A low voice behind said: “Surrender or die!”
But there was laughter in his voice, according to the Gettysburg College Mercury of April 1899. It was a young Union officer speaking—Harry!
Startled, Bob at first had whirled and reached for his revolver, but then he saw who it was, and the two old pals from college days joyously embraced. “For a while the grim business on which they were engaged was forgotten, and they fairly overwhelmed each other with questions,” recalled the Mercury.
Harry suddenly mentioned Bess. That was when Bob confessed he used to visit Bess quite frequently. Now Harry was startled.
“Don’t you remember?” queried Bob.
“No, I don’t,” Harry replied stiffly.
“Well, perhaps I didn’t tell you where I went. We used to keep such things quiet at college, but that is where I made the calls you and the other fellows used to jolly me so much about.”
Bob had a question. “How is she?”
For two or more years, Bess and family had lived within Union perimeters, and Harry, of course, as a Union officer, was on that side of the Civil War’s dividing line. Bob was not.
But now Bob was close to her home, a scout for Robert E. Lee’s invading army. He was so close and he was burning to know about her.
Harry provided a reply—and a question of his own. “Her father and brothers are all enlisted in the Northern army, and she and her mother, as they remained on the place, are right in your line of attack. But Bob, how come you are so interested?”
The truth was out. Bob’s face turned red, and Harry’s then darkened with anger. Both Bob Lancy and Harry Sinclair loved Bess Marl.
They acknowledged the fact with some difficulty. After a while Harry urged Bob to shield her while the farm remained within Confederate lines, and Bob agreed that someday they would let Bess decide between them. “Then the two men pledged each other to shield and protect the girl for whom they would both have given their lives.” They shook hands on it, with Bob warning they might not meet again. And so, good-bye.
It was late afternoon now. Two women stood on the plain below the onlooking sky, tiny figures in the scheme of the ages, hurriedly packing their goods into a wagon with the help of a servant. Bess and her mother were fleeing their home because it was in the line of battle, caught between forces and likely to be blown to pieces the next day.
Down the road they trundled until from the adjoining woods came a Reb horseman.
Horseman and wagon-riders drew closer to one another until at last there was full realization. Bob recognized them, and they Bob. “Why, Miss Bess,” he said, “I am in luck.”
After informing them the road ahead was clear, Bob acknowledged he must ride off to his duties of war. And yet—“Not before he had looked deep into Bess Marl’s eyes,” we are told. And hers did frankly meet his, we are informed as well, “then dropped as he inquired where he might see them [Bess and her mother], if he lived.”
Lived? With that frightening statement, “Miss Marl had looked up quickly and then had bent to arrange something in the wagon and he saw her lips trembling; then with a lingering hand clasp he was gone.”
Bob was gone, but not Harry. In the woods nearby he had been the silent spectator. He surely did not mean to spy. He himself had been “about to ride up to the wagon,” the Mercury divined, but Bob had appeared too soon, too quickly.
Now, in what pain did Harry ride away?
We’ll never know.
All we know is that during the grim battle the next day, Bob and Harry “clashed in hand to hand combat.” Sabers “flashed.” A stray shot coursed through the air. One of Bess Marl’s two young men went down.
His old friend and college chum was by his side at the last. Tell her, said the stricken suitor, “Tell—Bess—I—knew she—loved you and so I didn’t—”
Didn’t what?—Approach at the same moment?
We’ll never know what else he might have told his old college pal. Mumbling something also about his mother, he pointed to his coat pocket and said, “Give—Mother—”
And said no more. Harry. Oh, Harry!
Coincidences at Gettysburg
INCREDIBLE THINGS HAPPENED AT GETTYSBURG. IT WAS A DECISIVE CONFLICT, A great sprawling battle for more than 165,000 men and for hundreds of awed, terrified civilians. More artillery shells hurled from one side to the other than those sent arcing their deadly way through all of Napoleon’s battles. A microcosm of the American Civil War, it was full of ironic encounters and downright oddities.
Here, at Gettysburg, for instance, Robert E. Lee’s invading Army of Northern Virginia had achieved an initial victory in the first day of the three-day battle. Far to the west, Ulysses S. Grant was at the same time still drawing tight the noose he had placed around Vicksburg. At Gettysburg early the afternoon of that July 1, a wounded officer from Georgia lay near death in a Gettysburg home turned into a field hospital. Just before he died, he was heard to say: “There now, there now, Vicksburg has fallen, General Lee is retreating and the South is whipped.”
So it was…three days later. Both the Gettysburg and Vicksburg battles were lost by July 4, and the decline of Confederate fortunes was now inevitable.
On the way to Gettysburg on June 30 a New York cavalryman named Abraham Folger had been captured by Lieutenant Colonel William H. Paine’s 2nd North Carolina Cavalry. Passing a tannery while being escorted to the Confederate rear, Folger saw a discarded carbine lying on the ground. He seized it and immediately shot his captor’s horse. The stricken animal inadvertently threw its rider, Colonel Paine, into one of the tanning vats.
Turning the carbine on the officer’s orderly, Folger ordered him to help Paine out of the vat, then marched them both to his own lines, not far away. The Confederate officer had been completely submerged in the foul tanning liquid. “His gray uniform with its white velvet facing, his white gauntlet gloves, face and hair, had all become completely stained so that he presented a most laughable sight,” wrote Folger later.
For Folger, in fact, there were double and triple laughs. The carbine that subdued both Rebel prisoners had held only one round—the one he used to kill the unfortunate horse. His two prisoners could have run or turned on him with impunity, if only they had known. More amazing, though, Folger had been captured once before during the Civil War—by the same Colonel Paine’s 2nd North Carolina Cavalry. It had been the winter before, recalled Folger later, “and you can just believe that I was glad to return the compliment with interest.”
Sometimes the events seemed like more than coincidences. On June 28, advancing elements of Lee’s army stayed overnight in tiny Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, not far from Gettysburg. One house occupied so briefly by the Southerners belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Smith. Their son Silas, carrying a pocket Bible, had gone off to war with the Union Army months earlier. Wounded and captured, he died of his wounds in a Confederate hospital far from home.
When the Rebels left Wrightsville and the Smiths returned to their home on Locust Street, across from a church, their son’s pocket Bible was lying on a table, his name and address still written on the flyleaf. Someone had left it, but who?
The Southern troops quartered in Wrightsville had been led, incidentally, by John B. Gordon of Georgia, destined himself for a thought-provoking coincidence in connection with Gettysburg. It came during the heat of battle on July 1 as Brigadier General Gordon, in command of a brigade under Jubal Early, fought Union troops for control of a hill north of Gettysburg. The Union troops were also led by a brigadier, Francis C. Barlow of New York. When Barlow fell gravely wounded, his men had to leave him behind as they retreated before the fired-up Rebels.
Gordon came along on his horse, saw his stricken counterpart, and dismounted to ask if he could do anything for him. Both men thought Barlow surely must die from his terrible wound, and Gordon made arrangements at Barlow’s request for the latter’s wife, a Union nurse, to pass through the lines to be by her husband’s side in his final hours.
Gordon went on his way, assuming that Barlow would die. But he didn’t. He survived to fight another day, to prosper later as an attorney and to rise to the post of attorney general of New York. In the meantime, he heard that a General Gordon had died in battle the year after Gettysburg.
But John Gordon had also survived the war, and he became governor of Georgia and a U.S. senator. Years later, at a political dinner in Washington, D.C., each was startled and gratified to meet the man each had thought dead all those years.
Nor were those two the only soldiers at Gettysburg destined for high achievement in later life or descended from historically significant luminaries. In the latter category were a great-grandson of Patrick Henry, the 53rd Virginia Infantry’s Colonel W. R. Aylett (wounded); a grandson of former President John Tyler, the same 53rd Virginia’s color-bearer, Robert Tyler Jones (badly wounded); Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son Federick, a Union staff officer; African explorer-missionary Dr. David Livingstone’s son Robert, a Union soldier (wounded, captured, died in prison camp).
As for those with future portent, Chaplain (Father) William Corby of the Irish Brigade (New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania) would later be president of Notre Dame University; Captain Emil Frey of the 82nd Illinois Infantry, a Swiss-born immigrant, would later be president of Switzerland (even after his capture at Gettysburg and subsequent eighteen-month imprisonment at Libby Prison in Richmond). Lewis T. Powell, a private in the 2nd Florida Infantry, would later, under the name Lewis Paine, join John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy and hang for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (at Gettysburg, Powell was wounded and captured; he soon would escape and change his name). Finally, there was one George Nixon, whose grandson would be father of future U.S. president Richard M. Nixon. Forebear George was a private with Ohio’s 73rd Infantry. Fortunately for descendant Richard, George’s nine children had already been born; they were left fatherless when the forty-three-year-old George was mortally wounded in the second day of battle at Gettysburg.
Many of the wounded, Union and Confederate, were taken to a field hospital a mile east of Gettysburg. There they began the road to recovery—or often death. It was at this giant hospital that Union soldier Frank Stokes one day saw two nurses and a “wardmaster” carrying a recumbent Confederate soldier on a stretcher to the “dead house” to await burial. “After they passed me a few steps, the supposed dead man partly raised himself up on the stretcher and asked what they intended to do with him.” With a “hearty laugh,” the hospital workers turned and carried their patient back to the wards.
In a similar incident, Private Luther White of the 20th Massachusetts was himself trundled to the very edge of an open grave. The men carrying him on an “army couch” dropped it with such a jolt, the supposedly deceased young man awoke, raised his head, and said, “Boys, what are you doing?” He, too, was spared a premature burial.
Also at Gettysburg was a badly wounded officer from Georgia who had been captured. He and his companions were to be escorted to prison camps in the North, but the Union surgeons said this man, Henry D. McDaniel, could not possibly survive the rigors of such a trip. His friends came to say good-bye, but McDaniel said he would not stay behind. Either put me on a litter and take me with you, or I’ll start walking until I drop dead, he said.
The doctors then gave in, and the difficult march began. But the patient on the litter grew steadily weaker, so the group stopped at a small Pennsylvania town for a rest. The curious townspeople gathered to stare; McDaniel appeared all but gone. A friend, a Colonel Nesbit, drew close to see if he indeed might really be dead, but McDaniel’s eyes suddenly flew open and he motioned Nesbit to come close. When Nesbit did, the wounded man grabbed his friend’s coat and pulled him still closer to impart what might be his final words.
“Nesbit,” he whispered. “Nesbit, old fellow. Did you ever see such an ungodly pair of ankles as that Dutch woman on that porch has got?”
Needless to say, McDaniel was not yet ready to die. In fact, he recovered, returned to the South, and some time later was reincarnated as the governor of Georgia.
Old White Oak
THE OLD WHITE OAK, WROTE GETTYSBURG HISTORIAN GREGORY A. COCO, STOOD solitary in its open field for probably 150 years. The field was part of the Bliss Farm at Gettysburg, once the home of Adelina and Williams Bliss.
No buildings from the Civil War era remain there today, thanks largely to one of the many thousands of incidents that comprised the three days of deadly battle at Gettysburg—July 1 through July 3 of 1863—between those two armies of 165,000 men in all.
With Confederate sharpshooters picking at his men from buildings on the Bliss farm, Union General Alexander Hays on the third day of battle finally decided he must order the barn and house of his Yankee countryman burned down, thus denying the Rebel marksmen their sanctuary. The man who volunteered to carry out the mission had to zigzag right up to the buildings where the enemy was sheltered and set them afire.
That volunteer was Sergeant Charles A. Hitchcock of the 111th New York Infantry, reported National Park Service Ranger Historian Coco in his book On the Bloodstained Field II. Even though Hitchcock suffered a serious wound in the arm in the process, he accomplished the task—house and barn soon were brightly ablaze.
The aforementioned white oak reared its lovely head in an empty field not far away. It, too, was a haven for Rebel sharpshooters harassing the Union lines. On the third day of battle, wrote Lieutenant Tom Galwey, 8th Ohio Infantry, he was again confounded by Rebel marksmen shooting at his company from beneath the solitary tree, not thirty yards in front of the Union men.
To the surprise of the Yankees at one point, however, came a pause as one of the Rebs hidden behind the old oak cried out, “Don’t fire, Yanks!”
Not knowing what to expect, the Ohioans complied, curious to see what would happen next.
“A man with his gun slung across his shoulder came out from the tree,” recalled Galwey. Some of the Union men, angry and grieving over comrades already struck down by the Confederate shooters, took quick aim at this bold enemy, “but the others checked them, to see what would follow.”
The Yankees could see that their Reb enemy carried a canteen in his hand as he made his way halfway to the Union line. He stopped then, kneeled, and gently gave a wounded man a drink from the canteen—a wounded Yank!
“Of course, we cheered the Reb,” wrote Galwey. Indeed, the Union men by now had risen to their feet, and the Rebs behind their Good Samaritan had stopped firing, too, and were standing in full view. Everybody was now an easy target for their opponents; it was a scenario that could not, and would not, last.
“As soon as the sharpshooter had finished his generous work, he turned and went back to the tree, and then at the top of his voice shouted, ‘Down Yanks, we’re going to fire.’ And down we lay again.”
Their battle at the foot of the old white oak resumed, and the next day, with Lee’s army now in retreat, “a heap of Confederates was found under that tree,” said Galwey. “Whether the hero of the day before was one of the ghastly dead will probably never be known.”
Indeed, only the oak could ever have told, but the tree maintained its silent vigil for more than a century until on June 20, 1987, a severe windstorm blew it down.
Black Faces in the Crowd
ROBERT MORROW WENT TO WEST POINT—AS A BODY SERVANT TO CADET JAMES J. Pettigrew of North Carolina. Pettigrew went on to become a Confederate general and to suffer a mortal wound while leading a division in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Morrow, on the other hand, sought refuge in Union-held New Bern, North Carolina, early in the war.
There he became a teacher in schools formed to educate the newly freed blacks in the state’s federally held territory. He was a favorite of Horace James, a Northern minister and former Union Army chaplain appointed Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina. Morrow was a Union soldier himself, a sergeant in the newly formed 1st North Carolina Heavy Artillery, one of the allblack military u
nits manned by escaped slaves—and freed blacks—who wanted to fight for the Union. He had been “for many years a body servant of the rebel General Pettigrew, whom he deserted for liberty and Union,” wrote James in 1864. Morrow was “an enthusiastic and excellent teacher,” added James.
Sadly, though, Morrow contracted yellow fever while recruiting additional black troops on Roanoke Island and died suddenly in his bed one night. “It matters little to him that he left the world without warning,” wrote minister James also, “for he daily walked with God.”
The obituaries of 1915 told this man’s rare story—born a slave in South Carolina and later a member of Congress from South Carolina. In between, he organized a spectacular escape from slavery for himself and sixteen fellow blacks, with five women and three children among them.
Early in the Civil War, Robert Small was a pilot aboard the Confederate Army supply steamer Planter, often plying the waters of Charleston Harbor. On the night of May 13, 1862, the vessel’s captain went ashore, and Small made his move—taking over the Planter and steaming, hell-bent, for the Union warships blockading the harbor. After saluting the Confederate forts on his way toward the open sea, Small delivered himself and his escaping party to the Federal naval authorities, who then benefited from his knowledge of the area’s waters and the Charleston defenses. He spent the rest of the war as a Union pilot. During Reconstruction after the war, he served as a South Carolina lawmaker and member of the House of Representatives in Washington. In his early twenties at the time of his escape, he lived to the age of seventy-six before his death in 1915.
They came forth in droves to greet, to follow, to help, to entreat the Union conquerors. Especially the highly visible William Tecumseh Sherman in his march not only to the sea, but later northward from Savannah into North Carolina with the intention of meeting Grant’s great army at the gates of Richmond.
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