Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (70 page)

Hospitals set up in the town had better cover, but because they lay between the two armies, they were also more likely to be hit by stray
shells. The
Washington Hotel, which had been taken over by the medical officers of the
1st Corps, was seized by the Confederates on July 1st, but being filled with Union wounded gave it no exemption from friendly fire. “Two shells struck it, pieces of one taking off the thumb of one of Dr. [James L.] Farley’s attendants” and the other perforating the rear wall of the hotel and exploding, but “without doing any personal damage.” Nor were the conditions any less haphazard than those in the barns. A soldier from the 12th Massachusetts was carried into the house of Pennsylvania College president Henry Baugher (along with “twenty or more of us lying in the hallway and lower rooms”) where “shells were frequently bursting around the grounds, the fragments crashing against the walls of the building and tearing the limbs from the trees in the yard.”
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The great enemy of the surgeon was time. Joe Hooker’s original campaign orders had cut down the size of the trains accompanying the Army of the Potomac to two wagons per brigade—over the protests of the Army of the
Potomac’s chief medical officer, Jonathan Letterman, who could see that this would require limiting precious medical supplies. And sure enough, the battle began with only barely sufficient supplies of “dressings, chloroform, and such articles,” and for “several days … we were obliged to skirmish around the country to get something for the wounded to eat.” The surgeons of
James Barnes’
5th Corps division had to place the wounded “in long rows, with no reference to the nature or gravity of their injuries, nor condition or rank,” and in the dark, “opiates were administered to alleviate pain, and water supplied to appease their thirst” until daylight would enable them to begin inspecting, sorting, operating.

Others tried to labor by whatever meager light they could find: an artilleryman in Clark’s
1st New Jersey Artillery remembered his
bivouac near a stone barn where “a dozen or more surgeons were at work at the amputating tables by candlelight, and all night.” The Confederate medical officers were just as shorthanded, and caught just as much off guard. In their hurry, the surgeons in Powell Hill’s corps “had hardly opened our battlefield supplies” before the wounded began to arrive, and there was no alternative but to improvise with nearly anything as an operating table—“doors laid on barrels,” wrote one Confederate surgeon, “or any box we could lay hold of.” The 800 or so Confederate wounded who crowded into the Lutheran seminary and the white-pillared main “edifice” of Pennsylvania College took up space “in the Library, and in the halls of the Societies, as well as in the recitation rooms, chapel, and student rooms,” where they used “volumes of old German theologians” as pillows.
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Dealing with other people’s wounds could be nearly as traumatic as receiving them oneself.
Shell can blow parts of a body to hanging shreds or rupture internal organs; solid shot can mangle or sever body parts; lead
rifle bullets could smash and splatter, trailing ooze; and wounded men can lose control over bodily functions and even over their sanity. The amputations came off the tables in a gruesome tumble, as “the red, human blood ran in streams from under the operating tables, and huge piles of arms and legs, withered and horrible to behold” dropped off onto the ground and were, at intervals, carried away. A Vermont officer saw “by the door” of one field hospital “a ghastly pile of amputated arms and legs, and around each of them lay multitudes of wounded men, covering the ground by the acre, wrapped in their blankets and awaiting their turns under the knife.”
Carl Schurz was unnerved to see “the surgeons, their sleeves rolled up to the elbows, their bare arms as well as their linen aprons smeared with blood, their knives not seldom held between their teeth, while … around them pools of blood and amputated arms or legs in heaps,” were collecting sometimes “more than man-high.”
One
3rd Corps surgeon “performed at the least calculation fifty amputations,” fourteen of them at one stretch “without leaving the table.”

The surgeons sometimes developed a protective layer of professionally bleak humor to cope with this, although even then some of them cracked under the strain. (Schurz had seen how a “surgeon, having been long at work, would put down his knife, exclaiming that his hand had grown unsteady, and that this was too much for human endurance—not seldom hysterical tears streaming down his face.”) A soldier’s comrades, or the musicians and ordinary soldiers dragooned into duty as bearers and nurses, could often be more undone by the sight of wounded men than dead men. An officer in the 3rd Corps who volunteered on the night of July 2nd to assist with the wounded was “appalled” by the “prostrate men, their groans, and piteous appeals for help.” Men screamed “in a state of delirium … as if upon the battlefield.” But what finally drove him to run away was “a man I was about stepping over,” who “sprang to his feet, shook in front of me a bloody bandage he had just torn from a dreadful gaping wound in his breast, and uttered a hideous laughing shriek which sent the hot blood spurting from his wound into my very face.” A Pennsylvania College student, Horatio Watkins, was brushed back by “a rebel soldier” with a bandaged head, “insane from his wound,” who “raised his hands, tore wide open his eyes, and turned towards me.”

For those civilians left in the town, the experience of Confederate occupation followed no consistent or predictable theme. The rebel soldiers were not shy about helping themselves to the stockrooms of Gettysburg’s stores, although (unlike
Jubal Early’s earlier foray on June 26th) the looting was as much about asserting a sense of power as it was from a prescribed agenda of occupation.
Joseph Polley of the 4th Texas let himself into a store “on the main street of the little town” and discovered “a lot of … cloth gaiters such as ladies wear.” Even though he had “as little idea what I wanted them for” as he might for a “grindstone,” he “selected a pair of No. 3’s and brought them away.” If they served no other purpose, they could be sold to the sutlers for spot cash. Deserted houses and stores were considered fair game for breaking and entering, and several members of the 33rd Virginia’s pioneer detail helped themselves to a “large farmhouse,” where they found “several barrels of flour,
a smokehouse full of bacon, a springhouse full of milk and butter,” and even a table set “with the dishes on it … If we did not live well for two days,” one of the detail smirked, “I don’t know a good thing when I see it.” Army bureaucracy also asserted itself: the press of the Republican
Star and Banner
was used to print a fresh supply of blank army forms. At least
Daniel Klingel had the acid satisfaction of returning to his farm and finding the rebels who had broken into his house to make off with a pan and some flour all dead, sitting around what had been their fire. “They had a pan, with a portion of cake remaining in the pan, showing that the explosion of a
shell had killed the four men while they were enjoying their meal.”
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But not even houses whose occupants had stubbornly decided to stay and hold on to their property were free from threats and theft. From their cellar,
Leander Warren and his mother heard “several Confederates in our kitchen going through the cupboard. They took everything there was to eat, leaving us with almost nothing.” Confederates “stole everything eatable” around
Alexander Cobean’s farm, “took all the cured meat and killed the cattle in the fields for fresh meat.” Horatio Watkins, who had taken shelter with several fellow students in the cellar of a house, heard “some of the wandering rebels” try to break into the cellar. When he tried to persuade them that there was nothing there worth their effort, “one of the band” popped out with the old pickpocket’s ploy,
What time is it?
Watkins knew what he wanted:
Four o’clock
. No, the rebel replied,
What time of your watch? It’s broken
, Watkins countered again.
Let me see it
, the rebel demanded, and finally Watkins had to bring out his watch, which the rebel promptly appropriated. One part of the population in which the rebels showed an entirely different interest was the handful of Gettysburg’s blacks who had stayed in the town. The McCrearys’ “old washerwoman,”
Elizabeth Butler, was flushed out of hiding in the town, along with several others who were marched out
Chambersburg Street, “going back to
slavery.” At least for the McCrearys’ “Old Liz,” the story had a happier ending; she slipped away into
Christ Lutheran Church, “climbed up into the belfry,” and hid there for two days.
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Houses on the south side of the town offered other attractions than looting. “The Rebs occupied the whole part of the town out as far as the back end of my house,” complained
John Rupp, who owned the tannery at the foot of
Baltimore Street. After building a barricade across the street, the rebels “occupied my porch” and used that nook to keep up a spray of fire on the Union soldiers on
Cemetery Hill. Other houses allowed rebel riflemen to mix business and pleasure.
Harry Handerson was amused to find “the majority of my company” sitting down to “a generous meal” in a house facing Cemetery Hill, while “at each of the front windows a couple of men were occasionally exchanging shots with the enemy.” After a while, the shooters came downstairs,
“being relieved at intervals by their comrades and retiring to join in the feast until their turn once more came around.”

In these houses, the Confederates usually had a blunt ultimatum to deliver to any stay-behinds: get out, or get to the cellar.
Catharine Sweney’s house on the west side of
Baltimore Street had a convenient line of sight from its garret window to
Cemetery Hill, and in short order Sweney and her daughter were packed off “to seek refuge” back in the town.
Albertus McCreary, who had already gotten into enough trouble for one boy, got into still more when he and his brother used a trapdoor in the roof of their house on Baltimore Street to get “a good view of Cemetery Hill and of the fields near the Emmetsburg Road.” They noticed a neighbor do likewise, until a bullet struck the brickwork of his chimney “just above his head.” The neighbor dropped so quickly back down his trap door “that we both laughed”—until two bullets stripped off shingles within a foot of McCreary’s head, and he and his brother sought the refuge of the cellar without any further laughter.
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The cellars might be safe, but they also sealed the townspeople into a bubble just as unnerving as the law of the bullets in the street, apart from “the reports given us by the Confederate soldiers.” Those reports, as Albertus McCreary quickly learned, were more in the nature of mockery than information. “They said their men had taken Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and were nearing Washington, and that all was up with us.” The experience of the cellar was a kind of deafness added to blindness. In fact, one of McCreary’s neighbors who shared the McCreary cellar “was a deaf and dumb man, who, though he could not hear the firing, plainly felt the vibrations.” If a
shell burst heavily and closely, “he would spell out on his fingers, ‘That was a heavy one.’ ” For the twenty-two people who sought shelter in
David Troxel’s house, the blankness of the cellar eased their anxiety, because it shut out everything in the external world. When a shell struck the upper floor of the Troxel house, “no one mentioned the fact though … a number of men heard it enter [the] house while they were in [the] cellar. They were afraid it would excite the women and children to talk about it.” John Schick coped with his exile to the cellar of his store by smoking “21 cigars in one day.”
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Perhaps the cigars worked some peculiar safeguard, because the most unusual aspect of the Gettysburg battle was how little damage was done to civilians or their property. Only one documented civilian fatality occurred, on the morning of July 3rd, when Mary Virginia Wade incautiously left the cellar of her sister’s house on Baltimore Street, on the north slope of Cemetery Hill, to bake bread in the kitchen. A bullet drilled through two doors, striking her “in the back of her neck” and killing her instantly. In addition to
John Burns, six civilians were wounded—
Jacob Gilbert,
Georgianna Stauffer,
Duncan Carson, the dry goods merchant
Robert F. McIlhenny, and two students,
Amos Whetstone and Frederick Lehman (who would survive being shot below the knee but would walk with a limp for the rest of his life)—none of them seriously.

Apart from the “seventeen bullet holes” Matilda Pierce was able to count in the upper balcony of her home, and bullets that chipped brickwork and broke windowpanes in other south-side houses, there was little real physical damage done to the town. Part of this may have been simply due to lack of opportunity; the town was contested territory for all three days of the battle, and the Confederate occupiers had relatively little time for systematic destruction of the sort they would visit a year later in nearby Chambersburg. But another is linked to what cannot be said often enough about the technology of Civil War combat—that the weapons of the armies were neither sufficiently accurate nor sufficiently destructive to wreak the kind of obliteration which Krupp guns and aerial bombings would visit on European cities and towns in the twentieth century. The number of Gettysburg buildings which survive to this day with nothing more serious than bullet scrapes and the odd solid shot wedged into a rafter are a reminder not to rush too quickly to descriptions of the Civil War as a
modern
, or
total
, war. Even had the armies possessed the malevolence equal to such destructiveness, they did not possess the means.