By Andrew Dalton, President & CEO, Gettysburg History
More than 160 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, a remarkable collection of more than 40 original Civil War-era letters has come to light, revealing in extraordinary detail a forgotten chapter of the battle’s aftermath: the years-long search for the Confederate dead.
Recently donated to Gettysburg History, the letters were written between grieving Southern families and Dr. J.W.C. O’Neal of Gettysburg, who spent years helping to locate, identify, exhume, and return the remains of Confederate soldiers killed in the battle. Previously unknown to historians, the correspondence opens an extraordinary window into how that process unfolded—and the grief of families who, years after the Civil War’s end, still did not know exactly where their sons, husbands, and brothers were buried.
Rosella Zinn to J.W.C. O’Neal, July 16, 1866. Gettysburg History
“[I have] seen in the papers that you have a list of the Confederate dead of Gettysburg and can inform their relatives of their graves,” Rosella C. Zinn of Augusta, Georgia, wrote O’Neal in 1866 while searching for her only son, 18-year-old Private Henry L. Zinn of the 48th Georgia.
Three years earlier, Henry had marched north with Robert E. Lee’s army and disappeared during the fighting at Gettysburg on July 2nd. His military service record listed him first as missing and later as having died from wounds received in the battle. But his mother had no body and no grave.
“My Son was supposed to have been killed as the army retreated from the field,” she wrote to O’Neal. “He was seen during the engagement but was missing afterwards…. I would like very much to know if it is possible to get his body, but I do fear getting the wrong one.”
Simply receiving an answer from O’Neal, she continued, would “do more good to heal the bleeding wounds of his heart-broken sisters than thousands from the purses of the millionaire.”
To read transcripts of the letters, please click here.
A Doctor at Gettysburg
O’Neal knew Gettysburg intimately, but he was not a lifelong resident. Born April 21, 1821 in Fairfax County, Virginia, he spent his early years in Taneytown, Maryland before attending Pennsylvania College (now Gettysburg College). After receiving his medical degree from the University of Maryland in 1844, he began practicing medicine in Hanover, Pennsylvania and then in Baltimore, Maryland. Just a few months before the battle, O’Neal returned to Gettysburg and purchased a home on Baltimore Street.
An early daguerreotype image of J.W.C. O’Neal, possibly taken during his time as a student at Pennsylvania College. Gettysburg History
On June 30th, the day before the Battle of Gettysburg, O’Neal encountered a Confederate column on the Chambersburg Pike west of town while visiting patients in the area. In his own reminiscences, O’Neal recalled being questioned by General James J. Pettigrew about the whereabouts of Union forces. He claimed to have replied: “General, if I did have any matter of information I couldn’t give it to you for I’m a medical practitioner and not an informant.”
Three separate accounts from North Carolinians in Pettigrew’s brigade, however, tell a different story. One recalled that “a well mounted citizen, professing to be a physician…confessed that four or five thousand Federals were in the vicinity, and a much larger force a few miles from town.” Another stated that the unnamed citizen “came out for the purpose of giving us warning.”
Whatever O’Neal’s intentions that day, he acknowledged that he remained behind Confederate lines until after the capture of Gettysburg on July 1st, when he returned home to his family as the town endured another two days of heavy fighting.
When the smoke cleared on July 4th, approximately 7,000 dead remained scattered across the battlefield. Union soldiers were removed to the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery within months, but thousands of Confederates remained buried across the farms, orchards, and woodlots surrounding the town, many in shallow graves or mass trenches marked only by wooden boards with names and units etched on them.
As the years passed, those crude markers began to disappear.
“The marks over the dead are being fast obliterated,” O’Neal wrote in 1867, “and my heart bleeds when I pass over our field of battle & find so many marks leveled with the ground.”
O’Neal had recognized the danger almost immediately. Within weeks of the battle, he began surveying the field and recording as many marked Confederate graves as he could locate. Long lists of his findings were published first in New York and then in Southern newspapers, alerting families hundreds of miles away that a doctor in Gettysburg might know where their loved ones were buried.
The newly discovered letters reveal just how painstaking the search could be. Families supplied names, photographs, descriptions of wounds, burial locations remembered by comrades, and whatever other scraps of information they could find. O’Neal questioned local landowners, visited suspected graves, examined surviving markers, recovered personal effects, arranged exhumations, and organized the shipment of remains south.
Again and again, the letters ask the same question:
Can you find him?
“I Never Want a Doubt to Arise”
Few relatives expressed that uncertainty more powerfully than Mary L. Jones, whose husband, 41-year-old Colonel John Augustus “Jack” Jones of the 20th Georgia, had been killed on July 2nd near the farmhouse of John Slyder.
She had information about his burial place and even the position of his body.
“Col Jones’ head is against the tree,” she wrote. His fatal wound, she explained, had been caused by a shell striking “the lower part of the face.”
But identification mattered enormously.
“I want to have the box opened & examine it myself,” she wrote O’Neal in December 1865, “as I never want a doubt to arise whether it is his, or not. I want to be sure of it.”
Then came a question:
“Will it be possible to recognize the features? Or has it been too long?”
She closed by assuring O’Neal that his “kindness & prompt attention will be ever gratefully remembered by one who has suffered severely during this dreadful war.”
Jones was found. But the story took an unimaginable turn.
His remains began the journey back to Georgia aboard a ship from Baltimore. During a heavy storm, the vessel developed a leak. The crew and passengers bailed water for several days before finally abandoning ship in an “angry sea.” According to an account preserved with the correspondence, the captain made room in his small lifeboat for Jones’s remains, but the cabin had already flooded too deeply to reach them.
“So the shattered ship and her cargo were left to the mercy of the winds and waves.”
Colonel Jones, killed at Gettysburg and recovered more than two years later, was lost at sea on his journey home.
His widow nevertheless wrote O’Neal afterward.
“Your kindness to my son & myself made me feel that you were not indifferent to his fate,” she told him, “or that of the remains of one who gave his life for his country.”
Read the correspondence pertaining to Colonel John Augustus “Jack” Jones
“Under the Ancestral Shade Trees”
The desire to finally bring the dead home appears on page after page of this incredible group of letters.
In 1869, Lucy H. Wood wrote O’Neal about her brother, 23-year-old Second Lieutenant Valentine W. Southall of the 23rd Virginia. Southall had been wounded at Gettysburg on Culp’s Hill and died on July 20, 1863 at a field hospital. Information in O’Neal’s records and a hand-drawn map created by a comrade placed his grave near the York Road east of town.
“It has always been our wish to remove his remains,” Wood wrote, “but unfortunately our circumstances are so reduced as to have entirely prevented us, up to the present time. I am myself a widow—became so during the war.”
Six years had passed since Gettysburg, but her grief had hardly diminished.
“The circumstances of his death have always been so touching and heartrending that I cannot speak of him even at this late day without tears.”
She pleaded with O’Neal:
“May the Lord enable you to find his remains, that they may at last rest under the Ancestral shade trees of our family burial ground.”
O’Neal responded with the matter-of-fact language of a man who had by then performed this work many times.
“There is no doubt as regards the corner of the field in which the remains lye,” he wrote.
Travel to Gettysburg was unnecessary, he explained. After six years, the remains were “but the principle bones and would hold in a small box.” Once received, the box could be secured inside a conventional coffin for burial. He estimated its weight at only 35 or 40 pounds.
“This is merely a suggestion, prompted by experience,” O’Neal explained, intended to avoid “extraordinary expense of travel, coffin express freight, &c. &c.”
A month later, he returned to retrieve the body.
“To day I had exhumed & packed the remains of Lt. Southall,” O’Neal wrote on August 10, 1869. “The wounded bone is wrapped in paper & packed top of box which you can examine.”
He then itemized every expense:
For digging – 1.50
Horse & wagon – 1.50
Box screws etc – 1.75
Postage & gates [likely a reference to toll gates] about .50”
The total cost of exhuming Valentine Southall from his Gettysburg grave was $5.25.
Read the correspondence pertaining to 2nd Lieutenant Valentine Wood Southall
A Rose on a Soldier’s Breast
Sometimes the evidence O’Neal discovered preserved remarkably intimate details from the days immediately following the battle.
Lieutenant Colonel James Washington Hance of the 53rd Georgia Infantry was 34 when he was killed on July 2nd in the brutal clash around George Rose’s farm. His father, William Hance, wanted desperately to locate his son’s remains.
In June 1869, nearly six years after the battle, O’Neal went searching along the Emmitsburg Road.
Confederate dead at the George Rose Farm, photographed circa July 5-6, 1863 by Alexander Gardner and his crew. Library of Congress
“This morning, I entered the locality,” he reported, “and find marked on an old cherry tree, near the Garden the word ‘HANCE.’”
O’Neal spoke with the Rose family, who remembered a grave in front of the tree near their garden. The grave was shallow, and a door had been placed over the remains to protect them. Mrs. Rose remembered that the dead officer appeared to have been dressed in gray with a blue blouse or coat.
“Upon the breast & between the coats was placed a Rose apparently put there as a mark of respect by some friend.”
O’Neal added simply: “Mr. Rose wants no price for the remains he points out.”
Hance’s father thanked O’Neal for sending him a button and piece of cloth from the site. If recovery proved impossible, he begged O’Neal at least to preserve the grave marker.
“If I can do no more,” he wrote, “I design at last to mark the spot where my son rests.”
Two years later, William Hance wrote again to O’Neal, this time inquiring about what it would take to have his son’s remains sent home: “…It would have been a consolation to my self & family to have had him buried here beside his two brothers who were also killed in battle.” Indeed, Hance had lost three sons to the war. Captain William W. Hance of the 3rd South Carolina had been mortally wounded at Fredericksburg in 1862, while Theodore S. Hance, also of the 3rd South Carolina, was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863.
O’Neal went ahead and arranged for Lt. Col. James Hance’s remains to be sent directly to his father rather than transported to a cemetery in Savannah “with other marked and recovered Georgians.”
“If you will notify me your nearest express office I will have them shipped to your address,” O’Neal wrote, “so they may lie in peace beside the ashes of his brothers.”
“This will be to me a melancholy pleasure,” he continued, “as I know it will satisfy the longings of an affectionate father.”
He even advised Hance how to reinforce the container when it arrived.
“Excuse the suggestion,” O’Neal wrote, “but a long experience, prompts me to make it.”
Read the correspondence pertaining to Lieutenant Colonel James Washington Hance
“We Look Upon Each Particle of His Dust as Precious”
The letters make clear that poverty often stood between families and the return of their dead.
Captain William Westwood McCreary had been serving on the staff of General James J. Pettigrew when he was killed during the first day of the battle during the infamous clash between the 26th North Carolina and 24th Michigan in farmer John Herbst’s woods. His brother, John Van Lew McCreary, wrote to O’Neal in 1866.
“In the first day’s fight, I lost my only Brother,” he began. “He was a Captain on Gen. Pettigrew’s staff, and fell at the head of the 26 North Carolina regiment.”
McCreary believed his brother had been buried beside Colonel Henry Burgwyn of the 26th North Carolina, “about one mile out from Gettysburg on the side of the pike leading to Chambersburg, under a large tree.”
But he worried about what recovery would cost.
“If it is much, I must accept it,” he explained, “as I am my mother’s only support and have a wife also, and am a clerk on a small salary.”
O’Neal calculated the expenses and suggested that the remains could simply be shipped south.
“The remains will not be in form,” he cautioned, “as the most of them when disinterred are nothing but dry bones.”
Doing it this way, he explained, “will save you traveling and other expenses which under the circumstances [would] be material.”
Other letter writers faced the same reality. Members of a North Carolina Masonic lodge explained in 1866 that they could not afford to spend heavily recovering three brothers in the 11th North Carolina who were killed at Gettysburg because they had “so many widow & orphans of our gallant deceased brothers” who needed whatever money could be spared.
Yet when families did succeed in bringing someone home, their letters reveal why they had tried for so long.
Private John M. Goetchius of the 2nd Georgia Battalion was just 22 when he was mortally wounded at Gettysburg. His remains finally returned to Columbus, Georgia, in 1871.
“I write at this time to inform you that the remains of brother John reached us on yesterday,” his brother George told O’Neal. “They were properly interred to day and now rest quietly in the family enclosure by the side of other loved ones.”
“You can well imagine how comforting it is to us to have them. We look upon each particle of his dust as precious.”
Read the correspondence pertaining to Private John Micajah Goetchius
“More Like a Brother Than a Stranger”
O’Neal’s correspondents did not forget what he had done for them.
Aaron Henderson Griffith traveled to Gettysburg seeking his 19-year-old son, Private Aaron Eli Griffith of the 30th North Carolina, who had been shot in the hip and died at a nearby field hospital.
“I landed home with the precious remains of my dear son on the 8th of December,” Griffith wrote O’Neal in January 1866.
“I never can pay you the debt of gratitude I owe to you. You treated me more like a brother than a stranger.”
Read the correspondence pertaining to Private Aaron Eli Griffith
That same sentiment was expressed by Jennie E. Ross, whose 20-year-old brother, Major Egbert A. Ross of the 11th North Carolina, was killed near Willoughby’s Run on July 1st.
Major Egbert A. Ross of the 11th North Carolina, killed July 1, 1863. Courtesy of U.S. Army Center of Military History
“If it had not been for you,” she wrote, “we might not have been able to procure the precious remains of my idolized brother.”
Those who had cared for his grave, she continued, “have a claim on our hearts, which will last as long as life.”
She regretted only that the family had failed to recover his hair, which they had hoped to turn into keepsakes.
“T’was indeed a great consolation to get our dear one’s remains,” she wrote. “We could [not] bear to think for one moment of leaving them always in that lonely spot.”
“My brother was indeed our house hold treasure,” she continued. “Upon him was bestowed all our affection & fondest hopes.”
The same letter also demonstrates that gratitude toward O’Neal should not be mistaken for broader reconciliation. Ross bitterly denounced the North and Reconstruction, describing the recently concluded conflict as a “cruel & unholy war” and writing: “We are in a worse condition than our slaves ever were. Yes! A thousand times worse, our hands are bound, we have no rights whatever.” She went on to complain that the defeated South was being forced to drink “the cup of humiliation.”
Ross almost certainly did not know that many of the Confederate remains recovered through O’Neal’s efforts were exhumed and carefully packed for shipment by his driver and assistant, J. Thomas McCullough—a Black veteran of the United States Colored Troops.
The war was over. But political wounds and stark racial animosities were very much alive.
Read the correspondence pertaining to Major Egbert Alexander Ross
A burial crew at Hanover, Pennsylvania in the process of exhuming Union remains that were removed to the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg. J. Thomas McCullough is said to be among the group, along with his employer at the time, Gettysburg veterinarian Basil Biggs.
“The Rude Plough Share”
Time was working against Dr. O’Neal. By the late 1860s, many wooden burial markers were beginning to disappear, lost to the elements and the steady return of cultivation.
In 1868, Joshua Theus learned that his brother, Sergeant Simeon B. Theus of the 59th Georgia, appeared on a list of Confederate dead at Gettysburg.
He immediately wrote O’Neal.
An 1882 illustration published in Frank Leslie’s Illustration Newspaper shows a farmer plowing the fields of Gettysburg, with an upturned skull in the foreground. Library of Congress
“If not I will try and devise some means to get them back to his native soil.”
Read the correspondence pertaining to Sergeant Simeon B. Theus
Others searched for men whose fates were even less certain. A family friend sought Major Robert H. Poore of the 14th Virginia, who had suffered a compound fracture of the thigh during Pickett’s Charge and had written home from a field hospital shortly after the battle.
“Since which time,” N.H. Howard wrote, “we have never been able to trace him in any way.”
Considering the severity of the wound, family and friends feared that he had simply died in a Gettysburg hospital and disappeared from the historical record.
Read the correspondence pertaining to Major Robert Henry Poore
Mrs. W.M. Wilson sent O’Neal a photograph of Colonel James Gregory Hodges, also of the 14th Virginia, hoping that somehow it might help identify his remains.
“Pray excuse my apparent impatience,” she wrote in 1864, asking O’Neal to return the photograph and tell her “what you have learned on the subject as soon as possible.”
“I am anxious to give the widow of Col. Hodges the result of your enquiries.”
Struck down in Pickett’s Charge on July 3rd near his brigade commander, General Lewis A. Armistead, Hodges’ body was never successfully identified.
Read the correspondence pertaining to Colonel James Gregory Hodges
Rescuing the Dead from Oblivion
Taken individually, these letters tell deeply personal stories of loss. Together, they reveal far more than previously known about how the Confederate dead were located, exhumed, and returned home from Gettysburg.
They trace how information moved—from soldiers to families, from local farmers to O’Neal, and from O’Neal back to relatives hundreds of miles away. They also lay bare the cruel mechanics of recovery: searching fields, identifying graves, examining clothing and wounds, exhuming remains, building boxes, calculating freight costs, and shipping what was left of the bodies by express.
But perhaps most importantly, these letters allow us to hear directly from the families of the dead. For them, Gettysburg did not end on July 3, 1863.
The battle continued through unanswered letters, empty graves at home, faded memories of burial places, and the fear that a farmer’s plow might forever erase the last physical trace of someone they loved. Years after Appomattox, mothers and fathers were still trying to bring their children home.
O’Neal could not find everyone. Some, like Colonel Hodges, remained unidentified. Others were recovered only after years of searching. And in the extraordinary case of Colonel Jack Jones, even successful recovery did not guarantee that the dead would ever reach home.
But again and again, families thanked the Virginia-born Gettysburg doctor who walked the battlefield on their behalf.
Perhaps the most telling assessment of his work came not from O’Neal himself, but from a grieving mother.
Rosella Zinn never knew with certainty where her only son rested. Today, a cenotaph to Henry stands in Magnolia Cemetery in Augusta, Georgia, bearing a mother’s tribute to the 18-year-old who died at Gettysburg.
But in 1866, with his fate still uncertain, she wrote to the stranger in Pennsylvania who was willing to search for him.
“I pray God to bless you,” she told O’Neal, “for what you have done to rescue the dead from oblivion.”
