The Ragpickers at Gettysburg

by Patrick Nevins

The Ragpickers learned of the battle from Mr. Pages at the Hauer paper mill in Spring Forge. The three men had been picking rags for him from the farms that dotted the countryside around the village, but with the field hospitals collecting every scrap for bandages, there were no more rags to be had.

“Gettysburg,” Mr. Pages had said. “Twenty-four miles west. I don’t like the idea one bit, but it’s the only chance I’ve got to keep the mill operating. And you men are nothing but bags of bones.”

“You should see our horses,” said one of the Ragpickers. “Should we not make it there, we can open a glue factory.”

“You’ll want to ride by day, and pick at night.”

“Why’s that, sir?”

“They’ll be burying the dead all day long, for days, maybe weeks. Look for the unburied.”

“We’re ragpickers, not graverobbers. Right?”

“Take care to avoid Union eyes,” Mr. Pages warned. “And take only rags.”

The Ragpickers drove their horses silently, sweltering on the bench seat. York Turnpike was empty save for a wagon being driven out of Gettysburg by a disreputable-looking sort. The wagon driver sneered at them and tightened his grip on his musket, likely stolen from the battlefield, to stave off any attempt by the Ragpickers to rob him. Even if the Ragpickers had wanted to rob him, they had neither the strength nor the guns. The scavenger’s wagon, they imagined, was loaded with the arms of the Confederate dead. Maybe Union dead, too. But not rags. So the Ragpickers nodded gravely and rode on.

Evening came on, and the Ragpickers rode with bowed heads against the setting sun. The drone of crickets in the fields and the clop of hooves was lulling them to sleep. But before they crossed over into slumber, the collapse of one of their horses jerked them to attention. The Ragpickers unhitched the dead horse and dragged her from the road. One of the Ragpickers retrieved a shovel from the wagon.

“You want to bury her?”

“She deserves better than to be left on the side of the road. And we’ll build up an enormous appetite.”

“You remember we’ve nothing to eat?”

“Then we’ll be ravenous when we finally break our fast. Come on, we’ll take turns.”

The third Ragpicker took the shovel and broke earth on the shallow grave.

As the Ragpicker who’d proposed the burial laid the last shovelful of dirt onto the grave, he said, “We are not doing this again.”

* * *

Late into the night, the three remaining horses thrashed and snorted, as if afraid to go on. By their lantern light, the Ragpickers could see no more than a few feet in front of their horses, but the death stench told them that they were close to the battlefield.

“We’re almost there, girls. Then you can rest.”

They crossed Rook Creek and turned south into the death stench. They crested a ridge and arrived at a valley bordered by the creek to the east and a breastwork to the west. Among trees that had been shredded or felled by the battle, massive boulders kept a deathwatch over an untold number of festering bodies stretching before them. Across the valley and over the breastworks, there must have been thousands more. Slaughtered horses, too, picked at by buzzards.

The Ragpickers stepped down from the wagon and took a cursory walk among the dead. Union and Confederate, tossed and soiled enough to look like part of the earth. It was horrifying by any measure, but what ultimately unsettled the Ragpickers was the youth of so many of the dead. The Ragpickers’ sons would be about the age of these boys. The Ragpickers had not seen their sons in years, but their young, soft faces came to them vividly now.

One of the Ragpickers squatted by an older soldier and took hold of his blue jacket, gently fingering the wool. The soldier appeared to have been stripped of his arms, but the Ragpicker discovered a small sidearm inside his jacket. Something overlooked by the scavenger the Ragpickers had passed on the road. The Ragpicker left it on the soldier.

“Let’s begin in this valley,” he said. “Rags only. Leave everything else.”

The Ragpickers grabbed their sacks and systematically worked their way across the valley. With great care, they removed jackets, shirts, trousers, and undergarments. They laid each man’s hat across his chest so he could be buried with his Union or Confederate brothers.

The Ragpickers’ hands were quickly and deeply stained with blood and earth. When a Ragpicker’s sack was full, he slung it over his shoulder and hauled it back to the wagon, emptied it, and began again.

“Come, look!” one of the Ragpickers called.

The other Ragpickers rushed over to see what was matter, taking care not to trample any of the dead. The first Ragpicker stood and slowly opened his palm to reveal a roll of Necco Wafers.

“I know we’re not to take anything but rags …”

“Oh, I doubt the Union will miss these.”

So, the Ragpickers divided the wafers and, as they worked into the night, sucked on their chalky sweetness to keep up their spirits.

* * *

Until the Union could muster the men to properly attend to the battlefield, the 21^st Pennsylvania Cavalry was charged with patrolling the site. They camped just south of Evergreen Cemetery, and though they were nearly starved, daily rode out to the sites of battle east and west to chase away thieves and other curious types, often taking off of them anything they could eat or spend as punishment. Further south, the farms-turned-hospitals were spilling over with injured men; men filled every room of every house and the fields, too. But the sites of battle were generally deserted save the men from town busy digging shallow trenches for unmarked burials.

The morning after the Ragpickers had been at work by Rook Creek, the cavalry had ridden to the southwest and formed a ring around three boys who’d been spotted among the dead near the hospitals on Taneytown Road. The captain dismounted and approached the boys. He weaved among the dead and got right up to one of the boys, who flinched at his yellowed teeth and whiskey breath.

“We were just looking, Captain. Honest.”

“Everything in this battlefield is Union property. If I find you’ve stolen so much as a single Necco Wafer—”

“He’s telling the truth, Captain.”

The captain turned to the boy who’d brazenly interrupted him. “You’re Widow Wallace’s boy, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m disappointed to see you mixed up in this.”

“We’re sorry, Captain. We won’t trespass again.”

The captain said nothing to the boy. “Search them!”

A half-dozen men dismounted and in pairs grabbed the boys and searched them roughly, finding nothing in the boys’ pockets but some salted meat, which they took for themselves. The captain walked over to the widow’s boy, who was still held by two of his men. The captain brought his face very close to the boy’s and whispered, “Since you’re not helping your poor mother, perhaps you’d like to come back to camp?”

“Thank you, Captain, but she’s expecting me back any minute.”

“Oh, I doubt she’d mind if you were in the company of a captain of the Union Army.”

The captain removed his gloves. He hooked his fingers into the rim of the boy’s trousers, pulling him closer, and the boy tensed in his captors’ arms, sickened with fear of what would happen next.

“Captain!” A lone cavalry man was riding in from the east. “Trouble on Culp’s Hill.”

The captain turned toward the voice, and the boys thrashed from the men’s holds and ran, dashing across Taneytown Road back to their farms. The captain huffed at seeing the boys escape, but clearly there was something more pressing than some curious boys. He mounted his horse, and the cavalry rode out to meet the scout.

“What is it, Major?”

“Scores of the dead robbed, Union and Rebel. It’s very curious, sir. Many have not been stripped of their arms, but have been desecrated in a rather unusual manner.”

“How is that?”

“They’ve been stripped of their clothes, save their hats.”

“Ragpickers. Filthy Irish. Should they come back, we’ll make them pay.”

* * *

Mr. Pages delighted at seeing the Ragpickers’ wagon return the next evening, and though he blanched at the blood-stained tears in the uniforms, he paid the Ragpickers well and asked if they would go back for another load. The Ragpickers, seeing their position, agreed to risk the journey and Union trouble, under certain conditions.

“There is plenty more. You would think a war was being fought! But we’ll need to eat first.”

“Yes! I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse.”

“Though we’d prefer not to; we’ve already lost one!”

“Certainly,” Mr. Pages said. “Allow me to feed you men.”

“Our horses, too. Lest they decide to eat us!”

Mr. Pages brought food and beer to the Ragpickers and fed their horses. The Ragpickers ate and drank what they could hold in their shrunken bellies and stuffed their pockets with the leftovers, then slept in the back of their wagon on their empty sacks. They awakened in the morning to the patter of rain on the wagon’s roof and again set out for Gettysburg.

* * *

Their farmhouse and barn having been turned into a hospital, and being overfilled with injured soldiers and the doctors and nurses attending to their wounds, Mrs. Wallace and her son were sitting down in the damp grass behind the house for their supper. The rain had finally stopped, and there was such a lovely starlight that for a moment Mrs. Wallace and her son might forget the calamity that had descended upon them for those three days. They had acclimated to the death stench, and preferred it to the cries of the infected, though those were impossible to escape entirely; nearly all of the men whose beds, as it were, were situated outside of the house and barn, were grievously infected.

As they were saying a prayer, William saw three lights coming over a ridge north of the farm. Lanterns. A wagon, he guessed, from the way they moved. The boy jumped up to take a closer look. Now Mrs. Wallace saw them, too.

“Stay put, son.”

“Is it scavengers?”

“It may be. Better go tell the captain right away.”

“The captain? I thought you wanted me to stay put?”

“Don’t be smart, young man.”

“Shouldn’t I stay here to protect you?”

“No one except the dying wants in here. Maybe not even them. Besides, I’ve got your father’s rifle.”

William didn’t move. The silence was broken by a moan from one of the fields.

“Hurry up, now.”

“They call them the Forty Thieves. They’re worse than scavengers.”

“What are you talking about? You know what—I don’t even want to know. Just get going.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

William rode up to the cavalry’s camp, praying that no one would be there. He didn’t like scavengers, but would rather see them get away with a few guns and sabers than suffer the captain’s cold fingers on him again. God, he wanted to kill him! If his father were still alive, they would patrol the battlefield, keep it safe from scavengers, and not harass the families that lived there. They would be heroes; the captain and the Forty Thieves might as well be secesh.

When William arrived at the camp, he found that the cavalry had been joined by a second cavalry, in whose charge were dozens of haggard-looking Confederate prisoners. The prisoners, William came to understand from the captain of the second cavalry, were to be put to work burying the dead.

“And what is your business, young man?” This new captain asked William.

“Scavengers, sir.”

* * *

“A most unusual thing grows in this valley.”

Two nights after their first journey into Gettysburg, the Ragpickers returned to the valley. One of them had his lantern lowered to the earth to show the others what he’d nearly tripped over: from a low mound emerged the toe of a boot. Its partner sprouted next to it.

One of the other Ragpickers bent over and pulled at one of the boots; the earth’s grip upon it told him that it remained on its wearer. He might’ve pulled the boot, foot and all, from the earth, so rotted was the body; instead he let go. “I suspect this thing has quite the root system.”

“We’re not graverobbers.”

One of the Ragpickers brushed some of the damp earth from the mound and revealed a gray jacket. “This isn’t a proper grave.” He brushed more earth away, and in a moment a decomposing Confederate soldier lay before them. “So there’s nothing to worry about!”

The shallow grave was just one in a long, buried trench that ran parallel to the breastwork. The Ragpickers guessed that a dozen or more soldiers lay there, so that’s where they began. After removing a soldier’s clothes, they kicked some of the earth back and laid his hat across him.

“How long do you suppose we can go on doing this?”

“Making a killing off dead soldiers? Maybe we’ll get lucky and the war will never end!”

After a while, one of the Ragpickers spoke with an earnestness rarely heard among the Ragpickers. “You don’t think any of our boys got caught up in this?”

“Not a chance,” said one of the others as he was pulling the jacket off a dead soldier. “If they’re anything like us, they won’t be caught anywhere near this war.”

At that moment, the Ragpickers felt the earth quaking as if under a stampede. They turned toward the sound, helplessly.

“Yes,” the third Ragpicker said. “Good thing we have more sense than to get involved in the war …”

A cavalry came into view as it rode through a gap in the breastwork and descended into the valley. As the cavalry funneled through, a boy broke off from the line and rode away. The cavalry approached the Ragpickers, and a few men dismounted and immediately climbed into their wagon. The cavalry’s leader narrowed his eyes at the Ragpickers, looked at the uncovered and half-stripped bodies at their feet, the soiled sacks in their hands.

“This isn’t your first time in Gettysburg, is it, ragpickers?”

“No, sir. Is it yours? Lovely, isn’t it?”

The captain unsheathed his saber and thrust it inches from the Ragpicker’s face.

“I’ve a notion that you’ve taken arms off the dead.”

“We’ve not taken anything but rags, sir.”

One of the men called from the wagon, “Nothing but clothes here, sir.”

“See?” said the Ragpicker. “Holey things, too. And bloody, very bloody. Beyond mending.”

“Shut up!” yelled the captain. “Search them.”

Men grabbed the Ragpickers and emptied their pockets of salted meat, crusts of bread, and the last few Necco Wafers.

“For the unholy crime of desecrating the bodies of Union soldiers, men who gave their lives to preserve these United States, you degenerate Irish ragpickers are sentenced to burn the bodies of all the fallen horses in this valley.”

“There must be hundreds,” said one of the Ragpickers. “Any chance we could get back those wafers, sir? It would make for much quicker work.”

The captain crushed the candies in his fist.

“On second thought, why don’t you enjoy them? They do something wonderful for your disposition.”

The Ragpickers, along with the prisoners, began dragging the picked-at horses toward the center of the valley for burning. Some horses were intact, and required several men to move; others, whose joints had been chewed by animals, were in pieces that a single man could carry. The Ragpickers couldn’t decide which was worse. A cavalryman lighted the pile of rotting flesh.

“At least,” said one of the Ragpickers, “we don’t have to bury them.”

As dawn approached, and with it more rainfall, the cavalry and the prisoners watched the pile smolder. The reek reignited the olfactories of the cavalry and the prisoners, who’d grown used to the death stench. Mrs. Wallace and William and the doctors and nurses and suffering men housed at their farm were overtaken by it, too.

And the Ragpickers laughed.

About the author

Patrick Nevins is the author of the novel Man in a Cage (forthcoming from Malarkey Books). "The Ragpickers at Gettysburg" will appear in his collection The Commission of Inquiry (forthcoming from Cornerstone Press).

About the illustration

The illustration is Battle-field of Gettysburg. Dead horses of Bigelow's (9th Massachusetts) battery. Photograph taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan in July 1863. In the public domain, via the Library of Congress.