Despite the receipt of the sad letter, Sarah Mercer continued to hold out a faint sense of hope that her beloved brother might still be alive. “I would think sometimes that there must be a mistake and that he was taken prisoner and would come home again sometime,” she confided to her diary. Even that remote possibility, however, was firmly extinguished a few months later when Chaplain Alexander Betts from Ramseur’s Brigade, who had been the family’s local minister before the war, sent Sarah a letter describing how he found her brother’s body on the field of battle. “His letter caused the last spark of hope that I had entertained of ever seeing dear Buddy on earth again, to go out,” she lamented.⁶⁵

The news from Gettysburg proved just as devastating for the families of the soldiers in the 23rd North Carolina, the last of the three regiments driven back into the bloody gully and nearly eliminated there. Of the estimated 22 officers and 262 enlisted men from the regiment trapped in the depression before the stone wall, only one officer and about 16 enlisted men made it out of the July 1 fight without injury. The casualties included the adjutant and all three of the field officers. Adjutant Junius B. French succumbed to his injuries on the day after the fight. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Johnston suffered wounds to his jaw, neck, and right clavicle during the wholly preventable fiasco in the Forney field. Colonel Daniel Christie barely clung to life after being shot in both lungs while leading his men in the desperate but short-lived charge out of the hollow.⁶⁶

Major Blacknall also suffered a severe wound during the fighting on the first day of the battle. Blacknall was struck down by a bullet early in the attack as he tried to climb over a mortised fence running through the center of the field. While not life threatening, his injuries proved incredibly painful. During the retreat, Lieutenant Colonel Green noticed that Blacknall spoke “with some difficulty of articulation as he had had a pretty rough operation of dentistry two days before, a musket-ball entering one side of his jaw, taking out a half-dozen of his teeth, and coming out on the other.”⁶⁷

The losses proved just as heavy among the men in the line companies. Private O’Daniel counted 28 casualties in his company alone, including both officers who were present on the field. “Our Company suffered dreadfully,” he wrote a few days after the battle. “Their was three killed dead on the field. Three that was mortally wounded that died shortly after the fight was over that time. Two died before night and one in the night.” According to O’Daniel, four others were “seriously wounded and ware still living when I left them on Saturday.” The total also included several soldiers with more minor wounds and 11 unwounded men who were captured in the hollow.⁶⁸

The outcome was almost as bad in Pvt. Coghill’s company, which suffered 27 casualties. Lieutenant Charles William Champion, the only commissioned officer present with the company, was killed outright. The company lost one enlisted man killed, seven wounded, seven more who were both wounded and captured, and 11 unwounded men captured when the hollow was stormed by the Federals. Private Robert K. Turner was among those few who escaped capture by hiding among the piles of bodies in the gully.

Even the return of the slightly wounded men to duty did little to improve the situation. More than a week after the battle, Coghill informed his family that there still were fewer than 45 men present for duty in the entire regiment. Including the cooks, clerks, litter-bearers, and other detailed men, he counted no more than 80 men. About the same time, O’Daniel reported that only eight soldiers were present in his entire company. “We have no officer, neither Commissioned or non commissioned,” he wrote. “Four Lieut[s] is all the officer[s] in the regiment.”⁶⁹

According to one veteran, Colonel Christie was so angry and distraught over the needless devastation suffered by his regiment that he summoned the survivors to the Hankey farmhouse on the morning of July 2. The scene that unfolded was one eyewitnesses never forgot. As the handful of men from the 23rd North Carolina gathered around the porch, the colonel lifted himself up in the litter that ultimately would later double as his death bed to proclaim “with much feeling” that “he might never live to again lead them in battle but he would see that ‘the imbecile Iverson never should.’”⁷⁰

The mortally wounded Christie was not alone in his feeling of bitterness toward the brigade commander. Many others also expressed outrage at Iverson’s failure to personally lead his troops into the fight. “Iverson’s part in the heroic struggle of his brigade seems to have begun and ended with the order to move forward and ‘Give them hell,’” Capt. Vines Turner complained. He further argued that the attack had failed because “our brigade commander (Iverson) after ordering us forward, did not follow us in that advance, and our alignment soon became false.” Lieutenant Joseph Oliver agreed, commenting bitterly that “Gen. Iverson gave the order to forward and went back in the woods and left his brigade to take care of itself.”⁷¹

For others, Iverson’s decision to remain in the rear during the attack was cause for even harsher and more personal criticism. Stories soon began circulating that he had failed to accompany his troops onto the field because he was a coward. “Rumor had it that he not only remained in the rear but that a big chestnut log intervened between him and the battle and that more than once he reminded his staff that for more than one at a time to look over was an unnecessary exposure of person,” an enlisted man in the 23rd North Carolina explained to Major Blacknall’s son years later.⁷²

The accounts of Iverson’s cowardice on July 1 caught fire and spread quickly throughout the division. Among those who heard the stories was Sgt. Alexander S. “Sandie” Murdock from the 2nd North Carolina in Ramseur’s Brigade. “Iverson was nowhere to be found on the battlefield,” he explained in a letter to his brother about one month after the battle. “It is said that he took his position behind a tree about 1/2 mile from it.” Murdock readily admitted that the news came to him as a secondhand account, noting simply that “such is the report.”⁷³

Major Campbell Brown, Ewell’s stepson and observant staff member, also referred in his journal to “the well-known cowardly behavior of Iverson.” According to Brown, the source of his information was hearsay from Generals Daniel and Rodes and from some of the survivors of Iverson’s own brigade. The only account to support the widely held—but weakly sourced—belief that Iverson was drunk that day surfaced several decades after the war from another soldier in Ramseur’s Brigade. “General Ivison, who was drunk, I think, and a coward besides, was off hiding somewhere, while his brigade… was being beaten by the Yankees,” he declared in his reminiscences.⁷⁴

For his fellow officers, however, the most damning aspect of the sorry affair appeared in Iverson’s own report to Rodes. In it, the brigadier reported that his line of battle in the hollow had gone over to the enemy which, wrote Iverson, “I characterized… as disgraceful.” Although both Rodes and Ewell largely refrained from criticizing his actions in their official accounts of the fighting, his obvious panic in the middle of the battle, far removed from the front line, proved impossible to ignore. “The unfortunate mistake of General Iverson at this critical juncture in sending word to Major-General Rodes that one of his regiments had raised the white flag and gone over to the enemy might have produced the most disastrous consequences,” Ewell announced in his official campaign report.⁷⁵

Even before Ewell issued his official rebuke, Capt. Benjamin Robinson from the 5th North Carolina sent a detailed letter to Governor Vance strongly disputing the claim that his regiment had surrendered. “That charge I denounce as an infamous falsehood and malicious slander,” Robinson declared. “No surrender was authorized; no order was given for a cessation of the fire; our colors were brought in triumph from the field, pierced with fifteen balls and the staff shattered into pieces.” Vance responded by turning the message over for publication in a Raleigh newspaper.

In that same letter, Robinson vigorously denied the allegation that a large number of unwounded men from his regiment had been captured in the hollow. Instead, he insisted that nearly all of them continued to fight rather than surrender. “The pale bloody corpses of its noble men who lie sleeping on the hill sides near Gettysburg, the shrieks of its wounded on that field; the mangled bodies of its officers and soldiers, attest in tones of mighty eloquence to the gallantry of our Regiment on that occasion,” he declared, “and stamp as a falsehood the ungenerous aspersions that have been leveled at its fair fame.”⁷⁶