The Gettysburg Compiler (2024)

By Erica Uszak ’22

War on the Doorstep: Civilians of Gettysburg

By late June of 1863, alarms warning of approaching Confederate forces were nothing new for the 2,400 residents of Gettysburg. Living just ten miles from the Mason-Dixon line, small-scale raids, kidnappings of freed-people, and rumors of an imminent clash between the two great armies had long plagued the borough and its surrounding community. Nevertheless, none of these events could prepare Gettysburgians for the ferocious 3-day fight between 165,000 soldiers in early July of that year that would transform the lives and lands of Gettysburg’s civilians forever. However, these civilians’ experiences were not monolithic; while some were defined by tragedy and blight, others included remarkable episodes of perseverance, successful pragmatism, and creative profiteering. This blog series profiles the lives of diverse Gettysburgians who were forced to confront the war at their very doorsteps, each on their own terms, whose stories speak to the kaleidoscope of experiences of civilians struggling to survive, and thrive, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border during the Civil War.

The Warfields were an African American family who evacuated before the Battle of Gettysburg began. Their story reminds us of the unique dangers that the battle posed to the African American community, such as Confederate kidnappers who trafficked many free blacks into slavery, as well as the possibility of physical abuse and even death if they dared to remain in Gettysburg. When the Warfields returned to their farm, they confronted the graves of Confederate and Union soldiers in their yard, the destruction of their home, and the loss of their crops and animals. Thus, for the Warfields, the merciful end of the battle on July 3, 1863 did not bring the conclusion of their troubles in Gettysburg, but rather ushered in a new set of challenges in recovering what they had lost.

The Warfield family had moved to Gettysburg between October 1861 and October 1862. Their house had been built in 1845, and by the time of the battle, the family had constructed a blacksmith shop, a barn, and an orchard on their thirteen acres, upon which they also grew wheat and corn. The head of the household, James Warfield, was born in Maryland in either 1819 or 1821 and married a woman named Eliza. James was a farmer as well as a blacksmith. From the 1860 census, it appears that he and Eliza had six children when they lived in Uniontown, Maryland, but by 1863, a few of them may have moved away. It is also uncertain whether Eliza was present in Gettysburg in 1863.

According to the 1860 census, James Warfield was a man of modest means, with his real estate valued at $600 and his personal estate at $200. However, the 1870 census shows that, seven years after the battle, he still had four young daughters in Gettysburg to look after: Anna Louisa (also shown in the 1870 census as Ann Louisa), Martha Ellen, Mary Alice, and Sarah Jane. (Most of the daughters had been born in Maryland, except the youngest, Sarah Jane). James Warfield was literate and recognized the importance of education for his children, ensuring that his three youngest daughters had attended school by 1870.

Gettysburg was a small town in 1863 with a little more than 2,000 residents, many of whom worked as farmers like the Warfields or in a variety of middle and lower class occupations. However, it was somewhat unusual that an African American man such as James was a self-sufficient farmer, as historian Margaret Creighton notes that “many black men worked without a named skill, and labored for others as a means to credit or pay” in Gettysburg. James certainly felt proud of his success as a farmer and blacksmith and the house that he had procured, even without the skills of reading and writing. A white family, the Sherfys, lived close by the Warfields. The Sherfys were pacifists, belonged to the Church of the Brethren, and the patriarch, Joseph Sherfy, served as the reverend of the church. The two families must have formed some sort of working relationship with each other, as Raphael Sherfy later became the executor of James Warfield’s will and oversaw the sale of the Warfields’ house after James’s death.

There is no question that James Warfield worried about his, and especially his young daughters’ safety when he heard news of the nearby Confederate army. In October of 1862, Confederate cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart had come as close as four miles away from Gettysburg, no doubt bringing terror to the residents. In mid-June of 1863, the governor of Pennsylvania called for Gettysburgians to harvest their crops and hide their valuables or transfer them elsewhere, and one Union general, Darius Couch, warned the local residents to seek immediate shelter. People had sounded the false alarms of Confederate invasion before, but James must have felt the unique urgency of this particular situation as more people began to evacuate the area. Like many of his fellow townsfolk, James may have evacuated his family on previous occasions as a precaution. However, the increasingly panicked rumors unsettled James to the point where he felt he needed to take his family away from the danger.

The exact date of when James left remains unclear—he may have left in late June, when many others began to evacuate, or maybe as late as July 1, when he heard the sound of the guns north of town. Even so, up until the end of June, it was uncertain where both armies stood and the routes the Warfields could safely take to avoid an encounter with Confederates. Perhaps James reached out to other African American families in the area to travel together. He likely packed the bare necessities that they could take with them, like food and clothing, as well any precious items they could carry that James feared might be destroyed. The uncertainty and terror of the situation was undoubtedly maddening, as James had no idea of when—or if—the family could return. Regardless, James’s decision to evacuate proved to be a wise move, as his house would eventually sit squarely within the major Confederate battle lines.

Many African Americans moved further north and east (and elsewhere) to avoid the Confederate army, including places like Harrisburg and even as far as Philadelphia. Many African Americans also evacuated to York and Carlisle, and other places within 30 miles or so of Gettysburg. Although we don’t know the exact of number of black kidnappings nor the fate of those taken, civilian accounts of the battle reveal that the Confederate army seized a number of African American civilians to be taken south into slavery. One African American resident was brutally attacked and mutilated by Confederate soldiers and left to suffer a painful death when he refused to go with them any further. Certainly James Warfield feared a similar attack by the Confederates and what might become of his young daughters–the eldest of whom was eight years old and the youngest of whom merely about one year old. James also likely wondered (with no small amount of horror) what would happen if the Confederates won the battle, and what such a victory ultimately would mean for him, his family, and his home. A return to Maryland was even less secure than remaining in Gettysburg. Where would they go? What would a Union defeat meant for the country?

During the battle, it is likely that Confederate soldiers used the Warfield’s house for shelter; however, the farm and it came under fire on the second day of the battle. At one point, Alabama troops clashed with the 1^st United States Sharpshooters and the 3^rd Maine around the Pitzer Woods area near the Warfield farm, a fight which ended in the retreat of the U.S. skirmishers. When James returned to his property a few days after the battle, he found it much changed and significantly damaged. He summoned Abraham Flenner, a fellow (white) farmer of Adams County, who helped him assess the value of the damage to his property. While James and his family had survived and the U.S. army had won a costly, but critical victory, one can imagine his anguish at seeing his modest abode in ruin, the farm and blacksmith shop—his entire livelihood that supported his large family and for which he had worked so hard—in shambles. The house itself was damaged, his furniture ruined, his fences torn down, his bushels of corn and wheat destroyed, and his pigs and cattle missing. An unwanted graveyard now pock-marked his farm, with at least thirteen Confederates and five U.S. soldiers buried there upon it. After overcoming his shock, James’s mind likely turned to how he might possibly rebuild his livelihood, what to do with his farm, and whether anyone, including the state and federal government, would help him recover what he had lost.

The Warfields were not alone in their struggle. Numerous Gettysburg farm families found themselves in similar situations, but it is unclear to the extent that the community came together to help them. According to Margaret Creighton, African Americans in the community seemingly were left to fend for themselves when repairing damages to their property. However, she also notes that several African Americans earned money by washing the bloodied uniforms of the dead and wounded to be reused, and that they fixed damages to white families’ properties, although it is unclear as to the amount of compensation they received for either. Did James Warfield himself ever turn to his neighbors for help? His relatives? Would his neighbors refuse to help an African American family? As mentioned previously, James had at least one good relationship with his white neighbors, the Sherfy family. The Sherfys also left their farm early on the morning of July 2 and returned July 6 to ruin and destruction. Raphael Sherfy, as mentioned earlier, later became the executor of James Warfield’s will, so it is possible that the Warfields and the Sherfys turned to each other for help in the battle’s aftermath, perhaps working to rebuild each other’s properties and replant their fields.

A year after the battle, the house and property remained a thorn in James’s side as he struggled over what to do with it. He tried to sell the property in 1864, but no one was interested. Like many other unfortunate families, especially other African Americans who evacuated before the battle, the Warfield family eventually left Gettysburg sometime in 1864 or 1865 and shifted their place of residence to nearby Cashtown, Pennsylvania. The Warfields had to settle with a rotating lease of the Gettysburg farm for income, as no one claimed interest in buying it as a permanent residence.

In 1868, the Pennsylvania state government passed a law allowing for compensation for those “whose property was damaged, destroyed, or appropriated for the public service” during the war. Warfield filed a claim that year, but it was not until the Pennsylvania government passed another act in May 1871 that they approved Warfield’s claim of property damage. In total, James applied for $516 worth of property damage–$155 for the loss of his pigs, cattle, and furniture and $361 for real estate damage to cover the loss of 50 bushels of wheat, 60 bushels of corn, fences and crops, and general damage to the house. $516 was a valuable sum in 1868—in today’s dollars (2021), that amount equals almost $10,000.

The Pennsylvania government did not grant James Warfield the full amount of $516, but awarded him $410 in November of 1871, based upon the act passed earlier that May. Many people who filed never received anything, and the slow-moving process likely felt discouraging to James. But after eight years of persistence, James earned the financial compensation that he desperately deserved, having lost so much in the battle. He had overcome many obstacles to become a successful, independent farmer and blacksmith, and, despite the necessity, perhaps felt frustrated about having to depend on the state government for financial support. He also likely reflected upon his ironic, bad fortune that his hard-earned self-sufficiency and independence in a free state had ultimately been destroyed largely by Confederate soldiers, of all people.

James was one of many Gettysburgians to file for state compensation. In fact, so numerous were the locals’ complaints about their damages and losses that they aroused the frustration and scorn of Union artillery officer Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, who scoffed that the Gettysburg residents had “damned themselves [ with their selfishness] with a disgrace that can never be washed out.” Wainwright scorned, “Instead of helping us, they were coming in shoals with their petty complaints of damages.” For the Warfields, as for so many, the damage that their house and property sustained was far from petty. They had put their life’s work into buying the house, cultivating a farm of their own, and running a successful blacksmith business—all of which they were forced to walk away from. And unlike the majority of their white neighbors, they had risked their lives in doing so.

James died in 1875, and after his death, the house was sold to a Frank H. Echenrode (or Eckenrode). Interestingly, it appears that, despite the unexpected devastation of the war years, James not only managed to recover some of his financial losses by 1870, but that he actually increased his wealth, as the federal census shows that he had $1,700 worth of real estate and $500 of personal estate. He resumed working as a blacksmith and farmer in Cumberland Township.

The National Park Service has worked for the past two years to restore the Warfield house to what it would have looked like in 1863. The interior of the house was presented to the public for the first time in 2021, and the house is open for visitation during certain occasions. Park staff have removed the modern additions, post-war vegetation, and stabilized the existing historic parts of the house. The park staff also worked on restoring the roofline for the original 1 ½ story house, the historic windows, and other features on the interior and outside portions of the house. Visitors can see the original floor, stone masonry, wall beams, bricks, and the house’s overall structure when they step inside. Standing outside the Warfield house, looking at Southern monuments on nearby Confederate Avenue, a sharp contrast exists between the triumphant picture of Confederate soldiers fighting to preserve the system of slavery against the story of a free African American family that toiled long and hard to earn their own house and property, only to have their home and farm destroyed by a battle that ultimately helped to save the Union. The Warfields’ story and restored home reminds visitors of how close the Confederate army came to threatening not only the family’s lives and freedom, but also their livelihoods. Despite their ultimate relocation to Cashtown, the Warfield home also attests to the Warfields’ remarkable resilience to recover and rebuild in the aftermath of the battle that helped to determine the future of four million of their fellow African Americans in bondage.

By Alexander Dau ’22

War on the Doorstep: Civilians of Gettysburg

By late June of 1863, alarms warning of approaching Confederate forces were nothing new for the 2,400 residents of Gettysburg. Living just ten miles from the Mason-Dixon line, small-scale raids, kidnappings of freed-people, and rumors of an imminent clash between the two great armies had long plagued the borough and its surrounding community. Nevertheless, none of these events could prepare Gettysburgians for the ferocious 3-day fight between 165,000 soldiers in early July of that year that would transform the lives and lands of Gettysburg’s civilians forever. However, these civilians’ experiences were not monolithic; while some were defined by tragedy and blight, others included remarkable episodes of perseverance, successful pragmatism, and creative profiteering. This blog series profiles the lives of diverse Gettysburgians who were forced to confront the war at their very doorsteps, each on their own terms, whose stories speak to the kaleidoscope of experiences of civilians struggling to survive, and thrive, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border during the Civil War.

For most students, college is a stressful time. But no amount of stress, previously or afterward, compares to that experienced in July of 1863 by the students of Pennsylvania College (now Gettysburg College), whose classes were interrupted by the largest battle in the western hemisphere. Two of those students were Michael Colver and H.J. Watkins, whose stories highlight just some of the many chaotic and bewildering experiences that many of Gettysburg’s youth endured during their three days of terror, as well as how they sought to make themselves useful to those in need during the great contest.

Michael Colver was originally from Olivet, Pennsylvania and was a member of the class of 1863, meaning he was a senior during the time of the battle. Horatio J. Watkins, meanwhile, was from Hagerstown, Maryland and a year below Colver. Both boys must have been educated young men, as enrollment requirements for the College at the time included, “an examination on Caesar, Virgil, the Greek Reader, Adam’s Latin Grammar, Sophocles’ Greek Grammar, English Grammar, Ancient and Modern Geography, Arithmetic and Loomis’ Ele-mentary Algebra” as well as “testimonials of good moral character.” Yet it was not just academics that Colver and Watkins were interested in. As their experiences during the battle showed, both had an intense curiosity about combat—a trait they shared with many other Gettysburg youth. At several moments, they put themselves in perilous situations in order to get a better view of the battle. However, despite this fascination with combat, the young men’s stories also reveal the depth of their compassion for humanity, as both Colver and Watkins would treat wounded men from both sides during and after the battle.

July 1, 1863 began as usual for the students of Pennsylvania College. Watkins was in class in Pennsylvania Hall when a U.S. Signal Corps officer interrupted and requested access to the cupola to make observations. Due to the disruption, the class was dismissed. As Watkins exited the building he encountered Colver. Both students began to hear shooting and Colver proposed that they go to the top of the cupola of the Lutheran Seminary to get a better look at what was going on. Watkins said that they should get permission from the faculty first, but Colver brushed the suggestion aside and they both made their way to the Seminary. They were joined by several other students and together they witnessed the early fighting to the north of town. However, they were forced to vacate the cupola when a Confederate shell passed nearby. At this point Colver and Watkins became separated. Instead of trying to find a place to hide, Colver and Watkins actively sought out danger as they had not yet satisfied their curiosity.

Colver and another student, Alexander Miller, proceeded to Cemetery Ridge just south of town in order to obtain another observation point of the battle. Here they encountered a Union chaplain who told them to either help out or head home. Before Colver could reply, an artillery shell landed nearby and he became separated from Miller. Colver then wandered the town for several hours, hiding wherever he could. He appeared to find relief at the home of the Swisher family (which still stands today on Taneytown Road, south of town) and was able to get supper. But the arrival of Union troops from the Twelfth Corps forced him to go on the move once again. By the evening he finally found a place to stay – a cabin full of wounded Northern soldiers. Colver helped with the dressing of their wounds, for which the soldiers awarded him the endearing title of “doctor,” and it was here that he stayed the night. After enduring a day of horror and terror, the soldiers certainly appreciated the help that the young Colver provided, and Colver himself must have been pleased to have been able to find a way, even as a mere college student, to help the men he was so eager to see in combat.

Watkins, meanwhile, was also acting the role of doctor. After leaving the Seminary, he made his way to the railroad depot to help the wounded, including Lieutenant Colonel Mark Flanigan of the 24th Michigan. As evening approached, Watkins found shelter in a cellar in town, along with several wounded Union troops. That night, Confederate soldiers attempted to break in, but were unable to do so. In the morning, the Confederates returned while Watkins was outside. One of them stole his watch and it was only after pleading with an officer that Watkins was able to get it back. Learning his lesson from his encounter with the Rebels, Watkins decided to stay in the cellar for the rest of the day. While many civilians after the battle would recall that the Confederates were surprisingly civil and polite in Gettysburg, some angrily noted that the Southern soldiers were a bunch of ruffians who pillaged their homes and either taunted or disrespected the townsfolk. Watkins’s experience matched those in the latter category.

That same morning, Colver left his cabin and sought a less crowded place to hide. He found a stone house south of town where he was reunited with Miller. Seemingly satisfied with what they had seen of battle, Colver and Miller stayed in their shelter for the remainder of the fighting. But for Watkins, the ordeal was not over. On the third day of battle, he made his way to his old boarding house owned by the Minnighs on the west side of town and stayed the night. The willingness of the Minnighs to take in Watkins, and the Swishers with Colver on the first day, highlights an important aspect of the College students’ experiences during the battle. When the fighting began, most Gettysburg residents (who had not fled town altogether) were able to seek shelter in the cellars of their homes. But this was not possible for the students. Their home had been the College, which was converted into a Confederate hospital on the first day of battle, leaving the students homeless. Therefore, they had to rely on the townspeople to take them in and provide them with shelter. As the stories of Colver and Watkins highlight, many were willing to do this —not only for the wandering students but also for fellow residents who deemed the location of their homes unsafe, and were forced to spend their days “house-hopping” as refugees within their own town. The generosity of the various “hosts” thus provided vital safety for those who otherwise would have been left out in the crossfire of battle.

Around midnight, a Confederate soldier who had been wounded in the head broke into the Minnighs’ house and began to act strangely, holding his eyes open and screaming into a mirror. As the only man in the house at the time, Watkins seized the man and tossed him out before slamming the door shut, doubtless unnerved by the experience, but likely proud of his ability to protect the vulnerable other occupants of the home. When morning came, Watkins saw that the Confederates had fled and made his way towards the College. Along the way, he took a knife from a drunken Confederate soldier who had been left behind. He may have done so in order to procure a souvenir of his experiences during the great battle, or perhaps it was his way of exacting a small bit of revenge upon the invaders who had devastated his adopted town. He also might have viewed the knife as an essential means of protection in the wake of his unsettling experiences with the Confederates the previous night. On that same day, Colver and Miller also emerged from their sanctuary only to be told (falsely) that Confederates were preparing to shell the town. Even after the battle was over there, chaos and confusion abounded, and with no one knowing what to expect next, many civilians feared the worst. Taking these rumors for fact, the two students returned to the stone house, where they remained until Monday, July 6.

Like all citizens of Gettysburg, the students of Pennsylvania College faced significant clean-up duties after the battle. During the battle, the College had served as a hospital and there were still many wounded remaining – around 700 according to Colver. All of the students’ books and school supplies had been tossed into the College president’s house while the rooms of Pennsylvania Hall were occupied by the wounded, mainly Confederates. When Colver entered his room he found three men, one on the bed and two on the floor. The cries and moans of the wounded echoed down the halls. For the students, it must have been unnerving and bewildering to find their adoptive home occupied by enemy soldiers and converted into such a miserable and grim place. But there was no time to complain, as for each minute that passed, more and more soldiers were dying, and for students such as Colver and Watkins, it did not matter that those suffering were the enemy. As they had done several days previously, Colver and Watkins began to help treat the wounded to the gratitude of the Confederates. The young men’s curious readiness to help those from the enemy army may be related to the fact that after graduating, Colver and Watkins both became ministers. Perhaps their compassion toward the Rebels was rooted in deeper, pre-existing moral and religious beliefs that led to their sense of duty and willingness to help others, no matter who they were. (Conversely, perhaps the students merely felt moved both by simple necessity, combined with nineteenth century notions of duty toward humanity, to help the wounded Confederates, and it was those humbling experiences immersed in suffering and death that drove the students toward the ministry). The College would remain a hospital for several weeks. As a result, the faculty decided to forgo final examinations and immediately graduate the class of 1863, which doubtless pleased Colver, who had already experienced the greatest physical and emotional test of his life.

After graduating, Colver would marry and move out to the midwest, frequently changing his residence. The College alumni records list him as living in Minnesota, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio in the second half of the nineteenth century. It seems that his eagerness to wander and observe, which had shown itself during the battle, were still with him. Watkins initially stayed in Pennsylvania before moving to, and eventually settling in Lockport, New York. He would marry the daughter of German immigrants and had eight children with her. Despite moving away, neither student forgot his experiences. In the 1902 edition of the Spectrum, the yearbook of Gettysburg College, both Colver and Watkins recounted their stories a full thirty-nine years after the battle. Towards the end of his narrative, Colver reflected on the significance of the battle for Gettysburg College students. Interestingly, he did not write about the horrors of the battle and its aftermath, nor of the fear that he felt. Instead, he wrote how proud Gettysburg College students should be that their campus was the site of a great Union victory that should forever swell their hearts with great feelings of patriotism. Colver, it seems, did not want to remember, or at least publicly dwell upon the suffering that he and the men he helped went through. Perhaps those memories were something he wanted to forget, or at least reflect upon merely in private. Instead, he wanted the college community to focus on the ultimately positive outcomes of the battle, and how those trying three days served to make both himself and his community stronger and united in their shared experience of playing host to such a renowned Union victory. Although it is this version of his battle experience—the story that Colver wanted to tell—that dominates the college’s printed records of what the battle was like and what it meant to those students who experienced it, it is the other version of Colver’s narrative that ultimately provides a far more complex lens into the life-changing impact of those three days in July upon those who had, for better or worse, chosen Gettysburg as their adoptive educational home.

By Emma Monzeglio, ‘24

Private John R. Cates was born around 1838 in the southeastern Tennessee county of Roane. He would ultimately serve in Company E of Turney’s 1^st Tennessee Regiment under Captain Ezekiel Y. Salmon. Unlike middle and western portions of the state, Cates’s home county and its surroundings were overwhelmingly pro-Union, with less than 25% of the population voting for secession. Given Cates’s Confederate service, it is likely that his life on the eve of 1861 was filled with tension and community divisions between the Cates family and his neighbors over their opinions regarding secession. 13% of the population in Roane County were slaves, most of whom worked small agricultural jobs and lived in close quarters with their masters or were rented out as laborers for specific skilled jobs. Cates himself was an illiterate laborer, owning very little land, and no slaves, but like many non-slaveholding southern whites, likely supported the “peculiar institution” nonetheless.

Cates enlisted nearly two weeks after the start of the war, on April 29^th, 1861. His enthusiasm to enlist could be attributed to numerous factors: The financial lure of a soldier’s salary, a possible yearning for adventure (being only 23 years old at the time), or a patriotic zeal for the Confederacy, fueled by the desire to preserve his aspirational property rights and social position as a white male from perceived northern aggressors and so-called “Black Republicans.” Cates also may have enlisted in defense of his family’s honor; as many Civil War regiments were organized by community, he may have felt pressure to enlist if he saw friends and neighbors doing so, and may have even felt more confident or excited to be fighting alongside pro-Confederate friends and family—particularly after having grown up surrounded by so many Unionists and other political “enemies.” Cates may also have enlisted in defense of Southern slavery. Despite not owning slaves, Cates’s white skin automatically helped forge a bond between himself and the slaveholding class, as the protection of white superiority and the socio-economic privileges that whiteness granted even to the poorest man over African Americans were of prime importance to the majority of southern whites. Additionally, Cates very well could have benefited materially from the peculiar institution through hiring out slaves or through extended family or friend networks with slaveholders. Like many non-slaveholding southern whites Cates likely hoped to one day rise up through the socio-economic ranks and become a slaveholder himself–an opportunity he may have wanted to protect.

On May 17^th, Cates and 1^st Tennessee infantry moved out by railroad to Richmond, Virginia, where they entered training camp. Once in the ranks, John Cates’s likely romantic initial notions of war as a glorious adventure would have been challenged by the harsh realities of a soldier’s life. Camp life was often monotonous. Cates would have spent most of his time building shelter, cooking, and collecting firewood. Camps were also a breeding ground for lice and various illnesses which added to the discomfort and demoralization. Food was inadequate and mainly consisted of corn, dried peas, and hardtack. On May 18^th, Cates was admitted for a two-day stay into Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital, for diarrhea. Many Civil War soldiers were plagued by diarrhea throughout their camp life due to unsanitary living conditions and poor food and water. Given that more men died of disease than battlefield wounds during the war, the constant slew of debilitating illnesses proved enormously taxing on soldiers’ bodies and minds. Despite these and other hardships, however, Cates most likely built strong bonds with his comrades. The shared experiences and suffering of the men both on and off the battlefield was a unifying force, bringing men of all different social classes together, and forming a sometimes lifelong brotherhood. Such brotherhood would prove essential to survival amidst the harsh elements of soldiering which propelled many soldiers to seek out innovative methods of individual and collective self-care in order to help navigate environmental challenges that their officers and war bureaucrats often were not prepared or able to mitigate.

After being drilled by Virginia Military Institute cadets for fifteen days, on June 1^st Cates and his comrades in Turney’s regiment moved up to Harpers Ferry, where they fell under the command of Brigadier General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s command. Jackson held his men to a high standard and relentlessly trained and drilled them, believing good discipline would bring success to the army in battle. In turn, his men were deeply devoted to him and respected Jackson immensely. Being pushed to his limits marching and drilling, Cates first began to experience the realities of a soldier’s life. Not every day would be an adventure filled with action; instead, significant time was needed to train and fully prepare for the battlefield. Cates first saw battle at First Manassas on July 21^st, when his company arrived at the end of fighting to support Jackson’s line. The horror of witnessing the violence of the killing fields for the first time was undoubtedly coupled with the excitement of a Confederate victory. As was true for many Confederates that day, Cates was likely shocked by the unexpected intensity of the fight, but his pride in his new nation’s smashing victory likely would have bolstered his spirits and made the deaths of some of his comrades sacred. Cates and the 1^st Tennessee infantry remained in Northern Virginia until September 30^th, 1861. The regiment mainly fought in the Eastern theatre with the Army of Northern Virginia, eventually becoming part of the Tennessee Brigade on March 8^th, 1862, under the command of Brigadier General Samuel R. Anderson.

In the spring and summer of 1862, Cates took part in the Peninsula Campaign, fighting at Seven Pines and in the Seven Days battles, where the regiment reported ninety-nine casualties and at Second Manassas, where they suffered fifty-seven casualties. This more intense experience of combat, coupled with witnessing additional close comrades fall in gruesome ways on the battlefield likely taxed Cates’s mind and body, but also may have motivated him to keep up his fight to avenge their deaths. On September 29^th, 1862 Cates was captured while serving as a nurse. Though a few details exist about the nature of his capture or the duration of his captivity, one can imagine that, as was true for many POWs, this experience was likely unpleasant, at best, and dehumanizing, at worst. Inadequate clothing, food, shelter, and the severe boredom of imprisonment were enormously taxing and demoralizing. Depending on how long Cates was captured, he could have been tortured by thoughts of his loved ones at home and how his fellow comrades were doing, being disconnected from any news from the front. He also may have viewed his capture as somewhat emasculating, given that he was taken prisoner not in the heart of combat, but while doctoring his comrades. However, nineteenth-century notions of the need for stoic martial masculinity, combined with his experiences on the battlefield and in hospitals amidst the continuous pain, suffering, and death induced by enemy Union soldiers may well have churned up deep longings for vengeance, further strengthening his motivations to continuing fighting. Conversely, like some POWs and battle-weary soldiers, Cates may have come to question his initial motivations for fighting, wondering, was the war worth the suffering? We may never know his precise thoughts, and he likely experienced a range of emotions during his captivity, but he was eventually exchanged and rejoined his old unit.

Prior to Gettysburg, Cates survived the brutal fighting at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. The 1^st Tennessee Infantry sustained fifty-seven casualties at Fredericksburg, including Colonel Peter Turney, who received a severe wounded that prevented his return to field command, and fifty-eight casualties at Chancellorsville. Losing a beloved commander was a trying experience for Civil War soldiers; however, the Confederate army’s smashing victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville bolstered many soldiers’ morale and convinced them that, surely the end of the war was on the horizon and the future of the Confederate nation was assured. Furthermore, 19^th-century beliefs in Divine Providence convinced many Southerners that their victories on the battlefield were evidence of being God’s chosen people.

Entering Pennsylvania later that spring, the 1^st Tennessee was captivated by the bountiful food supplies and miles of the expansive, fertile farmland stretching out before them—a sharp change from the blighted, war-ravaged fields of Virginia. It had been a long and muddy march up to Pennsylvania; however, the idea of full bellies and finally having an opportunity to wreak havoc on northern soil after years of the Yankees’ seemingly merciless destruction of Southern land—not to mention their occupation of large swaths of his home state–likely carried Cates through those long weeks of marching. On July 1, the 1^st Tennessee, joined by other elements of James Archer’s brigade, took part in the opening assaults at Gettysburg. After encountering John Buford’s Union cavalry along Herr’s Ridge, the brigade continued to press its way eastward towards Gettysburg, eventually clashing with elements of Meredith’s famed Iron Brigade along the slopes of Willoughby Run. During this action, Archer—as well as many members of the 1^st Tennessee—was captured, and the rest of the brigade ultimately was removed to reinforce the Confederate right flank. This opening fighting was fierce, and at close-range, but Confederate army’s successes in driving Federals back through the town by the end of July 1 surely would have bolstered Cates’s spirits.

Over the next day, however, Cates would have been forced to simply wait and watch as over ten thousand of his comrades surged across the open, rolling farm field towards the Union line stretched along and before Cemetery Ridge. The fight was close, with multiple Confederate brigades nearly reaching the center of Cemetery Ridge itself before being driven back by the Federals. The casualties had been horrific, and now Cates knew that it would be his turn to try to take the same formidable ground the next day. Excitement, anxiety, fear, and thirst for vengeance likely occupied Cates’s mind that night as he listened to the groans of the wounded lying out in the fields in front of him. On the afternoon of July 3^rd, the 1^st and 7^th Tennessee Infantry regiments would fight on the Confederates’ left flank during famed “Pickett-Pettigrew” Charge. The two-hour long artillery barrage and wait in Seminary Ridge wood line, hunkered down with his comrades amidst exploding shells and falling tree limbs, must have seemed a lifetime to Cates and his comrades.

As Cates emerged from the woods at last and began the march over the open, undulating fields before him, he and his comrades sought occasional shelter in the dips and swales of the farmland in between their terrifying exposure to shot and shell between the swales. However, the regiment would not begin to take severe casualties until coming within musket range of the Union troops posted atop Cemetery Ridge, somewhere near the Emmitsburg Road. The sudden slaughter and disorientating smoke were terrifying, with the sound of minie balls constantly zipping around the soldiers and the thunderous roar of cannon fire to their front and side. Sheer adrenaline and the camaraderie of fellow Tennesseans helped to sustain their forward momentum. Cates may have consoled himself with the knowledge that he had survived previous deadly battles like Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, though the circ*mstances here were vastly different. Thoughts of his family and home likely rushed through his mind, galvanizing him further for the fight at hand. The Union soldiers firing at Cates and his fellow Confederates likely brought back memories of the many lives of dear friends he had already lost at the barrel of Union guns, pushing him to fight that much harder under the sweltering July sun.

At some point during the fight, John Cates suffered a shrapnel wound to one of his upper arms. His comrades in the 1^st and 7^th Tennessee continued to press onward amidst the storm of leaden hail and ultimately were some of the only units to break the Union lines before losing their colors to the 14^th Connecticut Infantry and being forced to retreat in the face of a tide of Union reinforcements. The honor of breaking the Union lines was a great, yet fleeting success, as for a moment, victory seemed tantalizingly close. But, it was not to be. That honor ultimately came at a price: of the two hundred and eighty-one men who came to Gettysburg, the 1^st Tennessee Infantry lost more than 60% of them. Despite the pride the men surely felt at having briefly cracked the Union lines, their enormous disappointment in not being able to hold that prize position, and losing their beloved colors in the process, was almost too much to bear. The colors represented their home, encapsulated their unit pride and Confederate nationalism, had guided them through deadly battles and flown above victorious battlefields of the past, and now they­­—like so many of their comrades—were gone.

Cates himself was captured, once again, by the Union Army on July 5^th. It is unclear if he was immediately seized by Union forces on July 3^rd or whether he lay out on the battlefield in the oppressive July heat or in a makeshift hospital until his capture. However, once in captivity Cates was admitted to the Satterlee U.S. General Hospital in Philadelphia on July 12^th and then transferred to the U.S. General Hospital in Chester, Pennsylvania on July 14^th. While at the hospitals, Cates’s arm was amputated. John Cates’s time at the hospitals undoubtedly was an agonizing experience. Suffering in the humid summer heat with a festering wound, far from friends and family, and in the hands of the enemy once more likely sapped Cates of his remaining physical and mental strength. Unable to read or write, he may have spent his free time dictating letters to nurses or fellow soldiers to send home, as often occurred with illiterate soldiers seeking to communicate with loved ones and convey final wishes and sentiments to family and friends. After more than two agonizing long months, Cates died from exhaustion, induced by his amputation, on September 21^st. He was ultimately buried over six hundred and fifty miles from home, utterly alone, in Chester Cemetery. News of his death was crushing to his family, whose Victorian notions about the “Good Death” were challenged by the harsh realities of war and soldiering. Cates’s family and many Civil War families believed a soldier would die at home surrounded by their loved ones, whole in body and able to give their final words before receiving a proper Christian burial in a nearby family plot. Cates’s death was far from the comforting notion of the Good Death, which forced both his family and comrades to reframe former notions of death and suffering; indeed, John Cates would die a long painful death after months of being bedridden, in enemy territory, surrounded by enemies, and ultimately buried by enemies in northern soil.

Today, Cates’s and his comrades’ sacrifice and service at Gettysburg are memorialized through the Tennessee State Monument, which was dedicated on July 3^rd, 1982, one hundred and nineteen years after the battle. Most visitors focus solely on the role of Virginia and North Carolina in the Pickett-Pettigrew charge, which has long created tensions and controversy amongst Tennesseans who also wished to have their state’s unique contributions to the charge recognized. Theirs was the last Confederate monument constructed and the only one to be privately funded. The monument is imbued with rich symbolism, promoting the idea of reunion and reconciliation while also conveying great pride for the Tennesseans’ contributions to the Confederate cause: The base of the structure is sixteen feet long, a conspicuous nod to Tennessee’s place as the sixteenth state of the Union which it quickly rejoined in 1866 after the war’s end—the first state in the Confederacy to do so. However, the monument proudly commemorates the valor and courage of the three Tennessee regiments who fought there. The three men on the front of the monument represent the three regiments, the 1^st, 7^th, and 14^th Tennessee Infantry. The three stars on the top symbolize the three distinct geographic areas of Tennessee, the East, Central, and West, which are also reflected on the state flag. Virginia and North Carolina have long tended to attract the bulk of scholars’ and visitors’ attention when touring the fields of “Pickett’s Charge,” further prompting Tennessee to erect their own monument in an effort to remind visitors of Tennessee’s contributions to the battle and to the soldiers’ courage.

With its nod to the state’s place and history within the United States as a whole, the monument promotes the idea of brothers once more coming together after the death and destruction of the Civil War. However, the monument still clearly defends and celebrates the Southern honor of the Tennessee soldiers, with an inscription stating, “they died for their convictions.” Clearly, the monument seeks to justify and make sacred the service and sacrifice of the Tennesseans. But the vagueness of the wording, namely “their convictions,” consciously glosses over what the exact nature of those convictions were, thus ignoring the causes and deeper meaning of the war while deflecting attention wholly to the heroic bravery and martial honor of the soldiers themselves. The monument also paints a romantic picture of the war—one far from the horrific realities experienced by the combatants whom it honors, such as John Cates. Nevertheless, by memorializing the often unsung actions of Tennessee soldiers at Gettysburg, the monument both brings martial honor and physical ownership of a critical swath of the iconic battlefield landscape to men like Cates, who were common laborers, transformed by war into hardened soldiers, and remembered, for better or worse, as heroes.

Sources cited:

“1st Tennessee Infantry Regiment (Provisional Army).”The Civil War in the East. Last modified June 20, 2021. Accessed July 7, 2021. https://civilwarintheeast.com/confederate-regiments/tennessee/1st-tennessee-infantry-regiment-provisional-army/.

“1st (Turney’s) Confederate Infantry Regiment.”Tennessee the Civil War. Last modified November 26, 2016. Accessed July 6, 2021. https://tngenweb.org/civilwar/1st-turneys-confederate-infantry-regiment/.

Ancestry.com. 1860 United States Federal Census [Database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009 Images reproduced by Family Search.

“Battle Unit Details.”National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, n.d. Accessed July 6, 2021. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=CTN0001RI02.

“Civil War.”Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society, March 1, 2018. Last modified March 1, 2018. Accessed July 6, 2021. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/civil-war/.

“Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Tennessee” database with images Fold3 (https://www-fold3-com.ezpro.cc.gettysburg.edu//title/40/civil-war-service-records-cmsr-confederate-tennessee: accessed August 19, 2021)

John S. Robson, b. 1844 How a One-Legged Rebel Lives: Reminiscences of the Civil War: The Story of the Campaigns of Stonewall Jackson, as Told by a High Private in the “Foot Cavalry”: From Alleghany Mountain to Chancellorsville: With the Complete Regimental Rosters of Both the Great Armies at Gettysburg.Accessed July 7, 2021. https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/robson/menu.html.

Larson, Jennifer L.Memories of Stonewall Jackson. Accessed July 7, 2021. https://docsouth.unc.edu/highlights/jackson.html.

“Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States. Compiled from the Census of 1860.”The Library of Congress. Accessed July 7, 2021. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3861e.cw0013200/?r=0.39%2C0.134%2C0.627%2C0.297%2C0.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Washington, D.C.; Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Tennessee; Series Number: M268; Roll: 107

“Stars on the Tennessee State Monument.”Gettysburg Daily. Last modified May 11, 2017. Accessed July 6, 2021. https://www.gettysburgdaily.com/stars-tennessee-state-monument/.

“The State of Tennessee Monument at Gettysburg, with Photos and Map.”The Battle of Gettysburg. Last modified January 20, 2020. Accessed July 6, 2021. https://gettysburg.stonesentinels.com/confederate-monuments/confederate-state-monuments/tennessee/.

Whiteaker, Larry H. “Civil War.”Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society, March 1, 2018. Last modified March 1, 2018. Accessed July 7, 2021. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/civil-war/.

By Jessica Roshon ’23

War on the Doorstep: Civilians of Gettysburg

By late June of 1863, alarms warning of approaching Confederate forces were nothing new for the 2,400 residents of Gettysburg. Living just ten miles from the Mason-Dixon line, small-scale raids, kidnappings of freed-people, and rumors of an imminent clash between the two great armies had long plagued the borough and its surrounding community. Nevertheless, none of these events could prepare Gettysburgians for the ferocious 3-day fight between 165,000 soldiers in early July of that year that would transform the lives and lands of Gettysburg’s civilians forever. However, these civilians’ experiences were not monolithic; while some were defined by tragedy and blight, others included remarkable episodes of perseverance, successful pragmatism, and creative profiteering. This new blog series profiles the lives of diverse Gettysburgians who were forced to confront the war at their very doorsteps, each on their own terms, whose stories speak to the kaleidoscope of experiences of civilians struggling to survive, and thrive, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border during the Civil War.

No matter how far and safe non-combatants saw themselves from the conflict, the Civil War always managed to find itself on the doorstep of countless helpless civilians. Henry Spangler’s family was no exception: They had no specific reason to believe the war would come to their very home, and, despite the fact that they lived along the tenuous boundary between North and South, unlike many families, no one from the Spangler clan was serving. Unfortunately war is impersonal, destroys everything it touches, and can appear on one’s doorstep at any time as it did for Henry Spangler’s family.

Henry’s family was one of three wealthy Spangler households in Gettysburg—all of which would become famous witnesses to history in July of 1863. Although he owned a 156-acre farm on the Emmitsburg Road, Henry was renting the property out to tenant Jacob Eckenrode in 1863. (This farm would become the infamous “stepping off point” for the Armistead’s brigade during the July 3^rd Pickett-Pettigrew assault.) Instead, Henry lived on a farm owned by his father, Abraham that was located behind Culp’s Hill during the time of the battle. Abraham and his wife, Elizabeth resided west of town on Chambersburg Pike, between Willoughby Run and Herr’s Ridge, on a farm he had purchased in 1855. Henry’s older brother, George, also owned a farm south of the Culp’s Hill farm along the Baltimore Pike that was used by the Union Army as an artillery park for reserve batteries as well as a hospital for the Union 11^th Corps. (It was also in the summer kitchen at George’s farm that Confederate General Lewis Armistead would famously die after his July 3^rd wounding during “Pickett’s Charge.”) Abraham’s farm—that is, the July 1863 home of Henry and his family–would become host to several bloody and iconic battlefield landmarks such as Spangler Meadow, Pardee Field, and most famously, Spangler’s Spring, whose cool, pure water famously drew thirsty and bloodied men from both armies toward its sustenance during the battle.

The war-time residence of Henry Spangler encompassed 130.84 acres, all of which were purchased by the United States government on March 28, 1955. The main house was constructed around 1820 and made of brick and stone. The central part of the home was two stories, with an extension on the west side which tapered down to a height of one story. This section was eventually raised to meet the rest of the house in 1880. In addition to the house, a blacksmith shop lay about 20 yards to the west and the property held a barn as well. Several additional outbuildings were constructed after the battle, such as a large summer kitchen, small brick smokehouse, and a structure which functioned as a toolshed and chicken house.

In July of 1863, Henry Spangler, his wife Sarah (whom he had married in 1855), and their four children, Calvin, Alice, Anna, and William, lived at the Abraham Spangler farm. A day before the battle began, a Union officer arrived at the home and asked Sarah Spangler to take her family and flee out of fear for their safety. After packing some belongings, Sarah departed with her children to the nearby village of Two Taverns in a spring wagon, but Henry decided to stay at home in the cellar to try to protect the home from ransacking soldiers. General Slocum’s 12^th Corps of the Union Army eventually arrived at the property on July 1^st where they constructed earthworks above the spring and remained until the next day. Slocum was then called away temporarily, leaving the earthworks virtually unoccupied due to General George Greene’s inability to reach the area. Consequently, Confederate Brigadier General George Steuart’s brigade arrived on the scene unopposed but was quickly swept up in a series of attacks and counterattacks until the firing slowly died away into the night. The fighting resumed early the following morning when the 12^th Corps attacked Steuart’s men from the west and rained artillery fire from the Baltimore Pike down on the earthworks where the Confederates were trapped. At the climax of the battle, the 2^nd Massachusetts and the 27^th Indiana regiments were incredulously ordered to charge Steuart’s Virginians after a series of miscommunications. The results were devastating. While charging through what is now known as Spangler’s Meadow, the Union troops were under blistering musket fire from three sides and suffered heavy losses. Colonel Ario Pardee of the 147^th Pennsylvania led a far more successful charge across a nearby field which now bears his name. 1200 Confederates were reported dead, 500 taken prisoner, and many more were wounded as a result. After seven more hours of brutal fighting, General Edward “Allegheny” Johnson ordered Steuart to retreat and reform at Rock Creek, which allowed the Union troops to reoccupy the earthworks and proceed with retrieving the wounded and burying the dead. The last troops to march through the Spangler farm were Union soldiers involved in the repulse of “Pickett’s Charge” on their way to the “Angle” atop Cemetery Ridge.

When Sarah and her family returned, they found the property in complete ruin. Soldiers had cleared the home of food and bed clothes. One of the family’s best horses and all their cows were stolen. All of the fences had been torn down and the crops severely damaged. Union and Confederate bullets littered the ground. The house itself was partially damaged due to its use as a field hospital where countless men soaked the floorboards and stained the furniture with blood. Their corpses and amputated limbs were buried across the property. Despite all this destruction and bloodshed, a tale of brotherhood and comradeship managed to arise from the property. Reports emerged of truces being called between the opposing forces in order to fill up their canteens and cups. These stories likely originated from veterans reminiscing on their experiences and fit neatly into the post-war Lost Cause narrative of reconciliation. However, as comfortable as this little story is, it is highly unlikely that this event actually occurred because of the location of the spring and the vicious fighting which occurred around it. Romanticizing this portion of the battle does not change how thousands of men lost their lives and wounded men screamed in agony for their comrades in an attempt to find them, ironically on a farm owned by a “war immune” family.

The story of Henry Spangler, and every branch of the Spangler family in the Gettysburg area, is an intriguing one because it is a story that is common, yet still shocking at the same time. Countless civilians had their property and lives destroyed by the war, but the contrast between peaceful farmland and roaring guns, cool flowing springs, and the screams and flowing rivers of blood from the dying remains chilling, nonetheless.

By Jessica Roshon ’23

War on the Doorstep: Civilians of Gettysburg

By late June of 1863, alarms warning of approaching Confederate forces were nothing new for the 2,400 residents of Gettysburg. Living just ten miles from the Mason-Dixon line, small-scale raids, kidnappings of freed-people, and rumors of an imminent clash between the two great armies had long plagued the borough and its surrounding community. Nevertheless, none of these events could prepare Gettysburgians for the ferocious 3-day fight between 165,000 soldiers in early July of that year that would transform the lives and lands of Gettysburg’s civilians forever. However, these civilians’ experiences were not monolithic; while some were defined by tragedy and blight, others included remarkable episodes of perseverance, successful pragmatism, and creative profiteering. This new blog series profiles the lives of diverse Gettysburgians who were forced to confront the war at their very doorsteps, each on their own terms, whose stories speak to the kaleidoscope of experiences of civilians struggling to survive, and thrive, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border during the Civil War.

For many 19^th-century Gettysburgians, life on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border meant a nearly continuous interchange between northern and southern goods, civilians, and cultural values. For black Gettysburgians, life along the Mason-Dixon line created a tenuous and often terrifying existence between freedom and slavery. However, for many whites living in the area, the outbreak of war in 1861 wrought often irreparably destructive damage upon families who found their homes torn apart by fathers, sons, and cousins with conflicting political loyalties. Such was the case for the Wentz family, who not only experienced the physical impacts of war upon their doorstep and the emotional fallout of a house politically divided; they also became a focal point for postwar narratives about the meaning and legacy of the Civil War in the broader American consciousness.

Before the battle ravaged their land and home, John and Mary Wentz lived peacefully in a long, one-and-a-half story log cabin which stood at the intersection of the Emmitsburg and (what is now) Wheatfield Roads. Their quaint home and few outbuildings occupied a small tract of land adjacent to Joseph Sherfy’s now famous peach orchard. The couple had two children: Susan, who was from John’s previous marriage, lived with her parents at the time of the battle, but their son, Henry, had been disavowed by his father after deciding to enlist in the Confederate army in April of 1861. Prior to his disownment, Henry had moved to Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia) to establish his own carriage-building shop. He enlisted in Captain Ephraim G. Alburtis’s artillery battery, which formed in Berkeley County, Virginia. The unit’s command then fell to Captain James S. Brown and its name changed to the Wise Artillery, named for Governor Wise of Virginia, until it was discontinued in October 1862. Henry was appointed First Sergeant on February 10, 1862 and maintained this rank when he was transferred from Pendleton’s Battery to Brown’s Battery, eventually earning the rank of Corporal on October 8, 1862 after being transferred yet again to Eubank’s Battery. On January 1, 1863, Wentz was promoted once again to orderly sergeant, the grade he held when he finally returned home in July of 1863.

At the time of the battle, John, age 73, Mary, age 74, Susan, age 27, and a boy named Charles Culp, age 15, were present in the Wentz house. The family was not in danger during the first day of the battle, but their luck changed when General Lee extended his battle line along Seminary Ridge and General Meade responded in kind by stretching the Union line on Cemetery Ridge in preparation for a second day of battle. As a result, the family decided to flee while John Wentz remained behind and hid in the cellar. John’s choice might initially come across as an intriguing one, considering the gendered expectations of men for the time; men were expected to protect their families at all costs, so one would assume that he would flee with his family. However, he likely viewed the preservation of the family homestead – the physical embodiment of his family’s future and financial stability – as most vulnerable and in need of his defense. In any case, this decision ironically caused him to come within a mere few hundred yards of his son’s own artillery battery, which ultimately was posted about 200 yards northeast of the Wentz house, just opposite the Sherfy House. In one of the great, but fitting ironies of the battle, although John Wentz had officially purged his son from his real life, his very residence along the porous boundary between North and South ultimately made real John’s fears that his disavowed son and his “repugnant” political leanings would assault the very foundations of the Wentz family’s livelihood – but this time not merely with Confederate ideals, but with literal shot and shell.

Out of this incident came several extraordinary, though ultimately debunked, stories about Henry’s return to Gettysburg and his supposed reunion with his father, which fell neatly into line with the iconic, though flawed, “brother vs. brother” narrative of tragic domestic and national divides and the ultimate reconciliation of both that emerged shortly after the war.

The earliest story appeared in the 1887 book, The Great Invasion of 1863 by Jacob Hoke. In this clearly romanticized tale, which played on tropes common during the sentimentalist movement, Hoke claims that Henry commanded a Confederate battery and allegedly hid his parents in the cellar of their house prior to firing upon the Union line, or more specifically, upon the Pennsylvania Reserves. The next most commonly known story lies in W.C. Storrick’s The Battle of Gettysburg, The Country, The Contestants, The Results, published in 1931. This story also claims that Henry was given command of a battery but differs slightly in the description of the encounter between Henry and John Wentz. According to this rendition, the night following Pickett’s Charge, Henry supposedly checked on his father to find him peacefully sleeping in the cellar, so he pinned a note reading, “Good-bye and God bless you!” to his father’s lapel. The final interpretation of the Wentz reunion can be found in the memoirs of Rufus W. Jacklin of the 16^th Michigan Infantry, who described finding paperwork connecting Henry to one of the dead soldiers being buried on the property. John and Mary Wentz replied to the pronouncement of the discovered paperwork with dismissal, claiming that their son was a traitor and they wanted nothing to do with his body.

As mentioned earlier, these stories reflect a domestically focused, overly sentimental and highly romanticized version of the Civil War which emerged around the same time as the “Lost Cause.” Such popular and politicized portrayals of the war and its aftermath often glossed over the uncomfortable roots of the conflict, wallowed in the tragedies of the war while celebrating stories of martial bravery and moral nobility, and sought to reconcile the North and South around comforting stories of domestic and national reunion and shared forgiveness. Jacklin’s story challenges key parts of this romantic trope with the family’s indifference to hearing of their son’s possible death – perhaps a result of Jacklin’s own military service which may have framed his personal perceptions of political disloyalty and family divisions within a more cynical, less forgiving light.

Despite witnessing intense fighting during the second and third days of the battle, the Wentz house suffered minimal damage. In April of 1870, John Wentz passed away at the age of 84. He was followed by his wife and daughter in the subsequent two years. John’s will stated that his estate would fall to Susan, and then to his surviving children after all his debts were paid, blatantly excising Henry from his inheritance. Henry had continued to fight with the Confederates until he was captured on April 6, 1865 at Sailor’s Creek near Farmville, Virginia and was subsequently released after taking the oath of allegiance on June 21, 1865. Once the Wentz homestead passed, by default, to Henry following the deaths of his mother and sister, he immediately sold it and ten acres of his own land in April 1872 to a neighbor named Joseph Smith, who had already acquired the neighboring Daniel Klingel farm. The property was later acquired by John Beecher, who remodeled the house in the 1880s. During the late 1890s and early 1900s, the original log cabin was dismantled and replaced with a number of white buildings which stood until 1960, when they were taken down by the National Park Service.

The history and memory of the Wentz family, and how that history is interpreted today, speaks to the complications undergirding interpretations of the Civil War itself as a whole. Rifts between families were quite common, especially among those living on the border, and showed how the war cut to the deepest parts of people’s lives, but the romanticization of Henry Wentz’s story reflects the nation’s need to heal and a forceful willingness to seemingly forget all that had transpired during the conflict itself. Stories of reunion and reconciliation were an integral part of the national narrative immediately following the war, and the myth of the Wentz family played right into these sentimentalist viewpoints. This romanticization of the war continues to be a convenient fallback for many still today as we often sanitize the truly unsettling, if not horrifying aspects of war. As the Wentz’s true family story reveals, such falsified representations of war inhibit our ability to comprehend, let alone accept how deeply scarred and divided the nation remained after the guns fell silent, leading to open wounds and sectional reverberations–generations out from the war that forever destroyed John Wentz’s home.

By Lauren Letizia

“War on the Doorstep: Civilians of Gettysburg”

By late June of 1863, alarms warning of approaching Confederate forces were nothing new for the 2,400 residents of Gettysburg. Living just ten miles from the Mason-Dixon line, small-scale raids, kidnappings of freed-people, and rumors of an imminent clash between the two great armies had long plagued the borough and its surrounding community. Nevertheless, none of these events could prepare Gettysburgians for the ferocious 3-day fight between 165,000 soldiers in early July of that year that would transform the lives and lands of Gettysburg’s civilians forever. However, these civilians’ experiences were not monolithic; while some were defined by tragedy and blight, others included remarkable episodes of perseverance, successful pragmatism, and creative profiteering. This new blog series profiles the lives of diverse Gettysburgians who were forced to confront the war at their very doorsteps, each on their own terms, whose stories speak to the kaleidoscope of experiences of civilians struggling to survive, and thrive, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border during the Civil War.

When Nicholas and George Codori emigrated to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from Hottviller, France on 20th June 1828, they could not have foreseen the epic battle that would reshape both the physical and historical landscape of their new hometown.

The Codoris’ sprawling tracts of land and multiple houses would become some of the most significant locales during the Battle of Gettysburg, with one of the family farms playing host to over 500 buried Confederate dead, the most of any farm in the area. Although, like most Gettysburg civilians, the Codoris’ livelihoods were dramatically altered during and after the infamous clash, their story is, in many ways, one of mixed struggle and ironic success as a result of the bloody battle that transformed their town forever.

Like many European immigrants of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Codori brothers viewed American land ownership as the key to personal opportunity and family fortune. Inspired by the promises of a free labor society that championed hard work and the ownership of one’s own labor as the foundation for successful, stable, and moral living, twenty-two-year-old George and nineteen-year-old Nicholas hoped to become successful, independent, and contributing members of their local community. The U.S. Census lists their occupations as butchers. Nicholas became an apprentice with local butcher, Anthony Kuntz and eventually started his own business behind his home on York Street. Interestingly, his was the former house of Gettysburg founder, James Gettys. During the aftermath of the battle, the York Street house would be used as a temporary church for the displaced congregation of the Catholic church, St. Francis Xavier, which served as a hospital for wounded and dying soldiers.

Ambition defined Nicholas Codori’s life. In 1835, he married Elizabeth Martin, with whom he had two sons, George and Simon. Distrustful of banks, Nicholas continually invested his life savings into new land and farm properties. In 1854, he purchased approximately 273 acres of land along the Emmitsburg Rd., just outside the borough, and proceeded to build a brick house on the property between 1854 and 1863, leasing the farmhouse to tenants. In 1861, he purchased an additional 66 acres across the Emmitsburg Road. During the battle, Nicholas’s niece, Catherine Codori Staub, and her husband, John Staub, were renting the farmhouse. John was serving in the 165th Pennsylvania at the time, so an extremely pregnant Catherine, her children, and her parents were alone in the house. Codori family history states that Catherine hid in the basem*nt; however, there are no records or diaries to indicate this as fact. Other rumors suggest she fled to Carlisle, but this is unlikely given the advanced state of her pregnancy; she gave birth to twin girls on July 8, 1863. (A more likely explanation states that the Staubs may have owned their own farm behind the Sherfy property, giving Catherine and her family another place to wait out the violence).

However, according to an officer in General George Stanndard’s Vermont Brigade there were occupants in the Codori farmhouse on the eve of the battle. The officer writes that, when his brigade stopped at the farm, an old man ran out of the house, opened the gate, and (rather comically) begged the soldiers to “move around his wheat field and not pass through it.” This man may have been Catherine’s father, Anthony Codori, as there is no record of Nicholas’s and his family’s movements during the three days of fighting.

During the Civil War, George’s family would suffer the worst of the Codoris. In 1829, George had married a fellow French immigrant, Regina Wallenberger. They had made their home on West Middle Street and began a family, raising two daughters, Suzanne and Cecelia, and a son, Nicholas. Apparently eager to go to war to defend his family’s adopted nation and the ideals of Union and free labor that defined the northern war effort, Nicholas enlisted in Company E of the 2nd Pennsylvania on April 20, 1861. Discharged after his 90-day enlistment expired, it is unknown why he chose not to immediately re-enlist. In 1864, perhaps fearful of the draft or due to community pressures, he finally renewed his enlistment with the 210th PA, but deserted twelve days later. Perhaps the divergence between romantic notions of warfare and the realities of soldier life was simply too much for young Nicholas.

During the Battle of Gettysburg, while George’s daughter, Suzanne and her husband hid in his brother Nicholas’s basem*nt on York Street, George fell victim to marauding Confederates and was one of eight Gettysburg citizens to be captured and imprisoned by the Confederate Army. There is no definitive record of why 57-year-old George was arrested, but the family claims he was detained by suspicious southern cavalry as he was returning home from a business trip to Baltimore, perhaps wearing his son’s old Union soldier’s jacket. Conversely, Annie McSherry, the great great-granddaughter of George, states that he and part of his family had fled to the Culp Farm on July 1 and had returned home on the 4th to find a wounded Confederate soldier hiding in their home. McSherry claims that George helped the soldier return to the lines and that George may had been detained while doing so. Whatever the circ*mstances, George was transported to a prison in Richmond, Virginia and then moved to Salisbury Prison in North Carolina. The Codoris anxiously awaited his return, baffled by how Confederates could justify his continued incarceration following the Gettysburg Campaign. Sadly, George did not return home until March 1865 and severely weakened by his time in southern prisons, he died of pneumonia just days later. Regina soon followed, passing away a few months after. The George Codori family story speaks to the myriad unexpected tragedies that upended the lives of numerous families living along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border during the Gettysburg Campaign.

Luckily for Nicholas Codori, fortune once again favored ambition and boldness. In 1865, Nicholas purchased a large tract of land across the Emmitsburg Road from Nicholas’s farmhouse which had belonged to William Bliss. Capitalizing on the damages the Bliss land and burned-out house and barn sustained during the battle, Codori purchased the property from a despondent and financially desperate Bliss. Three years later, in 1868, Codori decided to further profit from the prime location of the farmland east of the Emmitsburg Road, where hundreds of Confederate soldiers had been buried in shallow graves. When this was discovered, he sold the land to Southern organizations that were commissioned to repatriate Confederate remains. He bought this portion back in 1872 after the soldiers’ bodies were removed and sent back to the South. Nicholas continued to prosper from his rampant purchase and sale of local farmlands until 1878, when he sustained mortal injuries from a mowing accident on one of his farms. While driving a horse-drawn mower, Codori fell into the sharp blades of the mower after his horse became spooked and suddenly jerked its body. Nicholas lay alone amidst the mowing with a partially severed leg for approximately 30 minutes, until help finally arrived. He survived for a few days afterwards before succumbing to his wound on July 11, 1878. In one of the great ironies of his life, the cherished land that had long sustained his family’s fortunes, and which had enabled his family to endure and thrive in the wake of the cataclysmic battle fought around them, had fatally failed him.

Despite Nicholas’s tragic death, the Codori family fortunes continued to prosper. By 1880, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) had purchased significant ownership of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association. The combined GAR-GBMA began to encourage widespread erection of monuments and memorials on pivotal pieces of the battlefield. Well-aware of the enormous historical value of the family’s sprawling farm and sensing a financial boon for the Codori family, Nicholas’s son, Simon started selling large portions of his family’s land to veterans’ groups, stating that wished to memorialize their soldiers’ sacrifices. Codori land now claims monuments to the 106th and 26th PA, the death sites of Colonel Willard of the 126th NY and Colonel Ward of the 15th MA, as well as the site of General Winfield Scott Hanco*ck’s famed wounding. Due to Simon’s foresight, Codori land was no longer solely of monetary value, but of pivotal commemorative value. The Codori family’s wartime experiences were defined by a kaleidoscope of emotions and fortunes—confusion, fear, chaos, tragedy, grief, and loss—but also opportunity, ironic success, and growth. However, in the end, it was Nicholas Codori’s antebellum foresight about the importance of land ownership, his unwavering belief in the power of free labor ideals and practices to secure upward mobility and financial security, and his family’s opportunism that enabled the Codoris to ride out the storm of civil war on the Pennsylvania border—and to emerge, largely, better for it. His land and various properties became battlefields, hideouts, havens, churches, burial grounds, and memorial landscapes. Throughout this constant repurposing and shifts in meaning, the Codori properties played an integral role not only in the family’s fortunes, but also in the history and memory of the Gettysburg landscape as we know it.

By : Felicia Marks

Freshman students in CWI’s all-volunteer First Year Experience Program spent the year discussing scholarly articles about the soldier experience, attending workshops with practicing public historians, participating in on-site interpretive battlefield experiences, and researching and writing about a soldier of their choice for the Compiler blog. Their pieces roughly follow anabbreviatedformat of the CWI’s“Killed at Gettysburg”digital history project.

Authors Note: I would like to thank Mrs. Virginia Gage for graciously providing me with family history and additional resources that allowed me to learn more about the 136th New York. Although the 136^thhas long been overlooked, she, alongside numerous other descendants, continue to memorialize these men and their contributions through their Facebook page today.

Elias Gage was born on April 4, 1835, in Danbury, CT. He was one of seven children born to parents Elias P Gage and Mary Oakley. He was a tall young man with light hair and blue eyes. He and his family later moved to Burns, Allegany County, New York, and established a successful farm. Family stood at the forefront of his moral values; rather than attending college, he continued to work on his family’s farm into adulthood. On June 2, 1860, he married Lodorsca Miller, the eldest daughter of Joseph and Eunice Miller, in Almond Village, New York. With little money to his name, Elias became a paid farm laborer to a member of Lodorsca’s family in exchange for residency. On July 5, 1861, the two welcomed their first daughter, Susan Ann Gage. By spring of the following year, Lodorsca was expecting her second child.

In the summer of 1862, President Lincoln issued a call for 300,000 more troops. Men were to enlist by August 15, and if this quota were not met, vacancies would eventually be filled through conscription. Elias now faced a moral dilemma. With a pregnant wife and infant daughter at home, he was struggling to support his family financially, and he was in no position to leave them. However, by staying home, he risked being drafted into the ranks. Volunteering would offer him greater financial support as he would receive a $100.00 bounty and a higher salary than he would as a conscript. Additionally, if he lived to see the end of the war, how would his reputation play out? Would he be remembered as a valiant patriot who volunteered to serve his country at a time of need, or would he go down as a coward who was forced into the ranks or evaded service entirely? After Lincoln’s deadline passed, Elias was consumed by a heightened sense of urgency to choose between his family and his nation. On August 25, 1862, Elias and his older brother, Joshua, enlisted at Burns, New York, to serve in Company B of the 136^th New York Volunteer Infantry at the rank of Private. The Gage brothers were mustered into service on September 25, 1862, and Elias bid his final farewell to his family.

Before deployment, Elias arrived in Portage, New York, for training. Initially, life in the ranks had been a pleasant surprise. He served under Col. James Wood, who was well-respected by his troops for his willingness to cultivate camaraderie with Privates, a practice not common in other units. Military service brought many fortunes to Elias. His barracks were comfortable, and he was well fed. His need for his familial companionship was fulfilled not only by serving alongside his brother, but he additionally received a furlough for his hard work. These pleasantries, however, were not permanent. With immense pressure to deploy, Elias and his regiment had only trained for two weeks before leaving Portage on October 2, 1862.

Two days later, Elias and his regiment arrived at Arlington, VA, where they joined the 11^th Corps. The harsh realities of military service quickly set in. On their first night after settling at an encampment near Fairfax Court House, all of the men slept on the ground without tents. They had gone to bed hungry because their supper that night was practically inedible as it was riddled with dirt and grease. New problems continued to emerge even after men became fully settled in camp. Each day was a battle against the elements as large periods of rain prevented them from getting adequate amounts of sleep or being able to cook their food properly. Whereas Sundays had once been a sacred day for prayer and relaxation, officers now expected men to work on Sundays as if it were any other day. Days became weeks, and Elias became accustomed to the same repetitive patterns of long marches and keeping watch, but he had yet to see any action. By the end of November, the arrival of the extreme cold weather had a detrimental impact on morale and health. Many of Elias’s comrades grew ill and were discharged for poor health. Others, now disillusioned with the war, deserted and returned home to their families. Elias and Joshua, however, found strength in each other. Their companionship acted as a constant reminder of the promises of life after the war and how they might one day be able to return home and reunite with their family. Elias, in particular, looked forward to one day meeting his second daughter, Mary, who was born on February 2, 1863.

For months, Elias had only engaged in minor skirmishes with the enemy, and he had yet to see action. Hardened by his experiences at camp, he was anxious to one day experience true combat. The spring of 1863 brought new hope to his regiment, self-nicknamed “the Ironclads.” On April 30, the regiment had been out on reconnaissance when the rest of the 11^th Corps was attacked at Chancellorsville. They arrived the next day, and they were drawn into line in the evening. Waiting on a plank road, they were ordered to cap their guns and lie down on their stomachs. Hearing the firing of cannons, musketry, and faint screams from the battlefield, Elias had long anticipated this very moment with both excitement and anxiety. The night soon fell, and the men still waited to be called into battle. Eventually, they were ordered to move down the road and go to bed for the night. For the remainder of the battle, the regiment saw no action; they primarily waited on standby or helped other regiments to bring back men after engagements with the rebels. By the end of the battle, the regiment had only lost two men. Although disappointed with his lack of engagement, Elias was likely content that he and Joshua remained in good health and were safe after seeing the tremendously bloody carnage wreaked upon friend and foe alike by the great battle. Doubtless, the enormous Union defeat at Chancellorsville weighed heavily upon his mind; however, Elias had more on his mind beyond battles at this point as he anxiously awaited news of his second child’s birth back in New York. The men eventually returned to camp, and the weeks following Chancellorsville were uneventful. With the exception of certain tests to measure how quickly the regiment could deploy in the event of an attack, life at camp returned to its previous state of waiting.

Six weeks later, rumors began to spread about movement, but no one knew quite how far the men would travel. On June 12, they received orders to prepare to march by the afternoon. Once they began moving, it was evident that this march would prove to be the greatest challenge Elias had encountered yet. Marching an average of twenty miles per day, many men in his regiment succumbed to physical exhaustion and were left behind. Water was scarce, as many creeks had dried up, leaving men to depend on the few springs they encountered for survival. The intense summer heat, coupled with the long marches through alternately muddy and mountainous terrain fatigued Elias more and more each day. Nevertheless, he persisted as his regiment continued northward through Maryland. Beginning in the afternoon of June 28, these men would complete a whopping thirty-eight-mile march from the Boonsboro Gap to Emmitsburg in twenty-four hours with no food or rest. However, the difficulty of this stretch was no match for the Ironclads; finding strength within their martial brotherhood, they fought off physical and mental exhaustion, completing the march with no stragglers. Their arrival at Emmitsburg had been a highlight of their journey. Many men were enticed by the rolling wheat fields and beautiful countryside and were thrilled to be back near northern soil. However, their sense of relief was relatively short-lived. Less than one day after their arrival, there was a general muster of the army in preparation for a battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Early in the morning on July 1, the 11^th Corps began marching toward Gettysburg with Col. Orlando Smith’s Brigade. They arrived in the midst of a raging battle. The brigade was halted by General Steinwehr, who promptly formed it into a line of battle at the rear of Cemetery Hill for support. Smith’s men advanced through the cemetery to the front of the hill. He strategically placed his four regiments to resist any attack made on the hill, which 11^th Corps commander General Oliver Otis Howard had deemed the lynchpin of the entire battle. Inundated with excitement, Elias knew that Gettysburg would provide him with the long-awaited opportunity to engage in combat. After a long day of fighting on the northwestern edges of town, which had resulted in the retreat of the 1^st and other portions of the 11^th Corps back through town and up to Cemetery Hill, the Confederates paused as they awaited orders to renew their pursuit of the beaten Federals and attack Cemetery Hill. However, the weariness of the Confederates, combined with a lack of immediately available fresh reinforcements, and the resolute appearance of the 11^th Corps atop the formidable hill, forced Confederate generals to waffle and their opportunities to launch a successful attack were soon lost. By the end of the first day of the battle, the 136^th New York had once again been denied the chance to fight. The long lines of wounded and bloodied comrades from the 1^st and 11^th corps streaming up the hill and the tales of the brutal fighting earlier that day likely weighed heavily on Elias’s mind as he contemplated when—or if—it would finally be his turn to “see the elephant” at Gettysburg.

During the second and third days of fighting, the 11th Corps maintained the same position. The 136th New York held the leftmost position of the 11th Corps line along Taneytown Road. Elias was introduced to heightened levels of intensity beginning on the second day, and the reality of hard war utterly transformed his perceptions of battle. Black clouds of sulfurous smoke consumed the landscape. The Confederate army deployed skirmishers and sharpshooters to rain down a constant fire upon the brigade, who were deployed within easy musket range. Col. Wood deployed his own line of skirmishers and sharpshooters from the Ironclads to meet this imminent threat. Somewhere in the midst of this utter ferocity of chaotic combat, Elias was struck and killed by the bullet of a sharpshooter. Of his regiment, seventeen other men were killed, eighty-nine were wounded, and three went missing.

Despite the smashing Union victory at Gettysburg, Elias’s former comrades experienced a drastic shift in morale. The harsh realities of war had now crushed the once prideful Ironclads. As the surviving members of the regiment returned to the skirmish line on July 5, they were met with a sea of wounded men groaning in the field, begging for someone to simply put them out of their misery. In a journal entry written by John T. McMahon of the 136^th New York, he recounted his impressions of that day, writing, “This is the first battle field [sic] I ever went over and never wanted to see another.” The fact that the unit had lost so many, such as Elias Gage, to the sinister bullet of the sharpshooter weighed particularly heavily in their mind. For a relatively green unit to have been picked apart by unseen and unexpected foe at all hours of the day and night, rather than to have been martyred in the idealized “glorious charge” for the world to behold and admire, was utterly demoralizing. The Ironclads took their seventeen losses hard. Another soldier, writing a letter to his family, noted, “It is pretty tough. When will this cruel war end? Elias Gage was killed in Gettysburg battle.” No one, however, was impacted by loss quite like Joshua. After the death of his brother, he was now alone. An unmarried man with no children of his own, he now had no motivation to live to see the end of the war. During the corps’ return from Gettysburg, Joshua became ill with typhus. Only twenty days after Elias’s death, Joshua died in Washington DC.

One can only imagine the grief that Elias’s family in New York experienced upon hearing of the deaths of both men within a month of each other. But Lodorsca had taken the death of her twenty-seven-year-old husband especially hard. She had only been twenty-one years old at the time of his death, but she never remarried. She collected a Widow’s Pension of $8 per month from July 3, 1863, with an additional $2 for each of her children, yet this money was not enough to sustain her family. Struggling for financial support, she took her daughters with her and temporarily moved in with her parents. She eventually saved enough money to establish her own household. Enticed by cheap land and the financial promises of the emerging west, she took her daughters and moved to Topeka, Kansas. Susan and Mary later married and established their own households. As she got older, Lodorsca joined Mary’s household, where she remained until her death on May 5, 1908.

Like the contributions of the 136^th itself, the monument which stands today to commemorate the 136^th New York’s actions is often overlooked in the greater context of Gettysburg. Situated across the street from the infinitely more iconic National Cemetery (in which lie the remains of Elias Gage himself), along Taneytown Road, the monument depicts an infantryman’s equipment hanging from a war-torn tree trunk. It is simple, serene, and lacks any of the romance and martial stoicism portrayed by so many of the other regimental monuments, particularly those featuring images or sculptures of soldiers under fire. It features a sculpted crescent moon, which was the symbol of the 11^th Corps, and, in addition to a brief notation about the unit’s muster-in and muster-out dates, bears a simple inscription on the side reading, “Casualties; Killed 17, Wounded 89, Missing 3, Total 108;” a conspicuously uncarved block remains where it would otherwise indicate the number engaged. The relatively spartan, utterly unromanticized nature of the monument speaks volumes about how the regiment perceived and sought to represent its experiences at Gettysburg: The regiment dutifully performed the martial responsibilities expected of it, but was stripped away like the shredded, pock-marked bark of a firmly rooted tree under fire. For men who had waited so long to “see the elephant,” and to have sacrificed so much when they finally did, one might expect a more grandiose or elaborate monument. Yet, the almost haunting simplicity of the Ironclads’ monument speaks to the solemn, unsanitized, grim realities of the nature of Civil War combat.

It is unfortunate and ironic that the 136^th New York’s monument and the men it commemorates are so frequently overlooked in favor of the cemetery atop the hill in whose shadow it lies, and for which Elias Gage and his comrades gave their lives in defense; had Cemetery Hill fallen during the fighting, the battle of Gettysburg may very well have had a vastly different outcome. Yet, even in the shadows, the story of Elias Gage and his comrades–and their collective sacrifice at Gettysburg–speaks quietly and humbly to the legacy of the battle in which they gave their lives, and help give meaning and purpose to the deaths of the thousands of fellow Union comrades lying just yards from their monument, surrounding Elias himself, atop the iconic hill.

Bibliography

Ancestry.com. 1860 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009.

Busey, Travis W., and John W. Busey. Essay. In Union Casualties at Gettysburg: A Comprehensive Record. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2011.

Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Veterans of the Army and Navy Who Served Mainly in the Civil War and the War with Spain, compiled 1861 – 1934, National Archives, Washington D. C.

Havens, Lewis Clayton. Historical Sketch of the 136th New York Infantry, 1862-1865. Dalton, NY s.n. 1934.

Hawks, Steve A. “136th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment.” The Civil War in the East, 2019. https://civilwarintheeast.com/us-regiments-batteries/new-york-infantry/136th-new-york/.

Hawks, Steve A. “Monument to the 136th New York Infantry Regiment at Gettysburg.” Stone Sentinels – Gettysburg. 2020.

McMahon, John T. John T. McMahon’s Diary of the 136th New York, 1861-1864. Shippensburg, PA, USA: White Mane Pub. Co. 1993.

Military, Compiled Service Records. Civil War. Carded Records, Volunteer Organizations. Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1890–1912. National Archives, Washington, D. C.

“136th Infantry Regiment” New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center. https://museum.dmna.ny.gov/unit-history/infantry-2/136th-infantry-regiment.

Staff. “Here Men Died for their Country: In the Footsteps of the 136th New York.” From the Fields of Gettysburg – The Blog of Gettysburg National Military Park. 2016.

By Lauren Letizia

War on the Doorstep: Civilians of Gettysburg

By late June of 1863, alarms warning of approaching Confederate forces were nothing new for the 2,400 residents of Gettysburg. Living just ten miles from the Mason-Dixon line, small-scale raids, kidnappings of freed-people, and rumors of an imminent clash between the two great armies had long plagued the borough and its surrounding community. Nevertheless, none of these events could prepare Gettysburgians for the ferocious 3-day fight between 165,000 soldiers in early July of that year that would transform the lives and lands of Gettysburg’s civilians forever. However, these civilians’ experiences were not monolithic; while some were defined by tragedy and blight, others included remarkable episodes of perseverance, successful pragmatism, and creative profiteering. This new blog series profiles the lives of diverse Gettysburgians who were forced to confront the war at their very doorsteps, each on their own terms, whose stories speak to the kaleidoscope of experiences of civilians struggling to survive, and thrive, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border during the Civil War.

The surname Sherfy has been a pillar of the Gettysburg community for generations. It conjures up images of small, neat orchards, perfect peaches, and a devastating battle that forever altered the land. However, the story of the Sherfy family and their farm is also one of steadfastness, strength under pressure, and American ingenuity.

“The Sherfys of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania” was an established line well before their peaches became famous. They were descended from Kaspar Scherffig, a German immigrant farmer who came to Uniontown, Maryland in 1751 at the age of 16. His son, Jacob, was born in 1769, moved to southern Gettysburg, married a woman named Catherine, and raised eleven children. Their first home was built slightly farther south and to the east of the Emmitsburg Road than the red building now associated with their family. That first home is now called the Rose Farm. Sadly, Jacob and Catherine faced personal tragedy and death years before the Battle of Gettysburg. Their eldest son, Daniel, was thrown from a frightened horse and dragged through a tree thicket. Jacob was unable to stop the horse before Daniel died. In 1842, Jacob Sherfy passed away at the age of 73, passing the plot of land north of the Rose Farm to his son, Joseph. Joseph constructed the now iconic red brick house, and turned it into a homestead for himself and his wife Mary. They planted a four-acre peach orchard about 200 yards south of the home and expanded the orchard northward around 1862. Their farm also included a cherry tree grove and fields filled with oats, corn, and wheat, as well as hogs and other farm animals. In addition to tending his land, Joseph was a Dunker preacher. The Dunker faith was established in Germany during the early 18th Century. They espoused pietism, which means religion of the heart, and was closely aligned with Anabaptists, a religion that was against secularization of society and the conducting of warfare. As a core value of the Dunker religion, Joseph most likely subscribed to the belief in non-violent living and was likely greatly disturbed by the oncoming conflict. He and Mary had six children born between 1843 and 1860. Mary’s mother, known as Grandma Haegen, was also living with the Sherfy family at the time of the battle.

As the Union and Confederate armies thundered into Gettysburg, Joseph and Mary decided to send their children to safety south to the John Trostle Farm, located behind Big and Little Round Tops. However, either due to fears of unchecked destruction to the farm in their absence or a sense of stubborn pride, Grandma Haegen refused their pleas to leave the home, so Joseph and Mary elected to stay with her. On the morning of July 2, the sharpshooters of Colonel Hiram Berdan, under the command of General Daniel Sickles, found General Richard H. Anderson’s Confederate soldiers positioned in the woods behind the Sherfy Farm. A brief skirmish commenced, causing a bullet to burrow through a fence post, rip through the folds of Grandma Haegen’s dress, and land on the ground nearby. Haegen allegedly picked up the bullet and said, “It’s time to go to Taneytown!”

With the old woman’s approval, the Sherfys finally fled their farm, which would prove to be fortuitous. General Sickles, convinced that (at worst) General Robert E. Lee would push southward around the Federal flank toward Washington D.C, or that the Union defensive line would be far better suited along a forward salient anchored in the Sherfy’s peach orchard than it would be behind that critical high ground), ordered over 6,000 troops from his III Corps to advance from their original position along Cemetery Ridge and protect the Emmitsburg Road. There, Sickles established numerous batteries of southward-facing artillery to reinforce his one- and-a-quarter mile long line of infantry. Dangerously exposed along the open high ground and separated from the main Union lines, Sickles’s men were besieged by heavy Confederate artillery fire for approximately two and a half hours. Some of the shells and shrapnel collapsed portions of the Sherfys’ roof. Later in the evening, around 6:30pm, the advancing tide of William Barksdale’s Confederates finally broke through the Union lines along the Emmitsburg Road and, in tragic irony, the land of the peaceful Dunkards witnessed a bloodbath. The buildings were poked with bullet holes and the home began to fill with wounded and dying soldiers who were seeking protection. After the battle, survivors dug trenches around the farm to bury the dead and about 30 dead horses littered the torn land. Infamously, the Sherfy’s red barn caught fire during the fighting with scores of Union soldiers inside. It is not known how the barn ignited, but the fire could have been set deliberately by the 18^th Mississippi to rout out possible Union sharpshooters, or simply could have fallen victim to a fiery shell. Most of the soldiers trapped in the barn were wounded men from the 73^rd New York and the 57^th and 68^th Pennsylvania regiments. Due to the severity of their injuries sustained in battle, they were too weak to escape the inferno and ultimately perished.

After the gruesome battle, Joseph and his son Raphael returned to Gettysburg on July 6. They were forced to confront the barren and charred state of their family’s property. Not only were their buildings peppered with bullet holes and their barn completely destroyed, but the burnt bodies of the victim soldiers were gruesomely intermingled with the charred debris. It is estimated that 150 soldiers who were killed on or around the Sherfy farm were ultimately buried on the land. On July 7, Mary and the other children returned to witness the devastation. Joseph submitted three claims to the federal government after 1881 for compensation. The claims amounted to $2,500; they were mostly denied due to the government’s statement that much of the damage was not caused by the Union Army. The Sherfys, determined to reclaim their lives, started to rebuild all they lost. Remarkably, they were able to harvest peaches from the 114 surviving trees and canned them for sale. Joseph and Mary planned to use the earnings to pay for the reconstruction of the family homestead. They were baffled when their peach products began to fly off the shelves. Realizing a unique marketing strategy, the Sherfys branded their peaches as those grown on the iconic battlefield. The family continued to live on the property until Joseph’s death from typhoid at the age of 70.

The history of the Sherfy property is bloody, morbid, and macabre. The now deceptively picturesque landscape and red house, the tidy peach orchard, and quaint barn had once been transformed into a singed, ravaged, desolate tableau. The fate of the Sherfy property is one that many families’ homesteads around Gettysburg faced when the violence subsided. However, like some of their neighbors such as Lydia Leister and Nicholas Codori, the Sherfys did not let the bleak landscape and destruction discourage them from reaping future fortune. They immediately searched for innovative—and indeed, unlikely–ways to better their predicament and become self-sustaining once again. Their story exemplifies the power of determination, the benefits of flexibility, and the ingenuity of familial innovation. They made sweet (and financially fruitful) peach preserves out of war’s scorched orchards.

By: Lauren Letizia

War on the Doorstep: Civilians of Gettysburg

By late June of 1863, alarms warning of approaching Confederate forces were nothing new for the 2,400 residents of Gettysburg. Living just ten miles from the Mason-Dixon line, small-scale raids, kidnappings of freed-people, and rumors of an imminent clash between the two great armies had long plagued the borough and its surrounding community. Nevertheless, none of these events could prepare Gettysburgians for the ferocious 3-day fight between 165,000 soldiers in early July of that year that would transform the lives and lands of Gettysburg’s civilians forever. However, these civilians’ experiences were not monolithic; while some were defined by tragedy and blight, others included remarkable episodes of perseverance, successful pragmatism, and creative profiteering. This new blog series profiles the lives of diverse Gettysburgians who were forced to confront the war at their very doorsteps, each on their own terms, whose stories speak to the kaleidoscope of experiences of civilians struggling to survive, and thrive, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border during the Civil War.

It is often said that in hard times we discover the true characters of our neighbors. While some become distant and aloof during times of terrible hardship or fear, others demonstrate courage, kindness, and selflessness. The latter phenomenon is exemplified in the story of Gettysburg civilian, Josephine Rogers, also known as Josephine Miller. A young woman at the time of the great battle, she risked her own life to help young soldiers in need of sustenance and shelter. Interestingly, as she did so, she simultaneously defied traditional gender norms and fulfilled them in ways that proved not only celebratory, but were also memorialized by those who witnessed her selfless actions.

Josephine Rogers’s small farmhouse was located on the edge of the Emmitsburg Road, south of Gettysburg. It was owned by her relatives, Peter and Susan Rogers. There is some dispute as to Josephine’s familial relationship with Peter and Susan. Some accounts list her as a niece, while others state she was a granddaughter or adopted daughter. Josephine would eventually marry her neighbor, William J. Slyder on October 25, 1863, with whom she soon moved to Ohio. But on the second day of fighting, the entire Rogers family was still occupying their small farmhouse. As the violence began to intensify in the vicinity of the Rogers home, Union General J.B. Carr, commanding a brigade of New Yorkers stationed closest to the home, requested that Josephine and the Rogers leave immediately. However, 18-year-old Josephine refused to flee, telling the general she had a batch of bread baking in the oven. She reassured him she would leave after the bread was finished. This decision is lyrically described Harvard University graduate, Edgar Foster Davis’s poem published in 1912:

The war cloud is gath’ring o’er Gettysburg vale,

Portending hoarse thundering and death-dealing hail;

The solid earth trembles, and the rent is the air,

With the rushing of squadrons, —the loud trumpets blare.

The clanking of arms, and the shouting of men,

And the neighing of steeds from each echoing glen;

But unheeding the din and unhindered by dread

Josephine Miller is baking her bread.

Around 1:00 pm on July 2, General Daniel Sickles ordered the 3^rd Army Corps to leave its position on Cemetery Ridge and move into the valley along the Emmitsburg Road, seeking to thwart a supposed Confederate march to Washington D.C. and move his troops to what Sickles considered to be a less vulnerable position along the high ground immediately above the Emmitsburg Road. The men of the 1^st Massachusetts began to move into the Rogers’s fields and towards the farmhouse. At approximately 2:00, the men started to smell the scent of fresh bread, and as they arrived in position, they saw Josephine removing the loaves from the oven. Noting the soldiers’ desperate hunger, Josephine quickly sliced the loaves and distributed them to the Union soldiers. Three hours later, the Confederates open fired on the newly stationed 3^rd Corps, bombarding the 1^st Massachusetts, and Josephine Rogers, with shells. Despite the increasingly perilous situation, Rogers kneaded, baked, and sliced more loaves of bread for the troops. The officers offered her compensation, but she vehemently refused. To show their thanks, as Josephine’s flour supply dwindled, some soldiers volunteered to steal more from General Sickles’s commissary stores. They also returned with a supply of raisins, currants, and a sheep. Josephine Rogers stayed in her home for two days, not only feeding the soldiers, but also caring for the dying and wounded.

On July 3, the infamous artillery duel between the two armies shook the foundations of Josephine’s farmhouse. The Confederate infantry began to advance against the Union line, with some southerners marching directly through the Rogers’s fields. Just as General Carr had found Josephine hard at work by her stove, the Confederates incredulously noted Josephine Rogers once again baking bread amidst the hailstorm of lead flying about her.

Over the course of the now iconic Pickett-Pettigrew charge, many Confederate soldiers died near Josephine’s home. When the smoke had cleared, the home still stood but was marked with bullets and scarred by artillery shells. Seventeen bodies were removed from the farmhouse and the cellar. Additionally, many wounded soldiers, both Union and Confederate, had crawled into Josephine’s home to seek a haven from the bloody storm. Josephine cared for and comforted them as best she could, no matter what color uniform they wore.

Josephine Rogers’s actions at Gettysburg symbolize both the breaking and fulfilling of traditional 19^th-century gender roles. By obstinately refusing the orders and protective offers of powerful men and remaining in her home in the midst of battle, she directly contradicted the image of the meek and passive housewife who depended on masculine aid in the face of danger, and did not hesitate to attend to the mangled bodies of strange men. However, in other critical ways, she also fulfilled the roles expected of a 19^th-century woman: She remained in her home to carry out her domestic responsibilities of baking, nursing the men under her roof, and (in true “Republican motherhood” style) literally propping up men to perform their “proper” civic and martial duties. Though she did all of this in spite of the horror and bullets swirling around her, Josephine represented the pinnacle of 19^th-century feminine duty to home and to country. For both her defiance of and dedication to such gender norms, she earned a permanent place in the hearts of the men she interacted with on those two famous July days.

As the Civil War drew to a gruesome finale in 1865 and the nation struggled to heal, many people never knew about the heroic and altruistic actions of Josephine Rogers. However, the surviving troops of the 1^st Massachusetts could not forget her. After the war, she was named an honorary member of the 3^rd Corps, the only woman to receive such an honor. On July 2, 1886, when General Carr’s brigade reunited in Gettysburg, they invited Josephine Rogers to attend. They sought out her current whereabouts and mailed an invitation to her new home in Dayton, Ohio. Josephine agreed to travel back to her old home to once more to see the men she had aided. During the reunion, the Massachusetts men dedicated a monument to their unit’s actions at Gettysburg across the road from the Rogers’s house. Josephine was granted a privileged seat on the official ceremonial stand at the dedication. During the ceremony, some of the veterans moved the legendary black stove that Josephine had so famously used to bake bread for the soldiers under fire from the farmhouse and set it in front of the new monument. Josephine posed for a photo next to the stove with a loaf of bread in her hand. Josephine’s beloved stove has been lost to history, and the Rogers house no longer stands, having been torn down in the 1880s. Now, only a small plaque bearing the family name and a square-shaped picket fence remain to mark the homestead. Few people know the name or story of Josephine Rogers, but her heroic deeds speak to us over the generations from the memoirs and histories of the soldiers whose lives she touched, whose bodies she healed, and whose hunger she unflinchingly risked her life to quell; the import of her actions to those soldiers is forever enshrined in the rolls and records of the 1^st Massachusetts, in the dedication speeches for the monument that still stands across the road from her homestead, and in the photos of her proudly posing by her stove with the veteran Bay Staters who made sure she would not be forgotten by history. Blending traditional 19^th-century gender roles with the pragmatism necessitated by war, Josephine’s unlikely actions speak to her patriotism, but also her humanity, which she refused to sacrifice to the horrors and affronts of war.

By Ziv Carmi

This past Fall, the Special Collections & College Archives of Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library received, through the generous donation of Kerry Cotter of Easton, Maryland 21 letters penned by her ancestor, Private Eli S. Knowlton of the 3rd New York Cavalry. Over the course of the Fall semester, CWI Fellows Abigail Adam (’22) and Ziv Carmi (’23) transcribed these letters for future researchers and interpreted them through additional contextual information from census records, pension files, and secondary source reading. The following is a post authored by Ziv offering his reflections on some of the main interpretive themes and take-aways he gathered from his transcription work with Knowlton’s letters.

While it may be clear today that the Civil War was fought over slavery, to many of the soldiers fighting for the North, neither emancipation nor racial equality was the primary motivator early in the war. Rather, most people believed that the war was to be waged for the sake of Union, and that ending slavery should—and indeed had to—take a back seat to restoring the nation. From the mere private to the commander of the Army of the Potomac, combatants vehemently voiced such sentiments time and again. Indeed, when the Civil War transformed from a war for Union to a war for emancipation, attitudes toward the latter were quite hostile. Due to the evolving aims of the war, many soldiers were forced to rethink, and ultimately adapted, their views on slavery and race. Indeed, the motivations of soldiers were incredibly complex and often dynamic. However, they could also be deeply personal and defy easy political classification or understanding. Such is true in the case of Eli Knowlton, a private with the 3^rd New York Cavalry, who, through a series of letters with his parents, illuminates his personal exploits as a common cavalryman while giving us raw and curious insights into his own possibly evolving views on the war and his varied motivations for fighting.

Born circa 1842 or 1843, Knowlton, a resident of Monroe County, enlisted in August of 1862 for three years of service with the 3^rd New York Cavalry. Spending much of the first few years of the war in North Carolina, the regiment was then transferred to Kautz’s Division of Cavalry in the Army of the James in April of 1864 to serve mainly around Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Suffolk, Virginia during the Petersburg Campaign. Private Knowlton was wounded on May 8, 1864, likely during action at Nottoway Bridge. He eventually returned to service and was discharged in May of 1865, having served a total of 2 years and 9 months with the federal military.

While we will never know his exact motivations for joining the Union army, it appears that financial necessity may have played a significant factor. The Knowlton family’s personal estate value was listed as $843 on the 1860 census, which is approximately $95,000 when adjusted for inflation (assuming that the average inflation rate since 1860 was about 3%). Between this personal estate value and the fact that Eli Knowlton’s basic language and frequent spelling and grammatical errors indicate a fairly low level of education, it can be assumed that the Knowlton family was reasonably poor. Indeed, Knowlton refers numerous times in his letters to the importance of the soldier’s salary to the financial assistance of the family back home in New York. Knowlton writes frequently to his parents that he was planning to send or already sent money home. Privates in the Union Army were paid $13 per month, approximately $1,300 when adjusted for inflation (assuming that the average inflation rate since 1865 was about 3%) (American Battlefield Trust). While this salary may seem meager, it is clear that Knowlton saved as much of it as he could for his parents, indicating that they were in financial need. Given Knowlton’s comparatively late enlistment, it is possible that he remained at home to work on the farm and ensure the family’s financial independence. However, the acquisition of a soldier’s salary, in addition to bounty money, may ultimately have proven more lucrative than his farm work. Additionally, given that he wrote on multiple occasions about the purchase of a new family farm, he may have ultimately chosen to enlist to help his parents afford to buy the new piece of property.

Motivations of Union soldiers were often multifaceted, however, and one cannot discount the political sway that the idea of Union likely carried in Eli’s choice to enlist. As historian Chandra Manning writes, “the average white Northerner would have much preferred not to think about the issue of slavery at all;” however, the “ordinary white guy” who enlisted with the Union in the early stages of the war believed that allowing unchallenged secession as a reaction to an election would make a global spectacle of American self-government as a failed experiment, which would, in turn, impede the spread of democracy around the world (Manning 3). While the notion of America as an exceptional beacon of democracy might strike some as more of a 20^th-century idea, Manning explains that many soldiers wrote about these sorts of ideas with significant emotion in letters to their parents, spouses, or siblings (Manning 2). Such was the case in the letters of a Massachusetts private, who wrote to his wife in 1862 that he felt “the liberty of the world is placed in our hands to defend, and if we are overcome then farewell to freedom” (McPherson 30). A Connecticut soldier echoed his words, writing in 1863, that if the “traitors be allowed to overthrow and break asunder ties most sacred… all the hope and confidence of the world in the capacity of men for self government will be lost… and perhaps be followed by a long night of tyranny” (McPherson 30).

Many Federal soldiers also believed that, in fighting to preserve the Union, they were defending and perpetuating the legacy of their Revolutionary-era forefathers who had risked their lives to secure for them what Lincoln would call “the last best hope of democratic government.” We can see these sacred beliefs reflected in the writings of scores of soldiers, including one Missourian, who wrote to his parents in 1861 that “we fight for the blessings bought by the blood and treasure of our Fathers,” as well as a lieutenant from Ohio, who wrote to his wife that “Our Fathers made this country, we, their children are to save it… without Union & peace our freedom is worthless…” (McPherson 28-29) Given the myriad ways that Unionist sentiments shaped the political notions and daily worldviews of most northern soldiers, it is difficult to fathom that Eli Knowlton escaped the powerful influence of Unionism when it came time to sign his enlistment papers. What is most curious is that Knowlton himself does not discuss the topic of Union more in his letters; rather, he focuses mostly on the day-to-day drudgeries of camp life or gloats about the exploits of recent raids and damages he and his comrades have incurred on Confederates and southern infrastructure. Such focus on the day-to-day is common amongst Civil War soldier letters, but the near absence of reflections on “the Cause” is not, making one wonder if the absence of such discussion might be a reflection on his personal political motivations to enlist.

Another reason Knowlton might have enlisted was out of personal pride and concern for his reputation. Monroe County was a region where men enlisted with great enthusiasm at the onset of the war. William Peck, a local historian, noted that Monroe County was one of the first in New York to mobilize in April 1861 (Peck 80). Peck also boasted that “few sections of the country responded more promptly than did Monroe County” and that “few sent more troops into the field in proportion to the population” (Peck, Landmarks of Monroe County, 93). While these claims are likely exaggerated, they reflect the pride that Monroe County held for its collective service in the war, even forty or fifty years after it ended, when these histories were written. This societal pride, and the fact that so many others enlisted and mobilized so early on in the war effort, might ultimately have placed so much societal pressure upon Knowlton that he felt compelled to enlist a year into the war. Knowlton may also have feared that if he did not join the army of his own accord, he might very well fall victim to the growing calls for a federal draft, which could rob him of his chance to earn a bounty and might soil his societal reputation.

Knowlton was clearly cognizant of and influenced by socio-cultural norms of the time regarding manhood and martial duty. He wrote his mother in August of 1863 that “Miller” (likely someone else from their town who had been serving with the army but had since gone AWOL) is a “Coward and A Pisspot” and that “if he had not been [he] wood not have never deserted” (August 13^th, 1863 letter to Seneca and Polly Knowlton). However, Knowlton’s sentiments on martial masculinity and patriotic duty had clearly evolved throughout his first year of service, as he confessed to his mother in the same letter that he had told Miller that if he had known how difficult service would be, he himself would have “dug out,” but he has “changed his mind since,” indicating that his notions of duty had ultimately won out over his disgust and frustrations with the day-to-day life of soldiering. In a particularly biting rebuke of gossips back at home who dared to speak ill of him or his commitment to military service, Eli concluded, “you tell all them that Have So much to say about me That thay can kiss my US ass all of them” (August 13^th, 1863 letter to Seneca and Polly Knowlton). While Knowlton’s initial regret over his enlistment is evident, his predominant focus is on his anger and frustration at people in his hometown claiming that he was a coward and wanted to desert. Indeed, the phrase “kiss my US ass” indicates that, even while writing about his discomfort on campaign, he was still proud of his service to the United States and sought to differentiate himself from the “cowards and pisspots” who had chosen to remain home. In such a county as Monroe in the 19^th century, desertion and cowardice were prime indications of masculine weakness and poor character, not to mention possible disloyalty, and Knowlton wanted no such associations with his name.

Indeed, an examination of a local newspaper, The Brockport Republic, makes it clear that, to most in the county, any sort of anti-war sentiments were considered to be disloyal. For example, in October 1862, the newspaper discusses the state’s responses to Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, noting that the three Democratic politicians who condemned the proclamation (Horatio Seymour, the 1862 Democratic candidate for Governor, Fernando Wood, the incumbent mayor of New York City, and Gaylord Jay Clark, the Democratic ticket for Inspector of State Prisons) “have more sympathy with the rebels than with the federal authorities” (October 9, 1862 edition). While it is possible this rhetoric was unduly exaggerated due to 1862 being an election year, the Republic wrote similar criticisms of Seymour in later editions after he had been sworn in as governor, indicating that these sentiments were printed for more than short-term political purposes. Indeed, after Seymour criticized Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation for being an “unconstitutional attempt on the part of the President to carry on the war, not for the restoration of the Union but the abolishment of slavery,” the Republic defended Lincoln’s actions, noting that the President stated emancipation was done only for strategic purposes against the Confederacy and Lincoln was solely fighting to save the Union (February 9, 1863 edition).

Not only was Monroe County fiercely committed to the war effort, but an examination of the Brockport Republic reveals that the county was likely staunchly Republican, appearing to condemn slavery and its spread, although (initially) not wishing to entirely abolish it. For example, when discussing the Republican candidates who were nominated for the 1858 elections and their stances, the editor writes that four of them had been Democrats, but “when that party embraced slavery as its loyal child,” they “allied- as all true freemen must do- their interests with the genuine Democracy- the Republican Party” (October 2, 1857 edition). The newspaper then printed the platform of the Republican Party of New York, which stated that “it is a contradiction to call that man a Democrat who believes in the right of one man to enslave another” and “that slavery and official corruption and encroachment upon the purity of the ballot box are the great evils which threaten our institutions” (October 2, 1857 edition).

Furthermore, the Republican Party of New York resolved that New York would never allow slavery within its borders and condemned the Dred Scott decision (October 2, 1857 edition). Indeed, the newspaper also printed a condemnation of Illinois Democrats and other Free States that were “moving to introduce Slavery into their midst.” and praised the Convention of New York Republicans for their resolution regarding slavery within the state (October 2, 1857 edition). The column concluded by noting that Republicans put their principles “before the intelligent and free people” and if their readers think they are right, they should give them “that ardent, unwavering support, due from a freeman to any just, great, and [G-D]-like cause” (October 2, 1857 edition). This final sentence, which upholds opposition to slavery as a righteous cause, might allude to the anti-slavery sentiments of the county at large.

While the Knowltons’ neighbors appeared to oppose slavery, that did not necessarily mean the Knowlton family followed suit, nor that Eli Knowlton supported racial equality. In a January 16, 1863 letter, which Eli probably wrote shortly after hearing the news of the Emancipation Proclamation, Eli writes that “this Soldiering and fiteing for Nigars haint whott I thought I was a coming down hear for.” Indeed, his derisive and dismissive manner of discussing the Union’s shift to a war for emancipation implies that he likely did not particularly care for the idea of emancipation. He expanded upon this sentiment in his next letter from January 28. While discussing his war-weariness, Knowlton notes that “when [the government] fetch the white Boys of the North down on a levle and a little belo a d-d Southern nigar and make him fite beside them then I think the thing is pretty well played out” and later writes that he hoped that if he had “to go in to Battle with a nigar I will get tuck prisner and poraled [paroled]” (then noting that parole would be the quickest way to get out of fighting). Such vitriolic language makes clear that Eli felt personally debased by being forced to risk his life for black people and dreaded the possibility of having to fight alongside black troops as if they were his equal. The shocking fact that he openly admits that he would rather be taken prisoner than have to fight alongside black soldiers speaks volumes about his racial views and his refusal to embrace emancipation as a righteous and necessary war aim.

However, while Knowlton might have initially shared the racial attitudes of many of his peers who also expressed disgust over the Emancipation Proclamation, it is possible that those views changed and evolved throughout his time serving in the South. Indeed, throughout the spring and summer of 1862, many Union soldiers serving on the Virginia Peninsula and around Richmond—very close to where Knowlton himself would serve from April 1864 onward—were profoundly changed by their first-hand experiences with slaves and slavery, on the march and in battle. Many of these soldiers encountered slaves for the first time after they had been “confiscated” by the military or had refugeed to contraband camps. As historian Glenn Brasher notes, during the Peninsula Campaign, a mutually beneficial relationship between fugitive slaves and soldiers developed. This relationship consisted of former enslaved people selling food to soldiers, doing manual labor such as digging trenches, working as servants for the officers, and even breaking the monotony soldiers felt by conversing and joking with them (Brasher 105). While, at this point, many soldiers still undoubtedly held bigoted notions of black people, there is no doubt that speaking directly with them and experiencing their humanity produced sympathy and even emancipationist sentiments in many soldiers.

Furthermore, it became obvious to Union soldiers that black workers were extraordinarily beneficial to the war machines of whichever army utilized them. Indeed, following the highly disappointing culmination of the Peninsula Campaign, several newspapers proclaimed their relief that the Union army had hired former slaves to assist the Union war effort in Richmond while the battle-weary Army of the Potomac could enjoy some much-needed rest (Brasher 220). Furthermore, these slaves and former slaves were beneficial to the logistical movements of the army as they knew the local terrain and could both reconnoiter and lead Union forces through hostile territory.

Conversely, the loss of enslaved workers greatly harmed the Confederate economy and war effort. Indeed, from the start of the war, many enslaved black people were conscripted to build fortifications and dig trenches for the South. Brasher notes that, following McClellan’s defeat on the Peninsula, many Northerners observed that this enslaved labor allowed Confederates to get more rest and be more physically prepared to fight than their Union counterparts; indeed, after the failure of the campaign, many wondered if it could have had a successful outcome had Confederates not used slave labor to fortify and defend themselves (Brasher 227). In other words, emancipation increasingly became a strategic goal rather than simply a moral or political one.

The treatment of the enslaved by their owners also appalled soldiers. The Philadelphia Inquirer, which, by the desire of its owner William Harding, was as objective in its reporting of military action as possible (despite the paper standing behind the Union), reported that “The negro cabins without exception are more like smoke-houses in the inside… As to the furniture, an old table and a broken chair or two, with an old shelf and a shake-down to sleep on” (Brasher 104). Indeed, the terrible living conditions of slaves shocked soldiers who saw them personally during their service. Later on in the campaign, General McClellan established his headquarters on the plantation “White House” that belonged to Robert E. Lee’s son. The slave quarters on this plantation were especially repulsive; Oliver Wilcox Norton, a Pennsylvania soldier who would later lead a US Colored Troops regiment, wrote that they were little more than “log huts with no windows but holes in the walls and only a mud floor;” New York officer Richard Tylden Auchmuty described them as “a village of pigsties;” and US Signal Corps officer Luther C. Furst noted that “the more [he saw] of slavery, the more [he thought] it should be abolished” (Brasher 157-158).

As a result of these myriad direct encounters with the enslaved, Brasher writes, “despite the racist sentiments of northern soldiers” and the “frequently cruel treatment of African Americans behind the lines,” the connection between enslaved people and soldiers was, for the most part, “increasingly positive” (Brasher 161).

While Knowlton personally remained fairly silent regarding race in his later letters, it is possible, if not likely, that he may have experienced a mini “racial reckoning” somewhat similar to what the Union soldiers fighting on the Peninsula and around Richmond experienced. While his service brought Knowlton to the South at a slightly later point, scores of other northern soldiers from numerous Union armies reported similar changes in their attitudes toward slavery. Undoubtedly also witnessing, firsthand, the brutality and horrors of slavery, as well as the ways in which slavery benefitted the enemy’s war effort, Knowlton may very well have softened his views on the peculiar institution over time, though such cannot be confirmed in his letters.

It is interesting, however that near the end of his service, in letters to his parents in which he writes about demoralized Confederate soldiers deserting (“the Rebs loos about a Regament of men Every day by Deserting to us”) and a Prisoner of War exchange, he never once mentions any incidents of enslaved people fleeing their owners to follow or assist the Union forces (Feb 24, 1865 letter to Seneca and Polly Knowlton). Given how common this was, it is not likely that Knowlton lacked interactions with escaped slaves, raising the question of why he did not mention them in his letters. Perhaps he thought it was something that his parents would not find interesting, or perhaps it was something he simply did not want to address if his racial attitudes actually remained more rigid than some of his peers.

A final and related curiosity of Knowlton’s service that his letters also speak to is the question of what, besides personal honor and a sense of masculine or patriotic duty, might have sustained Knowlton throughout his nearly three years of service. Historian James McPherson discusses the differing motivations behind why soldiers fought. Soldiers had initial motivations for enlistment, motivations to remain enlisted (sustaining motivations), and motivations to fight (combat motivations). While, for many Northerners, the sentiment of fighting for Union was an strong motivator, it might not have been a sustaining motivation following the terrible conditions they endured within the war, which Knowlton bemoaned on more than one occasion. Indeed, by the end of the war, Knowlton wished to leave the army as soon as possible. A couple of months before his discharge in May 1865, Knowlton wrote to his parents that “[the government] can not hold me onely [sic] a little over 5 months longer then they Can do as they Pleas[sic] for all of me for all the money that I ever saw yet wood[sic] be no temptation for [me] to stay [enlisted] Enny[sic] longer” (March 8, 1865 letter to Seneca and Polly Knowlton). This sentiment occurs throughout Knowlton’s later letters. In another one, he writes to his parents that he “shall never be the man for hard work that [he] would have been if [he] had not ever come in the army” and that “it will take some time for [him] to git straitened out after [he] comes home” (Jan 25, 1865 letter to Seneca and Polly Knowlton). Even with Union victory on the clear horizon, Knowlton couldn’t help but elaborate, time and again, on how he could not wait to be permanently beyond the army’s ownership of his life and labor, while simultaneously lamenting the immense toll that soldiering had taken on his body and mind.

Such thoughts were not uncommon for even the most patriotic or devoted of Civil War soldiers, as men continuously juggled myriad and often conflicting ideas about the war, ranging from idealistic, faith-infused notions of righteous conflict, to utter depression and war-weariness, to outright disgust for the atrocities and immoralities of soldiering. Nevertheless, they found ways to navigate the realities of waging daily war within the increasingly malleable boundaries of their political and ideological frameworks through what historian Peter Carmichael has referred to as a “pragmatic approach” to soldiering in the Civil War. Knowlton clearly fought similar internal battles to help him navigate his way through nearly three years of a war that taxed his mind, body, and psyche.

Ultimately, the letters of Private Eli Knowlton prove fascinating both for what they can tell us about the genuine, sometimes conflicting—and sometimes even evolving–worldviews of the common Civil War soldier, and for the questions they leave unanswered regarding the complexity of the front-line experiences and changing inner world of a common cavalryman. Far from the sentimental and romanticized stories of the saber-wielding horsem*n thundering across open fields in heroic charges, Knowlton’s letters invite us into the ambivalent, camp-weary, unpolished world of the average cavalryman whose struggles to survive and derive meaning from his soldiering years are far more uncommon to find in the public’s beloved portrayals of the cavalry at war, but were indeed far more common and illustrative of the Civil War as its combatants lived and understood it.

Works Referenced

American Battlefield Trust. “Military Pay.” Accessed April 15, 2021. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/military-pay

Ancestry.com. “1860 United States Federal Census.” Accessed April 12, 2021. https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/imageviewer/collections/7667/images/4236613_00287?pId=46799257

Brasher, Glenn David. The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom. University of North Carolina Press, 2012. JSTOR.

Knowlton, Eli S. Letters of Eli Knowlton, Gettysburg College Special Collections.

Manning, Chandra. “What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War.” Civil War Book Review, 9, Issue 3 (Summer 2007): 1-13. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2623&context=cwbr

McPherson, James M. What They Fought For: 1861-1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center. “3^rd Regiment Cavalry, NY Volunteers | Standard | Civil War.” https://museum.dmna.ny.gov/flags/cavalry/3rd-regiment-cavalry-ny-volunteers-standard-civil-war

Peck, William F. “The County in the Civil War.” In Landmarks of Monroe County, 93-102. Boston: The Boston History Company, 1895.

Peck, William F. History of Rochester and Monroe County, New York. New York: The Pioneer Publishing Company, 1908.

The Brockport Republic. February 19, 1863 edition. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn86053142/1863-02-19/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=01%2F01%2F1862&index=2&date2=12%2F31%2F1863&words=emancipation+proclamation&to_year2=1863&searchType=advanced&sequence=0&from_year2=1862&proxdistance=5&page=1&county=Monroe&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=Emancipation+Proclamation&phrasetext=&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&SearchType2=prox5

The Brockport Republic. January 3, 1860 edition. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn86053142/1860-01-03/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=01%2F01%2F1850&index=4&date2=12%2F31%2F1865&words=Dred+Scott&to_year2=1865&searchType=advanced&sequence=0&from_year2=1850&proxdistance=5&page=1&county=Monroe&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=Dred+Scott&phrasetext=&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&SearchType2=prox5

The Brockport Republic. July 21, 1859 edition. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn86053142/1859-07-21/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=01%2F01%2F1850&index=2&date2=12%2F31%2F1865&words=Dred+Scott&to_year2=1865&searchType=advanced&sequence=0&from_year2=1850&proxdistance=5&page=1&county=Monroe&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=Dred+Scott&phrasetext=&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&SearchType2=prox5

The Brockport Republic. October 2, 1857 edition. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn86053142/1857-10-02/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=01%2F01%2F1850&index=1&date2=12%2F31%2F1865&words=Dred+Scott&to_year2=1865&searchType=advanced&sequence=0&from_year2=1850&proxdistance=5&page=1&county=Monroe&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=Dred+Scott&phrasetext=&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&SearchType2=prox5

The Brockport Republic. October 9, 1862 edition. https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn86053142/1862-10-09/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=01%2F01%2F1862&index=1&date2=12%2F31%2F1863&words=emancipation+proclamation&to_year2=1863&searchType=advanced&sequence=0&from_year2=1862&proxdistance=5&page=1&county=Monroe&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=Emancipation+Proclamation&phrasetext=&andtext=&dateFilterType=range&SearchType2=prox5

Williams, Edgar. “A History of The Inquirer.” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2003. https://web.archive.org/web/20070219044935/http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/6135296.htm?1c