Gettysburg: The Crossroads Town

by Tim Black

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

  We are springing to the call of our brothers gone before,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

  And we’ll fill our vacant ranks with a million freemen more,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

  Tillie smiled at Victor and frowned at Bette. “What’s wrong with her, can’t she sing?”

  “She has a lousy voice,” Victor said.

  It was Bette’s turn to frown, although she glared at Victor.

  As Victor and Tillie finished another chorus of Battle Cry of Freedom, Bette said, “I much prefer this tune,” and began a rendition of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, in a lovely alto voice, which startled Tillie Pierce. And Victor. He knew she was in the school chorus, but he had never heard her sing before.

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

  His truth is marching on.

  Victor joined her in the chorus.

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  His truth is marching on.

  Smiling, Tillie Pierce joined in as well until the trio consisted of a soprano, an alto and a first tenor.

  I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

  They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

  I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

  His day is marching on.

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  His truth is marching on.

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  His day is marching on.

  And then the trio, finding a harmony, lifted their voices, sending the words resoundingly down Taneytown Road, causing a company of infantry to pause and listen to the three teenagers’ rendition.

  He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

  He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;

  Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!

  Our God is marching on.

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Our God is marching on!

  The soldiers began to applaud, and several approached the fence for cool water and to deliver their heartfelt thanks for the acapella performance.

  The only disparaging note was added when a wagon stopped to stack several piles of rough pine boxes alongside the road. Coffins. Victor sadly realized their purpose and wondered which of the men who had just applauded their rendition of Julia Ward Howe’s song would be resting in those coffins by the end of the day. But Victor conceded to the practicality of the Army of the Potomac; there would no doubt be many dead soldiers before the night fell.

  One of the soldiers remarked, “There is no telling how soon I will be put in one.”

  To which the man next to him responded, “I will consider myself lucky if I get one.”

  Both men laughed at the second man’s gallows humor.

  As the sardonic soldiers and the rest of their company passed the Weikert farm, another group followed behind them. Victor spotted a bedraggled soldier, crawling along on his hands and knees, trying futilely to keep up with his companions. Suddenly an officer rode up to him and cursed at the poor fellow to get off his knees.

  “I can’t go on!” the soldier complained. “I am finished.”

  “Get up, you bastard!” the officer swore and struck the man on his back with his officer’s saber. Then the officer rode on, leaving the soldier lying wounded in the road.

  Two of the man’s comrades picked up the limp body and carried the wounded man into the Weikert farmhouse. When the two men returned to their company, which had stopped to rest along Taneytown Road, one of the soldiers said, “We will mark that officer for this!”

  Bette whispered to Victor, “What does he mean by that, Victor?”

  Victor said soberly, “The soldiers mean to kill the officer, Bette.”

  “Really?” Bette asked, incredulous.

  “In every war, some soldiers will kill their own officers and most often it is justified. In Vietnam, the soldiers called it ‘fragging.’”

  About an hour after the incident with the officer and the soldier that Bette thought was actually suffering from sunstroke in light of the fact of the July heat and the man’s wool uniform, three officers on horseback approached the three teen water carriers. The one in the center of the group, sporting a well-trimmed beard, asked Tillie for a drink of water. Victor saw that the man was a two-star general. But who was he? Victor wondered.

  “Please excuse the tin cup, sir,” Tillie said politely, raising the cup to the man on horseback.

  The general smiled. “Certainly; that is all right,” he said.

  After the officer downed the water, he leaned down and returned the tin cup to Tillie. “Thank you, miss,” he said pleasantly. He then turned his horse away, returned the salute of nearby soldiers and rode on down the Taneytown Road.

  “Who was that?” Tillie asked a nearby soldier.

  “Why that is General Meade,” the soldier said. “He’s the commander of the army and the man who is going to lick Bobby Lee!”

  “Hoorah!” a group of soldiers shouted.

  So that was General Meade, Victor thought. How right they were; Major General George Meade, a Pennsylvania native, would defeat Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, but not without the greatest tussle of the Civil War, a battle which would determine the outcome of the struggle between the North and South.

  The trio continued to dispense water to the passing, thirsty troops. Caissons of Union artillery continued to pass by. The muddy road was worsening with the heavy volume of wagon traffic, and many of the vehicles and the artillery caissons left the roads to proceed through the fields, finding the pastures easier going than the soggy Taneytown Road. As the trio watched, an explosion blew up a caisson, tossing a man into the air. He came to rest in a wheat field nearby. Two of his companions picked the man up and brought him into the Weikert house. Victor noticed that the man’s eyes were blown out, and he heard him strangely mutter, “Oh dear! I forgot to read my Bible today! What will my poor wife and children say?”

  The two soldiers carried their comrade up the stairs to a second-floor bedroom and placed him on a bed. Then they wrapped him in cotton. Bette and Tillie exchanged shocked looks.

  But their attention was returned toward Taneytown Road as another battalion of infantry marched by and the teens realized that these soldiers were as thirsty as the troops who had preceded them. They returned to their work.

  The passing troops were soon replaced by wounded soldiers. Victor, on a trip to the spring, overhead two soldiers converse with Mr. Weikert about the hard fighting in which they were engaged, and the many men who were wounded or killed.

  “My buddy was hit by an artillery shell, and when the smoke cleared I went looking for him, sir. All I could find of him was one finger.”

  Envisioning the scene, Victor felt a sudden urge to throw up, which he promptly did behind a nearby bush. A wounded soldier passed by with his thumb tied up. Tillie Pierce thought the poor man’s injury was dreadful and mentioned this to the soldier.

  “Oh this?” he said. “This ain’t nothin’, girlie,” the man replied with a smile that showed a few missing teeth. “You’ll see worse than this before too long, I think.”

  The soldier was prophetic. Wounded soldiers began to arrive at the farm. The Weikerts’ commodious barn was turned into a make-shift field hospital. Some of the injured men were hobbling, some of the men had t
heir heads bandaged, while others had arms in slings. Some men crawled from the ambulances. Others were brought to the barn on stretchers. Victor watched in stunned silence as did both Bette and Tillie Pierce. Before dark, the Weikerts’ immense barn was filled with wounded and dying men who had charged off to fight the enemy so heroically only scant hours before. Victor was certain that some of the men had received water from the Weikerts’ spring. The Union boys who had so gallantly marched past the form were back now in mangled form. Victor saw no glory in it, only horror. Why, Victor wondered, did mankind never learn from war? Why did they keep starting new ones? His musing ended when Mrs. Weikert called the three teens in for supper. Like the Union army, Victor marched on his stomach.

  Chapter 5

  After Victor and Bette walked down Baltimore Street, Minerva and Mr. Greene made their way back to the hotel, pausing when they reached the town square. Others too were congregating in the Diamond, as if expecting someone to tell them what they should do. Horse-drawn ambulances were arriving in the town’s center, wounded men in tow. Minerva watched as stretcher bearers began taking the wounded into the courthouse.

  The wounded men unnerved Minerva. Suddenly, she felt very petty for grousing about missing her summer college visits. Her problems seemed minor next to the conditions of the boys being carried into the courthouse.

  “Mother!” one soldier shouted from his stretcher. “Mother help me!” he cried out. Minerva sensed the boy was about her own age. Too young for this horror! she thought.

  “Mr. Greene, the poor boy!” Minerva said.

  “Yes, Minerva,” Greene said evenly. “By the end of the day, buildings all over town will serve as mini hospitals, and church pews will serve as beds for the wounded soldiers. The horror will be unimaginable to the people of Gettysburg. You wish to be a doctor? Well, I think if you pay attention you will get a good idea about Civil War medicine and how physicians earned the sobriquet of ‘sawbones.’ Their medicine is awfully primitive, Minerva, and by our modern standards, most doctors would be considered quacks. The hygiene is atrocious. Doctors didn’t even wash their hands between surgeries. Many had no concept of bacteria, and an infection could mean an amputation. Minerva, if any of us gets wounded, that person must be given my antibiotics. That is why I gave some of my pills to Victor. I can’t return a student to Cassadaga with a missing limb. That is too horrible to contemplate. Let us return to the observatory on the roof of the Fahnestock Building and see how things are going in the battle.”

  The previous crowd on the roof of the Fahnestock Building had dwindled to a few diehard spectators.

  An elderly man looked at Mr. Greene suspiciously. “Are you sesesh?” he asked the teacher.

  “No sir, I am not a secessionist, I am a Unionist,” Greene replied indignantly. “My niece and I are refugees from Mercersburg.”

  Another older man asked, “I heard the Rebs rounded up all the coloreds and marched them south, is that true, mister?”

  “Yes, sir, it is,” Greene replied. Having studied the Gettysburg Campaign in great detail, the history teacher was quite aware of the Army of Northern Virginia’s proclivity for enslaving blacks. Whether an African-American was a runaway slave or a freeman made no difference to the Confederates. The procedure was not condoned by Robert E. Lee; in fact, he had issued a directive against “barbarous outrages against the unarmed and defenseless,” of which the colored citizens were a part, but his soldiers, many of whom had been members of slave patrols and had pursued runaway slaves before the war, felt that they were merely paying the Union back for its army freeing the Southern slaves in areas that the Union army had conquered.

  “Did you witness it?” the man asked Mr. Greene.

  “I did sir,” Greene lied, although the information he gave was historically accurate. “It was an advanced cavalry unit and the officer in charge threatened to burn every house that harbored a colored person if the colored was not produced within twenty minutes.”

  “What excuse did the Rebel officer give for such infamy?” the man persisted.

  “Well, he announced that they were reclaiming their property, which Pennsylvania residents had stolen and harbored.”

  “Oh Lord Jesus!” the old man cried out pointing to the west. “Our boys are running!”

  Minerva turned her head toward the Lutheran Theological Seminary. Amid the artillery smoke, the Union lines were buckling. Soldiers in blue uniforms began to run down Chambersburg Pike toward the town. It appeared to be more a rout than a retreat, she thought.

  Many of the Union soldiers were dropping their equipment in the street. Some tossed away their 1861 model Springfield Rifles with the flip-up sight, a weapon that was accurate as far away as three hundred yards, a rifle that had replaced the smooth-bore musket which couldn’t hit anything over a hundred yards. Minerva was stunned to see how much equipment the average Union infantryman carried into battle, and Mr. Greene answered every question that Minerva proffered.

  “The rifles weighed nine pounds, Minerva,” he said. “It fired a .58 caliber minie ball. That is an incredibly large bullet, which broke many an arm and a leg when it hit a bone. The men are carrying rucksacks, wearing wool uniforms in summer heat and wearing black brogans, a type of shoe that covered a man’s ankle. It’s a good deal of weight and it slows a soldier down when he is running away. Hence, the reason they dropped the equipment.”

  “That boy, what is he carrying over his shoulder?”

  “That’s his cartridge box. He has about forty cartridges in that box. It is his ammunition. If he is really fast, a soldier can shoot three rounds in a minute…not exactly an automatic weapon that we are accustomed to. In fact, after the battle they discovered many discarded rifles on the battlefield with multiple bullets in the barrel. It seems that during the battle a soldier would think his rifle fired and then go about reloading until he had several bullets stuck in the barrel. One rifle had ten bullets stuck in it. They could not hear their own gun go off amid the din of battle.”

  “So how much did it all weigh, Mr. Greene?”

  “A shade over forty pounds, Minerva, if you throw in his knapsack that held a wool blanket, his shelter half for a two-man tent, and a rubber jacket for hard rain that also served as a waterproof cover for a wet ground. In his haversack and mucket, the soldier carried a change of socks, writing paper for letters home as well as envelopes, ink and a pen, a shaving kit, and a ‘housewife,’ which was a nickname for a sewing kit. He also carried a small coffee grinder. Many men also carried a Bible, though some only carried the New Testament.”

  “What was a mucket?”

  “A soldier’s canteen, tin cup and tin pot or two. Maybe a frying pan and a spatula for field cooking and a couple pieces of silverware and a half canteen to serve as a plate.”

  “A soldier carried all of that into battle?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Greene replied.

  “They never show all that in the movies,” Minerva said.

  “No, they don’t Minerva. No they don’t.”

  Minerva nodded.

  “We’d best get back to the hotel, Minerva,” Mr. Greene said. “It will be safer there. I don’t think it will be safe to walk the streets in a few minutes,” he added,

  As they hurriedly walked back to the hotel, Minerva asked Mr. Greene, “Did they really put free African-Americans into slavery, Mr. Greene?”

  “Yes, Minerva and be careful. Do not repeat the phrase ‘African-American outside our group’” Greene cautioned.

  “Why?”

  “That term did not exist back in 1863. Heck, the term ‘African-American’ did not exist in 1963. Refer to black people as ‘coloreds,’ or ‘Negroes.’ Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know last week, the Rebels came through Gettysburg. June 26th. They stopped first in Caledonia, which is halfway between Gettysburg and Chambersburg. Many freed coloreds worked at the ironworks owned by Thaddeus Stevens. The Rebels destroyed the ironworks and captured
some colored workers and marched them off into slavery. During the Gettysburg campaign, historians estimate that nearly a thousand Negroes were forced into slavery. Some of them were runaway slaves, but many were born free in Pennsylvania, for Pennsylvania was a free state. Ironically, most of the blacks captured during the Gettysburg campaign were taken in areas where slavery had been abolished. In Pennsylvania, the abolition of slavery began before the first shots of the American Revolution. Even in Virginia, because of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, all the slaves held in Union occupied territory were free. Taking blacks and putting them into slavery was making mockery of Lincoln’s decree. Heck,” Greene said, “a black child could go to a public school with a white child in Gettysburg. That was because of Thaddeus Stevens. Do you remember him?”

  “The guy Tommy Lee Jones played in the movie Lincoln?” Minerva asked, for Mr. Greene had shown the film to his class after the completion of the Advanced Placement Examination in May.

  Mr. Greene laughed.

  “He was the one with the black mistress, wasn’t he?”

  “Well,” Mr. Greene smiled. “Stevens introduced her as his ‘housekeeper’ which caused a few folks to snicker. Her name was Lydia Smith and he left her property in his will. Stevens was a fascinating man, a driving force behind the 13th Amendment, which was…?”

  “The abolition of slavery?”

  “That’s correct. Stevens gave the land for Pennsylvania College and was behind the establishment of a public high school in Gettysburg. Most students went no further than eighth grade if they got that far. Pennsylvania was way ahead of other states in education in the 19th century. And a college education? It was out of the reach of the great majority of people. Talk about the one percent, literally between one and two percent of students went to college in the 1860s.”

  Minerva and Mr. Greene watched the Yankee retreat from a window in the Gettysburg Hotel. The Union army ran into the town square and then made a beeline for Baltimore Street. Soldiers had broken ranks and were running. Their frightened faces unnerved Minerva. Among the soldiers’ skedaddle were a number of ambulances bringing wounded into the Diamond.