Brave Deeds of Union Soldiers

by Samuel Scoville

The battle of Gettysburg was the most important of the Civil War. Lee with seventy thousand men was pouring into the North. If he defeated Meade and the Union Army, Washington, the capital, would fall. Even Philadelphia and New York would be threatened. In three days of terrible fighting, thirty thousand men were killed. In one of the charges one regiment, the 1st Minnesota, lost eighty-two per cent. of its men—more than twice as many as the famous Light Brigade lost at Balaclava. Pickett's charge of fifteen thousand men over nearly a mile and a half against the hill which marked the center of the Union lines was one of the greatest charges in history. When the Confederates were driven back, two-thirds of the charging party had been killed or wounded. It was the crisis of the war. If that charge went home Gettysburg was lost, the Union Army would become a rabble and the whole strength of the Confederate forces would pass on into the North. On the Union batteries depended the whole fate of the army. If they could keep up a fire to the last moment, the charge must fail. Otherwise the picked thousands of the Confederate Army would break the center of the Union forces and the battle would be lost. Lee gathered together one hundred and fifteen guns and directed a storm of shot and shell against the Union batteries as his regiments charged up the hill. On the very crest was a battery commanded by young Cushing, a brother of Lieutenant W. B. Cushing, who drove a tiny torpedo launch over a boom of logs under the fire of forts, troops and iron-clads and destroyed the great Confederate iron-clad Albemarle. This Cushing was of the same fighting breed. During the battle he was shot through both thighs but would not leave his post though suffering agonies from the wounds. When the charge began he fought his battery as fast as the guns could be loaded and fired and his grape-shot and canister mowed down the charging Confederates by the hundred. In spite of tremendous losses the Rebels rushed up the hill firing as they came and so fierce was their fire and that of the Confederate batteries that of the Union officers in command of the batteries just in front of the charge, all but two were struck. But the men kept up the fire to the very last. As what was left of the Confederates topped the hill, a shell struck the wounded Cushing tearing him almost in two. He held together his mangled body with one hand and with the other fired his last gun and fell dead just as the Confederates reached the stone wall on the crest. They were so shattered by his fire that they were unable to hold the hill and were driven back and the battle won for the Union.

Old John Burns was another one of the many heroes of Gettysburg. John was over seventy years old when the battle was fought and lived in a little house in the town of Gettysburg with his wife who was nearly as old as he. Burns had fought in the war of 1812 and began to get more and more uneasy every day as the battle was joined at different points near where he was living. The night before the last day of the battle the old man went out to get his cow and found that a foraging band of Confederates had driven her off. This was the last straw. The next day regiment after regiment of the Confederate forces marched past his house and the old man took down his flintlock musket which had done good service against the British in 1812 and began to melt lead and run bullets through his little old bullet mould. Mrs. Burns had been watching him uneasily for some time.

"John, what in the world are you doing there?" she finally asked.

"Oh," he said, "I thought I would fix up the old gun and get some bullets ready in case any of the boys might want to use it. There's goin' to be some fightin' and it's just as well to get ready. There ain't a piece in the army that will shoot straighter than Betsy here," and the old man patted the long stock of the musket affectionately.

"Well," said his wife, "you see that you keep out of it. You know if the Rebs catch you fightin' in citizens' clothes, they'll hang you sure."

"Don't you worry about me," said John. "I helped to lick the British and I ain't afraid of a lot of Rebels."

Finally the long procession of Confederate forces passed and for an hour or so the road was empty and silent. At last in the distance sounded the roll and rattle of drums and through a great cloud of dust flamed the stars and stripes and in a moment the road was filled with solid masses of blue-clad troops hurrying to their positions on what was to be one of the great battle-fields of the world. As regiment after regiment filed past, old John could stand it no longer. He grabbed his musket and started out the door.

"John! John! Where are you going?" screamed his wife, running after him. "Ain't you old enough to know better?"

"I'm just goin' out to get a little fresh air," said John, pulling away from her and hurrying down the street. "I'll be back before night sure."

It was the afternoon of the last day when the men of a Wisconsin regiment near the front saw a little old man approaching, dressed in a blue swallow-tail coat with brass buttons and carrying a long flintlock rifle with a big powder-horn strapped about him.