An Autumn Surprise

So many deaths, casualties, and missing soldiers were the result of the Battle of Gettysburg, that legions of worried family members came to town to search for their loved ones. A couple from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania made the trip to Gettysburg several days after the battle, hoping to find their son, who was listed as one of the missing.

They spent days searching through field hospitals without success. Finally procuring help from a local citizen, they scoured the battlefield, hoping against hope to find him. After much difficulty, they learned that a body had surfaced near the spot where their son had been involved in the fighting. The parents soberly gave a description, and it appeared that the slain soldier matched that of their son. The parents were called over to the spot, and they viewed the remains. In spite of the decomposition, the hair, stature, and facial features were enough like their son to cause them to identify the slain soldier as their loved one. They claimed the remains and sorrowfully took the body home, where he was buried in the family graveyard.

It seemed an all-too-familiar ending to so many family sagas during the Civil War.

For the next few months, the parents received almost no visitors, as grief engulfed their days. Throughout the summer and the fall, the pair quietly survived, day after day. Then, late in the month of October, they were startled by a sharp rapping at their door.

When they opened the door, they received the shock of their lives.

Their son, the one they thought had been killed at Gettysburg, was standing in the doorway.

How had he possibly been alive all this time, and why had he not written to them?

As it turned out, the young soldier was captured at Gettysburg. After several days, he managed to escape his captors, and endured quite an ordeal meandering through Virginia until he was at last reunited with his regiment. At the time, the Mine Run Campaign had begun and he had been needed at the front. When the campaign ended at the end of October, he requested leave, explaining that his parents had to be worried. He had not heard from them since Gettysburg; any letters he had written, he believed, might not have reached them.

His leave was granted, and he soon arrived home to his overjoyed parents in Allegheny County.

But who was the boy in the family cemetery?

While the identity of the young soldier was never officially known, they did realize that the youth killed at Gettysburg, and mistaken for their son, was actually a Confederate. Like so many from the South who were in desperate need of better clothing, the young man had taken a Union jacket. Blond and tall like their son, the boy did bear a striking resemblance to the young soldier from Pennsylvania.

For two parents in Allegheny County, the case of mistaken identity was solved at last, on an autumn day several months after the Battle of Gettysburg. After so many mournful stories of the lost and fallen, it is heartening to learn that, even in terrible times, once in a while there is a tale with a happy ending, a rare event in 1863.

From the Adams Sentinel, Nov. 3, 1863. 

In the article, neither the Union soldier nor his unit were identified.