Romances of Gettysburg – The Barlow-Gordon Incident, Part 3

    Nearly everything we know about the Barlow-Gordon incident came from John B. Gordon. What did Francis Barlow have to say about it? The answer is Barlow did not write about the war. His son Charles wrote to the National Park Service on March 21, 1960, “so far as I can recall my father never published anything about the Civil War except a talk on Spotsylvania before the Massachusetts Historical Society.” [Gettysburg NMP Library Vertical File 8-22]. The only postwar account he left about the battle was an oral statement to the historian John B. Bachelder about the operations of his division on July 1, which Bachelder included in his ponderous Official History of the Battle of Gettysburg. Unfortunately, for our purposes, Bachelder omitted whatever Barlow had to say about the fighting on Barlow’s Knoll. We do not even know when Barlow made this oral statement.
We are left with what Henry Field claims was told to him by Barlow, which is second-hand, and Barlow’s two letters, mentioned in the earlier posts, written, we believe, on July 7 and 10, 1863. The letters are problematic so far as the Barlow-Gordon incident are concerned. In the July 7 letter he wrote that when the Confederates came upon him they were “very kind,” and that a Major Pitzer, “a staff officer of Gen. Early had me carried by some men into the woods.” The last sentence that survives of this letter begins, “Ewell + Early sent word that at the first flag of truce, they would;” the rest is missing. In the letter believed to have been written on July 10, Barlow mentioned that before the Confederates reached him he destroyed all the letters in his pocket. [Barlow’s correspondence was edited and published by Christian G. Samito in, “Fear Was Not in Him,” The Civil War Letters of Major General Francis C. Barlow, U.S.A. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).]
    The officer Barlow identified as Major Pitzer was Lieutenant Andrew Lewis Pitzer, who was an aide-de-camp to Major General Jubal Early, who commanded the division to which Gordon’s brigade belonged. So, although Barlow had the rank wrong, he remembered the name correctly. And one cannot but speculate that the incomplete sentence in Barlow’s July 7 letter was about Ewell and Early saying that at the first flag of truce they would

Looking west toward Barlow's Knoll from the left of Gordon's position. NPS

send a communication through the lines to Barlow’s wife Arabella. Did Gordon know of this and later claim credit for sending this communication?
    Barlow’s statement that he destroyed the letters in his pocket also damages the credibility of Gordon’s account, as does the fact that what Gordon says about the letters changed in each account. In 1879 Barlow believed he was dying and asked Gordon to read one of Arabella’s letters to him. In Henry Field’s version of the story there is no mention of the letters at all. When Gordon prepared his “Last Days of the Confederacy,” lecture, he wrote that after he had Barlow placed on a litter and about to be carried to the nearby shade that Barlow “asked me to take from his side pocket, as he was paralyzed, some letters, and open them before his face.” The letters were from Barlow’s wife and “as his eyes rested, as he supposed, for the last time, the last lingering look, upon her signature, the great tears ran down his pale face. By 1903 Gordon had modified this to Barlow asked him to take the letters from his pocket and destroy them, that they were from his wife. He did repeat that Barlow was paralyzed, including the detail that the ball had struck him in front and passed out near his spinal cord, which paralyzed his legs and arms. This detail is significant and we shall return to it. But for now the letters are our focus. We have the following: In the earliest account of the incident Gordon reads one of Arabella’s letters to Barlow. In the next account there is no mention of the letters. Then Gordon claims Barlow was paralyzed and asked him to take the letters from his pocket and open them before his face, but Gordon does not read any of them. And lastly, the paralyzed Barlow asks Gordon only to take the letters from his pocket and destroy them.
    Barlow’s letter of July 10, and the details of his wound, deals a severe blow to the credibility of Gordon’s account about the letters. Barlow was not shot in the front of the body with the ball passing out by his spinal cord and he was not paralyzed. He was hit in the side about half way between the arm pit and head of the thigh bone, and the bullet glanced down into the “cavity of the pelvis.” He was also hit by a spent ball in the back that “has made quite a bruise.” There is no mention in either of his letters after the battle about any paralysis. His July 10 is clear that he, not someone else, destroyed the letters in his pocket, which is the clearest evidence possible that he did not suffer paralysis. I considered the possibility that Barlow did have Gordon destroy the letters and for some reason wanted to conceal this from his mother so he claimed that he did it, but this defies all logic since the letters included ones that Barlow did not want to fall into Confederate hands. The likelier scenario is that someone on Early’s or Gordon’s staff found the torn up letters, possibly Lieutenant Pitzer, picked them up thinking they might contain some valuable information, was able to discern that they were from Barlow’s wife, and later shared this information with Gordon . Also, lost in this letter business, is the fact that Gordon had a battle to fight and a brigade to manage. The idea that while his brigade was pursuing the retreating Yankees that he paused to read a letter to Barlow, or show him the letters, or even took the time to destroy them, is preposterous.
    There is also a question as to whether Gordon had Barlow carried to nearby shade. Major John Warwick Daniel served on the staff of General Jubal Early. In postwar notes [there is no date on the notes, but it appears they are post 1903 since they contain reference to Gordon’s Reminiscences] Daniel wrote that after Gordon’s attack broke Barlow’s line and drove the Federals off Barlow’s Knoll he was sent by Early to follow Gordon. Daniel writes:
    Passing by Gen. Barlow who lay on the ground wounded amongst the fallen of his Division; then through the field full of thousands of prisoners, then to the right where Doles’ brigade of Rodes’ Division was advancing in fine style and uniting with Gordon . . .” [John Warwick Daniel papers, copy GNMP Library, “Misc Notes Concerning Gordon’s Brigade,” Box B-8.]
    Daniel’s account informs us about two things, one, Barlow was lying among the fallen of his division and was not being cared for under the shade of nearby trees, and two, Gordon had moved on with his brigade in pursuit of the enemy and had not tarried long on Barlow’s Knoll, if at all. In these same notes Daniel describes Gordon’s overall account of Gettysburg in his Reminiscences as “an astonishing miscreate of history. It shows that Gen. Gordon either never knew the situation of the field he was on, or had forgotten it; and if he knew no more of other battles and wars then he did of Early and his division at Gettysburg his historical reading was sadly deficient.” [Ibid.]
    If Gordon exaggerated or played loose with other aspects of the battle on July 1, as Daniel believed he did, then it is reasonable to assume that he did so in recalling his encounter with General Barlow.
    Under closer scrutiny the Arabella Barlow story Gordon told, which appeared to be sustained by the post-war accounts of Oliver O. Howard and Dan Skelly cited in part 2, must also be questioned. In his letter of July 7, Barlow mentioned that he was carried from the woods (where he says Lieutenant Pitzer had stretcher bearers carry him) to a nearby house, which was the Josiah Benner farmhouse. He remained here for the night of July 1

The Josiah Benner farmhouse where Barlow was taken on July 1. The view is looking south. The Old Harrisburg Road is to the left. Rock Creek is about 100 south of the house. Barlow's Knoll is several hundred yards southwest of the house. NPS

under the care of Confederate surgeons who declared his wounds to be mortal. On the morning of July 2 Barlow was moved to the John Crawford house, on the northeastern edge of town, where “an elderly lady + her daughter were very kind to me.” He remained here July 2 and July 3, during which time “the ladies + some of our wounded in the house did what nursing I required.” If Arabella did pass through Union lines on July 1, as Howard

The Crawford house on the Old Harrisburg Road where Barlow was moved to on July 2. It is about one mile south of the Benner farm. This is a private residence. NPS

wrote, or July 2, as Skelly claimed, then she did not find her husband until July 4, for it is inconceivable that Barlow would not mention that his wife arrived during the battle and helped care for him. The conclusion must be either that Howard and Skelly did not correctly remember when they encountered Arabella, or that she had difficulty in finding where Barlow was being treated.
    A final piece of evidence to be considered are the letters Gordon wrote to his wife Fanny on July 7 and 10. There is no mention of General Barlow or Arabella, only a mention of the terrible damage his brigade inflicted upon the enemy on July 1. If the encounter with General Barlow was so memorable one would think Gordon would have at least mentioned the Yankee general or his wife.[Gen. Gordon’s letters are in the Special Collections at the University of George Library. Copies of the letters are at the Gettysburg NMP Library in the John B. Gordon vertical file.]
    So, is the Barlow-Gordon incident a myth? No. There is too much evidence that some encounter between the two occurred. It might be said to resemble a fish story. A fish of modest size was caught, but each time the story of catching the fish was told it grew larger and the battle to catch it more fantastic. We shall never know what really happened on Barlow’s Knoll that afternoon but the evidence points to Gordon’s role being considerably smaller than he claimed. Gordon very likely did dismount when he came upon Barlow, found out who he was, gave him some water and then moved on with his brigade certain that the Yankee general was mortally wounded. This is how Gordon presumably learned who Barlow was. Someone alerted Lieutenant Pitzer to Barlow. There is the possibility that this was Gordon or someone on Gordon’s staff, but it could just have likely been that Early and his staff passed over the knoll – it was an excellent vantage point – and found Barlow. Pitzer had Barlow moved to the woods and later to the Benner farm. Barlow may have told Pitzer about his wife being behind Union lines which would explain Barlow’s incomplete sentence, “Ewell + Early sent word that at the first flag of truce, they would . . ;” which might be about sending word to Arabella. Barlow mentioned that while at Crawford’s some of Ewell’s and Early’s staff came to see him and that he talked “very freely with them.” Surely, some of what Barlow shared with Ewell’s and Early’s staffs made its way to Gordon. This is likely how Gordon learned about Barlow’s letters to his wife and that Ewell and Early sent word through the lines under a flag of truce to Arabella.
    In reconstructing the event years after the war Gordon made himself the central figure, eliminating the parts that Pitzer, Early and Ewell played in the story and assuming them for himself. As Major Daniel’s notes on Gordon’s Reminiscences reveal, the General was

Senator John B. Gordon

not above playing loose with facts to serve his purposes. The dinner at Clarkson Potter’s, where Gordon and Barlow met again, certainly happened. So too did the meeting between the two generals on Barlow’s Knoll in 1888. What seems likely is that Barlow understood Gordon’s motives in using the story of their meeting on the battlefield for his purposes of reconciliation, and even though the story was exaggerated and embellished from what had really happened, he saw no value in publicly refuting it.

D. Scott Hartwig

Francis Barlow's bronze statue on Barlow's Knoll.

Gettysburg – Does it Still Matter? (Again)

We’ve hit the one year mark for Gettysburg National Military Park’s blogs and altogether it has been amazingly rewarding experience for the park staff.  To date we have had more than 70,000 blog viewers for “From the Fields of Gettysburg,” and we have a growing audience for “The Gettysburg School Bus: The Civil War in the Classroom” as well.  Since we didn’t have many readers in early April 2011, I am reposting my for blog, “Does it still Matter?”  Enjoy, and thanks for being there…

Katie Lawhon

After 17 years of answering questions, taking calls from visitors and reporters, and acting as the unofficial complaint department for Gettysburg National Military Park, I still get that feeling.  You know the one, where in the middle of talking to somebody, say a visitor or a travel writer, about a soldier or a regiment – going over the story like you have so many times before – you find your voice cracking and you think (or I do at least):  Glad I’m on the phone, and they can’t see that this is actually choking me up! 

Why is it that the stories of Gettysburg have so much power and passion?  How can so many people from all over the country – the world even, have such strong feeling for these 6,000 acres?  The best stories from Gettysburg will never get tired and old.  We all have Gettysburg moments we carry with us.  They can be terrifying, inspiring, and even, on rare occasions, consoling.  William Faulkner described just such a moment in Intruder in the Dust.  Where every southern boy has an instant, a freeze frame that is his very own .…  It’s Pickett’s men just before the charge. 

We have these images.  We carry them around and unfurl them when it’s quiet. 

Gettysburg moments come to us from the pages of books and other places. They jump at us from stories told by Park Rangers and Licensed Battlefield Guides.  We inherit them from our families.  The great, great grandfather wounded in the Wheatfield, but recovered.  His cousin lost, nobody knows where.  The quilt that your great aunt shows you that she says he once owned.

Sometimes I tell some of these stories to my family.  To see if I can make my laughing nephews quiet down and think.  Make a few sisters’ eyes well up.  A small note or two.  Maybe the two sides of Confederate General Armistead: one who expresses regret as he fell at the Angle, and the other Armistead, close to death, who pulls raw corn from his pocket and tells the Union doctor treating his fatal wounds, “Men who can subsist on raw corn can never be whipped.”

The numbers:  When the armies left Gettysburg the dead and wounded outnumbered the living eleven to one.

The images:  Street fighting and the barricades in town.  The panic of citizens on rooftops who watched with curiosity one minute and fled the next as they realized the fight was huge, unpredictable, and out of control.

How do we pass these stories on to the people in our lives who don’t yet seem to care or want to pay attention?  More importantly, how do we preserve our battlefield – all our battlefields – unless we make them relevant to the ones who are young, and who will be paying the taxes and the bills when we’ve passed on?

Here at Gettysburg National Military Park, we have the stories and we have to keep telling them.  Maybe a blog will help capture new audiences and new visitors?  We’ll try.  I will be posting again in two weeks.  Until then, let me leave you with this passage from William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust:

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once, but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances…”

Katie Lawhon, Management Assistant

Romances of Gettysburg – The Barlow-Gordon Incident, Part 2

    Who was Clarkson Nott Potter? He is important to unraveling the Barlow-Gordon story, for it was at his Washington, D.C. residence that John B. Gordon says he met Francis C. Barlow again, sixteen years after the Battle of Gettysburg. [Gordon says it was 15 years later, which is possible since he was re-elected Georgia’s U.S. Senator again in November 1878, so conceivably the dinner may have been late in the year] So, who Potter was is significant because it can help us establish whether such a dinner ever took place or was instead a product of Gordon’s imagination.
    Clarkson Potter was a Democratic U.S. Congressman from New York who served from 1869 to 1875, and again from March 1877 to March 1879. Potter returned to Congress the

Clarkson Nott Potter. Library of Congress

year of the Compromise of 1877 which decided the election of 1876 in favor of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. The compromise gave the election to Hayes in return for the withdrawal of Federal troops from the former Confederacy. This meant the end of Reconstruction and paved the way for the Democratic “Redeemers,” white Southerners who sought a return to white’s only rule and a suppression of rights for African Americans (both of which Gordon subscribed to), to gain control of state governments across the former Confederacy. Potter was a Tilden man. Tilden did not accept the Compromise of 1877 gracefully and declared the election “a great fraud.” Enemies of Hayes’s administration sought to exploit the controversy of his election as a means of weakening his presidency and putting a Democrat back in the White House in 1880. In January 1878, Montomery Blair, who had been Lincoln’s Postmaster General, called for legal action to overturn the Electoral Commission’s decision that gave Hayes the election. On May 17, 1878, Congressman Potter introduced legislation to appoint an eleven man committee to investigate the allegations of fraud in the election. As this was intended more to damage Hayes than produce an objective finding, nothing came of the investigation, but it elevated Potter into national prominence, and in the fiercely contested New York gubernatorial election of 1879, Samuel Tilden added Potter to the ticket as a candidate for lieutenant governor. The Democrats in New York had separated into two rival factions that despised one another; the reformers led by Samuel Tilden, and the Tammany Hall machine of New York City, led by John Kelly. The rivalry split the Democratic vote, the Republicans carried the election, and Potter’s political career was effectively ended.
    That is the background, but why does any of this matter? Because it helps us understand why Potter would invite Francis Barlow, a New York Republican, and John B. Gordon, a Georgia Democrat, to the same dinner party. Gordon’s attendance can be easily understood. He was a Democrat with a strong interest in reconciliation between the North and South and a return to white rule in the South. A congressman with close connections to Samuel Tilden was a good contact to have. But why would Barlow be there? There are two plausible reasons. From 1871 to 1873 Barlow served as attorney general of New York State. During his tenure he attacked the corruption rampant in Tammany Hall, overthrew the party boss, William “Boss” Tweed, and successfully prosecuted the Tammany Ring. Clarkson Potter, closely aligned with Samuel Tilden and the reformers in the Democratic Party, was delighted with Barlow’s attack on the Tammany machine. Three years later, in 1876, Barlow was tapped by the Republican Party to investigate the questionable ballot count in Florida for the Hayes-Tilden presidential election. Barlow was assigned to examine the voting in Alachua County, where Republicans expected he would find rampant fraud against African American voters. But when Barlow reported back that claims by the Democrats to Florida’s electoral votes might have merit, he was immediately recalled and replaced. That he also believed the Democrats claims to massive Republican voter fraud held no water was ignored. Although he remained a Republican, Barlow was an outsider in his party. But for Clarkson Potter, facing a tough gubernatorial election in New York in 1879, Barlow was a man worth courting.
    So, while Gordon left the only known written account of the dinner party at Clarkson Potter’s Washington residence and his meeting with Barlow, the evidence leans strongly that such a party did indeed occur.
    Lending further credence to Gordon’s story is a March 1, 1879 Philadelphia Weekly Times article about Gordon and Barlow. The story was also published in the National Tribune, a newspaper for Union veterans, that same month, and was apparently picked up in other papers across the country. Although it differed in some minor details from the version Gordon told in his reminiscences, the essential details are identical; Barlow was wounded, Gordon dismounted to give him a drink from his canteen, Barlow believed he was dying and asked Gordon to read one of his wife’s letters to him (note, this part did differ from Gordon’s Reminicences), then to destroy them; Barlow asked for Gordon to send word through the lines to his wife, to which Gordon agreed, Gordon had Barlow carried to the shade of a nearby tree, and finally the two men met again at a dinner party in Washington. Unfortunately, the source for the story is identified only as “a Washington correspondent of the Boston Transcript,” so we do not know who he is. [National Tribune, March 1879]
    Gordon published his first version of the incident in another Union veterans newspaper, Grand Army Scout and Sentinel Mail, on June 19, 1886. That same year, Henry Martyn Field, a Presbyterian minister and travel writer, published the book Blood is Thicker Than Water, about his postwar trip through the South. Early in the book Field wrote about a dinner he attended in Atlanta, where the discussion drifted to the war and reconciliation. After hearing from his Southern hosts, Field related a story from the funeral of Ulysses S. Grant, then thinking it “not inappropriate to tell a story in harmony with the spirit of the hour,” proceeded to tell a story he emphasized had been told him by both the actors in the drama. Field then proceeded to relate the Barlow-Gordon story. [Henry M. Field, Blood is Thicker Than Water, (New York: George Munro Publisher, 1886), 33-35.]
    Gordon’s account received further unexpected support from an 1885 article about Gettysburg by Union General Oliver O. Howard, Barlow’s corps commander. Howard related that Barlow’s remarkable wife, Arabella Barlow, appeared on Cemetery Hill on the night of July 1 after learning that her husband had been wounded and lay behind Confederate lines. Howard explained that he could not authorize a flag of truce to send her through the lines to which she replied that the soldiers would not fire upon a woman and she set off down Baltimore Street toward town. Whether anyone fired at her or not is unknown but there was enough firing and bullets striking near her that she turned back and returned to Howard, who found her undeterred in her mission. “I will go off there,” he recalled her saying, and pointing to the left (perhaps Washington Street), “where both sides can see me.” “She did so,” wrote Howard, “and this time succeeded in passing through both skirmish-lines and reaching her husband.” [Oliver O. Howard, “After the Battle,” National Tribune, Dec. 31, 1885]
    Dan Skelly, a teenager at the time of the battle, also recalled encountering Arabella, although he remembered it as the night of July 2, and that Arabella was mounted on a horse and escorted by two Confederate soldiers. She had been told her husband was at a McCreary residence on Chambersburg Street. Skelly directed her to the McCreary’s where Arabella may have learned that her husband was at the Josiah Benner farm. The details here are irrelevant for our purposes. What is important is we have a second confirmation that Arabella passed through the lines during the battle to find her husband. [A Boy’s Experience During the Battle of Gettysburg, (Gettysburg, 1932).]
    Gordon, significantly, did not claim credit for escorting Arabella through the lines, only that he sent word through the lines that her husband was gravely wounded and that he would ensure she should have safe passage through the lines. Had Gordon invented this entire tale it seems odd that he would not have also claimed credit for providing Arabella safe conduct through the lines to her husband.
    Since it can be confirmed that Arabella passed through the lines during the battle why did Barlow not mention her? The answer is he might have. Part of the letter he wrote from the battlefield on July 7 and a second, believed to be written on July 10, is missing.
Barlow and Gordon met again in 1888, at the observation of the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Gordon and his wife arrived on the field on July 2 and proceeded to tour the field by carriage. They drove to Barlow’s Knoll, where they met Barlow, and Gordon shared his story of the Barlow-Gordon incident to those gathered around, which included members of the press. “The meeting was rather affecting,” observed a New York Times reporter who was present, a statement indicating a warm, friendly encounter. [New York Times, July 4, 1888]
    In 1893, while serving another term as a U.S. Senator from Georgia, Gordon prepared a lecture he entitled “The Last Days of the Confederacy.” It focused primarily on the final days of the war, leading to Appomattox, but Gordon included several human interest

The Brooklyn Tabernacle. Harpers Weekly.

stories from earlier points in the war that helped advance the greater purpose of his lecture, which his biographer wrote was to “establish a common vantage point from which northerners and southerners alike could view the war and derive pride and honor from their participation.” One of the stories he included in the lecture was the Barlow-Gordon incident. He presented the lecture for the first time to an audience of 5,000 at the Tabernacle of Brookyln, in New York City on November 17, 1893. It was so well received that Gordon was asked to deliver it again the next week at Carnegie Music Hall. Since Francis Barlow was a resident of New York City it seems impossible that he was unaware of Gordon’s speech and that the Barlow-Gordon incident was an important element of it. [Ralph L. Eckert, John B. Gordon: Soldier, Southerner, American (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 315.]
    The evidence then appears to refute the case that the Barlow-Gordon incident was an invention of John B. Gordon for the purpose of promoting his cause of national reconciliation. There is simply too much testimony from too many different sources to support that some encounter occurred between the two men at Gettysburg. But what did Barlow have to say about it? This is what we shall take up in the third and final part of this series.

D. Scott Hartwig

A Tradition of Military Teaching on the Gettysburg Battlefield

United States Marines in front of the Codori Farm in 1922 during their reenactment of Pickett's Charge. Photo courtesy of Marine Corps University Research Archives, Quantico, Va.

In its early years, Gettysburg National Military Park fell under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of War.  In addition to providing access for normal visitors, the War Department also quite naturally used the battlefield for all varieties of military purposes, including training camps for the National Guard and U.S. Army, and instruction for those studying military science such as the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

The first large-scale use of the battlefield for military training was in 1884, when a division of the Pennsylvania National Guard camped for seven days.  In 1894, regular U.S. troops joined the Pennsylvania National Guard in another encampment.  Soon after its establishment as a National Military Park, active-duty military units began to visit the battlefield in large encampments.  According to the Gettysburg Compiler, 9,500 members of the National Guard of Pennsylvania camped at Gettysburg from July 12^th to the 19^th in 1902.  The Guards were told “Boys, when you camp here, your eight days will not be half long enough to learn what took place here before you were born.  Here on this spot by the gallantry of your fathers our Union and this glorious country of ours was saved.”

In March 1910, 5,000 members of the regular army and the National Guard encamped on the battlefield.

Soldiers at Camp Colt follow a Renault tank over the remains of the bank barn on the Bliss farm on the fields of Pickett's Charge. Eisenhower was responsible for training the soldiers to operate ands fight with tanks, a new weapon in 1918. The Gettysburg battlefield was their classroom. Photo courtesy of National Archives, Army Signal Corps #15531, August 8, 1918, Photographer James L. McGarrigle.

In 1918 the U.S. Army established Camp Colt on the battlefield, under the command of Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a training camp for the Army’s new Tank Corps.  Although there were only two of the small French tanks available for training, at its height Camp Colt supported a military population of over 10,000.

In 1922, a contingent of the US Marines Corps marched to Gettysburg from Quantico, Virginia.  During the stay, they reenacted Pickett’s Charge twice–once like the 1863 soldiers fought it, then a second time with the aid of tanks and planes. 

After Gettysburg was transferred from the Department of War to a new, young agency called the National Park Service in 1933, use of the battlefield for large-scale military encampments and training declined.

By that time, Gettysburg had also become a favorite spot for military leadership training.  Starting around the turn of the century, the senior class of West Point began the tradition of visiting and studying the battlefield.  During these “Staff Rides,” cadets studied the terrain, the strategy of the commanders, and the leadership qualities of unit commanders during those fateful days of July 1863.  The “Staff Ride” tradition continues to this day, with excursions from West Point, the Army War College, the Command and General Staff College, and innumerable visits from active and reserve component units of all branches of the U.S. military.   

In the latest evolution of Gettysburg as classroom, the Gettysburg Foundation and others offer opportunities for corporate executives and business leaders to do “Staff Rides” on the battlefield.  They study the important lessons of military leadership and apply them to the corporate world and the development of business leaders.

Gettysburg Park Ranger Greg Coco talks with soldiers in the national cemetery in 2005.

Gettysburg presents lessons in leadership for us all, from the average visitor to the staff and leadership of our nation’s corporations, military, academia, and government.  The park’s ongoing efforts to preserve the battlefield and bring back missing features that affected the fighting in 1863 enhance your understanding whether you’re from West Point, West Virginia, or Westinghouse.

Katie Lawhon, Management Assistant

Special thanks to John Heiser for his assistance with this blog.

Romances of Gettysburg – The Barlow-Gordon Incident

    It is perhaps the most well known human-interest story of the Battle of Gettysburg; Confederate Brigadier General John B. Gordon, his troops in pursuit of the retreating Federal soldiers of the 11th Corps on the afternoon of July 1, stops to help the badly wounded Union Brigadier General Francis C. Barlow, who lies prostrate on the knoll that will eventually bear his name. The most frequently quoted version of this story appeared in Gordon’s Reminiscences of the Civil War, published in 1903:
    In the midst of the wild disorder in his ranks, and through a storm of bullets, a Union officer was seeking to rally his men for a final stand. He, too, went down, pierced by a Minie’ ball. Riding forward with my rapidly advancing lines, I discovered that brave officer lying upon his back, with the July sun pouring its rays into his pale face. He was surrounded by Union dead, and his own life seemed to be quickly ebbing out. Quickly dismounting and lifting his head, I gave him water from my canteen, asked hi s name and the character of his wounds. He was Major General Francis C. Barlow, of New York, and of Howard’s corps. The ball had entered his body in front and passed out near the spinal cord, paralyzing him in legs and arms. Neither of us had the remotest thought that he could possibly survive many hours. I summoned several soldiers who were looking after the wounded, and directed them to place him upon a litter and carry him to the shade in the rear. Before parting, he asked me to take from his pocket a package of letters and destroy them. They were from his wife. He had but one request to make of me. That request was that if I should live to the end of the war and should ever meet Mrs. Barlow, I would tell her of our meeting on the field of Gettysburg and of his thoughts of her in his last moments. He wished me to assure her that he died doing his duty at the front, that he was willing to give his life for his country, and that his deepest regret was that he must die without looking upon her face again.
    Gordon continued that he learned that same day that Mrs. Barlow was with the Union army and close to the battlefield. How he learned this he does not tell us, but he sent Barlow’s message to his wife through the lines under a flag of truce after the fighting on July 1 ended, adding the assurance that if Mrs. Barlow wished to come through the lines he would make sure that she would have safe escort to her husband’s side. He did not hear from Mrs. Barlow and the subsequent events of the battle of July 2 and 3, and his army’s retreat from the field, occupied his attention and he “thought no more of Barlow, except to number him with the noble dead of the two armies.”

General John B. Gordon. Library of Congress

    Sixteen years later, in 1879, Gordon was a U.S. Senator from Georgia in his second term [Gordon writes that this was fifteen years later, but this cannot be since he was in his first term in the Senate in 1878]. He was invited to a dinner party hosted by Democratic Congressman Clarkson N. Potter, of New York. It turned out that a General Barlow, formerly of the Union army, had also been invited. Gordon presumed it was another General Barlow since he was certain the one he had encountered at Gettysburg had died. According to Gordon, Barlow thought the same thing about Gordon. During the fighting around Richmond in 1864, Barlow had read that a Confederate General J. B. Gordon had been killed, and he presumed that this was the same Gordon that had assisted him on the Gettysburg battlefield. So he supposed that the General Gordon coming to the dinner party must be a different Gordon. When they met at the dinner table the two men were astounded to discover that they were the same Gordon and Barlow of Gettysburg, and Gordon relates that thus began a lifelong friendship that continued to Barlow’s death in 1896.
    This version of the Barlow-Gordon incident was accepted without question for decades. When I first arrived at Gettysburg NMP there was a National Park Service waysideexhibit on Barlow’s Knoll that related the story, and a diorama in the Cyclorama Center which illustrated the moment on the knoll when Gordon knelt down to help the wounded Barlow. In May 1985 Civil War Times Illustrated published William F. Hanna’s, “A Gettysburg Myth Exploded,” in which Hanna argued that the Gordon-Barlow incident was largely a myth invented by Gordon to promote the sectional reconciliation he believed was critical for the nation’s future. Hanna based his challenge to Gordon’s account on several pieces of evidence. A letter written by Francis Barlow to his mother on July 7 described his wounding in some detail but said that a Major Pitzera of General Jubal Early’s staff had

Francis C. Barlow as a major general. Library of Congress

Barlow carried by some men into the nearby woods and placed on a bed of leaves. Barlow said nothing about Gordon. Barlow also made no mention to his mother that his wife had joined him, and in a letter written on July 10 he related how, before the Confederates reached him, he had destroyed all the letters in his pocket, which included two letters between Barlow and Robert Dale Owen, a well known emancipationist, about the possibility of Barlow accepting the position of superintendent-general of one of the newly created departments on the east coast set up to administer to the needs of newly freed slaves. “I remembered I had two of those letters in my pocket,” wrote Barlow, “+ that the enemy might not be inclined to parole so important a functionary as the ‘Superintendent of the Freedmen throughout the U.S.’”
    Hanna’s article raised questions about Gordon’s credibility. Independent of Hanna, a new generation of Civil War historians were already beginning to critically analyze Gordon’s Reminiscences and other standard from the post-war era, such as Henry Kyd Douglas’s I Rode With Stonewall, that for decades were accepted as factual, unbiased accounts of the war. Dr. Gary Gallagher was part of this new generation and he advised that Gordon’s recollections should be used with great care, writing, “Few witnesses matched Gordon in his egocentrism or his willingness to play loose with the truth, and his recollections leave unwary readers with a distinct impression that the South would have triumphed if only misguided superiors such as Ewell and Early had acted on his advice. [Gary W. Gallagher, ed., “Confederate Corps Leadership on the First Day at Gettysburg,” Three Days at Gettysburg: Essays on Confederate and Union Leadership (Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 1999), 31. Note: this article first appeared in 1992 in The First Day at Gettysburg: Essays on Confederate and Union Leadership.] 
    By the 1990’s, in the Civil War community, Gordon’s Reminiscences were no longer considered to be a credible source, and the Gordon-Barlow incident was assumed to be another of the romances with which Gettysburg abounds. But was it a romance? Was it possible that the incident had occurred but that Gordon had embellished it to help serve the purposes of his Reminiscences? This is the question we shall take up in our next post.

D. Scott Hartwig

Amphibians: Then and Now.

The Civil War generated countless journal and diary entries and in some cases these journals documented the natural world that surrounded the soldiers on both sides of the war. The following is an excerpt from Kelby Ouchely’s “Flora and Fauna of the Civil War: An Environmental Reference Guide.”

American Toad

“About fifty species of frogs and toads are found in the eastern United States. They live in a diverse range of habitats, from below ground to tree-tops. Most are closely tied to wetlands during part or all of their life cycle, especially during egg and larval (tadpole) stages. Frogs occupy important roles in the middle of food webs. They eat insects and other invertebrates and are eaten by fish, snakes, egrets, herons, owls, raccoons, mink and humans among others.

Frog were likely more abundant during Civil War era than today because most wetland habitats were still intact. In the period since, large-scale habitat losses have resulted from activities such as agriculture in…and urban sprawl that often fragmented and isolated habitat. Scientists consider frogs and other amphibians as biological indicators of overall ecosystem health because of their permeable skin that is sensitive to pollutants, their intermediate position in the food web, and the fact that many species spend part of their lives on land and part in water. This leads to the premise that collapsing frog populations should raise concerns for overall ecosystem (including human) health.

Grey Treefrog

The idea of frogs as “coal mine canaries” was foreign during the Civil War. Most soldiers mentioned frogs only incidentally in their letters, diaries, and journals. Some considered the sound of calling frogs a pleasant experience; others did not. Perhaps the contrast was a result of an individual’s state of affairs at the time. The first two anecdotes reveal the differences in attitude as a northern and southern soldier write about frogs on the same Georgia night while only ninety miles apart.”

Sergeant Taylor Peirce, 22nd Iowa Infantry, writing to his wife on Feb. 4, 1865 at Savannah, Georgia: “The weather is mild and pleasant. The frogs are Singing and all nature shows the near approach of Spring.”

John S. Jackman, 9th Kentucky Infantry, near Waynesboro, Georgia, on Feb 4, 1865: “Our camp is on the boarder of a little lake, out of which we use water, and which abounds with frogs. The frogs keep up such a croaking as to prevent us from sleeping at night.”

Spotted Salamander

Here at Gettysburg National Military Park as our daily temperatures begin to rise with the approach of spring…so do the hibernating critters that inhabits the battlefield. After months of sleeping, some almost frozen solid, frogs, toads, and salamanders are beginning to awaken from their winter slumber. Whether they are aquatic or terrestrial there are 10 species of frogs and toads and 5 species of salamanders known to call Gettysburg NMP their home.

The spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) a popular park resident (if you’re into amphibians) has been up for weeks and has wasted no time in pairing up with a mate. These sleek black and yellow-spotted creatures have already laid eggs which can be observed in vernal pools throughout the park. Although the salamanders silently select their mates and mark the arrival of spring…soon other amphibians–a bit more gregarious like the northern spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer crucifer)–will vocally announce their availability as they compete for the right to mate. Within a few weeks strings of eggs and other egg masses will appear next to the spotted salamanders white-cottony looking egg mass progeny.

Spotted Salamander Eggs

When you are visiting the Gettysburg battlefield, you may want to take some time to listen and look for these signs of spring. Please observe these egg masses from the edge of vernal pools. There are two known amphibian diseases that may have the potential to affect our local populations; ravanvirus and chytrid fungus. Both have been discovered in native populations of amphibians and reptiles in Pennsylvanian and Maryland. Scientist from USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center will test amphibians in vernal pools this spring for the presence of either disease.

To keep our amphibian populations safe from these diseases and potentially others please review these recommendations from biologists:

- Stay out of the pool as much as possible, walk outside the pool including the very shallow waters when moving from place to place

- Don’t take animals or egg masses home or move them between pools

- Rubber knee boots or hip waders with solid (versus felt) soles are the ideal foot gear, make sure they are scrubbed clean and totally dry prior to visiting the site.

For an easy online identification take a look at the attached link:

http://www.paherps.com/herps/frogs-toads

For more information on Ranavirus:

http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/disease_information/other_diseases/ranavirus.jsp

For more information about Ranavirus in our local area read the recent discovery below. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/commuting/2012/02/01/gIQA5O0Z9Q_story.html

For more information on Chytrid Fungus:
http://www.amphibianark.org/the-crisis/chytrid-fungus/

Special thanks to Carolyn Davis, NPS, and Evan Grant, USGS, for use of their photos.

by Zach Bolītho
Chief, Resource Management
Gettysburg NMP & Eisenhower NHS

Eliza W. Farnham – An Unsung Heroine of Gettysburg

    Eliza W. Farnham was a woman who did not just advocate for reform and help to the poor and dispossessed. She lived her beliefs – vigorously. Born in 1815 in Rensselaerville, New York, she spent part of her life in Illinois and was living in California at the outbreak of the Civil War. A freethinker, she advocated for prison reform, serving for a time in the 1840’s as the matron of the women’s section of Sing Sing Prison, and she boldly waded into the controversial arena of women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. In 1859 she addressed the National Women’s Rights Convention in New York City, and in 1863, working with the Women’s Loyal National League, she appealed to Congress for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. In her busy life she found time to write five books, of which her most prominent was A Woman and Her Era, published in 1864. In it, she did not argue for equal rights between the sexes, instead she contended that women were superior to men and that they played the crucial role in the moral and spiritual elevation of society. Whatever cause she took up, Eliza was a force to be reckoned with. As one of her contemporaries described her, “She has nerves alone to explore the seven circles of Dante’s Hell.”
    In July 1863, while in Philadelphia for a speaking engagement (she had returned to from California in late 1862 and was living in New York), Eliza learned of the desperate need for volunteer nurses at Gettysburg. She left at once and arrived in Gettysburg on the evening of July 6. The following evening, July 7, after a full day in Gettysburg she took time to write of her experiences to an old friend in Santa Cruz, California. The letter was published in a journal titled Common Sense (if any readers can find further information about this I would like to hear from you) on August 22, 1874. To my knowledge, it has not appeared since. A copy of the single page from the journal with Eliza’s letter was donated to the Gettysburg NMP library nearly twenty years ago. I thought for this Women’s History Month that it was fitting we should hear from Eliza again.

July 7 – Evening
Let me tell you, dear, how I have spent this day. It will be, most probably, a fair history of what will follow for three weeks, or a month, if I can stand it so long. In the first place, let me say that on Saturday last (being in Philadelphia) when the news of the great battle arrived, I determined to come down and do what I could. I got a cheap calico and made it up in a few hours with _______ helping me. Lectured on Sunday evening for the Spiritualist society, and at midnight started with three other women who had joined me for this place, via Baltimore; Had a battle there with the red-tape department, but finally got through, and arrived at six last evening. This A.M. at six, breakfasted and then went out into the hospital across the street, (the Lutheran Church) [Note – This is the Christ Lutheran Church on Chambersburg Street]. Spent 2 ½ hours in service there. Such sights and conditions! All states from health to death before us. The whole town, about 3000 inhabitants, is one vast hospital; all public and a great many private buildings full of sufferers. At a little past nine we set out in a field ambulance for the field hospitals, on and near the battle ground, which extended from the streets of the village to five miles away on the south and east. It is impossible, in a letter, to give you any idea of what awaited us at the end of that drive. The road, for a long distances, was in many places strewn with dead horses; the human dead having been all removed by this time. The earth in the roads and fields is ploughed to a mire by the army wheels and horses. Houses are occasionally riddled with bullets, cannon or shell, and the straggling wounded line the roads, and rest against the fences, (where the latter are not torn down, or burnt up). Breastworks, and the places where batteries were planted, loom up here and there in the desolated fields. The putrid remains of slaughtered bullocks, the cast-off clothing of the dead and wounded, lie scattered about.
Well, at length we left the road and returned into a trampled meadow toward a wooded height. On all hands, as we went, cities of tents (detached from each other) were seen, the field-hospitals of the different corps that were engaged in this fearful battle. When we reached the place we were bound to, there appeared before us avenues of white tents under the green boughs, and many men moving about. But good God! What those quiet looking tents contained! What spectacles awaited us on the slopes of the rolling hills around us! It is absolutely inconceivable, unless you see it. There are miles of tents and acres of men lying on the open earth beneath the trees. I never could have imagined anything to compare with it. Dead and dying, and wounded, in every condition you can conceive after two days in such a rain of missiles. Old veterans who have seen all our battles, say that there never has been such firing anywhere for more than half an hour or so, as there was here for the greater part of nine hours. No wonder that men who were rushing upon and through and upon it, should be torn to pieces in every way. I worked from ten till half past four, without five minutes cessation, in spreading, cutting and distributing bread and butter. Such thankful eyes and stifled voices, and quivering lips, from poor fellows without legs, or arms, or hands, or terribly wounded otherwise, who had seen nothing but hardtack since they were hurt!
At last I came to a group of Confederate prisoners. Such destitute, abject looking creatures as the privates were! Enough of them to cover four such lots as your house is in. [1 ¼ acre lot]
If Mrs. C. is in Santa Cruz tell her I had the pleasure of giving a piece of bread and butter to a friend of hers – Colonel Fry, of Sacramento. He is shot through the ankle, but seems well and very resolute. There was a man and his son lying beside him, each having lost a leg; other men with both legs gone. But the most horrible thing was to see these limbs lying, piled up like offal at the foot of a tree in front of the surgeon’s tent. Adieu. I do the same work to-morrow, and shall be too exhausted to write soon again. Yours, E. W. F.

    Because Eliza identified Colonel Fry - who was Colonel Birkett Fry, a former U.S. Army officer, who commanded the 13th Alabama Infantry, and was wounded while commanding Archer’s brigade in Pickett’s Charge - we know that she was at the Union 2nd Corps field hospital at the Jacob Schwartz farm. 3,260 wounded, including 952 Confederates, were at this hospital when Eliza arrived which accounts for her description of the “cities of tents.” She did get one thing wrong about Colonel Fry – he was shot through the thigh and hit in the shoulder by a shell fragment. The wound in the thigh cost the colonel his leg but he survived and was even eventually exchanged and returned to active duty.

A scene at the 2nd Corps field hospital sometime between July 9 and 11. Note the women in the left center rear of the image. NPS

    Eliza did not prove as hardy as Colonel Fry. Four days tending to the wounded exhausted her and she fell sick. She took what was reported to be a severe cold and left for home. Six months later she was dead from consumption, which is consistent with the cold like symptoms she began to exhibit at Gettysburg.
    Even at the distance of nearly 150 years, Eliza Farnham’s courage is inspiring. She did not have to go to Gettysburg, but that was not how she lived her life.

D. Scott Hartwig

For more on Eliza Farnham’s life, see Edward T. James; Janet Wilson James; Paul S. Boyer. Notable American Women: 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary. Harvard University Press. pp. 598-600.