiers fought in the battle—and to do it at Gettysburg. The key component would be obtaining the sponsorship of Pennsylvania, and for that, they turned to the Gettysburg native son who seemed to have the fastest connections to Pennsylvania’s governor, Andrew Gregg Curtin, and that was David Wills.14

  Wills was a graduate of Pennsylvania College in 1851, a protégé of Thaddeus Stevens’, and above all other things the son-in-law of the powerful Pennsylvania Republican Alexander McClure. He had already been designated by Curtin as Pennsylvania’s representative for supervising the exhumation “of the bodies of Pennsylvanians killed in the late battle,” and so it was logical for Seymour and Dimon to request a meeting with Wills and unload their plan. Wills evidently liked it, because on July 24th Wills wrote to Curtin, turning on all of his persuasive power to convince the governor. “Our dead are lying on the field unburied,” Wills declared. “In many instances arms and legs and sometimes heads protrude and my attention has been directed to several places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them… [H]umanity calls on us to take measures to remedy this.” Together with Seymour and Dimon, Wills “suggested … the propriety and actual necessity of the purchase of a common burial ground for the dead, now only partially buried over miles of country around Gettysburg.” He already had the perfect location in mind: on Cemetery Hill, between the Taneytown Road and the Baltimore Pike, on the western boundary of the Evergreen Cemetery. “There is one spot very desirable for this purpose. It is the elevated piece of ground on the Baltimore Turnpike opposite the Cemetery.” Curtin, who saw nothing in the plan but roses for his reelection campaign, bestowed upon Wills “full power to act upon the suggestions in his letter, and to correspond with the governors of all the States that had been represented by troops in the battle.”15

  It took Wills less than a month to obtain assents from the eighteen Northern states whose troops had fought at Gettysburg, and by mid-August Wills had purchased seventeen acres for the modest sum of $2,475.87, signed agreements with a noted landscape gardener, William Saunders, for the layout of the new cemetery, and with a local contractor, Franklin Biesecker, for the exhumation, identification, and reburial of over 3,300 bodies. The reburial work did not actually begin until October 27th (and would not be finished until the following March). But by then, Wills already had his plans for a grand dedication ceremony well in hand. He recruited, as the marshal for the ceremonies, Ward Hill Lamon, the marshal of the District of Columbia, and extended invitations to governors, members of the presidential cabinet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the diplomatic corps. Above all, in September, he invited Edward Everett, the former Massachusetts governor and congressman, president of Harvard, and secretary of state, to give the formal oration. Everett wrote back with regrets, but the date Wills had set—October 23rd—was simply not enough time to prepare an address equal to the occasion. Wills, however, was determined to recruit Everett, and at Everett’s prompting, Wills rescheduled the entire affair for November 19th.

  He also invited Abraham Lincoln, and it is likely that some suggestion was informally communicated to the president about participating in the ceremonies; it was not until November 2nd, just seventeen days before the ceremony was scheduled to take place, that Wills formalized the idea that, “after the oration,” Lincoln should, “as Chief Executive of the nation,” perform the actual dedication of “these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.”16

  Epilogue

  THE MIND OF THE TALL MAN in the White House had been weighing what the battle signified ever since the news of Gettysburg first came sparking over the telegraph wires to the War Department on July 4th. Three days later, at his morning cabinet meeting, he wore “a countenance indicating sadness and despondency” over George Meade’s perplexing tardiness in pursuing the Army of Northern Virginia, but Navy Secretary Welles had cheered him out of his dour mood with the official dispatch from Admiral David Dixon Porter, “communicating the fall of Vicksburg on the fourth of July.” At once, he was “beaming with joy.” What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? He exulted, It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great! That night, the capital joined in reveling over the twin victories. “The news immediately spread throughout the city, creating intense and joyous excitement,” and “flags were displayed from all the Departments, and crowds assembled with cheers.” A large throng marched up Pennsylvania Avenue with the Marine Band at their head, milling in front of the White House and calling on him for a speech.1

  The tall man did not like speaking unrehearsed, but he appeared at a second-floor window on the north side of the executive mansion and allowed his speculations to ramble. How long ago is it? he asked rhetorically, eighty odd years—si
nce on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” The victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, coming on the anniversary of that self-evident truth, had now put “the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal” on the run. This was, he continued, “a glorious theme,” but “I am not prepared” to make a speech “worthy of the occasion.” Bring up the music, he said, and off they went to the War Department to call for Stanton.2