A medical display inside the Seminary Ridge Museum at Gettysburg depicts a hospital steward (left) administering chloroform or ether to a wounded soldier as a surgeon waits to amputate the man’s badly wounded leg. (Brian F. Swartz Photo)
Rain falling since July 14, 1863 had turned the grounds at III Corps’ hospital at Gettysburg “so wet and muddy” that nurses wore India-rubber boots to get around, said nurse Emily Bliss Souder, a Kennebunk-born Mainer now living in Philadelphia with her husband and surviving children.
Not letting up until July 18, the rain cooled the air, benefiting wounded men, and washed away the stench, except “where the dead horses poison the atmosphere,” Souder noticed. By now soldiers had started burning piled horses; the smoke rose dark and greasy, and the smell carried on the wind.
Souder particularly enjoyed finding Col. William Colvill, 1st Minnesota, and several of his men among her patients. Colvill apparently knew Souder’s brother Joseph (a Minnesota politician), and Souder brightened a letter to him with news about the Minnesota wounded.
Timothy O’Sullivan photographed these Confederates being buried in a shallow grave at Gettysburg. Volunteer nurses arriving soon after the fighting ended frequently wrote about seeing many graves dotting the battlefield. (Library of Congress)
Souder learned to differentiate the dead or living being carried on a stretcher “by noticing whether he is carried with his head or his feet toward the shoulders of the bearers.” The dead were wrapped in blankets before being “laid to rest under a tree,” each grave “marked by a small strip of board or the lid of a box, with the name rudely cut with a pocket-knife or marked with a pencil by some kind-hearted comrade,” she said.
When a 19th Maine lad died on Tuesday, July 21, he would have gone into the ground in his death clothes had not Souder convinced “the ward-master … “to put a clean shirt and drawers on him.” She and three companion nurses soon walked to where “this Maine boy lay, in a wide, shallow grave, beside a Pennsylvanian, each wrapped in his blanket, and the name of each written on paper pinned on his breast.”
Souder summoned a minister to conduct “the burial service.”
A Seminary Ridge Museum display depicts wounded Union soldiers confined to a lower room within the building during the July 1-3, 1863 fighting. Both Union and Confederate hospitals occupied the Lutheran Seminary building during the battle of Gettysburg. (BFS)
The rain beat at the graves and head boards. Civilians scoured Gettysburg for their slain; Souder remembered “groups of men, standing in the fields, searching for the name of some friend or brother.” Coffins were ubiquitous across the battlefield and at the hospitals.
Worn out by her work, Souder “gave out totally” on July 22. Her nurse companions “looked sadly worn” and “many … surgeons looked very much worn.”
Before leaving Gettysburg, army medical director Dr. Jonathan Letterman gave Dr. Henry Janes, a native Vermonter, “general charge” of the military hospitals and made Dr. Daniel Brinton the “Medical Purveyor.” As the wounded ranks shrank, hospitals closed, and medical care consolidated at Letterman Hospital, a large field hospital that opened near the York Pike and the Gettysburg Railroad on July 22.
Robert C. Corson, the Maine state military agent in Philadelphia, visited Gettysburg at least twice. He described Letterman Hospital as “situated near a beautiful grove about one mile from the town[,] a very healthy location. The men, mostly wounded cases[,] are improving rapidly, and some are being sent” to Philadelphia.
At Letterman, patients “are receiving every attention from the surgeons,” Corson said. Due to the U.S. Christian Commission and U.S. Sanitary Commission members at the hospital, plus “the citizens of Gettysburg,” patients were “supplied with nearly every thing they require.”
Dead horses belonging to Capt. John Bigelow’s 9th Massachusetts Battery litter the Trostle Farm after the battle of Gettysburg. Maine-born nurse Emily Bliss Souder mentioned seeing dead horses in letters written to her husband and relatives. (Library of Congress)
The II Corps hospital was shifting to Letterman Hospital by July 27, Souder noticed, and churches underwent “purifying … very energetically” as patients relocated to the new general hospital, too. In a July 29 letter to her brother Peter (a Rockland lawyer), she mentioned coffins still “passing to and fro” as “strangers [were] looking for their dead on every farm and under every tree.”
Emily Souder shared with several people planning to relocate their slain the increasing chatter about creating a national cemetery at Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg, “the most honorable burying-place a soldier can have.”
Each state would have its own section to which “the noble dead may be gathered from the fields and hillsides,” she said. The national cemetery, “like Mt. Vernon …will be a place of pilgrimage for the nation.”
Souder and her companions soon left Gettysburg for home.
Sources: Mrs. Edmund A. Souder, Leaves from the Battle-field of Gettysburg: A Series of Letters From a Field Hospital and National Poems, Caxton Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1864; Robert Corson letter to Governor Abner Coburn, September 8, 1863, Maine State Archives
“Swartz delves into the personal stories of sacrifice and loss…” — Civil War News
If you enjoy reading the adventures of Mainers caught up in the Civil War, be sure to like Maine at War on Facebook and get a copy of the new Maine at War Volume 1: Bladensburg to Sharpsburg, available online at Amazon and all major book retailers, including Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble. —————————————————————————————————————–
Available now: Passing Through the Fire: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the Civil War, released by Savas Beatie.
This new book chronicles the swift transition of Joshua L. Chamberlain from college professor and family man to regimental and brigade commander and follows him into combat at Shepherdstown, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and the Petersburg and Appomattox campaigns.
Drawing on Chamberlain’s extensive memoirs and writings and multiple period sources, historian Brian F. Swartz follows Chamberlain across Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia while examining the determined warrior who let nothing prevent him from helping save the United States.
Order your autographed copy by contacting me at visionsofmaine@tds.net.
Passing Through the Fire is also available at savasbeatie.com or amazon.com.
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Brian Swartz can be reached at visionsofmaine@tds.net. He enjoys hearing from Civil War buffs interested in Maine’s involvement in the war.
