Gettysburg would prove to be the high-water mark of the Confederacy. Two more years of brutal warfare would follow, but never again would Southerners come so close to achieving nationhood. The costliest battle of the war with 51,112 casualties, Gettysburg would afflict both North and South. But Federal casualties—23,049 dead, wounded and missing—could be quickly replaced in the Army of the Potomac. It was not so for Lee's army. The Army of Northern Virginia had suffered 28,063 casualties at Gettysburg, and the gaps in Lee's ranks would be difficult to fill from a Southern population already bled white. Characteristically, Lee blamed himself for the defeat. “I have no complaints to make of anyone but myself,” he wrote President Davis. Soon after the battle, Lee offered to resign. So did Meade, who had incurred Lincoln's displeasure for failing to destroy Lee's retreating army. Both offers were refused.¹

Lee made no apologies for his men. “The privations and hardships of the march and camp were cheerfully encountered, and borne with a fortitude unsurpassed by our ancestors in their struggle for independence,” he noted in his official report, “while their courage in battle entitles them to rank with the soldiers of any army at any time.” Lee's troops meanwhile were relieved to be back home in the South. “We are now, thank God, on Confederate soil, but oh, how many of our dear comrades have we left behind,” a North Carolina soldier penned in his diary. “We can never forget this campaign. We had hard marching, hard fighting, suffered hunger and privation, but our general officers were always with us…. Many a general have I seen walk and a poor sick private riding his horse, and our father, Lee, was scarcely ever out of sight when there was danger. We could not feel gloomy when we saw his old gray head uncovered as he would pass us on the march, or be with us in a fight. I care not how weary or hungry we were, when we saw him we gave that Rebel yell, and hunger and wounds would be forgotten.”²

(p.222) Despite the severity of their casualties, many of Lee's troops refused to view the Gettysburg Campaign as a complete failure. “Although we did not gain a victory,” noted a Gettysburg veteran, “still we did not suffer a defeat.” Many believed they had dealt a serious blow to the North. “If we had not gone into [Pennsylvania] it would have been better for us,” a North Carolinian wrote his family, “although I believe that the battle of Gettysburg has done more to strike terror to them than anything else.” Lee's men were satisfied that they had taken the war to the North; that they had brought a season of relief to Virginia; and that they had supplied their army with an abundance of Yankee livestock. If the march north had ended abruptly, they were reassured by the fact that they had not expected to occupy Northern territory permanently. They had failed to achieve the great victory that would end the war, but they remained confident that they had made a good showing and had retained the army's hard-fighting reputation. They were consoled by the belief that they had scored a dramatic victory on Gettysburg's first day, achieved a draw on the second—and were repulsed on the third only because they had tried to take an impregnable position.·⁵

A far greater calamity for the South, some soldiers believed, was the loss of Vicksburg and the Mississippi. “Our news from the west is worse than anything from Lee,” a Tarheel soldier confided to his diary. “Vicksburg fell on the 4th July and that day has been for us a day of mourning and bitterness. The picture looks gloomy & casts a smoky & frightful shadow over coming events. We can only look to God and hope for the best. He can inspire us and our weary Lee or his army with courage & wisdom & cast down the arrogance of our jubilant foes.” Back in Virginia, Lee's army experienced a renewed wave of desertions, but the vast majority of troops remained loyal and ready to fight again. “Our army is in splendid health and spirits, and is being increased rapidly every day by conscription and by men returning from the hospitals,” a South Carolinian in Heth's Division wrote home. “We get plenty to eat now and I am beginning to get as fat as ever again.” They expected to fight the Yankees again and expected to win. “The men have unbounded confidence in Gen. Lee,” Major Jones wrote his father, “and have not the least doubt that we will give Meade a great thrashing when he sees fit to advance.” Vowed one Confederate: “We will make them howl worse & more loudly than they are now laughing.”⁴

After Gettysburg, the tattered remnant of the 26th North Carolina remained with the Army of Northern Virginia, which took up a defensive line along the Rapidan River northwest of Fredericksburg. The Army of the (p.223) Potomac, meanwhile, occupied an opposing line to the north near the Rappahannock. Officers were promoted and commanders were reshuffled. Colonel Thomas C. Singletary of the 44th North Carolina temporarily took command of what had been Pettigrew's Brigade when his regiment rejoined the brigade from detached service. In late August, Brigadier General William W. Kirkland—a North Carolinian and a Gettysburg veteran—assumed command of the brigade. Major Jones, promoted to lieutenant colonel, resumed command of the 26th pending the return of Lieutenant Colonel Lane. When Lane rejoined the regiment, Jones became second-incommand, and Company D's Captain James T. Adams—who had been wounded at Gettysburg—was promoted to major and, later, to lieutenant colonel. For awhile, there was concern within the thinly manned regiment that it might be consolidated with other depleted regiments and lose its identity. Wounded veterans returned to the ranks, however, and new troops were recruited, bringing the regiment back to an acceptable strength.⁵

Rested and reorganized, Lee took the offensive again in October, moving to strike the right flank of the Federal army. At the battle of Bristoe Station on October the 14th, General A. P. Hill hurried Kirkland's and Brigadier General John R. Cooke's brigades into battle without the benefit of adequate recon-naissance. As the two brigades attacked what appeared to be the Army of the Potomac's rearguard, they were unexpectedly raked by a savage flank fire from three Federal divisions concealed in a railroad embankment. Although severely outnumbered, the Confederates courageously turned and assaulted the Federal line. Kirkland and Cooke were badly wounded, while Cooke's brigade was mangled and turned back with 700 casualties. Kirkland's Brigade pushed on, however, led by the 26th North Carolina. The men charged into the face of another deadly firestorm, reached the Federal line, and engaged in brutal hand-to-hand combat until forced back. More than 1,300 Confederates were killed, wounded or captured. The 26th suffered almost 100 casualties and the loss of the regimental battle flag, which was captured by the 19th Maine. “I can Say that I have Come threw a nother Storm of iron hail Safe and unhurt, while Some of our Company was kill on the field,” Private Thomas Setser wrote home. “[It] is a lonsom time in Company F now. [When] I look a round and See nun of our boys, and think what has becom of them, I cante helpe but cry…,”⁶

The 26th wintered near Orange Court House with the rest of Lee's army. By spring of 1864, the regiment numbered 760 troops. In May, the 26th was (p.224) engaged in the battle of the Wilderness. The Army of the Potomac was still commanded by General Meade, but Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant—newly promoted to general-in-chief—had come east to direct operations from the field. Grant boldly moved his army across the Rapidan River in an attempt to turn Lee's right flank. Lee responded promptly by advancing Ewell's and Hill's Corps—with Heth's Division and Kirkland's Brigade leading the advance. Kirkland, who had recovered from his Bristoe Station wound, put the 26th at the head of his brigade. The regiment was engaged in severe fighting on May 5 th, and held its own against a series of Federal assaults. Exhausted, the men were told they would be relieved during the night. No relief came; instead the regiment and much of Hill's Corps were struck by a massive Federal assault at daybreak. Kirkland's Brigade “became very near being stampeded”—according to Major Adams—but the 26th held on until ammunition was almost exhausted. At that critical moment, the line was reinforced by Longstreet's Corps and Grant's forces were driven back.⁷

The battle ended in a draw, but Grant—whose army more than doubled Lee's 60,000-man force—shifted southward, intending to put his army between Lee's and Richmond. Anticipating Grant's actions, Lee put his army on a night-time forced march and intercepted the Army of the Potomac at Spotsylvania Court House. The bloody battles of Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor followed. Heth's Division and Kirldand's Brigade were engaged in much of the fighting, but the men of the battered 26th were temporarily detached as support troops. At one point, the regiment drew the crucial duty of escorting a wagon train of grain needed to resupply the horses of Lee's artillery corps. At Cold Harbor, Kirkland was again wounded, and twenty-nine-year-old Colonel William Mac-Rae of the 15th North Carolina took command of the brigade. He would soon be promoted to brigadier general, and the unit formerly known as Pettigrew's Brigade, and then Kirkland's, would finish the war as Mac-Rae's Brigade.⁸

Mac-Rae was a small man with a big reputation for leadership. He had risen in the ranks from private to brigadier general, so he understood the enlisted man's needs and motivation. The men of the 26th, accustomed by mid-1864 to turnovers in brigade command, quickly built a loyalty to Mac-Rae that was reminiscent of their devotion to Pettigrew. “General Mac-Rae soon won the confidence and admiration of the brigade, both officers and men,” a veteran of the regiment would later recount. “He could place his command in position quicker and infuse more of his fighting qualities into his (p.225) men, than any officer I ever saw. His presence with his troops seemed to dispel all fear, and to inspire every one with a desire for the fray.”⁹

In mid-June of 1864, Grant moved his army against Petersburg, the key rail junction south of Richmond. Lee again countered by shifting the Army of Northern Virginia. On June 18th, Hill's Corps—including Heth's Division, Mac-Rae's Brigade and the 26th North Carolina—manned the extreme right of Lee's defensive line at Petersburg. A series of engagements followed in the summer and fall, and the fighting eventually became gruesome trench war-fare. Men died day after day in actions along the line that seemed to provide no advantage to either side and left the trench-bound troops demoralized. “We have to lie in our trenches day and night, rain and shine,” a North Carolinian wrote his furloughed brother from Petersburg. “Thair is some killed or wounded more or less every day by mortar shells or sharpshooters. The men have become so careless they don't care much for anything. John, I don't want to give any Body bad advice but if I was at home—I would stay thair till times get better.”¹⁰

At the battle of Reams' Station on August 26, 1864, the 26th was again engaged in fierce fighting. “I thought I would bee kill ever minute, for the ball giste ploude the ground all a round mee,” Private Thomas Setser wrote home. “[Then] we was call too attention and ordered to charge the yankees brest works, and we did so. tha run as soon [as] we got in fronte of them, we taken a few prisners, but we coulden take the battry and we Stop at ther breste works, and I tell you tay made the grape and Canister fly. that was a lode of grape Struck the breste work rite in front of mee, kill a man on my lefte and nock mee down. …” While Heth's Division waited for orders to assault the Federal line, General Heth called for a battle flag to be brought forward. The 26th's color-bearer reported to him. Heth reached for the man's flag, but the soldier refused to give it up. “General, tell me where you want the flag to go, and I will take it,” he vowed. “I will not surrender my colors.” Heth demanded the flag, but the color-bearer refused. Finally the general gave up. “Come on,” he told the soldier, taking him by the arm. “We will carry the colors together.” At Heth's orders, the soldier waved the flag back and forth, signaling the charge. The Rebel yell erupted from the line, and the men dashed forward. They broke the Federal line, and Hill's Corps took more than 2,000 Yankee prisoners.¹¹

There were few such moments of gain or glory near the end. To counter the expansion of Grant's mammoth army, Lee was forced to stretch his line at Petersburg to the breaking point. Fighting erupted sporadically along the line, (p.226) and the troops of the 26th were engaged “almost daily along their front and flanks” at formerly obscure Virginia locales such as Jones' Farm, Burgess' Mill, Belfield and Hatcher's Run. At Burgess' Mill on October 27, 1864, the regimental colors were again captured when several officers and a small body of troops from the 26th strayed too close to the Federal line and were captured by the 7th Michigan. The face-off at Petersburg continued until March 29, 1865, when Grant's army made a new strike against Lee's overextended line, and successfully achieved a major break-through at Five Forks on April 1st. The next day, Grant followed up with a wide-scale attack along Lee's front at Petersburg, which penetrated the Confederate defenses in a series of spots. One breakthrough occurred against Mac-Rae's section of the line to the left of the 26th North Carolina. The Federal victory forced the fall of Richmond, and sent Lee's army on the march that ended at Appomattox.¹²

By the time he surrendered, Lee had little army left. Worn down by the attrition of battle, large-scale captures and a flood of final desertions, the Army of Northern Virginia had barely 25,000 troops on hand at Appomattox. Present at the end was the 26th North Carolina. General A. P. Hill had been killed on April 2, 1865, and his troops—the 26th included—had been merged with Longstreet's Corps. When blocked by the Army of the Potomac at Appomattox, Lee's army was outnumbered more than four-to-one. Those present were still game for a fight, however: When the ragged ranks were drawn up in a final battle line, a soldier with two badly wounded arms was spotted in line without a weapon. “What are you doing here?” an officer demanded. “You can't fight.” Replied the bandaged Johnny Reb: “I know I can't, but I can still yell.” Lee would not needlessly sacrifice such troops. He made terms with Grant on April 9, 1865, and surrendered on the 12th. “I shall never forget the scene that followed [the news of the surrender],” recalled a North Carolinian in Lee's army. “Some … threw down their guns, others broke them against trees and I saw one man thrust his musket between a forked sapling, bend the barrel, and say, ‘No yankee will ever shoot at us with you….”¹³

When the time came for the 26th to stack arms at Appomattox, Colonel Lane was hospitalized with complications from his wounds, and Lieutenant Colonel Adams was temporarily commanding the brigade—so it was left to Captain Cureton to surrender the regiment. When heads were counted, the 26th North Carolina officially numbered a mere 131 officers and troops. In Company F, according to one count, there were four soldiers left. It was a (p.227) heart-rending ending for a regiment that had sacrificed so much. “I saw the old ragged veterans crying,” Private Columbus Tuttle would later remember, “as if their hearts would break.”¹⁴

After the surrender, some of 26th's men joined other soldiers lining the road for a last look at General Lee. “We boys were all on the roadside,” Jake Bush would later recall, “and as he rode along he saluted us, holding his hat in his left hand and saluting us with his right, never speaking a word.” The regiment's survivors—men who had depended upon each other for life—who had faced death together—now turned away to face a new and uncertain future. “Next morning we hit the pike and it was every man for himself,” one would later recount. “Too many together could not fare so well, so we thought it advisable to travel in less numbers so that people would not dread to feed us as we came along.” In small groups, in pairs or alone, they began the long journey home.¹⁵

Despite its long service in campaigns and battles throughout the war, the 26th North Carolina would always be associated with Gettysburg. It was there—among the Pennsylvania ridges, woods and fields on those two torrid July afternoons—that the regiment's reputation was established in the annals of military history. The men of the regiment who lived through the firestorms of Gettysburg and survived the rest of the war would never forget the bloody climb up McPherson's Ridge and the long, deadly walk to Cemetery Ridge. The milestone of memory to which the 26th's aging veterans would inevitably return would always be the grand and awful events of Gettysburg.¹⁶

JAMES T. ADAMS, the Company D captain who eventually rose to lieu-tenant colonel, at times commanded the regiment. At one point during the fighting near Petersburg the regiment lost sight of its colors. Adams mounted a stump during the heat of battle and yelled to his troops: “Twentysixth, rally on your commander. He is here if the colors are lost.” After Appomattox, he came home to Holly Springs, where he farmed, raised his family and contributed to his community until his death in 1918. A few years before he died, he wrote a brief history of the regiment for his niece. Otherwise, for more than a half century, he said little about his experiences in the war. “It was done,” explained his grandson. “It was over. What was the use ever to think about it or talk about it again…. [Of] the nine children and the more than 55 grandchildren of the Adams' I know only two who even know to what command he belonged much less any of the things the command did.”¹⁷

(p.228) HENRY CLAY ALBRIGHT, the commander of Company G and the only captain in the regiment who was not killed or wounded at Gettysburg, came through Bristoe Station, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Reams' Station without harm. The prolonged carnage eventually convinced him, however, that he would never go home. “I know you don't like this kind of chat, but I cannot avoid it,” he wrote a relative. “I never expect to survive this accursed war no how. I am just as ready to die today (and I might say as willing) as I ever shall be. … I am however in fine spirits and perfectly sanguine of success, ultimately.” After emerging unscathed from so many major engagements, Captain Albright fell shot in the head during a minor skirmish at Squirrel Level near Petersburg on September 29, 1864. He died in a Richmond hospital a month later. He was twenty-two years old.¹⁸

MCKESSON “KESSE” BLALOCK, the Company F private who took his wife Malinda to war disguised as a soldier, returned to the North Carolina high country with his wife after his medical discharge in 1862. There Kesse organized a gang of bushwhackers and became known “the terror of the mountains.” Operating from pro-Union East Tennessee, Blalock and his outlaw band—which included wife Malinda—blended Unionist guerrilla raids with mountain-style feuding. He was wounded twice and Malinda was shot once, but the two survived more than two years of raiding, hiding and skirmishing with Confederate militia—and were never brought to justice. After the war, the couple set up shop in nearby Mitchell County, where Kesse unsuccessfully ran for the state legislature as a Republican. They relocated to Texas for a few years, but eventually returned to the North Carolina mountains where they lived unmolested into the twentieth century. Malinda suffered a natural death in 1903, but Kesse's death was more dramatic. In 1913, he was fatally injured when he crashed a railroad handcar into a mountain gorge at age 72.¹⁹

STEPHEN W. BREWER, the commander of Company E who was wounded carrying the regimental colors up Cemetery Ridge, made it back to the Confederate line, but was captured with other wounded near Greencastle, Maryland on the retreat from Gettysburg. He was imprisoned in the North until near the end of the war, when he was released in a prisoner exchange. He returned home to North Carolina where he became the sheriff of Chatham County.²⁰

JAMES M. BROOKS and DANIEL BOONE THOMAS, the two soldiers from Company E who went over the wall at Cemetery Ridge with the regimental colors, were both imprisoned up North at Fort Delaware. Sergeant Brooks (p.229) was transferred to Point Lookout and freed in a prisoner exchange in March of 1864. He returned to duty, was wounded in action, but was back with the regiment in early 1865. A week before Appomattox he was captured again and sent back North to prison. He was released in June of 1865, and made his way home to North Carolina. He eventually took a job teaching school in Texas, where he reportedly died of tuberculosis. Daniel Boone Thomas survived more than a year-and-a-half at the notorious Fort Delaware prison before he was freed in a prisoner exchange in February of 1865. He moved back to North Carolina and faded into the obscurity of daily life.²¹

GASTON H. BROUGHTON, the Company D lieutenant who was wounded in the foot near the climax of the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge, spent the remainder of the war in Northern prisons. Somehow he survived the deadly diseases and harsh winters that claimed so many Confederate prisoners in the North and was released in June of 1865. After living as a farmer back home in North Carolina's Wake County, he took up a job in nearby Raleigh as the custodian of the State Supreme Court building. Eventually, age dimmed the vigor that had enabled him to charge up Cemetery Ridge. At age sixty-eight, he was granted a veteran's pension by the State of North Carolina. A stroke had left him “wholly incapacitated,” his physician attested. Broughton had no other source of income, the doctor noted, but was “worthy in every respect to receive a pension.”²²

JACOB “JAKE” BUSH lay on the battlefield for two nights after being wounded in the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge. Taken prisoner, Sergeant Bush was treated well by the Federal soldiers, not by a Yankee surgeon—who ordered him out of a hospital tent for Northern troops. “The doctor said, ‘Get out of here or I will kick you out right now,’” Bush recalled, “so I went out and sat down by the root of a tree and got as wet as if I had been dipped in a creek…. I never went into another Yankee tent while I stayed there.” Bush survived his soaking, recovered from his four wounds, endured imprisonment at David's Island in New York Harbor, and was returned South in a prisoner exchange two months after Gettysburg. He was granted an extended furlough and went home to North Carolina's mountain country. There he nursed his wounds, taught school and got married. He returned to the regiment, was wounded again at the battle of Reams' Station, but was promoted to lieutenant and remained with the 26th until Appomattox. Almost sixty years later, his account of Gettysburg was published by his hometown newspaper, the News-Topic of (p.230) Lenoir. “I went into the army at 19 years of age,” Bush concluded, “and came out with a little more experience than I had when I left home…”²³

WILLIAM M. CHEEK, the Company E private who redeemed Colonel Burgwyn's pocket watch at gunpoint, was wounded in the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge and became a prisoner of war. He spent several months at the David's Island prison in New York Harbor and at Point Lookout before he was exchanged. He returned to duty in mid-1864, but was captured again near Petersburg. He was sent back to Point Lookout until war's end, when he went home. Thirty-seven years after Gettysburg, he attended a Confederate Memorial Day address in Raleigh where the keynote speaker was William H.S. Burgwyn—Colonel Burgwyn's brother. Cheek shared his account of Colonel Burgwyn's last moments with Burgwyn's brother, who produced the late colonel's sash, gauntlets and sword. Holding the artifacts and remembering the colonel's final moments on McPherson's Ridge, Cheek was moved to tears.²⁴

GEORGE W. COFFEY and JESSE P. COFFEY were the only members of the Coffey family in Company F who survived Gettysburg unharmed. The seven other Coffeys in the company were wounded, and five died. Several months after Gettysburg, George was captured at the battle of Bristoe Station and was imprisoned at Point Lookout until near the end of the war. Jesse deserted on the retreat from Gettysburg, but later rejoined the regiment. On June 11, 1864, he deserted again. This time he went over to the enemy, was briefly imprisoned at Point Lookout, then joined the U.S. Army. Despite its horrendous losses at Gettysburg, the Coffey family survived and continued to farm the mountain country around John's River well into the 20th century.²⁵

THOMAS J. CURETON, the newly promoted captain who led Company B in the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge, remained with the regiment for the rest of the war. Less than a year after Gettysburg, he was seriously wounded while commanding a skirmish line following the battle of Spotsylvania. He recovered, however, and at Appomattox oversaw the regiment's surrender. He returned home to the Waxhaws region after the war, and pursued a career as a cotton merchant. In 1890, he penned an account of the regiment's actions at Gettysburg for John R. Lane. “I was engaged in every battle or engagement the 26th was in from New Bern to Appomattox,” he reminded Lane. “I am getting old and … would like to see it all written up for the truth of history.”²⁶

(p.231) JOSEPH R. DAVIS, whose brigade was ravaged by crossfire in the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge, was present at Appomattox. After the war he moved to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where he practiced law until his death in 1896.²⁷

JOHN R. EMERSON, the lieutenant from Company E who sent his wife a formal will when he went off to war, never recovered from the wound he received in the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge. Left on the field and captured, he died in the Federal prison at David's Island, New York, of complications from his wound. Back in North Carolina, his wife Martha received the letter so dreaded on the home front: “It becomes my painful duty to inform you of the death of your husband. …” Like numerous other Southern survivors of Gettysburg, Lieutenant Emerson became a prison camp statistic, buried in grave # 773, Cypress Hill Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York. At the time of his death, he and his wife were still childless.²⁸

ALEXANDER HAYS, the Federal division commander who played such a pivotal role in the repulse of the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge, saw his Blue Birds merged with other divisions when Grant took command of the Army of the Potomac. The reorganization left Hays in command of a single brigade. At the battle of the Wilderness, Hays was shot through the head and killed. He was buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh. Fort Hays, Kansas and nearby Hays City were named for him.²⁹

THE 12th NEW JERSEY, whose troops captured the 26th's battle flag on Cemetery Ridge, remained with the Army of the Potomac after Gettysburg. The regiment was present at Bristoe Station, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and the siege of Petersburg. When the Confederate line was broken at Five Forks, the 12th New Jersey joined in the pursuit of Lee's army, was present at Appomattox, and was mustered out of service on July 15, 1865. During the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, the troops of the 12th refrained from cheering or taunting the defeated Confederates. “Such plucky, brave fighters had won our respect,” a New Jersey veteran explained, “and we gladly shared with them our hardtack and coffee, as we swapped reminiscences of the times when we were foemen—now friends.” Major John T. Hill, the officer who commanded the Jerseymen on Cemetery Ridge, suffered poor health after Gettysburg and was discharged from the army in early 1864.³⁰

ROBERT N. HUDSPETH, the sole member of Company F to survive the charge up McPherson's Ridge unharmed, kept the lieutenant's rank given to him on Gettysburg's third day. He remained with the regiment through Bris-toe Station, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Reams' Station. (p.232) After surviving so much deadly combat, he “was taken sick with fever” in November of 1864 and died in a Richmond hospital. His epitaph: “Cause of death not reported.”³¹

PRENTISS KIRKMAN, one of the four Kirkman brothers in Company G, was the only brother to survive Gettysburg unharmed. George and Preston died at Gettysburg, and Bascom succumbed to his wounds in a Federal field hospital two months later. Prentiss survived the battle, but was captured by Federal forces on July 5th. Fie was imprisoned at Fort Delaware and then was transferred to Point Lookout. There he contracted scurvy—an illness his physician father could have cured—and died in prison one month before Lee surrendered. The Kirkman family was left to mourn four brothers who never returned from the war.³²

JAMES PL LANE, the brigadier general whose troops surged up Cemetery Ridge on the left until raked with a crossfire, lost almost half his brigade at Gettysburg. After the war he went home to Virginia, where he found the family plantation in ruins. A former college engineering instructor, he returned to the classroom and ended his career as a department chairman at Alabama Polytechnic Institute.³³

JULIUS LINEBACK and the 26th North Carolina Band remained with the regiment until the retreat to Appomattox. At least twice during the Virginia campaigns, the band serenaded General Lee, who complimented the musicians on each performance. “I don't believe we can have an army without music,” Lee observed. The band members also continued to serve as hospital attendants. “I could amputate a man's leg as well as some of the doctors …,” Lineback later recalled. On the retreat to Appomattox, the band was separated from the regiment. After securing some food at a house along their way, the musicians played a tune in appreciation for the handout. It proved to be the band's farewell performance. After trying to hide for several days, the musicians finally surrendered to Federal troops. “Our instruments were taken from us and that seemed to be the bitterest experience of all,” Lineback recollected. “I had learned to love my B-flat cornet more than all the rest of my few pos-sessions and to see it go into the hands of another and know that I would never see it again, was a very hard thing to endure.” Imprisonment for three months at Point Lookout proved even harder. “Here we soon learned what poverty, misery, helplessness and dependence meant,” recalled Lineback. “Dirt and filth made our tent or whatever shelter we might have, almost unendurable. We had scarcely any opportunity to wash either our persons or clothing, (p.233) privacy was impossible and our condition was as near that of brutes as could well be imagined….” Back home in Salem after the war, Lineback married Anna Vogler, the daughter of Moravian missionaries, and together they parented five children. He returned to bookkeeping until 1876. That year he became an administrator in the Moravian Church, rising eventually to church treasurer—a post he held until he retired in 1914 at age eighty.³⁴

JEFFERSON B. MANSFIELD, the color sergeant wounded during the opening minutes of the assault on McPherson's Ridge, also was captured and imprisoned. “I am here in the hospital; am shot in the foot,” he wrote home from prison on David's Island, “but I think that I can save my foot … I am getting good fare, am treated very well, but would like to get home.” He was freed in the same prisoner exchange as Jake Bush, was restricted to “light duty” for the rest of the war and survived to become “father to many children and the ancestor to many, many more.”³⁵

JAMES D. “JIMMIE” MOORE, the seventeen-year-old private who was the eighty-fifth soldier from Company F to be shot down on McPherson's Ridge, eventually became a prominent textile executive. After Gettysburg, he went home to the Globe to recover from his wounds. While recuperating, his family home was raided by Keese Blalock and his gang. Moore and the rest of the family fought off the raiders, and during a second assault one of them managed to shoot out one of Blalock's eyes. Back with the regiment, Moore fought at the battle of the Wilderness, but was unable to march because of his leg wound. Instead of going home, he joined the 1st North Carolina Cavalry, was involved in numerous actions and, by war's end, was serving as a courier to Confederate General Wade Hampton.³⁶

After the war, he worked for several years as a storekeeper in Indiana and then joined his brother in a mercantile business in North Carolina's Gaston County. There he married Martha Lewis, the daughter of the local clerk of court, and raised eight children. He also raised up a series of cotton mills and became a leading citizen in Gastonia. He served as a town alderman, cashier of the First National Bank and Sunday school teacher of the First Baptist Church. Exceeding his reputation as a businessman was his reputation for Christian charity. In a season of bloody fighting late in the war, a fellow Confederate, B.M. Tuttle, had shared the Gospel with Moore one night. “Awhile after they had lain down, father awoke and noticed that young Moore was gone from his side,” recounted the Rev. D.H. Tuttle in 1905. “He soon heard groaning in prayer and found him in a fence corner, face in hands and on the (p.234) ground, earnestly crying to God for mercy … Father then got down by him, directing him by God's word in the way to the kingdom.”³⁷

Respected and revered, Moore died at age fifty-nine—stricken at his Gastonia home by an apparent aneurysm. His death was front page news in the Charlotte Observer. “The whole town is in mourning,” the Observer reported. “He never needed to be reminded of a case of want,” recalled a colleague. “He knew every house in this town where there was trouble or need and he was at their service …” Back in the Globe, the hunting trails Moore had followed as a boy disappeared in new forests, the old family home washed away in a flood, and the Globe's population shriveled away in size when the farming community was by-passed by a modern highway. By the end of the twentieth century, there were few reminders of Jimmie Moore and his wartime saga even in the Globe—except for the wooded mountainsides that faintly resembled faraway McPherson's Ridge.³⁸

HENRY A. MORROW, the colonel of the 24th Michigan, was captured with other Federal wounded on Gettysburg's first day. On July 3rd, Morrow asked Confederate Brigadier General John B. Gordon for assistance in treating the Iron Brigade's wounded, many of whom had lain untended on the field for two days. That night Gordon provided Morrow with a dozen Confederate ambulances, ample litter-bearers and permission to move the wounded Black Hat troops to a field hospital. “It was a weird sight,” Morrow would later recall, “that long train of army hearses, as by the fitful light of a half-clouded moon … this party threaded its way among the blackened and swollen corpses…. [The] moans and cries of the wounded for assistance, and their supplications for water were heart-rending. Some were delirious and talked of home and friends…. But by midnight they were all tenderly borne away to receive the care they so much needed and so many a valuable life was saved.”³⁹

Morrow escaped being swept South into imprisonment with Lee's retreating army by posing as a Federal surgeon. He recovered from his wound and rejoined his regiment. He was given a brigade command in January of 1864, but was wounded again at the battle of the Wilderness—and required a six-month recovery. He returned to the front during the siege of Petersburg and was brevetted a brigadier general by Meade's order. Morrow continued intermittently to hold brigade command, but he was disturbed by the increasingly brutal nature of the war in Virginia. “The burning of private dwellings, churches etc. deserves to be reprobated as neither politic nor in accordance with civilized warfare,” he wrote in his diary in December of 1864. “It exasperated (p.235) the People & makes the struggle more cruel & bloody. It carries one back to a less enlightened & civilized age.”⁴⁰

On February 6, 1865, while again in command of the Iron Brigade, Morrow was wounded a third time at the battle of Dabney's Mill. It was a severe wound, but he recovered in time to rejoin the brigade when it was mustered out of service. At the close of the war, he was brevetted major general for valor in combat. In peacetime he resumed his law practice in Detroit, but soon rejoined the military. Commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army in 1866, he rose to colonel and commander of the 21st Infantry. Two of his sons also became army officers. While posted to Fort Sidney, Nebraska, Colonel Morrow developed a fatal illness and died on January 31, 1891. He was buried with military honors in Niles, Michigan.⁴¹

Colonel Morrow's counterpart with the 19th Indiana, Colonel Samuel J. Williams, was praised by General Doubleday for his “promptness, courage and skill” in defending the Iron Brigade's left flank on McPherson's Ridge. After Gettysburg, Williams remained in command of his Hoosier regiment during the fighting in Virginia. Like General Hays and Colonel Morrow, he too was struck down at the battle of the Wilderness—where he was hit by a cannonball and instantly killed on May 6, 1864. He left behind a wife and six children.⁴²

THE IRON BRIGADE—with which Colonels Morrow and Williams would forever be associated—never fully recovered from the dreadful losses it suffered on Gettysburg's first day. The casualty rate among the Black Hats at Gettysburg was calculated to be 65 percent, which included the 19th Indiana's 73 percent casualty rate and the 80 percent casualty rate of the 24th Michigan. Like the troops of the 26th North Carolina within Lee's army, the men of the 24th Michigan achieved a lamentable distinction at Gettysburg: They were said to have incurred the highest number of losses of any Northern regiment engaged in the battle. The brigade remained with the Army of the Potomac until near the end of the war, but lost its Western character when its depleted ranks were filled by regiments from the East. In October of 1864, the 19th Indiana was consolidated with another regiment and ceased to exist. The troops of the 24th Michigan remained with the reorganized Iron Brigade. In February of 1865, a few days after Colonel Morrow received his last wound, most of the brigade was detached from Grant's army and sent to New York and Illinois to keep order among new Northern draftees. The 24th Michigan was pulling guard duty in Springfield, Illinois when its long-time opponent, the Army of (p.236) Northern Virginia, surrendered at Appomattox. The regiment served as military escort at President Lincoln's funeral and then was mustered out of Federal service on June 30, 1865. For the Gettysburg veterans of the Iron Brigade, the long and bloody first day of fighting would remain the brigade's principal expression of duty and sacrifice. At McPherson's Ridge, it too “covered itself with glory.”⁴³

THOMAS PERRETT, the private who never forgot the sight of so many young soldiers singing “Maryland, My Maryland” at the Potomac Crossing, recovered from his Gettysburg wound, returned to the regiment and was promoted to sergeant. He was wounded again in the summer of 1864, recovered, and again returned to duty In early 1865, during the prolonged, deadly fighting at Petersburg, he gave up and “went over to the enemy” He was confined in Washington, D.C., until after Lee's surrender, when he was released. After the war, he lived in Faison, North Carolina, where he worked as a life insurance agent. In his last years, he engaged in a letter-writing campaign to preserve the history of the regiment's action at Gettysburg. In 1905, he penned an account of the Gettysburg Campaign, which he entitled “A Trip That Didn't Pay.” In it, he recalled the regiment's river crossing into Maryland. “Many of my comrades, companions of my youth, were then looking for the last time upon the receding shores of their beloved Southland,” he wrote. “The incident has lingered with me all these sad years as the sad memory of a troubled dream.”⁴⁴

JAMES JOHNSTON PETTIGREW was mourned by a multitude of Southern leaders as “the brightest star in that galaxy that North Carolina sent to Virginia.” Pettigrew's body lay in state in North Carolina's capitol, and business was suspended in Raleigh during his funeral. After temporary burial in a Raleigh cemetery, his body was reinterred in the family's burial ground at Bonarva Plantation. “I want no higher honor,” vowed a North Carolina officer, “than to have been a member of his command.”⁴⁵

SIMEON PHILYAW, the Company F corporal who prematurely fired the regiment's first shot in the assault on McPherson's Ridge, survived a battle wound at Gettysburg and incarceration in a Northern prison camp. After he was exchanged in 1864, he went home to the North Carolina mountains on furlough, and joined Kesse Blalock's gang of outlaws. Soon afterwards, he was accidentally killed when his handgun prematurely discharged.⁴⁶

ELI SETSER, the champion marbles player of Company F, died of the wounds he received in the first day's fighting. “Eli requested me to write to (p.237) you,” a North Carolina officer wrote Setser's father after Gettysburg. “I went by and saw him as we fell back…. He told me that he was willing to die and that he hoped to meet me in heaven. It was hard for me to leave the boys, and if I had not been an officer I would have been taken with them. Jo Setser lay close to Eli with his leg amputated above the nee, and Dan Courtenay lay near them with his leg broke below the nee. … I told them I must go, that the yankees was coming and with a heavy heart I took their hands, and a tear fell from our eyes and we parted.”⁴⁷

THOMAS W. SETSER, Eli's cousin, was also wounded at Gettysburg, but survived and returned to Virginia with the regiment. He lived through the fierce fighting at Bristoe Station and was promoted to sergeant. Wounded in the spring campaign of 1864, he returned to duty in the summer and experienced more combat at Reams' Station. “When I found the Regiment tha was on the front lines in too hundred yards of the yankees, a shooting at each other all the time,” he wrote his parents, “and a man couden look over the breste works with oute beeing shot in the head. …” By March of 1865, Thomas Setser was among a handful of Company F men who had survived almost four years of war. On March 29th—less than two weeks before Appo-mattox—he deserted to the enemy.⁴⁸

ISAAC R. TRIMBLE, whose two brigades followed Pettigrew's division in the assault against Cemetery Ridge, was so badly wounded that one of his legs had to be amputated. Left at Gettysburg with the severely wounded, he became a prisoner of war, and was not exchanged until February of 1865. After the war, he lived in Baltimore, and worked as an engineering consultant for a Northern railroad. He died in 1888 at age 86.⁴⁹

ROMULUS M. TUTTLE, the captain who commanded Company F in the charge up McPherson's Ridge, recovered from the wound he suffered in the assault and returned to duty in early 1864. He was wounded again at the Wilderness and on two other occasions during the Petersburg Campaign. Finally, he was placed in the Invalid Corps, where he remained until war's end. After the war he graduated from Davidson College, accepted a call to the ministry and pastored Presbyterian churches in Texas and Virginia.⁵⁰

GEORGE W. WILCOX, the Company H lieutenant who picked up the 26th's fallen battle flag after Captain McCreery was killed, recovered from his wounds. He was captured by captured by Federal troops twice, and escaped both times. He was wounded again at the Wilderness, but survived and stayed with the regiment until late 1864, when he was appointed captain in the 46th (p.238) North Carolina. After the war he went home to Moore County, married a local girl, and was elected to the state legislature, serving first as a house member and later as a state senator.⁵¹

JOSEPH J. YOUNG, the regimental quartermaster who prepared Colonel Burgywn's body for burial, was appointed brigade quartermaster in 1864. He survived the war and returned home to North Carolina, where he married, raised a family and enjoyed a long career as a prominent planter.⁵²

Louis G. YOUNG, Pettigrew's aide-de-camp at Gettysburg, survived the war, married, moved to Savannah and excelled in his family's cotton export business. Six months after Gettysburg, his fellow officers persuaded him to write a brief history of the brigade's actions in the battle. In 1875, his account was published in Our Living and Our Dead, a journal specializing in Southern war memoirs. About a quarter-century later, his profiles of Pettigrew's brigade appeared in Walter Clark's epic Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions From North Carolina in the Great War. Young died on May 31, 1922, almost 70 years after Gettysburg. His skillfully crafted accounts eventually became obligatory sources for historians studying Pettigrew's men.⁵³

ZEBULON B. VANCE, the 26th North Carolina's first colonel, became famous as his state's war governor. His determined efforts to keep Tarheel soldiers equipped and fed were remarkably successful, although his policies often grated on Confederate officials. At the war's end he was taken into custody by Federal authorities, who imprisoned him without charges or trial. After a month and a half in Washington's Old Capitol Prison, he was released without explanation or apology. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1870 but was not permitted to serve. In 1876, he was again elected governor, but halfway through his term the state legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate. This time he was allowed to take his seat. He served for three terms, and died in office in 1894 at age sixty-three. After a funeral service in the U.S. Senate, Vance's body was returned to North Carolina for services in the state capitol and burial in Asheville's Riverside Cemetery. As the funeral cortege moved by rail across the state, Zeb Vance drew a final crowd: Thousands of grateful Confederate veterans lined the tracks in his honor. Almost a century after Vance's Civil War service, his birthplace near Asheville was restored and designated as a state historic site.⁵⁴

HENRY K. BURGWYN JR., was mourned throughout his home state. “The life, career, and death of young Burgwyn,” eulogized the Raleigh Observer, (p.239) “convey a lesson to the youth of this Confederacy which cannot be too well studied and thoroughly profited by” His parents were heartbroken, but bore the news nobly After a long and dangerous trek from Gettysburg, Colonel Burgwyn's grieving servant, Kincian, arrived at the family plantation with Burgwyn's two horses and his personal belongings. Long after emancipation, Kincian continued to share a bond of friendship with the Burgywn family.⁵⁵

Burgwyns parents continued to speak and write about Harry ror the rest or their lives. They tried to recover his body during the war, but U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton reportedly refused to allow it. In 1867, they were successful. Burgwyns remains were removed from the Gettysburg burial site and reinterred in Raleigh's Oakwood Cemetery. After the war, Burgwyns family suffered from indebtedness. Henry Senior eventually filed for bankruptcy and moved with wife Anna to a house in Richmond. He suffered a series of strokes and died in 1877, followed ten years later by Harry's mother. Although revered as a war hero by contemporaries, Burgwyns fame faded with the passing of his generation. Eventually, he was known only to serious students of the war. In 1985, however, he regained a measure of recognition when the University of North Carolina Press published his biography. Aptly told by a banker-turned-historian, Archie Davis, the book was titled Boy Colonel of the Confederacy.⁵⁶

Annie “Nan” Devereux, Colonel Burgwyns fiancée, never married. Like Burgwyns sister Maria, she dressed in mourning attire the rest of her life. The Devereux family lost most of its fortune in the war. Major John Devereux, Nan's father, died in 1893, and a few years later the family sold Will's Forest. The stately home was torn down and the land was developed as North Carolina's capital city expanded. Within a century, only a few street names—Devereux Street, Will's Forest Street—survived as evidence of “the happy and delightful home” where a twenty-one-year-old Colonel Henry Burgwyn came calling on a nineteen-year-old Nan Devereux. For almost a half-century following the war, Nan taught school and lived with her widowed mother. Eventually, observed a Raleigh old-timer, “the widowed mother and her elder daughter, drawn nearer together by the circumstances of their loving dependence, [became] to the minds of their many dear friends and relatives, a precious reminder of the happy days of the past.”⁵⁷

The mother, Margaret Devereux, died at age eighty-eight. Two years later, sixty-eight-year-old Nan followed her, passing away at her Raleigh home on April 29, 1912. Her modest two-inch obituary in the local newspaper was obscured by reports about the recent sinking of the Titanic, presidential candidate (p.240) Woodrow Wilson's warnings of socialism, and Roald Amundsen's expedition to the South Pole. The days sports news reported Cincinnati's lead in the National League; a weather map charted the nation's high pressure systems; and advertisements trumpeted products ranging from new automobiles to Wrigley's chewing gum. Among such modern marvels who could imagine Confederate cavaliers, refined Southern belles and death-dealing volleys on a Pennsylvania hillside? After a funeral in Raleigh's Christ Church, Miss Devereux was buried in the family plot at Oakwood Cemetery.⁵⁸

Left behind among her treasured effects was a small envelope, yellowed with age, which was addressed to “Miss Annie Devereux—At Home.” In it, written in a youthful script, was a meticulously rendered poem typical of a nineteenth-century courtship between an educated antebellum maiden and a Southern gentleman:

• None so humble, none so weak
• But may flush his father's cheek
• And his Maidens dear and true
• With the deeds that he may do.
• Be his days as dark as night
• He may make himself a light.

Was the anonymously penned poetry a farewell from her young colonel, when he was bound for Gettysburg? If so, Nan took the secret to her grave. Ironically, just as death separated the two, it reunited them somewhat almost a half century later. Across the field of stones from Nan Devereux's grave stood a granite monument inscribed Semper Fidélis—“Always Faithful”—which marked the final resting place of Colonel Henry K. Burgwyn Jr.³⁹

JOHN “KNOCK” JONES, the major who commanded the 26th North Carolina in the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge, was promoted to lieutenant colonel after Gettysburg. His promotion was back-dated to July 1, 1863—the day he had taken command of the regiment following the loss of Burgwyn and Lane. When General Pettigrew was shot at Falling Waters, Jones temporarily led the brigade. “I understand Gen. Heth was pleased at the manner in which I brought up the brigade at Fallings Waters,” Jones wrote his father. “Had Gen. Pettigrew lived I think I would have been Col. of the 26th without a doubt. He as good as told me so several times after the battle.” Jones faced a challenging job after Gettysburg: maintaining a regiment that had been almost destroyed in battle. He also had to deal with personal loss. Not only had he lost his close friend and commander—Harry Burgwyn—along with numerous friends in (p.241) the regiment, but he had also lost a brother. A few weeks after returning Virginia, Jones learned that Wat had died of the wound he had received Gettysburg.⁶⁰

Jones led the regiment through the battle of Bristoe Station and then assumed second-incommand when Lane returned to the regiment as colonel. He remained dedicated to the 26th, and bristled in defense when rumors blamed the failure of the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge on North Carolina troops. “That we never came up is all a lie,” he wrote his father in August of 1863. “Tell a man in this army that North Carolinians failed to go where Virginians went and he would think you a fool.” Jones also remained optimistic that the South would eventually win its independence. On the eve of the bloody battle of the Wilderness, he wrote his father a cheerful letter in which he predicted a Confederate victory. “Our army certainly was never in so fine a condition and they feel confident of success,” he reported. “I had a long conversation with Gen. Lee a day or two since. He is in the highest of spirits, and seems to think our prospects have never been so very good. … If we are only successful this campaign, I think as Gen. Lee that another winter will find us all at home.”⁶¹

Knock Jones never saw home again. He was mortally wounded at the Wilderness on May 6, 1864, when Grant's army assaulted the line defended by Hill's Corps. Colonel Lane had been wounded the day before, and Jones had again resumed command of the regiment. The men of the 26th were exhausted from the previous day's fighting. In the morning, instead of being relieved, they were hit by a surprise assault. The men were lying in line when the Federals attacked. Throughout the war, Jones had habitually avoided lying down on the battle line. This time he made exception—and was struck by enemy fire while lying down. After he was hit, he was moved back from the front line. His best friend, Surgeon William Gaither, removed the bullet from Jones's body and confessed that the wound was mortal. “It must not be,” Jones replied. “I was born to accomplish more good than I have done.” He remained composed, however, and complained only that he wished he could live long enough to see Southern nationhood. He died at 10:40 the next morning.⁶²

In a letter similar to the one he had written Colonel Burgwyn's father, Captain Joseph Young offered condolences to Jones's father. “He had been so long connected with us,” Young wrote, “had been in so many fights and always came out unhurt that all hoped he would be spared. But, alas, death has deprived us of one never to be forgotten. He fell where the true patriot (p.242) could only wish—at the heart of the command in the face of danger…. His sense of honor, truth and virtue was of the purest type.” Jones's surrogate mother, Maria Spears, who had written that “the subject of her incessant prayers was to see John Jones a Christian,” apparently had her prayers answered. Beginning in 1862 and increasing after the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, a spiritual revival had swept through the Southern armies. “We have a large number of preachers here now from home who are preaching to the soldiers,” a Confederate in Lee's army wrote home in September of 1863, “and we have religious services in camp almost every day.” Noted another: “We sometimes feel more as if we were in a camp-meeting than in the army expecting to meet an enemy.” In this season of revival, one who appeared to profess Jesus as Lord was John Jones. “You spoke to me in your last letter on the subject of religion,” he had written to his father shortly before the Wilderness. “I can tell you this much—I often think seriously of such things and think I would be confirmed if an opportunity should offer.” After Jones's death, Captain Young reported how the young officer had come to demonstrate “great reliance and trust in Him who controls all things.” After temporary burial in a soldier's graveyard, Jones's body was reinterred near his mother's grave back home in Happy Valley.⁶³

JOHN RANDOLPH LANE never fully recovered from the head wound he received at Gettysburg. The wound continued to drain for the rest of his life and it also left him with a slight speech impediment—problems Lane dismissed as minor. He returned to the regiment in November of 1863, and was promoted to colonel. His commission was back-dated to July 1, 1863, when command of the regiment had fallen to him on McPhersons Ridge. He officially led the 26th North Carolina for the rest of the war, although his command was interrupted several more times by battle wounds. He was wounded three more times after Gettysburg—at the Wilderness, at Yellow Tavern near Petersburg, and at Reams's Station. His fourth wound, caused by an exploding artillery shell, appeared mortal, but he again surprised the surgeons and returned to his regiment. During the siege of Petersburg in the spring of 1865, complications from his wounds forced him to seek more medical treatment. He was in a military hospital in Danville, Virginia, when the 26th North Carolina and the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox.⁶⁴

When the war ended, Lane went home to Ore Hill in North Carolina's Chatham County and became rich. He did it, according to the Raleigh News and Observer, by “untiring energy, business ability and thrift.” With the same (p.243) determination and devotion to duty that had propelled him up McPherson's Ridge, he built a prosperous real estate, mercantile and livestock company. By 1900, his Ore Hill firm, the Brookside Farm and Land Company, boasted a new-fangled telephone, a grist-mill and a mercantile store—and was advertising “good farms for sale” along with “fine jacks and brood mares.” Success did not erase his characteristic humility. Lane was described as “a quiet, unimposing and unpretentious gentleman … of the Old South.” Along the way, he married Mary Ellen Siler—daughter of the founder of nearby Siler City—and raised a son and a daughter. “There was about him a grand simplicity,” observed a contemporary. “Without the advantage of a college education, without any previous military training, and without the aid of influential friends, Colonel Lane obtained his position in life.”⁶⁵

As the twentieth century approached and the number of Civil War veterans began to diminish rapidly, Americans began paying an increasing amount of tribute to the old warriors. In 1889, a retired Northern officer, William F. Fox, caught the nation's attention when he published a compilation of the war's terrible harvest—Regimental Losses in the American Civil War. In it, he cited the unique sacrifice of the 26th North Carolina at Gettysburg. “This loss of the 26th North Carolina at Gettysburg,” he wrote, “was the severest regiment loss during the war.” Other publications, including the Souths influential Confederate Veteran, reported the regiment's dramatic story, and attention focused on Lane as the 26th's surviving colonel. In 1900, he was invited to appear as a headliner at a Louisville convention of the United Confederate Veterans. Erect, dignified and humble, Lane electrified his audience. “I presented him in the convention hall to all his comrades,” recalled his host, “and, standing in his worn and tattered regimentals, stained in many places with his blood, he received an ovation that is accorded but to few men.”⁶⁶

In his last years, John Randolph Lane became a regional symbol of Southern valor and national reconciliation. “His name is known throughout the State and the South,” proclaimed the News and Observer, “as the valiant leader of the famous Twenty-Sixth North Carolina Regiment in the Confederate army.” He served as commander of his local U.C.V. camp, appeared at veterans' assemblies, and encouraged mutual respect and cordiality with the Grand Army of the Republic—the G.A.R.—which was the Northern counterpart to the U.C.V. As late as 1907, when age seventy-two, he mounted one of his horses and rode in a parade to unveil a Confederate monument at his county seat. “Colonel Lane wore his old uniform,” noted a reporter, “and although (p.244) seventy-two years old, he rode a spirited horse at the head of the procession, erect as an Indian, with all the ease and grace of an accomplished cavalier.”⁶⁷

As he packed for another veterans' convention in the fall of 1908, he fell ill. By year's end he was obviously failing. Typically he met his end calmly and fearlessly. “With a sublime physical courage and strong Christian faith he met the great Conqueror without a tremor,” observed a friend. “I never knew a kinder, braver, or more knightly man.” At 4 P.M., on December 31, 1908, Lane uttered his last words—“I am nearing the shore”—and died at age seventy-three. He was buried in the cemetery of his beloved Brush Creek Baptist Church, and was eulogized throughout the South. “Wealth, social position and political honors were not what he strove for,” observed a relative, “but to live for the good of his fellowman, and to follow in the footsteps of his Master. This was the ambition of his life.”⁶⁸

Five years before his death, Lane returned to Gettysburg. It was the 40th anniversary of the battle, and he was invited by the North Carolina Society of Baltimore to be a keynote speaker at a commemoration of the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge. Accompanying him was a Chicago pharmaceutical executive named Charles H. McConnell—the man who had shot Lane on McPherson's Ridge four decades earlier. McConnell, who was president of the Iron Brigade Association, had been introduced to Lane by Colonel Burgwyn's brother, William, who had met McConnell while on a trip North. Now, addressing each other as “dear old friend,” they were borne by a procession of carriages to a stage erected near the “High-Water Mark of the Confederacy” on Cemetery Ridge. There, before a crowd of several thousand, the two former enemies again greeted each other. “I thank God I did not kill you,” McConnell told Lane. Then the two old soldiers heartily shook hands. In response, the heavily Southern crowd sent the Rebel yell echoing again over the battleground at Gettysburg.⁶⁹

When Lane spoke, the crowd hushed. Looking down into the faces of his audience, he saw many who had witnessed the excitement, tragedy and horror on those unforgettable fields of fire. There too were many who could never imagine what he described; they were a new generation for whom those three days were merely history. “I was once a soldier …,” he began, and then spoke at length—an old man telling a young man's story of smoke and fire and death. He tried to tell them about the shouts and the volleys, about brave enemies in Black Hats, about dressed lines and fallen color-bearers. He tried to tell them about the courage and the confusion, about McCreery and Wilcox and Honeycutt—and about Colonel Burgwyn, down and dying. He tried to (p.245) tell them what it was like to look into the race or a twenty-one-year-old when the boyish light in his eyes was fading. He spoke of exhilarating victory and searing losses. “On the third day,” he told them, “the remnant with colors flying stepped out, with hearts of oak, to take part in that memorable third day's charge.” He gave them brutal numbers and awful statistics of bloody subtraction: 800 young and healthy men with homes and families and futures—reduced to so few and then reduced again to nearly nothing.⁷⁰

Always, he came back to his men. “Your valor is coming to be regarded as the common heritage of the American nation,” he told them. “It no longer belongs to your State alone; it no longer belongs to the South; it is the high-water mark of what Americans have done and can do.” He wept. In front of everyone and without apology, the old warrior looked at the tiny, aged remnant of the 26th North Carolina and he wept. “I give you the highest tribute,” he told them, “—a comrade's tears.” A blue-uniformed band of Pennsylvania veterans then broke into a spirited rendition of “Dixie,” and the audience—Northerners, Southerners, Americans all—erupted in cheers. In that rare moment of reflection—on the battleground at Gettysburg—surely John Ran-dolph Lane again heard the guns, saw the faces, recalled the horrors, mourned the fallen and remembered the words: covered with glory … covered with glory.⁷¹