by Lisa Klein
After the lovers said their reluctant good-byes, Lizzie and I walked home together. She was like a twittering bird, while I was a sage owl, my mind stirred with serious thoughts.
“You’re not listening to me!” said Lizzie, stopping so suddenly that a woman walking behind us almost collided with her. She put her hands on her hips.
“I was listening, dear cousin,” I protested. “Then my own thoughts distracted me. I am sorry. But do you remember how Mr. Lincoln spoke of the great task remaining before us, the work that is not yet finished?”
“Of course. Who could forget such a speech?” Lizzie sat down on a stone wall beside the road and immediately became serious.
“Well, Camp Letterman is closed now, but the work of healing is still not finished. The war and the suffering go on. I’m not ready to give up my work. I want to learn more about treating infections of the blood and different types of gangrene. Lizzie, what do you think about my going to Washington to study nursing?”
She frowned and said, “I thought you would stay in Gettysburg.”
I explained that as much as I loved her and Margaret, I did not belong in Gettysburg. Ever since I began following John’s regiment as a nurse, I’ve known that I want to help others in this way. But it was Mr. Lincoln’s speech today that moved me to act. I said that I would begin making inquiries. Perhaps I can study with the Sisters of Charity, live at the convent, and work for wages in one of the new general hospitals. I promised I would come back often to visit, then glanced at Lizzie, awaiting her protests and persuasion.
But when she looked up, she was smiling.
“One day, Rosanna, you will be a famous physician.”
Her words took me aback. A woman doctor is such a rarity I had not even considered myself in that role. Now that the idea is planted, I feel it taking root.
“And what do you wish for?” I asked, thinking my lovestruck cousin would reply that she wished to be Martin Weigel’s wife.
“I know that I don’t want to be a teacher any longer. Yes, after all the fuss I made about going to Mrs. Pierpont’s school …” She stood up and began to walk again. I hurried after her.
“Papa will be so disappointed,” she whispered.
“Lizzie, the problem is that you’re too smart for her poetry and music classes. You should go to college—Pennsylvania College, right here in Gettysburg.”
“But that is a school for men. I would have to disguise myself, cut my hair, and wear pants. I could hardly get away with that,” she said, glancing down at her figure.
I thought sadly of Kate O’Neill and her determination. Then I renewed my efforts to persuade Lizzie.
“Why shouldn’t you be allowed the same education as a man? Didn’t Mr. Lincoln just speak of the great task before us, the unfinished work of freedom and equality?”
Lizzie grasped the thread of my thoughts, but pulled it in a new direction. “Why, it’s Amos who deserves to go to college. He has learned to read and figure as well as any man.”
We were silent for a moment at the greatness of the idea that women and Negroes might someday attend colleges.
“Rosanna, the truth is, I’ve gotten used to being in charge of the butcher shop.”
I regarded her with dismay. “You want to be a butcher?”
Lizzie laughed. “No, of course not! Papa will manage the shop again, and Martin will continue working there—if Papa approves him—until Luke comes home. No, I want to have my own store. A bookshop.”
My cousin, a businesswoman! Now I was the one startled into silence.
“Even if I can’t go to Pennsylvania College, I can study textbooks on economic principles, and I do have experience running a shop. I will ask Papa to supply the capital.”
“And I will invest in your shop as well,” I said, my enthusiasm growing.
Thus encouraged, Lizzie continued building her castle, stone by stone.
“I could use the profits from the shop to publish new books. You must let me print your history of the war. We could call it The Memoirs of a Confederate Field Nurse. It will sell hundreds of copies. Then I will help Grace write the story of her years in slavery. It will be so heartbreaking that Jefferson Davis will read it and issue his own Emancipation Proclamation.”
I had never seen Lizzie so animated. My down-to-earth cousin was on fire with bold ideals.
“So I will learn to cure gangrene, and you will change the hearts of men through books,” I said with a wistful laugh.
Lizzie took me by the shoulders. In the middle of the road we faced each other. Her bonnet had fallen from her shoulders, and her wheat gold hair escaped from its pins. I saw her girlish self like a faint shadow behind her present womanly features. She seemed lit from within, like a lamp.
“I am not joking, Rosanna. These are not dreams for a far-off future. These are plans,” she said emphatically. “It is like deciding to picnic at Culp’s Hill. We will not do it someday, but tomorrow.”
“Whether the sun shines or the rain falls,” I said, echoing her conviction.
Lizzie smiled, her green eyes bright with hope. I began to feel that everything we had spoken of was possible. The waning sun shot its beams through the bare-branched trees along Cemetery Ridge as this memorable day slipped into dusk, while Lizzie and I resumed our way along the deeply rutted pike that led at once toward Gettysburg and away from it.
author’s note
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual, historical persons and events is … completely intentional!
If you’re like me, when you read a novel about a historical event, you ask, “How much of this really happened?” My answer here is, “More than you might realize.” It all could have happened exactly as written, for all the fictional characters and events occur within a framework of actual events that I did not alter, not even to make a better story.
For example, Lizzie Allbauer is drawn after the fifteen-year-old Matilda “Tillie” Pierce, the daughter of a butcher with a brother in the Pennsylvania Reserves. She spent the second day of the battle at the farmhouse of Jacob and Sarah Weikert on Taneytown Road just behind Little Round Top. In 1889, Tillie Pierce Alleman wrote a memoir of the battle (At Gettysburg: Or What a Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle) that first gave me the idea for this book. But I changed Tillie enough that I gave her a new name. The rest of the Allbauers are made up. Ginnie Wade was a real person (called “Jennie” by her family), as was Sarah Brodhead and Mr. Kendlehart. Other citizens of Gettysburg and soldiers in Company K are invented but based on real people. Rosanna McGreevey and her family are entirely made up, as are Amos and Grace. There was a ladies’ seminary in Gettysburg run by a Mrs. Eyster, but I have rendered her as Mrs. Pierpont. The Weikerts have become the Weigels. My rule of thumb was that any historical person who appears under his or her own name has not been fictionalized. This includes the military personnel such as generals George Meade, Robert E. Lee, and Gouverneur Warren, and, of course, President Abraham Lincoln.
There is so much written about the Civil War and especially the battle of Gettysburg, and the truth is so compelling, that there is really no reason to make anything up. For the military campaigns and battles I relied on Richard Wheeler’s Gettysburg, 1863: Campaign of Endless Echoes and Bruce Catton’s The Civil War. The movements of John Wilcox’s regiment follow closely the account in John Dooley, Confederate Soldier: His War Journal, and the actions of the Pennsylvania Reserves follow Henry Minnigh’s History of Company K and Samuel P. Bates’s History of the Pennsylvania Volunteers. For the Gettysburg battle itself, nothing matches the compelling volume by David J. Eicher, Gettysburg Battlefield: The Definitive Illustrated History. Thanks to the three-dimensional drawings, it is possible to envision the flow of battle hour by hour. The many photographs that exist of Gettysburg and the battlefield also served as a great inspiration and research aid. William Frassanito’s Early Photography at Gettysburg and Gettysburg Then & Now make it possible to stand almost anywhere and imagine the scene 150 ye
ars ago. E. F. Conklin’s Women at Gettysburg, 1863 has a wealth of true stories of ordinary yet heroic women. Robert E. Denney’s Civil War Medicine: Care and Comfort of the Wounded consists of excerpts from contemporary sources detailing the drama of saving lives under horrific conditions. And I used Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America for my account of the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. I did some research at the Adams County Historical Society (located in the Lutheran Seminary building that served as a hospital during the battle), where knowledgeable Civil War buffs and historians such as Tim Smith hang out, chatting about the battle in phenomenal detail. But if you really want to experience the past, visit Gettysburg during Remembrance Day weekend in November or Civil War Heritage Days in early July, when there are parades, reenactments, and thousands of visitors in period costumes. I promise you that history will come incredibly alive.
It was a visit to Gettysburg with my family six years ago that made me want to write a novel about the Civil War. I was fascinated by the photographs of civilians on one wall of the Visitor’s Center at Gettysburg National Military Park. Each of their lives was marked with tragedy and moments of heroism due to the battle that unfolded at their very doorsteps. I had never before thought about the ordinary people who were caught up in the war, and I wanted to write about their fears, their sacrifices, and their everyday joys. Lizzie and Rosanna took shape as opposites, two halves of a divided country, and in them I tried to imagine the opportunities for heroism in the lives of two girls coming of age during the most shattering events of our American history.
In three days at Gettysburg, nearly eight thousand soldiers died, and another thirty-seven thousand were wounded, captured, or missing. Jennie Wade was the only civilian killed. When writing fiction about the Civil War, one can invent scenes of battlefield bravery, human tragedy, freakish accidents, and near miraculous escapes, only to discover, with enough reading, that something even more amazing or terrible actually happened. Yes, this book is a work of fiction, but everything in it could have occurred just as described to real, historical people living between June 1861 and November 1863, when the cataclysmic Civil War touched the lives of every man, woman, and child in our divided nation.
For Further Reading and Research
Bates, Samuel P. History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–5. Harrisburg, PA: B. 1869–71. Available online at www.pacivilwar.com.
Bennett, Gerald R. Days of “Uncertainty and Dread”: The Ordeal Endured by the Citizens at Gettysburg. Littlestown, PA: Gerald R. Bennett, 1994.
Billings, John D. Hardtack and Coffee: or the Unwritten Story of Army Life. Boston, 1887. G.M. Smith & Co.
Bloom, Robert L. “ ‘We Never Expected a Battle’: The Civilians at Gettysburg, 1863.” Pennsylvania History 55, no. 4 (October 1988): 161–200.
Brodhead, Sarah. The Diary of a Lady of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, from June 15 to July 15, 1863. Privately printed. (Copy in State Library of Ohio).
Catton, Bruce. The Civil War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. Edited by C. Vann Woodward. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
Coco, Gregory A. A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg: The Aftermath of a Battle. Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1995.
Conklin, E. F., ed. Women at Gettysburg, 1863. Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1995.
Denney, Robert E. Civil War Medicine: Care and Comfort of the Wounded. New York: Sterling, 1994.
Eicher, David J. Gettysburg Battlefield: The Definitive Illustrated History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Frassanito, William A. Early Photography at Gettysburg. Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1995.
———. Gettysburg Then & Now: Touring the Battlefield with Old Photos, 1863–1889. Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1996.
History of Cumberland and Adams Counties, Pennsylvania. Chicago: Warner, Beers, 1886.
John Dooley, Confederate Soldier: His War Journal. Edited by Joseph T. Durkin. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1945.
Leisch, Juanita. An Introduction to the Civil War Civilians. Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1994.
Minnigh, Henry N. History of Company K. Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1998.
Pember, Phoebe Yates. A Southern Woman’s Story. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
Sheldon, George. When the Smoke Cleared at Gettysburg: The Tragic Aftermath of the Bloodiest Battle of the Civil War. Nashville: Cumberland House, 2003.
Small, Cindy L. The Jennie Wade Story. Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1991.
Volo, Dorothy D. Daily Life in Civil War America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Wheeler, Richard. Gettysburg, 1863: Campaign of Endless Echoes. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999.
Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Web Sites:
www.civilwarmed.org (National Museum of Civil War Medicine)
www.americancivilwar.com (timelines, battles, people)
www.nps.gov/gett (Gettysburg National Military Park)
www.civil-war.net (outstanding site for research; many photographs)
acknowledgments
I wish to thank Julie Romeis and Melanie Cecka, gifted editors, along with the Bloomsbury staff—particularly, Sandy, Jill, Melissa, Jennifer, and Donna. And, of course, dear Carolyn French, my agent. Finally, Rob, David, and Adam, for putting up with a wife and mother who is sometimes absent from the here and now.
ALSO BY LISA KLEIN
Ophelia
Copyright © 2008 by Lisa Klein
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in the United States of America in October 2008
by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers
E-book edition published in April 2011
www.bloomsburykids.com
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Bloomsbury BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Klein, Lisa M.
Two girls of Gettysburg / Lisa Klein.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When the Civil War breaks out, two cousins, Lizzie and Rosanna, find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict until the war re unites them in the town of Gettysburg.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59990-105-3 • ISBN-10: 1-59990-105-6 (hardcover)
1. Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863—Juvenile fiction. [1. Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863—Fiction. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Cousins—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K678342Tw 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2008010322
ISBN 978-1-59990-805-2 (e-book)