‘Then it was suddenly quiet’
A client’s ancestor (more than one, actually) participated in Pickett’s Charge on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. This is from their family history report (citations removed):
John’s younger brother Sylvanus enlisted on January 23, 1863, into Company I of the 1st Virginia Infantry, committing to serve for the entirety of the war. About six months later, on July 3, he found himself standing nervously on a field just south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon, baking hot, and the artillery behind him had unleashed hell for an hour. Then it was suddenly quiet. General George Pickett shouted a few words that Private Neal probably couldn’t hear, and anyway, who could concentrate enough to listen? It was the third day of a losing battle, and this was to be one last desperate attempt to snatch victory. The charge that followed has been ruthlessly romanticized—the so-called High Water Mark of the Confederacy—but in reality it was just death, death, and more death. John Dooley, an officer in Neal’s regiment, said that once he came under fire, “instead of burning to avenge the insults of our country, families and altars and firesides, the thought is most frequently, Oh, if I could just come out of this charge safely how thankful would I be!” The 1st Virginia was part of a brigade commanded by General James L. Kemper, a planter from Madison County, and assigned to the far right of Pickett’s line. Less than one hundred yards away stood the boys of the 13th and 16th Vermont, equally nervous, perhaps, but much better protected behind a fence. Against their fire, Kemper’s infantry “swiftly melted away,” as one historian put it. Men were mowed down in neat rows; some were mangled and blown apart, while others looked as if they had just slipped into a quiet slumber. The 1st Virginia, which had brought 209 men to the field that day, lost 113 of them, killed, wounded, or missing. Private Neal was among the wounded, having been shot in the left groin. With Lee’s army in full retreat the next day, he was left behind and captured by Union troops. He spent the next year and a half in hospitals, first in Baltimore, then Richmond. On January 20, 1865, Confederate authorities sent Private Neal home, having found him to be “permanently & totally incapable of performing any military duty …” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sylvanus never married. He helped his mother on the farm after his father’s death in 1865, and later worked as a shoemaker. He died at the R. E. Lee Camp Confederate Soldiers’ Home in Richmond on July 30, 1891, aged about fifty-eight, and was buried in the soldiers section of Hollywood Cemetery.
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Image at top: “Picketts charge on the Union centre at the grove of tress about 3 PM” by Edwin Forbes (Library of Congress)