by Mark Nesbitt
But cavalry can rarely hold out for very long against veteran infantry. Gradually the troopers gave way, but not before the Union army’s infantry was arriving on the field.
Buford had ridden back from his lines to the Lutheran Seminary and climbed to the cupola of the largest building—called “Old Dorm”— to look for the infantry. Squinting through his field glasses to the southeast, he saw the blue-coated foot soldiers of Major General John F. Reynolds, stretched across the undulating fields from the red brick Codori farmhouse on the road to Emmitsburg to the eastern base of the ridge upon which the Seminary stood. As he came down the ladder he was met by Reynolds.
“What’s the matter, John?” said the tall, brown-bearded Reynolds.
“The devil’s to pay!” was the irreverent reply in the structure more suited to vespers than oaths.
The situation to both men was obvious: Confederates by now seriously outnumbered the meager Union Cavalry and were lapping around their flanks. It was only a matter of time before Buford’s line would crumble. Reynolds asked if Buford thought he could hold his line until the First Corps came up.
The feisty Buford seemed to bristle a little at the inadvertent challenge: “I reckon I can.”
So off they went from the Seminary: Buford to inspire his exhausted horsemen to fight a little longer, and Reynolds to hurry his infantrymen along. For both, it would be their last big battle.
After several skirmishes and fairly wicked fights in the fall of 1863, the hard life of the cavalryman took its toll on the 36-year-old Buford. He died of illness in a Washington hospital a little over five months from his tenacious stand west of Seminary Ridge. And while Buford had a few months to live after his role in the Battle of Gettysburg, Reynolds had but minutes.
Reynolds, a 42-year-old native Pennsylvanian, probably felt a special commitment in fighting at Gettysburg. His own home lay only fifty-five miles to the east in Lancaster, and Confederates had already been reported at the Susquehanna River near Wrightsville. If the rebels were not stopped here, his own home and family might be threatened. Leading his men, not far from the McPherson family’s farm buildings, he turned his head to the southeast to look for more of his brigades.
Somewhere to the west, just as Reynolds turned, a Confederate soldier pulled the trigger of his rifle-musket and the Major General took the soft lead minie ball in the back of the neck at something under 900 feet per second. The lush Pennsylvania farm fields, the thrilling sight of men marching to battle, the sounds of an army in combat all exploded into crimson nothingness for John Reynolds, and he entered the land where none of that matters. His participation in his final battle lasted only about fifteen minutes.
While his body was carried back to the town, his troops held out as long as they could. But pressure from the Confederates was too much, and by mid-afternoon the entire Union line, from the Fairfield Road northward to Oak Hill and over to the Harrisburg Road began to disintegrate. Seminary Ridge was abandoned by the Federal troops and occupied by the Confederates, and the buildings upon it became hospitals and operating rooms overflowing with wounded, suffering men and boys. No symbolic ablution was this for the sins of man in the fields of the Lord around the Seminary, but a real true blood sacrifice.
And, like every other building in the near environs of Gettysburg during death’s horrible carnival the first three days of July that year, the large buildings of the Lutheran Seminary became shelters for the helpless and dying. Where penitents once knelt to pray, soldiers lay to bleed.
Reynolds was taken from Mr. George’s small fieldstone house in the southern part of Gettysburg, where he had been lovingly carried by his aides, to his home in Lancaster to be buried. Though his body was gone, no doubt he—like thousands of others who felt their mortal bodies suddenly and violently torn from them—left energies to linger along Seminary Ridge and the long chain of the South Mountains which lead from it into Maryland.
Reynolds’s military aides, upon examining his body, were surprised to find that his West Point class ring was missing. A subsequent search to find a West Pointer’s most prized possession proved futile and they sadly assumed it had been lost in the frantic confusion of removing the general’s body under fire.
Major William Riddle also noticed a small catholic medal around his neck. Odd, they thought, because the general was not Catholic. As well, there was a gold ring in the shape of clasped hands with the inner band inscribed, “Dear Kate.”
The mystery was short-lived and when explained reveals a story overflowing with the human emotions of love, sudden grief, and sincere, deathless devotion.
The word of such a high ranking Union officer’s death spread immediately. On July 3, while the battle that Reynolds helped start was reaching its fabulous climax, a note was received by the Reynolds family in Lancaster from a Miss Hewitt of New York. She had asked to view the remains. Jennie, John Reynolds’s sister wrote that, “She seems to be a very superior person.”
Miss Kate Hewitt, in her early twenties, was highly educated and from a fine, well-to-do New York family. As a young, single woman she traveled out west to work as a nanny. While there she met and fell in love with a tall, darkly handsome army officer named John Reynolds. Although he had been a bachelor for nearly four decades, the lovely Miss Hewitt’s grace and youthful beauty were too much for the dedicated soldier: He lowered the ramparts to his heart and the tough professional officer surrendered for the first time in his life. The devotion was sincere and, as was soon to be seen, everlasting. Marriage plans were discussed; a honeymoon in Europe was planned. Then, with all the savage irony of a Shakespearean tragedy, the war came. He must go, he told her. He was a soldier, first and foremost. Would she wait for him? If he lived through the war, then they would marry. Certainly she would wait for him to come back, she answered with all her young heart. And if he didn’t return…well, then she would join a convent.
True to her word, sometime after John Reynolds’s violent death and mournful funeral, she moved into the Mother Seton Convent in Emmitsburg, Maryland, to become one of the Daughters of Charity. Not surprisingly it was the closest nunnery to, that most fateful of all places, Gettysburg. There is no record of her ever visiting the battlefield where all her dreams had been extinguished in one sudden instant, but in the spring of 1864 she was visited by Charles H. Veil, General Reynolds’s orderly who was with him when he was shot, who had come to Gettysburg with Reynolds’s sisters. He alone apparently made the side trip to Emmitsburg to visit the beautiful Miss Hewitt. In a remembrance he wrote that, “She made a great deal of me. I had to tell her all about the General, his last moments, and so forth, and she wanted very particularly to know if he left any last message….”1 Sadly, the rebel bullet that took his life did its job with deadly efficiency. He left no final message to this world.
One of the last things she had told John Reynolds before he left her for the war was that if he should die in his country’s service, the world would hold no interest for her. Perhaps that explains why she became very ill some time after Veil’s heart-rending visit and had to leave the convent. She disappears from the records after that.
On July 8, 1863, Reynolds was to visit her at her home in New York. Instead, five days earlier, she visited him in his coffin after he had consummated another, more fateful rendezvous near the slopes upon which the Lutheran Theological Seminary stands outside Gettysburg. Instead of marrying his “Dear Kate,” he took a more sinister and supremely jealous Bride in a union from which there is no divorce or separation.
Numerous stories abound of strange noises and odd creakings in some of the older Seminary buildings still sitting upon the ridge that bears their name. Krauth House has been known to produce post-midnight noises of large items being moved around and slid across the floor in the attic—moved, perhaps, by unseen orderlies and nurses to make room for even more wounded men to be jammed mercilessly in the stifling heat of an attic in summer, all of them not only invisible, but a century too late.
&n
bsp; Books, being in abundance at the Seminary, were once used as makeshift (and no doubt uncomfortable) pillows for the wounded and dying boys who found themselves helpless to find better resting places for feverish heads. The sounds of books being thrown about the attic and slammed or dropped to the floor—perhaps by hands frustrated in this life by the weakness of wounded and torn flesh—have been reported awakening the students in the wee hours of darkness.
Krauth House on Seminary Ridge.
Having done research in the upper rooms of Schmucker Hall—now the Adams County Historical Society—I too have heard the strange groaning of floorboards above me while the volunteer caretakers of the building’s archives were downstairs. Perhaps one of them had gone upstairs to walk the hall alone without my noticing it. Perhaps it was merely the old building after centuries of settling…just settling again. Perhaps not. Other historians have reported the phantom noises too.
A story floats around the Seminary that a chaplain from a branch of the military was staying in one of the dormitories—perhaps ancient Krauth House— and was told that he should remember to close the closet door in his room. It was through that door, the stories held, that the spirits would come. Perhaps he decided to prove that his faith was a bulwark against the incursion of spirits. Or perhaps he simply wanted to tempt the other world. Nevertheless, he left the closet door ajar as he retired. Later that night he was awakened, his breath catching at the strange creaking of the bedsprings and depressing of the bed next to him, as if some unseen weight just about the length of a reclining human, impressed itself in the mattress along side him.
Schmucker Hall— “Old Dorm ”—on Seminary Ridge.
In April 1992, a student at the Seminary who had read Ghosts of Gettysburg called and asked if I was interested in something that had happened to him and a friend just the month before.
He told me of how one night in the first week of March he had fallen asleep in his dormitory room in one of the newer buildings which sits on the west slope of Seminary Ridge just a few hundred yards or so from where the Union Army struggled on the first day of Gettysburg and John Fulton Reynolds spent his last moments on earth. About 2:00 a.m. he was awakened by a scream from down the hall. He recognized the voice as one of his friends, assumed that he was kidding around with someone in the dorm, and fell back asleep.
About 3:00 a.m. he was awakened by a cold chill. Thinking he had left a window open and that the wind had changed direction, he opened his eyes. Standing against one wall of the room leaning against his dresser was a man dressed in dark blue with a dark beard. At first assuming he was dreaming, he closed his eyes tightly and opened them again. The man still stood there, completely visible but only from the waist up. Fighting the growing panic, still hoping he was dreaming, again he closed his eyes and opened them. Still the man stood watching him. A third and final time, to assure himself he wasn’t dreaming and perhaps to gather courage, he closed his eyes, opened them, and still the man stood, staring. The seminarian sat up in bed to confront the dark, bearded intruder, and the man vanished. Sleep came with great difficulty the rest of the night.
A day or so later he ran into his friend whom he had heard kidding around in the middle of the night and asked him what tomfoolery he had been engaged in to cause such a wild screech.
The friend proceeded to tell him that, at about 2:00 a.m. he had awakened to see a frightening and unexplainable intruder to his dormitory room. A man, darkly countenanced, had visited him through his locked door as he awakened, piercing eyes staring at him over a heavy, shadowed beard. What frightened him most is that no body accompanied the visage—just that veiled, disembodied face and head, floating surreally before him. While the head was completely discernible and distinct, the body just couldn’t materialize itself. The scream his friend down the hall had heard was certainly not one of joviality, but of horror and fear.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about the story is that the dark, bearded man was alone, without a beautiful, charming young woman at his side.
A lost soul on his way to fulfill the sincere nuptial promises made earlier, now stuck meandering somewhere between Gettysburg, Lancaster, and Emmitsburg? Was it perhaps for her that he was searching? With so many souls set free on their fantastic journey within sight of the Seminary, who’s to say for sure who might still be wandering, seeking…whatever.
But obviously, not finished with his nocturnal search, the dark-visaged apparition in indigo blue moved down the hall an hour later to seek further and pay yet another visit upon an unsuspecting student.
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Chapter 7: A Cavalryman’s Revenge
No proposition Euclid wrote
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn a bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow.
Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—
The odds are on the cheaper man.
—Rudyard Kipling
There is probably no other name more closely linked to the Confederate Cavalry than Jeb Stuart. He was the quintessential cavalry commander, leading his troops into small fights and big, making decisions that would affect not only the thousands of lives entrusted to him, but the fate of nations. His cavalrymen were, at one time during the war, not seemingly, but actually invincible, so completely dominating their Northern counterparts as to render them nearly non-effective. And Stuart himself played an important role by setting an example by his constant high spirits and utter contempt of personal danger.
The story of his military life is similar to those of so many of the young men who fought in that war: sincere friendships broken by politics and the accident of birthplace; anger at fate for stepping cruelly between classmates and family members; disgust at the destruction of places once held dear dictated by the necessities of war. For Stuart, his personal life, as well, was torn asunder.
He attended the United States Military Academy while Robert E. Lee was commandant, and graduated in 1854. While at West Point he got to know the likes of George Washington Custis Lee, son of the Commandant, and Fitzhugh Lee, his cousin. Both would become Confederate generals. Alfred Pleasanton and William Averell were also at the Academy at the same time. They would eventually wear stars in the Union Army.
Stuart did well academically, but excelled at gaining demerits, especially for fighting. The odd thing about it, according to his classmates, was that he often got whipped, but was always ready for another good scrap. It was obvious that he just plain loved to fight no matter what the odds. It was a trait that in a few years—much to the chagrin of Pleasonton and Averell—would serve him well.
He was assigned to the Mounted Rifles after graduation and left for the frontier; while there he was transferred to the newly formed 1st Cavalry Regiment. In the regiment he counted as comrades-in-arms Joseph E. Johnston, John Sedgwick, George McClellan, Richard Garnett, and Lunsford Lomax. In the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, closely associated with the 1st, were Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, George Thomas, Earl Van Dorn, Kirby Smith, George Stoneman, John Bell Hood, and Fitz Lee. In all, between the 1st and 2nd Cavalry there would emerge in the coming conflict of the Civil War, two Union Army commanders, five full generals under Confederate arms, and over thirty commanders of brigades, divisions, and corps. They were men whom Stuart would literally bleed beside on the frontier, and later make bleed as his enemies.
While stationed at Fort Leavenworth, he met and married Flora Cooke, one of the three daughters of the commandant of the post, Philip St. George Cooke. There would be heart-tearing sorrow in that union, for while Philip St. George Cooke would remain with the Federal Army in the coming Civil War, and one of his other daughters would marry a Union officer, a third daughter would marry young Dr. Brewer who would become Surgeon General of the Confederate States Army, and St. George Cooke’s son, John R. Cooke, late of Harvard, would become a brigadier general of Confederate infantry, get wounded five times, and eventually reconcile with his father—
twenty years after the war. Of course, their most famous relative, James Ewell Brown Stuart—”Jeb“—would take his wife Flora, and follow the flag of the South while his father-in-law, although born a Virginian, would choose to command United States Cavalry, a position that would bring him face-to-face in battle with his son-in-law. His decision to command Union cavalry, invade Virginia and become Jeb’s enemy said Stuart, he will regret only once—continually.1
Stuart’s role in the Gettysburg Campaign has become a favorite sticking point with historians. Without ever analyzing the facts, most are happy just to accept the silly rumors and innuendo of past historians and even primary sources who had a reputation to defend, and continue to vilify Stuart, blaming his actions as some of the major reasons for the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. Some go so far as to claim he was disobeying orders, and even that he was off chasing women instead of Yankees. The scoundrels offer not a shred of solid evidence.
Yet the controversy remains, and Stuart’s ride from June 22, 1863, when he left Lee’s Army to draw the Union Army’s attention from Lee’s invasion, until he rejoined Lee on July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg, is rife with agonized decisions and emotional turmoil. It remains, after nearly a century and a third, one of the most controversial aspects of Gettysburg. If the ghostly columns of gray cavalry do not still ride through the mists of the back roads of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, certainly the emotional remnants of an exhausted four and a half thousand Southern cavaliers with the hopes, as well as the disappointments, of a nation pinned on them surely do.
