Gettysburg – The Horrible Deaths
WARNING: This video contains graphic content – viewer discretion is advised.
By the end of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, there were more than 50,000 casualties, 7,000 soldiers dead, and more than 3,000 horses dead. During this time, the town of Gettysburg only had a population of 2,400, which meant that there were more dead bodies in Gettysburg than living residents.
A Federal veteran recalled years later what life on the battlefield was like after Pickett's charge. “Just as the sun sets.” I went to the top of the hill to look at the field. No words can describe this terrible image. The trail of the great charge was marked by bodies of men in every possible position, wounded, bleeding, dying and dead. Near the wall where the final battle took place, the men lay in heaps, the wounded writhing and groaning under the weight of the dead… I found my head reeling, tears streaming, and my stomach knotting at the sight. For months, the specter haunted my dreams, and even after 47 years, it returns as the most horrible vision I have ever conceived.
An anonymous New Jersey soldier wrote this account on July 4, 1863: "Burial parties were sent out, and those who could escape their commands came out to see the scene of carnage, and it was surely a scene to never forget. On open fields, like sheaves bound by the reaper, in the crevices of rocks, behind fences, trees and buildings; in the thickets, where they had slipped to take shelter and then died in excruciating suffering; near a stream, a wall or a hedge, wherever the battle had raged or where their waking steps could carry them, lay the dead. Some, with faces swollen and blackened beyond recognition, lay with glassy eyes, staring into the burning summer sun; others, with downcast faces and clenched hands filled with grass or earth, which spoke of the agony of the last moments. Here a headless trunk, there a severed limb; in all the grotesque positions in which unbearable pain and intense suffering distort the human form, they lay. A smile had frozen on the faces of some dead people; some showed the trembling shadow of fear, while on others was indelibly imprinted the grim stamp of determination. All around was the wreckage that the storm of battle leaves in its wake: broken caissons, disassembled cannons, small arms bent and twisted by the storm or dropped and scattered by crippled hands; dead and bloated horses, torn and tattered equipment, and all the painful wrecks that the waves of battle leave behind as they ebb; and above all, shrouding the earth like a fog, poisoning every breath, the pestilential stench of decaying humanity."
Another account, this one from a Confederate, wrote: "The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable: corpses swollen to twice their size, pulled apart by the pressure of gases and vapors…The The smells were nauseating and so deadly that within a short time At one time we were all sick and lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely.
Keep in mind that these accounts were written only a day after the battle ended. And it only got worse after that…
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