July 10, 2019 • 37 mins
Military history rarely focuses on the women who lived through conflict and worked on recovery efforts. This episode covers women who assisted troops, buried the dead, nursed the wounded, and managed to survive the fighting in Gettysburg Pennsylvania.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
This is our show from our recent live appearance in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
(00:22):
Sort of. We did record that show, but as we
always warned might be the case, Yes, some minor technical
difficulties with that recording. Yeah, we had some technical difficulties.
We were there as part of an event called Great
Conversations at Gettysburg. This was a whole full day of
programming that was sponsored by the Gettysburg Foundation. We had
a great time, but recording an outdoor event is always
(00:46):
kind of a challenge. This time we had a rain
delay followed by very breezy weather and just surprising number
of motorcycle interruptions. Yeah, and as we were outdoors, so
all of those things can fired to make kind of
a slushy sound quality. Yea, So we are going to
have a studio version of this show rather than the
(01:08):
live recording. Also, we didn't call it this because folks
just walking through Gettysburg wouldn't necessarily know what six impossible
episodes means. But This is basically a six impossible episodes
edition of the show. It's just focused on Gettysburg's ladies. Yes, yes,
for this live podcast, we wanted to focus on women
(01:30):
in the Battle of Gettysburg, and there are just so
many to choose from. Some of the people we are
going to talk about we're local to Gettysburg, some were
connected to the armies in some way, and some arrived
after the battle was actually over. We just picked a
few favorites. If we don't have your favorite, it's not
because that person was not any good, just that, you know,
we had a select few to twos for this time. Also,
(01:53):
this is not remotely all the women who were there,
and we're going to be focused mostly on the women's
connections to Getty's Berg into the battle itself. So this
is not going to be a full biography of all
the women that we're going to talk about, but we
will jump in and first we will talk about Marie Tepe,
known as Fearless French Mary, who became quite a recognizable
(02:14):
character during the Civil War. She was born Marie brus
probably in Brest, France, and she eventually immigrated to the
United States and once she got here, she married Bernard Tepe,
who was a tailor in Philadelphia. In June of eighteen
sixty one, Bernard joined the twenty seven Pennsylvania Infantry, and
he really wanted Marie to stay behind and mind their
(02:34):
tailor shop. She wanted to go with him, though, so
she became a vivandiere, which is a French term for
uniformed women who traveled with the armies to kind of
bolster the troops morale. A lot of times they acted
as merchants and sold things like food and tobacco. Americans
learned about vivandiere during the Crimean War, and during the
Civil War there were women in this role on both
(02:56):
sides of the fighting. Marie bought things like whiskey, food, tobacco,
and various necessities to then sell to the soldiers. She
carried her whiskey in a small keg, and she filled
that keg with water when she couldn't get whiskey and
sold water instead. And she fought when she had to,
and she also helped care for the wounded. She was
paid a soldiers salary, plus an extra five cents a
(03:20):
day if she was doing hospital work. At some point,
Marie left the seven Pennsylvania Inventory and Bernard Tepe. The story,
as reported by other people, was that several soldiers, one
of them being her husband, broke into her tent and
stole six dollars from her. It is always tricky to
try to convert currency from that long ago to today's dollars,
(03:43):
but that was a huge amount of money. It would
be a huge amount of money today if someone stole
that from me, so at that time that was a fortune. Well,
and even if like her husband had just broken in
and stolen at twenty like, that's still not cool. Theft
is theft, but it really was quite a large um.
But she did not stay gone from the picture for long.
(04:03):
Irish immigrant Charles H. T. Collis had previously served in
the eighteenth Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, and after his enlistment was over,
he decided to start his own volunteer unit, and he
wanted to style this unit after the French light infantry
troops known as the Zuave, patterning the uniforms after their
colorful pants, jackets, and turbans. At first, he had a
(04:25):
small group known as the Zouave d'a rik or Collis's Zuav.
They eventually became the fourteenth Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. As had
been the case with the Vivandiere, Americans first experience to
the Zuave was during the Crimean War, and then there
was Quave style units on both sides of the Civil War.
Just to be clear, although the earliest French Zuave troops
(04:47):
were from Northern Africa, eventually these units associated with the
French army were made up of Europeans, and the zuab
units in the Civil War, even though they might have
some nod the idea of Africa, they were made up
of white troops. Collis wanted his unit to have a Zizandiere.
Either he recruited Marie or she simply heard about what
he was doing and volunteered to join. She once again
(05:10):
sold provisions, cooked and cared for the wounded. She also
delivered water and supplies to the front lines, and doing
that she actually took a bullet in the ankle at Fredericksburg.
She was recovered enough to carry water to the troops
at Chancellorsville, and there she was under so much heavy
fire that people described her skirts as being riddled with
bullet holes. She was awarded the Kearney Cross for valor
(05:34):
on May sixteenth of eighteen sixty three, but she refused
to wear it. She said she did not want a present.
By the Battle of Gettysburg, Marie was a recognizable figure
for much of the Union army in the area. She
had also started carrying a red, white and blue keg
after her first keg was shattered by a bullet. She
was there during the battle, and she came through all
of that unharmed. Although it does not appear that she
(05:56):
left when the soldiers left. There's actually a picture of
her standing on Cemetery Hill in Gettysburg taken some time afterward,
and it's possible that she stayed behind to help care
for the wounded, and then she joined back up with
her unit. Later after the war, she married Corporal Richard Leonard,
and she was photographed with her keg at a reunion
in eight Eventually, she and Richard divorced, and she died
(06:19):
of an apparent suicide in nineteen o one. Before we
move on, we should really note that although Marie was
in combat at various times and she was paid a
soldier salary, she was not actually there as a soldier.
But there were female soldiers at Gettysburg. There were women
like Mary's seas Goal, who disguised herself as a man
so that she could fight alongside her husband. And there
(06:39):
are other people whose stories and identities are less clear,
people who were found to have female anatomy after being
injured or killed in combat. There are at least five documented,
including Sea's Goal too for the Union side, and three
for the Confederacy, although it is possible that there were
many more who went unnoticed and undocumented. Next, we'll have
(07:01):
somebody who will be familiar to people who have seen
the women's memorial at Gettysburg, and that's Elizabeth Thorne. She
was born in Germany as Elizabeth Catherine Masser, and then
after immigrating to the United States, she married John Peter Thorne,
who went by Peter. They had three sons before the
Civil War started, and then Peter joined the army in
August of eighteen sixty two. Peter was the caretaker of
(07:23):
Evergreen Cemetery and the family lived in the cemetery's art
shaped gatehouse, which still stands today. When Peter joined the army,
Elizabeth took over for him as caretaker while also taking
care of their children, and when the Battle of Gettysburg began,
She was also about six months pregnant. Six months pregnant
and taking care of three little boys and acting as
(07:45):
the caretaker of the cemetery. When the Confederate army started
to arrive in Gettysburg at the end of June, they
requisitioned food from the Thorn household, and then when the
Federal army arrived a few days later, Elizabeth helped General
Oliver Otis Howard get the Layo land. She sort of
showed him which roads went where and what some of
the local backways were that the Confederacy might not know about.
(08:07):
She also provided dinner for some of the officers, although
by that point she really did not have much left
as thanks though, some of Otis's men helped her move
some of the family's valuables down into the cellar for safekeeping,
and they also told her that if she were ordered
to leave the area, she should do so immediately, and
that cemetery was part of Cemetery Hill, which became an
(08:28):
active battlefield. On July two, the family was ordered to evacuate,
although Elizabeth came back during the night to check on things,
and she found that the families hogs had been killed
and that the gatehouse was full of wounded soldiers. She
left again to try to find food and shelter, and
this time she stayed away until July seven. Once the
(08:49):
family got back, they found that their home had just
been ransacked, including what they had moved into the cellar.
Amputations had been performed on their beds, so their feather
beds and betting were almos beyond repair. It took her
in three women days of Washington fix them, and that
was after they first repaired the pump, and some of
what they had was really just beyond repair. There were
(09:10):
also dead bodies the waiting burial outside, along with the
bodies of horses that had been killed in the battle.
But Elizabeth Thorn is most well known for what happened
after all of that. She had run into the president
of the cemetery on her way home, and he told
her that there was more work waiting for her than
she could possibly do. In her own account, in the
days after the battle, she wrote, quote, I got a
(09:33):
note from the President of the Cemetery, and he said,
Mrs Thorn, it is made out that we will bury
the soldiers in our cemetery for a while. So you
go for that piece of ground and commenced, sticking off
lots and graves as fast as you can make them. Well,
you may know how I felt. My husband in the army,
my father an aged man. Yet for all the foul air,
(09:53):
we two started in. I stuck off the graves, and
while my father finished one, I had another one started.
They did this in just terrible heat and filth and stench,
because this was July and some of these bodies had
been decaying for days. Later on, she had some friends
who helped, but both of them became very ill and
had to leave. A lot of people noted that the
(10:16):
men who came to help her got too sick to
continue on, and she was out there pregnant, carrying on
with it. These burials went on for weeks. She buried
thirteen bodies on August eleven, which was more than a
month after the battle. They were still burying the dead
up until Gettysburg National Cemetery opened in October. That was
formally dedicated in November, but at that point a lot
(10:37):
of bodies had already been buried or reburied there. Some
of the bodies buried in Evergreen were ultimately moved to
the National Cemetery. In the end, Elizabeth buried a hundred
and five people with very little help. Ninety one of
those were soldiers and fourteen were civilians. She wasn't compensated
for the additional labor, or for the loss of her property,
or the cost of cleaning and repairing the gatehouse. This
(11:00):
was also a tiny, tiny fraction of the work that
needed to be done. Gettysburg itself had a population of
about twenty one people, but about eleven thousand people died
as a result of the battle. About seven thousand died
of their wounds immediately, and the rest followed in the
days and weeks afterward. Elizabeth's daughter, Rose Mead Thorn, was
(11:20):
born the September after the battle, and her middle name
was named after General George Mead, who had commanded the
Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg. Peter Thorne returned from
the war in eighteen sixty five, and he and Elizabeth
both died in nineteen o seven and two thousand two,
the Gettysburg Women's Civil War Memorial was unveiled. It depicts
Elizabeth Thorne clearly exhausted and pregnant with a shovel, and
(11:43):
although she is the woman who was depicted in this memorial.
It is a memorial to all the women. And now
we're going to take a quick break and have a
little word from one of the sponsors to keep stuff
you missed in history class going. So we talked just
before the break about how the number of people killed
(12:05):
in battle at Gettysburg was more than five times greater
than Gettysburg's population of people living there, and the gap
between the town's population and the number of wounded was
even greater. Between twenty thousand and thirty thousand people were wounded,
most of them stayed in Gettysburg for at least some
time after the battle, and our next subject as an
(12:25):
example of how long this situation remained really critical. The
active fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg took place between
July one and third. Euphemia Mary Goldsboro arrived around July twelfth.
By that point, there was still a lot of work
to do. Goldsboro was a nurse and one of many
women from both sides of the war who went to
(12:45):
Gettysburg during the battle's aftermath to try to care for
the injured and dying soldiers. Goldsboro, who was known as Effie,
was one of many Confederate supporters living in Baltimore, Maryland,
She and other women there had been preparing for the
fighting to come to them, so when Gettysburg ended in
a Union victory and tremendous casualty numbers, they traveled from
(13:06):
Baltimore to assist. When they arrived in Gettysburg, conditions were
just really dire. Nearly all of the doctors and the
surgeons had left with their respective armies, so the very
few who were left behind were so overwhelmed that they
could really only focus on the most urgent needs. Pennsylvania
Hall at Gettysburg College was being used as a hospital
(13:27):
for wounded from both sides, and that is where Goldsboro
started working when she arrived. Here is how an unknown
Confederate soldier described the conditions there quote. Unless it was
a case of amputation needed immediately or the stopping of hemorrhage,
they had not time to attend to anyone. Thus, for
the first two weeks, there were no nurses, no medicines,
(13:48):
no kinds of food proper for men in our condition
and for men who were reduced to mere skeletons from
severe wounds and loss of blood. The floor was a
hard bed with only a blanket on it. Ventually, Goldsboro
was assigned to Camp Letterman, which was a hospital camp
set up near the battlefield. Goldsboro was in charge of
a word with a hundred patients, fifty from each side,
(14:10):
and the words of that same Confederate soldier quote. Miss
Goldsborough recognized the importance of showing no partiality, and many
of both armies owed their lives to her good nursing,
common sense, and justice, while she gladly forgot party spirit
of the time and saw the necessity of sacrificing herself
to the good of the southern wounded dying soldiers of
the Confederate Army. She remained their nine weeks, working incessantly
(14:32):
forgetting the world and self, living only to comfort and
support the suffering and dying. One of the men that
she tried to save was Lieutenant Colonel Waller Tazewell, Patent
of Virginia, who had been shot through the lung and
his condition had reached a point that he needed to
be propped up to be able to breathe. But there
was just nothing there available for him to be propped
up on, and so Goldsboro offered herself sitting on the
(14:56):
floor and letting them secure him to her back, so
they were basically back to and she was kind of
forming a chair for him, and although she sat there
overnight without moving, his condition was too grave and he
died on July twenty one. Although she cared for men
without regard to what side they had been on, her
work was not entirely above board. She knew that the
surviving Confederate soldiers were going to be transferred to prisons
(15:18):
once they were well enough, and she thought that they
should have proper clothes and boots when they went, But
it was against the rules to give them these things,
probably because of the risk that they might try to
escape if they had them. So she came up with
an excuse to go into town, and she came back
with clothes and boots secured up underneath her hoop skirt,
hoping that they wouldn't bang together or fall out when
(15:39):
she made her way past the Union guards. This worked.
Goldsboro left Gettysburg after about nine weeks, shortly after the
death of a Texas soldier named Samuel Watson, who she seemed,
based on her diary, to have really become quite attached to.
She returned home and at first her family hardly knew
her because she was so frail and exhausted, But eventually
(16:01):
she recovered and she started smuggling again, this time to
try to get things like male clothes and supplies to
imprisoned Confederate men. She was also a courier and a spy,
and she used a lap desk with hidden compartments to
smuggle dispatches. She was ultimately caught while trying to help
a prisoner escape, and her quote, treasonable plans and letters
(16:21):
and traitorous poetry were confiscated. She was sentenced to banishment
for the duration of the war. By coincidence, she was
sent to Virginia on the same boat as Belle Boyd,
who previous hosts of the podcast have done an episode on.
She apparently did not like bell Boyd. Very curious about
what the situation was there, but I did not look
into it. She referred to Boyd as quote that horrid woman.
(16:45):
Aside from demonstrating how Gettysburg's aftermath stretched on after the battle,
Goldsborough's story also illustrates how a lot of women put
aside their political leanings to care for the sick, injured,
and dying. Goldsboro Let's be clear was a star supporter
of the Confederacy, but at the battlefield's hospital, she gave
compassionate care to anyone who needed it, no matter what
(17:07):
side of the battle they had fought on. Outside of
the medical community, though this definitely was not the case
for all of gettysburg civilian population, a lot of them
refused to harbor or assist Confederate sympathizers, including refusing to
let sympathetic nurses board with them, and Goldsboro and other
Confederate supporters were viewed with very understandable suspicion within their
(17:28):
medical work as well. That same unknown soldier whose account
we were reading from earlier reported that the reason her
ward was half and half Federal and Confederate troops was
just to make sure she didn't do anything treasonous. The
next woman we are going to talk about is Margaret Divitt.
You'll also see that spelled Devitt or sometimes even with
an a as Davitt, and she was also known as
mag Palm. She was part of Gettysburg's black community. There
(17:51):
were people of African descent in Gettysburg for almost as
long as there were Europeans. Some of the first Europeans
to settle in the area brought enslaved Africans with them.
Before that point, the area had been a hunting ground
and a travel route for the native peoples in the area,
but what is now Gettysburg does not appear to have
ever been home to a permanent indigenous settlement. Of course,
(18:13):
there is a whole history there that is outside of
the scope of what we were talking about in this
particular podcast. Pennsylvania passed an Act for the gradual abolition
of slavery in seventeen eighties, so by the Civil War,
Gettysburg's black community was free and numbered close to two
hundred people are not quite ten percent of the population.
Gettysburg had a school for black children and an African
(18:34):
Methodist Episcopal church. Because of its proximity to the Mason
Dixon line, Gettysburg was home to a lot of underground
railroad activity. About a third of its black residence in
eighteen sixty had been liberated or had liberated themselves from
Maryland or Virginia. But it was also an incredibly dangerous
place to be as a black person. Being so close
(18:56):
to slave territory was a constant risk, especially in the
light a fugitive slave laws that encouraged the capturing of
people and taking them into slave territory, regardless of whether
they had been previously enslaved or not. So Margaret Palm,
who had been born Margaret Divitt or maybe Davitt, had
direct experience with these dangers. She had been the target
(19:17):
of an attempted capture herself. Her employer's son, David Schick,
described it this way quote On this occasion, she was
attacked by a group of men who made the attempt
to kidnap her and take her south where they expected
to sell her and derive quite a prophet. She was
a powerful woman, and they would have from the sale
derived quite a prophet. These men succeeded in tying Mag's hands.
(19:38):
She was fighting them as best she could. With her
hands tied, she would attempt to slow them and succeeded
in one instance in catching an attacker's thumb in her
mouth and bit the thumb off. When we did this
as our live show, there was definitely some cheers of
support for Meg at this moment. Rightly so. In eighteen
sixties three, Palm was about twenty seven years old, She
(20:00):
had at least one child, and she was living with
a man named Alf Palm. They were tenants on the
land of Abraham Bryan, a free black man who had
lived in the area for about twenty years. Although a
census taker listed her occupation as mistress Harlott, it appears
that she actually had a job working cleaning and doing laundry.
It appears that the census taker listed that as her
(20:22):
occupation because she and Alf were not married at the time. Yeah,
I have some words for that census taker. As the
Confederate Army approached Gettysburg, many of its black residents fled.
They knew that if they stayed they were likely to
be captured and enslaved. That had happened and lots of
other towns that the army had moved through as they
(20:43):
made their way into Union territory. But leaving was really
also a risk. People would be leaving their jobs behind
as well. They would have to go without income for
an unknown amount of time until the danger had passed.
They would also be leaving behind personal possessions which were
really likely to be taken, damaged, or destroy Foyd. So
Margaret was one of the people who stayed to act
(21:03):
as a lookout and warn the black community when they
really could not wait any longer to go, and with
her warning, many of Gettysburg's black residents did successfully evacuate
before the battle began. Some that could not or did
not leave were sheltered by their white employers or other friends,
but this did not always totally work out. Uh There
is at least one account of two black women who
(21:25):
were sheltered in the cellar, but then when Confederate officers
commandeered that home, those women were forced to come out
and cook and care for them. At the same time,
an unknown number of Gettysburg's black residents were captured by
the Confederates and marched out of town. The house that
Margaret and alf we're renting was largely destroyed in the battle.
A lot of the fighting at Gettysburg was very urban,
(21:48):
but she and her family survived. Her life after the
war was a lot like it had been before. She
continued to make a living by cleaning, doing laundry, and
working as a porter. She and other black women also
retrieved you reforms from soldiers who had been wounded or killed.
They cleaned these uniforms, repaired them, and sent them back
to the Union Army to reuse. Margaret Palm eventually saved
(22:09):
up enough money to buy property of her own, and
she also became known as an eccentric character around town,
nicknamed Meg Palm at this point, and there were embellished
stories recounting her daring do before and during the battle
and her adventures afterward. Often these were reported in newspapers,
but in those accounts, her speech was rendered as the
(22:29):
sort of imagined dialect of enslaved people living on plantations
in the South just is not how she spoke, right.
It was very similar to our previous episode about the
ain't i Ale woman's speech and how it was just
sort of a made up, imagined wave of talking. We
don't entirely know how she felt about becoming this kind
of local celebrity, but she definitely did not appreciate how
(22:53):
other people kind of took her story over for themselves
and turned her into a caricature. She took care to
tell her friends and her face only about what she
had done in her own words. She also had a
picture of herself taken later on, posed to show the
way that her assailants had tried to bind her hands.
Decades later, her great great granddaughter Catherine Carter related these
(23:14):
family stories to another woman named Margaret. That was Margaret S. Creighton,
author of the Colors of Courage Gettysburg's Forgotten History. They
especially talked about her fighting back against those attempted captors.
Almost thirty years after palms eighteen ninety six death, Elsie
Singmaster published A Boy at Gettysburg, which used Palm as
the inspiration for the character Maggie Bluecoat, and that fictional
(23:38):
character was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and wore
an officer's jacket from the War of eighteen twelve, thus
her Bluecoat nickname. It is possible that the real Margaret
was involved with the Underground Railroad and with Gettysburg's Slave
Refuge Society, which was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
but in some accounts her real story has been really
(23:59):
conflated in fused with this fictional character. If she was
involved with the Underground Railroad, she probably would have been
a lot more secretive about it than the fictional character
of Maggie Blue Coach. We should also know that Gettysburg
was permanently altered for its black community after the battle
was over. A lot of the people who fled never returned.
Most of the ones who did come back were people
(24:19):
who had property to come back to. A lot of
that property had been seriously damaged or destroyed in the fighting.
In the fall of eighteen sixty three, there were only
sixty four black residents listed on the city's tax roll,
which was a much smaller number than before the battle.
Although the abolition of slavery made Gettysburg a much less
dangerous place to live, from that perspective, it really became
(24:40):
more of a stopping point than a destination as freed
people moved north after the war. And we're going to
pause once again for a little sponsor break. We take
a break, and then we will come right back with
more of Gettysburg's women. Matilda Appears, known as Tilly, was
(25:02):
an ordinary but pretty well off civilian from Gettysburg. She
was fifteen in July of eighteen sixty three when the
battle happened. In eighteen eighty five, she published Gettysburg or
What a Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle, which
was her first person account. Tilly was the youngest of
four children, and she was at school at the Young
Ladies Seminary at the Gettysburg Female Institute on June when
(25:24):
they first heard that the Confederate army was approaching. Their
teacher told them all to run home as fast as
they could, although she was sure that some of them
couldn't have made it before the troops arrived. Her book
gives a day by day accounting of the battle. At first,
her tones pretty excited. She tacks about the insults and
indignities of the Confederate army taking her horse. She also
(25:47):
talks about their appearance and behavior, which she finds to
be pretty raggedy and rude, but apart from that she
sounds pretty upbeat. But when the actual fighting begins, things
quickly become frightening. She describes a neighbor passing by on
the way to Jacob White Hurt's farm south of town
and asking for Tilly to come along, thinking that she
was going to be safer there, and at first this
(26:09):
seemed like a perfectly good plan, but as the battle shifted,
it turned out to not be true at all. The
farm was not far from Little Round Chop and that
was the site of active fighting. She describes the house
and barn becoming a field hospital for Union soldiers and
treating at least one hundred men, and Tilly's words quote
the number of wounded brought to the place was indeed appalling.
(26:31):
They were laid in different parts of the house. The
orchard and space around the buildings were covered with the
shattered and dying, and the barn became more and more crowded.
The scene had become terrible beyond description. This becomes one
of those really unique insights into what the mindset of
someone is like going through trauma. Tracy mentioned just a
little bit ago that her accounts, before things really started
(26:51):
getting heated, we're almost kind of excited. And then in
the early part of the fighting, Tilly was terrified and
describes herself as weeping in fear. But by the third day,
she writes, quote, amputating benches had been placed about the house.
I must have become inured to seeing the terrors of battle,
else I could hardly have gazed upon the scenes now presented.
(27:12):
Her account also mentions the death of Mary Virginia Wade
known as Jenny, who's the only civilian known to have
been killed directly in the fighting. There were other civilians
who died as a result of the battle as well,
including at least one who gave birth and wasn't able
to get the necessary medical attention. Jenny was at the
home of her sister, Georgia McClellan, who had also given
(27:33):
birth just hours before the battle started. The McClellan home
was directly in the line of fire between the two armies.
Jenny was needing dough to make bread for the Union soldiers,
and she was struck by a stray bullet and killed
on the morning of July three. Tilly also writes about
the conditions after the battle as she was returning home. Quote,
as it was impossible to travel the roads on account
(27:56):
of the mud, we took to the fields. While passing along,
the stench arising from the fields of carnage was most sickening.
Dead horses swell into almost twice their natural size, lay
in all directions, Stains of blood frequently met our gaze,
and all kinds of army accouterments covered the ground. Fences
had disappeared, some buildings were gone, others ruined. The whole
(28:19):
landscape had been changed, and I felt as though we
were in a strange and blighted land. Are killed and
wounded had by this time been nearly all carried from
the field. With such surroundings, I made my journey homeward
after the battle. Once the battle was over, till he
helped care for the wounded, including several Union soldiers who
were cared for in her own family home. And her
(28:39):
book concludes with her adult self looking back on what
had happened when she was a teenager and Gettysburg's recovery
decades later. Her tone is pretty optimistic. Quote years have
come and gone since the happening of the events narrated
in the preceding chapters, but there is indelibly stamped upon
my memory as when passing before me. In actual reality,
the carnage and desolation, the joys and sorrows therein depicted,
(29:02):
have all long since passed away. Instead of the clashing
tumult of battle, the groans of the wounded and dying,
the mangled corpses, the shattered canon, the lifeless charger, and
the confusion of armies and a Creutermont, a new era
of joy and prosperity, harmony and unity prevails. After the war.
Tilly grew up, married, had children, and lived her life
(29:22):
before dying on March fifteenth n Hers is one of
a lot of eyewitness accounts of Gettysburg, including letters, journals,
and published books, but It is also a unique perspective
because it is from a civilian who was a fifteen
year old girl at the time of the battle, and
that brings us to our last women to talk about today.
Tilly Pierce was an ordinary girl whose name we remember
(29:45):
today because she published her experiences in a book. But
so many other women and girls had very similar experiences
in eighteen sixty three, but there's were unrecorded and consequently unremembered.
So you've probably heard the phrase well behaved women seldom history.
Most of the time people interpret this is kind of
a rallying cry celebrating the so called ill behaved women
(30:06):
who broke new ground and made strides in a way
that changed the world in defiance of how society thought
they should act. A lot of times, it's kind of
a make some noise and go make history. But that
quote didn't come from Eleanor Roosevelt, or Marilyn Monroe or
any of the other historically famous women that it's generally
attributed to. It was first published in a nineteen seventy
(30:26):
six paper in American Quarterly by Laurel though Thatcher ull Rich.
At the time, she was studying at the University of
New Hampshire, and her intent was very different from the
way that people usually use that quote today. It was
more about all the ordinary women who lived and worked
and made a difference in their world but are not
included in history books because their lives were quiet and pious.
(30:48):
The full sentence from that paper is quote, well behaved
women seldom make history against antinomians, and which is these
pious matrons have had little chance at all all. Rich
eventually wrote a book exploring how this quote has spread
and evolved and what it means for a woman to
actually make history. So Gettysburg was just full of pious
matrons and other dutiful women and girls. Most of the
(31:11):
men who were able to fight were away fighting, so
the people left behind were mostly women, children, elders, and
people with illnesses or disabilities. So ordinary women who lived
in Gettysburg were the ones cooking for soldiers and tending
the wounded and otherwise being part of the battle, but
not necessarily with the excitement or flare or personality that
would make them memorable to history. Those who couldn't or
(31:33):
didn't leave ahead of the fighting found themselves in the
middle of an active battlefield, and this was of course terrifying,
with many women's journals and letters describing hearing soldiers in
their houses above them while they hid in their cellars,
and not knowing if those soldiers were friends or enemies.
They went through all kinds of hardships, going without food
after the armies requisitioned everything they had, or having their
(31:55):
homes used as sniper posts which drew enemy fire. They
all so endured the battles horrifying aftermath, with the unburied
bodies of people and animals creating a stench so strong
that they had to go around with handkerchiefs that were
soaked in peppermint or penny royal, holding those over their
noses and mouths. This lasted for months, pretty much until
the weather got cold and the late fall and winter.
(32:18):
They turned homes and barns and outbuildings into temporary hospitals
and helped care for the wounded. They cleaned and repaired
and dug graves and sweltering heat and torrential rainstorms, and
often without enough food or clean beds to sleep in.
The railroads and telegraphs were destroyed, so they did all
of this without really being able to communicate with the
(32:38):
rest of the world. And they also gave shelter to
people who traveled to Gettysburg looking for friends and family members,
who then became part of the recovery effort as well.
And we also cannot forget the women who had made
Gettysburg their home but then had to make the choice
between leaving it behind or risking being enslaved. So we
named this episode Fearless, Feisty, and unfly the women of Gettysburg,
(33:01):
But a whole lot of women who were part of
the Battle of Gettysburg's history weren't necessarily any of those things.
There were so many ordinary women who were scared and
exhausted or were just doing their best in an unimaginably
horrifying situation. But their lives and their contributions still have
value and they should not be forgotten. Before we move
(33:23):
on to some listener mail, since this was a live show,
we just want to thank all the people involved with it,
so thanks so much to the Gettysburg Foundation and especially
events coordinator Bethany Yngling for all of their help leading
up to and during the show and for inviting us
in the first place. Thanks also to Chris Gwinn from
the Gettysburg National Military Park for leading us on a
(33:44):
tour of the battlefield while they we were there. That
was great, and thank you so much to everyone who
came out and bore with us through the weather. We
were getting ready, We were sort of doing our final
go over of all of our notes, having some water,
getting ready to go out there, and Holly walked into
the kitchen they had they had put us up in
(34:06):
a cottage that's right there um at the at the venue.
Holly walked into the kitchen and kind of went WHOA.
I was like, what what? Holly said, it's dark outside,
And it turned out there was a severe thunderstorm warning,
including the potential for a half dollar sized hail. So
thanks to everybody who didn't just immediately go home and
(34:29):
stay away. Yeah. I peeked out the window and could
see people running from the tent. I was, uh, they
had just postponed things. They handled the whole thing so
beautifully and just kind of had a delay for a bit.
We started about twenty minutes late after things had passed over.
Thankfully it was quick, but yeah, everyone stuck it out
and I was so so thankful for all of the
(34:50):
listeners that came out said hello, Uh that was a
really spectacular event. I had a fantastic time me too,
And now I have listener mail. This is from Ursula,
and Ursula says Hi, Holly and Tracy. I listened to
her Winnipeg strike episode and loved it. I am from
Winnipeg and I never knew just how big the strike
(35:10):
was till this year when the city started installing historic
exhibits throughout downtown. The Manitoba Museum has an early nineteen
hundreds recreated town inside the museum. It's a fairly large gallery,
complete with homes, businesses, and even a movie theater that
you can enter some buildings or even two stories. It
was my favorite part of the museum as a child
and a twenty two. It still is. The museum recently
(35:33):
gave a massive nineteen nineteen strike update to the town.
Though I must say that my experience with the exhibit
was made so much better by a small group of
relatives of strikers who were also there that day. They
were passing on the personal experiences of their relatives. Walking
through was really walking through a giant memory lane. It
wasn't an event put on the museum. I just lucked
out that day. It was a really special and suite.
(35:56):
Thank you for all the effort, fun and passion you
put into the show. I love it, Dearly Sola, thank
you so much for this email. Ursula. We have gotten
several notes from folks about that um about that episode
that folks seem to have really enjoyed, So I'm glad
I stuck with it, even though I felt like we
were having a little heavy dose of nineteen nineteen earlier
(36:17):
this uh this year. If you would like to write
to us about this there any other podcast, We're at
history podcast at how stuff works dot com, and then
we're all over social media at missed in History. That's
where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. You
can come to our website at missed in History dot
com find show notes for all the episodes that Holly
and I have are done together, and a sourciable archive
(36:38):
of everything. Ever, and you can subscribe to our show
on Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio app, and anywhere else
you get podcasts. Stuffy Missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
This is our show from our recent live appearance in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
(00:22):
Sort of. We did record that show, but as we
always warned might be the case, Yes, some minor technical
difficulties with that recording. Yeah, we had some technical difficulties.
We were there as part of an event called Great
Conversations at Gettysburg. This was a whole full day of
programming that was sponsored by the Gettysburg Foundation. We had
a great time, but recording an outdoor event is always
(00:46):
kind of a challenge. This time we had a rain
delay followed by very breezy weather and just surprising number
of motorcycle interruptions. Yeah, and as we were outdoors, so
all of those things can fired to make kind of
a slushy sound quality. Yea, So we are going to
have a studio version of this show rather than the
(01:08):
live recording. Also, we didn't call it this because folks
just walking through Gettysburg wouldn't necessarily know what six impossible
episodes means. But This is basically a six impossible episodes
edition of the show. It's just focused on Gettysburg's ladies. Yes, yes,
for this live podcast, we wanted to focus on women
(01:30):
in the Battle of Gettysburg, and there are just so
many to choose from. Some of the people we are
going to talk about we're local to Gettysburg, some were
connected to the armies in some way, and some arrived
after the battle was actually over. We just picked a
few favorites. If we don't have your favorite, it's not
because that person was not any good, just that, you know,
we had a select few to twos for this time. Also,
(01:53):
this is not remotely all the women who were there,
and we're going to be focused mostly on the women's
connections to Getty's Berg into the battle itself. So this
is not going to be a full biography of all
the women that we're going to talk about, but we
will jump in and first we will talk about Marie Tepe,
known as Fearless French Mary, who became quite a recognizable
(02:14):
character during the Civil War. She was born Marie brus
probably in Brest, France, and she eventually immigrated to the
United States and once she got here, she married Bernard Tepe,
who was a tailor in Philadelphia. In June of eighteen
sixty one, Bernard joined the twenty seven Pennsylvania Infantry, and
he really wanted Marie to stay behind and mind their
(02:34):
tailor shop. She wanted to go with him, though, so
she became a vivandiere, which is a French term for
uniformed women who traveled with the armies to kind of
bolster the troops morale. A lot of times they acted
as merchants and sold things like food and tobacco. Americans
learned about vivandiere during the Crimean War, and during the
Civil War there were women in this role on both
(02:56):
sides of the fighting. Marie bought things like whiskey, food, tobacco,
and various necessities to then sell to the soldiers. She
carried her whiskey in a small keg, and she filled
that keg with water when she couldn't get whiskey and
sold water instead. And she fought when she had to,
and she also helped care for the wounded. She was
paid a soldiers salary, plus an extra five cents a
(03:20):
day if she was doing hospital work. At some point,
Marie left the seven Pennsylvania Inventory and Bernard Tepe. The story,
as reported by other people, was that several soldiers, one
of them being her husband, broke into her tent and
stole six dollars from her. It is always tricky to
try to convert currency from that long ago to today's dollars,
(03:43):
but that was a huge amount of money. It would
be a huge amount of money today if someone stole
that from me, so at that time that was a fortune. Well,
and even if like her husband had just broken in
and stolen at twenty like, that's still not cool. Theft
is theft, but it really was quite a large um.
But she did not stay gone from the picture for long.
(04:03):
Irish immigrant Charles H. T. Collis had previously served in
the eighteenth Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, and after his enlistment was over,
he decided to start his own volunteer unit, and he
wanted to style this unit after the French light infantry
troops known as the Zuave, patterning the uniforms after their
colorful pants, jackets, and turbans. At first, he had a
(04:25):
small group known as the Zouave d'a rik or Collis's Zuav.
They eventually became the fourteenth Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. As had
been the case with the Vivandiere, Americans first experience to
the Zuave was during the Crimean War, and then there
was Quave style units on both sides of the Civil War.
Just to be clear, although the earliest French Zuave troops
(04:47):
were from Northern Africa, eventually these units associated with the
French army were made up of Europeans, and the zuab
units in the Civil War, even though they might have
some nod the idea of Africa, they were made up
of white troops. Collis wanted his unit to have a Zizandiere.
Either he recruited Marie or she simply heard about what
he was doing and volunteered to join. She once again
(05:10):
sold provisions, cooked and cared for the wounded. She also
delivered water and supplies to the front lines, and doing
that she actually took a bullet in the ankle at Fredericksburg.
She was recovered enough to carry water to the troops
at Chancellorsville, and there she was under so much heavy
fire that people described her skirts as being riddled with
bullet holes. She was awarded the Kearney Cross for valor
(05:34):
on May sixteenth of eighteen sixty three, but she refused
to wear it. She said she did not want a present.
By the Battle of Gettysburg, Marie was a recognizable figure
for much of the Union army in the area. She
had also started carrying a red, white and blue keg
after her first keg was shattered by a bullet. She
was there during the battle, and she came through all
of that unharmed. Although it does not appear that she
(05:56):
left when the soldiers left. There's actually a picture of
her standing on Cemetery Hill in Gettysburg taken some time afterward,
and it's possible that she stayed behind to help care
for the wounded, and then she joined back up with
her unit. Later after the war, she married Corporal Richard Leonard,
and she was photographed with her keg at a reunion
in eight Eventually, she and Richard divorced, and she died
(06:19):
of an apparent suicide in nineteen o one. Before we
move on, we should really note that although Marie was
in combat at various times and she was paid a
soldier salary, she was not actually there as a soldier.
But there were female soldiers at Gettysburg. There were women
like Mary's seas Goal, who disguised herself as a man
so that she could fight alongside her husband. And there
(06:39):
are other people whose stories and identities are less clear,
people who were found to have female anatomy after being
injured or killed in combat. There are at least five documented,
including Sea's Goal too for the Union side, and three
for the Confederacy, although it is possible that there were
many more who went unnoticed and undocumented. Next, we'll have
(07:01):
somebody who will be familiar to people who have seen
the women's memorial at Gettysburg, and that's Elizabeth Thorne. She
was born in Germany as Elizabeth Catherine Masser, and then
after immigrating to the United States, she married John Peter Thorne,
who went by Peter. They had three sons before the
Civil War started, and then Peter joined the army in
August of eighteen sixty two. Peter was the caretaker of
(07:23):
Evergreen Cemetery and the family lived in the cemetery's art
shaped gatehouse, which still stands today. When Peter joined the army,
Elizabeth took over for him as caretaker while also taking
care of their children, and when the Battle of Gettysburg began,
She was also about six months pregnant. Six months pregnant
and taking care of three little boys and acting as
(07:45):
the caretaker of the cemetery. When the Confederate army started
to arrive in Gettysburg at the end of June, they
requisitioned food from the Thorn household, and then when the
Federal army arrived a few days later, Elizabeth helped General
Oliver Otis Howard get the Layo land. She sort of
showed him which roads went where and what some of
the local backways were that the Confederacy might not know about.
(08:07):
She also provided dinner for some of the officers, although
by that point she really did not have much left
as thanks though, some of Otis's men helped her move
some of the family's valuables down into the cellar for safekeeping,
and they also told her that if she were ordered
to leave the area, she should do so immediately, and
that cemetery was part of Cemetery Hill, which became an
(08:28):
active battlefield. On July two, the family was ordered to evacuate,
although Elizabeth came back during the night to check on things,
and she found that the families hogs had been killed
and that the gatehouse was full of wounded soldiers. She
left again to try to find food and shelter, and
this time she stayed away until July seven. Once the
(08:49):
family got back, they found that their home had just
been ransacked, including what they had moved into the cellar.
Amputations had been performed on their beds, so their feather
beds and betting were almos beyond repair. It took her
in three women days of Washington fix them, and that
was after they first repaired the pump, and some of
what they had was really just beyond repair. There were
(09:10):
also dead bodies the waiting burial outside, along with the
bodies of horses that had been killed in the battle.
But Elizabeth Thorn is most well known for what happened
after all of that. She had run into the president
of the cemetery on her way home, and he told
her that there was more work waiting for her than
she could possibly do. In her own account, in the
days after the battle, she wrote, quote, I got a
(09:33):
note from the President of the Cemetery, and he said,
Mrs Thorn, it is made out that we will bury
the soldiers in our cemetery for a while. So you
go for that piece of ground and commenced, sticking off
lots and graves as fast as you can make them. Well,
you may know how I felt. My husband in the army,
my father an aged man. Yet for all the foul air,
(09:53):
we two started in. I stuck off the graves, and
while my father finished one, I had another one started.
They did this in just terrible heat and filth and stench,
because this was July and some of these bodies had
been decaying for days. Later on, she had some friends
who helped, but both of them became very ill and
had to leave. A lot of people noted that the
(10:16):
men who came to help her got too sick to
continue on, and she was out there pregnant, carrying on
with it. These burials went on for weeks. She buried
thirteen bodies on August eleven, which was more than a
month after the battle. They were still burying the dead
up until Gettysburg National Cemetery opened in October. That was
formally dedicated in November, but at that point a lot
(10:37):
of bodies had already been buried or reburied there. Some
of the bodies buried in Evergreen were ultimately moved to
the National Cemetery. In the end, Elizabeth buried a hundred
and five people with very little help. Ninety one of
those were soldiers and fourteen were civilians. She wasn't compensated
for the additional labor, or for the loss of her property,
or the cost of cleaning and repairing the gatehouse. This
(11:00):
was also a tiny, tiny fraction of the work that
needed to be done. Gettysburg itself had a population of
about twenty one people, but about eleven thousand people died
as a result of the battle. About seven thousand died
of their wounds immediately, and the rest followed in the
days and weeks afterward. Elizabeth's daughter, Rose Mead Thorn, was
(11:20):
born the September after the battle, and her middle name
was named after General George Mead, who had commanded the
Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg. Peter Thorne returned from
the war in eighteen sixty five, and he and Elizabeth
both died in nineteen o seven and two thousand two,
the Gettysburg Women's Civil War Memorial was unveiled. It depicts
Elizabeth Thorne clearly exhausted and pregnant with a shovel, and
(11:43):
although she is the woman who was depicted in this memorial.
It is a memorial to all the women. And now
we're going to take a quick break and have a
little word from one of the sponsors to keep stuff
you missed in history class going. So we talked just
before the break about how the number of people killed
(12:05):
in battle at Gettysburg was more than five times greater
than Gettysburg's population of people living there, and the gap
between the town's population and the number of wounded was
even greater. Between twenty thousand and thirty thousand people were wounded,
most of them stayed in Gettysburg for at least some
time after the battle, and our next subject as an
(12:25):
example of how long this situation remained really critical. The
active fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg took place between
July one and third. Euphemia Mary Goldsboro arrived around July twelfth.
By that point, there was still a lot of work
to do. Goldsboro was a nurse and one of many
women from both sides of the war who went to
(12:45):
Gettysburg during the battle's aftermath to try to care for
the injured and dying soldiers. Goldsboro, who was known as Effie,
was one of many Confederate supporters living in Baltimore, Maryland,
She and other women there had been preparing for the
fighting to come to them, so when Gettysburg ended in
a Union victory and tremendous casualty numbers, they traveled from
(13:06):
Baltimore to assist. When they arrived in Gettysburg, conditions were
just really dire. Nearly all of the doctors and the
surgeons had left with their respective armies, so the very
few who were left behind were so overwhelmed that they
could really only focus on the most urgent needs. Pennsylvania
Hall at Gettysburg College was being used as a hospital
(13:27):
for wounded from both sides, and that is where Goldsboro
started working when she arrived. Here is how an unknown
Confederate soldier described the conditions there quote. Unless it was
a case of amputation needed immediately or the stopping of hemorrhage,
they had not time to attend to anyone. Thus, for
the first two weeks, there were no nurses, no medicines,
(13:48):
no kinds of food proper for men in our condition
and for men who were reduced to mere skeletons from
severe wounds and loss of blood. The floor was a
hard bed with only a blanket on it. Ventually, Goldsboro
was assigned to Camp Letterman, which was a hospital camp
set up near the battlefield. Goldsboro was in charge of
a word with a hundred patients, fifty from each side,
(14:10):
and the words of that same Confederate soldier quote. Miss
Goldsborough recognized the importance of showing no partiality, and many
of both armies owed their lives to her good nursing,
common sense, and justice, while she gladly forgot party spirit
of the time and saw the necessity of sacrificing herself
to the good of the southern wounded dying soldiers of
the Confederate Army. She remained their nine weeks, working incessantly
(14:32):
forgetting the world and self, living only to comfort and
support the suffering and dying. One of the men that
she tried to save was Lieutenant Colonel Waller Tazewell, Patent
of Virginia, who had been shot through the lung and
his condition had reached a point that he needed to
be propped up to be able to breathe. But there
was just nothing there available for him to be propped
up on, and so Goldsboro offered herself sitting on the
(14:56):
floor and letting them secure him to her back, so
they were basically back to and she was kind of
forming a chair for him, and although she sat there
overnight without moving, his condition was too grave and he
died on July twenty one. Although she cared for men
without regard to what side they had been on, her
work was not entirely above board. She knew that the
surviving Confederate soldiers were going to be transferred to prisons
(15:18):
once they were well enough, and she thought that they
should have proper clothes and boots when they went, But
it was against the rules to give them these things,
probably because of the risk that they might try to
escape if they had them. So she came up with
an excuse to go into town, and she came back
with clothes and boots secured up underneath her hoop skirt,
hoping that they wouldn't bang together or fall out when
(15:39):
she made her way past the Union guards. This worked.
Goldsboro left Gettysburg after about nine weeks, shortly after the
death of a Texas soldier named Samuel Watson, who she seemed,
based on her diary, to have really become quite attached to.
She returned home and at first her family hardly knew
her because she was so frail and exhausted, But eventually
(16:01):
she recovered and she started smuggling again, this time to
try to get things like male clothes and supplies to
imprisoned Confederate men. She was also a courier and a spy,
and she used a lap desk with hidden compartments to
smuggle dispatches. She was ultimately caught while trying to help
a prisoner escape, and her quote, treasonable plans and letters
(16:21):
and traitorous poetry were confiscated. She was sentenced to banishment
for the duration of the war. By coincidence, she was
sent to Virginia on the same boat as Belle Boyd,
who previous hosts of the podcast have done an episode on.
She apparently did not like bell Boyd. Very curious about
what the situation was there, but I did not look
into it. She referred to Boyd as quote that horrid woman.
(16:45):
Aside from demonstrating how Gettysburg's aftermath stretched on after the battle,
Goldsborough's story also illustrates how a lot of women put
aside their political leanings to care for the sick, injured,
and dying. Goldsboro Let's be clear was a star supporter
of the Confederacy, but at the battlefield's hospital, she gave
compassionate care to anyone who needed it, no matter what
(17:07):
side of the battle they had fought on. Outside of
the medical community, though this definitely was not the case
for all of gettysburg civilian population, a lot of them
refused to harbor or assist Confederate sympathizers, including refusing to
let sympathetic nurses board with them, and Goldsboro and other
Confederate supporters were viewed with very understandable suspicion within their
(17:28):
medical work as well. That same unknown soldier whose account
we were reading from earlier reported that the reason her
ward was half and half Federal and Confederate troops was
just to make sure she didn't do anything treasonous. The
next woman we are going to talk about is Margaret Divitt.
You'll also see that spelled Devitt or sometimes even with
an a as Davitt, and she was also known as
mag Palm. She was part of Gettysburg's black community. There
(17:51):
were people of African descent in Gettysburg for almost as
long as there were Europeans. Some of the first Europeans
to settle in the area brought enslaved Africans with them.
Before that point, the area had been a hunting ground
and a travel route for the native peoples in the area,
but what is now Gettysburg does not appear to have
ever been home to a permanent indigenous settlement. Of course,
(18:13):
there is a whole history there that is outside of
the scope of what we were talking about in this
particular podcast. Pennsylvania passed an Act for the gradual abolition
of slavery in seventeen eighties, so by the Civil War,
Gettysburg's black community was free and numbered close to two
hundred people are not quite ten percent of the population.
Gettysburg had a school for black children and an African
(18:34):
Methodist Episcopal church. Because of its proximity to the Mason
Dixon line, Gettysburg was home to a lot of underground
railroad activity. About a third of its black residence in
eighteen sixty had been liberated or had liberated themselves from
Maryland or Virginia. But it was also an incredibly dangerous
place to be as a black person. Being so close
(18:56):
to slave territory was a constant risk, especially in the
light a fugitive slave laws that encouraged the capturing of
people and taking them into slave territory, regardless of whether
they had been previously enslaved or not. So Margaret Palm,
who had been born Margaret Divitt or maybe Davitt, had
direct experience with these dangers. She had been the target
(19:17):
of an attempted capture herself. Her employer's son, David Schick,
described it this way quote On this occasion, she was
attacked by a group of men who made the attempt
to kidnap her and take her south where they expected
to sell her and derive quite a prophet. She was
a powerful woman, and they would have from the sale
derived quite a prophet. These men succeeded in tying Mag's hands.
(19:38):
She was fighting them as best she could. With her
hands tied, she would attempt to slow them and succeeded
in one instance in catching an attacker's thumb in her
mouth and bit the thumb off. When we did this
as our live show, there was definitely some cheers of
support for Meg at this moment. Rightly so. In eighteen
sixties three, Palm was about twenty seven years old, She
(20:00):
had at least one child, and she was living with
a man named Alf Palm. They were tenants on the
land of Abraham Bryan, a free black man who had
lived in the area for about twenty years. Although a
census taker listed her occupation as mistress Harlott, it appears
that she actually had a job working cleaning and doing laundry.
It appears that the census taker listed that as her
(20:22):
occupation because she and Alf were not married at the time. Yeah,
I have some words for that census taker. As the
Confederate Army approached Gettysburg, many of its black residents fled.
They knew that if they stayed they were likely to
be captured and enslaved. That had happened and lots of
other towns that the army had moved through as they
(20:43):
made their way into Union territory. But leaving was really
also a risk. People would be leaving their jobs behind
as well. They would have to go without income for
an unknown amount of time until the danger had passed.
They would also be leaving behind personal possessions which were
really likely to be taken, damaged, or destroy Foyd. So
Margaret was one of the people who stayed to act
(21:03):
as a lookout and warn the black community when they
really could not wait any longer to go, and with
her warning, many of Gettysburg's black residents did successfully evacuate
before the battle began. Some that could not or did
not leave were sheltered by their white employers or other friends,
but this did not always totally work out. Uh There
is at least one account of two black women who
(21:25):
were sheltered in the cellar, but then when Confederate officers
commandeered that home, those women were forced to come out
and cook and care for them. At the same time,
an unknown number of Gettysburg's black residents were captured by
the Confederates and marched out of town. The house that
Margaret and alf we're renting was largely destroyed in the battle.
A lot of the fighting at Gettysburg was very urban,
(21:48):
but she and her family survived. Her life after the
war was a lot like it had been before. She
continued to make a living by cleaning, doing laundry, and
working as a porter. She and other black women also
retrieved you reforms from soldiers who had been wounded or killed.
They cleaned these uniforms, repaired them, and sent them back
to the Union Army to reuse. Margaret Palm eventually saved
(22:09):
up enough money to buy property of her own, and
she also became known as an eccentric character around town,
nicknamed Meg Palm at this point, and there were embellished
stories recounting her daring do before and during the battle
and her adventures afterward. Often these were reported in newspapers,
but in those accounts, her speech was rendered as the
(22:29):
sort of imagined dialect of enslaved people living on plantations
in the South just is not how she spoke, right.
It was very similar to our previous episode about the
ain't i Ale woman's speech and how it was just
sort of a made up, imagined wave of talking. We
don't entirely know how she felt about becoming this kind
of local celebrity, but she definitely did not appreciate how
(22:53):
other people kind of took her story over for themselves
and turned her into a caricature. She took care to
tell her friends and her face only about what she
had done in her own words. She also had a
picture of herself taken later on, posed to show the
way that her assailants had tried to bind her hands.
Decades later, her great great granddaughter Catherine Carter related these
(23:14):
family stories to another woman named Margaret. That was Margaret S. Creighton,
author of the Colors of Courage Gettysburg's Forgotten History. They
especially talked about her fighting back against those attempted captors.
Almost thirty years after palms eighteen ninety six death, Elsie
Singmaster published A Boy at Gettysburg, which used Palm as
the inspiration for the character Maggie Bluecoat, and that fictional
(23:38):
character was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and wore
an officer's jacket from the War of eighteen twelve, thus
her Bluecoat nickname. It is possible that the real Margaret
was involved with the Underground Railroad and with Gettysburg's Slave
Refuge Society, which was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
but in some accounts her real story has been really
(23:59):
conflated in fused with this fictional character. If she was
involved with the Underground Railroad, she probably would have been
a lot more secretive about it than the fictional character
of Maggie Blue Coach. We should also know that Gettysburg
was permanently altered for its black community after the battle
was over. A lot of the people who fled never returned.
Most of the ones who did come back were people
(24:19):
who had property to come back to. A lot of
that property had been seriously damaged or destroyed in the fighting.
In the fall of eighteen sixty three, there were only
sixty four black residents listed on the city's tax roll,
which was a much smaller number than before the battle.
Although the abolition of slavery made Gettysburg a much less
dangerous place to live, from that perspective, it really became
(24:40):
more of a stopping point than a destination as freed
people moved north after the war. And we're going to
pause once again for a little sponsor break. We take
a break, and then we will come right back with
more of Gettysburg's women. Matilda Appears, known as Tilly, was
(25:02):
an ordinary but pretty well off civilian from Gettysburg. She
was fifteen in July of eighteen sixty three when the
battle happened. In eighteen eighty five, she published Gettysburg or
What a Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle, which
was her first person account. Tilly was the youngest of
four children, and she was at school at the Young
Ladies Seminary at the Gettysburg Female Institute on June when
(25:24):
they first heard that the Confederate army was approaching. Their
teacher told them all to run home as fast as
they could, although she was sure that some of them
couldn't have made it before the troops arrived. Her book
gives a day by day accounting of the battle. At first,
her tones pretty excited. She tacks about the insults and
indignities of the Confederate army taking her horse. She also
(25:47):
talks about their appearance and behavior, which she finds to
be pretty raggedy and rude, but apart from that she
sounds pretty upbeat. But when the actual fighting begins, things
quickly become frightening. She describes a neighbor passing by on
the way to Jacob White Hurt's farm south of town
and asking for Tilly to come along, thinking that she
was going to be safer there, and at first this
(26:09):
seemed like a perfectly good plan, but as the battle shifted,
it turned out to not be true at all. The
farm was not far from Little Round Chop and that
was the site of active fighting. She describes the house
and barn becoming a field hospital for Union soldiers and
treating at least one hundred men, and Tilly's words quote
the number of wounded brought to the place was indeed appalling.
(26:31):
They were laid in different parts of the house. The
orchard and space around the buildings were covered with the
shattered and dying, and the barn became more and more crowded.
The scene had become terrible beyond description. This becomes one
of those really unique insights into what the mindset of
someone is like going through trauma. Tracy mentioned just a
little bit ago that her accounts, before things really started
(26:51):
getting heated, we're almost kind of excited. And then in
the early part of the fighting, Tilly was terrified and
describes herself as weeping in fear. But by the third day,
she writes, quote, amputating benches had been placed about the house.
I must have become inured to seeing the terrors of battle,
else I could hardly have gazed upon the scenes now presented.
(27:12):
Her account also mentions the death of Mary Virginia Wade
known as Jenny, who's the only civilian known to have
been killed directly in the fighting. There were other civilians
who died as a result of the battle as well,
including at least one who gave birth and wasn't able
to get the necessary medical attention. Jenny was at the
home of her sister, Georgia McClellan, who had also given
(27:33):
birth just hours before the battle started. The McClellan home
was directly in the line of fire between the two armies.
Jenny was needing dough to make bread for the Union soldiers,
and she was struck by a stray bullet and killed
on the morning of July three. Tilly also writes about
the conditions after the battle as she was returning home. Quote,
as it was impossible to travel the roads on account
(27:56):
of the mud, we took to the fields. While passing along,
the stench arising from the fields of carnage was most sickening.
Dead horses swell into almost twice their natural size, lay
in all directions, Stains of blood frequently met our gaze,
and all kinds of army accouterments covered the ground. Fences
had disappeared, some buildings were gone, others ruined. The whole
(28:19):
landscape had been changed, and I felt as though we
were in a strange and blighted land. Are killed and
wounded had by this time been nearly all carried from
the field. With such surroundings, I made my journey homeward
after the battle. Once the battle was over, till he
helped care for the wounded, including several Union soldiers who
were cared for in her own family home. And her
(28:39):
book concludes with her adult self looking back on what
had happened when she was a teenager and Gettysburg's recovery
decades later. Her tone is pretty optimistic. Quote years have
come and gone since the happening of the events narrated
in the preceding chapters, but there is indelibly stamped upon
my memory as when passing before me. In actual reality,
the carnage and desolation, the joys and sorrows therein depicted,
(29:02):
have all long since passed away. Instead of the clashing
tumult of battle, the groans of the wounded and dying,
the mangled corpses, the shattered canon, the lifeless charger, and
the confusion of armies and a Creutermont, a new era
of joy and prosperity, harmony and unity prevails. After the war.
Tilly grew up, married, had children, and lived her life
(29:22):
before dying on March fifteenth n Hers is one of
a lot of eyewitness accounts of Gettysburg, including letters, journals,
and published books, but It is also a unique perspective
because it is from a civilian who was a fifteen
year old girl at the time of the battle, and
that brings us to our last women to talk about today.
Tilly Pierce was an ordinary girl whose name we remember
(29:45):
today because she published her experiences in a book. But
so many other women and girls had very similar experiences
in eighteen sixty three, but there's were unrecorded and consequently unremembered.
So you've probably heard the phrase well behaved women seldom history.
Most of the time people interpret this is kind of
a rallying cry celebrating the so called ill behaved women
(30:06):
who broke new ground and made strides in a way
that changed the world in defiance of how society thought
they should act. A lot of times, it's kind of
a make some noise and go make history. But that
quote didn't come from Eleanor Roosevelt, or Marilyn Monroe or
any of the other historically famous women that it's generally
attributed to. It was first published in a nineteen seventy
(30:26):
six paper in American Quarterly by Laurel though Thatcher ull Rich.
At the time, she was studying at the University of
New Hampshire, and her intent was very different from the
way that people usually use that quote today. It was
more about all the ordinary women who lived and worked
and made a difference in their world but are not
included in history books because their lives were quiet and pious.
(30:48):
The full sentence from that paper is quote, well behaved
women seldom make history against antinomians, and which is these
pious matrons have had little chance at all all. Rich
eventually wrote a book exploring how this quote has spread
and evolved and what it means for a woman to
actually make history. So Gettysburg was just full of pious
matrons and other dutiful women and girls. Most of the
(31:11):
men who were able to fight were away fighting, so
the people left behind were mostly women, children, elders, and
people with illnesses or disabilities. So ordinary women who lived
in Gettysburg were the ones cooking for soldiers and tending
the wounded and otherwise being part of the battle, but
not necessarily with the excitement or flare or personality that
would make them memorable to history. Those who couldn't or
(31:33):
didn't leave ahead of the fighting found themselves in the
middle of an active battlefield, and this was of course terrifying,
with many women's journals and letters describing hearing soldiers in
their houses above them while they hid in their cellars,
and not knowing if those soldiers were friends or enemies.
They went through all kinds of hardships, going without food
after the armies requisitioned everything they had, or having their
(31:55):
homes used as sniper posts which drew enemy fire. They
all so endured the battles horrifying aftermath, with the unburied
bodies of people and animals creating a stench so strong
that they had to go around with handkerchiefs that were
soaked in peppermint or penny royal, holding those over their
noses and mouths. This lasted for months, pretty much until
the weather got cold and the late fall and winter.
(32:18):
They turned homes and barns and outbuildings into temporary hospitals
and helped care for the wounded. They cleaned and repaired
and dug graves and sweltering heat and torrential rainstorms, and
often without enough food or clean beds to sleep in.
The railroads and telegraphs were destroyed, so they did all
of this without really being able to communicate with the
(32:38):
rest of the world. And they also gave shelter to
people who traveled to Gettysburg looking for friends and family members,
who then became part of the recovery effort as well.
And we also cannot forget the women who had made
Gettysburg their home but then had to make the choice
between leaving it behind or risking being enslaved. So we
named this episode Fearless, Feisty, and unfly the women of Gettysburg,
(33:01):
But a whole lot of women who were part of
the Battle of Gettysburg's history weren't necessarily any of those things.
There were so many ordinary women who were scared and
exhausted or were just doing their best in an unimaginably
horrifying situation. But their lives and their contributions still have
value and they should not be forgotten. Before we move
(33:23):
on to some listener mail, since this was a live show,
we just want to thank all the people involved with it,
so thanks so much to the Gettysburg Foundation and especially
events coordinator Bethany Yngling for all of their help leading
up to and during the show and for inviting us
in the first place. Thanks also to Chris Gwinn from
the Gettysburg National Military Park for leading us on a
(33:44):
tour of the battlefield while they we were there. That
was great, and thank you so much to everyone who
came out and bore with us through the weather. We
were getting ready, We were sort of doing our final
go over of all of our notes, having some water,
getting ready to go out there, and Holly walked into
the kitchen they had they had put us up in
(34:06):
a cottage that's right there um at the at the venue.
Holly walked into the kitchen and kind of went WHOA.
I was like, what what? Holly said, it's dark outside,
And it turned out there was a severe thunderstorm warning,
including the potential for a half dollar sized hail. So
thanks to everybody who didn't just immediately go home and
(34:29):
stay away. Yeah. I peeked out the window and could
see people running from the tent. I was, uh, they
had just postponed things. They handled the whole thing so
beautifully and just kind of had a delay for a bit.
We started about twenty minutes late after things had passed over.
Thankfully it was quick, but yeah, everyone stuck it out
and I was so so thankful for all of the
(34:50):
listeners that came out said hello, Uh that was a
really spectacular event. I had a fantastic time me too,
And now I have listener mail. This is from Ursula,
and Ursula says Hi, Holly and Tracy. I listened to
her Winnipeg strike episode and loved it. I am from
Winnipeg and I never knew just how big the strike
(35:10):
was till this year when the city started installing historic
exhibits throughout downtown. The Manitoba Museum has an early nineteen
hundreds recreated town inside the museum. It's a fairly large gallery,
complete with homes, businesses, and even a movie theater that
you can enter some buildings or even two stories. It
was my favorite part of the museum as a child
and a twenty two. It still is. The museum recently
(35:33):
gave a massive nineteen nineteen strike update to the town.
Though I must say that my experience with the exhibit
was made so much better by a small group of
relatives of strikers who were also there that day. They
were passing on the personal experiences of their relatives. Walking
through was really walking through a giant memory lane. It
wasn't an event put on the museum. I just lucked
out that day. It was a really special and suite.
(35:56):
Thank you for all the effort, fun and passion you
put into the show. I love it, Dearly Sola, thank
you so much for this email. Ursula. We have gotten
several notes from folks about that um about that episode
that folks seem to have really enjoyed, So I'm glad
I stuck with it, even though I felt like we
were having a little heavy dose of nineteen nineteen earlier
(36:17):
this uh this year. If you would like to write
to us about this there any other podcast, We're at
history podcast at how stuff works dot com, and then
we're all over social media at missed in History. That's
where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. You
can come to our website at missed in History dot
com find show notes for all the episodes that Holly
and I have are done together, and a sourciable archive
(36:38):
of everything. Ever, and you can subscribe to our show
on Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio app, and anywhere else
you get podcasts. Stuffy Missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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