Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg Read Online Free PDF Page B

the mural on the side of a warehouse portraying the action at this site.
    Amos Humiston was a sergeant in the 154th New York. Thirty-two years old when he enlisted in 1862, Humiston had apprenticed as a harness-maker in his youth. At age twenty, however, he had succumbed to the temptation for adventure and travel as a hand on a whaling ship. After a three-year voyage marked by hardships, dangers, and minimal earnings, he decided that the life of a harness-maker was not so bad after all. He settled down in western New York, married, and fathered three children. When war came in 1861, parental responsibilities prevented him from enlisting. But in 1862 he could no longer hold back.
    Here on this spot in the late afternoon of July 1, Humiston was in line with 950 other Union infantrymen facing the onslaught of 2,300 yelling Confederates. Coster's tiny brigade stemmed the attack for a few vital minutes, buying time for other Eleventh Corps soldiers to escape, but were soon overwhelmed. Sometime during this firefight, Amos Humiston was mortally wounded. His body was found a few days later a quarter-mile south of the action, near today's fire-house on Stratton Street. There stands a monument to Humiston, the only monument to an individual enlisted man on the battlefield.
    When Humiston's body was discovered, it had no identification save an ambrotype of three children (two boys and a girl, ages eight, six, and four) clutched in his hand. It was the last thing he gazed on as hedied. “Whose Father Was He?” asked a Philadelphia newspaper. Other papers picked up this question, which soon spread through the North accompanied by woodcut illustrations of the three children. The story plucked at the nation's heartstrings. In November 1863, four months after Amos Humiston's death, a religious weekly carrying the story and picture made its way to Humiston's hometown of Portville, New York, where Philanda Humiston finally learned that she was a widow and her children were fatherless.
    That was not the end of the story. Poems and songs about “The Unknown Soldier” and “The Children of the Battlefield” swept the North.
Carte de visite
copies of the ambrotype sold widely. The publicity inspired the founding of a “Homestead Association” to raise money for the establishment in Gettysburg of a home for widows and orphans of Union soldiers. The National Soldiers’ Orphan Homestead opened in November 1866 with Philanda Humiston as wardrobe mistress and the three Humiston children as its first residents. Over the eleven years of its existence, the orphanage sheltered and raised hundreds of children. The original buildings still stand on Baltimore Street just north of the entrance to the National Military Cemetery. Today they cater to tourists as the Homestead Lodging Inn and the Soldiers’ National Museum.
    By 5:00 P.M. on July 1 the Confederates appeared tohave won a great victory. Gettysburg was shaping up as another Chancellorsville. Lee was aware, however, that the triumph was incomplete so long as Union forces held Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill, to which the remnants of the First and Eleventh Corps were retreating. Lee also knew that the rest of the Army of the Potomac must be hurrying toward Gettysburg (indeed, three divisions of the Twelfth and Third Corps were only a few miles away). Lee thought his best chance to complete the victory was to gain the hills before Union reinforcements got there.
    Lee turned to Ewell, whose two divisions had sustained fewer casualties than Hill's during the fighting, and whose third division was arriving. Nearly three hours of daylight remained. Lee gave verbal orders to Ewell to attack Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” Ewell reconnoitered the position, consulted subordinates, and then hesitated. His troops were tired and disorganized from chasing Yankees through town and rounding up prisoners. They were suffering from lack of water on a warm day after a long march and intense fighting. Ewell