During the Civil War, institutions of higher learning throughout the land contributed their fair share of soldiers to both the Union and the Confederacy. Comprised mainly of students or recent graduates of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, the University Greys were among the most famous of these scholarly outfits. The young men from “Ole Miss” became Company A of the 11th Mississippi Infantry, a regiment that would go on to earn a distinguished place in the annals of American military history. On the final day at Gettysburg, this unit suffered more casualties than any other regiment in the Army of Northern Virginia.
This potential had not been foreseeable during its formation back in May of 1861. “No more disorderly mob of men ever got together to make an army,” confessed a member of the University Greys. Another soldier was more flattering, boasting that the ranks were “made up in large measure from the choicest spirits of the state – intelligent, honorable, and brave.”
Perhaps no man in the regiment displayed these attributes more fully than Jeremiah Sanders Gage. The son of a prosperous planter and slaveholder, he grew up with his seven sisters and four brothers in Holmes County, Mississippi. Matthew Gage, Jr. died prior to the Civil War but he left ample provision for his family and his slaves. Jeremiah’s mother, Patience Williams Saunders Gage, was described as an “artist with brush and needle.”
After graduating from the literary department of the University of Mississippi, Jeremiah Gage entered law school at Oxford in the fall of 1860. But the following spring he placed his aspirations on hold and signed on with many of his fellow scholars as a member of the University Greys.
There can be no doubt that “Jere” Gage was a big man on campus. A sunburned blond with a strong and ruddy countenance framed by the muscular physique of an athlete, he possessed a singular self-confidence. A deferential politeness and his steadfast, gray-blue eyes tempered these striking physical attributes.
Private Gage immediately displayed a reckless courage on the battlefield. Comrade Richard Lipsey related: “J.S. Gage was in First Manassas, Williamsburg, and at Seven Pines where we were under a furious fusillade of canister and grape shot…The order, given to lie down was quickly obeyed, except by Colonel Frank Liddell and Jere Gage, who had seventeen bullet holes in his clothes. He did not know what fear was.” Gage suffered a severe hip wound a short time later during the battle at Gaines’ Mill on June 27, 1862. From that point forward he walked with a noticeable limp.
At the outset of the Gettysburg campaign it appeared as though Gage’s military career was near its end. In a letter written to his sister from Fredericksburg on June 10, 1863, Gage expressed delight in the fact that his brother-in-law had nearly completed a negotiation for a hired substitute to take his place and that the colonel of the 11th Mississippi had consented to the arrangement. Either the deal fell through or the army moved before the transaction took place because Gage was still in the ranks when the Army of Northern Virginia marched into Pennsylvania.
When Heth’s Division came toward Gettysburg on the early morning of July 1, 1863, the 11th Mississippi remained behind to guard the division’s wagon train at Cashtown. By this stroke of good fortune the regiment avoided the fate of the remainder of Joe Davis’s brigade at the railroad cut west of the town. Rejoining their comrades on July 2, the nearly 600 members of the 11th would more than compensate for their absence by the end of the next day.
As the eight battered brigades of A.P. Hill’s Corps assembled to the left of Pickett’s Virginians on July 3, 1863, the Mississippi regiment suffered its first casualties at Gettysburg during the heavy cannonade preceding the charge. To Hugh Q. Bridges of the University Greys the very ground seemed “to shake from the plunge of solid shot and the detonations of bursting, shrieking shells, which appeared to rake and search out every square yard of the ground we occupied.” Bridges noted that most of the men were in a lying position with the notable exception of the officers and Private Gage.
Suddenly, a shell exploded in the front of the 11th Mississippi. One of the fragments ripped through Gage’s left arm while another pierced his abdomen. Private James Dailey and three other litter bearers gathered up the wounded soldier and dashed off to the nearest aid station. About 200 yards to the south, at a large stone barn, they found assistant surgeons Dr. Joseph Holt and Dr. LeGrand Wilson, along with a Dr. Shields, waiting for the inevitable onslaught of mangled bodies.
As the first rescue party of the day neared the barn, the young soldier on the litter raised his head and exclaimed loudly, “Doctor, they have got Jere Gage at last. I thought I would go through safely, but they have got me.” After being placed on a makeshift examining table, Gage asked that the doctors be truthful concerning his condition.
Discovering that his patient’s left arm had been nearly severed between the elbow and the shoulder, Holt offered an encouraging remark, that it was not too bad a wound. In response, Gage smiled and said, “Why, Doctor, that is nothing; here is where I am really hurt,” and he peeled back a blanket from his lower abdomen to reveal a hideous sight. Another piece of shrapnel had struck his left side near the stomach, tearing away a rib, the entire bladder, much of his intestine, and part of his pelvis – leaving only a twisted mass of tissue and bone in its wake.
Despite the ghastly nature of his wounds, Holt was struck by the attractiveness and manliness of the soldier as well as the tender devotion displayed by the litter bearers. “No word or detail of this scene has faded from my memory,” recalled Holt. “There was no thought of the dramatic; it was dreadfully genuine and naturally spontaneous, in the unconscious creating and acting of a grander tragedy than we might ever hope to play.”
Gage calmly asked Doctor Holt how long he had to live.
“A very few hours,” was the reply.
“Doctor, I am in great agony; let me die easy, dear Doctor; I would do the same for you.”
It appeared to Holt that the very soul of the dying soldier peered out from the depths of his gray-blue eyes in an appeal of anguish that cut the doctor to the heart.
“You dear, noble fellow, I will see to it that you shall die easy.”
The doctor called to one of his assistants to bring him a concentrated solution of opium, which he mixed with some water in a tin cup. Just before offering the drug to his patient, a thought flashed into Holt’s mind. “Have you no message to leave?” he asked.
For the first time, Gage’s composure left him. “My mother, O, my darling mother, how could I have forgotten you? Quick! I want to write,” he cried out in a low wail. A pencil and a sheet of paper were secured and the smooth lid of a hospital knapsack improvised as a desk. As Dr. Holt supported him and the small group of onlookers wept silently, Gage hastily scrawled his final message:
“This is the last time you may ever hear from me. I have time to tell you that I died like a man. Bear my loss as best you can. Remember that I am true to my country and my greatest regret at dying is that she is not free and that you and my sisters are robbed of my worth, whatever that may be. I hope this will reach you and you must not regret that my body cannot be obtained. It is a mere matter of form anyhow…This letter is stained with my blood.”
He softly repeated the last line and pressed the back of the letter upon his oozing wound before handing it over to Dr. Holt. After being handed the cup of opium, Gage feebly waved as he called out, “Come around, boys, and let us have a toast. I do not invite you to drink with me, but I drink the toast to you, and to the Southern Confederacy, and to victory!” Gage then requested Jim Dailey to bury him in his old shawl. It was the fashion of the boys of the University to wear shawls in lieu of topcoats, and it was this garment that would become his winding sheet.
As he slowly drifted in and out of consciousness from the effects of the opium, Gage whispered, “How dark it grows. Come nearer, boys. I can’t see you, but take my hand, each one of you, so I can feel that you are all near me.” Next he made his friends promise to bury him deep in the earth, “so the beasts won’t get me.”
As the shattered columns of Southern soldiers drifted back to Seminary Ridge that day, Holt laid aside the cover from the face of the 23-year-old soldier and discovered that his spirit had departed. “His death surpassed in tenderness of love, in philosophical resignation, in courage and willing to sacrifice of self, if it were possible, even that of Socrates, as revealed to us in the Phaedo,” proclaimed Holt. Although the team of doctors witnessed numerous personal tragedies throughout the day and well into the evening, Dr. Wilson later admitted that the loss of Gage “wrung our hearts with anguish and blinded our eyes from weeping for many days.”
Upon reaching Virginia, Holt mailed the letter entrusted to him to Mrs. Gage in Richland, Mississippi. She would not be the only one receiving a sad missive. The 11th Mississippi had the distinction of suffering more casualties on July 3 than any other regiment that day, north or south. The unit lost 103 killed, 166 wounded, and 41 captured, nearly all of these losses incurred in the space of one hour during the assault. Of the 31 members of the University Greys present at Gettysburg, 14 were killed, and 17 were wounded.
Jeremiah Gage could have easily been just another faceless statistic, the courage and humility of his final moments lost forever, had it not been for the reminiscences of Dr. Holt that appeared in the New Orleans Times-Democrat near the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913. Following the war, Holt served as the professor of obstetrics at his alma mater, the New Orleans School of Medicine, and was later named president of the Louisiana State Board of Health. Despite these accomplishments and the passage of time, he could never forget the heroic death of one Mississippi soldier on that historic July afternoon in 1863, and much of his account was devoted to this subject.
Holt’s vivid description stirred the interest of many readers, particularly Virgie Gage Armistead, a resident of 2616 Royal Street in New Orleans, and the youngest sibling of Jeremiah Gage.
Recalling many details of the story, Mrs. Armistead immediately wrote to the doctor and asked him to confirm that it was indeed her brother that he wrote of in his piece. “I was such a small child when he enlisted that I do not remember him at all, but I know the story of his life and death from others,” she related.
A special messenger personally delivered Holt’s reply. It read in part:
“That you, his sister, have announced his name, from this time hence the story of his departure will live in cherished memories of the Southern people, and as part of the common heritage of the magnanimity and valor of American manhood in even balance. He needs no tablature, brass or bronze. That you are his sister, I profoundly congratulate you, madam, and myself in being the medium of information.”
A follow-up article appeared in the June 29, 1913 issue of the Times-Democrat, accompanied by a photo of Gage during his college days and a reproduction of the hastily scrawled letter to his mother. The gracious, refined, and soft-spoken Mrs. Armistead told a reporter, “It is such a wonderful thing to have read…the story of how our brother died. It brought all the recollections back – how our mother tried to find his grave, and the stories of his bravery that I treasured as a little girl.”
James L. Goodloe, a Memphis attorney, was also profoundly moved by the tribute to his old schoolmate and Delta Psi fraternity brother. Although reading about him had reopened old wounds in Goodloe, he also confided to Mrs. Armistead, “I have all my life felt that my loved friends who have preceded me to the Great Beyond are still with me in spirit, and that I can almost commune with them. This always affords me intense pleasure…My love for Jerrie was, & is, unbounded by time.”
Sources: Steven H. Stubbs, Duty, Honor, and Valor: The Story of the 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. Philadelphia, MS: Dancing Rabbit Press, 2000. Steven R. Davis. “Like Leaves in an Autumn Wind: The 11th Mississippi Infantry in the Army of Northern Virginia:, Civil War Regiments, Vol. 2, no. 4 (1992), pp. 269, 293-294, 297. Terrence Winschel, “The Gettysburg Diary of Lieutenant William Peel.” The Gettysburg Magazine, no. 9 (July 1993), pp. 98-99. Maud Morrow Brown, The University Greys. Richmond, VA: Garrett and Massie, 1940, pp. 38-43. Letter, Jeremiah Gage to Mary M. Saunders, June 10, 1863, and James L. Goodloe to Mrs. Armistead, June 26, 1913. Archives and Special Collections, The University of Mississippi, University, MS. “Death Message of a Southern Hero on the Battle Field of Gettysburg,” New Orleans Times-Democrat, June 29, 1913. “Prominent Doctor Claimed by Death”, New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 24, 1924. James W. Silver, ed., The Confederate Soldier by LeGrand James Wilson. Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1973, pp. 120-125.
Michael Dreese is a native Pennsylvanian and a frequent contributor to The Gettysburg Experience. The above article is an excerpt from his latest book, Torn Families: Death and Kinship at the Battle of Gettysburg, published by McFarland & Company, and appears by permission of the author. For information on purchasing the book, contact the publisher at www.mcfarlandpub.com.
