too enthusiastically. This division has been accustomed to distinguished
leadership. Sumner, Sedgwick and Howard have honored, and been honored
by, its command. It was repulsed under Sedgwick at Antietam and under
Howard at Fredericksburg; it was victorious under Gibbon at the 2d
Fredericksburg and at Gettysburg. At Gettysburg its loss in killed and
wounded was over _one thousand seven hundred_, near one-half of all
engaged; it captured _seventeen_ battle-flags and _two thousand three
hundred_ prisoners. Its bullets hailed on Pickett's division, and killed
or mortally wounded four Rebel generals, _Barksdale_ on the 2d of July,
with the three on the 3d, _Armstead_, _Garnett_ and _Kemper_. In losses
in killed and wounded, and in captures from the enemy of prisoners and
flags, it stood pre-eminent among all the divisions at Gettysburg.
Under such generals as Hancock and Gibbon brilliant results may be
expected. Will the country remember them?
It is understood in the army that the President thanked the slayer of
Barton Key for _saving the day_ at Gettysburg. Does the country know any
better than the President that Meade, Hancock and Gibbon were entitled
to some little share of such credit?
At about six o'clock on the afternoon of the 3d of July, my duties done
upon the field, I quitted it to go to the General. My brave horse
_Dick_--poor creature, his good conduct in the battle that afternoon had
been complimented by a Brigadier--was a sight to see. He was literally
covered with blood. Struck repeatedly, his right thigh had been ripped
open in a ghastly manner by a piece of shell, and three bullets were
lodged deep in his body, and from his wounds the blood oozed and ran
down his sides and legs and with the sweat formed a bloody foam. Dick's
was no mean part in that battle. Good conduct in men under such
circumstances as he was placed in might result from a sense of duty--his
was the result of his bravery. Most horses would have been unmanageable
with the flash and roar of arms about and the shouting. Dick was utterly
cool, and would have obeyed the rein had it been a straw. To Dick
belongs the honor of first mounting that stormy crest before the enemy,
not forty yards away, whose bullets smote him, and of being the only
horse there during the heat of the battle. Even the enemy noticed Dick,
and one of their reports of the battle mentions the "_solitary
horseman_" who rallied our wavering line. He enabled me to do twelve
times as much as I could have done on foot. It would not be dignified
for an officer on foot to run; it is entirely so, mounted, to gallop. I
do not approve of officers dismounting in battle, which is the time of
all when they most need to be mounted, for thereby they have so much
greater facilities for being everywhere present. Most officers, however,
in close action, dismount. Dick deserves well of his country, and one
day should have a horse-monument. If there be "_ut sapientibus placit_,"
and equine elysium, I will send to Charon the brass coin, the fee for
Dick's passage over, and on the other side of the Styx in those shadowy
clover-fields he may nibble the blossoms forever.
I had been struck upon the thigh by a bullet which I think must have
glanced and partially spent its force upon my saddle. It had pierced the
thick cloth of my trowsers and two thicknesses of underclothing, but had
not broken the skin, leaving me with an enormous bruise that for a time
benumbed the entire leg. At the time of receiving it, I heard the thump,
and noticed it and the hole in the cloth into which I thrust my finger,
and I experienced a feeling of relief I am sure, when I found that my
leg was not pierced. I think when I dismounted my horse after that fight
that I was no very comely specimen of humanity. Drenched with sweat, the
white of battle, by the reaction, now turned to burning red. I felt like
a boiled man; and had it not been for the exhiliration at results I
should have been miserable. This kept me up, however, and having found a
man to transfer the saddle from poor Dick, who was now disposed to lie
down by loss of blood and exhaustion, to another horse, I hobbled on
among the hospitals in search of Gen. Gibbon.
The skulkers were about, and they were as loud as any in their
rejoicings at the victory, and I took a malicious pleasure as I went
along and met them, in taunting the _sneaks_ with their cowardice and
telling them--it was not true--that Gen. Meade had just given the order
to the Provost Guard to arrest and shoot all men they could find away
from their regiments who could not prove a good account of themselves.
To find the General was no easy matter. I inquired for both Generals
Hancock and Gibbon--I knew well enough that they would be together--and
for the hospitals of the 2d corps. My search was attended with many
incidents that were provokingly humorous. The stupidity of most men is
amazing. I would ask of a man I met, "Do you know, sir, where the 2d
corps hospitals are?" "The 12th corps hospital is there!" Then I would
ask sharply, "Did you understand me to ask for the 12th corps hospital?"
"No!" "Then why tell me what I do not ask or care to know?" Then
stupidity would stare or mutter about the ingratitude of some people for
kindness. Did I ask for the Generals I was looking for, they would
announce the interesting fact, in reply, that they had seen some other
generals. Some were sure that Gen. Hancock or Gibbon was dead. They had
seen his dead body. This was a falsehood, and they knew it. Then it was
Gen. Longstreet. This was also, as they knew, a falsehood.
Oh, sorrowful was the sight to see so many wounded! The whole
neighborhood in rear of the field became one vast hospital of miles in
extent. Some could walk to the hospitals; such as could not were taken
upon stretchers from the places where they fell to selected points and
thence the ambulance bore them, a miserable load, to their destination.
Many were brought to the building, along the Taneytown road, and too
badly wounded to be carried further, died and were buried there, Union
and Rebel soldiers together. At every house, and barn, and shed the
wounded were; by many a cooling brook, or many a shady slope or grassy
glade, the red flags beckoned them to their tented asylums, and there
they gathered, in numbers a great army, a mutilated, bruised mass of
humanity. Men with gray hair and furrowed cheeks and soft-lipped,
beardless boys were there, for these bullets have made no distinction
between age and youth. Every conceivable wound that iron and lead can
make, blunt or sharp, bullet, ball and shell, piercing, bruising,
tearing, was there; sometimes so light that a bandage and cold water
would restore the soldier to the ranks again; sometimes so severe that
the poor victim in his hopeless pain, remedy-less save by the only
panacea for all mortal suffering, invoked that. The men are generally
cheerful, and even those with frightful wounds, often are talking with
animated faces of nothing but the battle and the victory. But some are
downcast, their faces distorted with pain. Some have undergone the
surgeon's work; some, like men at a ticket office, await impatiently
their turn to have an arm or a leg cut off. Some walk about with an arm
in a sling; some sit idly upon the ground; some lie at full length upon
a little straw, or a blanket, with their brawny, now blood-stained,
limbs bare, and you may see where the minie bullet has struck or the
shell has torn. From a small round hole upon many a manly breast, the
red blood trickles, but the pallid cheek, the hard-drawn breath and dim
closed eyes tell how near the source of life it has gone. The surgeons,
with coats off and sleeves rolled up, and the hospital attendants with
green bands upon their caps, are about their work; and their faces and
clothes are spattered with blood; and though they look weary and tired,
their work goes systematically and steadily on. How much and how long
they have worked, the piles of legs, arms, feet, hands, and fingers
about partially tell. Such sounds are heard sometimes--you would not
have heard them upon the field--as convince that bodies, bones, sinews
and muscles are not made of insensible stone. Near by appear a row of
small fresh mounds, placed side by side. They were not there day before
yesterday. They will become more numerous every day.
Such things I saw as I rode along. At last I found the Generals. Gen.
Gibbon was sitting on a chair that had been borrowed somewhere, with his
wounded shoulder bare, and an attendant was bathing it with cold water.
Gen. Hancock was near by in an ambulance. They were at the tents of the
Second Corps hospitals, which were on Rock Run. As I approached Gen.
Gibbon, when he saw me, he began to hurrah and wave his right hand. He
had heard the result. I said: "O, General, long and well may you
wave"--and he shook me warmly by the hand. Gen. Gibbon was struck by a
bullet in the left shoulder, which had passed from the front through the
flesh and out behind, fracturing the shoulder blade and inflicting a
severe but not dangerous wound. He thinks he was the mark of a
sharpshooter of the enemy hid in the bushes, near where he and I had
sat so long during the cannonade; and he was wounded and taken off the
field before the fire of the main lines of infantry had commenced, he
being at the time he was hit near the left of his division. Gen. Hancock
was struck a little later near the same part of the field by a bullet,
piercing and almost going through his thigh, without touching the bone,
however. His wound was severe, also. He was carried back out of range,
but before he would be carried off the field, he lay upon the ground in
sight of the crest, where he could see something of the fight, until he
knew what would be the result.
And then, at Gen. Gibbon's request, I had to tell him and a large
voluntary crowd of the wounded who pressed around now, for the wounds
they showed not rebuked for closing up to the Generals, the story of the
fight. I was nothing loth; and I must say though I used sometimes before
the war to make speeches, that I never had so enthusiastic an audience
before. Cries of "good," "glorious," frequently interrupted me, and the
storming of the wall was applauded by enthusiastic tears and the waving
of battered, bloody hands.
By the custom of the service the General had the right to have me along
with him, while away with his wound; but duty and inclination attracted
me still to the field, and I obtained the General's consent to stay.
Accompanying Gen. Gibbon to Westminster, the nearest point to which
railroad trains then ran, and seeing him transferred from an ambulance
to the cars for Baltimore on the 4th, the next day I returned to the
field to his division, since his wounding in the command of Gen. Harrow.
On the 6th of July, while my bullet bruise was yet too inflamed and
sensitive for me to be good for much in the way of duty--the division
was then halted for the day some four miles from the field on the
Baltimore turnpike--I could not repress the desire or omit the
opportunity to see again where the battle had been. With the right
stirrup strap shortened in a manner to favor the bruised leg, I could
ride my horse at a walk without serious discomfort. It seemed very
strange upon approaching the horse-shoe crest again, not to see it
covered with the thousands of troops and horses and guns, but they were
all gone--the armies, to my seeming, had vanished--and on that lovely
summer morning the stillness and silence of death pervaded the
localities where so recently the shouts and the cannon had thundered.
The recent rains had washed out many an unsightly spot, and smoothed
many a harrowed trace of the conflict; but one still needed no guide
save the eyes, to follow the track of that storm, which the storms of
heaven were powerless soon to entirely efface. The spade and shovel, so
far as a little earth for the human bodies would render their task done,
had completed their work--a great labor, that. But still might see under
some concealing bush, or sheltering rock, what had once been a man, and
the thousands of stricken horses still lay scattered as they had died.
The scattered small arms and the accoutrements had been collected and
carried away, almost all that were of any value; but great numbers of
bent and splintered muskets, rent knapsacks and haversacks, bruised
canteens, shreds of caps, coats, trowsers, of blue or gray cloth,
worthless belts and cartridge boxes, torn blankets, ammunition boxes,
broken wheels, smashed limbers, shattered gun carriages, parts of
harness, of all that men or horses wear or use in battle, were scattered
broadcast over miles of the field. From these one could tell where the
fight had been hottest. The rifle-pits and epaulements and the trampled
grass told where the lines had stood, and the batteries--the former
being thicker where the enemy had been than those of our own
construction. No soldier was to be seen, but numbers of civilians and
boys, and some girls even, were curiously loitering about the field, and
their faces showed not sadness or horror, but only staring wonder or
smirking curiosity. They looked for mementoes of the battle to keep,
they said; but their furtive attempts to conceal an uninjured musket or
an untorn blanket--they had been told that all property left here
belonged to the Government--showed that the love of gain was an
ingredient at least of their motive for coming here. Of course there was
not the slightest objection to their taking anything they could find
now; but their manner of doing it was the objectionable thing. I could
now understand why soldiers had been asked a dollar for a small strip
of old linen to bind their own wound, and not be compelled to go off to
the hospitals.
Never elsewhere upon any field have I seen such abundant evidences of a
terrific fire of cannon and musketry as upon this. Along the enemy's
position, where our shells and shot had struck during the cannonade of
the third, the trees had cast their trunks and branches as if they had
been icicles shaken by a blast. And graves of the Rebel's making, and
dead horses and scattered accoutrements, showed that other things
besides trees had been struck by our projectiles. I must say that,
having seen the work of their guns upon the same occasion, I was
gratified to see these things. Along the slope of Culp's Hill, in front
of the position of the 12th, and the 1st Division of the 1st Corps, the
trees were almost literally peeled, from the ground up some fifteen or
twenty feet, so thick upon them were the scars the bullets had made.
Upon a single tree, not over a foot and a half in diameter, I actually
counted as many as two hundred and fifty bullet marks. The ground was
covered by the little twigs that had been cut off by the hailstorm of
lead. Such were the evidences of the storm under which Ewell's bold
Rebels assaulted our breastworks on the night of the 2d and the morning
of the 3d of July. And those works looked formidable, zig-zaging along
these rocky crests, even now when not a musket was behind them. What
madness on the part of the enemy to have attacked them! All along
through these bullet-stormed woods were interspersed little patches of
fresh earth, raised a foot or so above the surrounding ground. Some were
very near the front of the works; and near by, upon a tree whose bark
had been smoothed by an axe, written in red chalk would be the words,
not in fine handwriting, "75 Rebels buried here." "54 Rebs. there." And
so on. Such was the burial and such the epitaph of many of those famous
men, once led by the mighty Stonewall Jackson. Oh, this damned rebellion
will make brutes of us all, if it is not soon quelled! Our own men were
buried in graves, not trenches; and upon a piece of board, or stave of a
barrel, or bit of cracker box, placed at the head, were neatly cut or
penciled the name and regiment of the one buried in such. This practice
was general, but of course there must be some exceptions, for sometimes
the cannon's load had not left enough of a man to recognize or name. The
reasons here for the more careful interment of our own dead than such as
was given to the dead of the enemy are obvious and I think satisfactory.
Our own dead were usually buried not long after they fell, and without
any general order to that effect. It was a work that the men's hearts
were in as soon as the fight was over and opportunity offered, to hunt
out their dead companions, to make them a grave in some convenient spot,
and decently composed with their blankets wrapped about them, to cover
them tenderly with earth and mark their resting place. Such burials were
not without as scalding tears as ever fell upon the face of coffined
mortality. The dead of the enemy could not be buried until after the
close of the whole battle. The army was about to move--some of it was
already upon the march, before such burial commenced. Tools, save those
carried by the pioneers, were many miles away with the train, and the
burying parties were required to make all haste in their work, in order
to be ready to move with their regiments. To make long shallow
trenches, to collect the Rebel dead, often hundreds in one place, and to
cover them hastily with a little earth, without name, number, or mark,
save the shallow mound above them--their names of course they did not
know--was the best that could be done. I should have been glad to have
seen more formal burial, even of these men of the rebellion, both
because hostilities should cease with death, and of the respect I have
for them as my brave, though deluded, countrymen. I found fault with
such burial at the time, though I knew that the best was done that could
be under the circumstances; but it may perhaps soften somewhat the
rising feelings upon this subject, of any who may be disposed to share
mine, to remember that under similar circumstances--had the issue of the
battle been reversed--our own dead would have had no burial at all, at
the hands of the enemy, but, stripped of their clothing, their naked
bodies would have been left to rot, and their bones to whiten upon the
top of the ground where they fell. Plenty of such examples of Rebel
magnanimity are not wanting, and one occurred on this field, too. Our
dead that fell into the hands of the enemy on the 1st of July had been
plundered of all their clothing, but they were left unburied until our
own men buried them after the Rebels had retreated at the end of the
battle.
All was bustle and noise in the little town of Gettysburg as I entered
it on my tour of the field. From the afternoon of the 1st to the morning
of the 4th of July, the enemy was in possession. Very many of the
inhabitants had, upon the first approach of the enemy, or upon the
retirement of our troops, fled their homes and the town not to return
until after the battle. Now the town was a hospital where gray and blue
mingled in about equal proportion. The public buildings, the courthouse,
the churches and many private dwellings were full of wounded. There had
been in some of the streets a good deal of fighting, and bullets had
thickly spattered the fences and walls, and shells had riddled the
houses from side to side. And the Rebels had done their work of pillage
there, too, in spite of the smooth-sounding general order of the Rebel
commander enjoining a sacred regard for private property--the order was
really good and would sound marvelously well abroad or in history. All
stores of drugs and medicines, of clothing, tin-ware and all groceries
had been rifled and emptied without pay or offer of recompense.
Libraries, public and private, had been entered and the books scattered
about the yards or destroyed. Great numbers of private dwellings had
been entered and occupied without ceremony and whatever was liked had
been appropriated or wantonly destroyed. Furniture had been smashed and
beds ripped open, and apparently unlicensed pillage had reigned.
Citizens and women who had remained had been kindly relieved of their
money, their jewelry and their watches--all this by the high-toned
chivalry, the army of the magnanimous Lee! Put these things by the side
of the acts of the "vandal Yankees" in Virginia, and then let mad
Rebeldom prate of honor! But the people, the women and children that had
fled, were returning, or had returned to their homes--such homes--and
amid the general havoc were restoring as they could order to the
desecrated firesides. And the faces of them all plainly told that, with
all they had lost and bad as was the condition of all things they
found, they were better pleased with such homes than with wandering
houseless in the fields with the Rebels there. All had treasures of
incidents of the battle and of the occupation of the enemy--wonderful
sights, escapes, witnessed encounters, wounds, the marvelous passage of
shells or bullets which, upon the asking, or even without, they were
willing to share with the stranger. I heard of no more than one or two
cases of any personal injury received by any of the inhabitants. One
woman was said to have been killed while at her wash-tub, sometime
during the battle; but probably by a stray bullet coming a very long
distance from our own men. For the next hundred years Gettysburg will be
rich in legends and traditions of the battle. I rode through the
Cemetery on "Cemetery Hill." How these quiet sleepers must have been
astounded in their graves when the twenty pound Parrott guns thundered
above them and the solid shot crushed their gravestones! The flowers,
roses and creeping vines that pious hands had planted to bloom and shed
their odors over the ashes of dead ones gone, were trampled upon the
ground and black with the cannon's soot. A dead horse lay by the marble
shaft, and over it the marble finger pointed to the sky. The marble lamb
that had slept its white sleep on the grave of a child, now lies
blackened upon a broken gun-carriage. Such are the incongruities and
jumblings of battle.
I looked away to _the group of trees_--the Rebel gunners know what ones
I mean, and so do the survivors of Pickett's division--and a strange
fascination led me thither. How thick are the marks of battle as I
approach--the graves of the men of the 3d division of the 2d corps; the
splintered oaks, the scattered horses--seventy-one dead horses were on a
spot some fifty yards square near the position of Woodruff's battery,
and where he fell.
I stood solitary upon the crest by "_the trees_" where, less than three
days ago, I had stood before; but now how changed is all the eye
beholds. Do these thick mounds cover the fiery hearts that in the battle
rage swept the crest and stormed the wall? I read their names--them,
alas, I do not know--but I see the regiments marked on their frail
monuments--"20th Mass. Vols.," "69 P. V.," "1st Minn. Vols.," and the
rest--they are all represented, and as they fought commingled here. So I
am not alone. These, my brethren of the fight, are with me. Sleep, noble
brave! The foe shall not desecrate your sleep. Yonder thick trenches
will hold them. As long as patriotism is a virtue, and treason a crime
your deeds have made this crest, your resting place, hallowed ground!