July 21, 2025 • 59 mins
Jon Tracey joined Bo and Joey to wrap up their guest appearances for our Gettysburg Anniversary Series and chat about Camp Letterman.
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Want to support the show? Visit buymeacoffee.com/homebrewhistory and become a monthly subscriber to access bonus episodes and exclusive member's only livestreams!
Remember, Home Brew History is brought to you by #civilwartrails! Learn more here: https://www.civilwartrails.org/
Home Brew History is partnered with the Bearded Historian, Jeff Williams. Check out his designs here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheBeardedHistorian
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
M talking about.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Everybody again.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Smack the hell out of my computer for new.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Hello, is anyone out there? Is anyone listening?
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Hello?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
How are you goohd And first off, before we go anywhere,
go Tigers?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Oh no?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeahs home the College World Series once again the eighth
time in program yestory.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Dude, I saw this map that had like all the
states pulling for Coastal Carolina and it was just Louisyanna, Nebraska,
and Arizona that we're pulling for LSU. And I was like,
I wouldn't like to put one green dot on my
house because it's just anything or anyone but l s U.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Well, you have to be at least thankful for the Tigers,
least one time. You've got Paul Schemes.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, but but the Pirates don't him. I was gonna say, yeah,
but the Pirates don't have him. So it's just it's
a never ending kind of disappointment, like I'm great, happy, yay.
Paul also very upset in that he can't win a
game on his own. And you know, I have a
(01:45):
little surprise, a little shock, a little treat that came
in the mail the other day. So I worked on
a project right before I left Franklin, that was compiling
a bunch of primary accounts into a single bound volume
so that visitors and battlefield guides everybody could use it.
(02:05):
I left that project kind of in hopes that it
would eventually be published, and just kind of kept hoping
and hoping and hoping, and then bam showed up in
the mails. So there it is. I want to unblur
my screen to show if for nothing else, my name's
(02:27):
in print. If you can read through the blur, yeah,
maybe you can't. Anyways, it's there, I promise. I edited
by Joseph Rickey.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
So you know, if you want to pick up a
copy of this and follow along with the Army of
Tennessee the Army of the Cumberland, the Army of the
Ohio through November of eighteen sixty four fourteen.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Ninety nine on boft dot org, slash store or shop
I don't remember. Just go to bof's website, go to
the thing where you can buy stuff. Okay, just buy it.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
All right, we're gonna bring up your Superman.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Well, well, no, that's on a shelf of high regard
in the living room. It's one of it's the only
action figure. Okay, I don't have a lot of rules,
and Catherine doesn't impose a lot of rules on me.
But it was like, please don't let your action figure
collection spill out into the living room. So I asked,
can I have one like on a rotation? Right, so
(03:28):
like this month it's this Superman, next month it's Batman.
I took down my action comic Superman and stuck David
corn Sweat and the new Superman. Okay, we're going way
off topic, but anyways, that's going on. Book is out
and looking at I mean, it's just it's got the
right feel, it's the papers, right, it's got really just
(03:51):
you know, great images. You know, look at this, look
at these maps.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
See if I pictures for those of us who can't.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Read great maps. You know, good stuff there. And then
two the intro and the overview written by so good
stuff here. Check out, check that out on the website.
And to know that every time that you make a
purchase through boft dot org, you're making a direct donation
right towards battleful reclamation, preservation and the maintenance of all
(04:21):
the sites. So they're not paying me to say that.
They don't pay me anymore. So you know that that's
a free beings, that's free promotional and if I know,
if I know the folks at BOFD free Promotionals, that's.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
That's what they look for.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Funny enough, right there.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
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Speaker 1 (07:36):
Anyways, we are kicking off a series here, aren't we
This is episode one? Well, this is recording one, probably
episode last one, three or four. I don't know however
many we do on this, but I think we should
call it like the The Westerners Go East or something.
Speaker 5 (07:57):
We're talking, and I think I just gave it away
by accident. We're talk ends John Gettysburg. And of course
I have the campaign Atlas because Giant Nerd. But anyways,
we also have we also have a guest joining us
because who could let Ball and I talk about Gettysburg
(08:20):
because I feel like we're woefully unqualified, but talk about
some of the kind of the aftermath of Gettysburg. And
to do that, we have Emerging Civil Wars Editorial Board
Chairman John Tracy. John is a public historian focused on
soldier experience, medical care, memory, and veteran life in the
Civil War era. His BA from History comes from Gettysburg College,
(08:42):
Well that's appropriate, with minors in public history and Civil
War Era studies and an MA from West Virginia University
in public history and a certificate in Cultural Research Management.
John's worked extensively on preserving and interpreting historic sites, including
with some of the national organizations. Most of his research
focuses on a complex topic of historical memory and the
(09:03):
way that Americans have chosen to remember and commemorate the war.
He's currently a Culture and Research Cultural Resource program manager
and manages the ECW editorial board that reviews guest post submissions.
So John has had to see a fair deal with
me until I started writing continuously for ECW. But John,
(09:24):
welcome to this page.
Speaker 6 (09:28):
Hello, great to be here. I do just want to
I am no longer the editorial board chair for ECW,
so I don't want to be steal at any of
the thunder from Neil Shadolaine, who's been doing it for
a while. I did it for several years, worked with
lots of great guest authors, and then I decided I
wanted a little more time to do my own writing
(09:49):
rather than just editing everybody else's.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
It sounds like we need to get your bio updated. Yes,
that's what I.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
Was hearing through that up like, oh, oh should probably
go update that.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
So that is uh yeah, I was.
Speaker 6 (10:07):
I was frantically, uh frantically writing it myself a sticky
note as you introduced me of like oh better go.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Check on that.
Speaker 6 (10:15):
But yes, everything else in there is correct, though, is
an accurate portrayal of my educational and professional background. So none,
none of that's made up. I swear I've got big
expensive pieces of paper in my office.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Well tell us about it.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I can't even find where my big expensive pieces of
paper are. We're still unpacking this room. That's why the
screen is still burnt to be. But like I thought,
I came across from a couple of weeks ago and
gone again. They just like they fell into the ether
of other boxes. And here we are. Here we are,
(10:55):
so John, we're here tonight to talk about Camp and
after math of the Battle of Gettysburg. Which seems like
a terrible way to start a series of recordings on
the Gettysburg campaign by putting the caboose before literally everything else.
But I think, you know, this is what we did
(11:15):
from Market Garden Bell we did. We did it backwards
Nam too. So we just have a scheduling which.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Star wars.
Speaker 7 (11:24):
Yeah, this is the original trilogy, and here we go.
That's right, John, I guess let's start with what are
the origins of Camp Fireman.
Speaker 6 (11:36):
Yeah, So as as a majority of folks listening to
this probably no, you know, Gettysburg is one of the
largest battles of the American Civil War, and that leaves
behind just tens of thousands of wounded soldiers just in
those fields in Pennsylvania, in folks homes and barns and
fields and tent hospitals all over the place.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (11:59):
And the army move out of Gettysburg pretty quick. Within
a few days after the battle. They're sprinting their way
back south, the Confederate Army withdrawing the United States Army
pursuing them. They're moving quick. They can't bring all of
their wounded with them, so the wounded are left behind
in Gettysburg. And again it is just thousands and thousands
of soldiers left behind, many of whom are in absolutely
(12:21):
no shape to do any kind of traveling, even if
they are in the back of wagons. And so they're
going to be, of course, the Union soldiers left behind,
but also thousands upon thousands of wounded Confederates that will
just kind of be left in the fields as the
Confederate army retreats. And so that kind of leads to
the immediate question of what are we going to do
with these thousands of wounded soldiers. The divisional field hospitals
(12:46):
and all of the immediate care.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Of the wounded that you hear about.
Speaker 6 (12:50):
Even in traditional campaign histories, soldiers are wounded in the field,
they will be perhaps taken just a little bit behind
the lines, put in the nearest bar, put in the
nearest house. Slowly they'll be moved to divisional or core
level field hospitals, again often in and around barns and homes,
or simply in private houses throughout the town. Some of
(13:14):
the most famous and preserved examples of that we have,
of course, the Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg, which is now
an excellent, excellent museum, and the Spangler Farm that is
preserved by the Gettysburg Foundation and able to be visited.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So there are some really great museums focused on that sword.
Speaker 6 (13:33):
The Camp Letterman story is a little different because Camp
Letterman is kind of the next stage of that. So
Camp Letterman is not founded July first through third, It
is not founded July fourth. It is found in July twentieth.
And so as those other field hospitals send away some
of the less wounded soldiers and start distributing them, perhaps
(13:56):
back to the army for service, perhaps to other hospitals
for their north. There are still thousands of soldiers that
are that are not going to survive being moved anywhere far,
and so all of these hospitals are now being condensed
into Camp Letterman about two weeks after the close of
(14:18):
the battle. So Camp Letterman is situated on about eighty
acres or so on the York Road, So that's Route thirty.
So just go a little bit northeast to town. For
folks who've spent a lot of time in Gettysburg, like
I did as a college student. It's near the Giant,
the grocery store. Spent a lot of time in that
grocery store. So it's about eighty acres a little northeast
(14:42):
of town. It's going to be situated there because of
the easy access to the rail network. So as these
hospitals are consolidating and sending away they're wounded, everybody who's
left there is going to be moved to Camp latermen,
and there's it's still going to be size of the
even by mid August. There's a local newspaper account that
(15:04):
says there's over sixteen hundred wounded and about four hundred
or so attendants. So that's soldiers that had partially recovered
that are sticking around to help. That's nurses, that's surgeons.
So even you know, mid August, a month after the battle,
we are still talking about two thousand people in a
tent city along group thirty with what are basically some
(15:28):
of the worst wounded.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
From the Battle of Gettysburg.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
So, John, what is an average day in the life
of someone at Camp Letterman? What does that look like like?
You just mentioned just a moment ago, these are some
of the you know, worst off of you know, if
if death was sweet, Unfortunately, these people are not too
far from I'm imagining it's pretty brutal. So what does
(15:57):
it What does an average day look like?
Speaker 6 (15:59):
Yeah, So to to start answering that question, I want
to set the stage. Joe's put this great photo of
the tents up. You see those evergreen boughs placed on
all of the tents there, and it really kind of
it really sets the scene. You can see the walkways there.
I want to begin this answer with a quote from
Sophronia Bucklin, who's a nurse at Camp Letterman, because she
(16:20):
leaves find a really great kind of visual example for
us to envision ourselves here before we go through our
daily routine.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
She wrote.
Speaker 6 (16:28):
The hospital tents were set in rows, five hundred of them,
seeming like great fluttering pairs of white wings, brooding peacefully
over those wounded men. Walks were thrown up between these
rows in order that they might dry quickly after the
summer rains. The ground, now sod it soon to be
hardened by many feet was the only floor in the wards,
(16:48):
or in our quarters. So what we see there is
pretty much it. We've got the rows of the tents.
They try to kind of maybe sod some walkways in
between them, but you are in kind of these a
bunch of these smaller tents here where the wounded, where
some of the wounded are, where the attendants are living,
especially more in the more wooded areas, and then occasionally
(17:08):
kind of larger tents divided into specific hospital wards. So
the nurses and some of the aid organizations here, both
the United States Sanitary Commission and the United States Christian Commission,
are providing really good care and service for the wounded here,
(17:28):
and the surgeons in the employee of the United States
or Confederate Armies are doing so as well.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Well.
Speaker 6 (17:36):
We may gravitate towards some of these scenes. You know,
we've got amputation scenes in films like Glory. You've got
the brief cuts of hospital scenes in the film Gettysburg, right,
those are often the immediate aftermath of battle, and I
don't want to pretend that that wasn't a pretty bad side.
But by the time we get to Camp Letterman, things
(17:57):
are a little more under control. The logistics are all
really really well in play. And so if you are
being cared for a Camp Letterman, you have what is
absolutely state of the art medical care for the time,
because it is now eighteen sixty three and the Union
Army has been doing this for a couple of years.
The Army of the Potomac has been around the block,
(18:18):
and they know what a casualty is and they know
how to treat that casualty. There are medical journals kicking around.
Surgeons have been doing this for a while, and so
you are getting good care. There are incredible accounts of
the amount and variety of food that is being served,
both provided by the Army and provided by the aid organizations.
(18:39):
At this point, with the establishment of this they are
now kind of setting up a variety of different diets
of Okay. You know, this soldier is going to need,
you know, extra bone broth because that's all they can
keep down. But it's just going to be chock full
of what we now know to be the nutrients that
are just going to keep them, keep them on the
path to recovery. There's even kind of a brief there's
(19:02):
some back and forth and some of the historical records
I was refreshing myself on where some soldiers or a visitor,
you know, kind of complain up to a congressional rep.
The congressional rep gets on the Army's back, and the
Army writes back this whole thing of like this is
exactly what was served to this ward of this camp
on this date.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
This is fine, it's going okay.
Speaker 6 (19:29):
And then I mentioned briefly some of those aid organizations,
the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission, to private organizations
that follow around the armies, providing supplies for soldiers and
caring for the wounded. There's all kinds of great stuff
in here. That nurse I quoted from earlier remembered that
a Christian commissioned woman would take a wagon to the
(19:50):
countryside daily and return with quote fowls, eggs, milk, and butter.
The officer in charge of Camp Letterman, who was not
Jonathan Letterman, and I can more into that later if
we want, but was a man named Henry James from Vermont.
In his receipt book was that he had purchased nine
hundred dollars of goods for the wounded that was then
(20:11):
going to be reimbursed by the Sanitary Commission. And this
single bill for one set of supplies paid for by
the Sanitary Commission included one thousand, five hundred and thirty
two pounds of butter, one thousand, two hundred and thirty
two dozen eggs, one hundred and one gallons of oysters,
(20:32):
and eight hundred and twenty five chickens. Another later tabulated
statement of goods issued by the Sanitary Commission its shirts, socks, soap, crutches, lanterns, blankets,
mosquito netting, jellies, oranges, canned goods, tobacco. So when you
(20:53):
are at Camp Letterman, you don't want to be there
because it means that you're in you've had a very
bad time. But yeah, by the time you get to
Camp Letterman, you are being taken care of and it
is it is. You know, you're not in the bottom
level of a barn. You are in this tent on
(21:15):
a raised area near a spring, on a big open
field specifically picked for that purpose. They're going to be
opening your tent flaps every day to try to get
as much airflow as possible through here. That's what those
evergreen boughs draped on all those tents are for as well.
It's to freshen the air because of you know, some
of the Still again, this is cutting edge in eighteen
(21:36):
sixty three, but the medical science is not quite as
good as it comes to be later. But the evergreen boughs,
it's like, oh, it's clean air, it smells good, it
purifies the air, and it's going to help healing. And
the evergreen boughs might not have helped healing, but I'm
sure they appreciated it.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Still.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
This is one of the things in Bom. I'm sure
you've probably hear this too, is like, you know, civil
war armies and civil war medicine in particular, it was
so backwards and it was barbaric, and nobody knew what
they were doing and they were just figuring it all out.
And John, I'm sure you've not been spared any of
those tropes either. I used to do this thing on
tours at Carrnton, the field hospital that I was at,
(22:19):
and I would ask my tour groups, you know, you
have three words to describe civil war medicine go and
usually those three words I could, like if I had
like one of those those charts where it puts the
most common word big and right, the biggest word would
be barbaric, the next one would be bloody, and then
(22:42):
probably in third place is either ignorant or stupid. And
yet the thing that I think everyone forgets and John
you kind of spoke to this is that it's state
of the art for eighteen sixty three sixty four. The
medical treatment that's ongoing in a field hospital is maybe
(23:03):
it's more of like the emergency triage, but you survive
that to get to a place like a camp Letterman,
like a general hospital number one, like a hospital number seven,
and you see the kind of evolution of military medicine.
So maybe if you would just speak to a minute
about you know, you talked about the comforts and the creature,
(23:25):
like the creature comforts that come along with it, but
there's still some medical procedures that have to be ongoing
in a convalescent scene in the convalescent center like camp Letterman.
Speaker 6 (23:36):
Yeah, so, you know, I'm trying to figure out how
to condense this as much as possible, right because a
couple of years ago, Emerging Civil War had a symposium
on the the what ifs about the war and my
talk was a bit of a stretch to fit that topic.
But my what if was was basically the realities of
civil war medicine under the lens of what if it
wasn't as bad as we think it was. So I'm
(23:58):
trying to take, you know, my out long symposium lecture
and shove it into like three minutes here. But yeah,
it's one of the most enduring you know, midst of
the war here, and you see it, you know, as
a tour guide, you see it, you know, as you
go through these sources. And one of one of my
big go tos is always, yes, medicine got better after
(24:19):
the Civil War, But in many cases it is getting
better because of the Civil War, is getting better because
of the medical literature that is tested, discovered, and applied
during the war. They are sharing knowledge during the war,
and then they are massively distributing everything they learn afterward.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
It's it's incredible stuff. You could you could even make
the point that civil war medicine has already advanced by
eighteen sixty three from the eighteen fifties in the Crimean War. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (24:54):
Yeah, And there's a there's some really great literature on that.
One of one of my favorite is a Sean Divines book,
Learning from the Wounded. Just the entire thing is just
unpacking the transfer of knowledge. You know, by the middle
of the war, surgeons are basically said, are told you
need to write reports of treatments of your wounded, you
(25:14):
need to submit them to the central portions of the government,
and also, in a more grizzly thing, keep track of
anything interesting that you remove from living soldiers or dead soldiers,
and we require you to send those into us too,
for what is called the Army Medical Museum, which does
still exist in a different form today along with some
(25:36):
of those very grizzly collections. But so they are actively
trying to collect and distribute the knowledge during the war,
and then they are distributing the knowledge after the war.
In just these massive print tones, the medical and surgical
history of the War of the rebellion, and so they
are just throwing all of the data as open sources
(25:57):
they can get it at the time. It's it really
is remarkable. And you know, one stat I also love
to throw around is from our friends at the National
Museum of Civil War Medicine and Frederick Maryland, and that
is that over ninety five percent of surgeries performed during
the Civil War, you have the use of anesthesia. It's
(26:17):
usually ether or chloroform. But that's that's ninety five percent, right.
So this idea that everybody's just out there, you know,
pulling around out of their cartridge box and shoving it
in their mouth and biting the bullet as their their
limb is is heartlessly chopped off in three seconds.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Is.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
Not what things look like. That kind of brings us
to the topic of amputation. And again it seems bad,
but you know, it's just it's just kind of what
you have to do when you are hit by a
you know, a sixty nine caliber ball of lead that
flattens when it hits you, shatters the bone, tears your
(26:58):
all your all of your blood vessels. And I'm trying
to we know, you know, when I gave this talk
to the Civil Wars and posium. I think I was
like right before right after lunch, and I'm like, this
was a mistake because I just but you know what
I what I had in those notes is that you know,
even today in the twenty first century, you know, there's
a story from a hunter in twenty twenty one who
(27:21):
was a muzzle loading so he went hunting with a
muzzle loading rifle with similar calibers to the Civil War. Right,
lots of folks do that. He had an accident and
he discharged that firearm into his thigh. And you know
what modern medicine at a state of the art hospital did,
They amputated. Yeah, that was That remains the way that
(27:45):
you deal with that injury. And you know, my, my,
one of my closing thoughts on amputation, unless unless you
guys really want to get into it, is this one
line from a from a chapter by historian Alfred J.
Bolett that is always stuck with me, and it's that
this image of veterans with amputated limbs is so prevalent
(28:07):
in the post war period, and it sticks with us
even as we see photos of veterans on crutches in
nineteen thirteen in nineteen thirty eight with all the reunions
at Gettysburg. But the very fact that people remembered seeing
Civil War veterans with amputated limbs throughout their childhood is
evidence that the amputation worked because they were alive to
(28:30):
be seen. Right, So, soldiers who died of their wounds,
who died because the surgeons tried to treat the wounds
quote unquote conservatively by trying to save the limb, well,
those soldiers died, many of them did. And then so
you don't see them. You don't see the quote unquote
(28:50):
failures either of an amputation that was unsuccessful or if
soldiers treated without amputation. So this visual image of veterans
and with prosthetic limbs or on crutches for decades following
the war, every single one of them is there because
(29:12):
they survived the amputation, and a very sizeable percentage of
them may not have survived without that amputation. And so
that's always striking to me to think, hey, you know this,
this image that we see as a failure of Civil
war medicine, as it being barbaric, is perhaps an image
of a man who would not have survived if that
(29:33):
operation had not occurred.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
And that the care for them long term is what
brings them to a place like camp Letterman.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, Earl Hess wrote this book, End of the Crater,
really great book, but you know, talking about amputation. I
remember reading in the aftermath of in the aftermath of
all of this, there was a Union soldier that was
in his left arm. And as all married men will know,
(30:05):
that you wear your wedding ring on your you know,
on that little left left arms and there, uh and
and I remember he was hitting the left shoulder, so obviously,
you know, doctors have to amputate, you know, from the
shoulder down. And afterward he looks at the doctor and
he says, you know, I need to know where my
left arm went. And the doctors like pointing toward a
(30:26):
mountain of limbs that are piling up, and he's like,
you know, I really need to find my left arm
because if I come home without my wedding ring, my
wife will kill me. I'm thinking I'm thinking this. I'm like, Okay,
this man has just been shot. His entire left shoulder
has been shattered. He fears not that he does not
fear gang Green. He fears a woman's scorn. If I
(30:49):
don't come home with my wedding ring. She's gonna kill me.
If it's not a Confederate bullet, it's definitely my wife.
Hilarious to prove the point that has times change, sometimes
men just don't. John, you were kind of talking a
little bit about how camp Letterman sees both Confederate and
(31:10):
Union wounded, How are they interacting with one another considering
there's a whole civil war going on.
Speaker 6 (31:17):
Yeah, so I'm trying to I'm frantically now going to
try to go through some of my old thesis notes
here because I know there's a really good.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Quote in there.
Speaker 6 (31:26):
So I'm gonna I'm gonna talk around it until I
can find it.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, I mean to me, it's to me, I kind
of want to picture like, you know, you know, I
got you, Johnny rev Or, you know, Billy Yank, I
got you. You know I got you worse, you know.
Speaker 6 (31:41):
Yeah, So I've got the quote. So the general story is, first,
I want to emphasize that Confederate soldiers who are being
treated here are being treated exactly the same as United
States soldiers. It is worth noting that even at the
time they were noticing that statistically there were perhaps more
Confederate soldiers that were dying at Camp Letterman, but I
(32:02):
have never once seen we treated them less well. It's
also worth noting that ever since earlier stages of the war,
surgeons would be allowed to remain behind, not as prisoners,
but as still caring for the wounded. So Confederate surgeons,
a handful of them are here, and they are often
going to be the ones caring for the Confederate wounded.
(32:23):
But as we look at like food and the like,
and many of the supplies, Confederate soldiers are getting the
same amount as well. But I have found my citation
back to the Justice sylamon letters where he remembers some
of these tensions between opposing troops. They were in separate wards,
but again the tents are not all that far away.
(32:46):
So this Connecticut soldier. He wrote of a local choir
that would visit Camp Letterman, stating that they would often
sing patriotic songs near Confederates and emphasize verses such as
quote down with the traders or quote will route the
rebel horde. He wrote that quote that the two sides
quote generally agree pretty well, but also admitted we have
(33:09):
had a few single handed skirmishes in which the Red
invariably gets knocked down and afterward arrested.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
So again.
Speaker 6 (33:18):
It's it's not a bunch of you know, wounded soldiers
beating each other up in tents, but sometimes the the
tensions pop back up. And of course, you know, these
Confederate soldiers when they recover. Union soldiers that recover are
going to be ultimately sent back to their units. Confederate
soldiers once they recover at Camp Letterman, they may be
sent to another hospital for a while, but ultimately they
(33:41):
are probably going to be spending some time at a
prisoner of war camp elsewhere in the North. And that's
that's not a particularly good feeling to have. So yeah,
so as soon as you said that, I'm like, there's
a quote in here that I've got to talk about.
You know, these local civilian choirs coming to patriotic songs
directly outside the tents of the Confederate soldiers. I know
(34:05):
there are some other quotes where there is you know,
big feasts set up and some of the Confederate soldiers
kind of jostled their way in to get to all
the good food first and stuff like that. So there
are there are guards there are guards throughout the camp
that are are there to keep ordering to keep Confederate soldiers.
Where have Union soldiers from just you know, fleeing into
the woods, right, Union soldiers could could desert, Confederate soldiers
(34:27):
could escape, And so there are there are guards around
doing some of those things. And oftentimes those guards are
soldiers who had been wounded at Gettysburg but recovered a
little quicker, but stuck around officially performing duties rather than
being immediately sent back to join the Army of the Potomac.
So I think I think those are are are kind
(34:48):
of a view into some of the less ordinary things
that nevertheless are certainly memorable moments that these soldiers are
thinking about in their time to camera. Well, you mentioned
him earlier and how he's completely not involved. But let's
talk about Jonathan Letterman. How does his name get attached
(35:09):
to a camp that he's not act. Yeah, So Jonathan
Letterman comes in as the medical director for the Army
of the Potomac in June of eighteen sixty two. June
of eighteen sixty two, the Army of the Potomac is
not physically well because they're the middle of the Peninsula
campaign and the Peninsula is not a great place to
be in June, as a lot of our friends know
(35:31):
right now, because Virginia's in the middle of a big
old heat wave, and so there are a lot of
sanitary sanitation issues on healthy food, fecal contamination and drinking
water and sickness. The Army of the Potomac's in a
real bad spot, not even counting things like combat casualties.
So Letterman rocks up. He starts overhauling rations and cooking, bathing,
(35:55):
latrine standards. He's going to be overhauling some of the
hospital systems. He's going to be addcating for more record keeping.
Joe's earlier talk about some of the triage systems, some
of those can be traced back to some of the
efforts of Jonathan Letterman in the Army of the Potomac.
Jonathan Letterman is also really influential in the ambulance system.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
That the Army of the Potomac will be spearheading.
Speaker 6 (36:19):
And so Jonathan Letterman is definitely very, very important for
medical care in the Army of the Potomac. But he
is not at Camp letter because as the armies depart
shortly after the conclusion of the Battle of Gettysburg. We
may know that there's not a gigantic battle at Falling Waters,
(36:41):
just fairly small fights during the retreat. They don't know that.
So they are going to take the majority of their surgeons,
including the head of the medical department, with them. They
know there are lots of wounded at Gettysburg, but they
don't know if there's about to be a lot more
wounded somewhere else, somewhere in Maryland, somewhere in the northern
(37:02):
perish portions of Virginia. So Letterman will be with the
rest of the Army of the Potomac as they pursue
Roberty Leave's Army of Northern Virginia, and that will leave
for Monter surgeon Henry James to be in charge of
the hospitals around Gettysburg as they consolidate into Camp letter.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
John.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
How important are the roles of I mean, you mentioned
him a little bit earlier, but the United States Sanitary
Commission and the Christian Commission as well. How crucial is
their role related to the survival of wounded of.
Speaker 6 (37:36):
Camp letter Yeah, So it's it's a lot of those
those extra comfort things. The Christian Commission, of course, in
the name, right is religion, and they will be doing
a lot of religious services and distributions of Bibles and
prayer books. And I have seen some very powerful accounts
from some of the reverends that were with the Christian Commission,
(37:59):
and so you know, in addition to the tangible goods
they are distributing, it's really hard to place a value
on the intangible benefits of having reverends and pastors moving
throughout these tents to talk to soldiers, to help them
write letters or to say last rites over barriers. Right,
That's an intangible but is obviously incredibly, incredibly important in
(38:22):
nineteenth century America. So right there, I mean, it's hard
to quantify that aspect of the benefit of the Christian Commission,
but it was there the Sanitary Commission. We were talking
earlier about all of the bonus stuff that they are
helping to provide. Now, I still think that without these organizations,
the standard of care at Camp Letterman was still going
(38:42):
to be pretty good. But having these private organizations that
could oftentimes move faster than the government organization or then
kind of supplement those things with sending folks out into
the countryside to buy additional goods or coordinating with relief
organizations in places like New York City. You know, we
(39:04):
talked about just the wide variety of functionally luxury goods
that they're they're providing. You know, there was that astounding
account of you know, fifteen hundred pounds of butter, one
hundred and one gallons of oysters in one order, right,
and being able to add some variety to the diet,
(39:25):
add some heartier foods and all of that. And to
have these folks kind of moving throughout as civilians and
oftentimes women there were many female nurses as well, just
moving throughout these camps of soldiers that have been in
the army oftentimes for well over two years at this point.
(39:47):
You know, it's a big boost to them, I think.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
And so we see them treating thousands of men. But
then we get into say July turns to August, August
turns to September, and were now and then going in
towards the fall. What starts to happen And is there
ever a decision that comes about to say, you know,
(40:13):
it's time to move the wounded on from Camp Letterman.
Do it someplace more permanent if they need to, say
in Washington, d C. Or in Baltimore. Does it come
to a point where they just say it's time to
go ahead and bring an end to Camp Letterman. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (40:32):
So, so Camp Letterman was was never really intended to
kind of bring everybody all the way back to one.
It was in many cases just to get them to
the point where they then could be moved either back
to their units or back to, like you said, other hospitals.
Oftentimes most of them get transferred to Baltimore or Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
For the most part.
Speaker 6 (40:58):
And so and also, you know, it is a tent hospital,
and so Camp Letterman kind of closes fittingly enough on
November twentieth, you know, right after the delivery of the
Gettysburg address is when it kind of closes. Now, there
are still some wounded in Gettysburg. I believe there are
(41:19):
some wounded that remain at the Seminary Ridge Hospital in
the Lutheran Seminary later than that. I can't quite remember
those gates off the top of my head, but I
know there were some very long tenure wounded that were
being cared for at the Seminary. And go visit that
museum and see their exhibits and learn all about that.
(41:40):
But so Camp Letterman kind of closes up as we
kind of move towards that onset of winter, and many
of those soldiers will be actually some of them basically
spend the rest of the war in hospitals. Some of
them that I followed remain in a hospital until they
are mustered out in eighteen sixty five, either the end
(42:00):
of their three year enlistments or with the end of
the war. And so some of them will spend the
rest of their war in various states of treatment, but
they will be doing so in permanent hospitals in northern cities.
And so it is somewhat kind of gradual as they
get folks to points where they are able to stand
(42:23):
a longer train ride out and and all of that
that they are stable to do so, and they have
kind of figured out like, Okay, we've got these wounded
that need this kind of treatment still, and so you
see that in the medical records there. I've examined about
a thousand medical records for Camp Letterman, and plenty of
them you'll basically see, you know, transferred cured, being like Okay,
(42:46):
there really isn't any more treatment here. They may not
be going back to active duty military service but staying
in a hospital is not going to do anything else
for them, or you have transferred not cured, which is
basically they're good to move, but they're going to be
in another hospital for a couple more months before we
are able to send them back to their regiment or
(43:07):
potentially I dismissed them from service and send them home.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
So before we get into what happens after it closes,
and we kind of talk a little bit post war
and into memory, let's take a second in a hot
commercial break and we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Well, all right, so John, we're back talking about Camp
Latterman here, and we're kind of wrapping up a little
bit about the legacy of Camp Latterman here because obviously
it's because of Camp Letterman, and like you said earlier
on in the episode, that you know, the fact that
you know so many young you know, individuals who were
(43:44):
sort of born as children, you know, during the height
of the American Civil War. They're able to look at
these veterans you know, with amputations, you know, and their
survival means that this you know, medical treatment here in
you know, the mid nineteenth century was it. And it's
things like Camp Letterman that we have, you know, primary
(44:05):
examples of it actually working. So John, I'm actually kind
of curious. You said you kind of followed you know, uh,
you know several thousand medical records, maybe even the lives
of you know, soldiers, you know, pass a former residence
of Camp Letterman. Where did you find the most outstanding? Like,
was there something one in particular that's kind of stood
(44:26):
out to you?
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (44:28):
I mean, so they they leave Camp Letterman, and you
know there's there's a lot of them that will return
to military service. There are there are officers. Again, I'm
kind of frantically trying to, h you know, go back
through all of these, you know, piles of notes I
have here, trying to trying to think about something particularly touching. Right,
(44:51):
there's there's a quote from Uh it is Private Samuel Eller,
who had been with the twenty third North Carolina Infantry.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
He was wound three times.
Speaker 6 (45:01):
In one leg on July first during the assault by
Breeder General Alfred Iverson. So he gets a butt shot
lodged in the bone, a mini ball shatters his femur,
and a second mini ball goes through his thigh. There
really is no solution for that other than amputation. He
(45:23):
arrives at Camp Letterman in early August, and there's a
whole bunch of treatment records before he's ultimately sent to
a hospital in Baltimore and then to City Point for
a prisoner exchange with the Confederacy, where the record kind
of closes is improving and will probably recover though of
course he had an amputated leg, but Confederate Veteran Magazine
(45:48):
remembers that his farm in eighteen eighty five is in
pretty good shape. So he's out there with a crutcher
prosthetic limb farming with his brothers th farms described as
having quote a great amount of excellent pasture. So he's
lost a leg, but he's survived, and he is exchanged,
(46:10):
goes back home, runs his farm where he lives, I believe,
a good way into the nineteen hundreds, and there's even
kind of a photo of him with his prosthetic limb
standing on his farm in the Confederate Veteran Periodical. For
kind of another example, there's Captain John Hilton of one
(46:31):
hundred and forty fifth Pennsylvania Infantry who's wounded on July second,
and again he has his leg amputated and Ultimately, after
going through his treatment records, he will be transferred out
Camp Letterman at the beginning of September, and by December
he has returned to service with an amputated limb with
(46:53):
the Veterans Reserve Corps, where he serves until the summer
of eighteen sixty six, and then he comes back really
active in the Regimental Veterans Organization. In September eighteen eighty nine,
he represents the regiment for Pennsylvania Day, where he is
(47:14):
delivering the dedication speech for the Monument of the one
hundred and forty fifth Pennsylvania, you know, dedicating the monument
next to where he receives the wound that leads to
the loss of his limb. He's there for the nineteen
thirteen reunion for the fiftieth fiftieth anniversary. He lives until
nineteen twenty five, and he lives until nineteen twenty five
(47:38):
again because of that care he receives a Camp Letterman.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah, which is like we were talking about earlier. That's
the part that I think most people forget. They get
caught up in maybe the drama of an amputation scene
in a movie, or you know, a really gory fictitious
telling or just really bad. You know, you work in
public history. I have experienced in public history. I'm still
(48:02):
in public history. Both in public history, bad tour guides,
bad interpreters, bad you know, bad storytelling at historic sites
feeds the imagination to where you know, you get limb
piles everywhere, and this all this gory nonsense for the
sake of maybe selling an extra ticket or two and
leaving someone with a you know, entertaining story as opposed
(48:25):
to the truth. And they go to another place, or
they read another book where they engage with another source,
and all of a sudden, everything that they know, we're
told is being challenged by the fact that, you know,
a soldier in the one hundred and forty fifth Pennsylvania
moves to nineteen twenty five, and he's there, like you said,
(48:45):
dedicating a monument next to the place where he's wounded,
only because of the care that he received. Yeah, and
he's choosing to come back.
Speaker 6 (48:53):
He's choosing to come back, and he's choosing to be
playing a super active role in coming back.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (49:00):
Now, certainly you know, also in my notes, our stories
of soldiers who do not survive their amputation, who are
treated without amputation and do not survive, or soldiers who
undergo an amputation develop an infection, possibly undergo a second
amputation higher up on the limb, and then the die
of potential infections or other means. Right, So there, those
(49:23):
stories are there, But so are stories of people who
are able to recover and lead full lives, you know,
decades upon decades after the war.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
Bo I think, I think we're ready for the segment.
I think, so, you know the one I'm talking about?
Speaker 2 (49:45):
I do, I do, so, John, what boo Hicky is?
It's something that is just absolutely completely either made up,
absolutely ridiculous, complete fabrication, something that is just on your
mind that you have to debunk. What is it either
(50:06):
about camp Letterman, civil war science, civil war medicine. I
know there's a lot out there, because I've always found
very fascinating that that people have this over infatuation with
civil war medicine and science. But it's but they're like
fascination is with the Boo Hicky. You know, it's it's
not right, you know. So what is it now that
(50:29):
you want to debunk?
Speaker 1 (50:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (50:31):
You know, I feel like, you know, I had this
in my notes as a as a separate section, but
we hit it so much earlier. It's just this idea
that that Civil war medicine is just an awful, awful disaster.
That they saw a scene in a movie or or
in a television show, or they read an account of
like medical care of first manasses right like the first
(50:51):
time through, and just this one particularly horrible visual or
written account just really lodges in their head. And this
is what it was like all of the time for
the entirety of the war. In every case, when especially
at Camp Letterman, where you are two weeks removed from
(51:13):
actual combat, where you have evacuation of casualties off the battlefield,
two dedicated hospital spaces where you have people who are
there one hundred percent to provide excellent care for the wounded,
whether that's you know, physical ministrations by a surgeon in
an operating table, whether that's nurses cleaning the wounds, whether
(51:36):
that's sanitary or Christian Commission delegates talking to soldiers, helping
them write letters home, or just bringing them luxuries. That's
all there, and that is all the story of Civil
war medicine. And then, of course, you know, the second
half of that would probably be the idea that amputation
was awful and unnecessary and kills more people than it
lengthens the life of And I think as we've kind
(51:58):
of unpacked today, it was something that was was necessary
and was something that well impacting perhaps the quality of
life for these soldiers, made sure that many of them
were able to return home and have have any sort
of of of life at all.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
And there was actually, you know, anesthetics used. I think
people tend to forget, and so I think people are
obsessed with, you know all that. You know, people were
just drinking an insane amount of you know, whiskey to
dumb the pain, and you know, bite down a leather
strap or a bullet, you know, and it's like, no,
(52:40):
they had they had stuff, and things'd be too crazy.
Speaker 1 (52:45):
Here m but speaking of an insane amount of bourbon, said,
you put that right on the tee there for me
only if only the pitches would come across the plate
for the pirates the same way.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
Too bad.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
But hey, June could be that never mind, I'm not
even start it could be the month could turn it around.
I'm gonna try it. Uh, you know, we go around
the room, we say what's in our cup? All those things, John,
what you got?
Speaker 6 (53:16):
Yeah, So I'm going to give a pitch for public history.
Speaker 2 (53:19):
Right.
Speaker 6 (53:19):
This is this is the Monoga heel a Rye from
the west Overton Village slash west Overton Distillery. It is
in Scottdale, Pennsylvania. It is it is a good friend
of mine works over there, and not only is it
a historic site, but it is a functional distillery. It
is a free Civil War community, and that is associated
(53:42):
with a pre Civil war distillery operated by the Overhoult family.
So that might ring a couple of bells, and so
this one in particular is one of their harder to
get limited releases. It's the Monoga heel a Rye. So
it's like eighty percent rye. It's rye forward, and it's
in a pre Civil War style that is named for
(54:05):
the Monongahela River out in western Pennsylvania West Virginia where
that was the dominant style for much of the eighteen hundreds.
So I was just like, okay, civil war medicine. It's
it's got to be a whiskey. Hey, I got my
buddy stuff right over there, and I'll give them a
nice plug. It's public history, it's craft whiskey. I mean,
(54:26):
the boxes are all checked, but it's not Civil war medicine, right,
but it's not correct.
Speaker 2 (54:35):
Well how about you you got ghosts in your blood.
Here's some whiskey. I have some Tennessee whiskey that I had.
It is now gone. It was just as delicious on
the last as it was the first. So cheers to that.
It does have to be a whiskey when you're talking
about Civil war era stuff. But Joey, I'm scared to
(55:00):
does it.
Speaker 1 (55:01):
Does it have to be whiskey? Sure, it doesn't have
to be. All right, we're do I even won't even begin.
So I boiled some oat milk, oh no, and I
steeped a bag of cinnamon or chot the Sleepy Time
(55:22):
tea in it. I mean, look, you know, I'm going
to stop saying what I'm drinking, and I'm going to
start saying what I had for dinner or something. You
hate me. I don't need this anymore, but let me
just tell you what I had for dinner. Okay, all right?
I had Catherine made the most delicious bowl of yakamine.
(55:46):
And I did not know this, but outside of Louisiana,
yakamine is effectively not thing like it's it's a very
New Orleans culture based thing in the blend of Asian
and African cults together to make a really great protein
and noodle soup with broth and veshels. So Catherine made
(56:07):
it and like she was asking why I thought of it,
and I said, oh, you know, it's all sober. And
then I started realizing, like I don't need I don't
need old sober anymore. I don't drink. But it was incredible.
I mean, I've never well she put some of the places.
She put Yachamane Lady out of business tonight. But anyways,
(56:32):
the cinnamon archata and oat milk tea, that that was
the move. That was a very powerful move. And those
of you who keep up with me on other social
media when I'm not doing this, you also saw that
I set up my tea shop today in my office
at work. So I'm set for green tea and waters
and all kinds of great stuff forever. And I'll be
(56:53):
the Downer, the Debbie Downer on the What's in Your
Cup segment.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
All he needs is a British passport.
Speaker 1 (56:58):
He's just like, just give me citizenship.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
He's like that close.
Speaker 1 (57:06):
The citizenship.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
The day you start putting most peas on on chips,
we're gonna talk.
Speaker 1 (57:13):
Did you see the roast? Did you see this in
their roast?
Speaker 2 (57:16):
That's one thing somebody roast istory that looks delicious.
Speaker 1 (57:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (57:24):
So now talking about.
Speaker 1 (57:32):
Just a reminder, Homer History is brought you by Civil
War Trails. You want to help us out, do us
a favor. Visit civil War Trails dot org and find
ways to help spread the word about the world's ourgest
outdoor museum. You want to help out Homber History, though,
hop down to the buying me a Coffee page. You
can find the linked down in the description, and that's
where you can send in some member of questions so
that we can throw questions at our guests like John. Uh,
(57:53):
Johnny got away with an easy one tonight because someone
someone maybe forgot to ask the members want they're questions work.
But here is the good news for you. If you
go down to the buy me a Coffee page, you
get all these episodes all at once. So when we
do a series like this, instead of having to wait
a month to hear the entire conclusion of what our
(58:16):
guests have to say, you can just get it all
right in one fell swoop, one drive to work, two
drives to work, three drives to work, four drives to work.
All of a sudden, you have every episode of the
Gettysburg series, so be sure to check out the Buying
a Coffee page and send in your questions to us. BO.
I think, I think that that's yeah, pretty much it.
(58:39):
That's all I had. John. I want to thank you
for coming on the show. So appreciated you fitness into
your your schedule and dealing with this inside of all
of all the other stuff that goes on in your world,
and no longer being the editorial board during With all
the free time you had not doing that, you were
(59:00):
able to join us on Homebrew.
Speaker 6 (59:01):
So there we go, right, you know, more time for
more time for more projects.
Speaker 1 (59:08):
Bo. Until next time, John is always cheers. Let's go home,
M talking about.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Everybody again.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Smack the hell out of my computer for new.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Hello, is anyone out there? Is anyone listening?
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Hello?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
How are you goohd And first off, before we go anywhere,
go Tigers?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Oh no?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeahs home the College World Series once again the eighth
time in program yestory.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Dude, I saw this map that had like all the
states pulling for Coastal Carolina and it was just Louisyanna, Nebraska,
and Arizona that we're pulling for LSU. And I was like,
I wouldn't like to put one green dot on my
house because it's just anything or anyone but l s U.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Well, you have to be at least thankful for the Tigers,
least one time. You've got Paul Schemes.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, but but the Pirates don't him. I was gonna say, yeah,
but the Pirates don't have him. So it's just it's
a never ending kind of disappointment, like I'm great, happy, yay.
Paul also very upset in that he can't win a
game on his own. And you know, I have a
(01:45):
little surprise, a little shock, a little treat that came
in the mail the other day. So I worked on
a project right before I left Franklin, that was compiling
a bunch of primary accounts into a single bound volume
so that visitors and battlefield guides everybody could use it.
(02:05):
I left that project kind of in hopes that it
would eventually be published, and just kind of kept hoping
and hoping and hoping, and then bam showed up in
the mails. So there it is. I want to unblur
my screen to show if for nothing else, my name's
(02:27):
in print. If you can read through the blur, yeah,
maybe you can't. Anyways, it's there, I promise. I edited
by Joseph Rickey.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
So you know, if you want to pick up a
copy of this and follow along with the Army of
Tennessee the Army of the Cumberland, the Army of the
Ohio through November of eighteen sixty four fourteen.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Ninety nine on boft dot org, slash store or shop
I don't remember. Just go to bof's website, go to
the thing where you can buy stuff. Okay, just buy it.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
All right, we're gonna bring up your Superman.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Well, well, no, that's on a shelf of high regard
in the living room. It's one of it's the only
action figure. Okay, I don't have a lot of rules,
and Catherine doesn't impose a lot of rules on me.
But it was like, please don't let your action figure
collection spill out into the living room. So I asked,
can I have one like on a rotation? Right, so
(03:28):
like this month it's this Superman, next month it's Batman.
I took down my action comic Superman and stuck David
corn Sweat and the new Superman. Okay, we're going way
off topic, but anyways, that's going on. Book is out
and looking at I mean, it's just it's got the
right feel, it's the papers, right, it's got really just
(03:51):
you know, great images. You know, look at this, look
at these maps.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
See if I pictures for those of us who can't.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Read great maps. You know, good stuff there. And then
two the intro and the overview written by so good
stuff here. Check out, check that out on the website.
And to know that every time that you make a
purchase through boft dot org, you're making a direct donation
right towards battleful reclamation, preservation and the maintenance of all
(04:21):
the sites. So they're not paying me to say that.
They don't pay me anymore. So you know that that's
a free beings, that's free promotional and if I know,
if I know the folks at BOFD free Promotionals, that's.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
That's what they look for.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Funny enough, right there.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
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Speaker 1 (07:36):
Anyways, we are kicking off a series here, aren't we
This is episode one? Well, this is recording one, probably
episode last one, three or four. I don't know however
many we do on this, but I think we should
call it like the The Westerners Go East or something.
Speaker 5 (07:57):
We're talking, and I think I just gave it away
by accident. We're talk ends John Gettysburg. And of course
I have the campaign Atlas because Giant Nerd. But anyways,
we also have we also have a guest joining us
because who could let Ball and I talk about Gettysburg
(08:20):
because I feel like we're woefully unqualified, but talk about
some of the kind of the aftermath of Gettysburg. And
to do that, we have Emerging Civil Wars Editorial Board
Chairman John Tracy. John is a public historian focused on
soldier experience, medical care, memory, and veteran life in the
Civil War era. His BA from History comes from Gettysburg College,
(08:42):
Well that's appropriate, with minors in public history and Civil
War Era studies and an MA from West Virginia University
in public history and a certificate in Cultural Research Management.
John's worked extensively on preserving and interpreting historic sites, including
with some of the national organizations. Most of his research
focuses on a complex topic of historical memory and the
(09:03):
way that Americans have chosen to remember and commemorate the war.
He's currently a Culture and Research Cultural Resource program manager
and manages the ECW editorial board that reviews guest post submissions.
So John has had to see a fair deal with
me until I started writing continuously for ECW. But John,
(09:24):
welcome to this page.
Speaker 6 (09:28):
Hello, great to be here. I do just want to
I am no longer the editorial board chair for ECW,
so I don't want to be steal at any of
the thunder from Neil Shadolaine, who's been doing it for
a while. I did it for several years, worked with
lots of great guest authors, and then I decided I
wanted a little more time to do my own writing
(09:49):
rather than just editing everybody else's.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
It sounds like we need to get your bio updated. Yes,
that's what I.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
Was hearing through that up like, oh, oh should probably
go update that.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
So that is uh yeah, I was.
Speaker 6 (10:07):
I was frantically, uh frantically writing it myself a sticky
note as you introduced me of like oh better go.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Check on that.
Speaker 6 (10:15):
But yes, everything else in there is correct, though, is
an accurate portrayal of my educational and professional background. So none,
none of that's made up. I swear I've got big
expensive pieces of paper in my office.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Well tell us about it.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I can't even find where my big expensive pieces of
paper are. We're still unpacking this room. That's why the
screen is still burnt to be. But like I thought,
I came across from a couple of weeks ago and
gone again. They just like they fell into the ether
of other boxes. And here we are. Here we are,
(10:55):
so John, we're here tonight to talk about Camp and
after math of the Battle of Gettysburg. Which seems like
a terrible way to start a series of recordings on
the Gettysburg campaign by putting the caboose before literally everything else.
But I think, you know, this is what we did
(11:15):
from Market Garden Bell we did. We did it backwards
Nam too. So we just have a scheduling which.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Star wars.
Speaker 7 (11:24):
Yeah, this is the original trilogy, and here we go.
That's right, John, I guess let's start with what are
the origins of Camp Fireman.
Speaker 6 (11:36):
Yeah, So as as a majority of folks listening to
this probably no, you know, Gettysburg is one of the
largest battles of the American Civil War, and that leaves
behind just tens of thousands of wounded soldiers just in
those fields in Pennsylvania, in folks homes and barns and
fields and tent hospitals all over the place.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (11:59):
And the army move out of Gettysburg pretty quick. Within
a few days after the battle. They're sprinting their way
back south, the Confederate Army withdrawing the United States Army
pursuing them. They're moving quick. They can't bring all of
their wounded with them, so the wounded are left behind
in Gettysburg. And again it is just thousands and thousands
of soldiers left behind, many of whom are in absolutely
(12:21):
no shape to do any kind of traveling, even if
they are in the back of wagons. And so they're
going to be, of course, the Union soldiers left behind,
but also thousands upon thousands of wounded Confederates that will
just kind of be left in the fields as the
Confederate army retreats. And so that kind of leads to
the immediate question of what are we going to do
with these thousands of wounded soldiers. The divisional field hospitals
(12:46):
and all of the immediate care.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Of the wounded that you hear about.
Speaker 6 (12:50):
Even in traditional campaign histories, soldiers are wounded in the field,
they will be perhaps taken just a little bit behind
the lines, put in the nearest bar, put in the
nearest house. Slowly they'll be moved to divisional or core
level field hospitals, again often in and around barns and homes,
or simply in private houses throughout the town. Some of
(13:14):
the most famous and preserved examples of that we have,
of course, the Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg, which is now
an excellent, excellent museum, and the Spangler Farm that is
preserved by the Gettysburg Foundation and able to be visited.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So there are some really great museums focused on that sword.
Speaker 6 (13:33):
The Camp Letterman story is a little different because Camp
Letterman is kind of the next stage of that. So
Camp Letterman is not founded July first through third, It
is not founded July fourth. It is found in July twentieth.
And so as those other field hospitals send away some
of the less wounded soldiers and start distributing them, perhaps
(13:56):
back to the army for service, perhaps to other hospitals
for their north. There are still thousands of soldiers that
are that are not going to survive being moved anywhere far,
and so all of these hospitals are now being condensed
into Camp Letterman about two weeks after the close of
(14:18):
the battle. So Camp Letterman is situated on about eighty
acres or so on the York Road, So that's Route thirty.
So just go a little bit northeast to town. For
folks who've spent a lot of time in Gettysburg, like
I did as a college student. It's near the Giant,
the grocery store. Spent a lot of time in that
grocery store. So it's about eighty acres a little northeast
(14:42):
of town. It's going to be situated there because of
the easy access to the rail network. So as these
hospitals are consolidating and sending away they're wounded, everybody who's
left there is going to be moved to Camp latermen,
and there's it's still going to be size of the
even by mid August. There's a local newspaper account that
(15:04):
says there's over sixteen hundred wounded and about four hundred
or so attendants. So that's soldiers that had partially recovered
that are sticking around to help. That's nurses, that's surgeons.
So even you know, mid August, a month after the battle,
we are still talking about two thousand people in a
tent city along group thirty with what are basically some
(15:28):
of the worst wounded.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
From the Battle of Gettysburg.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
So, John, what is an average day in the life
of someone at Camp Letterman? What does that look like like?
You just mentioned just a moment ago, these are some
of the you know, worst off of you know, if
if death was sweet, Unfortunately, these people are not too
far from I'm imagining it's pretty brutal. So what does
(15:57):
it What does an average day look like?
Speaker 6 (15:59):
Yeah, So to to start answering that question, I want
to set the stage. Joe's put this great photo of
the tents up. You see those evergreen boughs placed on
all of the tents there, and it really kind of
it really sets the scene. You can see the walkways there.
I want to begin this answer with a quote from
Sophronia Bucklin, who's a nurse at Camp Letterman, because she
(16:20):
leaves find a really great kind of visual example for
us to envision ourselves here before we go through our
daily routine.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
She wrote.
Speaker 6 (16:28):
The hospital tents were set in rows, five hundred of them,
seeming like great fluttering pairs of white wings, brooding peacefully
over those wounded men. Walks were thrown up between these
rows in order that they might dry quickly after the
summer rains. The ground, now sod it soon to be
hardened by many feet was the only floor in the wards,
(16:48):
or in our quarters. So what we see there is
pretty much it. We've got the rows of the tents.
They try to kind of maybe sod some walkways in
between them, but you are in kind of these a
bunch of these smaller tents here where the wounded, where
some of the wounded are, where the attendants are living,
especially more in the more wooded areas, and then occasionally
(17:08):
kind of larger tents divided into specific hospital wards. So
the nurses and some of the aid organizations here, both
the United States Sanitary Commission and the United States Christian Commission,
are providing really good care and service for the wounded here,
(17:28):
and the surgeons in the employee of the United States
or Confederate Armies are doing so as well.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Well.
Speaker 6 (17:36):
We may gravitate towards some of these scenes. You know,
we've got amputation scenes in films like Glory. You've got
the brief cuts of hospital scenes in the film Gettysburg, right,
those are often the immediate aftermath of battle, and I
don't want to pretend that that wasn't a pretty bad side.
But by the time we get to Camp Letterman, things
(17:57):
are a little more under control. The logistics are all
really really well in play. And so if you are
being cared for a Camp Letterman, you have what is
absolutely state of the art medical care for the time,
because it is now eighteen sixty three and the Union
Army has been doing this for a couple of years.
The Army of the Potomac has been around the block,
(18:18):
and they know what a casualty is and they know
how to treat that casualty. There are medical journals kicking around.
Surgeons have been doing this for a while, and so
you are getting good care. There are incredible accounts of
the amount and variety of food that is being served,
both provided by the Army and provided by the aid organizations.
(18:39):
At this point, with the establishment of this they are
now kind of setting up a variety of different diets
of Okay. You know, this soldier is going to need,
you know, extra bone broth because that's all they can
keep down. But it's just going to be chock full
of what we now know to be the nutrients that
are just going to keep them, keep them on the
path to recovery. There's even kind of a brief there's
(19:02):
some back and forth and some of the historical records
I was refreshing myself on where some soldiers or a visitor,
you know, kind of complain up to a congressional rep.
The congressional rep gets on the Army's back, and the
Army writes back this whole thing of like this is
exactly what was served to this ward of this camp
on this date.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
This is fine, it's going okay.
Speaker 6 (19:29):
And then I mentioned briefly some of those aid organizations,
the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission, to private organizations
that follow around the armies, providing supplies for soldiers and
caring for the wounded. There's all kinds of great stuff
in here. That nurse I quoted from earlier remembered that
a Christian commissioned woman would take a wagon to the
(19:50):
countryside daily and return with quote fowls, eggs, milk, and butter.
The officer in charge of Camp Letterman, who was not
Jonathan Letterman, and I can more into that later if
we want, but was a man named Henry James from Vermont.
In his receipt book was that he had purchased nine
hundred dollars of goods for the wounded that was then
(20:11):
going to be reimbursed by the Sanitary Commission. And this
single bill for one set of supplies paid for by
the Sanitary Commission included one thousand, five hundred and thirty
two pounds of butter, one thousand, two hundred and thirty
two dozen eggs, one hundred and one gallons of oysters,
(20:32):
and eight hundred and twenty five chickens. Another later tabulated
statement of goods issued by the Sanitary Commission its shirts, socks, soap, crutches, lanterns, blankets,
mosquito netting, jellies, oranges, canned goods, tobacco. So when you
(20:53):
are at Camp Letterman, you don't want to be there
because it means that you're in you've had a very
bad time. But yeah, by the time you get to
Camp Letterman, you are being taken care of and it
is it is. You know, you're not in the bottom
level of a barn. You are in this tent on
(21:15):
a raised area near a spring, on a big open
field specifically picked for that purpose. They're going to be
opening your tent flaps every day to try to get
as much airflow as possible through here. That's what those
evergreen boughs draped on all those tents are for as well.
It's to freshen the air because of you know, some
of the Still again, this is cutting edge in eighteen
(21:36):
sixty three, but the medical science is not quite as
good as it comes to be later. But the evergreen boughs,
it's like, oh, it's clean air, it smells good, it
purifies the air, and it's going to help healing. And
the evergreen boughs might not have helped healing, but I'm
sure they appreciated it.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Still.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
This is one of the things in Bom. I'm sure
you've probably hear this too, is like, you know, civil
war armies and civil war medicine in particular, it was
so backwards and it was barbaric, and nobody knew what
they were doing and they were just figuring it all out.
And John, I'm sure you've not been spared any of
those tropes either. I used to do this thing on
tours at Carrnton, the field hospital that I was at,
(22:19):
and I would ask my tour groups, you know, you
have three words to describe civil war medicine go and
usually those three words I could, like if I had
like one of those those charts where it puts the
most common word big and right, the biggest word would
be barbaric, the next one would be bloody, and then
(22:42):
probably in third place is either ignorant or stupid. And
yet the thing that I think everyone forgets and John
you kind of spoke to this is that it's state
of the art for eighteen sixty three sixty four. The
medical treatment that's ongoing in a field hospital is maybe
(23:03):
it's more of like the emergency triage, but you survive
that to get to a place like a camp Letterman,
like a general hospital number one, like a hospital number seven,
and you see the kind of evolution of military medicine.
So maybe if you would just speak to a minute
about you know, you talked about the comforts and the creature,
(23:25):
like the creature comforts that come along with it, but
there's still some medical procedures that have to be ongoing
in a convalescent scene in the convalescent center like camp Letterman.
Speaker 6 (23:36):
Yeah, so, you know, I'm trying to figure out how
to condense this as much as possible, right because a
couple of years ago, Emerging Civil War had a symposium
on the the what ifs about the war and my
talk was a bit of a stretch to fit that topic.
But my what if was was basically the realities of
civil war medicine under the lens of what if it
wasn't as bad as we think it was. So I'm
(23:58):
trying to take, you know, my out long symposium lecture
and shove it into like three minutes here. But yeah,
it's one of the most enduring you know, midst of
the war here, and you see it, you know, as
a tour guide, you see it, you know, as you
go through these sources. And one of one of my
big go tos is always, yes, medicine got better after
(24:19):
the Civil War, But in many cases it is getting
better because of the Civil War, is getting better because
of the medical literature that is tested, discovered, and applied
during the war. They are sharing knowledge during the war,
and then they are massively distributing everything they learn afterward.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
It's it's incredible stuff. You could you could even make
the point that civil war medicine has already advanced by
eighteen sixty three from the eighteen fifties in the Crimean War. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (24:54):
Yeah, And there's a there's some really great literature on that.
One of one of my favorite is a Sean Divines book,
Learning from the Wounded. Just the entire thing is just
unpacking the transfer of knowledge. You know, by the middle
of the war, surgeons are basically said, are told you
need to write reports of treatments of your wounded, you
(25:14):
need to submit them to the central portions of the government,
and also, in a more grizzly thing, keep track of
anything interesting that you remove from living soldiers or dead soldiers,
and we require you to send those into us too,
for what is called the Army Medical Museum, which does
still exist in a different form today along with some
(25:36):
of those very grizzly collections. But so they are actively
trying to collect and distribute the knowledge during the war,
and then they are distributing the knowledge after the war.
In just these massive print tones, the medical and surgical
history of the War of the rebellion, and so they
are just throwing all of the data as open sources
(25:57):
they can get it at the time. It's it really
is remarkable. And you know, one stat I also love
to throw around is from our friends at the National
Museum of Civil War Medicine and Frederick Maryland, and that
is that over ninety five percent of surgeries performed during
the Civil War, you have the use of anesthesia. It's
(26:17):
usually ether or chloroform. But that's that's ninety five percent, right.
So this idea that everybody's just out there, you know,
pulling around out of their cartridge box and shoving it
in their mouth and biting the bullet as their their
limb is is heartlessly chopped off in three seconds.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Is.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
Not what things look like. That kind of brings us
to the topic of amputation. And again it seems bad,
but you know, it's just it's just kind of what
you have to do when you are hit by a
you know, a sixty nine caliber ball of lead that
flattens when it hits you, shatters the bone, tears your
(26:58):
all your all of your blood vessels. And I'm trying
to we know, you know, when I gave this talk
to the Civil Wars and posium. I think I was
like right before right after lunch, and I'm like, this
was a mistake because I just but you know what
I what I had in those notes is that you know,
even today in the twenty first century, you know, there's
a story from a hunter in twenty twenty one who
(27:21):
was a muzzle loading so he went hunting with a
muzzle loading rifle with similar calibers to the Civil War. Right,
lots of folks do that. He had an accident and
he discharged that firearm into his thigh. And you know
what modern medicine at a state of the art hospital did,
They amputated. Yeah, that was That remains the way that
(27:45):
you deal with that injury. And you know, my, my,
one of my closing thoughts on amputation, unless unless you
guys really want to get into it, is this one
line from a from a chapter by historian Alfred J.
Bolett that is always stuck with me, and it's that
this image of veterans with amputated limbs is so prevalent
(28:07):
in the post war period, and it sticks with us
even as we see photos of veterans on crutches in
nineteen thirteen in nineteen thirty eight with all the reunions
at Gettysburg. But the very fact that people remembered seeing
Civil War veterans with amputated limbs throughout their childhood is
evidence that the amputation worked because they were alive to
(28:30):
be seen. Right, So, soldiers who died of their wounds,
who died because the surgeons tried to treat the wounds
quote unquote conservatively by trying to save the limb, well,
those soldiers died, many of them did. And then so
you don't see them. You don't see the quote unquote
(28:50):
failures either of an amputation that was unsuccessful or if
soldiers treated without amputation. So this visual image of veterans
and with prosthetic limbs or on crutches for decades following
the war, every single one of them is there because
(29:12):
they survived the amputation, and a very sizeable percentage of
them may not have survived without that amputation. And so
that's always striking to me to think, hey, you know this,
this image that we see as a failure of Civil
war medicine, as it being barbaric, is perhaps an image
of a man who would not have survived if that
(29:33):
operation had not occurred.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
And that the care for them long term is what
brings them to a place like camp Letterman.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yeah, Earl Hess wrote this book, End of the Crater,
really great book, but you know, talking about amputation. I
remember reading in the aftermath of in the aftermath of
all of this, there was a Union soldier that was
in his left arm. And as all married men will know,
(30:05):
that you wear your wedding ring on your you know,
on that little left left arms and there, uh and
and I remember he was hitting the left shoulder, so obviously,
you know, doctors have to amputate, you know, from the
shoulder down. And afterward he looks at the doctor and
he says, you know, I need to know where my
left arm went. And the doctors like pointing toward a
(30:26):
mountain of limbs that are piling up, and he's like,
you know, I really need to find my left arm
because if I come home without my wedding ring, my
wife will kill me. I'm thinking I'm thinking this. I'm like, Okay,
this man has just been shot. His entire left shoulder
has been shattered. He fears not that he does not
fear gang Green. He fears a woman's scorn. If I
(30:49):
don't come home with my wedding ring. She's gonna kill me.
If it's not a Confederate bullet, it's definitely my wife.
Hilarious to prove the point that has times change, sometimes
men just don't. John, you were kind of talking a
little bit about how camp Letterman sees both Confederate and
(31:10):
Union wounded, How are they interacting with one another considering
there's a whole civil war going on.
Speaker 6 (31:17):
Yeah, so I'm trying to I'm frantically now going to
try to go through some of my old thesis notes
here because I know there's a really good.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Quote in there.
Speaker 6 (31:26):
So I'm gonna I'm gonna talk around it until I
can find it.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, I mean to me, it's to me, I kind
of want to picture like, you know, you know, I
got you, Johnny rev Or, you know, Billy Yank, I
got you. You know I got you worse, you know.
Speaker 6 (31:41):
Yeah, So I've got the quote. So the general story is, first,
I want to emphasize that Confederate soldiers who are being
treated here are being treated exactly the same as United
States soldiers. It is worth noting that even at the
time they were noticing that statistically there were perhaps more
Confederate soldiers that were dying at Camp Letterman, but I
(32:02):
have never once seen we treated them less well. It's
also worth noting that ever since earlier stages of the war,
surgeons would be allowed to remain behind, not as prisoners,
but as still caring for the wounded. So Confederate surgeons,
a handful of them are here, and they are often
going to be the ones caring for the Confederate wounded.
(32:23):
But as we look at like food and the like,
and many of the supplies, Confederate soldiers are getting the
same amount as well. But I have found my citation
back to the Justice sylamon letters where he remembers some
of these tensions between opposing troops. They were in separate wards,
but again the tents are not all that far away.
(32:46):
So this Connecticut soldier. He wrote of a local choir
that would visit Camp Letterman, stating that they would often
sing patriotic songs near Confederates and emphasize verses such as
quote down with the traders or quote will route the
rebel horde. He wrote that quote that the two sides
quote generally agree pretty well, but also admitted we have
(33:09):
had a few single handed skirmishes in which the Red
invariably gets knocked down and afterward arrested.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
So again.
Speaker 6 (33:18):
It's it's not a bunch of you know, wounded soldiers
beating each other up in tents, but sometimes the the
tensions pop back up. And of course, you know, these
Confederate soldiers when they recover. Union soldiers that recover are
going to be ultimately sent back to their units. Confederate
soldiers once they recover at Camp Letterman, they may be
sent to another hospital for a while, but ultimately they
(33:41):
are probably going to be spending some time at a
prisoner of war camp elsewhere in the North. And that's
that's not a particularly good feeling to have. So yeah,
so as soon as you said that, I'm like, there's
a quote in here that I've got to talk about.
You know, these local civilian choirs coming to patriotic songs
directly outside the tents of the Confederate soldiers. I know
(34:05):
there are some other quotes where there is you know,
big feasts set up and some of the Confederate soldiers
kind of jostled their way in to get to all
the good food first and stuff like that. So there
are there are guards there are guards throughout the camp
that are are there to keep ordering to keep Confederate soldiers.
Where have Union soldiers from just you know, fleeing into
the woods, right, Union soldiers could could desert, Confederate soldiers
(34:27):
could escape, And so there are there are guards around
doing some of those things. And oftentimes those guards are
soldiers who had been wounded at Gettysburg but recovered a
little quicker, but stuck around officially performing duties rather than
being immediately sent back to join the Army of the Potomac.
So I think I think those are are are kind
(34:48):
of a view into some of the less ordinary things
that nevertheless are certainly memorable moments that these soldiers are
thinking about in their time to camera. Well, you mentioned
him earlier and how he's completely not involved. But let's
talk about Jonathan Letterman. How does his name get attached
(35:09):
to a camp that he's not act. Yeah, So Jonathan
Letterman comes in as the medical director for the Army
of the Potomac in June of eighteen sixty two. June
of eighteen sixty two, the Army of the Potomac is
not physically well because they're the middle of the Peninsula
campaign and the Peninsula is not a great place to
be in June, as a lot of our friends know
(35:31):
right now, because Virginia's in the middle of a big
old heat wave, and so there are a lot of
sanitary sanitation issues on healthy food, fecal contamination and drinking
water and sickness. The Army of the Potomac's in a
real bad spot, not even counting things like combat casualties.
So Letterman rocks up. He starts overhauling rations and cooking, bathing,
(35:55):
latrine standards. He's going to be overhauling some of the
hospital systems. He's going to be addcating for more record keeping.
Joe's earlier talk about some of the triage systems, some
of those can be traced back to some of the
efforts of Jonathan Letterman in the Army of the Potomac.
Jonathan Letterman is also really influential in the ambulance system.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
That the Army of the Potomac will be spearheading.
Speaker 6 (36:19):
And so Jonathan Letterman is definitely very, very important for
medical care in the Army of the Potomac. But he
is not at Camp letter because as the armies depart
shortly after the conclusion of the Battle of Gettysburg. We
may know that there's not a gigantic battle at Falling Waters,
(36:41):
just fairly small fights during the retreat. They don't know that.
So they are going to take the majority of their surgeons,
including the head of the medical department, with them. They
know there are lots of wounded at Gettysburg, but they
don't know if there's about to be a lot more
wounded somewhere else, somewhere in Maryland, somewhere in the northern
(37:02):
perish portions of Virginia. So Letterman will be with the
rest of the Army of the Potomac as they pursue
Roberty Leave's Army of Northern Virginia, and that will leave
for Monter surgeon Henry James to be in charge of
the hospitals around Gettysburg as they consolidate into Camp letter.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
John.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
How important are the roles of I mean, you mentioned
him a little bit earlier, but the United States Sanitary
Commission and the Christian Commission as well. How crucial is
their role related to the survival of wounded of.
Speaker 6 (37:36):
Camp letter Yeah, So it's it's a lot of those
those extra comfort things. The Christian Commission, of course, in
the name, right is religion, and they will be doing
a lot of religious services and distributions of Bibles and
prayer books. And I have seen some very powerful accounts
from some of the reverends that were with the Christian Commission,
(37:59):
and so you know, in addition to the tangible goods
they are distributing, it's really hard to place a value
on the intangible benefits of having reverends and pastors moving
throughout these tents to talk to soldiers, to help them
write letters or to say last rites over barriers. Right,
That's an intangible but is obviously incredibly, incredibly important in
(38:22):
nineteenth century America. So right there, I mean, it's hard
to quantify that aspect of the benefit of the Christian Commission,
but it was there the Sanitary Commission. We were talking
earlier about all of the bonus stuff that they are
helping to provide. Now, I still think that without these organizations,
the standard of care at Camp Letterman was still going
(38:42):
to be pretty good. But having these private organizations that
could oftentimes move faster than the government organization or then
kind of supplement those things with sending folks out into
the countryside to buy additional goods or coordinating with relief
organizations in places like New York City. You know, we
(39:04):
talked about just the wide variety of functionally luxury goods
that they're they're providing. You know, there was that astounding
account of you know, fifteen hundred pounds of butter, one
hundred and one gallons of oysters in one order, right,
and being able to add some variety to the diet,
(39:25):
add some heartier foods and all of that. And to
have these folks kind of moving throughout as civilians and
oftentimes women there were many female nurses as well, just
moving throughout these camps of soldiers that have been in
the army oftentimes for well over two years at this point.
(39:47):
You know, it's a big boost to them, I think.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
And so we see them treating thousands of men. But
then we get into say July turns to August, August
turns to September, and were now and then going in
towards the fall. What starts to happen And is there
ever a decision that comes about to say, you know,
(40:13):
it's time to move the wounded on from Camp Letterman.
Do it someplace more permanent if they need to, say
in Washington, d C. Or in Baltimore. Does it come
to a point where they just say it's time to
go ahead and bring an end to Camp Letterman. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (40:32):
So, so Camp Letterman was was never really intended to
kind of bring everybody all the way back to one.
It was in many cases just to get them to
the point where they then could be moved either back
to their units or back to, like you said, other hospitals.
Oftentimes most of them get transferred to Baltimore or Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
For the most part.
Speaker 6 (40:58):
And so and also, you know, it is a tent hospital,
and so Camp Letterman kind of closes fittingly enough on
November twentieth, you know, right after the delivery of the
Gettysburg address is when it kind of closes. Now, there
are still some wounded in Gettysburg. I believe there are
(41:19):
some wounded that remain at the Seminary Ridge Hospital in
the Lutheran Seminary later than that. I can't quite remember
those gates off the top of my head, but I
know there were some very long tenure wounded that were
being cared for at the Seminary. And go visit that
museum and see their exhibits and learn all about that.
(41:40):
But so Camp Letterman kind of closes up as we
kind of move towards that onset of winter, and many
of those soldiers will be actually some of them basically
spend the rest of the war in hospitals. Some of
them that I followed remain in a hospital until they
are mustered out in eighteen sixty five, either the end
(42:00):
of their three year enlistments or with the end of
the war. And so some of them will spend the
rest of their war in various states of treatment, but
they will be doing so in permanent hospitals in northern cities.
And so it is somewhat kind of gradual as they
get folks to points where they are able to stand
(42:23):
a longer train ride out and and all of that
that they are stable to do so, and they have
kind of figured out like, Okay, we've got these wounded
that need this kind of treatment still, and so you
see that in the medical records there. I've examined about
a thousand medical records for Camp Letterman, and plenty of
them you'll basically see, you know, transferred cured, being like Okay,
(42:46):
there really isn't any more treatment here. They may not
be going back to active duty military service but staying
in a hospital is not going to do anything else
for them, or you have transferred not cured, which is
basically they're good to move, but they're going to be
in another hospital for a couple more months before we
are able to send them back to their regiment or
(43:07):
potentially I dismissed them from service and send them home.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
So before we get into what happens after it closes,
and we kind of talk a little bit post war
and into memory, let's take a second in a hot
commercial break and we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Well, all right, so John, we're back talking about Camp
Latterman here, and we're kind of wrapping up a little
bit about the legacy of Camp Latterman here because obviously
it's because of Camp Letterman, and like you said earlier
on in the episode, that you know, the fact that
you know so many young you know, individuals who were
(43:44):
sort of born as children, you know, during the height
of the American Civil War. They're able to look at
these veterans you know, with amputations, you know, and their
survival means that this you know, medical treatment here in
you know, the mid nineteenth century was it. And it's
things like Camp Letterman that we have, you know, primary
(44:05):
examples of it actually working. So John, I'm actually kind
of curious. You said you kind of followed you know, uh,
you know several thousand medical records, maybe even the lives
of you know, soldiers, you know, pass a former residence
of Camp Letterman. Where did you find the most outstanding? Like,
was there something one in particular that's kind of stood
(44:26):
out to you?
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (44:28):
I mean, so they they leave Camp Letterman, and you
know there's there's a lot of them that will return
to military service. There are there are officers. Again, I'm
kind of frantically trying to, h you know, go back
through all of these, you know, piles of notes I
have here, trying to trying to think about something particularly touching. Right,
(44:51):
there's there's a quote from Uh it is Private Samuel Eller,
who had been with the twenty third North Carolina Infantry.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
He was wound three times.
Speaker 6 (45:01):
In one leg on July first during the assault by
Breeder General Alfred Iverson. So he gets a butt shot
lodged in the bone, a mini ball shatters his femur,
and a second mini ball goes through his thigh. There
really is no solution for that other than amputation. He
(45:23):
arrives at Camp Letterman in early August, and there's a
whole bunch of treatment records before he's ultimately sent to
a hospital in Baltimore and then to City Point for
a prisoner exchange with the Confederacy, where the record kind
of closes is improving and will probably recover though of
course he had an amputated leg, but Confederate Veteran Magazine
(45:48):
remembers that his farm in eighteen eighty five is in
pretty good shape. So he's out there with a crutcher
prosthetic limb farming with his brothers th farms described as
having quote a great amount of excellent pasture. So he's
lost a leg, but he's survived, and he is exchanged,
(46:10):
goes back home, runs his farm where he lives, I believe,
a good way into the nineteen hundreds, and there's even
kind of a photo of him with his prosthetic limb
standing on his farm in the Confederate Veteran Periodical. For
kind of another example, there's Captain John Hilton of one
(46:31):
hundred and forty fifth Pennsylvania Infantry who's wounded on July second,
and again he has his leg amputated and Ultimately, after
going through his treatment records, he will be transferred out
Camp Letterman at the beginning of September, and by December
he has returned to service with an amputated limb with
(46:53):
the Veterans Reserve Corps, where he serves until the summer
of eighteen sixty six, and then he comes back really
active in the Regimental Veterans Organization. In September eighteen eighty nine,
he represents the regiment for Pennsylvania Day, where he is
(47:14):
delivering the dedication speech for the Monument of the one
hundred and forty fifth Pennsylvania, you know, dedicating the monument
next to where he receives the wound that leads to
the loss of his limb. He's there for the nineteen
thirteen reunion for the fiftieth fiftieth anniversary. He lives until
nineteen twenty five, and he lives until nineteen twenty five
(47:38):
again because of that care he receives a Camp Letterman.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah, which is like we were talking about earlier. That's
the part that I think most people forget. They get
caught up in maybe the drama of an amputation scene
in a movie, or you know, a really gory fictitious
telling or just really bad. You know, you work in
public history. I have experienced in public history. I'm still
(48:02):
in public history. Both in public history, bad tour guides,
bad interpreters, bad you know, bad storytelling at historic sites
feeds the imagination to where you know, you get limb
piles everywhere, and this all this gory nonsense for the
sake of maybe selling an extra ticket or two and
leaving someone with a you know, entertaining story as opposed
(48:25):
to the truth. And they go to another place, or
they read another book where they engage with another source,
and all of a sudden, everything that they know, we're
told is being challenged by the fact that, you know,
a soldier in the one hundred and forty fifth Pennsylvania
moves to nineteen twenty five, and he's there, like you said,
(48:45):
dedicating a monument next to the place where he's wounded,
only because of the care that he received. Yeah, and
he's choosing to come back.
Speaker 6 (48:53):
He's choosing to come back, and he's choosing to be
playing a super active role in coming back.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (49:00):
Now, certainly you know, also in my notes, our stories
of soldiers who do not survive their amputation, who are
treated without amputation and do not survive, or soldiers who
undergo an amputation develop an infection, possibly undergo a second
amputation higher up on the limb, and then the die
of potential infections or other means. Right, So there, those
(49:23):
stories are there, But so are stories of people who
are able to recover and lead full lives, you know,
decades upon decades after the war.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
Bo I think, I think we're ready for the segment.
I think, so, you know the one I'm talking about?
Speaker 2 (49:45):
I do, I do, so, John, what boo Hicky is?
It's something that is just absolutely completely either made up,
absolutely ridiculous, complete fabrication, something that is just on your
mind that you have to debunk. What is it either
(50:06):
about camp Letterman, civil war science, civil war medicine. I
know there's a lot out there, because I've always found
very fascinating that that people have this over infatuation with
civil war medicine and science. But it's but they're like
fascination is with the Boo Hicky. You know, it's it's
not right, you know. So what is it now that
(50:29):
you want to debunk?
Speaker 1 (50:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (50:31):
You know, I feel like, you know, I had this
in my notes as a as a separate section, but
we hit it so much earlier. It's just this idea
that that Civil war medicine is just an awful, awful disaster.
That they saw a scene in a movie or or
in a television show, or they read an account of
like medical care of first manasses right like the first
(50:51):
time through, and just this one particularly horrible visual or
written account just really lodges in their head. And this
is what it was like all of the time for
the entirety of the war. In every case, when especially
at Camp Letterman, where you are two weeks removed from
(51:13):
actual combat, where you have evacuation of casualties off the battlefield,
two dedicated hospital spaces where you have people who are
there one hundred percent to provide excellent care for the wounded,
whether that's you know, physical ministrations by a surgeon in
an operating table, whether that's nurses cleaning the wounds, whether
(51:36):
that's sanitary or Christian Commission delegates talking to soldiers, helping
them write letters home, or just bringing them luxuries. That's
all there, and that is all the story of Civil
war medicine. And then, of course, you know, the second
half of that would probably be the idea that amputation
was awful and unnecessary and kills more people than it
lengthens the life of And I think as we've kind
(51:58):
of unpacked today, it was something that was was necessary
and was something that well impacting perhaps the quality of
life for these soldiers, made sure that many of them
were able to return home and have have any sort
of of of life at all.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
And there was actually, you know, anesthetics used. I think
people tend to forget, and so I think people are
obsessed with, you know all that. You know, people were
just drinking an insane amount of you know, whiskey to
dumb the pain, and you know, bite down a leather
strap or a bullet, you know, and it's like, no,
(52:40):
they had they had stuff, and things'd be too crazy.
Speaker 1 (52:45):
Here m but speaking of an insane amount of bourbon, said,
you put that right on the tee there for me
only if only the pitches would come across the plate
for the pirates the same way.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
Too bad.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
But hey, June could be that never mind, I'm not
even start it could be the month could turn it around.
I'm gonna try it. Uh, you know, we go around
the room, we say what's in our cup? All those things, John,
what you got?
Speaker 6 (53:16):
Yeah, So I'm going to give a pitch for public history.
Speaker 2 (53:19):
Right.
Speaker 6 (53:19):
This is this is the Monoga heel a Rye from
the west Overton Village slash west Overton Distillery. It is
in Scottdale, Pennsylvania. It is it is a good friend
of mine works over there, and not only is it
a historic site, but it is a functional distillery. It
is a free Civil War community, and that is associated
(53:42):
with a pre Civil war distillery operated by the Overhoult family.
So that might ring a couple of bells, and so
this one in particular is one of their harder to
get limited releases. It's the Monoga heel a Rye. So
it's like eighty percent rye. It's rye forward, and it's
in a pre Civil War style that is named for
(54:05):
the Monongahela River out in western Pennsylvania West Virginia where
that was the dominant style for much of the eighteen hundreds.
So I was just like, okay, civil war medicine. It's
it's got to be a whiskey. Hey, I got my
buddy stuff right over there, and I'll give them a
nice plug. It's public history, it's craft whiskey. I mean,
(54:26):
the boxes are all checked, but it's not Civil war medicine, right,
but it's not correct.
Speaker 2 (54:35):
Well how about you you got ghosts in your blood.
Here's some whiskey. I have some Tennessee whiskey that I had.
It is now gone. It was just as delicious on
the last as it was the first. So cheers to that.
It does have to be a whiskey when you're talking
about Civil war era stuff. But Joey, I'm scared to
(55:00):
does it.
Speaker 1 (55:01):
Does it have to be whiskey? Sure, it doesn't have
to be. All right, we're do I even won't even begin.
So I boiled some oat milk, oh no, and I
steeped a bag of cinnamon or chot the Sleepy Time
(55:22):
tea in it. I mean, look, you know, I'm going
to stop saying what I'm drinking, and I'm going to
start saying what I had for dinner or something. You
hate me. I don't need this anymore, but let me
just tell you what I had for dinner. Okay, all right?
I had Catherine made the most delicious bowl of yakamine.
(55:46):
And I did not know this, but outside of Louisiana,
yakamine is effectively not thing like it's it's a very
New Orleans culture based thing in the blend of Asian
and African cults together to make a really great protein
and noodle soup with broth and veshels. So Catherine made
(56:07):
it and like she was asking why I thought of it,
and I said, oh, you know, it's all sober. And
then I started realizing, like I don't need I don't
need old sober anymore. I don't drink. But it was incredible.
I mean, I've never well she put some of the places.
She put Yachamane Lady out of business tonight. But anyways,
(56:32):
the cinnamon archata and oat milk tea, that that was
the move. That was a very powerful move. And those
of you who keep up with me on other social
media when I'm not doing this, you also saw that
I set up my tea shop today in my office
at work. So I'm set for green tea and waters
and all kinds of great stuff forever. And I'll be
(56:53):
the Downer, the Debbie Downer on the What's in Your
Cup segment.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
All he needs is a British passport.
Speaker 1 (56:58):
He's just like, just give me citizenship.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
He's like that close.
Speaker 1 (57:06):
The citizenship.
Speaker 2 (57:07):
The day you start putting most peas on on chips,
we're gonna talk.
Speaker 1 (57:13):
Did you see the roast? Did you see this in
their roast?
Speaker 2 (57:16):
That's one thing somebody roast istory that looks delicious.
Speaker 1 (57:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (57:24):
So now talking about.
Speaker 1 (57:32):
Just a reminder, Homer History is brought you by Civil
War Trails. You want to help us out, do us
a favor. Visit civil War Trails dot org and find
ways to help spread the word about the world's ourgest
outdoor museum. You want to help out Homber History, though,
hop down to the buying me a Coffee page. You
can find the linked down in the description, and that's
where you can send in some member of questions so
that we can throw questions at our guests like John. Uh,
(57:53):
Johnny got away with an easy one tonight because someone
someone maybe forgot to ask the members want they're questions work.
But here is the good news for you. If you
go down to the buy me a Coffee page, you
get all these episodes all at once. So when we
do a series like this, instead of having to wait
a month to hear the entire conclusion of what our
(58:16):
guests have to say, you can just get it all
right in one fell swoop, one drive to work, two
drives to work, three drives to work, four drives to work.
All of a sudden, you have every episode of the
Gettysburg series, so be sure to check out the Buying
a Coffee page and send in your questions to us. BO.
I think, I think that that's yeah, pretty much it.
(58:39):
That's all I had. John. I want to thank you
for coming on the show. So appreciated you fitness into
your your schedule and dealing with this inside of all
of all the other stuff that goes on in your world,
and no longer being the editorial board during With all
the free time you had not doing that, you were
(59:00):
able to join us on Homebrew.
Speaker 6 (59:01):
So there we go, right, you know, more time for
more time for more projects.
Speaker 1 (59:08):
Bo. Until next time, John is always cheers. Let's go home,
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