Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (89 page)

Writing more than a year later,
Richard Henry Dana believed that Gettysburg “was the turning-point in our history,” not so much for winning a victory as for avoiding a defeat that would have proved the Army of the Potomac’s—and the Union’s—last defeat. “Had Lee gained that battle, the Democrats would have risen and stopped the war. With the city of New York and Governor [Horatio] Seymour, and Governor [Joel] Parker in New Jersey, and a majority in Pennsylvania, as they then would have had, they would so have crippled us as to end the contest. That they would have attempted it we at home know.” So even if Gettysburg was less than decisive in strictly military terms, it was decisive enough to restore the sinking morale of the Union, decisive enough to keep at bay the forces which hoped Lincoln could be persuaded to revoke emancipation, decisive enough to make people look back and understand that the Confederacy would never be able to mount a serious invasion again, decisive enough that the momentum of the war would from now on belong solely to the Union, decisive enough that after Gettysburg, the sun never shone for the South again.
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  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX  

D
ANIEL
S
KELLY
was awakened “about midnight” on July 4th “by a commotion” near his home on Middle Street in Gettysburg. It was made by “Confederate officers passing through the lines of Confederate soldiers bivouacked on the pavement below, telling them to get up quietly and fall back. Very soon the whole line disappeared.”
Mary McAllister was nudged out of sleep in her home on
Chambersburg Street by the rumble of wagons and a man who “came running down the street,” announcing, “Get up, get up, we are retreating.” Federal skirmishers and pickets also noticed the laconic stillness and odd lack of activity in the town. At first light, James Wadsworth sent out details from the 56th Pennsylvania and 7th Indiana to investigate, and so did
Adelbert Ames, who ordered “out a skirmish-line consisting of 10 men under a Lieutenant and Sergeant.” Unwary men could still get themselves shot—a sergeant in the 2nd U.S.
Sharpshooters “was killed by a shot in his fore-head” as his company probed slowly out to the
Emmitsburg Road—so they moved cautiously through the fog and drizzle, communicating “by signs of the hand.” Early-rising farmers along the
Fairfield Road galloped into town by side roads, seeking out Federal cavalry pickets to describe the enormous Confederate trains, and Federal signalers also caught sight of the long, withdrawing column.
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As civilians and soldiers alike poked around in ever increasing circles, what they found across the battlefield made words fail on the lips. In the town, the streets were littered with “coffee and groceries of all kinds, boxes and barrels, wagons and guns.” The photographer
Charles Tyson returned to his home on Chambersburg Street to find that his desk “had been ransacked
and the contents scattered over the room,” and in the parlor he “found a small heap of ashes, the residue of burned letters and papers. Tyson’s “cellar and pantry” had been “pretty well cleaned out,” but at least his gallery was “undisturbed.” Along the
York Pike, east of town, were “exploded caissons … abandoned wagons, leveled
fences, dwellings in whose yards were bloody clouts.” The “shutters and walls look like a target at a shooting match.” The open fields were thickly stippled with “everything belonging to soldiers afoot or on horseback, such as caps, hats, shoes, coats, guns, cartridge and cap boxes, belts, canteens, haversacks, blankets, tin cups, horses, saddles, and swords.” Along the
Emmitsburg Road, details of Union soldiers from Alex Hays’ division began retrieving some 2,500
rifles from where Pickett’s men had thrown them away, thrusting them bayonet-down into the ground so that they were “standing as thick as trees in a nursery.”
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In
Joseph Sherfy’s peach orchard, “only skeletons of trees” were “left; there was scarcely a leaf remaining,” and Sherfy’s house had been ransacked, “turning everything in drawers etc. out and clothes, bonnets, towels, linen etc. were found tramped in indistinguishable piles and filth of every description was strewn over the house.” At least Sherfy still had the house; the Sherfy barn had caught fire and burned to the ground, and
William Bliss’ house and barn had been deliberately torched. (All that was left were the stone walls of the barn; on July 29th, Bliss filed a claim for compensation to the tune of $1,256.08, but he never received a cent, and finally sold the farm for half of what it had cost him in 1857.) Overall, the town and the surrounding farmlands suffered over half a million dollars in damages, including 800 confiscated horses and 1,000 head of cattle. But few in Adams County ever saw a penny in compensation; in York County, claims for the depredations of
Jubal Early’s division amounted to a quarter-million dollars, but even fewer saw anything in the way of recompense. There were even a few missing persons: the Confederates may have missed
John Burns, but they
arrested nine other Gettysburg civilians on suspicion of bushwhacking, and carried them off to Richmond, where they remained imprisoned for the rest of the war.
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And there is no record of anyone ever learning the fate of Gettysburg’s kidnapped blacks.

The Confederates left stragglers and prisoners of their own in Gettysburg, a number of whom were rousted from cellars and houses in the town where they had overslept their leave, or else simply decided they had done enough fighting. Harriet Bayly found a “woebegone little ‘Reb’ ” of “about 17 years of age” on her doorstep north of Gettysburg in the wee hours of July 5th, “who said … he belonged to the
North Carolina service” and “never intended doing any more fighting for the Confederacy.” Bayly found him “a suit of citizen’s clothes” and hid him on her farm, and in the end he “remained
with the family,” married and acquired a farm in Adams County, and “has been more successful in peaceful pursuit than those of war.” Other rebels were more resigned, or more defiant. Details of Federal soldiers went through the town, “going up to the barn doors and pounding on them with the butts of our muskets … and commanding the Johnnies to come out at once, and to leave their guns behind.” But civilians also began rounding up stray Confederates, posse-style.
Robert McLean and his younger brother “assisted in hunting them up,” and found “one in our stable loft fast asleep. I called a couple of soldiers and he was a prisoner before he knew it.” (A few people had scores to settle with their own neighbors: Henry Stahle, the editor of Gettysburg’s Democratic newspaper, the
Compiler
, was denounced by local Republicans for “pointing out the refuge of Union Soldiers to Rebel Officers,” and briefly imprisoned at
Fort McHenry.) Eventually, the provost guard got prisoners moving down to Westminster as soon as possible, where they were herded into “a vacant lot” to await transportation to the Federal prisoner of war camp on
Johnson’s Island, near Sandusky, Ohio.
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“Generally speaking,” the rebels appeared to be “ragged, torn, bruised, mutilated, dirty … many of them … miserably ignorant and unable to read or write” and dressed in “every style and color, butternut cloth, half uniforms, no uniforms, full of mud from heavy rains.” But not all of them, and no one less so than Lt.
James Crocker of the 9th Virginia, the
Pennsylvania College alumnus. Captured at the end of the great charge, Crocker was only slightly hurt, and in that remarkably relaxed view toward prisoners of war that still prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century, he obtained a pass and walked off into his old college town “alone, unattended.” Even Crocker could appreciate that it was “a queer, incongruous sight to see a rebel lieutenant in gray mingling in the crowd.” But Crocker soon enough “met … my dear old professor of mathematics,”
Michael Jacobs (who “whispered to me in the kindest, gentlest way not to talk about the war”), and strolling over toward the college itself on Washington Street he crossed paths with the son of the college president, Henry Baugher, who extended “a cordial invitation to dine with him and his father.” Given that “old Dr. Baugher” had buried another son in the
Evergreen Cemetery who died of wounds at Shiloh, the unannounced appearance of an unrepentant Confederate might have made for a highly indigestible meal. But “the venerable Doctor saw before him only his old student, recalled only the old days, and their dear memories.”
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Crocker’s peculiar college cheerio sat incongruously beside the rows upon rows of wounded men who crammed “the town churches and public offices” and “many of the private houses in town,” as well as the corps
hospitals which had been set up “two to four miles out.”
Albertus McCreary remembered “four churches (within a block of us) which had been converted to hospitals”
with the “pews in the churches covered with boards … to make beds for the wounded,” plus “two school-houses” on High Street “and the court-house … and many private residences.” The McCreary house was one of those “private residences” and in it “all of our beds were occupied.” The McCrearys could hardly feed themselves, much less convalescent soldiers, and they had to be rescued by the arrival, beginning on July 5th, of a small army of civilian volunteers—a wagonful of nuns from the
Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg, the
Patriot Daughters of Lancaster, the U.S. Christian Commission, and the U.S. Sanitary Commission. But even with the assistance of citizen volunteers, there were 21,000 sick and wounded men in a town that usually numbered no more than 2,500, and the suffering easily broke over the thin boundaries of help that surgeons and volunteers tried to build around them. There were “wounds of every imaginable description, and upon all parts of the person … wounds in the head, the breast, the abdomen, the legs, the feet, the hands,” faces “partly shot away, leaving, perhaps, only a single eye or row of teeth.” Over half of the
amputations performed in these hospitals resulted in death; by the fall, 14 percent of all the wounded would be dead.
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The Confederate wounded were the lowest in the priorities of the 106 Federal medical officers who stayed behind the
Army of the Potomac to supervise the care of the wounded and dying. A number of Confederate medical personnel remained with their wounded after the withdrawal: Dr.
Simon Baruch (the father of the famed financier
Bernard Baruch) was ordered, along with two other Confederate surgeons, “to remain behind at the
Black Horse Tavern field hospital” with 222 “seriously wounded men” and 10 orderlies, and spent six weeks working hand in hand with the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission. Baruch’s patients were the happy ones, by contrast with the wounded cluttering the halls and classrooms of Pennsylvania College. “All the rooms, halls and hallways were occupied with the poor deluded sons of the South,” and “the moans prayers, and shrieks of the wounded and dying were heard everywhere.” Between 500 and 700 wounded Confederates were jammed in with “five of our surgeons” and “no nurses, no medicines, no kinds of food proper for men in our condition, our supply being two or three hard crackers a day with a small piece of fat pork, with now and then a cup of poor coffee.” Amputations took place on the college portico because the air inside had become “impregnated with the peculiar and sickening odor of blood and wounds.” Not until July 16th was a temporary general hospital on the York Pike, next to the railroad line, laid out under the supervision of Dr.
Henry Janes (a Vermont regimental surgeon who had been in charge of post-Antietam hospital organization), and not until July 22nd were Union and Confederate wounded finally moved there.
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Camp Letterman, as Janes named it, developed into a hundred-acre
village of cots and tents, with its own morgue and cemetery, and served more than 3,000 wounded men before it was finally closed in November. But even at their best, the hospitals and the medical knowledge of the day could only provide the most painfully basic services; in some cases, they could not even keep adequate track of who the wounded were.
James J. Melton, a private in the 7th Ohio, was wounded “in the head … and afterward taken to a hospital.” But being “unable to give any account himself … he is supposed to have become deranged and wandered away … since which his friends have heard nothing from him.”
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