The Battle of Gettysburg is forever etched in the pages of history as “the High Tide of the Confederacy”. It was also the most destructive battle that ever involved American troops. Gettysburg proved costliest in the life’s blood of its soldiers, including general officers. During the three-day conflict at Gettysburg, thirty-two general officers were casualties of the battle, sixteen of them fatally. Though the battle ended in a victory for the Union, of the thirty-two generals who fell, sixteen of them were loyal to the Union, sixteen to the Confederacy. Of the sixteen generals who were slain in battle or died of mortal wounds inflicted at Gettysburg, eight were Federals, eight were Confederates.

The lessons learned at Gettysburg for future military tactics were legion. Among these lessons concerning general officers, it appears that the bravest and the best fought alongside the men they commanded. They led charges across the open fields, stood in the front lines of battle along with the enlisted men, and shared their trenches. For those who survived, the leadership honed in the furnace of affliction followed them for the rest of their lives, yet, there were many more who did not survive. Hence, a major lesson from Gettysburg is not to allow the high command at the front unless they are willing to be lost.

After Pickett’s Charge, a Virginia captain wrote to his family, summing up the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg: “We gained nothing but glory,” he said, “and lost our bravest men.”1

Some of the brightest and best of men fell at Gettysburg, and many of them wore a general’s star. Though some survived, they were still considered casualties if they were killed, wounded, or captured. These fallen stars were:

The Union:
July 1, 1863:
1. John F. Reynolds was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and led the Union First Corps at Gettysburg. As the first to come to the aid of the beleaguered John Buford and his Union cavalry on the morning of the first day’s battle, John Reynolds, eager to dispel the Confederates from his native land, was in the front lines west of town. Easily seen by the Confederates as he wore the uniform of a major general and was on horseback amid a sea of infantrymen, it appears that three Confederates in Herbst Woods aimed for him simultaneously. One hit him squarely through the base of the head, and he fell from his horse. Conflicting reports say he either died immediately or very soon thereafter. He was the first Union general killed at Gettysburg, and the Union’s highest ranking officer to die here.

2. Francis Barlow led a division of General Oliver Howard’s 11th Corps, which rushed to Gettysburg, arriving there on the afternoon of July 1. Meeting General Early’s division of Richard Ewell’s First Corps north of Gettysburg, Barlow was severely wounded in a vain attempt to quell John Brown Gordon’s brigade as they attacked. Barlow survived only because his wife, Arabella, was also at Gettysburg. She managed to cross into the Confederate lines and nurse him back to health.

3. Solomon Meredith was born in North Carolina, but moved to Indiana as a youth. At Gettysburg he commanded the famed Iron Brigade, which was led into battle by Corps commander John Reynolds in the morning of the first day’s battle. Meredith had already been severely wounded at the Battle of Second Manassas in the summer of 1862. At Gettysburg, he was critically wounded again while leading his troops against men from his home state of North Carolina, and was incapacitated for many months. He finished the war away from the front. After serving as surveyor general in Montana Territory for many years after the war, he returned to Indiana, where he died in 1875.

4. Gabriel Paul, a St. Louis native, was a capable commander, graduating from West Point in 1834. A veteran of the Mexican War, Paul also spent his pre-Civil War years in fighting the Seminole Indians in Florida and spent time in New Mexico. Like his comrade-in-arms George Pickett, Paul won accolades from his superiors and a brevet for storming the walls of Chapultepec during the war with Mexico. Paul would not have the chance to fight against his old friend Pickett, or to even see him at Gettysburg. On the afternoon of the first day’s battle, Paul, a brigade commander in John Robertson’s Division of John Reynolds’s First Corps, was in the precarious position of leading troops who were surrounded by A.P. Hill’s men who came at them from the west of Gettysburg and Richard Ewell’s troops who came at them from the north. In an attempt to rally his brigade against impossible odds, Paul was struck in the head by a bullet, which blinded him, and seriously incapacitated his senses of taste and smell. Paul survived, but was immediately retired from the army. He died in Washington, D.C. in 1886, and was buried in Arlington Cemetery.

July 2, 1863:
5. James Barnes was one of the oldest general officers at Gettysburg, at age 61 in July 1863. A graduate of West Point in 1829 (the same class as Robert E. Lee), Barnes served as a civil engineer during the years that preceded the Civil War. A brigade commander for the first part of the war, Barnes was promoted to division command just before the Battle of Gettysburg. As General Lee ordered a flank attack on both ends of the Union line on the second day of battle, General Barnes’s division, in the Union 5th Corps, was ubiquitously involved. While some of his men stood valiantly in the defense of Little Round Top, many others were grappling in the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard against advancing Confederates under the generalship of James Longstreet. While scouting a position for artillery in the Peach Orchard area, Barnes, like John Reynolds on the first day, was on horseback and made an easy target. He was wounded, but survived the war, dying in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1869.

6. Charles Graham was born in New York City, and was a brigade commander in Dan Sickles’s Third Corps at Gettysburg. General Sickles had ordered his troops to head to the Emmitsburg Road at Gettysburg, rather than occupy the area that George Meade had instructed, which included Little Round Top. When James Longstreet saw that the Union flank had moved, with large gaps between the lines, he immediately attacked. Graham and his brigade occupied the Peach Orchard, near the Sherfy farm. In the ensuing hailstorm of lead and smoke, and engulfed by myriad men in gray, many in Graham’s brigade were captured, including their wounded brigadier. Charles Graham was sent to Libby Prison in Richmond, but was exchanged in September. He made a full recovery of his wound, finishing the war under Benjamin Butler (and later General Ord) in the Army of the James. He died in 1889.

7. Daniel Sickles is one of the most colorful, and controversial, of Gettysburg’s general officers. A powerful senator from New York, Sickles was made a brigadier general as a political move by Abraham Lincoln. Brash and brave, Sickles rose rapidly in the ranks to command the Union’s 3rd Corps at Gettysburg. His dislike of General Meade and his distrust for the capability of the Union high command made Sickles disobey (or widely interpret) the orders given to occupied ground. As a result, the second day’s battle at Gettysburg was the bloodiest of the three. Sickles placed his troops in lower and much contested ground – a good place for artillery, but not for infantry as Longstreet’s men reached them easily and with much ferocity. So many of Sickles’ men perished or were forever afterward useless for military work because of the intensity of their wounds that the 3rd Corps ceased to exist after Gettysburg. Sickles was one of the wounded. While watching the battle unfold at his headquarters at the Trostle barn, a solid shot cannon ball hit Sickles in the right leg. With the leg shattered, amputation was necessary, and Sickles’s field command days were at an end. After the war, Sickles served as Minister to Spain under Ulysses S. Grant. Continuing his leadership in the Senate, Sickles managed to get a bill passed in 1895 that made Gettysburg a national military park. Sickles was also present at the 1913 Reunion, one of the few of the high command of either side to do so. He died the following spring, in May, 1814, at age 94.

8. Strong Vincent was wounded as a colonel at Gettysburg, but died a general. At age 26, Vincent, a Harvard graduate who lived in Erie, Pennsylvania, led a brigade at Gettysburg in the Union 5th Corps. When Dan Sickles moved his troops to the Emmitsburg Road, Little Round Top was left defenseless. As the left flank of the Union line and the obvious key to the battle, Lee’s men wasted no time in an attempt to gain it. When Meade’s Chief of Engineers, Gouverneur Warren, saw the hill was devoid of troops, he immediately sent for General Barnes to deploy a brigade to occupy the hill. Strong Vincent’s men were already on their way to the Wheat Field, under orders to help Sickles’s struggling men in that area, when the young but capable commander met the courier with the message to General Barnes, who at that time could not be found. Vincent demanded the orders and offered to send his brigade there. The timely arrival of Vincent’s men kept Little Round Top in Union hands. For his gallantry, Vincent paid the ultimate price. While bolstering his troops on the western slope of the hill, Vincent was shot and mortally wounded. He remained conscious long enough to know that his men had carried the hill. For saving Little Round Top, Vincent was promoted to brigadier general, and his brevet came through immediately. He probably never knew of his promotion, as he lapsed into a coma before the battle ended. He died on July 7 of his wounds. The following month his wife delivered his only child, a daughter.

9. Gouverneur Warren was the man who ordered troops to be deployed on Little Round Top, when Sickles had failed to place his men there. As Chief Engineer on George Meade’s staff at Gettysburg, Warren found himself on the field on the afternoon of July 2, 1863. Noticing thousands of soldiers out by the Peach Orchard, George Meade, anticipating an attack from Robert E. Lee, knew he had not placed any troops there. General Warren was dispatched to find out if there were any gaps in the Union line. Standing upon Little Round Top, Warren found, to his utter dismay, where the empty place existed. After sending for troops, Warren remained on Little Round Top to ensure that enough troops arrived. He was shot in the neck – a grazed wound that was painful but not life-threatening – while standing on Little Round Top, probably by a Confederate soldier in Devil’s Den. He was quickly patched up, and managed to attend General Meade’s Council of War that night.

10. Stephen Weed was a brigadier general in the Union 5th Corps, a recently promoted officer who up to that time had spent his tenure in the artillery. After dispatching his men to Little Round Top, Weed was in the process of helping to place six guns of artillery that were under the command of his friend and colleague, Charles Hazlett. A shot from Devil’s Den hit Weed, like Warren, in the neck as he was speaking with Lt. Hazlett. Warren was far luckier than General Weed. Weed's wound was mortal and painful, severing his spinal chord. As Hazlett knelt over Weed’s body, he too was shot in the head and killed instantly. Weed was taken to a nearby farm, where he survived for several hours. Gettysburg civilian Tillie Pierce remembered visiting with him for a few minutes in the cellar of the Weikert farm behind the Round Tops. When Tillie asked him if he was hurt badly, Weed replied, “Yes, pretty badly.” When she asked if he suffered, he replied, “Yes, I do now, but I hope in the morning I will be better.” By morning he was dead.2

11. Samuel K. Zook loved to pretend he was a solider as a boy growing up in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He often played on the vestiges of the Revolution at Valley Forge, ordering his siblings in military fashion. The pride of his doting parents, Zook rose in rank from the onset of war, and commanded a brigade in General Hancock’s Second Corps at Gettysburg. Sent into the Wheatfield to bolster Sickles’ harangued troops there, Zook rode into battle with the all too familiar premonition of death. His prediction proved accurate. While placing his brigade in the Wheatfield, Zook, who was riding astride his horse, was struck in the abdomen. He lived long enough to know that Pickett’s Charge had failed, dying in the afternoon of July 3. When his father heard the news of Zook’s death, he was so devastated that he, too, died soon afterward.3
July 3, 1863:

12. Daniel Butterfield served as General Meade’s Chief of Staff. The New York native was, like Sickles, highly critical of George Meade, largely because he had not wanted the previous army commander, Joe Hooker, released from his position. Before Pickett’s Charge, on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, and as the men at Meade’s headquarters on the Taneytown Road were finishing their lunch, a sudden barrage of artillery missiles exploded from the Confederate lines toward the Union troops. General Meade had just moved from a makeshift seat outside the Leister home where he had just eaten chicken stew when a shell blasted the area, narrowly missing him. Artillery shells hit the Leister house several times, bursting and killing a servant and several horses. A fragment struck General Butterfield, severely wounding him and narrowly missing other officers. After healing, Butterfield followed his friend and former army commander Joe Hooker to the Western Theater. He survived into the next century, dying in 1901. Butterfield is credited as the actual composer of the stirring military bugle call “Taps”, which he created in 1862.
13. Elon Farnsworth was the youngest of the Union generals killed at Gettysburg, at age 25. A Michigan native who moved to Rockton, Illinois as a youth, he was a brigadier general for a total of five days. Commanding a cavalry brigade at Gettysburg, Farnsworth was involved in the short cavalry skirmish at Hunterstown on July 2, along with Gettysburg’s youngest general, 23-year-old George Armstrong Custer. On July 3, after Union forces repulsed Pickett’s Charge in the afternoon, Farnsworth participated in an ill-fated attempt on the part of some Union cavalry to dislodge Confederate troops from Big Round Top, notably units from Longstreet’s Corps who had managed to hold ground near the Union left flank. Amid the rocks and woods on the slopes of Big Round Top, Farnsworth made an excellent target on horseback against the defenders who crouched hidden among the rocks. Shot and mortally wounded, Farnsworth either died of that wound or, as Confederate commander Oates recalled, pulled out his revolver and shot himself rather than succumb to capture and suffer a slower, more agonized death in a Confederate prison. Either way, Farnsworth’s body was recovered and he was buried with military honors in Rockton.4

14. John Gibbon was born in Philadelphia, but moved to North Carolina as a young boy with his parents. A West Point graduate, he saw action in the Mexican War and fought the Seminoles in Florida before the outbreak of the Civil War. Though his wife was from Baltimore and pro-Confederate, and three brothers stayed on the side of the South, Gibbon remained loyal to the Union, helping to organize the famed Iron Brigade. He was that brigade’s first commander, leading them for the first two years of war. He was promoted to division command just before the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, where he was severely wounded on Marye’s Heights. He missed the Battle of Chancellorsville while he still recovered, but rejoined the Army of the Potomac, serving in General Hancock’s Second Corps in time for the Battle of Gettysburg. During the epic Pickett’s Charge, while attempting to repulse the oncoming Confederates from the Union position on Cemetery Ridge, Gibbon was again severely wounded by a barrage of bullets that the Confederates shot into the Union troops. General Gibbon and General Hancock were both struck at the same time, by the same group of men in gray and butternut. Gibbon survived, and in 1876 he was on the ill-fated expedition led by Custer in Montana Territory known as the Little Bighorn. Split off from Custer’s main body of soldiers, Gibbon arrived too late to help Custer or his men, except to bury them. After decades of Indian fighting in the west, Gibbon returned to Baltimore, where he died in 1896. He is buried in Arlington Cemetery.

15. Winfield Scott Hancock was one of three Union Corps commanders to be a casualty at Gettysburg. An exceptional soldier, like his namesake General Winfield Scott of Mexican War fame, Hancock arrived in Gettysburg before General Meade on the late afternoon of July 1 and deployed the rapidly retreating Union troops into the famed Union fishhook line, with its flanks on hills and its center on Cemetery Ridge. It was the center that Hancock was in charge of defending during the fateful Pickett’s Charge on the afternoon of July 3. A thorough, hands-on commander, Hancock was riding over the front lines, personally instructing his subordinates during Pickett’s Charge. After apparently ordering Stannard’s Vermont troops to fire into the flank of the Confederate advance, Hancock had attempted to go back to General Gibbon’s lines when a hailstorm of bullets hit the lines, one of them severely wounding Hancock in the thigh. The bullet hit Hancock’s saddle, and drove a nail from the saddle into his body, along with bone fragments and the bullet. Cutting an artery, Hancock fainted from the loss of blood. Of all the wounded Union commanders to survive Gettysburg, no one came closer to dying than Hancock. Weak from the loss of blood and becoming weaker from infection, Hancock was saved when General Meade, unwilling to lose him, had his personal surgeon operate on him. Having Hancock sit as though on horseback, the surgeon operated successfully, finding and extracting the bullet. Hancock returned to field command in 1864, but his Gettysburg wound split open again in November, and he was forced to sit behind a Washington desk for much of the remainder of the war. Hancock continued to make history after the war – as the official in charge of the execution of the Lincoln conspirators in July 1865 and as the Democratic nominee for President against James A. Garfield in 1880. The Pennsylvania native died from complications of diabetes in 1886.

16. George Stannard was a native of Vermont, and led his fellow statesmen at a crucial junction of the Battle of Gettysburg. He was, in all, wounded four times during the Civil War, and Gettysburg was his first. Hit by a shell fragment during Pickett’s Charge after it exploded in the midst of his men, Stannard managed to recover in time to fight in the next campaign in 1864, beginning with The Battle of the Wilderness. He was wounded again at Cold Harbor in early June, and a third time during the Battle of Petersburg a few weeks later. Stannard’s fourth and last wound cost him an arm, at the attack on Fort Harrison near Richmond, in October of that year. He died in 1886 in Washington, where he served as doorkeeper of the House of Representatives. He is memorialized in statue at Gettysburg, atop the Vermont State Memorial. Depicted without his arm, the likeness is an anachronism, as he had the use of both arms at Gettysburg.

The Confederacy:
July 1, 1863:
1. James Archer was the only general captured at Gettysburg who was not wounded, and who died as a result of his capture. He was born in Maryland, joined the Confederacy as commander of the 5th Texas, and led a brigade of Tennessee soldiers at Gettysburg. A Princeton graduate who saw action in the Mexican War, Archer’s troops were the leading unit into Gettysburg on the morning of July 1, 1863. They encountered, to their surprise, a fierce fight near the banks of Willoughby Run with the Union’s famed Iron Brigade. Caught in-between advancing regiments of the brigade, hundreds of the Tennessee men were captured, including Archer. A lieutenant of the 2nd Wisconsin wrote that Archer resisted capture, was understandably downcast and contrary, and when greeted by Union general Abner Doubleday, who exclaimed, “Good morning, Archer! How are you? I am glad to see you!” Archer sullenly replied, “Well, I am not glad to see you by a d___d sight.” After a year of suffering freezing conditions at the Federal prison camp on Johnson’s Island, Archer was released, in broken health, and died shortly afterward.5

2. Henry “Harry” Heth was a Virginian, whose family was well acquainted with Robert E. Lee. Eager to engage his division in a fight when one presented itself, Harry Heth took the bait offered him by John Buford, and commenced the Battle of Gettysburg on the morning of July 1, 1863, against orders. The fight soon escalated in ferocity, and the woods and ridges west of town were littered with wounded and dying by the afternoon. One of the severely wounded was General Heth, who was struck in the head by a bullet while riding to lead his troops on McPherson’s Ridge. Luckily for Heth, he had chosen a new felt hat after reaching Pennsylvania, which had proved slightly large. He placed some crumpled paper in the front of the hat in order to make it fit him better. The paper cushioned the blow that otherwise would likely have been mortal. Heth was replaced by the capable James Johnston Pettigrew, who would fall to a mortal wound before the campaign ended.

3. Alfred Scales was a lawyer and politician before the war, but quickly grew accustomed to the military. Enlisting as a captain of the 13th North Carolina at the onset of war, he was promoted to brigade command just before Gettysburg, to fill a vacancy left by new division commander Dorsey Pender. During the hotly contested afternoon’s contest for Seminary Ridge on July 1, 1863, Scales and his men were met with a withering Union artillery barrage as they advanced. Scales was struck and severely wounded by a piece of artillery shell, along with most of his field officers. When the Battle of Gettysburg ended, Scales was one of the thousands of Lee’s wounded taken into Virginia by the 17-mile stretch of wagon train. He was left behind in Winchester, Virginia, where he eventually recovered. He returned for a time to continue the fight in 1864, but illness or his Gettysburg wound forced him out of the field. He served as Governor of North Carolina after the war, from 1884 to 1888. He died in 1892.

July 2, 1863:
4. George T. Anderson was a Georgia native, and although not a West Point graduate, was an avid fighter, and earned the nickname “Tige” among his fellow officers. Ordered along with other units from General Hood’s division to flush the Union forces under Sickles from their stance below the Round Tops, Anderson’s Georgia brigade attacked a sizeable portion of the Union 3rd Corps in the Wheat Field – a place that came to be, by square footage, even bloodier than Pickett’s Charge. A crashing wave of gray exited the wood lot on the southern fringe of the field, attacking the men in blue who waited there, and caused them to recoil. Then, the blue wave answered back, and the two sides grappled in a hopeless contest, with Death the only prize. Men fell by the hundreds, and Anderson, while attempting to oversee the next attack, was shot, the bullet penetrating his thigh. The wound was severe, but luckily for General Anderson, the Confederates eventually took the Wheatfield and he was spared capture. He healed rather quickly from a wound that could have proved mortal, and was back at the front in September, fighting in the Battles of Chickamauga and Knoxville in the western theater of the war. At war’s end, he returned to Georgia and served as the Chief of Police in Atlanta. He died in 1901.
5. William Barksdale enjoyed a sterling career as a lawyer, statesman, and newspaper publisher in Mississippi before the war came. He distinguished himself early at First Manassas, the Pensinsular Campaign, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. He commanded his brigade of Mississippi troops beginning in the summer of 1862. During the battle for the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg, Barksdale and his men were zealous to fight, and when the general received the order to advance, his face was “radiant with joy.” The Mississippians crashed into Sickles’ line in a grand charge that was stopped near the banks of Plum Run. A volley of Union fire halted many of the Mississippi men in their tracks. Barksdale, furious that they stopped, tried to spur them onward – and he, too, was felled from his horse by a bullet to his chest. Taken to the Hummelbaugh House behind Cemetery Ridge, Barksdale died the following day. His family made the sorrowful trek to Gettysburg, and took his remains home to Mississippi.6

6. John Bell Hood was a man whose star rose meteorically, but its ascent was jarred at Gettysburg. Born in Kentucky, Hood was upset when his native state did not secede at the onset of war. He then traveled to Texas and joined the Confederacy. He distinguished himself in many battles with a reckless courage, and was thus promoted to higher command. While leading his division toward the Round Tops on the second day’s battle, Hood was not even able to get to the battle before a shell exploded in the air above him, and a piece of shrapnel tore through his arm. The general’s arm was not amputated, but it proved useless to him for the rest of his life. The year 1863 was not a good one for General Hood: he lost the use of his arm at Gettysburg, he lost a leg to amputation after being wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga in September, and on Christmas Eve, his fiancée broke their engagement. Hood’s star continued to rise and then falter, from reaching the rank of full general to losing Atlanta to the victorious Sherman, and ending with an embarrassing defeat at the Battle of Franklin. Hood married and moved to Louisiana after the war, where he died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1879.

7. William Dorsey Pender was one of the Confederacy’s brightest stars. A graduate of West Point’s class of 1854, Pender saw action in the west before he resigned his commission and joined the Confederacy after reading Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural speech. Capable and fearless, Pender was wounded once before in battle, at Malvern Hill during the Peninsular Campaign. He received his brigadier’s star after the Battle of Seven Pines, where he was cited for gallantry. During the Battle of Chancellorsville, he was seen grabbing the colors and leading his troops onward to crush the Union defenses. He was promoted to division command just before Gettysburg. He led his division on the first day’s battle, and capably – a few of the higher command believed it was Pender’s troops who dealt the Union the fatal blow at the end of that day’s fight. As he prepared to go into battle on the afternoon of the second day, a shell exploded near him, driving hot metal into his right leg near the thigh. Too severely wounded to move, as his leg bled profusely, Pender begged General Lee not to leave him behind. Jostling over dirt roads in the long wagon train of wounded, Pender’s leg continued to bleed. His leg was amputated on July 14 in Staunton, Virginia. The loss of copious amounts of blood, combined with the shock, sent the 29-year old father of two sons into the depths, and he never rallied. He died soon after the amputation. He didn’t know that he was about to become a father again, this time to a daughter. He was buried in his native Tarboro, North Carolina. General A.P. Hill said of Pender, “No man fell during the bloody battle of Gettysburg more regretted than he.” General Pender was the highest ranking Confederate to die as a casualty of Gettysburg.7

8. John Paul Semmes had the name of a soldier, after the great seaman John Paul Jones, so it was natural that he, too, would find his destiny in the military. A banker from Columbus, Georgia, he was active in the local militia until war came. He was elected colonel of the 2nd Georgia regiment in 1861, and through his own conscientious bravery was promoted to brigadier general in 1862. His brigade at Gettysburg was in the hotly contested area between the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard. Ordered to aid General Kershaw to attack the gap between the two areas, and cut off the Union defenses, Semmes was hit by an exploding shell and mortally wounded just as he prepared to lead his men into battle. He died on July 10 in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
July 3, 1863:
9. Lewis A. Armistead was born in North Carolina and attended West Point from 1834 to 1836. He was dismissed, apparently, for breaking a plate over Jubal Early’s head. (And who could blame him?) He fought in the war with Mexico and served in the U.S. Army until the outbreak of Civil War. One of his close friends was Union commander Winfield Scott Hancock. It is an interesting irony that these two friends faced each other at Gettysburg, in the epic Pickett’s Charge. Armistead, leading a brigade of Virginians in Pickett’s Division, was the only general who managed to pierce the Union line at the Angle. Shot down in the ensuing hand-to-hand combat after his men reached Cemetery Ridge, Armistead was carried behind the Union lines by a detail of the 72nd Pennsylvania. Surgeon Henry H. Bingham attended the mortally wounded Armistead, and asked if he could deliver for him any personal effects. According to Bingham, the general said, “Say to General Hancock for me that I have done him, and you all, a grievous injury which I shall always regret.” The message, controversial from the moment it was uttered, did not necessarily signify that Armistead regretted his Confederate stance, but that he regretted having to fight his old friend. Armistead died at Gettysburg on July 5. It is possible that exhaustion and malnutrition played a role in Armistead’s failure to rally from his wounds. Bingham noted that the general was “completely exhausted and seemingly broken spirited.” He was buried in Baltimore, Maryland.8

10. Richard B. Garnett was of gentlemanly descent, born at Rose Hill Plantation in Virginia in 1817. A West Point graduate, he served in the United States Army against the Seminoles and also in the west. He resigned his commission at the beginning of the war in 1861, and by the fall of that year was a brigade commander. In an embarrassing and unfair action instigated by General “Stonewall” Jackson, Garnett was blamed for the loss of the battle at Kernstown, Virginia on charges of cowardice. Demanding a hearing to defend himself against the charges, Garnett was never given the chance because of the death of General Jackson shortly after the Battle of Chancellorsville. Injured by his horse at Gettysburg, Garnett chose to ride during the charge rather than sit it out – detesting the possibility that he, again, might be called a coward by his superiors. Leading the main assault and in the front lines, Garnett was killed instantly from canister fire as he neared the wall at The Angle. An aide claimed that he saw him dead, but with Garnett’s remains unrecognizable from the deadly canister and his uniform defaced after the charge by souvenir hunters, his body was not recovered – at least not knowingly. Garnett was the only general killed at Gettysburg whose body was never found.9

11. Wade Hampton, a self-made millionaire, was a native of South Carolina. As the clouds of war loomed over Charleston Harbor in 1861, Hampton, a civilian and possibly the largest land-owner in the state at that time, used his own funds to outfit and muster troops for the Confederacy. Wounded at First Manassas, Hampton distinguished himself for bravery in battle and was promoted to brigade command in 1862. He switched commands from infantry to cavalry, and at Gettysburg commanded a brigade of horsemen in General J.E.B. Stuart’s Division. On July 3, 1863, General Stuart attempted to thwart the Union cavalry troops guarding the rear of the Union army south of town. Both sides galloped full speed at each other near the Rummel Farm off the Hanover Pike and collided with a loud crash. Hampton was hit twice on the head with a saber in the ensuing melee, one of them inflicting a dangerously deep gash. Carried off the field by his men, he narrowly escaped capture, and was hit with exploding shrapnel in the interim. He survived the wounds, and took over as commander of cavalry upon the death of General Stuart in 1864. At war’s end, with the rank of Lieutenant-General, he returned to South Carolina, serving as governor for many years, and then as a United States senator. He died in 1902.

12. Albert Jenkins resigned his seat in the United States Congress to join the Confederacy in 1861. A Virginia (later West Virginia) native, Jenkins graduated from Jefferson College in Pennsylvania and then from Harvard Law School. He was given his brigadier’s star in the summer of 1862. Like Wade Hampton, Jenkins commanded a cavalry brigade at Gettysburg, and like Hampton, was seriously wounded in the charge against David M. Gregg’s Union cavalry troops. He survived his Gettysburg wound, but in another cavalry battle in Georgia in 1864, received another which he did not survive. He is buried in Huntington, West Virginia.

13. John Marshall Jones is one of the least known general officers at Gettysburg. Commanding a brigade in Edward Johnson’s Division, Jones led his troops on the evening of July 2, 1863 during the Confederate assault on Culp’s Hill – which served as the Union right flank at Gettysburg. In the twilight, it was difficult to see the Federal troops, who were well ensconced in breastworks at the top of the hill. When the men in gray were spotted, a hailstorm of bullets found their way into the Confederate troops, and many were shot down. One of them was General Jones, with a thigh wound. The hemorrhaging wound caused a considerable loss of blood, and Jones was taken to the rear, out of action for the rest of the battle. He recovered and in 1864 was present for the Battle of the Wilderness in northern Virginia – the next battle that involved General Lee’s troops and those of General Meade. Sitting atop his horse, watching the Union troops advance and preparing to meet them, Jones never got the chance to charge. He was killed instantly by a Union bullet. He is buried in his native town of Charlottesville, Virginia.

14. James Kemper was another of Pickett’s ill-fated brigade commanders during the famous charge at Gettysburg. A statesman from Virginia, Kemper was an adept speaker and leader, which caused his star to rise when he threw in his lot for the Confederacy. Determined to reach the stone wall of Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, Kemper shouted to his comrade and fellow brigadier, General Armistead, that he intended to charge the heights and wanted Armistead’s support. Armistead replied that he would do it – but it is doubtful that Kemper heard, as he was shot in the groin from a Union musket on the ridge, and fell to the ground in great pain. The wound was considered mortal, and Kemper was left behind and captured when the Army of Northern Virginia retreated. The act saved Kemper’s life – unlike Pender, who might have survived had he not been jostled over rough, muddy roads. With his desperate wound making him unable for field command after he was paroled by the North, Kemper commanded reserve forces until the war ended. Practicing law after the war, Kemper was elected as Virginia’s governor for three years. He died in 1895, twenty-eight years after his “mortal” wounding at Gettysburg.

15. James J. Pettigrew was a scholarly gentleman who graduated from the University of North Carolina at the age of fifteen. Before the war, he traveled extensively throughout Europe, taught at the Naval Observatory in Washington, and was a published author. He witnessed the firing on Fort Sumter that instigated the Civil War. He began the war as the colonel of the 12th South Carolina, and was promoted to command a brigade of Carolinians in early 1862. Wounded and captured at the Battle of Seven Pines in the spring of 1862, he was released two months later and served until the following year in building up the defenses of his native North Carolina. In the summer of 1863 Pettigrew’s brigade was part of Heth’s Division, which played a role in the opening of the Battle of Gettysburg. When General Heth was wounded, Pettigrew assumed command of his division, and led it during Pickett’s Charge on July 3. Pettigrew, who rode his horse in the charge like General Garnett, was wounded in the hand. His luck ran out during the army’s retreat across the Potomac on July 14. Commanding a portion of the rear guard, Pettigrew and his men were attacked by a contingent of Union cavalry, led by the young General Custer. He was shot while defending his position and mortally wounded. He survived long enough to cross the Potomac, and died three days later in Virginia. He was the last of the generals to be mortally wounded in the Gettysburg Campaign.

16. Isaac Trimble, who was born in Virginia but always considered himself a Maryland man, was one of the oldest Confederate commanders at Gettysburg at 61 years of age. He was known as a supernumerary, or a general without troops to command, as he had barely returned to the army after recuperating from a desperate leg wound. Trimble soon received troops to command after the mortal wounding of General Pender on July 2. Leading the division during Pickett’s Charge the following day, Trimble was astride his horse and watching his men advance when a bursting shell drove hot metal into the same leg that he nearly lost at Second Manassas in 1862. Felled from his horse and bleeding profusely, Trimble went into shock and was subsequently captured. Union surgeons amputated his leg, and he recuperated at the Lutheran Seminary as a captured rebel. He was eventually released, and after the war he returned to Baltimore, where he died at age 85 in 1888.
“What is the loss of one man’s life compared to the good of his country?” wrote Dorsey Pender to his wife shortly before he arrived in Gettysburg. Nearly a century and a half later, the full extent of the answer to his question is still unknown. The Battle of Gettysburg cost America many of its bravest and best. And some of them wore stars.10

Sources: Alleman, Tillie Pierce. At Gettysburg: Or What A Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle. New York: Borland, 1889. (Reprint, Butternut & Blue, 1994.) Dorsey Pender/Mary Frances Pender Correspondence, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina. Pickett’s Division File, Gettysburg National Military Park. Coddington, Edwin B. The Gettysburg Campaign, A Study In Command. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative, Fredericksburg to Meridian. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, 1986. Gambone, A.M. The Life of General Zook. Baltimore: Butternut and Blue, 1996. Norton, Oliver Willcox. The Attack and Defense of Little Round Top. Gettysburg: Stan Clark Military Books, 1992 (Reprint, originally published in 1913). Oates, William C. The War Between the Union and the Confederacy. Dayton, OH: Morningside Press, 1985 (Reprint, originally published in 1905). Pfanz, Harry W. Gettysburg: The First Day. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pfanz, Harry W. Gettysburg: The Second Day. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Pfanz, Harry W. Gettysburg: Culp’s Hill & Cemetery Hill. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Stewart, George R. Pickett’s Charge. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1959. Tucker, Glenn. Hancock The Superb. Dayton, OH: Morningside Bookshop, 1980. Warner, Ezra T. Generals In Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Warner, Ezra T. Generals In Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959.

End Notes:
1. Pickett’s Division File, GNMP.
2. Alleman, pp.62-63.
3. Gambone, pp. 33-35.
4. Oates, pp.236-237.
5. Pfanz, Gettysburg: The First Day, p. 101.
6. Foote, p. 563.
7. Obituary of Dorsey Pender, Dorsey Pender/Mary Frances Pender Correspondence, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina.
8. Stewart, pp. 254-255.
9. Warner, Generals In Gray, p. 99. Stewart, p. 250.
10. Dorsey Pender/Mary Frances Pender Correspondence, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina.

Back to Top