The final member of this trio was Col. Waller Tazewell Patton (bottom right). He was slightly younger than his two classmates. Born July 15, 1835, Patton was 27 years old at Gettysburg. His great-grandfather was Revolutionary War hero General Hugh Mercer and it was no surprise that Patton pursued a military education. 7

Patton had served with distinction throughout the war and made colonel in June 1862. He was then wounded at Second Manassas. Patton must have been held in some esteem: he was elected to the Virginia State Senate while serving with the army despite not having an opportunity to even canvass his district during the election. 8

Colonel Patton led the 7th Virginia (Kemper’s Brigade.) He was shot in the jaw at the Emmitsburg Road and left behind when Lee’s army retreated. Taken to Pennsylvania (later Gettysburg) College’s field hospital, he was kindly attended to by a nurse from Baltimore. Patton could only communicate by writing on a slate due to his injur. “Tell my mother that I am about to die in a foreign land,” he wrote shortly before his death, “but I cherish the same intense affection for her as ever.” Federal officers who saw what he had written were astonished that he described Pennsylvania as a foreign land. Patton died at the hospital on July 21, days after his 28th birthday, and was eventually reinterred at the Stonewall Confederate Cemetery in Winchester, Virginia. He was buried next to his brother who also died during the war. 9

The military tradition continued in the Patton family. Colonel Waller Tazewell Patton is perhaps best remembered as the great-uncle of World War II General George S. Patton.