Whose Father Was He? (Part Five)

By ERROL MORRIS

This is the fifth and final installment of “Whose Father Was He?” — an investigation into a photograph of three children found on the dead body of Amos Humiston, a fallen Union soldier, at Gettysburg in 1863. Part one can be read here; part two here; part three here; and part four here.

Initially, I proposed three questions. Dr. Bourns provided an answer to the first question: What is his (the father’s) name? Whatever his underlying motivation might have been, he was able to use the ambrotype to track down Philinda Humiston and her children. And then Mark Dunkelman, through his extensive research (including the discovery of Amos Humiston’s letters), provided an answer to the second question: Who was he? But there was a third question: What does he mean to us?

In the years following there have been hundreds, maybe thousands of accounts of Gettysburg. Civil War historians have crisscrossed the battlefield, providing detailed tactical diagrams and maps; the matching of contemporary photographs with the photographs of Brady, O’Sullivan and Gardner; lists of the casualties, diaries, letters and personal accounts. Enthusiasts have reenacted the major events, complete with artillery, guns, uniforms and hardtack in their knapsacks.

Here are the essentials of Day One of the battle. There was a broad movement of the Confederate forces from the west and north that drove Union forces through Gettysburg to positions on Cemetery Hill and adjacent hills and ridges, where heavy fighting (including Pickett’s Charge) occurred on the following days, the 2nd and 3rd of July, 1863. The accounts range from the overwhelmingly general to the insanely specific, from the poetic to the pedantic. Of the 43,000 casualties at Gettysburg, there are 43,000 stories, most unknown. Amos Humiston’s is one of them.

It has now become known as Coster’s Last Stand [26]. The brigade marched north into town from Cemetery Hill. They followed Stratton Street, crossed Stevens Run, and finally filed through a narrow carriage gateway into Kuhn’s brickyard — brick kilns and a house, fenced off from the surrounding area. There was one way in and no other way out. They continued across the brickyard, moving in lines along a downward slope, taking position along a fence. To the left, the 27th Pennsylvania held the highest ground, adjacent to the 154th New York in the center, and the 134th New York made up the right flank. They knew they had to hold their fire until the Confederates were within range, but they had no idea that they were outnumbered three to one.

From “Gettysburg — The First Day” by Harry W. Pfanz. Copyright © 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher, uncpress.unc.edu.

When they crested the hill, the Confederates sent a curtain of shot and shell into the line of Federal troops. Coster’s brigade was simply engulfed. One great fear in 19th century infantry combat was the enfilade attack — fire from the flanks across the line. And that is exactly what happened — the Confederates, wrapping around the 134th New York to the right and the 27th Pennsylvania to the left.

Lt. Colonel Allen of the 154th New York ordered his men to retreat. Racing across the brickyard, he reached the top of the rise and found a steadfast wall of Confederate troops. It was a surprise. He thought the position had been held by the 27th Pennsylvania, but the 27th Pennsylvania was no more. Unaware of Lt. Colonel Allen’s predicament, Lieutenant John Mitchell, the commander of the 154th New York, Company C (Amos Humiston’s company), rallied his men to hold what he thought was an advantageous position. “Boys, let’s stay right here,” he called to them. But shortly, Mitchell came to what must have been the sickening realization: he was mistaken. They could not hold the Confederates off. He shouted again, “Boys, we must get out of here.”

What role did Amos Humiston play in the battle? What effect did Colonel Coster’s brigade — the brigade in which Amos Humiston served — have on the battle as a whole? Does the question make any sense? The Union was routed on Day One of Gettysburg, but the actions of Coster’s brigade allowed Union forces to consolidate their positions south of the town, and ultimately facilitated the Union victory on Day Three. Is it possible that Coster’s brigade, by protecting the flank and allowing a retreat, ultimately saved the day? Is it possible, is it meaningful to ask the question: how did Amos Humiston’s actions on Day One of Gettysburg — the day he died — contribute to the Union war effort? There is a tendency when writing about one man to make him the center of the universe, the hub of some vast wheel around which everything else revolves. What meaning does Amos Humiston’s life and death have?

Who can say? We know about battles in aggregate but not through their constituent parts. We can know something about Colonel Coster and his men — less about the individuals, including Amos Humiston, who were part of the brigade under his command. (We can know about the links between Egyptian and Meso-American civilizations, but not the names of the men who made the voyages from the Old to the New World.) We may know that the casualty-rate among the 154th New York regiment that afternoon was 78 percent, that four out of five men were casualties [27]. But it is the photograph of Humiston’s children, the knowledge that he had a family, and what that family looked like, that not only gives him a face, but it also provides the face of battle. It satisfies a deep craving to make the war about us, to allow us to see ourselves in the midst of it. The recovery of a unique individual from the myriad complexities of history.[28]

Library of Congress Geography and Map Division

Mark Dunkelman, in one memorable passage (excerpted below), describes the remains of the battlefield:

Gettysburg in the aftermath of the great battle was an appalling place… Wrecked caissons and wagons littered twenty-five square miles of battlefield. Shells, cannonballs, and musket balls were everywhere, embedded in trees, fences, and houses, and dotting the surface of the ground. Unexploded shells would maim or kill the curious who handled them in days and months to come. At least three thousand mangled, swollen, and fetid dead horses rotted on the battlefield, clumps of them marking positions where batteries had been decimated. Offal and bones of butchered cattle, sheep, and hogs were scattered widespread, evidence of a heavy loss of local livestock, and loose animals strayed over the battlefield. Swarms of flies covered decaying flesh in crawling, buzzing black masses. Notable by their absence were scavenging birds. Crows and vultures had been scared away by the tremendous noise of the battle and the acrid stench of burned gunpowder… And everywhere were the grotesque, decomposing corpses and body parts of men, transforming Gettysburg into a vast city of the dead.[29]

A vast city of the dead. But also a city of the nameless dead [30]. The story of the Humiston ambrotype and the carte-de-visite copies represent an attempt to recover a name and an identity from the refuse of the battlefield. The link back to Amos Humiston was made because of a photograph. And yet, the question posed by The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t ask us to provide the unknown soldier’s name, it asks us about the children — whose father was he? It implores us to reconstruct a family torn asunder by war. Perhaps the family already knew that Amos Humiston was dead. He had not been heard from for many months. Perhaps someone had discovered Humiston’s effects unclaimed at camp and written a letter to the Humiston family or a soldier had seen him fall or had been with him when he died, but that in itself would be a personal rather than a national story. Once the mystery of the photograph had been presented to the public, it had to be solved. It was important for the public to be able to follow Lincoln’s appeal in his Second Inaugural — to “bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who has borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan . . .”

Today in Gettysburg, there is a monument to Amos Humiston — a granite boulder with a bronze plaque with a likeness of Amos Humiston and his children affixed to it [31]. In Mark Dunkelman’s words, “The only monument to an individual enlisted man on the Gettysburg battlefield.”

From stonesentinels.com

At the heart of this is the dream of defeating time and thereby achieving immortality, creating a past that can live on after we die. Mark Dunkelman and David Humiston Kelley were inspired by their grandfather’s stories and spent a considerable fraction of their adult lives sifting through evidence and compiling genealogies. They are placing themselves in the arc of first being inspired by the past and then creating their future place in it. But not everyone is like this. Ironies abound. What about the other Humiston descendants? David Humiston Kelley was obsessed with history, but Allan Cox, who inherited the letters, was much less interested in the past. Mark Dunkelman found the letters, but how many Mark Dunkelmans are there in our futures? How many future historians to lovingly research and recreate our past?

Perhaps more than any other artifact, the photograph has engaged our thoughts about time and eternity. I say “perhaps,” because the history of photography spans less than 200 years. How many of us have been “immortalized” in a newspaper, a book or a painting vs. how many of us have appeared in a photograph [32]? The Mayas linked their culture to the movements of celestial objects. The ebb and flow of kingdoms and civilizations in the periodicities of the moon, the sun and the planets. In the glyphs that adorn their temples they recorded coronations, birth, deaths. Likewise, the photograph records part of our history. And expresses some of our ideas about time. The idea that we can make the past present.

The photograph of Amos Humiston’s three children — of Frank, Alice and Fred — allows us to imagine that we have grasped something both unique and universal. It suggests that the experience of this vast, unthinkable war can be reduced to the life and death of one man — by identifying Gettysburg’s “Unknown Soldier” we can reunite a family. That we can be saved from oblivion by an image that reaches and touches people, that communicates something undying and transcendent about each one of us.

THE EMPTY ENVELOPE

What about the photograph of the Humiston children? What about the ambrotype?

The initial newspaper article in The Philadelphia Inquirer sought its return:

It is earnestly desired that all the papers in the country will draw attention to the discovery of this picture and its attendant circumstances, so that, if possible, the family of the dead hero may come into possession of it. Of what inestimable value it will be to these children, proving, as it does, that the last thoughts of their dying father was for them, and them only.

It suggested that the family could be made whole again, if only the ambrotype could be once again placed in the family’s hands. And yet, the ambrotype has a tangled history. Subsequent newspaper articles suggested that Bourns intended to return it or promoted the promise of its return,

The American Presbyterian on November 19, 1863, “The Dead Soldier Identified”:

It was the identical picture. The dread certainty of widowhood and orphanage flashed upon the group with this discovery: yet, the severity of the blow, was tempered by the dying affection of the father, by the tender romance of mystery which enveloped the facts and by widespread interest the case had awakened in patriotic minds… Dr. Bourns proposes to visit Portville and return the ambrotype with his own hands. [The emphasis is in the original newspaper article.]

The Cattaraugus Union on December 11, 1863, “The Name of the Dead Soldier”:

The incident was one that had affected many hearts, as it illustrated the undying love of a father who had left his happy home circle to offer his life on the altar of his country… The bereaved widow will now have the mournful satisfaction of learning the circumstances of her husband’s death, and of regaining the precious relic which had been one of his last consolations.

But Alice Humiston made it clear that it was never returned.

David Humiston Kelley inherited an empty envelope from Alice or, at least, an envelope that did not fulfill a promise – the return of the coveted, original ambrotype. The envelope contained only one of the many thousands of cartes de visite produced. On the envelope itself, Alice wrote a sad, perhaps tragic complaint against Dr. Bourns: “My mother was young or this would not have happened.”

Courtesy of Mark H. Dunkelman, from the collection of David Humiston Kelley

Various attempts by Humiston heirs to find the ambrotype have been unsuccessful. Mark Dunkelman hoped that his book would draw attention to the story and secure its return, but the ambrotype has yet to be found. It is as my son Hamilton said when he was a little boy, “It’s not lost. I just don’t know where it is.”

Perhaps it is displayed on a mantle or in an antiquarian’s shop or in an eccentric, personal collection of Gettysburgiana (like Edward Woodward’s poem).Where is it?Where is the ambrotype? The readership of The Times is respectfully asked to join in the quest. The promise of its return still remains unfulfilled.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division An incident of Gettysburg – the last thought of a dying father. Illustrated in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 2, 1864, p. 236.

Note: The “Army of the Potomac” chart corrects a version posted earlier.

*****

Acknowledgments: Mark Dunkelman’s “Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier” is the source of most of the information in this essay. Although I have credited individual passages from the book, his research and writing informs everything that I have done. And needless to say, my interview with him along with my interviews of the two Humiston heirs, David Humiston Kelley and Allan Cox, were essential to this essay. Ann Petrone and Julie Fischer researched and edited many versions of this essay. Dan Mooney provided the charts. Julia Sheehan, my wife, and Charles Silver also read and commented on a number of drafts. I first became aware of the Humiston story through reading Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering.” Mark Dunkelman’s book has never been issued as a trade paperback, and it is my hope that a publisher will make it available to a much wider readership. To learn more about his work, visit his Web site at hardtackregiment.com.

FOOTNOTES

[26] This account has been assembled from many sources. Several books detail the events of Day One, among them: Harry Pfanz, Gettysburg: The First Day (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001) pp. 258ff.; David G. Martin, Gettysburg: July One (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995) pp. 306ff.

[27] New York in the War of the Rebellion, 3rd ed. Frederick Phisterer. Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1912. (www.dmna.state.ny.us/historic/reghist/civil/infantry/154thInf/154thInfTable.htm)

[28] The History of the Civil War in the United States, 1860-1865, J. Kellick Bathurst, compiler; Edward Perrin, del.; Courier Litho. Co., Buffalo, N.Y. The Comparative Synoptical Chart Co., Limited. The chart has been described as a “history of the Civil War drawn to a time scale of months, and the location of all events is entirely governed by this scale.” According to The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 1898, “A very satisfactory series of historical charts has been prepared under the supervision of Mr. A. H. Scaife. The distinctive feature of these charts is the application of an exact time-scale in the presentation of any given historical 
period. The idea of distance between events is thus conveyed accurately and impressively. Many ingenious devices are employed in representing historic movements to the eye. Mr. Scaife’s chart of the Cuban question covers the past fifty years of Cuba’s history more graphically. It more than fills the place of a printed volume on the subject. The same is true of the chart devoted to Mr. Gladstone’s life and times. Mr. Scaife also publishes wall charts of United 
States, English, and Canadian history, a special chart of the American Civil War, a genealogical tree of British sovereigns from 494 to 1897, The Genealogy of the Sovereigns of Great Britain, showing the descent from Earliest Times, of her Majesty, Queen Victoria, and The History of the First Century of the Christian Era, including the Principal Events in the Life of Christ.”
hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3701s.cw0062400

History of the Civil War in the United States, ca. 1897. Comparative Synoptical Chart Co., Ltd.

[29] From Mark Dunkelman, Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier, pp. 127-8.

[30] Drew Gilpin Faust in “This Republic of Suffering” writes a perfect epitaph for the Civil War in general but she could be writing about Gettysburg in particular… “These men had given their lives that the nation might live; their bodies, repositories of their “selfhood” and “surviving identity,” as Harper’s had put it, deserved the nation’s recognition and care… Yet these soldiers’ selfhood and their identity were also inseparable from their names. The project of decently burying the Civil War dead required more than simply interment. The work of locating the missing and naming the tens of thousands of men designated as “unknown” would prove one of the war’s most difficult tasks. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

[31] gettysburg.stonesentinels.com/Individuals/Humiston.php

[32] I had an opportunity to visit the fossil collections at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. It was part of a dinosaur fossil-hunting trip with Jack Horner, the premier hunter of T-Rex skeletons. Downstairs in the lab, there was a Triceratops skull sitting on a table. I picked it up and inserted my finger into the brain cavity. (I had read all these stories about how small the Triceratops brain had to have been and I wanted to see for myself.) I said to Jack Horner, “To think that someday somebody will do that with my skull.” And he said, “You should be so lucky. It’s only the privileged few of us who get to be fossils.”