Bayard Wilkeson And America’s Baptism Of Freedom

[FIELD ETHOS]

Bayard Wilkeson and America’s Baptism of Freedom | Field Ethos

By John Kleespies Confederate soldiers scrambled towards Cemetery Hill, fully exposed on Gettysburg’s rolling pastures and grain fields,…

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By John Kleespies

Confederate soldiers scrambled towards Cemetery Hill, fully exposed on Gettysburg’s rolling pastures and grain fields, hurdling fences and tripping in irrigation ditches … all while desperately trying to outrun the cannonballs. For a little over half an hour, Gen. Robert E. Lee distantly bore witness to 6,500 of his men surrendering, collapsing in blood, or dying outright in a conflagration of cannon shrapnel.

One example of artillery’s significance in the overall Battle of Gettysburg can be found with Battery G of the 4th U.S. Artillery, a 120-man unit of six cannons led by 19-year-old 1st Lt. Bayard Wilkeson.

Bayard’s father, Samuel, was a highly influential journalist and abolitionist with a direct connection to Abraham Lincoln, but politics played no role in young Bayard’s command assignment: his men fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Bayard, witnessing firsthand his cool demeanor under fire.

On day one of the Battle of Gettysburg, Battery G received orders to take a dangerously exposed firing position at Barlow’s Knoll. Bayard didn’t question his commanders, and thus his unit immediately drew fire as Confederate cannoneers exploited Battery G’s position.

Bayard commanded from horseback, even as cannon and Minié balls whizzed past his ears and spouted dirt at his horse’s hooves—until a Confederate cannonball thudded a perfectly centered hit on Bayard’s bright white steed. The solid ball passed completely through the horse’s body, and a combination of cast iron, bone, and guts tossed Bayard like a ragdoll to the dirt. There, Bayard discovered a hole where his knee used to belong.

The Resolve of Bayard Wilkeson​

Bayard clawed to the fallen horse, taking shield from the Minié balls whapping its carcass, and used his uniform’s sash as a tourniquet. He then sawed off the remainder of his leg with a penknife.

Laying in soil which glistened black from his own blood, and with his severed leg still laying alongside, Bayard resumed command of Battery G.

The artillerymen stood aghast at his wheezing commands, and rather than acknowledging his orders, they begged Bayard to seek medical attention.

Lame and barely conscious, the reality of Bayard’s situation was settling upon him. He resigned to his evacuation, but only on the condition that Battery G hold its ground until deemed otherwise by Command. His men swore to continue the fight, and so Bayard allowed himself to be carried to a field hospital.

And Bayard’s men, who promised to fight on, did just that.

They held the line until commanders ordered a retreat. Yet, even in that retreat, Battery G provided essential covering fire that allowed the Union infantry to evade capture and regroup for a return assault. The next two days featured Battery G pivoting through multiple battlefield positions, repelling enemy ground advances, disrupting Confederate artillery barrages, and eventually setting up on Cemetery Hill itself to decimate Pickett’s Charge, head on.

By the time the Union claimed victory on July 3, Battery G had expended 1,400 rounds of artillery, lost 31 horses, and suffered 17 casualties that included Bayard—their clarion call to fight through Hell, even in his absence.

Amid all of this, Battery G did not know that Bayard was dead: during the initial Union retreat, Confederate troops overran Bayard’s field hospital, the doctor’s fled, and their leader succumbed to blood loss.

Bayard’s story should have ended there—merely another artilleryman lost—but soon after the battle’s conclusion, one of the Union’s embedded war journalists sought out the abandoned field hospital where Bayard laid.

The journalist was Samuel Wilkeson, Bayard’s father.

America’s Baptism of Freedom​

Sitting alongside his son’s body, Samuel dutifully penned history’s most detailed description of the Battle of Gettysburg, which was published the next day in “The New YorkTimes” on July 4, 1863.

While the article is famous for its contemporaneous detail of the Union victory, it is also notable for its opening and closing paragraphs … the only moments through the pages-long account when Samuel the journalist gave way to Samuel the father:

Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly absorbing interest— the dead body of an oldest born son, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay?

My pen is heavy. Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburg have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battlefield with his feet and reaching fraternally and lovingly up to heaven. His right hand opens the gates of Paradise— with his left he beckons to these mutilated, bloody, swollen forms to ascend.