Originally aired on September 13, 1996 - In part 107 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson says there is a story about the Battles of Gettysburg that is seldom heard but that needs to be told. He says it is “the most human and telling picture of that war.”
#107 – The Other Gettysburg
Today hundreds of monuments stand on the Gettysburg battlefield. They speak of devotion to duty and honest gallantry in the most famous contest in the American military history. We know that almost 6,000 men and over 10,000 horses were killed during the battle. Deep in those stones at Gettysburg, however, is another story seldom heard. It needs to be told again and again because it is the most human and most telling picture of that war.
For three days in the Civil War’s third summer, men of North and South waged dramatic charges and stout defenses at Gettysburg. The final shots echoed over the rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania. Then the second battle of Gettysburg began.
The sleepy village of 2,500 citizens suddenly found itself inundated with 36,000 desperately wounded soldiers. Most of these men had been dumped in makeshift field hospitals where the sheer volume of the injured completely overtaxed available medical facilities and personnel. The number awaiting treatment at one first-air station grew so large that surgeons grimly separated the wounded into two groups: those who were likely to die, and those who had a chance of survival.
Scores of men in the first group were taken into nearby woods and laid in rows. There, semi-conscious, they moaned and twitched painfully while waiting alone for the end. A Union surgeon later observed that Gettysburg was an “occasion of the greatest amount of human suffering known to this nation since its birth”.
Other eyewitnesses told of the horror. Luther Hopkins, a Virginia soldier, wrote of the night of July 3: “The moon and starts came out, and the surgeons with their attendants appear with their knives and saws, and when the morning came there were stacks of legs and arms standing in the fields like shocks of corn.”
A young Quaker girl who answered the call for nurses was shocked when she got to Gettysburg. The foul stench of infection and death was overwhelming. It was an atmosphere, she said, that “robbed the battlefield of its glory, the survivors of their victory, and the wounded of what little chance of life was left to them.”
On July 4, while the two bloodied armies stared at each other, a teenage soldier from Alabama sent a note to his mother. “I am here a prisoner of war and mortally wounded,” he wrote. “I can live but a few hours more at farthest…I am very weak. Do not mourn my loss. I had hoped to be spared, but a righteous God had ordered it otherwise…Farewell to you all.”
The following day, Lee’s army started back to Virginia. Thousands of mangled Confederate soldiers were piled into wagons lacking springs, mattresses, or other basic comforts. What they had to endure was a living hell.
Colonel John D. Imboden of Staunton was in charge of the ambulance train. For four hours, as he rode past the line of wagons, he heard the groans and screams. Only one man in a hundred had received any medical attention. Every describable wound was in evidence.
From the wagons, Imboden said, came such pitiful cries as: “O God! Why can’t I die?...Will no one have mercy and kill me?... For God’s sake, stop just for a minute! Leave me to die along the roadside!”
No help could be given, Imboden noted, and he added: “During this one night I realized more of the horrors of war than I had in all the two preceding years.”
Such is the true picture of war. Untold numbers of monuments exist to the dead, but what kind of homage do we pay to the suffering?
