Lydia Smith

                                                History is His Story

July 4, 1863, a torrential rain broke out over Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  For 3 days 180,000 Union and Confederate forces had fought the bloodiest battle of the war, and with the rain the Confederates managed to escape.  They needed to. They had suffered 28,000 casualties, 40% of Lee’s 71,000-man army.  Meade’s larger (94,000) Union force had 22,000 casualties.  10,000 men and 3000 horses lay dead on the ground. Another 23,000 men lay wounded.  

            Harrisburg, the capital, had been Lee’s objective.  But the Confederates were quick to pilfer just about anything of value they could get their hands on to ship back to Virginia.  That included slaves.  An able-bodied male slave would bring about the same price as a house.  And the ugly secret was that southern Pennsylvania was full of free blacks.  With little regard for their status, the soldiers rounded up several hundred, tied them together and put them in carts.  Seeing the wagons full of weeping women and children, white Pennsylvanians argued and taunted the occupiers but to little avail.  “They’re fugitives escaped from us,” the soldiers claimed.  One pastor boldly protested that he had baptized several children and he knew they were freeborn. The Union forces had warned blacks in the area to flee ahead of the battle, but some refused since they were protecting their farms.  The Briens had a farm on Cemetery Ridge.  It wound up being the center of Pickett’s charge. On the edge of the Brien property was the shack of Margaret Palm, a black laundress, who, having fended off an earlier kidnapping attempt in 1857, had warned her neighbors to flee before being tied up herself. Another woman, referred to as "Old Liza," "took advantage of the chaos and the crowds of soldiers and civilians and bolted" with a group to the Lutheran Church in town, R. Creighton writes. Others were forced to cook for Confederate troops.  Everywhere, the threat of capture persisted during the battle. While the confusion saved some, another witness "saw 'a number of colored people' corralled together and marched away." What more than a few blacks of Gettysburg saw and heard themselves inspired them to join the Union cause as soldiers, among them prominent citizens like Randolph Johnston and teacher Lloyd Watts of the 24th U.S. Colored Troops; both became sergeants.

             July 4.  Lydia Smith looked out over the field strewn with bodies and asked herself what Jesus would do in such a situation.  She grabbed her water buckets and saddled her horse.  Of course, half the men were confederates but when they are dying or incapacitated, does it matter if someone were to take a pot shot at her?  And so she hitched a wagon to another horse, filled more buckets and began giving drinks, binding wounds, organizing transportation for the wounded.  The Union Army had refused to let a few black militias fight, but Lydia was armed with prayers for suffering soldiers and a servant’s heart.  And it didn’t matter if the soldier was blue or gray. Observing her, one reporter that Creighton quotes said, " 'This is quite a commentary … upon Gen. Lee's army of kidnappers and horse thieves who came here and fell wounded in their bold attempt to kidnap and carry off these free people of color.' "

            Gettysburg and surrounds was 15% Afro-American.  When Lincoln gave his address in October of that year, the town was still cleaning up.  The local AME churchmen worked tirelessly in the years after the war to commemorate the battlefield.