A lot of people know a lot of things about the Battle of Gettysburg, especially in our area, where you can absorb information about the conflict almost by osmosis. The odds are pretty good that many of you already know some of the things on this list. Some of you might know quite a few, and others might not. But in truth, it’s impossible for anyone to know everything about the Gettysburg Campaign.
Consider this: There were roughly 160,000 troops at the battle, of whom 7,058 were listed as killed, leaving 152,942 survivors. Over the 72 hours of the battle, those survivors accumulated 11,011,824 hours of experience, or 458,826 days – or 1,257 years. And that’s just the three days of the battle; the Gettysburg campaign actually went on for more than a month.
So think of this list as an informational scavenger hunt. I’ve gathered up 160 facts about events before, during, and after the battle. Some of them I already knew, some of them I did not, some of them I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and some “facts” turned out to be myths. A lot of facts come heavily encrusted with legend, and I can’t say with certainty that I chipped away all the layers. But I certainly learned a lot while compiling it, and I hope you enjoy it.
1. Ever wonder what the Gettysburg Campaign was called before the battle? While it was happening, it was generally referred to in the North as the “Emergency of 1863.”
2. The Shenandoah and Cumberland Valleys, where much of the activity of the Gettysburg Campaign took place, are but two of fourteen parts of one of the largest geological features of the North American continent-The Great Appalachian Valley, or just Great Valley. It stretches from Quebec to Alabama and is roughly 1200 miles long. Major Gettysburg-related locations in the Great Valley include (but are certainly not limited to) Winchester, Va, Williamsport, Md, and Greencastle, Chambersburg, Waynesboro, Shippensburg, Carlisle, Mechanicsburg, Camp Hill, and Harrisburg, Pa. (Incidentally, if you examine accounts from the time, you will find traveling northward from Virginia to Pennsylvania was called “going down the valley”.)
3. The area where Gettysburg and most of Adams County are located is what’s known broadly as the Piedmont, or Piedmont Province. Located westward from Philadelphia, it’s an area of rolling lowlands and low, rounded hills. The subsection of the Piedmont where Gettysburg is located is known as the Gettysburg-Newark Lowland Section. (Yes, it does continue east through New Jersey to Newark.) Gettysburg-related locations include (but again are not limited to) Cashtown, Hunterstown, Hanover, York, Dover, Dillsburg, Wrightsville, York Haven, Columbia, Lancaster, and of course Gettysburg. If you want to do a deep dive into the Physiographic Provinces of Pennsylvania, the Pa. Department of Natural Resources has a downloadable map here. If you want to do a deeper dive they have another map here.
4. There are four towns named Gettysburg in the U.S. There is Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, of course, Gettysburg, South Dakota, Gettysburg, South Carolina, and Gettysburg, Ohio. The Ohio Gettysburg is directly connected to Pennsylvania’s, but not to the battle. It was founded in the 1840s by settlers who moved west from Adams County, Pennsylvania and brought the name with them.
5. In 1863 nobody ever knew exactly what time it was, because there was no exact time. Standardized time zones did not exist until the railroads started using them on November 18, 1883. Up till then, communities had their own locally determined time, usually based on local noon- with varying degrees of accuracy. This is why, among other things, records and reports give multiple times for the start of the great bombardment before Pickett’s Charge.
6. Before the battle Gettysburg (population 2,400) was best known for its two schools; Pennsylvania College, now Gettysburg College, and the Lutheran Theological Seminary, after which Seminary Ridge is named.
7. Before they met at Gettysburg, both armies, trying to make the enemy come to them, established strong defensive positions, neither of which were used in the battle. Lee was hoping to meet the Union army at Cashtown, 8 miles west of Gettysburg; Meade made plans for a defensive line along Pipe Creek, near Taneytown, Maryland, about 11.8 miles southeast of Gettysburg.
8. The two sides did not just “blunder” into each other at Gettysburg; its many roads made it a natural concentration site, both sides were aware of it, and both sides were reconnoitering it. But, as noted above, neither side actually wanted to fight there. Gettysburg was what’s known in military parlance as a meeting engagement or encounter battle, one that occurs when one or both sides do not know the other’s exact location. The meeting engagement at Gettysburg ballooned into a military maelstrom, sucking in unit after unit as they were sent to reinforce the forces already engaged.
9. One of the enduring myths about Gettysburg is that the Confederates approached the town on July 1 looking for a shipment of shoes, or (in other tellings) a shoe factory. But there was no shoe factory in Gettysburg, nor were there any shoes. Jubal Early’s ransom demand to the town on June 26 included 1,500 pairs of shoes, but there were none to be had.
The Soldier’s life
10. In 1861 there were 977 living West Point graduates. Of these 259 or 26.5 percent served in the Confederate Army; 638 or 65.1 percent served in the Union Army.
11. Both Union and Confederate Armies used the same basic command structure. Companies were joined together into regiments, the regiments were consolidated into brigades, brigades begat divisions, and divisions were grouped together as corps. For the first three years of the war, though, Southern corps and divisions had about twice as many soldiers as those of the North.
12. Both armies had units from Maryland, a slave state that stayed in the Union, though not entirely of its own volition. It can also be said both sides had troops from Virginia, keeping in mind West Virginia was formed from part of Virginia during the Civil War. That area set up a separate government from the rest of Virginia in 1861 and was admitted to the Union on June 20th, 1863, just as the Gettysburg Campaign was in full swing.
13. Now here’s an interesting thought experiment for you – look at the clothes in your closet and just ask yourself, how many of them would survive being worn nonstop for four months? How about six months? The standard clothing allowance for a Union soldier as listed in the United States Army Regulations of 1861 consisted of:
| Two caps | One hat | One fatigue forage cap |
| A uniform coat (the “formal” coat, extending down almost to the knees) | Two flannel sack coats (the coat most often worn) | Three pairs of trousers |
| Three flannel shirts | Three pairs of flannel drawers (what we would now call long underwear) | Four pairs of bootees (a shoe that comes above the ankle) |
| Four Pairs of stockings | One great coat (for winter or bad weather) | One blanket |
In your second year of service, you would get only two pairs of trousers and drawers. You wouldn’t be issued a new blanket until your third year of service, and your great coat was expected to last for five years.
14. The word “shoddy” got its modern meaning during the Civil War. Shoddy was originally a noun, the name of a type of cloth. It was one of the first and most successful recycling programs in history. Benjamin Law invented shoddy in England in 1813, devising a way to take old woolen clothes, grind them down into fibers, and re-spin them into new threads for making cloth. The shoddy was not as good as cloth made from brand-new fiber, but it wasn’t bad either – and it was a lot cheaper. The process is still used today, on all kinds of fabrics. You might be wearing “a shoddy” right now and not even know it. Then came the American Civil War, and a huge demand for uniforms. Unscrupulous war profiteers supplied shoddy cloth of inferior quality, and uniforms cut poorly and assembled badly to squeeze out every penny of profit there was to purloin. The results were uniforms that, in some cases, fell apart almost as soon as men put them on. Since many of these uniforms were made of shoddy, “Shoddy” came to mean “poor quality” in clothing, and eventually, anything poorly made.
15. The boys in grey were often not as well-clothed as the boys in blue. In fact, the boys in grey often weren’t even in grey. Many Confederate soldiers often wore uniforms of a color called “butternut brown” because the cloth was actually dyed with butternuts or bark from the butternut tree. (Some “grey” Confederate uniforms were made by bleaching captured Union garb.)
16. Most of us today would probably find the army footwear of the Civil War very uncomfortable. The most common shoes issued to Union troops were often referred to as “bootees”, ankle-length, lace-up footwear too tall to be a shoe and too short to be a boot. They came in only four sizes. The usual way of getting them to fit better was to soak them in water, then walk around in them as the leather dried. There was no padding except thick socks and whatever calluses you developed while marching in them. And, like other military clothing, many of the boots were “shoddy” and tended to fall apart quickly.
17. Many Confederate soldiers marched barefoot, saving their valuable shoe leather for the actual battles, assuming they actually had shoe leather to save. (It’s estimated that at times 30 percent of Confederate soldiers went unshod.) When Jubal Early’s troops marched into Gettysburg on their way to York on June 26, resident Albertus McCreary took note of a shoeless Rebel on horseback with spurs strapped to his bare heels.
18. While he fell short on the battlefield, and was replaced just before the Battle of Gettysburg, Joseph Hooker was an able administrator who did much to improve conditions for the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, getting them better food and medical care, improving camp sanitation, and instituting an improved regular furlough system. He also created an efficient intelligence system that would serve him and later General George Meade well in the lead-up to Gettysburg.
In addition, Hooker introduced Corps badges. Each corps of the army would have its own distinctive cloth marking, on the top or side of the hat or cap, the left chest, or both. The shapes were also color-coded, with red for the first division of a corps, white for the second, and blue for the third. (There was also green for a fourth division, and orange for a fifth division, if such were needed.) Not only did this help create some genuine “esprit de corps”, it also made it much easier for commanders in the field to figure out who was doing what, where, and when. The idea of corps badges spread, and by the end of the war, almost every corps in the army had its own badge.
The Corps Badges for the Army of the Potomac were:
1st Corps — Circular disc or “full moon”
2nd Corps — Trefoil or “shamrock”
3rd Corps – Lozenge or “diamond”
5th Corps — Maltese or “iron cross”
6th Corps — “Greek” cross
11th Corps — Crescent moon
12th Corps — Star
The use of corps badges spread beyond just the soldiers. They appeared on the flags of the corps. A swallowtail flag designated the corps, square or rectangular flags designated divisions, and triangular “pennant” flags designated brigades.
19. One thing neither side provided their soldiers was any means of identification. Soldiers feared that if killed in battle, they would end up in an unmarked grave, and their families would never know what happened to them. Private enterprise filled the gap; sutlers, the merchants who followed the armies, sold soldiers small metal discs with a patriotic design stamped on one side, and a soldier’s information (name, unit, and sometimes home town) engraved on the other.
20. More soldiers died from disease than bullets. About 2/3 of the soldiers who died during the war succumbed to things like typhoid fever, mumps, and dysentery.
21. Hardtack has been called “The MRE of the Civil War.” It’s been around a lot longer than that. The oldest hardtack found (by whatever name it was called at the time) is over 6,000 years old. It’s basically a thick mixture of flour, water, and salt, baked until it’s extremely dry, with a moisture content of around 1.5% – 2.0%. (Not that they had a way to actually gauge that at the time.) This makes it almost impervious to bacteria and mold, which means it can keep for, well, 6,000 years. (To learn more about hardtack, including a recipe, click here.)
22. While Hardtack made good marching rations and supplied plenty of energy, they weren’t exactly what we’d nutritious. One of the things Union soldiers received in their rations to improve their diet was “desiccated vegetables”- string beans, turnips, carrots, beets, and onions compressed into one-inch by one-foot rectangular bricks. The bricks had to be boiled for about an hour, turning the veggies into a soggy clump (and probably leeching out most of their nutritional value.) Soldiers quickly took to calling them “desecrated” vegetables.
23. The “Minié Ball”, the most common rifle ammunition of the war, was not ball-shaped. Invented in 1847 by Claude-Etienne Minié, it was a cylindro-conoidal shape (which is a fancy way of saying it looked like a bullet) with a rounded cavity at the bottom. When fired, gases from the explosion would cause the cavity to expand, engaging the rifling in the musket barrel and making the Minié ball spin, which would make it highly accurate – and deadly.
24. Loading a civil war musket took nine steps: 1. Take a paper cartridge containing gunpowder and a Minie ball from the cartridge box. 2. Tear open the cartridge with your teeth. 3. Pour the gunpowder into the barrel. 4. Insert the Minie ball. 5. Shove the bullet down the barrel using the ramrod. 6. Pull out the ramrod. 7. Put a percussion cap on a “nipple” on the breech. 8. Cock the hammer. 9. Shoot! With practice, a soldier could manage three shots a minute. (Soldiers were taught to shove down the ramrod using their little fingers, because they were the most expendable if the musket discharged prematurely.)
25. One of the things medical examiners checked for in the Civil War was whether you had your front teeth. You needed them to bite open a cartridge.
26. At the height of the war, the Union manufactured 5000 muskets a day; the South could barely manage to produce 100.
27. Both sides relied on wagon trains to transport supplies. A typical supply wagon was as long as a modern tractor-trailer but in reverse. The wagon carrying the cargo was the small part in the back, and the motive power, a long string of horses or mules, was in the front.
28. The regulation saddle of the Union cavalry during the Civil War was the McClellan, invented by Captain George B. McClellan, who as General McClellan would (for a while) command the Army of the Potomac. Adopted in 1859, not only was it used in the Civil War, it remained the regulation saddle of the U.S. Cavalry until it was mechanized in the 1940s, and is still used today by U.S. Army ceremonial units. Most Civil War cavalry reenactors today ride reproduction McClellans, not because original saddles are unavailable (they were built to last) but because the shape of horses has changed. Most modern horses have broader withers than horses from the 1860s, and the front (pommel) of the modern reproduction McClellan is widened to take that into account.
29. General George Gordon Meade’s favorite horse, Baldy, made life difficult for Meade’s subordinates. Baldy, it seems, had an unusual pace called a “rack” that was faster than a walk, but slower than a trot. This forced Meade’s staff to alternate between walking and trotting to keep pace. Gen Meade died at 57 in 1872. Baldy would outlive him by ten years.
30. Perhaps the most famous horse of the Civil War was Traveller, ridden by Robert E. Lee. He was a grey American Saddlebred measuring 16 hands (64 inches, 163 cm) at the withers. He was noted for his speed, strength, and courage. Like Meade’s Baldy, he outlived his rider, but only by a few months.
31. “Jeb” is usually a nickname, a diminutive of “Jebediah”, Hebrew for “Beloved Friend”. In the case of Confederate general Jeb Stuart, it’s actually an acronym, formed from his first three names, Jame Ewell Brown, and should more properly be J.E.B. But hey, when was the last time you saw periods in NASA?
32. From 1852 to 1855 Robert E. Lee served as Superintendent of West Point. Officers he helped educate served both for and against him, and one of Lee’s advantages in the field was that he personally knew the strengths and weaknesses of many of these men.
33. Darius Couch, commander of the Department of the Susquehanna, took a one-year leave of absence in 1853 to join a Smithsonian Institute scientific mission to Mexico. He has two reptile species named after him, Couch’s Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus couchii) and Couch’s garter snake (Thamnophis couchii,) as well as an amphibian, Couch’s spadefoot toad (Scaphiopus couchii), and a bird, Couch’s kingbird (Tyrannus couchii).
34. Lieutenant General Richard Ewell, commander of the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, lost his left leg at the Battle of 2nd Manassas on August 28, 1862. He traveled in a horse and buggy while on the march, then rode into battle stapped into his saddle.
35. Some acquaintances in the armies went a long way back. At the 1847 Battle of Chapultepec during the Mexican War, Lt. James Longstreet, serving as a flag bearer, was hit by a bullet and, unable to continue marching forward, passed the flag to another Lieutenant – George E. Pickett.
The Invasion
36. In anticipation of an invasion of Pennsylvania, In early 1863 General Stonewall Jackson sent scouts (spies) into Pennsylvania. They visited county courthouses as well as borough and township offices to buy maps. From these Jackson had his cartographer, Jedediah Hotchkiss, create a map of the Shenandoah Valley and Central Pennsylvania, showing where farms and businesses were located. Copies of the map traveled with many Southern Officers. So, when the Army of Northern Virginia marched into Pennsylvania in June of 1863, they weren’t just relying on chance to find things to “requisition”; they knew where to go shopping.
37. When Lee’s army started to move, Union commanders were left to wonder which way he would go. They knew the Army of Northern Virginia was traveling through the Shenandoah Valley, and that was about it. From the valley, Lee could continue straight on towards Harrisburg, turn southeast towards Baltimore and Washington, head west to Pittsburgh, or southwest into the Ohio Valley, going on from there to relieve the siege on Vicksburg.
38. On June 21 Robert E. Lee issued his General Order 72, ordering his army to refrain from destroying private property, and that any property requisitioned was to be paid “the market price for the articles furnished.” If payment was refused they were to be given vouchers for what was taken. Of course, citizens were less than thrilled to be paid in either Confederate money or vouchers. And in spite of Lee’s orders a lot of “requisitioning” was wholesale thievery. To read the entire general order, click here.
39. During the Gettysburg Campaign, a lot of battles and skirmishes occurred besides the three-day fight at Gettysburg. Some of the locations that saw shots fired are Brandy Station, Winchester, Aldie, Middleburg, Upperville, Fairfax Court House, and Manassas Gap in Virginia; Williamsport, Funktown, and Boonsboro in Maryland; and Greencastle, Carlisle, Hunterstown, Fairfield, Hanover, Sporting Hill, Wrightsville, York Haven, and Monterey Gap in Pennsylvania
40. The heat of June 1863 was killing men even before the battle. Annie Hays, who was visiting her husband Brig. Gen. Alexander Hays (commander, 3rd Division, 2nd Corps) just as the Army of the Potomac began to move wrote “Sixty thousand men have marched past our door since Sunday, destination unknown.” she added, “In one division, 20 fell dead from the march, while 400 were sent to the hospitals.”
41. The battle at Winchester, Virginia on June 13-15, 1863, is known as the Second Battle of Winchester. The first Battle of Winchester took place on May 25, 1862; the third would take place in 1864. Even without large battles, Winchester would change hands 70 times during the war.
42. War Department policy prohibited accepting into Federal service any National Guard/militia officer above the rank of Colonel. When Lee invaded Pennsylvania an exception was made; they mustered in 3 regiments of New York’s national guard, including their Brigadier General, John Ewan. They were mustered in on June 18, 1863, and discharged on July 20, after taking part in the Battle of Sporting Hill near Harrisburg.
43. As Confederate troops marched through Greencastle, Pennsylvania, a young girl defiantly waved a Union flag at them and called them traitors. Things might have turned ugly, but an officer cheerfully tipped his hat in salute to the girl, prompting his men to do likewise. The officer? General George Pickett, who in a few days would be immortalized as the leader of Pickett’s Charge.
44. The first Union soldier killed in Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign was a Pennsylvanian, Corporal William H. Rihl of Philadelphia, serving in a Pennsylvania unit assigned to the First N.Y. Cavalry. He died in a clash with Albert Jenkins’ Confederate Cavalry near Greencastle, Franklin County, on June 22, 1863
45. The first Confederates to die in Pennsylvania were killed on June 29, 1863, in a skirmish between Union and Confederate Cavalry at McConnellsburg, Fulton County. The Confederates were forced to retreat and left behind William B. Moore and Thomas Shelton.
46. While South Central Pennsylvania struggled to establish defensive works, Pittsburgh, with its industrial base and large workforce, erected 37 redoubts to protect the city in the space of fewer than two weeks.
47. When General Hooker learned that Lee was starting to move north, he suggested this was the time for the Union Army to move south and attack the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia. This idea was vetoed since it would open Washington to attack, but troops under the command of Union Major General John A. Dix, stationed at Fort Monroe, Virginia, were ordered to move on to Richmond. The attack failed; Dix was a less than aggressive leader commanding largely untried soldiers, and Confederate General D.H. Hill had his three brigades of experienced troops safely entrenched, easily neutralizing Dix’s numerical advantage.
48. For the people of Chambersburg, Lee’s invasion was more of the same. in 1862 Confederate cavalry raided the town, ransacking stores and destroying as much of the Cumberland Valley Railroad as they could manage. The Confederate invasion of 1863 saw more destruction and pilferage. But the worst blow would come in 1864 when the town was set ablaze in retaliation for Union destruction in the Shenandoah Valley.
49. One of the things the Confederates requisitioned at Chambersburg in 1863 was a printing press. They used it to print out thousands of paroles for the prisoners they thought they would capture when they defeated the Army of the Potomac.
50. Many residents of South Central Pennsylvania tried to hide valuables from the invaders. Many who tried failed. Not only did the Confederated have the Hotchkiss map to guide them, but they had gotten so good at scrounging that they had a good idea of where people would try to hide stuff. One Shippensburg tanner, though, outwitted the Confederates who came “requisitioning”. William McLean built false bottoms in his tanning vats, where he hid some of his valuable processed hides, and stashed more of them under corncribs and firewood. The Confederates never found them.
51. Carlisle was invaded twice, first by Lt. General Richard Ewell’s Second Army Corps on June 27, 1863, then by Jeb Stuart’s Cavalry on July 1st.
52. When Ewell’s corps marched into Carlisle, he was approached by a group of clergymen, asking if he would object to them including a prayer for the President of the United States in their Sunday services. His reply was “By all means pray for him. I’m sure he needs it.”
53. In his book Flames Beyond Gettysburg, Scott L. Mingus Sr. tells of An unusual group of volunteers who arrived in Harrisburg: “Captain Charles C. Carson and a company of seventeen men, the youngest of whom was 68 years old, presented themselves for military service. Each senior citizen was a veteran of the War of 1812, and each wanted to serve their state and country in another time of need. A color bearer carried a tattered flag once borne at the Battle of Trenton by Pennsylvanians serving under George Washington. The old patriots asked for flintlock muskets. Then, using colonial commands and formations and with a drum and fife playing, they marched to the rifle pits. Their bodies may have aged, but their spirits had not.”
54. Gettysburg was invaded twice, first on July 26 by Confederate forces commanded by Jubal Early, then on July 1 by… just about everybody.
55. On their way from Chambersburg to Gettysburg, Early’s troops made a special point of destroying the Caledonia Iron Furnace, located at what’s now the intersection of Routes 30 and 233. Not only did it produce iron for the Union, but it was also owned by Pennsylvania’s U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a strong opponent of slavery who would help ram the 13th Amendment through Congress.
56. A businessman with no official standing took it upon himself to surrender York to the Confederates. Arthur Farquhar, angered by the apparent inability of the borough council to decide what to do about the approaching soldiers, set out in his carriage and met Brigadier General John B. Gordon at Abbottstown. Farquhar negotiated terms of surrender, then returned to York and told the astonished Burgess and Council what he’d done. The council rode back out with him, met with Gordon, and set the terms of surrender officially.
57. While there were no African American soldiers at Gettysburg, a company of African American militia helped defend the Columbia-Wrightsville Covered Bridge across the Susquehanna River. “Case’s Company” was formed by black employees of the Maultsby-Case Rolling Mill in Columbia, who answered the call for volunteers by company owner William G. Case. They dug entrenchments in Wrightsville. As Col. Jacob Frick in an after-action report stated, “After working industriously in the rifle pits all day, when the fight commenced they took their guns and stood up to their work bravely. They fell back only when ordered to do so.” (This was in contrast to a couple of white militia units that fled in panic.) Sadly, they were the only unit to lose a member, who was killed by a fragment of an artillery shell. You can learn more about them here.
58. At about 8 p.m. on June 28, Frick ordered that the Wrightsville bridge be set on fire to prevent Confederates from crossing the Susquehanna River. The flames blew into Wrightsville, threatening to incinerate the town. Southerners set aside their rifles, picked up buckets, and helped Wrightsville citizens put out the fires. Grateful to the Confederates for helping save Wrightsville, James F. Magee invited General Gordon to make his headquarters in his house for the night. Magee’s daughter served breakfast for the general and his staff in the morning. Gordon asked her if she was a Southern sympathizer, to which she replied she was a staunch Unionist, and her husband was an army doctor, but she was thankful to Gordon and his men for helping to save the town.
59. The largest battle in Pennsylvania’s history broke out on June 30, 1863, when Jeb Stuart’s cavalry clashed with Union cavalry in Hanover, York County. The battle was a draw but forced Stuart into a time-wasting detour – one of many he had to make during his attempt to ride around the Union Army. But the Battle of Hanover would hold its title as the largest battle in Pennsylvania for less than 24 hours (and would be bumped down to third place later.)
60. Jubal Early, marching west from York to rendezvous with Ewell, paused for lunch in Davidsburg. He heard cannon fire in the direction of Hanover but sent no one to investigate, leaving us to speculate about what would have happened if Jeb Stuart had linked up with the rest of Lee’s army on June 30 instead of July 2.
61. Part of the route Jeb Stuart’s cavalry took through southern York County following the Battle of Hanover no longer exists. The Village of Marburg was submerged by a dam when Codorus State Park was built in the 1960s.
62. Some citizens of Gettysburg believed the Confederate invasion, while troublesome, would never result in a battle in their area. After all, everything they heard suggested the Confederate’s ultimate target was Harrisburg or Philadelphia, not a small town in a rural county. After the battle one resident, Anna Mary Young wrote to a cousin that “the next time I hear the Rebels are coming I’ll believe instead of laughing at the idea of such a thing; and I will leave this region of country if I have to walk.”
63. James Longstreet’s spy, who alerted Robert E. Lee that the Army of the Potomac was on the move with its new commander, George Meade, had long been a man of mystery, known only by the name Harrison. Then in 1986 historian James O. Hall, while researching at the National Archives, was able to link Harrison to one Henry Thomas Harrison (1832-1923) who mustered into the 12th Mississippi Infantry in 1861, and served as a spy for most of the war. For more about Harrison’s life, click here.
First Day’s Battle
64. General George Meade had been in command of the Army of the Potomac for less than four days when the Battle of Gettysburg began. (He’d been awakened with the news of his appointment on June 28 – at 3 a.m. ) One of several Pennsylvanians who would play a prominent role during the battle, Meade started the war as a brigadier general of Pennsylvania volunteer for the Union army in the Eastern Theater. He was wounded at the Battle of Glendale in 1862. Meade then commanded an infantry brigade at the Battle of Second Manassas in August 1862, and a division during the Battle of Antietam. At the time of the Confederate invasion in 1863, he was a corps commander until his abrupt promotion. He remained commander of the Army of the Potomac for the remainder of the war. Retiring from the service after the war, in 1866 Meade became a commissioner of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, where he died in 1872.
65. During the first day’s fighting, troops and their commanding officers on both sides arrived in a piecemeal fashion. Overall command on the Union side switched between seven different generals based on rank and seniority; Buford, Reynolds (killed in action), Doubleday, Howard, Hancock, Slocum, and finally Meade.
66. Major General John F. Reynolds, commander of the First Corps of the Army of the Potomac, was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; his house still exists, about one block west of the square. On July 1, 1863, he was on the battlefield for only about 15 minutes before he was killed. In that time, though, he issued orders that would ultimately bring the rest of the Union Army to Gettysburg. He is buried in Lancaster, at the Lancaster Cemetery. Reynolds was the highest-ranking officer on either side to be killed at Gettysburg.
67. Amelia Harmon and her aunt remained in their home near Willoughby Run to the west of Gettysburg. Union troops entered the house on July 1st and sent the two women to the cellar for protection. Amelia listened to “the crack of rifles, the hurried orders, and outside the mingled roar of heavy musketry, galloping horses, yelling troops, and the occasional boom of cannon.” She also said, “We could hear the beating of our hearts” over the noise. Confederates torched the house and Amelia and her aunt were forced to flee across open fields amidst the battle. Ultimately they ended up behind Confederate lines where they were given some food. “We were doubtless the only persons on the Union side who were fed from General Lee’s commissary during the battle of Gettysburg.” Amelia later wrote.
68. When Union and Confederates clashed on the first day of the battle, the rebel soldiers weren’t sure at first if they were facing the regular army or local militia. They got their answer when the Iron Brigade showed up. The brigade was made up of regiments From Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan. Aside from their reputation for bravery in battle (General George McClellan remarked “They must be made of iron” at the Battle of South Mountain, and the nickname stuck) they were known for their headgear. Instead of the usual kepi or forage cap, they wore the Hardee hat, the official Army dress hat. And when they showed up at Gettysburg, it’s said a Confederate soldier yelled “It’s those damned black-hatted fellows! That’s no militia, it’s the Army of the Potomac!”
69. On the first day of battle, Confederate Brigadier General James Jay Archers’ brigade would be pushed back by the Iron Brigade. Archer was captured and taken under guard behind Union lines. There he encountered a pre-war acquaintance, Union Brigadier General Abner Doubleday. As the story goes, Doubleday said “Glad to see you, Archer”, to which Archer replied (with a certainly justifiable grumpiness) “Well, I’m not glad to see you by a damned sight!” Archer had the dubious distinction of being the first Confederate General captured during the battle.
70. On the first day of the battle, the 24th Michigan Regiment lost 9 color bearers, and the 26th North Carolina lost 14.
71. Both Robert E. Lee and George Meade made their headquarters at the homes of widows. Lee stayed at the home of 70-year-old Mary Thompson, who remained in her house through the battle. Meade made his HQ at the home of Lydia Leister, a widow with 6 children. Lydia left for the duration of the battle, then came back to find dead horses in her yard and her home damaged by bullets and shell fragments.
Second Day’s Battle
72. Taken just by itself the second day at Gettysburg was the 10th bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Over 100,000 troops were involved, and 20,000 were listed as killed, wounded, or missing.
73. A member of the 148th Pennsylvania later said that during the Battle of the Wheatfield on July 2, “I was struck by the way ears of wheat flew in the air all over the field as they were cut off by the enemy’s bullets.”
74. Early on the morning of July 2, the Bayly family, who lived on a farm about three miles north of Gettysburg, acquired a new family member in a most irregular manner. A young (sixteen going on seventeen) private who’d gotten separated from his North Carolina regiment told Harriet Bayly he was done with fighting with the Confederates. They hid him in plain sight, dressing him in civilian clothes and having him help with the chores like the other children. He managed to avoid any Confederates who might have recognized him (even while helping pass out water and bread to retreating Confederate troops) and spent the rest of his life in Gettysburg.
75. During the second day of the battle, Confederate artilleryman Henry Wentz set up his cannon in the yard of a house, then went in to talk with the owner-his father, John Wentz.
76. Dan Sickles, commander of the Union Army’s third Corps, was nicknamed “Sickles the Incredible”. That wasn’t necessarily a compliment. Before the war, his chief claim to fame was as the first person in US history to be acquitted of murder by a plea of temporary insanity, after shooting his wife’s (alleged) lover. His blunders on the 2nd day almost cost the Union the battle, and his 3rd Corps suffered 4000 casualties. (He himself lost a leg, which took him out of the war, and probably spared him a court marshall.)
77. Brigadier General Gouverneur Warren, Chief Engineer of the Union Army, was sent by General Meade in the afternoon to check on the situation at the extreme left flank. What he found horrified him. Little Round Top was only occupied by a small Signal Corps detachment. If Confederates took the hill and got some artillery in place, they could shell the entire Union line. Warren rode down the hill to Devil’s Den (which at this point was still held by the Union) and had Captain James Smith of the 4th New York Battery fire a round into the woods west of Emmitsburg Road. As Smith stated in his report, the shot revealed “the glistening of gun barrels and bayonets of the enemy’s line of battle.” Warren quickly sent a dispatch to Meade and, on his own authority, diverted Union troops to Little Round Top, getting them there just in time to stop the Confederate assault.
78. The Union victory at Little Round Top was decided in part by water. Before they attacked the 20th Maine, the anchor of the Union left flank, the 15th Alabama sent a squad out to refill the regiments’ canteens-and they got captured. Thirst and dehydration took a lot of the fight out of the regiment.
79. Plum Run, the small creek running between Little Round Top and Devil’s Den, was nicknamed Bloody Run during the battle because blood from dead and dying soldiers turned the water red.
80. The regiment that suffered the highest casualty rate of the entire war was the 1st Minnesota. Late on July 2, they stopped a Confederate Brigade from overrunning Cemetery Ridge and cutting the Union army in half, but in the process suffered 215 casualties or 82 percent of the regiment.
81. Spangler Spring is a natural spring on the south base of Culp’s Hill. Legend has it that on the night of July 2-3 Union and Confederate soldiers called a truce so they could fill their canteens. In some tellings, this becomes a casual, friendly get-together of soldiers laying aside their arms and chatting around the spring. Alas, all the evidence indicated no such truce happened. Troops from both sides got water, but it was by furtively sneaking up in the dark, filling canteens, and sneaking back before someone on the other side spotted them.
Third Day’s Battle
82. Wesley Culp, born in Gettysburg, moved to Virginia and returned to his hometown in 1863 as part of the Confederate army. He died on the third day of the battle, in a charge that passed thru his father’s farm.
83. Confederate troops fighting on Culp’s Hill came within a few hundred yards of Baltimore Pike, the main Union supply route. If they had captured and held it, it would have completely disrupted Union logistics.
84. During the 3rd day’s fighting on Culp’s Hill, a stray dog joined Confederate columns advancing up the hill. The dog was shot, and seeing him lick the hand of a soldier before dying, a Union officer declared the dog the “only civilized being” on the battlefield and ordered him honorably buried.
85. East Cavalry Field isn’t visited as much by tourists as the rest of the battlefield, but it was a key factor in the Union victory on July third. Lee’s plan for the day called for Confederate Cavalry under Jeb Stuart to make an attack on the right flank and rear of the Union line, at about the same time as Pickett’s Charge. Union Cavalry under Brigadier General David Gregg stopped the Confederate attack. Reports of the battle prominently features a newly promoted Brigadier General – George Armstrong Custer.
86. Winfield Scott Hancock was born in Montgomeryville, PA. At the start of the war he was stationed in Los Angeles, but was brought east to serve as a Brigadier General by Geoge McClellan. By Gettysburg, he was the commander of the Army of the Potomac’s Second Corps. Upon learning of the death of General Reynolds on the first day of the battle, Meade sent Hancock to take command of the 1st, 3rd, and 11th Corps. Meade also ordered Hancock to determine if it was good ground to stay and fight. On July 2nd Hancock helped salvage the mess caused by Daniel Sickles moving the 3rd Corps forward without orders, and in the evening sent the 1st Minnesota to halt Gen. A.P. Hill’s Corp on Cemetery Ridge. On July 3rd, his 2nd Corps bore the brunt of Pickett’s Charge. Hancock was seriously wounded in the thigh, and General Gouverneur Warren assumed command of the 2nd Corps. Hancock would not return to active duty, resuming command of the 2nd Corps, until March of 1864.
87. Sounds of battle, particularly artillery, can travel in strange ways depending on atmospheric conditions. The noise of the cannonade preceding Pickett’s charge on July 3rd was heard by people 140 miles away in Pittsburgh, yet locations closer to the battle heard nothing. (Similar incidents were reported many times in many different battles.)
88. Major General George Pickett was not in command of Pickett’s charge. That fell to Lt. Gen James Longstreet, in charge of the Army’s First Corps. Pickett was one of three Division commanders, the other two being Brigadier General James Johnston Pettigrew (commanding Henry Heth’s division after Heth was wounded) and Major General Isaac Trimble (commanding Pender’s Division after Major General William Pender had been mortally wounded.) Some have suggested it should be called the Pickett–Pettigrew–Trimble Charge, but that’s probably a bit too unwieldy to catch on.
89. At 12,000 soldiers, Pickett’s charge was not the largest infantry charge of the Civil War. The Confederate charge at Franklin, TN (November 30, 1864) involved about 20,000, and Gaines’ Mill, Virginia (June 27, 1862) around 30-50,000.
90. Not only was Pickett’s charge not the largest of the Civil War, it wasn’t even the largest at Gettysburg. Confederate assaults on July 1 (more than 20,000 charging in the afternoon) and July 2 (16,000 attacking en echelon, meaning each unit was somewhat to the left or right of the one behind it like a series of steps) were each larger than Pickett’s Charge on July 3 (12,000).
91. At the climax of Pickett’s Charge the 7th Virginia Regiment found itself being driven back by the 7th West Virginia Regiment. Lt. Lockwood of the 7th Va was wounded and captured. His uncle, Lt. Col Jonathon Lockwood, commanded the 7th W. Va.
The Retreat
92. The wagon train of Confederate wounded retreating from Gettysburg was 17 miles long. Riding in wagons without springs, jolted by ruts in the road, many of the wounded pleaded to be left by the road to die. Then a battle erupted.
93. The Battle of Monterey Gap, which displaced Hanover as the second largest battle in Pennsylvania history, took place the night of July 4-5, as the wagon train filled with Confederate wounded was attacked by Union Infantry. The fighting spread south into Maryland and became the only battle of the war to straddle the Mason-Dixon Line. General John Imboden, who commanded the train, said the battle “realized more of the horrors of war than had in the preceding two years.”
94. During the colonial era Monterey Pass, or Monterey Gap, was part of the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, which at one point carried more traffic in the colonies than all other roads combined.
95. The retreat from Gettysburg of the Army of Northern Virginia stalled at Williamsport, Maryland. Union cavalry had destroyed a Confederate pontoon bridge at Falling Water, and flooding of the Potomac River made it impossible to ford. The Confederates prepared for a siege. But Meade advanced cautiously, allowing time to rebuild the bridge. The Confederates began crossing the bridge on July 13th; on the 14th the rearguard on the bridge was attacked by cavalry under Custer, claiming the life of General J. Johnston Pettigrew, one of the division commanders of Pickett’s Charge.
Aftermath
96. Both sides called it the Battle of Gettysburg. This is unusual. The North usually named battles after geographical features, the South after the nearest town.
97. During the three days of fighting at Gettysburg, it’s estimated 569 tons of ammunition were fired.
98. There were 120 generals present at Gettysburg. Nine were killed or mortally wounded.
99. The people of Gettysburg either fled the area as the armies approached or spent the battle sheltering in basements and in back rooms away from the streets. Many also ended up hiding soldiers who got separated from their companies, taking care of wounded soldiers, and cooking food for hungry troops. It wasn’t until the battle ended and they were able to emerge from their hiding places that they began to understand the magnitude of what had happened.
100. Even though the battle of Gettysburg was technically over, the town’s streets were still hazardous places for several days afterward. Confederate snipers covering the retreat of the Army of Northern Virginia still inflicted casualties on Union troops, and Union snipers did the same to Confederates. Civilians still found themselves dodging bullets or only going out at night.
101. The two oldest general officers at Gettysburg faced each other on Culp’s Hill. Confederate Brigadier General William Smith, age 65, clashed with Union Brigadier General George Greene, age 62.
102. The oldest man fighting in the battle was John Burns, a 70-year-old resident of Gettysburg, who joined the Union lines on the first day. He had a score to settle; the Confederates had “requisitioned” his cattle. He suffered three minor wounds, was captured, and almost hung as a combatant out of uniform.
103. The youngest person to die as a result of the battle was Edward Woods. By July 5, souvenir hunters were already scavenging the battlefield, including 2 small boys who found a rifle. The older boy accidentally pulled the trigger, and the shot killed Woods – at the age of three.
104. Virginia “Jennie” Wade, the only civilian killed during the battle at Gettysburg, had a sweetheart, Corporal Jack Skelly of the 87th Pennsylvania Infantry. (They may have been engaged, but accounts differ on this point.) Jennie died not knowing Skelly had been mortally wounded a few days earlier at the Battle of Winchester.
105. John Rupp hid in the basement of his home at 449 Baltimore Street when soldiers of both armies broke in. Union snipers used the front porch and Confederate sharpshooters used the rear of the house. Neither side realized that soldiers on the other side were there.
106. The Civil War had the highest number of casualties per day of any US war in history (599 per day). The Battle of Gettysburg averaged 17,037 casualties EVERY DAY!
107. According to the U.S. Army’s official calculations, there were 51,112 casualties as a result of the Battle of Gettysburg. This includes those who died later from wounds received in the battle, those never found, etc. This is 6 times more than had died in all previous US wars combined:
Revolutionary War: 4435 deaths
War of 1812: 2260 deaths
Mexican War: 1733 deaths
Total: 8428 deaths
108. “For every man, woman, and child living in Gettysburg, there were almost ten wounded soldiers.” from Days of Darkness: The Gettysburg Civilians by William G. Williams,
109. More than 60 field hospitals were established to tend to the wounded (14,000 Union, 6,000 Confederate) after the Battle of Gettysburg. These included private homes, public buildings, churches, farms (and their barns), and tents.
110. Dr. J.W.C. O’Neal, a Gettysburg physician, tended to the wounded of both sides. He kept a journal listing Confederate graves, including identities, regiments, and locations. His work proved invaluable when the removal of Confederate dead to southern cemeteries began in 1870.
111. The field hospital Camp Letterman set up to the east of Gettysburg, had more than 400 tents on 80 acres, each housing 12 patients. It was named after Dr. Jonathan Letterman, Medical Director of the Army of the Potomac. It operated from July 20 to November 20, 1863, treating both Union and Confederate wounded. A marker for Camp Letterman may be found on Camp Letterman Drive off Route 30, next to the Sheetz.
112. More than 5000 mules and horses were killed at Gettysburg. Burying them was not practical; the corpses were shoved together, doused with kerosene, and burned. (During the course of the war, more than one million equines -horses, mules, and donkeys – were killed.)
113. For months after the battle, people in and around Gettysburg would wipe pennyroyal or peppermint oil under their noses to mask the ghastly odor of rotting bodies.
114. 37,574 rifles laying on the battlefield were collected after the battle. 24,000 were still loaded:
• 6,000 had one round in the barrel
• 12,000 had two rounds in the barrel
• 6,000 had three to ten rounds in the barrel
The weapons with multiple rounds had probably been loaded but not “capped”, meaning no percussion cap was put on the breech. This meant when the trigger was pulled and the hammer struck there was nothing to ignite the powder. In the noise and excitement of the battle, the soldiers didn’t notice and kept reloading their guns. Had a soldier remembered to cap their weapon after cramming half a dozen rounds in, it would probably have gone off like a bomb.
115. After the battle, a number of Confederate soldiers walked freely along the streets of Gettysburg. Most of them were paroled prisoners of war; some were stragglers gathered up after the Southern army departed; and still others were “walking wounded”.
116. After months of marching, fighting, and dying, by August 1863 both sides ended up right back where they started, facing each other across the Rappahannock River in Virginia. All the same, but different; the Confederacy would spend the rest of the war on the defensive, never able to mount another invasion.
117. The big tourist attraction in the years immediately after the war wasn’t the area of Pickett’s Charge, but Culp’s Hill, because that was where you could really see serious battle damage. The gunfire was so intense many trees on the hill had been chopped down by bullets.
118. There are a lot of vultures flying around Gettysburg. Legend has it they ate so well in 1863 they’ve been sticking around ever since, hoping for history to repeat itself. (The truth is more mundane – the hills and trees in the area just happen to make for a really good vulture habitat.)
119. French artist Paul Philippoteaux actually painted four Gettysburg Cycloramas. The first was exhibited in Chicago, and is now at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in need of restoration. The second, which was shown in Boston, is the one now displayed in Gettysburg. One of the remaining two was cut up for tents at a Shoshone Indian Reservation, and the fate of the fourth is a mystery.
120. Many Gettysburg citizens wrote accounts of the battle. Fifteen-year-old Tillie Pierce wrote about her experiences in the article, “What a Girl Heard and Saw at the Battle.” She left town with a neighbor to escape the battle but found herself nursing the sick and injured at the J. Weikert Farm south of town. She continued to take care of wounded soldiers when she got back to the family home on Baltimore Street.
121. Forty years after the battle Elizabeth Salome Myers, a school teacher, wrote How a Gettysburg Schoolteacher Spent Her Vacation in 1863. In it she recounts she “never could bear the sight of blood” but when Dr. James Fulton, surgeon of the 143rd Pennsylvania Volunteers, called for girls to help at St. Francis Catholic Church and United Presbyterian Church, she felt she couldn’t say no. She almost lost her nerve when the first man she tried to help told her he was going to die soon. She ran from the church – then turned around and went back in. returned to the man, Sergeant Alexander Stewart of the 149th Pennsylvania Volunteers. He asked her to read the 14th chapter of John to him. This was the same passage his family read together before he and his brother left home to fight. Although her experiences were often traumatic, Miss Myers was thankful to have been able to soothe the dying, brave men.
122. Gettysburg teenager Daniel Skelly worked as a clerk at the Fahnestock Dry Goods Store on Baltimore Street. Skelly saw Confederate soldiers camped on the street outside of his home while Union soldiers, cut off from their army, hid in cellars and outbuildings. He helped his mother tend to wounded soldiers in homes and churches. He published “A Boy’s Experiences During The Battle of Gettysburg”, in 1932, which is generally considered one of the best accounts of the battle as seen through the eyes of a civilian.
123. Harriet Bayl’s account of her experiences of the battle, titled “Three Days of Rebel Rule”, was published in the Gettysburg Star & Sentinel on September 25, 1888. This account tells of the Confederate soldier who hid at their home mentioned earlier, but it also tells of a personal loss. At the time of the battle, her family was still in mourning for their recently deceased daughter Nellie. When Confederates showed up and started confiscating animals, Harriet Bayly hid her daughter’s pet horse in the house’s basement. The horse was discovered, but Harriet successfully pleaded to a Confederate soldier to leave her this last connection to her daughter. But a short time later, the soldier returned under orders to take the horse, telling the devastated Mrs. Bayly ” Madam, I despise this whole business, and I’d leave her if I could. My own brother was shot down by my side this morning and I could not stop even to give him a kind word. They say soldiers must obey.”
124. One of the greatest of all civilian accounts of the battle is The Diary of a Lady of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from June 15 to July 15, 1863, by Sarah “Sallie” Middleton Robbins Broadhead. The thing that makes it so compelling, and so useful to historians, is that while many other accounts were written years or even decades after the battle, Sarah Broadhead wrote things down as they were happening, starting with “Today we heard the Rebels were crossing the river in heavy force” on June 15, and ending with “…again we have our house to ourselves” on July 14. Between those two lines is a month of living in fear of the advancing enemy, hiding in terror in the basement as shells fly overhead, and finally the grim task of picking up the pieces and taking care of the wounded afterward, all recorded “in real-time.” Sarah’s most horrifying moment -and her greatest- came on July 8 while helping at the field hospital established at the Lutheran Seminary, when she discovered nearly 100 wounded in a flooding basement who would’ve drowned if she hadn’t sounded the alarm. You can read her diary here.
125. In 1895, before the National Park was created, the United States War Department built Five observation towers, to give visitors and military students a chance to get elevated views of the battlefield. They were located at Oak Ridge (near the Peace Light), Culp’s Hill, Confederate Avenue (near the intersection with Millerstown Road), Big Round Top, and Ziegler’s Grove (near the High Water Mark.) The towers were originally 60 to 75 feet tall. Only three are still standing. The Ziegler’s Grove tower was demolished in 1962 to make way for the Visitor Center complex, which in turn was demolished in 2013 to return the area to its original appearance. The Big Round Top tower was taken down in 1968 after it was decided that the wind speeds were too high on the hill to safely maintain it. At about the same time, it was decided a lower tower at Oak Ridge would provide the same view while being easier to maintain, and it was rebuilt.
126. Many Medals of Honor awarded during the Civil War were for capturing enemy flags. Trying to capture an enemy flag was one of the most dangerous acts you could attempt on a battlefield. A flag was the symbol of a unit, treated with reverence, and protected at all costs. The flagbearers had guards that had to be overcome before you could get to a flag, and the rest of the unit wasn’t going to just stand idly by and let you walk away with it.
127. Sixty-Four Union soldiers received the Medal of Honor for bravery at Gettysburg. The last Medal of Honor was presented by President Barack Obama on September 15th, 2014, to First Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing. Cushing, commander of Battery A, 4th United States Artillery, in General Hancock’s Second Corps. With his battery largely out of action on July 3rd due to the Confederate bombardment, Cushing refused to retreat, rolling his last functioning cannons forward and continuing to shell the oncoming Confederates until he was killed. You can read a more detailed account here.
128. The Trostle Farm, located near Little Round Top, was almost completely destroyed during the battle. In 1868 Catherine Trostle made a petition to the Commission charged with assessing damages to citizens affected by the Gettysburg campaign. She listed damages of over $3100 (about $74,637 today). But she also revealed a cost of war that couldn’t be calculated; her husband Abraham had gone insane and was housed in a lunatic asylum. (The commission, noted for its parsimony, never compensated Mrs. Trostle for the family’s losses.)
129. Late in June 1863, the body of a Confederate soldier washed ashore on the west bank of the Susquehanna River near Dugan Run at Hellam Township, York County. The body, which by his uniform was identified as a cavalryman, was buried and a small marker erected. But who was this soldier, and where did he come from? In 2013 historian Scott Mingus pieced together the most plausible explanation. On June 28th General Jubal Early ordered the 17th Virginia Cavalry to ride northeast and burn bridges of the Northern Central Railroad near York Haven. They drove off companies of the 20th Pennsylvania Volunteer Militia, burned the bridges, then tried to ford the river to Bainbridge. But the river was either too deep or too fast, and they turned back. Reports of the time say one Confederate was shot and killed, and it might well be that his was the body that floated ashore downriver.
130. Elizabeth Thorn was the wife of Peter Thorne, the caretaker of Evergreen Cemetery, after which Cemetery Hill is named. While Peter served in the 138th Pennsylvania Infantry, Elizabeth took over his duties. After the battle, bodies were strewn across the Cemetery. Elizabeth buried almost 100 Union bodies (and a few Confederates.) She had some men assigned to help her, but they all quit because the job was too tough for them.
Elizabeth was six months pregnant at the time.
Fifty bodies buried by Elizabeth were exhumed and reinterred at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery The families of those still buried in Evergreen did not did not want their bodies moved. Today there is a statue of Elizabeth (six months along) as part of the Gettysburg Women’s Memorial located near the entrance to the cemetery.
131. The Soldiers National Cemetery was dedicated in November of 1863, but burials continued through March 1864. (At least for the time being.)
132. Edward Everett, the orator invited to give the main speech for the dedication of the cemetery, composed a two-hour speech – then recited it from memory.
133. Brigadier General John Gibbon was one of only a handful of soldiers who witnessed both the battle and the Gettysburg Address. He didn’t sit through the whole ceremony, though. Partway through he started feeling restless and wandered off to explore the battlefield with his aide. They toured the field, then returned to find the ceremony still going on.
134. 979 of the 3,512 Civil War graves at the national cemetery are marked “unknown”.
135. The task of preserving the battlefield for posterity would begin even before the Civil War ended. The Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association was formed in 1864. In 1895 they transferred their holdings to the Federal Government.
136. The first memorial erected outside the national cemetery was placed on Little Round Top in 1878. It marked the location where Colonel Strong Vincent was killed during the second day’s fighting. Vincent commanded the Third Brigade, First Division, Fifth Corp, which was one of the first to reinforce Little Round Top on July 2nd.
137. The 1885 reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic featured the first electric lights in Gettysburg. The power was provided by a generator brought in on a rail car.
138. Gettysburg is not the first National Military Park. That honor goes to the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, established in August 1890.
139. While Dan Sickles is most remembered today for moving the Union 3rd Corp forward to an exposed position and causing a near-catastrophe on the second day of the battle, he played a major role in preserving the battlefield after the war. Serving as the head of the New York Monuments Commission for the Battlefield of Gettysburg, as well as a representative in Congress, he pushed to protect the battlefield from commercial development. The “Sickles Bill”, signed into law in 1895, established the Gettysburg National Military Park. The boundaries of the park were based on those “shown on the map prepared by Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles.” The “Sickles Map” defined the park boundaries until 1974. In later years, asked if he was disappointed that there were no monuments to him on the battlefield, he reportedly responded “The whole battlefield is my monument.”
140. Sickles also help get the National Cemetery a fence. The iron fence that separates the Soldiers National Cemetery from the civilian Evergreen Cemetery was originally located in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., just across the street from the White House. The District of Columbia decided the fence was no longer needed, and on October 12, 1888, a joint resolution of Congress sponsored by Congressman Daniel Sickles donated the fence to the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association.
(That’s not the only reason it was referred to as “Sickle’s Fence”. It was near that fence that Sickles shot and killed Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key in 1859 for having an affair with Sickles’ wife. The story that Sickles declared he got the fence moved so the world could see “where I got away with murder” strikes me as highly unlikely – but not entirely impossible.)
141. According to the National Park Service, there are 1,328 monuments, memorials, markers, and plaques on the battlefield.
142. One of the myths about equestrian statues at Gettysburg (and other battlefields) is that if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the officer survived uninjured. If a foot is lifted, they were wounded, and if two feet are lifted the officer was killed. It’s a good story, but the truth is the position of the horses’ legs has nothing to do with what happened to the officers.
143. If you visit Gettysburg National Military Park, leave your metal detector at home. The notice on the Laws and Policies page of the park website is brief and to the point: “The possession of metal detectors on park property is strictly prohibited. Relic hunting by the use of metal detectors or other means is prohibited and violators will be prosecuted.”
144. On September 23rd, 1899, a mass grave was discovered at Culp’s Hill near Spangler’s Spring, containing the remains of seventeen Union soldiers missed by workmen moving the Federal dead to the National Cemetery in 1863 and 1864. Unfortunately, the remains were put together in two boxes, making individual identification impossible. The jumbled remains were interred, still in two boxes, in the Unknown section of the cemetery.
145. The roads winding through Gettysburg National Military Park were not located directly on the battle lines. Most of them were placed so veterans could point out a location and tell their grandchildren “That’s where me and m’ boys held off the whole reb army singlehanded!”
146. During the Civil War, gun carriages were typically constructed from wood. However, the gun carriages at Gettysburg National Military Park, which include around 400 original cannons, are made of cast iron. The carriages, manufactured in Gettysburg by the foundry of Calvin Gilbert, were purchased by the War Department beginning in 1895 through about 1910. Of course, not even cast iron will last forever, and by the 1990s the wear and tear of weather and people (mostly children) climbing on the carriages was starting to catch up with them. The park set up a maintenance shop where carriages come in on a rotating basis to be stripped of paint, inspected, cracks welded, and holes filled in, before being repainted, reassembled, and returned to service.
147. Most of the cannons on display around the battlefield are originals dating from the time of the battle. The most common is the Napoleon, a bronze smoothbore cannon that was the workhorse of Civil War artillery. They were “twelve pounders” meaning they could fire a 12-pound solid shot to a range of about a mile. Incidentally, the cannon was not named after Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, but Charles Louis Bonaparte, aka Napoleon III, who encouraged the development of the cannon in the 1850s. The other cannon you’ll find on the battlefield is the Parrott Rifle, invented in 1960 by Robert Parker Parrott. It’s made of iron, and is easy to identify by the reinforcing band around the breach. The rifled bore made it possible for it to hit a target 2500 yards away. There is a third cannon on display at Gettysburg, one that looks to the future of artillery. These are the Whitworth rifles, two of which may be found on the first day battlefield near the Eternal Peace Light. These British rifled cannons were capable of firing a shell three to four miles, but the most important thing about them is that unlike the Napoleons and Parrotts, which are muzzleloaders, the Whitworth is a breach loader.
148. Witness trees are trees that were around when historical events took place. Nobody really knows how many witness trees there are at Gettysburg. Estimates range from five to over 1500. Some have been marked by the National Park Service. Other times witness trees are only discovered when they are cut down, and bullets are found lodged in them.
The Reunion of 1913
149. The camp for veterans at the 50th Anniversary of the battle in 1913 officially opened on June 29, and the first meal of the reunion was served that evening. About 25,000 veterans arrived on the first day, including Major Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, the only surviving corps commander on either side.
150. During the first few days of the 1913 reunion temperatures climbed into the triple digits. The U.S. Army’s Chief Surgeon reported 744 cases were admitted to the camp’s hospitals, and 319 of those were for heat exhaustion. (Sunstroke and tonsillitis each accounted for one case.) There were nine fatalities during the reunion. Given that the mean age of the veterans was 72, and that most had traveled hundreds of miles to be there, it’s amazing there weren’t more. The Pennsylvania Commission’s post-reunion report called the small number of fatalities “nothing short of marvelous.”
Camp Colt
151. Gettysburg would not only figure in the Civil War but World War 1. In 1918 the Army established Camp Colt, its primary facility for training soldiers to use the newest advance on the battlefield – the tank. Selected to run the camp was Captain Dwight David Eisenhower, who became rather well-known later in the century.
Camp Colt did a lot of its tank training without tanks. The first French Renault tanks didn’t arrive until three months after the camp opened. Eisenhower improvised ways for the troops to practice maneuvers, using a variety of car chassis modified to look like tanks.
The Reunion of 1938
152. Veterans at the 75th-anniversary commemoration in 1938 averaged 94 years of age. At the time only about 8,000 Civil War veterans were still alive. Of these, around 25 actual veterans of the battle attended, along with 1,359 Union and 486 Confederate attendees. Three of the veterans died during the gathering.
153. The high point of the 75th-anniversary celebration was the unveiling of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial, with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt attending. Two Gettysburg veterans performed the actual unveiling, one Union, one Confederate.
154. The last living veteran of the Battle of Gettysburg (as far as can be determined) was James Marion Lurvey. Born in Maine in 1847, he enlisted as a drummer boy with the 40th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. After an illness, he got out of the hospital in 1863 just in time to be at Gettysburg, where he was assigned to the medical corps. “I was to stand by and carry out the soldiers’ arms and legs as the doctors amputated them.” he later said. “I guess that was the day I grew up and left boyhood forever.” He would die in 1950.
155. The last surviving Union veteran was Albert Henry Woolson, who died in 1956 at the age of 106. The last surviving Confederate veteran is a matter of some contention; Pleasant Riggs Crump, the last documented veteran, died in 1951, but at least a dozen men claiming to be Confederate soldiers lived after him, the last dying in 1959. These claims have either been proven false or remain unverified.
156. The last state monument on the battlefield, for Maryland, was dedicated on November 13, 1994. The statue reflects the divided nature of the state during the Civil War; it shows two wounded soldiers, one Union, and one Confederate, helping each other off the field, and a plaque shows the names of Maryland units that fought at the battle, on both sides.
157. The most recent discovery of human remains from the battle as of this writing was in 1996, after erosion exposed them near a railroad embankment. Once it was determined that the remains were in fact from the battle, they were interred in a specially designated location in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg marked “Unknown Civil War Remains” on July 1, 1997.
158. For several years in the early 2000s, there were no peach trees in The Peach Orchard, site of some of the worst fighting on the second day. The trees had been infected by the Tomato Ringspot virus, spread by nematodes, microscopic worms in the soil. The only way to stop this was to uproot the trees and let the field lie fallow for several years to disrupt the nematode reproduction cycle. New trees were planted in 2008, and they seem to be doing well.
159. On September 5, 2016, Gettysburg National Military Park signed a sister park agreement with the Sekigahara Battlefields in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, and the Borough of Gettysburg also signed a sister city agreement with Sekigahara, Japan. The Battle of Sekigahara which took place on October 21, 1600, involved about 160,000 warriors from opposing Eastern and Western factions. The six-hour battle resulted in the deaths of 8,000 samurai but brought Japan about 260 years of peace.
160. 2023 marks the 160th Anniversary of the battle, the 110th anniversary of the 50th anniversary commemoration, and the 85th anniversary of the 75th anniversary commemoration.
–abc27.com
.
