Gettysburg

  Gettysburg death studies, by Timothy O’Sullivan. Above: Union dead on the Rose farm. Below: Confederate dead in the area of the Emmitsburg Road. (Library of Congress–Chrysler Museum of Art)

  Confederate dead of Hood’s division in the Slaughter Pen, at the foot of Round Top, by Alexander Gardner. (Library of Congress)

  Lutheran Theological Seminary. Day after day, she noted in her diary, she had “done what I never expected to do or thought I could. I am becoming more used to the sights of misery.”

  But help was on the way. The U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission and the Sisters of Charity and other civilian volunteers rushed to Gettysburg in their hundreds. They brought organization to the hospitals, relief to the medical staffs and the local volunteers, and immense comfort to the wounded, whether blue or butternut. Herman Haupt, the Union’s expert railroader, got the York & Cumberland line from Gettysburg to Hanover Junction back in running order, and soon the wounded were being shipped off to established military hospitals. On July 9, for example, trains carrying more than 1,000 wounded arrived in Baltimore; on the 12th the day’s total was 1,219, half of them Confederates. Three weeks after the battle, the remaining wounded in and about Gettysburg were being cared for at a new hospital two miles from town on the York Pike called Camp Letterman.

  Indeed, so well were matters organized that on September 23 Camp Letterman was the site of a banquet organized by the Christian Commission and the ladies of Gettysburg. Every patient, Rebel or Yankee, was welcomed. The camp streets and tents were decorated with evergreen boughs, and there were many good things to eat—hams, chicken, oysters, pies, even ice cream. Mrs. Anna Holstein, in charge of the Camp Letterman kitchen, reported, “When the hour came for the good dinner, hundreds moved upon crutches with feeble, tottering steps to the table, looking with unmistakable delight upon the display of luxuries.”

  What was slowest to go away was the indescribable stench of the battlefield. For weeks it hung like the breath of Hell in the hot, still summer air. The bodies had mostly been buried within the first few days, but the job was very imperfectly done and their presence was evident. There were at least 3,000 dead horses and mules to dispose of, and this was done by burning, a slow and malodorous process. People in Gettysburg kept their windows closed through the heat of July and August. Albertus McCreary remembered that “the stench from the battlefield after the fight was so bad that everyone went around with a bottle of pennyroyal or peppermint oil.“23

  What ultimately to do with all these bodies—indeed, what to do to properly commemorate this at-long-last Union victory —became a matter of concern in Gettysburg and in Harrisburg. David McConaughy, one of Gettysburg’s leading lights, organizer of the ring of citizen-spies who had furnished General Meade with intelligence on the Rebels, was first to act on the question. In short order, reported a local paper, McConaughy “secured the purchase of the most striking portions of the battle ground,” including ground around Evergreen Cemetery on Cemetery Hill. McConaughy was president of the Evergreen Cemetery Association and, as he wrote Pennsylvania’s Governor Andrew Curtin, he proposed making “the most liberal arrangements … with our Cemetery, for the burial of our own dead” and also the dead of “all the loyal states, whose sons fell in the glorious strife….”

  This idea of a private cemetery soon gave way to the concept of a national cemetery for these honored dead—these Union honored dead. Theodore’S. Dimon, sent to Gettysburg by New York to care for that state’s wounded and dead, “presented a proposition that a portion of the ground occupied by our line of battle on Cemetery Hill should be purchased for a permanent burial place for the soldiers of our army who lost their lives….” Judge David Wills, another of Gettysburg’s leading citizens and Governor Curtin’s agent in this matter, seized on the idea and made a crusade of it. Seventeen acres adjacent to Evergreen Cemetery that McConaughy had acquired were sold by him (at cost) to the state of Pennsylvania, and Wills set about turning the vision of a national soldiers’ cemetery into a reality, and properly consecrating it.

  David McConaughy’s own vision assumed another direction. “The thought occurred to me,” he said, “that there could be no more fitting and expressive memorial to the heroic valor … of our army than the battlefield itself.” McConaughy’s extensive land purchases would in time form the core of the Gettysburg National Military Park.24

  The landscape architect William Saunders designed the new cemetery in the form of a great semicircle, its curving ranks of graves equally accommodating the states from which the dead had come. The process of disinterment and reinterment was soon begun. Much care was taken to try and identify the bodies, at least by state, but these efforts met with only limited success. Of the 3,512 bodies eventually interred in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, some 1,600 had to be marked unknown. And surely among these unknowns are a number of Southerners inadvertently placed in this hallowed ground.

  (It would be two decades before the South’s Gettysburg dead found final resting places in hallowed ground of their own in the former Confederate states. The count of bodies disinterred and shipped south came to some 3,320. By the best estimate, then, some 1,200 of Lee’s men lie in unmarked graves on the Gettysburg battlefield.)25

  To properly dedicate the cemetery, David Wills invited what was generally acknowledged to be the greatest orator of the day, Edward Everett. A former president of Harvard, Everett was described by Ralph Waldo Emerson as a “master of elegance.” Judge Wills had wanted the event to take place on October 23, but Everett said he could not compose such an important work by that date, and so it was rescheduled for November 19. Wills also sought an ode by a noted poet, and he sounded out three of the best known—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant—but none could oblige him. Then, on November 2, Wills wrote to President Lincoln, inviting him to attend the ceremony and “formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks … and perform this last but solemn act to the soldier dead on this battlefield.”

  Another invitee was General Meade, but he could not attend the ceremonies, he said, because of his duties with the army in Virginia. Yet Meade’s duties did not seem very clear, to him or to anyone else. The war in the East, despite the great victory in Pennsylvania, was stalled. “I am now waiting to know what they in Washington want done,” Meade wrote disgustedly to his wife. That fall both armies were called on to send substantial reinforcements to the battle for Tennessee, and so in these weeks Lee and Meade, like two wounded, spent gladiators, sparred listlessly along the Rapidan. It seemed to Northerners that the fruits of Gettysburg had been thrown away. “What little war news we have is not star-spangled,” the New York diarist George Templeton Strong complained on October 13. Indeed, the very meaning of that great battle had become clouded. The two armies together, on the three days of Gettysburg, had suffered 45,438 casualties; during the six-week Pennsylvania campaign their joint losses came to some 57,225. And yet nothing was changed—nothing except the loss of all those men. 26

  The crowd around the speakers’ stand during Lincoln’s address at the Gettysburg ceremonies on November 19. (National Archives)

  So it was left to Mr. Lincoln, on a pleasant November day, on the speaker’s stand atop Cemetery Hill, to unveil the meaning inherent in this terrible battle and its terrible losses. Someone had to speak for all these silent dead, and by rights that someone ought to be the commander-in-chief.

  The president of course rose to the occasion—just as General Meade and the men of the Army of the Potomac (Mr. Lincoln’s army) had risen to the occasion on this hilltop four and a half months earlier. It was reported that the president’s few appropriate remarks were welcomed by warm applause from the large crowd. In fact what he said required more than merely listening and applauding. John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, wrote in his diary that evening, “Mr Everett spoke as he always does perfectly—and the President in a firm free way, with more grace than is h
is wont said his half dozen lines of consecration and the music wailed and we went home through crowded and cheering streets. And all the particulars are in the daily papers.”

  Surely those particulars were worth a second thought. Edward Everett, who had a sense of these things, saw the transfiguring power of Lincoln’s address perhaps before anyone else. “Permit me…,” Everett wrote the president the next day, “to express my great admiration of the thoughts expressed by you, with such eloquent simplicity & appropriateness, at the consecration of the Cemetery. I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.“27

  Indeed those two minutes, those 272 words, would forever define and interpret all that had been done there. It is surely a matter worth pondering…

  Opposite: The earliest known draft in Lincoln’s hand of his Gettysburg Address, and possibly what he spoke from on November 19. (Library of Congress)

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  The Armies at Gettysburg

  This tabulation of the orders of battle for the two armies, July 1–14, 1863, is drawn primarily from the Official Records, with modifications from primary sources. In the notation of officer casualties, (k) stands for killed; (mw) for mortally wounded; (w) for wounded; and (c) for captured or missing.

  ARMY OF THE POTOMAC

  Maj. Gen. George G. Meade

  Headquarters

  Chief of Staff: Maj. Gen. Daniel Butterfield (w)

  Chief of Artillery: Brig. Gen. Henry J. Hunt

  Chief of Engineers: Brig. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren (w)

  Chief Quartermaster: Brig. Gen. Rufus Ingalls

  Signal Corps: Capt. Lemuel B. Norton

  Bur. of Military Information: Col. George H. Sharpe

  Medical Director: Surg. Jonathan Letterman

  Provost Marshal: Brig. Gen. Marsena R. Patrick

  First Corps

  Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds (k)

  Maj. Gen. Abner Doubleday

  Maj. Gen. John Newton

  First Division: Brig. Gen. James S. Wadsworth

  First Brigade: Brig. Gen. Solomon Meredith (w)

  Col. William W. Robinson

  19th Indiana: Col. Samuel J. Williams

  24th Michigan: Col. Henry A. Morrow (w)

  Capt. Albert M. Edwards

  2nd Wisconsin: Col. Lucius Fairchild (w)

  Lt. Col. George Stevens (k)

  Maj. John Mansfield (w)

  Capt. George H. Otis

  6th Wisconsin: Lt. Col. Rufus R. Dawes

  7th Wisconsin: Col. William W. Robinson

  Maj. Mark Finnicum

  Second Brigade: Brig. Gen. Lysander Cutler

  7th Indiana: Col. Ira G. Grover

  76th New York: Maj. Andrew J. Grover (k)

  Capt. John E. Cook

  84th New York (14th Brooklyn): Col. Edward B. Fowler

  95th New York: Col. George H. Biddle (w)

  Maj. Edward Pye

  147th New York: Lt. Col. Francis C. Miller (w)

  Maj. George Harney

  56th Pennsylvania: Col. J. William Hofmann

  Second Division: Brig. Gen. John C. Robinson

  First Brigade: Brig. Gen. Gabriel R. Paul (w)

  Col. Samuel H. Leonard (w)

  Col. Adrian R. Root (w-c)

  Col. Richard Coulter (w)

  Col. Peter Lyle

  16th Maine: Col. Charles W. Tilton (c)

  Maj. Archibald D. Leavitt

  13th Massachusetts: Col. Samuel H. Leonard (w)

  Lt. Col. N. Walter Batchelder

  94th New York: Col. Adrian R. Root (w-c)

  Maj. Samuel A. Moffett

  104th New York: Col. Gilbert C. Prey

  107th Pennsylvania: Lt. Col. James MacThomson (w)

  Capt. Emanuel D. Roath

  Second Brigade: Brig. Gen. Henry Baxter

  12th Massachusetts: Col. James L. Bates (w)

  Lt. Col. David Allen, Jr.

  83rd New York: Lt. Col. Joseph A. Moesch

  97th New York: Col. Charles Wheelock (c)

  Maj. Charles Northrup

  11th Pennsylvania: Col. Richard Coulter (w)

  Capt. Benjamin F. Haines (w)

  Capt. John B. Overmyer

  88th Pennsylvania: Maj. Benezet F. Foust (w)

  Capt. Henry Whiteside

  90th Pennsylvania: Col. Peter Lyle

  Maj. Alfred J. Sellers

  Third Division: Maj. Gen. Abner Doubleday

  Brig. Gen. Thomas A. Rowley

  Maj. Gen. Abner Doubleday

  First Brigade: Col. Chapman Biddle (w)

  Brig. Gen. Thomas A. Rowley

  80th New York: Col. Theodore B. Gates

  121st Pennsylvania: Maj. Alexander Biddle

  142nd Pennsylvania: Col. Robert P. Cummins (k)

  Lt. Col. A. B. McCalmont

  151st Pennsylvania: Lt. Col. George F. McFarland (w)

  Capt. Walter L. Owens

  Col. Harrison Allen

  Second Brigade: Col. Roy Stone (w)

  Col. Langhorne Wister (w)

  Col. Edmund L. Dana

  143rd Pennsylvania: Col. Edmund L. Dana

  Lt. Col. John D. Musser

  149th Pennsylvania: Lt. Col. Walton Dwight (w)

  Capt. James Glenn

  150th Pennsylvania: Col. Langhorne Wister (w)

  Lt. Col. H. S. Huidekoper (w)

  Capt. Cornelius C. Widdis

  Third Brigade: Brig. Gen. George J. Stannard (w)

  Col. Francis V. Randall

  12th Vermont: Col. Asa P. Blunt

  13th Vermont: Col. Francis V. Randall

  Maj. Joseph J. Boynton

  Lt. Col. William D. Munson

  14th Vermont: Col. William T. Nichols

  15th Vermont: Col. Redfield Proctor

  16th Vermont: Col. Wheelock G. Veasey

  Artillery Brigade: Col. Charles S. Wainwright

  2nd Maine Light: Capt. James A. Hall

  5th Maine Light: Capt. Greenleaf T. Stevens (w)

  Lt. Edward N. Whittier

  1st New York Light, Batteries L–E: Capt. Gilbert H. Reynolds (w)

  Lt. George Breck

  1st Pennsylvania Light, Battery B: Capt. James H. Cooper

  4th United States, Battery B: Lt. James Stewart (w)

  Second Corps

  Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock (w)

  Brig. Gen. John Gibbon (w)

  Brig. Gen. William Hays

  First Division: Brig. Gen. John C. Caldwell

  First Brigade: Col. Edward E. Cross (mw)

  Col. H. Boyd McKeen

  5th New Hampshire: Lt. Col. Charles E. Hapgood

  61st New York: Lt. Col. K. Oscar Broady

  81st Pennsylvania: Col. H. Boyd McKeen

  Lt. Col. Amos Stroh

  148th Pennsylvania: Lt. Col. Robert McFarlane

  Second Brigade: Col. Patrick Kelly

  28th Massachusetts: Col. R. Byrnes

  63rd New York: Lt. Col. Richard C. Bentley (w)

  Capt. Thomas Touhy

  69th New York: Capt. Richard Moroney (w)

  Lt. James J. Smith

  88th New York: Capt. Denis F. Burke

  116th Pennsylvania: Maj. St. Clair A. Mulholland

  Third Brigade: Brig. Gen. Samuel K. Zook (mw)

  Lt. Col. John Fraser

  52nd New York: Lt. Col. C. G. Freudenberg (w)

  Capt. William Scherrer

  57th New York: Lt. Col. Alford B. Chapman

  66th New York: Col. Orlando H. Morris (w)

  Lt. Col. John S. Hammell (w)

  Maj. Peter Nelson

  140th Pennsylvania: Col. Richard P. Roberts (k)

  Lt. Col. John Fraser

  Fourth Brigade: Col. John R. Brooke (w)

  27th Connecticut: Lt. Col. Henry C. Merwin (k)

  Maj. James H. Coburn

  2nd Delaware: Col. William P. Baily

  Capt. Charles H. Christman

  64th New York: Col. Daniel
G. Bingham (w)

  Maj. Leman W. Bradley

  53rd Pennsylvania: Lt. Col. Richards McMichael

  145th Pennsylvania: Col. Hiram L. Brown (w)

  Capt. John W. Reynolds (w)

  Capt. Moses W. Oliver

  Second Division: Brig. Gen. John Gibbon (w)

  Brig. Gen. William Harrow

  First Brigade: Brig. Gen. William Harrow

  Col. Francis E. Heath

  19th Maine: Col. Francis E. Heath

  Lt. Col. Henry W. Cunningham

  15th Massachusetts: Col. George H. Ward (k)

  Lt. Col. George C. Joslin

  1st Minnesota: Col. William Colville, Jr. (w)

  Capt. Nathan S. Messick (k)

  Capt. Henry C. Coates

  2nd Co. Minnesota Sharpshooters

  82nd New York: Lt. Col. James Huston (k)

  Capt. John Darrow

  Second Brigade: Brig. Gen. Alexander S. Webb (w)

  69th Pennsylvania: Col. Dennis O’Kane (mw)

  Capt. William Davis

  71st Pennsylvania: Col. Richard P. Smith

  72nd Pennsylvania: Col. DeWitt C. Baxter (w)

  Lt. Col. Theodore Hesser

  106th Pennsylvania: Lt. Col. William L. Curry

  Third Brigade: Col. Norman J. Hall

  19th Massachusetts: Col. Arthur F. Devereux

  20th Massachusetts: Col. Paul J. Revere (mw)

  Lt. Col. George N. Macy (w)

  Capt. Henry L. Abbott

  7th Michigan: Lt. Col. Amos E. Steele, Jr. (k)

  Maj. Sylvanus W. Curtis

  42nd New York: Col. James E. Mallon

  59th New York: Lt. Col. Max A. Thoman (k)

  Capt. William McFadden

  1st Co. Massachusetts Sharpshooters

  Third Division: Brig. Gen. Alexander Hays

  First Brigade: Col. Samuel S. Carroll

  14th Indiana: Col. John Coons

  4th Ohio: Lt. Col. Leonard W. Carpenter

  8th Ohio: Lt. Col. Franklin Sawyer

  7th West Virginia: Lt. Col. Jonathan H. Lockwood

  Second Brigade: Col. Thomas A. Smyth (w)

  Lt. Col. Francis E. Pierce