Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The civilian casualty of Gettysburg

Via Wikipedia
Almost 8,000 men died at the battle of Gettysburg, these 150 years ago.  Joining them in the Hereafter was a single civilian resident of Gettysburg, Ginnie Wade.

Miss Wade was a young woman who by chance seems to have been engaged to a Union soldier, Cpl. Jack Skelly.  Wade was kneading bread dough when fighting swept through the town.  The house she was in was riddled with 150 bullets.

One of those shot her through the heart.  Cpl Skelly had been wounded in a battle two weeks previously, and died a week and a half after Miss Wade.  Nobody had the heart to tell him that she had died before him.

If you visit Gettysburg and go to the Evergreen Cemetery you can see her monument, near Cpl. Skelly's grave.  Miss Wade is one of only two women to have a monument with a flag that is displayed 24x7 (the other is Betsy Ross in Philadelphia).

It's easy to look at history as nothing but a list of Kings and Battles.  History is made op of billions of stories of people who had their own hopes and dreams.  Some happily played out leaving little record.  Others, like Ginnie Wade, traded that lifetime of hopes and dreams for a spot in the history books.  I can't know, but imagine that Miss Wade would have chosen a different outcome, had she been offered a choice.

4 comments:

  1. Old NFOJuly 3, 2013 at 8:21 AM

    Yep, it's those little stories that are the REAL story in my mind... The diaries, the letters, THOSE tell the story at the personal level which can never be captured in the overarching picture...

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  2. ASM826July 3, 2013 at 8:59 AM

    Your series on Gettysburg has been some of your best posts in the last couple of years. Evocative and meaningful.

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  3. RabidAlienJuly 3, 2013 at 10:31 AM

    Thanks for posting these Gettysburg stories. I absolutely LOATHED (is there a stronger word?) every single history class I ever took in school. Rushing through history, rote memorization of names/dates/places/facts, puke them out on paper to get a grade and then promptly brainflush them over the summer. It wasn't until after a hitch in the Navy that I discovered biographies/autobiographies, and the joy of getting to experience history first-hand from the viewpoint of the guy in the mud (sometimes literally) that I got hooked, and have come to realize just how inaccurate a lot of public-school lessons actually are.

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  4. BorepatchJuly 3, 2013 at 1:49 PM

    ASM826, thanks. My fear is that I become too reflective or sentimental. I take it that I haven't (yet) lurched off the deep end.

    ;-)

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