Simon Fraser University Address


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Simon Fraser University Address

Simon Fraser University Address

Four and a half months earlier, in the first days of July, 1863, General George Meade's Army of the Potomac defeated General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. This was the Confederate army's northern-most advance into Union territory, and it resulted in the single bloodiest battle of the Civil War.

At that time, Gettysburg only had about 2,400 inhabitants when 172,000 American soldiers made the town and its surrounding fields their battlefield for three days, from July 1 through July 3. The morning after the final clash, Lee's army was on the retreat heading back across the Potomac, while the residents of Gettysburg ventured out and found the rotting bodies of soldiers and over 5000 horses. More than 51,112 casualties, wounded, and missing resulted from the three day battle.

The over-powering stench of death in the hot July weather required that residents bury the dead as soon as possible. Generally the Confederate dead were buried in the fields where they fell with no markers. Within the next seven years, those bodies were removed and re-interred in southern cemeteries but in most cases, the dead were unknown and the families never found out where they were buried.