I Could Tell You a Thousand Stories of Their Heroism…”1

“I Could Tell You a Thousand Stories of Their Heroism…”1 Voices of the Gettysburg Campaign and the First Day of Battle Eric A. Campbell These letters were written when we were very young, but they breathe forth but one spirit, that of patriotic devotion to the cause in which we were engaged, under an ever-crushing pressure of danger, exposure, hardship, toil, and privation, unequalled or unsurpassed in the history of any country, and certainly worthy of preservation and recital for many generations to come.2 Robert G. Carter wrote these words 48 years after his service with the 22nd Massachusetts ended, in attempting to describe the importance of his and his brothers’ wartime letters in completing his masterful classic, Four Brothers in Blue. Of all of the information available to the modern Civil War historian, the soldiers’ letters, diaries, and other wartime writings are by far the most valuable. Ironically, they are often the most overlooked sources. Why these writings have been underutilized will be discussed in more detail later. The intention of this paper, however, is to tell the story of the Gettysburg campaign and the first day of the battle (July 1, 1863) through the wartime writings created by both Union and Confederate soldiers. The reasons for taking this approach also help to explain the vast importance of these letters. Primarily, these writings contain the words of the soldiers themselves, who were not just eyewitnesses, but also participants in the events which they described. Being created during or just after the Gettysburg campaign, these letters, preserving the original spellings and grammar, create a tangible sense of immediacy unmatched by post-war writings. By the 1880s, as the veterans began to pen their wartime memoirs, the drudgery and misery of the war had begun to 1 fade, and thus their writings were heavily laden with the romantic version of the war. By comparison, the wartime writings ring with truth and cover topics left out or conveniently forgotten in the post-war reminiscences. The immediacy these letters is also evident in that they provide the modern reader with an unparalleled viewpoint of the soldiers’ perspective of the events they describe by stripping away the hindsight or layering of history that naturally occurs over time. In other words, these writings contain information that the soldiers believed to be true, and not simply what we know to be true today. This is also one reason the letters are often dismissed, in that they are full of misstatements, wild exaggerations, and outright falsehoods that have been proven inaccurate by modern studies. It is easy to forget that what appears to us to be wholly unreliable, was in fact what the soldier thought was correct when he penned his letters.3 These writings also place the Gettysburg campaign in the context of the entire American Civil War. The campaign and battle obviously did not occur in a vacuum. Many other outside events and factors were constantly affecting the lives of these men. Thus, these writings also convey the “human side” of the war and place faces on the numbers or statistics that are so often used to describe Gettysburg. One of the most famous principles of war by military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz states, “War is Merely the Continuation of Policy by Other Means.”4 If this is true, it follows that armies are an extension of the societies that created them. This would especially be true for volunteer armies, such as those formed by the Union and Confederate governments during the American Civil War. Thus men in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia represented the societies from which they came. Their letters therefore reveal much about the attitudes, goals, ideals, beliefs, politics, and countless other traits that defined their opposing cultures. Thus the letters, diaries, newspaper articles, and other writings penned by the Union and Confederate soldiers during and immediately after the Gettysburg campaign provide us with the closest, most intimate vantage point of these critical events. They tell us much about who these men were, what they were fighting for, and what their opinions were on a wide variety of subjects (including their commanders and leadership, the conduct of the war, their enemy’s political and military leaders, political events, and many others topics). These documents also illustrate the impact the war and the battle had upon themselves, their families, and the nation as a whole. Robert Carter expressed this idea well when he wrote after the war: The boys who served in the ranks during the Civil War, although perhaps obscure, in the sense that while carrying a rifle they wore no stars, bars nor eagles, were, nevertheless, the flower of the land. Bright, intelligent and right from the schools, colleges, stores, workshops and offices, they were very close observers, and what they saw and heard they jotted down in diaries and letters home. Many of these memorandums form to-day the … most valuable of all data upon which to found the future historians’ account of that war.5 In preparation for this paper hundreds of letters and other writings were reviewed, most of which were created within three months of the battle (or thus during a six-month period, April through September, 1863). While this sample admittedly represents a very small percentage of the nearly 170,000 men who participated in the campaign, the writings do provide a broad cross- section of both armies. Represented is every corps of each army, all branches of the service (infantry, artillery, cavalry), both officers and enlisted men, wealthy and poor, veteran and the untested soldier, and combat troops along with support units. Altogether, the material used certainly provides enough information to allow general conclusions to be drawn. 2 Company C, 110th Pennsylvania. The photo was taken shortly before the Chancellorsville Campaign, spring 1863. LC The Armies To provide a clearer insight of their writings a brief analysis of each army on the eve of the Gettysburg campaign will afford a better understanding of these Union and Confederate soldiers. The Army of the Potomac marched into battle at Gettysburg with an approximate strength of 90,000.6 Organized into seven corps of infantry, one cavalry corps and an artillery reserve, they were one of the last great volunteer armies. Nearly three quarters of the front line units (74 percent) had been recruited and mustered into service in 1861. By contrast a small percentage (less than 10 percent) of the units experienced their first combat during the Gettysburg campaign. The vast majority, acclimated to the routine of military regulation, seasoned by two years of constant marching, drilling, the fatigues and hardships of active campaigning, and hardened by numerous battlefield encounters were, by definition, experienced veterans.7 This experience had been purchased at an extremely high price, however. The average regiment, reduced by illness, desertion, and combat losses from its original strength of 1,000, could muster only slightly more than 300 men. The army as a whole represented this attrition. Previous campaign losses, along with the mustering out of nearly 23,000 men upon expiration of their enlistments, dwindled the army's ranks by nearly 20 percent in May and June 1863. The Army of the Potomac thus entered the Gettysburg campaign at nearly its lowest strength during the entire war.8 Being the principal Union army in the eastern theater of war, it is not surprising that the majority of the men were easterners, with New York and Pennsylvania providing the most soldiers. Only 14 percent of the units could be considered "western," hailing from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, or Wisconsin. Every state that fought for the Union, save Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, and Missouri, was represented within its ranks. The vast majority were volunteers, only twelve percent of the units being United States Regulars.9 The high-level leadership of the army, however, was more professional. Of the 107 officers commanding at brigade-level or above (brigade, division, corps, army), nearly half (49) were either 3 graduates of the United Stated Military Academy at West Point or were in the regular army when the war began. Not surprisingly, most of these officers were commanding at the corps or division level, although 23 brigades were also led by professionals. The vast majority of non-professional high- level officers commanded brigades (48), though there were also nine divisions and one corps of the army that were led to Gettysburg by these "citizen-soldiers." Although the overwhelming majority of officers in lower-level command positions (regiment or below) were volunteers, there were 50 additional West Point graduates scattered throughout the army in various positions.10 As the Army of Northern Virginia broke its camps around Fredericksburg, Virginia and began its movement north it numbered approximately 75,000.11 Being in the eastern theater and the principal defenders of Richmond, it is not surprising that Virginia troops comprised the largest proportion of the army; more than 25 percent. Nevertheless, all eleven Confederate states that made up the Confederacy, along with a contingent of nearly 1,000 soldiers from Maryland, were represented within its ranks. Although the Confederate government began conscription in April, 1862, the vast majority of the men were probably volunteers. Determining even an approximate number, however, is nearly impossible, for the Confederate armies integrated their new recruits into existing regiments (instead of creating new regiments as their Union counterparts did). This practice also makes it extremely difficult to state how many Southern soldiers saw their first combat during the Gettysburg campaign.12 An examination of the basic history of each unit, however, reveals that more than three quarters of the regiments and batteries were organized and mustered into service in 1861, before conscription was implemented.

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