SAMUEL WILKESON

In a dispatch from the Battle of Gettysburg written for the New York Times, Civil War correspondent Samuel Wilkeson misspelled the name of the town.

A forgivable offense, considering the man was mighty distracted: he’d arrived on the field to find that among the casualties to report was his eldest child.

Bayard Wilkeson, a Union lieutenant all of 19, had been commanding a battery of the 4th U.S. Artillery during fierce action north of town on the first day of battle, when an enemy shell left his right leg dangling by a tendon at the knee.

Wilkeson calmly finished the crude surgery by cutting the tendon with a penknife and applying a tourniquet. Taken to a nearby almshouse, he is said to have refused water so that another wounded man could have it. He died behind enemy lines.

Samuel Wilkeson got to the battlefield on the second day, July 2, and learned his son’s fate. He wasn’t able to retrieve Bayard’s body until the Army of Northern Virginia retreated on July 4.

Meanwhile, his broken heart hanging by a tendon, Samuel continued his job of reporting the battle.

“My pen is heavy,” he wrote.

“Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh (sic) have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battlefield with his feet and reaching fraternally and lovingly up to heaven.

“His right hand opens the gates of Paradise – with his left he beckons to these mutilated, bloody, swollen forms to ascend.”

It wouldn’t the first or last time that members of the Wilkeson family were tendons of history.

Samuel’s father, Samuel Sr., had served as a judge and then as mayor of Buffalo, N.Y., during the time when the Erie Canal was being planned. He had convinced the powers-that-be to make Buffalo the canal’s western terminus, thus bringing much recognition and prosperity to the city.

Samuel the reporter was born in Buffalo in 1817. He would marry Catherine Cady, the sister of feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Among the couple’s neighbors was former president Milliard Fillmore.

Samuel and Catherine had four children. A year after the death of Bayard, Frank, the youngest child, then 14, ran away to join the Union Army, lying about his age and causing his parents no end of worry.

Like his late brother, he became a lieutenant of artillery with the 4th U.S. Unlike Bayard, Frank survived the war.

Post-bellum, Samuel and Frank traveled to the Great Northwest to explore and write about some of more uncharted regions of Washington State. Samuel would publish “Wilkeson’s Notes on Puget Sound: Excerpts from Notes of Samuel Wilkeson of a Reconnaissance of the Proposed Route of the Northern Pacific Railroad.”

Wilkeson, Wa., a town founded on the railroad route, is named for him.

Samuel died in 1889, two years after Frank published “Turned Inside Out: Recollections of a Private Soldier.”

Frank lived until 1913.

Bayard Wilkeson has been immortalized in a sketch done by famed Civil War-era magazine artist and illustrator Alfred Waud. The work depicts the young lieutenant on horseback commanding his artillery unit in the midst of battle at Gettysburg.

RICHARD EWELL

If there was an odder bird than Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson among generals in the Army of Northern Virginia, it was Jackson’s onetime subordinate, Richard “Old Bald Head” Ewell.

If the two had ever squared off at 40 paces to match personal eccentricities, there’s no telling who would have come away victorious.

Jackson was a military genius and religious zealot who believed that the Almighty had gifted him a terrible, swift sword. He was convinced that one of his arms was longer than the other and often held it aloft to improve circulation.

He sometimes fell asleep while eating, and supposedly wouldn’t consume pepper because he thought it weakened his left leg.

The high-strung Ewell had a pronounced lisp and a soprano peep of a voice. He would hold his head to one side in a peculiar imitation of a drowsy bald eagle. He ate only a concoction called frumenty, a dish of hulled wheat and milk, because he believed he had internal maladies.

He was given to non sequiturs when he wasn’t cussing as if he were in the terminal stages of Tourette’s. He could be so absentminded that after he married his first cousin, he would refer to her as “Mrs. Brown,” her name from her dead first husband.

Still, Ewell’s men “who knew first hand his bravery and generosity of spirit, loved him all the more for (his eccentricities),” according to Larry Tagg, author of “The Generals of Gettysburg.”

He wasn’t universally loved. His actions, or non-actions, at Gettysburg stirred contentious debate and brought considerable criticism upon him.

Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Virginia at an estate with the felicitous name of Stony Lonesome, Ewell was the son of a doctor and the grandson of the first U.S. Secretary of the Navy.

After graduation from West Point in 1840, he went on to serve with gusto during the Mexican War and in Indian fighting out West.

With the Civil War, he chose the Confederacy. In the second year of the war, he distinguished himself while serving with Stonewall Jackson during a number of campaigns and battles. However, he lost his left leg below the knee after combat at Groveton, and was likely never the same.

After his return to the army, he was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of the Army of Northern Virginia’s II Corps after Stonewall Jackson’s death in May 1863. Ewell had never lacked for talent; otherwise, Jackson would never have kept him around.

But soon he would be condemned for indecisiveness and lack of foresight at Gettysburg, viewed by many through an unforgiving lens of WWSHD?, or What Would Stonewall Have Done?

The battle began splendidly for Ewell and the II Corps when the Union XI Corps was flanked and accordianized on the afternoon of the first day, leading to a frenzied retreat of blue through the town and to the sanctuary offered by the high ground of Cemetery Hill.

When Robert E. Lee arrived at Gettysburg and saw Union forces in disarray, he sent a message to Ewell to continue his pursuit of the fleeing Yankees and take Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” But Ewell balked, the critical high ground was garrisoned by Union troops, and Lee spent the next two days trying in vain to dislodge a stubborn Army of the Potomac.

Writes Kristopher D. White, “Armchair generals have since had a field day with what is seen as his failure, often arguing that ‘Stonewall’ Jackson would not have been so ‘timid’ and the legendary commander would have found it ‘practicable’ to attack and would have swept the Union forces from the field. “

Whether the criticism was fair or not, Ewell, who took a bullet to his wooden leg during the battle, remained in command of his corps.

But after a poor performance at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse in Virginia nearly a year after Gettysburg, he was relieved of command and reassigned to the defense of Richmond.

More misfortune followed. At Saylor’s Creek, shortly before Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Ewell was captured and subsequently imprisoned at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.

Released in July 1865, he retired to life as a farmer in Spring Hill, Tenn., where he died in 1872, age 54.

His memoir, “The Making of a Soldier,” was eventually published in 1935.

OLIVER W. NORTON

On a September day in 1889, Oliver Willcox Norton stood on Little Round Top at Gettysburg and sounded a stirring bugle call. Men came running, perhaps not as spryly as they had 26 years before as young soldiers, but muscle memory kicked in nonetheless.

“They came charging up to the spot where the bugler stood, some with tears in their eyes, asking to have it repeated,” wrote Norton.

“That familiar sound echoing among the rocks where they had fought brought back, perhaps more vividly than words could do, the memories of the days when they had answered so often to its sound.”

The occasion was a reunion of Gettysburg veterans who had returned to the battlefield to attend the dedication of one of the monuments that marble the face and shoulders of Little Round Top.

Norton had been there on July 2, 1863, in the thick of things, when quick and decisive action by his brigade commander had helped keep swarming, shrieking Confederates at bay.

It’s likely that Norton played the mournful “Taps” at some point during the dedication. After all, he’d been the first bugler ever to play the tune.

A New York State native born in 1839, Norton was teaching school in Pennsylvania when the Civil War broke out. He enlisted with the 83rd Pennsylvania and eventually became a bugler.

One day in 1862, he was summoned to the tent of his brigade commander, Gen. Daniel Butterfield, famous in the army at the time for writing bugle calls.

When Norton arrived, Butterfield gave him an envelope on which he had scribbled some musical notes, a reworking of an earlier bugle call played in the evening for “lights out.”

Norton played the tune for Butterfield and “Taps” was born. Even in Norton’s lifetime, the call evolved from a soldier’s lullaby to the traditional tune played at military funerals.

“There is something singularly beautiful and appropriate in the music of the wonderful call,” wrote Norton. “Its strains are melancholy, yet full of rest and peace. Its echoes linger the heart long after its tones have ceased to vibrate in the air.”

A year later at Gettysburg, Butterfield had become chief of staff to George Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac, while Norton was serving as bugler and flag bearer for his current brigade commander, Col. Strong Vincent, a 26-year-old Harvard graduate turned warrior.

Norton was at Vincent’s side on the second day of the battle when the colonel heeded a plea for reinforcements and rushed his brigade to Little Round Top to aid in stemming a Rebel attack on the stony citadel.

Sadly, Vincent, whose wife was pregnant with the couple’s first child, was mortally wounded.

“No knight of the days of chivalry was ever more knightly,” Norton wrote of Vincent.

Norton’s days as a bugler ended soon after Gettysburg when he received a commission as a first lieutenant with the 8th United States Colored Troops, with whom he remained until the end of the war.

Post-bellum, Norton married (the ceremony was performed by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” fame); became a very wealthy man in Chicago as one of the founders of the American Can Company; and wrote “The Attack and Defense of Little Round Top” despite losing his eyesight.

“Taps” was played at his funeral in 1920 in Chicago.

WADE HAMPTON

“Are you looking for that final touch in your bathroom to really bring the room together?”

Thus reads a come-on from a company selling a shower curtain bearing the visage of Wade Hampton III.

If your bathroom is a kind of porcelain temple to the Confederacy, then perhaps a Wade Hampton shower curtain is for you.

Hampton was one of the South’s wealthiest men before the Civil War and owned so many hundreds of slaves that the Emancipation Proclamation might have been a personal memo from Abraham Lincoln just for him.

As a strapping, fearless, Viking-bearded cavalry general during the war, he was a fierce fighter, never leading from the rear.

He was wounded in his very first battle, Bull Run, and half a dozen times more in various engagements over four years. At the Battle of Seven Pines in 1862, he took a bullet to the foot, but refused to leave the field, insisting that a doctor remove the bullet while Hampton remained on his horse.

At the Battle of Gettysburg, saber-wielding Union troopers tried to turn him into a Confederate kabob, but he argued otherwise, his defense counsel a four-foot sword. One of his biographers called him, “the most frequent and successful hand-to-hand combatant among general officers in American history.”

He was born in 1818 into baronial wealth in Charleston, S.C., the scion of a family of planters, soldiers and politicians that owned vast expanses of land and had deep roots in American history, including a grandfather who served in the American Revolution; an uncle who’d been governor of South Carolina; and a father who’d been an aide to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans.

Hampton became an avid horseman and hunter who is said to have killed some 80 bears using little more than a knife. A graduate of what is now the University of South Carolina, he studied law before the Civil War and served a term as a state senator.

Though his combat experience was limited to bears, he organized and financed Hampton’s Legion, a 600-man unit comprising infantry, cavalry and artillery, when the Civil War began.

He became most famous as a cavalry general and brigade commander under J.E.B. Stuart, with whom he fought at Brandy Station in June 1863, a prelude to the Battle of Gettysburg.

On the second day at Gettysburg, after the tardy Stuart had finally arrived on the field, Hampton was involved in a fracas with several Union cavalrymen and took a saber cut to the back of the head. On the following day, he was surrounded by Union troopers at the East Cavalry Battlefield and sabered twice more before fighting his way out.

The next two years of the war were eventful ones for Hampton, who was eventually promoted to lieutenant general and became head of the Cavalry Corps after Stuart’s death at the Battle of Yellow Tavern in 1864. Hampton survived the war, but one of his sons, who served as his aide, was killed, as was one of his brothers.

When he returned to South Carolina after the war, he found all his slaves gone and his ancestral home in ashes courtesy of William Tecumseh Sherman’s scorched-earth policy.

A virulent opponent of Radical Reconstruction and the Republican Party, Hampton and his Democratic political supporters fought to maintain white supremacy in South Carolina after the war.

Among the most popular and famous people in his state, he ran for governor in 1876. His campaign workers included the Red Shirts, a group of white vigilantes who operated out of a bordello and got out the vote for Hampton by armed intimidation if need be.

Later Hampton served two terms in the U.S. Senate. He also had a leg amputated after a fall from a mule while hunting.

Hampton died in 1902 in Columbia, S.C., age 84. Reportedly, his last words were, “God bless all my people, black and white.”

Today, an equestrian statue of Hampton stands outside the South Carolina State House. Both a county and a town in the state are named for him, as well as streets, schools, neighborhoods, parks and shower curtains. In the novel “Gone With the Wind,” Scarlett O’Hara names her first child Wade Hampton Hamilton. He is also the subject of several biographies.

ALEXANDER DAVIS BETTS

On July 3, 1863, the Rev. Alexander Davis Betts was riding through a Gettysburg field when he suddenly fainted and fell off his horse.

“Loss of sleep and excitement may have led to the vertigo,” he later wrote in his wartime diary. “God could take a man out of this world without his knowing anything of it.”

Betts knew about falling. Years before, as a farm boy in North Carolina, he’d unwisely tried to ride a reluctant steer, which threw him with such force that Betts limped every after.

Later, as a chaplain with the 30th North Carolina, he saw men whom he believed had fallen from grace, and his job was to hoist them closer to the light.

“General Lee spoke of him as ‘that model chaplain,’” wrote one admirer. “He walked for hours at a time that some footsore, sick or wounded soldier might ride his horse. He visited and prayed with prisoners. To friend and foe alike, he carried the message of God.”

As noted Betts didn’t care if a soul was clothed in blue or gray, only that it be sanctified.

“I found a wounded Federal sitting on the field – a broken thigh, a rifle ball through his arm and a bruised shoulder made him right helpless,” recalled Betts. “His undressed wounds were sore. He asked me if I thought our surgeons would care for him. I assured him they would. He said he had a wife and two little children in his northern home. His parents were pious and had raised him piously, but he had neglected his own soul.

“I said: ‘Brother, Jesus loves you. You came down here to kill my brothers, but I love you.’

“As I took him by the hand and commended him to God, I think my heart was as tender as it ever was. His bones may be in that field now. I hope to meet his soul in Heaven in a few years.”

Born in Cumberland County, N.C., in 1832, Betts compensated in part for his lameness by leading an upright life. As a young college student, he’d had a religious epiphany and went on to become a Methodist minister.

When the Civil War erupted, Betts, then 29, joined the 30th North Carolina, leaving behind a wife and three small children.

He was once asked by a skeptical young Northern woman, “Mr. Betts, what was your object in joining the army? Was it to help the rebellion?”

He wrote later, “I told her I could not have taken the oath of office as Chaplain if I had not been in full sympathy with the Confederate cause, but I did not think it so weak as to need my help. I told her my love for souls led me into the work.”

Among the souls was a young Confederate killed at Gettysburg.

“I wrote to the young man’s father, near Statesville (N.C.), and told him I had buried his son,” he recalled.

“At a Conference in Statesville, Dec. 1868, a lady called for me and told me her father, an old man too feeble to ride to town, asked her to come and find me and give his love to me, and thank me for what I had done for (his son). As we sat and wept, I felt a thousand times paid for my labor and my ten-cent postage stamp.”

Betts served until the end of the war. Down to the last dreg.

After Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, Betts traveled to join Joseph Johnston’s army further south, and stayed with Johnston until he too surrendered, to William Tecumseh Sherman.

Post-bellum, Betts, who was known popularly as “Uncle Betts,” lived to be 86, preaching to his last breath. He died from injuries suffered in a fall. He sired 11 children, one of whom edited his diary for publication as “Experience of a Confederate Chaplain, 1861-1865.”

HELEN GILSON

It may have been the greatest applause Helen Gilson ever heard, the response of a stricken Confederate at Gettysburg after she’d performed “When This Cruel War is Over” for a crowd of wounded soldiers.

“O ma’am!” the Rebel enthused. “I wish I had my other arm back, if it was only to clap my hands for your song!”

Gilson wasn’t a professional singer, but a soulful Massachusetts native who’d been a Union Army nurse for a year by the time of the Battle Gettysburg and the city of wounded in its aftermath.

“Never have I seen so much suffering mortality and destruction,” she wrote.

And she’d seen her share.

The first time Gilson applied to be an army nurse, she was turned away by the famed Dorothea Dix, the no-nonsense superintendent of army nurses, who felt that Gilson was too young.

But Gilson wouldn’t be discouraged. She was inspired by, and traveled with, her uncle, Frank B. Fay, the mayor of Chelsea, Mass., who from the onset of the war had worked energetically caring for the wounded in the wake of major battles fought by the Army of the Potomac.

At Gettysburg, Gilson was still young, and angelic, judging by an account left by a doctor on the scene named Bellows.

“I can never forget how, amid scenes which under ordinary circumstances no woman could have appeared in without gross indecorum, the holy pity and purity of this angel of mercy made her presence seem as fit as though she had indeed dropped out of heaven.

“The men themselves, sick or well, all seemed awed and purified by such a resident among them.”

The only thing missing in that description is a choir of winged cherubs, but it wasn’t the only time that Gilson inspired hyperbole.

But whatever praise came her way, her greatest acts of mercy and sacrifice were still to come.

In a workshop production for the horrors waiting in World War I, the Union siege of Petersburg, Va., beginning in April 1864, brought not only fierce trench warfare, but a landscape where malaria and other diseases stalked the unsuspected.

Among the Union soldiers at Petersburg was a large contingent of black troops, who when wounded or sick were segregated in the most abysmal of conditions.

According to one account, “(The black soldiers) were brought down to City Point, where a temporary hospital had been provided. It was, however, in no other sense a hospital than that it was a depot for wounded men. … The men were neglected, the hospital organization was imperfect, and the mortality was, in consequence, frightfully large. … The severity of the campaign, in a (malarial) country, had prostrated many with fevers; and typhoid, in its most malignant forms, was raging with increasing fatality.”

Gilson saw the soldiers’ plight for herself and suffered with them.

“It is very singular, this new experience of sick colored men,” she wrote.

“The sick are very sick, and seldom recover: the wounded are the most imperturbable creatures, uttering no complaint. … We have never endured so much. No roses here, nothing of beauty, only a parched and arid plain, a mile square of hospital tents, filled with sick and wounded men.”

Gilson took charge, first filibustering Union officials in order to create the Colored Hospital Service and then overseeing renovations, staffing and the stocking of medicine and food.

Among those who caught malaria was Gilson herself.

“I am tired, tired, chronically tired,” she wrote. “Tired to the very marrow of my bones. Last night I tried to answer your letter, but dropped asleep, pen in hand.”

Still, there was no vacation in her future. Malaria or not, she stayed at her post until war’s end. However, death was patient.

Gilson had married a man named E. Hamilton Osgood in 1866 in Massachusetts. On April 20, 1868, the couple was expecting their first child. But neither Ellen, still weakened by malaria, nor the baby survived childbirth. She was in her early 30s.

She is buried in Everett, Mass.

In her last recorded piece of writing, she had noted, “Life has been long to me, but God has given me the sunshine of sweet, dear friendships. I thank him for the joy and sorrow. I love humanity, the world, and I want to live that I may serve and be happy through my work.”

WILLIAM H. GILDER

“From Ikinnelikpatolok, the old Ookjoolik, we learned at the interview that he had only once seen white men alive. That was when he was a little boy. He is now about sixty-five or seventy.”

William Henry Gilder was a long way from Philadelphia, where he was born, and from Gettysburg, where he fought. He might as well have been on the moon, if skinned reindeer tongue had been served there.

The excerpt above comes from his personal account of an Artic expedition of 1878 to 1880, in which Gilder and others had gone where few white men dared to tread, covering some 3,000 miles of often frozen landscape, all the while subsisting on an Eskimo (or “Esquimau,” as he rendered it) diet of seal, walrus, blubber, birds, fish and the delicacy of skinned reindeer tongue.

Gilder was born in 1838, the son and namesake of the Rev. William Henry Gilder, a minister with whom he would serve in the 40th New York, the father as chaplain, the son as an infantry officer.

The 40th was known as “the Mozart Regiment,” an appellation more political than music, the unit being sponsored by the Mozart Hall Committee of the New York Democratic Party.

On the second day at Gettysburg, the regiment found itself fighting amid the rocky killing ground called the “Valley of Death,” between Devil’s Den and Little Round Top, where Gilder the younger was wounded twice and ran a mile in fear and pain to escape capture.

Among New York regiments, the Mozarts were second only to the 69th in the number of casualties suffered during the war. Gilder’s father was among the lost, dying from smallpox in 1864.

In the same year when his father died, Gilder was wounded again, at Hatcher’s Run, after being promoted to captain. By war’s end, he was a brevet major, cited for “gallant and meritorious conduct.”

In the immediate post-bellum years, Gilder became managing editor of the Newark Register in Newark, N.J. The paper had been co-founded by his younger brother, Richard Watson Gilder, a journalist and poet of some renown in his day.

Though he served for six years at the Register, William, who resembled Teddy Roosevelt in more ways than one, was too adventurous a spirit to remain tethered to a desk. In 1878, he signed on as second-in-command (and correspondent of the New York Herald) for a Canadian Artic expedition led by a Civil War veteran, Frederick Schwatka.

The trip was an attempt to retrieve any records left behind by an 1845 Arctic expedition led by British explorer John Franklin to discover a Northwest Passage. Franklin and his party were never heard from again.

The Schwatka team covered some 3,000 miles, the longest recorded sled journey at the time. As explorer and reporter, Gilder chronicled the trek in “Schwatka’s Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records.”

He saw and lived through threats to his life; curious weather in which he suffered sunburn and frostbite at the same time; attacks by wolf packs; various and sundry other deprivations; and tasted the Eskimo version of ice cream.

“The ribs of fat reindeer are also an especial delicacy,” he wrote. “A dish made of the contents of the paunch, mixed with seal oil, looks like ice-cream, and is the Esquimau substitute for that confection. … The first time I partook of this dainty I had unfortunately seen it in course of preparation.

“The confectioner was a toothless old hag, who mixed the ingredients in a wooden dish dirtier than anything I ever saw before, and filled with reindeer hairs. … She extracted the oil from the blubber by crunching it between her old gums, and spat it into the dish, stirring it with her fingers until the entire mass became white, and of about the consistency of cottage cheese.”

The trip uncovered evidence of the Franklin expedition, and Gilder was among those who concluded that the party had practiced cannibalism in an attempt to survive.

Gilder had barely thawed out from the Arctic journey when he was off on another expedition, one that took him to Russia and found him trekking some 2,000 miles across Siberia after the ship he was on was destroyed by fire.

He survived to write “Ice-Pack and Tundra,” published in 1883; to become a war correspondent in Asia; and to report on devastating earthquakes in Spain.

Death finally caught up to him when he died of a kidney ailment called Bright’s disease in 1900. He is buried in Bordentown, N.J.