A Thousand May Fall
Page 15
After three days of fighting, Gettysburg was a charnel house of human death and destruction. More than nine thousand bloated bodies littered the fields. Library of Congress
At the Spangler Farm, surgeons with “their sleeves rolled up to the elbows, their bare arms as well as their linen aprons smeared with blood,” worked around the clock. An “unceasing procession of stretchers and ambulances” quickly overwhelmed the handsome house and barn, crowding the “hay mows, the feed room, the cow stable, the horse stable and loft.” This obliged the newest arrivals to take whatever shelter they could find “under the eaves of the buildings.” The piles of amputated limbs and pools of blood grew steadily larger, “but still the surgeons cut away.” The side yard, meanwhile, became a makeshift graveyard, and Alfred Rider one of its undertakers. The regimental postmaster had been detailed to the hospital by the surgeon in charge, twenty-eight-year-old Dr. James Armstrong, an “able and efficient” graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Rider worked without respite—burying the dead, recording their names, and collecting their effects for shipment back home.
It was physically and psychologically demanding labor. Rider actually wore through the soles of his brogans, tracking “back and forth” between the hospital and the regiment to deliver frequent updates to his impatient comrades. One of those updates concerned the regiment’s young color bearer, who had been “shot in the wrist.” After traveling up his arm, the spiteful slug lodged “near the elbow.” The young soldier refused to let the surgeons operate. “I plead with him one evening when he was frying potatoes and onions to have the ball extracted,” Rider recalled. It was with no small regret, then, that the next morning Rider recorded his comrade’s name alongside the other interments.
EACH TIME HE recorded a name in that simple farm ledger, Rider must have felt the weight of history. He certainly did when he interred the hospital’s most famous patient, Brigadier General Lewis A. Armistead, who had been mortally wounded after defiantly mounting the stone fence at the Angle on July 3. Rider placed the forty-six-year-old, North Carolina–born brigade commander’s body in a “rough box,” which he buried in the “Confederate part” of the Spangler cemetery. He would contemplate it all years later, for there was no time to pause now. The orchestra of human misery—“heart-rending groans” and “shrill cries of pain,” the supple pleading of dying sons for their mothers—continued well into the night, the only serenade on this Fourth of July.22
BACK HOME, celebrations of the nation’s eighty-seventh birthday began early. By nine o’clock in the morning, Wooster’s public square was “already well filled with happy and patriotic people.” Men, women, and children in Canton capped a festive, flag-festooned day (“a pageant the like of which was never before witnessed in this section,” one observer commented) with a “filling, comfortable” ox roast. Notwithstanding some morning showers, “the masses poured along the streets” in Akron, eager to celebrate “a good old-fashioned Fourth of July” with a horse show and parade of fire companies. In downtown Cleveland, the evening sky was “illuminated with rockets, roman candles, and other pyrotechnical displays.” The pop, pop, pop of fireworks “crackling” along Superior Street continued for hours.23
News of the victory at Gettysburg, of course, would not reach Ohio in time for the celebrations. But telegraphs clacked furiously throughout the weekend, conveying the latest news. From this fitful, sporadic, and imperfect traffic of real-time rumors and reports, editors slowly wrung a coherent chronicle of events. By July 6 that narrative had still not taken shape; instead, in a way that betrayed the agonizing confusion and uncertainty of the weeks after a battle, telegraphic dispatches from Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Harrisburg rushed frantically across the front page of the Daily Cleveland Herald without the slightest attempt at analysis. “It is really true,” one war correspondent wrote, shrewdly anticipating that his report would be met with disbelief. “Lee has been totally routed, and is seeking to escape.”24
As the public cheered the results of the battle, families and loved ones grew anxious and impatient for news from their soldiers. After major engagements, newspapers not infrequently published registers of the killed, wounded, and missing. But these hastily transcribed lists could be notoriously inaccurate; more than a few soldiers, for instance, had read their own obituaries over the course of the war. So it was that the citizens of Norwalk, Ohio, dispatched a delegation to Gettysburg “to look after the sick and wounded Ohio boys.” After an exhausting, four-day journey by foot and freight car, the party reached the battlefield on the morning of July 9. Winding through overcrowded field hospitals, they visited with “many” wounded soldiers—including “several” men from the 107th Ohio—who appeared to be “well cared for” and “in excellent spirits.” One of those men may well have been Augustus Vignos, who was recovering from the amputation of his right arm with the aid of twenty-five-year-old Rebecca Lane Price, a volunteer nurse who had earlier that week rushed to Gettysburg from her home near Philadelphia.25
Yet few communities had either the means or wherewithal to send out search parties; they instead waited on letters from their fathers, sons, and brothers to supply the latest and most up-to-date information. On the page, soldiers attempted to translate their raw memories into prose; not infrequently, however, their narrative momentum stalled, and crisp accounts of battle devolved into painstaking catalogues of human destruction. Take, for example, the letter that Barnet Steiner addressed to his brother, William, on July 8: “Our right was compelled for a short time to fall back,” he began. “This was in the early part of the engagement. I was shot in the left shoulder blade, the ball lodging in my breast where it still is and will likely remain. H. Flora was shot through the left breast where the ball lodged. We are both in the hospital together. Among the others in the Company wounded are Hoagland, the little finger; Burnheimer, thigh, ball extracted; Tinkler, in head, pretty bad; L. McKinney, on cheek; Keiffer, same; Dine, forearm; Finkenbiner, shell struck on hip; Keedy and Exline, I think killed; also Palmer, and Lohm and Sinclare taken prisoners; several not heard from.”26
Unable to furnish war correspondents, local and regional newspapers likewise relied on these communiqués to convey news from the front lines. On July 15, the Stark County Democrat could inform its readers that, “the 107th O.V.I. suffered severely in the late battles at Gettysburg.” Still, two weeks after the fight for Blocher’s Knoll, its editors had “heard but few particulars.” The Sandusky Register was not able to communicate the details until the end of July, when Captain William Koch forwarded the lengthy list of Company F’s “killed and wounded.” Similarly, the Summit County Beacon’s reporting was indebted to a wrenching missive from George Billow, but it was not published until July 30. Wielding horrific losses—thirty men in his own Company I—as evidence of their courage, Billow concluded that, “the people of Summit County have every reason to be proud of the Germans in the 107th.”27
For men and women like John and Catherine Heiss—eager for a report from their nineteen-year-old son William Henry, a private in Company B—it seemed as though the “particulars” would never arrive. Making their residence in a tiny dwelling on Cleveland’s Parkman Street (“it was little better than a shanty”), the couple struggled to support their seven children. In fact, prior to his enlistment, William Henry worked in a spice mill to supplement his father’s earnings as a planer at Sheppherd’s Lumber. That autumn, the dreaded news arrived: the rebels shot their boy atop Blocher’s Knoll, and he succumbed to typhoid fever in a hospital in York, Pennsylvania, some thirty miles east of Gettysburg. It was too much for John Heiss. He “[broke] down right after the boy died,” one of his neighbors noted, “and was never afterward the man he had been.” With her grief-stricken husband unable to work, Catherine was “compelled to take in washing” as she waited for the federal government to approve her son’s pension money. But before that happened, and despite “a summer’s worth of medicine,” John Heiss “worrie
d himself to death”—no less a casualty of the battle of Gettysburg than his beloved son.28
WHILE MEN at the front could supply details about their own participation in the fight and the fate of individual soldiers, they were often just as uninformed as folks back home when it came to matters of operational and strategic importance. On the morning of July 5 they swarmed a “newspaper boy” hawking the latest copy, eager to learn the “probable number of killed and wounded” and “the mortality of the enemy’s forces.” Losses of the kind they suffered over the last few days demanded context and meaning. The stilted after-action report filed by Captain Lutz (“exposed to a heavy fire of artillery and musketry,” the regiment “suffered heavily in killed and wounded”) provided neither.29
Just before dusk, the 107th Ohio “again started on the march.” If loath to bid farewell to so many injured and dying comrades, the men were nonetheless impatient to leave behind Gettysburg’s “destruction” and “desolation.” Already, the heavy rains had opened many of the shallow graves strewn about the battlefield. “There was nothing to be found outside the dread results of war,” Jacob Smith lamented, predicting accurately that it would require “months of labor” and “even years of time” to efface the physical scars the battle left on the landscape.30
The next three weeks pushed the bedraggled men to the brink of exhaustion. Hungry, aching, and itching, they trudged through thick mud, waded swollen streams, and twisted through tight mountain gaps. Narrow, uneven, and in places nearly vertical, the roads that reached over the hills and mountains were negotiated only with the “greatest difficulty.” First, the men retraced their steps as far as Emmitsburg, Maryland, where they bivouacked in the vicinity of their old camp on the evening of July 6. Setting out before dawn the next morning, they tramped through Utica and Creagerstown, rounded High Knob (at more than fifteen hundred feet in elevation, the “loftiest peak” in the Catoctins afforded unrivaled views of the surrounding valley, including Harper’s Ferry), and made one last push out to Middletown, a steepled village in the shadow of South Mountain. Though “half the men were bare footed,” the troops logged a remarkable thirty-four miles that day.31
The next morning, a somewhat less strenuous march along the macadamized National Road—the first federal highway—delivered the men to Turner’s Gap, a “narrow passage” through South Mountain that had seen pitched fighting during Lee’s Maryland invasion the previous autumn. A most welcome respite on July 9 afforded the men an opportunity to wash their uniforms, now louse-infested and caked in a thick layer of dirt and grime. But before long it was off to Hagerstown, a “thriving” collection of “porches and verandas” located midway between South Mountain and the Potomac. Men and women choked the sidewalks to catch a glimpse of the massing troops.32
Perhaps unavoidably, these “long and tedious” marches invited questions about the army’s intentions. Were they moving to intercept Lee’s men, or “just marching leisurely along”? After such a costly, hard-earned victory, would Meade allow the enemy to escape unmolested back into Virginia? As they pondered the possibilities, their feet sore and blistered, an all too familiar dread began to gnaw at the rank and file.33
SINCE THAT unfortunate hour atop Blocher’s Knoll, dread of a different sort had been gnawing at Seraphim Meyer. The colonel tendered his resignation on the Fourth of July, but rather than accept it, General Ames placed him under arrest. “Dragged along in the rear” of his regiment “like a culprit,” the colonel now awaited the court-martial trial that would decide his fate. While courts-martial were not exactly rare occurrences during the Civil War—in a telling index of the earnestness with which the Union army enforced its code of conduct, well more than one hundred thousand Union soldiers responded to a court-martial inquiry between 1861 and 1865—they were much less common among officers. According to one estimate, two-thirds of all courts-martial involved privates; many of those cases, especially as the war entered its last two years, involved desertion. While several became high-profile because of the personalities involved, no more than ten percent of Civil War courts-martial cases implicated military commanders.34
During the Civil War, the military justice system distinguished between two sorts of court-martial inquiries. General courts-martial convened when the waywardness or misbehavior of a soldier or officer “threatened the security and success of the army,” while regimental courts-martial were empaneled to mete out justice for “minor” misdeeds. Colonel Meyer would face a general court-martial because of the humorless charge—misbehavior in the face of the enemy—that Ames specified against him. The Articles of War, the regulations adopted by the War Department in 1806 to govern the conduct of soldiers and officers, prescribed a punishment up to and including death for “any officer or soldier who shall misbehave himself before the enemy, run away, or shamefully abandon any fort, post or guard which he or they may be commanded to defend.” Though rules of procedure ensured equity and efficiency in general courts-martial inquiries—the accused was entitled to an advocate during the proceedings, had the right to object to members of the court of inquiry, and could not be tried by officers of a lesser rank, for example—a conviction required guilty votes from a simple majority of the panelists.35
On July 14, deeming it “a duty which I owe to myself as well as to my regiment,” Meyer penned a forceful letter to Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Meysenburg, Howard’s assistant adjutant general. Making a painstaking inventory of his sacrifices on behalf of the Union war effort, Meyer sought a “speedy” verdict. “As to my conduct on the field of battle,” Meyer added, “I appeal to every soldier and officer of my regiment. Exposed to a most tremendous crossfire, which nearly destroyed my regiment, I kept on encouraging officers and men to stand fast, which they gallantly did, and carried out every order given to me.” Still confident that the Army of the Potomac was moving to crush out Robert E. Lee, the colonel did not want to forgo the war’s “final” showdown.
But on that last score, at least, Meyer needn’t have worried. Earlier that morning, the rebels slipped back into Virginia, their supply trains and wagons trundling along the eight-hundred-foot long pontoon bridge that Lee’s engineer corps extended across the swollen Potomac. When the men of the 107th Ohio reached Williamsport and realized that the “strong” enemy works (“built as if they meant to stand a month’s siege,” Charles Wainwright remarked) were empty, they erupted with “considerable profanity.” Four-score miles away in Washington, D.C., President Lincoln, who had been tracking the army’s progress, also found it difficult to contain his disappointment. “Although he was not so profoundly distressed as he was when Hooker’s army re-crossed the Rappahannock after the battle of Chancellorsville,” the journalist and Lincoln intimate Noah Brooks observed, “his grief and anger were something sorrowful to behold.” The president vented his frustration in a memorandum to Meade. “You had at least twenty thousand veteran troops directly with you,” he scolded, “and as many more raw ones within supporting distance . . . I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape.”36
FOUR DAYS AFTER Lee slipped away, two narrow pontoon bridges carried a freshly provisioned Army of the Potomac across its namesake river. Once back in the Old Dominion, the men maintained a demanding itinerary—twenty-five miles to Aldie, a march at “sunrise” to New Baltimore (“we pushed on until dark and, after, still no orders were given to stop”), and a tramp out to Warrenton, the Fauquier County seat. Near that crossroads on the Manassas Gap Railroad, the men of the 107th Ohio, wearying under the remorseless July sun, staked their tents. Though a welcome reprieve from the grueling pace of the last few weeks, the new camp was located more than half a mile from the nearest source of fresh water—something that invited a squall of protest from the parched troops.37
Yet again, the soldiers exchanged the physical demands of life on campaign for the emotional demands of life in camp. Idle moments invited painful memories to prey upon the men. So too did Colonel Meyer’
s court-martial trial, which obliged men to relive that anguished hour north of the borough. Captain Edward Giddings convened the court just after ten o’clock on the morning of July 27. Once impatient for a thorough investigation of his conduct at Gettysburg, the colonel was now flooded with fear and misgiving. “What have I done to merit such treatment?” he demanded to know in yet another letter to Meysenburg, attempting unsuccessfully to head off his trial. “How ungrateful it seems to [me], after bringing all the sacrifices which I did.”38
For the next week, tasked with deciding whether the colonel had behaved “in an improper and cowardly manner” atop Blocher’s Knoll, a seven-member panel examined and cross-examined more than a dozen aides, staff officers, and enlisted men. The court heard from the prosecution’s witnesses first. General Ames opened the testimony with a withering assessment of the colonel’s performance, maintaining that Meyer’s “excited” commands were “not such as should have been given according to the tactics adopted by the War Department.” Captain John Marshall Brown assured the court that Meyer’s “manner exhibited agitation,” recalling how the colonel “crouch[ed] down on the neck of his horse at the sound of shells.” The testimony of General Howard’s aide-de-camp was equally devastating. With their intense scrutiny of Meyer’s carriage and posture—even the modulation of his voice—the prosecution’s witnesses revealed the unspoken rules that governed the expression of emotion on a Civil War battlefield.
Not surprisingly, witnesses for the defense roundly rejected the charge of cowardice, maintaining that Meyer made a “habit” of crouching upon his mount when delivering commands. “A spectator,” as Lieutenant Philip Wang explained, “might be inclined to laugh at his manner.” A captain, second lieutenant, and sergeant major from the 107th Ohio all agreed that there was nothing “unusual” about the way the colonel issued orders to the men that afternoon. The regimental surgeon even volunteered that Meyer’s “weak” left lung, “still suffering” from the effects of exposure the previous winter, sometimes caused him to lean forward on the neck of his steed. Although one lieutenant admitted that the colonel “swore” when posting the regiment on Blocher’s Knoll—something that was out of character—he insisted that Meyer remained with the regiment throughout the fight, and that he did not raise his voice “louder than was necessary.”39