Three Weeks at Gettysburg
By Georgeanna Woolsey (1863)
1. Along with her mother, Georgeanna “Georgy” Woolsey of Brooklyn, N.Y., traveled in July 1863 to Gettysburg, where the just-ended battle had resulted in a catastrophic casualty rate. The two had been told—erroneously—that the son of the family was among the wounded, but mother and daughter chose to stay and nurse the suffering survivors. In this memoir Georgy recalls a wounded Confederate, “lying on his blanket stretched over the straw—a fair-haired, blue-eyed lieutenant. . . . I could not think of him as a rebel; he was too near heaven for that.” She observes the strangeness of watching “the good brotherly feeling come over the soldiers, our own and the rebels, when side by side they lay in our tents. ‘Hullo, boys! this is the pleasantest way to meet, isn’t it? We are better friends when we are as close as this. . . . ’ And then they would go over the battles together, ‘We were here,’ and ‘you were there.’ ” She writes that “the streets of Gettysburg were filled with the battle. People . . . talked of nothing else” and observes that “hundreds of old muskets were piled on the pavements, the men who shouldered them a week before lying under ground now.”
