Gettysburg

The battle began here, about three miles west of Gettysburg, at roughly half past seven on the morning of 1 July 1863. Lieutenant Marcellus Jones of the 8th Illinois Cavalry was on picket at the Ephraim Wisler house, where the Chambersburg Pike crosses Knoxlyn Ridge, when Confederate infantry appeared on the road ahead. By his own account he borrowed a carbine from his sergeant, rested it on a fence rail for steadiness, and fired at a mounted officer at long range. There is no record that it hit anything. The two armies then spent three days and some fifty one thousand casualties on the consequences. Jones came back in 1886 and set a small stone here at his own expense, which is why the marker exists at all, and cut two comrades' names into it beside his own. It is a private monument, not a government one, and it makes a claim other men disputed for the rest of their lives. A corporal of the 9th New York Cavalry was firing on this road at about five that morning. The honest position is that a cavalry picket line trading shots at dawn produces no single first shot anybody could have timed. What makes the spot worth stopping at is not the claim but the geography. Three ridges stand between here and the town. The Confederate column coming up this road did not yet know how much Union cavalry was in front of it, and the cavalry did not know how much was behind.

John Burns was 69 years old, a former constable of Gettysburg with a reputation for being difficult, and on 1 July 1863 he put on his coat, picked up an old flintlock musket and a powder horn and walked west out of town toward the sound of the fighting. He was the only civilian resident of Gettysburg known to have taken up arms in the battle. He reported first to the 150th Pennsylvania, who sent him forward, and he ended the afternoon on McPherson's Ridge with the Iron Brigade, having asked a wounded soldier for a more modern rifle and his cartridges. He was shot three times and left on the field. He survived, and the newspapers made him famous within weeks. When Lincoln came to Gettysburg that November he asked to meet Burns, and on the evening of 19 November 1863, hours after the address, the two of them walked arm in arm down Baltimore Street to the Presbyterian church for a patriotic meeting. The story is usually told as pure heroism, and it was not quite that simple. Burns was a contrary man who had already made himself unpopular in town, and some of his neighbours thought the fame went to his head. What is not in dispute is the walk out of town on the first morning, at 69, alone, toward an army. The bronze figure here on Stone Avenue shows him with his musket, facing the ground he fought over.

The Eleventh Corps got off the field on the first day of Gettysburg because of a stand made in a brickyard on a back street, and it lasted less than half an hour. On the afternoon of 1 July 1863 the corps was collapsing north of town. Colonel Charles Coster's brigade was sent forward into John Kuhn's five acre brickyard, a lot fenced with rails and set with a wooden barn and dome shaped kilns, to buy time for the rest of the corps to get back through the streets to Cemetery Hill. Coster's men were outnumbered by roughly three to one and were flanked at both ends of their line by the Confederate brigades of Harry Hays and Isaac Avery. What that cost is legible in one regiment's figures: of about two hundred men of the 154th New York who went into the brickyard, one was killed, twenty one were wounded and one hundred and seventy eight were captured or missing. The brigade was swept out, and the retreat it covered got through. The battlefield association later bought less than three quarters of an acre of the site, a strip running back from North Stratton Street, and named it Coster Avenue. New York dedicated its monument to the 154th on 1 July 1890, the twenty seventh anniversary of the fight. It is one of the few pieces of the battlefield that sits inside the town rather than outside it, hemmed in by houses, and most visitors never find it.

This stone farmhouse, built in 1822, and the bank barn added twenty years later sat directly behind the Confederate left for two days of the battle, and what happened here was not fighting but its aftermath. Richard Ewell's Second Corps occupied the ground on 1 July 1863, and Edward Johnson's division used the farm as headquarters and staging while his brigades formed in the fields for the attacks on Culp's Hill. When those attacks failed on 2 and 3 July, the wounded came back down the slope to this farm, and it became a Confederate field hospital: officers in the house, the rank and file in the barn. Farms pressed into hospital service were stripped as a matter of course. Doors were lifted off their hinges here to serve as operating tables and furniture was broken up for firewood, and Daniel Lady afterwards filed a claim for the damage, one of many across the county. It was denied. Most of what had been done to his property was done by Confederate troops, and Pennsylvania would not pay for that. The barn still carries initials cut into its woodwork by men who were carried into it, preserved now under glass, among them BAR of the 23rd Virginia and ABE of the 3rd North Carolina. The preservation group that has owned the farm since 1999 also points to staining in the house floorboards as surgical. The claim to weigh is the initials, which are physical, legible, and signed.

Look at the south side of this brick barn and there is a hole punched through it by a shell, left unrepaired since 2 July 1863. It is the most direct piece of physical evidence on the battlefield of what happened in this farmyard. Late that afternoon the Union Third Corps line was disintegrating in the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield, and Captain John Bigelow's 9th Massachusetts Battery was ordered to hold the Trostle farmyard at all hazards, with no support, to buy the time the army needed to build a new line on Cemetery Ridge. Bigelow put his six Napoleons in the yard and fought them until the 21st Mississippi came over the rise and into the guns. Twenty seven of his men were killed or wounded, about eighty of the battery's horses were shot down, four of the six guns were left behind, and Bigelow himself was hit. The time he bought was enough. Freeman McGilvery got a scratch line of artillery formed behind him, and the Confederate advance stopped short of the ridge. Alexander Gardner's photographers reached this yard a few days later and made the images of the dead artillery horses lying in their traces where the teams had gone down. Those photographs did a great deal to fix in the public mind what a battlefield actually looked like. The Trostles, who had fled, came home to the horses, the wreckage and the hole in the brickwork.

George Rose's farm took the heaviest concentrated fighting of 2 July 1863, and then it took the burials. The Wheatfield, Rose Woods and the ground up to Sherfy's peach orchard were all on or beside this property, and more than twenty thousand men were engaged across that fighting in an afternoon. George owned the place; his brother John lived on it with his wife Elizabeth and their seven children. When the family came back they found their fields and woods being used as a graveyard, with somewhere between five hundred and a thousand Confederate dead put into shallow trenches wherever the ground allowed. The burials had been done fast and badly by exhausted men. A Pennsylvania lawyer named John B. Linn, walking the ground weeks afterwards, wrote that the dead were so thinly covered you could feel a body by pressing the earth with your foot, and described a hand still above the surface by the Rose barn, weathered like an old buckskin glove. The Union dead were lifted within months and taken to the new national cemetery. The Confederate dead were not: no government was going to pay for them, and they stayed in the Rose fields until Rufus Weaver, whose father Samuel had superintended the Union reburials, took the work on between 1871 and 1873, largely on money raised by Southern women's memorial associations. Three summers to empty this farm, and not every grave was found.

At about one in the afternoon on 1 July 1863, with the fighting already audible north of town, a neighbour named Hettie Schriver set out for her father's farm three miles down the Taneytown Road and asked whether the Pierces' fifteen year old daughter might come along, out of harm's way. Her parents agreed. The daughter was Tillie Pierce, the farm was Jacob Weikert's, and it sits directly behind the Round Tops. The next afternoon the Union left flank was fighting for Little Round Top a few hundred yards up the slope, and this farm became one of the places the wounded were brought. Pierce carried water to troops moving past on the first and second days and helped with the men laid out in the yard and the house while the surgeons worked. She wrote afterwards of a pile of amputated arms and legs outside, higher than the fence, and of picking her way among the bodies of the wounded to reach the door. General Stephen Weed died inside. Her account, published in 1889 as At Gettysburg, or What a Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle, is one of the fullest civilian records of those three days that exists. The detail worth carrying away is the decision that sent her here. It was the most careful choice available, and it moved her out of town directly into the second day of the battle. Meanwhile the house she had left on Baltimore Street took seventeen bullet holes in its upper balcony, with rounds passing through the rooms and the family sheltering in the cellar. There was no safe direction to send her.

One of the most reproduced photographs of the Civil War was taken at Devil's Den on 6 July 1863, and it was staged. Alexander Gardner and his assistant Timothy O'Sullivan titled it Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter: a young Confederate lying behind a neat stone barricade in the rocks, rifle propped beside him, apparently killed at his post. It is a composition, and every part of it that makes it work was arranged. In 1975 the photographic historian William Frassanito went through the surviving negatives and found six exposures of the same body in two different places, four where the man actually lay on the slope at the southern end of Devil's Den and two at the barricade. He had been carried about seventy yards, laid out on his back, and given a rifle. The rifle was not a sharpshooter's weapon; it turns up in other Gardner photographs and was almost certainly a prop the crew carried with them. The dead man was in all likelihood an ordinary infantryman. None of that makes the picture a lie about the war, which is why it still holds. It does make it a made thing rather than a found one, at a moment when photographs were being received as plain evidence. The barricade is still in the rocks here, but the stones are not the ones in the photograph: the Park Service rebuilt it, so what stands is a reconstruction of a scene that was itself constructed.

There is nothing here now, and that is the point. William Bliss's farm stood in the open ground between Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge, which put it squarely in the space between two armies. His barn was a large brick one, and a brick barn in no man's land is a fortress: Confederate marksmen worked from its windows and loopholes on 2 July 1863 and made the Union line on Cemetery Ridge expensive to hold. The buildings changed hands repeatedly over two days, taken and lost by regiments sent out for the purpose. On the morning of 3 July the Union command decided the problem was the building itself. Alexander Hays sent the order out to the barn by a sergeant of the 111th New York, and the 14th Connecticut carried it out. The wounded were brought out, fires were set in the house and the barn, and by about a quarter past eleven both were fully alight and coming down. Pickett's Charge crossed this ground a few hours later. The Bliss family had already fled, and they came back to a farm that had ceased to exist. Getting paid for it took the rest of William Bliss's life and beyond: Pennsylvania awarded him 3,216 dollars in November 1871, eight years after the fact, and the claim was still being passed between state and federal committees into the 1880s. The field was never rebuilt on. Standing here between the two ridges is the clearest way to understand why the barn had to go.

The Spangler family farmed a hundred and sixty six acres here behind Cemetery Ridge, far enough back to be out of the fighting and close enough to be useful, which is how the property became the Eleventh Corps field hospital. Wounded men were carried here from 1 July 1863 onward and laid in the barn, in the outbuildings and across the fields around them. More than nineteen hundred passed through. The surgery was done in and around the barn, and the farm's orchard and its spring were what made the site workable at that scale. The best known man brought here was Confederate. Lewis Armistead led his brigade over the stone wall at the climax of Pickett's Charge on 3 July, went down a few yards beyond it, and was carried back through the Union lines to this hospital, where he died on the morning of 5 July in the summer kitchen. A Union field hospital treating the enemy's wounded was ordinary rather than remarkable: both armies left their casualties in each other's hands here on a scale nobody had planned for. The Spanglers went back to farming afterwards on land that had been used as a hospital and a burial ground. The barn, the stone house, the summer kitchen and the smokehouse all still stand and have been restored, which makes this one of the few places on this field where the subject is medicine rather than tactics.

For four months in 1863 the largest tent hospital of the war stood in a field beside the York Pike, a mile and a half east of Gettysburg. The armies marched away in early July and left about twenty one thousand wounded men behind them, scattered through barns, churches and farmhouses for miles in every direction. Camp Letterman was the answer to that: one general hospital on George Wolf's farm, sited for its high ground, its spring water and its position beside both the York Road and the railroad that could carry men out. Construction ran from 10 to 22 July 1863 and the first patients arrived on the twentieth, while the carpenters were still working. It took its name from Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac, who had spent the previous year building the system that made such a place possible: forward dressing stations, a dedicated ambulance corps, then evacuation to a general hospital in the rear. Gettysburg was the largest test that system ever faced. Tents held twelve patients each, laid out in rows with a cookhouse, a dead house and an embalming tent, and both the Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission ran operations alongside. The hospital closed on 20 November 1863, the day after Lincoln dedicated the Soldiers' National Cemetery nearly two miles away. Most of the ground it stood on is now a shopping centre, though about eight acres have been preserved and carry interpretive plaques, which is more than almost anyone driving the Lincoln Highway past it realises is there.

The Black labourers of Gettysburg found, dug up and carried in most of the Union dead who lie in the Soldiers' National Cemetery, and could not be buried there themselves. This ground on Long Lane is where they went instead. It was established in 1867 by the Sons of Good Will, a Black benevolent society, and roughly thirty veterans of the United States Colored Troops lie here, along with more than four hundred other members of the town's Black community. The bar was custom rather than written rule, which is how two Black veterans did eventually reach the national ground, one of them not until 1936. The man who connects the two cemeteries is Basil Biggs, who is buried here. Biggs was born free in Maryland, taught himself veterinary work, and moved to Gettysburg in 1858 so his children could be schooled. After the battle the contract to bring in the Union dead went to a white contractor, F. W. Biesecker, at a dollar fifty nine a body; Biesecker subcontracted the actual work to Biggs at a dollar twenty five. From October 1863 to March 1864 Biggs and the crew he hired exhumed, coffined and hauled in 3,354 men, some from as far as Hanover, fourteen miles off. He used the money to buy thirty acres from Peter Frey on the Taneytown Road. The National Cemetery is half a mile from here. Lincoln's speech there is the most quoted passage in American public life, and the men who prepared the ground he spoke over were sent to a separate field to be buried themselves.

The most asked question on this battlefield is where Lincoln stood to give the Gettysburg Address, and it is still open. For a century the answer was assumed to be here, at the Soldiers' National Monument, dedicated in 1869 in the middle of the burial semicircle. The assumption was never based on much. When the Lincoln Address Memorial went up in 1912 its own plaque quietly declined to make the claim, saying the address was delivered about three hundred yards from that spot. In 1995 the photographic historian William Frassanito worked back from period images and argued that the speakers' platform had not stood in the national cemetery at all, but over the fence in Evergreen Cemetery, the town's own private burying ground. There is no marker there; the only signpost is a Park Service panel on this side of the fence pointing across it. More recently Christopher Oakley, an animator, built three dimensional models from the six known photographs and reached a third answer: the platform was trapezoidal rather than the rectangle everyone had assumed, the dignitaries sat in a shallow arc rather than a row, and the structure straddled the boundary between the two cemeteries. On his reconstruction Lincoln, when he rose, was just inside the national cemetery. So the ground is contested by a few dozen yards, between a monument that was never meant to mark it and a spot in the next cemetery that nothing marks at all. Nobody present thought to write down the one detail every later visitor would want.

In 1918 the fields that Pickett's Charge crossed were covered in tents again, this time by the United States Tank Corps. Camp Colt was the army's first tank training centre, roughly a hundred and ninety two acres spread over the open ground on both sides of the Emmitsburg Road, on land already flat, already cleared and already held for the battlefield park. Its commander was a 27 year old captain named Dwight Eisenhower, and it was his first independent command. Nearly eleven thousand men passed through it, in a camp that at the start held about a thousand. It had a problem that has since become a good story: for much of its existence it had almost no tanks. Men trained on trucks with machine guns bolted to them, and the three French Renaults the camp eventually received did not begin arriving until it had been running about three months. Eisenhower was teaching a form of warfare he had never seen. Then in September 1918 influenza arrived with a troop transfer from Camp Devens in Massachusetts. Within weeks a large share of the camp was sick. He quarantined the site, isolated new arrivals and had the tents disinfected daily, and was given the Distinguished Service Medal for how the camp came through it. He never got to France. What he did get was a first look at this county, and in 1950 he and Mamie bought a farm on the far side of the battlefield, the only house either of them ever owned.