…Scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy.
–H. P. Lovecraft
American Culture was vast and deep even a century-and-a-half ago, and more so because of the distance between shores. The diversity in cultures between North and South, as a matter of fact, was the root cause of the great fiery cauldron called the American Civil War.
And one thing that many historians often fail to include in their discussion of the American culture at the time of the Civil War was how religious a society it was.
There were several major revivals of Christianity in the 1840s, 50s and 60s, and the tendrils of this religious background intertwined with the more sordid aspects of armies and war.
Young men, whose mothers and fathers took them to church each Sunday and read the Holy Bible by lamplight in the evenings and said grace before each meal, suddenly found themselves in the company of other young men who were gamblers and drinkers and liars, who cussed and blasphemed and took the name of the Lord in vain. They heard about adultery committed, and stealing, and men bearing false witness against their neighbors, and coveting just about everything. The evils they had been warned about in the traveling camp meetings and in Sunday school they saw acted out in the army. At nearly every stop on the march or in every camp, out came “The Devil’s Pasteboards,”—playing cards—and men gambled away tobacco and coffee and every greenback they owned. They heard women called all sorts of vile names, and men—especially officers—called names as well; they heard almost unbelievable stories of strange and wicked happenings; and when they visited some of the larger cities like Washington, saw that it was all true!
They also found themselves in the awkward position, as devout Christians, of having to level a rifle-musket at a fellow human being, one also created in God’s image, and to pull the trigger and kill him. “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” was drilled into virtually every young man, North and South, from his formative years, and while Sigmund Freud did not discover the curse of the subconscious mind until well after the Civil War, it was, no doubt, in existence.
Yet another tenet of the mid-19th Century Christian Revival was the idea of “full-body resurrection.”
Many Christians believed that, at the “end of the age,” Christ will come to earth again to judge the quick and the dead, who shall rise from their graves and be resurrected. An important part of this orthodox belief is that the body have all its parts so that the individual may enter the Kingdom of God whole.
When one is in battle, with shot and shell and minie balls flying every which way, it is very difficult to guarantee that one will escape unscathed and intact.
Heard on more than one occasion, when a man was unceremoniously separated from one of his limbs by a cruel shell or shot, was that he wanted the limb brought along: “Here,” said one being carried off the field on a litter. “Bring me my leg and put it next to me. It has been an old friend and I do not wish to part with it now.”
Native Americans had a related belief: in whatever form a human left this earth, that would be the form in which he would be doomed to wander Eternity. This is why, after a battle, the Native American women would roam the battlefield, slicing with knives the dead enemies’ thighs so they could not walk through the afterlife; or decapitating them so they could not function headless; or chopping off feet and hands so they could never march to attack their people again, even after death. This explains the ritual mutilations of George Armstrong Custer (a Gettysburg veteran himself) and his men after the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
So it must have been particularly horrible for some young man, schooled in the catechism of “full body resurrection,” to awaken after the surgeon’s knife had removed a damaged limb and to find that it had been carelessly tossed out a window, mixed with others’ mangled, bloody, amputated limbs, carted away and buried or burned.
And so it must have been with one James McCleary of the Union artillery. Sometime before the battles there on July 2 and 3, on the easternmost crest of Cemetery Hill, Union artillerists had emplaced cannons within “lunettes”—the crescent-shaped mounds still embracing the cannons there that now represent the original gun positions during the battle. No doubt James pitched in with the boys, wielding pick and shovel with the two good arms he was born with, straining flesh and blood, muscle and sinew accustomed to the hard work in the artillery. He, like all his comrades, knew the lunettes could be a life-saving barricade between them and rebel bullets.
But they might not protect the gunners against other artillery shells, especially “plunging fire” with a trajectory that dropped them from above. Not much could defend against that, as poor James McCleary was soon to discover.
Beginning at about 3:00 p.m. on July 2, there was a classic “artillery duel” between Latimer’s Confederate Battery on Benner’s Hill and Wainwright’s Federal artillery on East Cemetery Hill. The fighting was particularly savage, even for an artillery fight. Men were cut in half, disemboweled, had their heads torn off, had legs amputated, pieces of skulls, necks, shoulders and hands gouged out. Horses were torn to pieces or panicked, kicked their handlers in heads, stomachs, and faces, and ran wild. Shells struck rows of men lying in what they thought was safety behind rock walls and ripped dozens apart. Shot struck wooden gun carriages, driving pieces of wood and iron into men attempting to load and fire the guns. On more than one occasion, a shot landed in an ammunition chest, exploding its contents and separating for eternity the body parts of the men around it.
Lunettes on East Cemetery Hill.
Sometime during the fight, James McCleary was wounded in the legs. But in a battle where immortal deeds were done by mortal men, McCleary bravely, tenaciously stuck to his post. From another battery came “plunging fire.” The Confederate fire was accurate. Fatally accurate for James McCleary. As he continued to work the gun his right arm was viciously torn off by an enemy shell. The limb landed somewhere near one of the lunettes James strained so hard to build just hours before. During the cleanup after the fight, heaven knows what became of the arm. It was thrown in amongst hundreds of other body parts, no doubt, and buried in some unmarked, unsanctified hole, or perhaps burned in one of the hideous, smoky pyres that dotted the field for weeks after the battle. The dauntless artillerist was last seen being carried off the field murmuring weakly about his missing arm. He died shortly and was buried in the Evergreen Cemetery, the civilian cemetery just a hundred yards or so from where his life’s blood flowed freely from a traumatic amputation by cannon shell. He lies there still…but without his arm.
But, if one believes the whispers among the tour guides of the Ghosts of Gettysburg Candlelight Walking Tours, when the earth was shoveled over his cold form was not the last time he was seen.
The guides and customers have seen and heard a number of mysterious, unexplainable things on East Cemetery Hill, from columns of blue lights over the statues of Generals O. O. Howard and Winfield Scott Hancock, to the distant, phantom sounds of soldiers cheering from the woods below, to gunfire echoing off Culp’s Hill in the distance. But perhaps the eeriest occurs only at certain times—after a thunderstorm or during full moon when shadows dance a mournful waltz among the lunettes.
Along the darkened and dismal skyline the guide and her customers see a lone figure moving, then bending low as if seeking something near the batteries, then moving on. Closer he comes to the confused group, closer still, in the dim light of the moon or the reflected light off the low cloud cover, until he turns and a frontal silhouette becomes clear. The observers look, and everything is fine until one notices: “Look. He’s missing…my goodness…he has no right arm.”
And so we must wonder: until he is reunited with the missing body part, is the courageous cannoneer James McCleary doomed to wander East Cemetery Hill in his zombie-like trance, searching—forever searching—for the arm that will allow him Grace?
James McCleary Headstone.
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