ECW News: Gettysburg Doctor’s Letter Collection Details Search for Confederate Dead

More than 160 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, a remarkable collection of more than 40 original Civil War-era letters has come to light, revealing in extraordinary detail a forgotten chapter of the battle’s aftermath: the years-long search for the Confederate dead.

Andrew Dalton, executive director of Gettysburg History, and Timothy Smith, historian for Gettysburg History, join Emerging Civil War’s Chris Mackowski to discuss the new trove of letters from Dr. J. W. C. O’Neal recently donated to Gettysburg History.

ECW is pleased to share one story from the collection, courtesy of Gettysburg History:

The desire to finally bring the dead home appears on page after page of this incredible group of letters.

In 1869, Lucy H. Wood wrote O’Neal about her brother, 23-year-old Second Lieutenant Valentine W. Southall of the 23rd Virginia. Southall had been wounded at Gettysburg on Culp’s Hill and died on July 20, 1863 at a field hospital. Information in O’Neal’s records and a hand-drawn map created by a comrade placed his grave near the York Road east of town.

“It has always been our wish to remove his remains,” Wood wrote, “but unfortunately our circumstances are so reduced as to have entirely prevented us, up to the present time. I am myself a widow—became so during the war.”

Six years had passed since Gettysburg, but her grief had hardly diminished. “The circumstances of his death have always been so touching and heartrending that I cannot speak of him even at this late day without tears.”

She pleaded with O’Neal: “May the Lord enable you to find his remains, that they may at last rest under the Ancestral shade trees of our family burial ground.”

O’Neal responded with the matter-of-fact language of a man who had by then performed this work many times.

“There is no doubt as regards the corner of the field in which the remains lye,” he wrote.

Travel to Gettysburg was unnecessary, he explained. After six years, the remains were “but the principle bones and would hold in a small box.” Once received, the box could be secured inside a conventional coffin for burial. He estimated its weight at only 35 or 40 pounds. “This is merely a suggestion, prompted by experience,” O’Neal explained, intended to avoid “extraordinary expense of travel, coffin express freight, &c. &c.”

A month later, he returned to retrieve the body.

“To day I had exhumed & packed the remains of Lt. Southall,” O’Neal wrote on August 10, 1869. “The wounded bone is wrapped in paper & packed top of box which you can examine.”

He then itemized every expense:

• For digging – 1.50
• Horse & wagon – 1.50Box screws etc – 1.75
• Postage & gates [likely a reference to toll gates] about .50”

The total cost of exhuming Valentine Southall from his Gettysburg grave was $5.25.

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The full collection of O’Neal’s letters has been digitized and is available online here.