By Charles T. Joyce
Visitors to the Gettysburg National Military Park encounter stone sentinels of all shapes and sizes. One of them, an austere granite marker on the north side of the Wheatfield Road, can be easily missed by tourists, some exceeding the speed limit as they pass it. Those who do stop will read a simple label without interpretation: “2nd Position of the 118th P.V., Corn Exchange Regt. July 2nd 1863., 1st Brig. 1st Div. 5th Corps.”
About 120 miles away in Philadelphia, strollers among the stately grounds of East Laurel Hill Cemetery, a fine example of the rural cemetery movement that graced the mid-19th century American landscape, can easily miss a small marble tombstone located near the edge of the sprawling burial ground, adjacent to a hard-scrabble section of the city. The inscription denoting whose remains lie beneath it has been utterly effaced by over 150 years of acid rain.
Both monuments are connected to the death of an officer who hailed from one of Philadelphia’s most famous families, a man of wealth and leisure: Richard Wistar Davids.
A century after the Battle of Gettysburg, a historian waxed poetically that the three days of fighting spread “long fingers of sorrow and anguish” throughout the land as families scanned casualty lists in local newspapers to learn the sad fate of loved ones. Although the causal link between a soldier’s death at Gettysburg and its effect upon those he left behind is at times conjectural or only subtly revealed, there is no doubt that families’ lives were irrevocably, and sometimes tragically, altered by the loss.
This story is one of them.
Collecting coins and carving duck decoys
Davids was born into a prominent Philadelphia family in 1825, the son of Benjamin Davids and Rebecca Morris. On his mother’s side, Davids’ great-great grandfather Caspar Wistar arrived in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, allegedly with “nine pennies to his name,” became a Quaker, and established himself as a wildly successful glassmaker and landowner before his death in 1752. Davids’ grandfather, also named Caspar Wistar, volunteered at age 16 to serve as a nurse in Washington’s Army, then went on to become a prominent physician and anatomist. Upon his death in 1818, the botanist Thomas Nuttall named a newly discovered genus of a flowering plant in his honor: Wisteria. As befitting his family’s Quaker faith, Dr. Wistar served as president of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, and became active in a prison reform organization, the Humane Society, and the Society for Circulating the Benefit of Vaccination.
By 1860, Davids’ father Benjamin had acquired a home at 275 South 4th Street, in what is now referred to as the Society Hill section of Philadelphia. A census taker estimated the value of the property and house to be $50,000—over $30 million today.
Davids, now 35, also lived in the mansion with his wife, Eliza Parke Jacobs. The household included three full-time servants who were African American: 35-year-old coachman Samuel Collins and two domestics, 40-year-old Emily Lane, and 25-year-old Jane Joyce. A cook, who was white, 45-year-old Eliza Thomas, rounded out the house staff.
In 1861, the city directory listed the occupation of Davids and his father as “Gentleman.” On July 2, Davids and Eliza welcomed a baby boy into the world. They named him Benjamin in honor of the family patriarch.
As befitting his background and social status, Davids lived a life of refined pursuits and gentile accomplishment. He became a renowned numismatist, publishing a well-regarded Catalogue of Coins and Medals in 1853. He also helped pioneer the field of American duck decoy carving; examples of his work command robust prices at auction today. In 2017, his model of a Sleeping Pintail Drake sold for $25,000.
Birth of the Corn Exchange Regiment
Davids did not answer the initial clamor for war after the fall of Fort Sumter and the Battle of Bull Run. However, in the summer of 1862, a mercantile organization known as the Philadelphia Corn Exchange formed and outfitted a new infantry regiment, and offered Davids a lieutenant’s commission. In late July, about two weeks after his son’s first birthday, Davids enrolled in Company B of the 118th Pennsylvania Infantry. On September 1, as the regiment prepared to leave Philadelphia for the front, Davids executed a simple will, “in view of my immediate departure in the service of my country,” leaving all his property to his wife.
By this time the 118th had become known as the Corn Exchange Regiment. Like all volunteer units, the abilities of its elected officers varied. One of them, peacetime shipping clerk Capt. Francis Adams Donaldson of Company H, shared his opinions in letters to an older brother, Jacob. Donaldson had a basis to take the measure of his peers, as he had previously served in the 71st Pennsylvania Infantry and suffered battle wounds at Ball’s Bluff and Fair Oaks.
Donaldson complained that Capt. Henry O’Neill of Company A, a 38-year-old Irish immigrant, possessed “bravery itself,” but “that is all,” adding, “He knows nothing, absolutely nothing at all about military movements and Company Drills.”
Conversely, Donaldson claimed that Charles Fernald, a bookseller commanding Company D, was “a well-posted tactician with a commanding voice,” but “utterly useless and unfit as an officer for two strong reasons. First—his inordinate love of rum which has caused the men to nick-name him Captain Drinkall, and second, he is not a brave man, morally or physically.”
Donaldson reserved the greatest censure for his superior officer, Lt. Col. James Gwyn, describing him as “an insufferable tyrant, a braggart,” a “drunken, dictatorial, worthless fellow, not fit to command gentlemen.” After Gwyn took command of the 118th, Donaldson lamented that the regiment “will become worthless, and will be torn to pieces by contentions and bitter feuds among the officers.” Donaldson continued: “The scum will boil to the top,” and “drunken and worthless sycophants, fawners, and clingers will flock around head-quarters,” while the “gentlemen and soldiers of the command” will “be made to feel the iron heel of the tyrant.”
Davids fared far better in Donaldson’s evaluation. He predicted that Davids, although unschooled in martial matters, would someday assume company command and make a “capital officer,” as he was “a true gentleman whose society I seek and whose company I greatly enjoy.”
Donaldson’s prediction came true in January 1863. Davids returned home to bury his father, and while in Philadelphia received a transfer to Company G and his captain’s bars. At some point during his stay, Davids met Jacob. During their conversation, Davids spoke well of Donaldson. Jacob informed Donaldson, who was cheered to learn of “the kindly way” Davids spoke of him. Donaldson noted that Davids “ is a man of few words, an earnest, honorable man, and words of praise from him are golden.”
Despite the personal rancor Donaldson revealed about his peers, he avidly collected their cartes de visite, commenting upon the portraits with the same intensity as he assessed their strengths and flaws as leaders.
Donaldson collected cartes de visite of his peers and commented on their portraits with the same intensity as he assessed their leadership abilities.
Donaldson obtained images of his first and second lieutenants, Winfield Scott Bachelder and Thomas M. Coane, sending them to Jacob with his usual commentary. Of Bachelder, whom he praised as having “no equal” when “handling a skirmish line,” he wrote, “I consider it a good picture and a correct likeness.” Of Coane, who, like Donaldson, had been a clerk, he wrote, “I make no comment but merely say he is better adapted for a mercantile than a military life.”
Donaldson sent Jacob an image of Chaplain William O’Neill, calling him “a good man, I believe, but like his brother Captain Henry O’Neill don’t know much about tactics,” and 1st Lt. John White of Davids’ Company G, whom he deemed “a most excellent fellow and a capable & intelligent officer. I wish there were more like him.”
Donaldson even obtained cartes of the cowardly “Captain Drinkall” and of the cursed Gwyn, sarcastically referring to him as “the gallant Lt. Colonel,” but allowing that his photograph, “by the way, is a most excellent likeness.” He also acquired an image of an enslaved child the regiment encountered in the streets of Fredericksburg. The men dubbed the “contraband” servant “Scipio Africanus,” for the celebrated Roman general and statesman. This derogatory reference reveals attitudes of the Pennsylvanians towards race at this time.
By the Spring of 1863, Donaldson asked Jacob to send him an album to store the “great many pictures scattered about my valise.” In late May, he acquired a carte that he exceptionally prized—Davids, who visited the Philadelphia studio of Frederick Gutekunst after receiving his captain’s bars. Davids returned to the regiment with a number of these images, inscribing the back of each “Camp Near Falmouth, Va. May 25th 1863, Capt Davids Co. G, 118th P.V.”
That same day, Donaldson wrote to Jacob: “Enclosed I hand you a photograph of Captain Richard W. Davids, Co. G. He is one of God’s noblemen, a true soldier and a gentleman under all circumstances. He has little to say and but few associates. He is a reserved man. I enjoy his company greatly when I am favored with it, which is pretty often of late. Please place his picture conspicuously among my collection.”
Unsaid, but notable, is that the war forged a friendship of two officers from very different walks of life—a refined gentleman of leisure and a working-class clerk.
“Carnival of death” at Stony Hill and Trostle Farm
In late June, the 118th marched north with the rest of the Army of the Potomac in pursuit of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s invading army. The summer heat and humidity took a toll. First Lt. Henry Kelly of Company F wrote to his wife that “the men are marched frequently in a manner that is brutal and inhuman, by men on horseback, who don’t care how they suffer.” One day, they trekked from four in the morning to after 10 at night, traveling 24 miles. “It was one of most fatiguing marches I was ever on,” Kelly told her. “My legs are chafed very badly and pain me a great deal.” Donaldson relayed to his brother that the officers of the regiment took to stuffing their hats with wet leaves and tree boughs to ward off the oppressive sun as they marched; “truly we look not unlike a walking forest,” he reported.
On June 29, Cpl. William Read of Company A scribbled in his diary that as the Corn Exchange Regiment crossed the Potomac River, “many were the ejaculations of joy at getting off the ‘sacred soil’ of old Virginia; I trust we may not have to step upon it again. It is a land of graves and desolation.” Read predicted that the Union Army would “in all probability get into Penna” to come to grips with the Confederates. “I hope we shall,” he wrote, “for if I am to die, I want to die on my native soil.”
The 118th crossed into the Keystone State and arrived at Gettysburg by 11 o’clock on the morning of July 2. It and the rest of its brigade, commanded by Col. William S. Tilton, and including the 1st Michigan and the 18th and 22d Massachusetts infantries, occupied the reserve near the right center of the Union line. A private in the 1st Michigan wrote in his diary that the atmosphere had become strangely “very quiet and still,” adding “I don’t like that much.”
Tilton’s Brigade was severely understrength; According to Donaldson, its four regiments had been whittled down by straggling to only around 425 muskets that morning, although more exacting estimates place the Brigade’s total battle strength at around 640. In any event, the unit’s largest contingent was the Corn Exchange men, with some 233 in their ranks. Donaldson took advantage of the downtime to find a nearby pond, and “rushed eagerly into the water … soon splashing and dashing about like a dolphin” before discovering that it contained a disquieting number of leeches he had to pick off his skin. By the time he got out and dried off, cannon fire had erupted far off to the left, and the sound of the missiles brought on a feeling of drowsiness; “my eyelids grew heavy and shut,” he reported in a post-battle letter to his aunt, and “thus closing out the warlike scene,” he fell into a deep slumber.
Davids left no account of how he passed the next few hours, but it is likely that his thoughts turned to Eliza and their little Benjamin, who turned two years old this very day.
The regiment’s reveries shattered just before four o’clock. Donaldson recalled, “the cry of ‘fall in!’” awakened him from his nap. “As the men took their places in line,” he noted, “still laughing and jesting among themselves, the order to load was given, which at once put a stop to all trifling, and by its peculiar significance made the blood leap suddenly in the veins, and the choking sensation to rise in the throat, as each realized that we were about to take an active part in the battle going on in front.”
Tilton’s tiny brigade hurried to the Union left, part of a frantic effort to rush troops into a sizable gap created by Maj. Gen. Dan Sickles after he moved his 3rd Corps far forward of the main federal battle line.
Disaster threatened the entire Union Army as the enemy exploited the gap.
The 118th occupied the far right of Tilton’s brigade along Stony Hill, with no infantry on its flank. The only Union force, a battery of brass guns posted about 200 yards to its right, fired away. The artillery, the 9th Massachusetts Light commanded by Capt. John Bigelow’s 9th, was in its first-ever combat.
The cannon fire did not stop an attack by Brig. Gen. Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolinians. The 118th, benefitting from the sloping wooded and rocky landscape, wreaked havoc on the advancing Confederates. Private John L. Smith of Company K wrote to his mother that he “stood up loading as fast as I could. I fired 13 shots at them,” and “every time I fired I thought I would give some of them a little leaden currency to take home with them to remember the Yanks.”
The 9th Massachusetts gunners added to the carnage when they fired case shot and canister into Kershaw’s left flank. The lieutenant colonel of the 2nd South Carolina Infantry reported sorrowfully that, “we were in ten minutes or less, terribly butchered. … I saw half a dozen at a time knocked up and flung to the ground like trifles,” and, “there were familiar forms and faces with parts of their heads shot away, legs shattered, arms torn off, etc.”
Meantime, a new threat to Tilton’s Brigade emerged on its right in the Peach Orchard. A brigade of Mississippians commanded by Brig. Gen. William Barksdale slammed into the Union salient. Tilton, already fretting about his exposed right, secured permission from his division commander to pull back before Barksdale’s men fully engaged.
The 118th obeyed an order to change its front to the rear and marched north and east into a woodlot owned by Abraham Trostle. The Pennsylvanians took up a position along a low stone wall in the timber, according to their regimental history, at a right angle and only “about two hundred feet from the gate opening in the lane” of Trostle’s farmhouse and a large bank barn.
Captain Bigelow and his artillerists also fell back, withdrawing across a 400-yard open field and taking up a new position just in front of the Trostle buildings with orders to hold the position and buy time for a new line of guns to be thrown together behind them. Barksdale’s Mississippians followed closely in hot and howling pursuit.
As Bigelow’s Battery went into action, the 118th, now located to their left along the stone wall, supported the guns. Private James P. Holt of Company K remembered initial contact with Barksdale’s boys. He recalled the harrowing scene 26 years later: “It was not an attack in line, it was not a charge, it was a melee, a carnival of death. Men hewed each others’ faces, they grappled in close embrace, murder to both; and all through the mass rained shot and shell from guns along the ridge.”
Holt noted that in just a few minutes of furious fighting at close quarters, two lieutenants, a sergeant, and a number of enlisted men fell. As the Pennsylvanians and Mississippians grappled for supremacy, he and his comrades witnessed the color bearer of the 21st Mississippi bull his way through the Trostle House gate and halt in the lane, “gallantly and courageously waving his colors in the midst of the thickest of the melee.” Next to him, “a Confederate skirmisher was seen to drop on one knee and take deliberate aim” at a Union captain who, according to a private in his Company, was coolly lighting his pipe as he stood behind his men.
Donaldson picked up where Holt left off, relaying what happened next: “Running to the rear of my company to prevent any movement looking towards a retreat, for all saw that our position was now untenable as the cannon were virtually in the hands of the enemy, I was met by Capt. Richd. W. Davids, who was slowly walking towards me. Upon stopping to see what was wanted, he said, ‘Capt., I am hit.’ ‘Where?,” said I.’ ‘Thro’ the stomach and bowels,’ said he, at the same time placing his hand upon his waist belt.”
Donaldson cried out to Davids to go to the rear. “He started to do so, but had not gone more than twenty steps before he fell, and I knew that death had come upon him.”
Donaldson never forgot the exchange, believed that he was the last person to speak directly to Davids, “and mine the ears to hear the last utterance of as brave and noble a gentleman as ever trod God’s green footstool.”
According to the regiment’s surgeon, Joseph Thomas, soldiers picked up Davids, placed him in an ambulance and transported him to a nearby field hospital, possibly the Jacob Weikert Farm on the Taneytown Road. Unloaded and set down among the mass of wounded, Davids lingered only for a few minutes. Surviving members of the 118th agreed that “he met his fate with true soldierly composure.”
By the time Davids breathed his last, the 118th had yielded to the rebel assault. The Pennsylvanians retreated through the Trostle woodlot to regroup. Altogether, they suffered 25 casualties in the encounter that lasted a matter of minutes. Davids’ company probably lost the highest number of casualties in the regiment; a modern accounting claims that of the 39 officers and men he took into action that day, three were killed or mortally wounded, one was captured and died in captivity, and three of six corporals were shot.
Away too went the fragment of gunners and guns left in the 9th Massachusetts Light who had survived that unit’s sacrifice to help save the Union line. The artillerists suffered fearful casualties: 11 men were killed, including two officers, and 18 wounded, and at least 60 of their 80-odd horses shot down.
The battered and bruised survivors in the 118th sought solace as the sun set and darkness descended upon them. The regimental history observed the night “was mellow in its soft summer radiance. A sulphurous smoke veiled the battle-field, but disappeared with the night wind. The stars shone brilliantly, and stillness, hushed, intense, inspiring, succeeded the terrible roar, which died away gradually with the fading daylight.”
In its hasty withdrawal from Trostle’s Woods, the regiment left behind gravely wounded Lt. Berzila J. Inman of Company F. After Surgeon Thomas recovered him on July 4, news of his nightmarish night quickly spread through the officer ranks. First Lt. Kelly wrote his wife that day how “poor Inman laid on the field 34 hours before being taken to a hospital,” and during that time, “dead and wounded [were] lying around him in all directions, & hogs were eating them. I hear it was all Inman could do to keep them off from him at night” with his sword.
At dawn the next day, the men relieved other 5th Corps troops posted on Big Round Top. Private Smith related, “we laid in among dead rebs for a day and they stunk very bad. The rocks was full of them.”
By July 6, the regiment pursued retreating Confederates. When it halted for the day, Private Smith’s captain detailed him to forage for food. Smith bargained with a farmer’s wife for a goose, paying 75 cents for the bird. When he returned with the poultry, Smith and his officers were chagrined to find that it was so tough after cooking that it had to be hacked apart with an axe, and even then, “the flesh refused to respond to all efforts at mastication.” Making comedy of the incident, the men decided to bury its remains, escorting the carcass “with muffled drums and reversed arms, to a place of decent sepulture.” When the veterans returned to Gettysburg 26 years later to dedicate their Stony Hill monument, Smith participated in the ceremony, holding a live goose in a photograph taken of the event.
Bringing the captain home
Crews of soldiers and civilians worked feverishly to bury rapidly deteriorating corpses of men and animals in the immediate aftermath of the fighting. In field hospitals scattered across the landscape, surgeons and medical staff labored to alleviate the sufferings of the maimed and wounded, and to ease the dying as they left the world. A small number of family members, desperately seeking loved ones listed as injured in early casualty reports, nurses, and other volunteers trickled into town.
In the 118th, another drama played out. The late Capt. Davids, like many officers, had a servant to attend to his needs. Though his identity is unknown—he might have been the family’s coachman, Samuel Collins—it likely fell to him to accompany the captain’s body and personal effects back to Philadelphia. In his Independence Day correspondence to his wife, 1st Lt. Kelly wrote that “Capt. Davids’ colored man is going home and will take this scrawl.”
When Eliza learned of her husband’s death is also a mystery. Philadelphia newspapers published obituaries on July 8 and 10 that he had been killed in an action on the afternoon of the second day of battle with no elaboration, and that details about his funeral were to come.
On July 13, Davids’ remains were laid to rest in East Laurel Hill Cemetery, close to the family plot of the Wistars.
A fatherless family soldiers on
Eliza and little Benjamin adjusted to life without a husband and father at 4th Street. In 1864, Eliza filed for widow’s benefits through the U.S. Sanitary Commission. The Pension Bureau promptly approved the application, which included a description of Davids’ last moments by Surgeon Thomas. Eliza may have filed for the benefits because she believed herself and her son entitled to them, or that she worried about her financial future.
Sometime thereafter, however, the family baptized Benjamin as “Richard Wistar” after the dead father he would never know. When Eliza sought an increase in benefits in early 1874 using her son’s new name, the puzzled Bureau of Pensions suspended her benefits. She hired an attorney to resolved the matter, which occurred in 1876.
By then, Eliza and Richard had moved several times, to increasingly less fashionable addresses in Philadelphia, before settling in Merion Station, a dozen or so miles west of the city. Still, finances allowed Richard to attend a private school, the West Penn Square Academy helmed by T. Brantley Langton. The academy promised to prepare boys for college, polytechnic school, or the business world.
Young Richard apparently did well under Langton’s tutelage, for some time between 1873 and 1879, the instructor presented him with a small brass merit badge. Its design resembled the Maltese Cross of the 5th Corps badge that his father likely wore. Faintly etched on its face is “T.B. Langton to Richard W. Davids.”
Richard went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. At commencement exercises, he displayed his musical side with a composition titled “The Power of the Future.”
Stone sentinels rise at Gettysburg
In September 1884, some 300 people boarded a special eight-car train at Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station bound for Gettysburg to witness the dedication of a new monument to the 118th—one of many stone sentinels popping up across the landscape as veterans looked back. Among them were many veterans of the regiment.
As they made their way along a serpentine path along Big Round Top, according to a pamphlet, “they recalled how fierce and desperate it was. As they passed over the field, they remembered with saddened hearts, and spoke in subdued tones, of the comrades who had lost their lives when the foe came charging upon them with a grim determination to conquer.”
The monument was erected by the Corn Exchange, now the Commercial Exchange Association of Philadelphia. According to an 1886 travel guide by J. Howard Wert, a fellow veteran from Gettysburg, “the most striking feature of this elaborately executed piece of workmanship” was “an artistically sculptured knapsack resting on cannon balls.”
Its location was chosen simply because the Battlefield Memorial Association had not, in 1884, yet acquired the land on Stony Hill where the Regiment first entered combat on July 2, or the Trostle woodlot where they took their heaviest losses, including Capt. Davids.
The attendees listened to a dedication address by former U.S. Senator Alexander G. Cattell, the Chairman of the Exchange in 1862. “I speak,” he intoned, while pointing in the direction of the Soldiers National Cemetery just a few miles to the north, “in behalf of the voiceless tenants of these graves—of our thousands of maimed and suffering soldiers—of the widows and orphans, and the desolate hearthstones, all over the land, when I arraign for condemnation the authors of this cruel war at the bar of public opinion … when I declare that the Union soldiers, living or dead, who perilled their all for the preservation of the Union, fought in a righteous cause, and that no mortals ever gave their lives for a higher or nobler purpose than the honored dead who sleep within the sacred precincts of yonder enclosure—guarded by the watchful care of a grateful Nation.”
Wert’s tourist guide noted that the handsome memorial would be joined by two more planned monuments to the 118th, one located in the Wheatfield and another to be erected by the widow of Capt. Davids on the spot where her husband fell.
The second monument, paid for by the Exchange, was dedicated before a crowd of about 100 survivors and guests who journeyed from Philadelphia on July 3, 1886. A report in the Philadelphia Inquirer described a three-foot square memorial of fine-cut granite “placed on the wheat field, in the rear of the spot where Bigelow’s battery was placed, a short distance in front of Round Top.” The same report stated that it was “a tablet to the memory of Captain Richard W. Davids, who was killed in the battle at this place.”
The report noted a prayer offered by William Read, the former corporal of Company A who had mused on the march to the battlefield of his wish to die on his native soil, an address by Surgeon Thomas, who had recorded Davids’ last moments, and, finally, the unveiling and formal presentation to the Gettysburg Memorial Association before returning home.
This report contained major inaccuracies, which suggests the unnamed Inquirer correspondent did not witness the event. The memorial was placed on Stony Hill, now a part of the battlefield, not the Wheatfield, and it was not meant to mark the site of Davids’ death.
The third monument, erected three years later, was funded by the State of Pennsylvania in honor of battle’s 25th anniversary. The government appropriated $121,000 to erect monuments to each Keystone State regiment, allocating $1,500 for every unit. The Survivor’s Association of the 118th commissioned an imposing shaft, carved from Vermont granite and topped with a statue of an infantryman. The design required the approval of the Commonwealth’s Gettysburg Monuments Commission. Throughout 1888 and early 1889 a flurry of correspondence ensued between the exasperated Secretary of the Association, George Carteret, and the Commission over the delay in securing the latter’s assent to the marker’s design. “We desire to know as soon as possible about our monument,” wrote Carteret, “because we will have to make some arrangements about moving our small tablet from its present position to another one, in order that the state monument may be placed where the small one now is.”
The Survivor’s Association planned to place the new memorial on the site of the second monument, the one dedicated in 1886, which added a logistical challenge.
In September 1889, the veterans dedicated their new monument on Stony Hill and relocated the second memorial to the southern edge of Trostle Woods. This location, according to primary accounts, stands at least 300 yards away from where the Corn Exchange Regiment fought its bloody duel with Barksdale’s Mississippians in support of Bigelow’s Battery. Thus, the words “2nd Position of 118th P.V.” emblazoned on the monument were now inaccurate.
Upon the formal dedication of the new statue on Stony Hill, this time attended by about 40 veterans and their guests, the Inquirer noted that “this will make the fourth monument the Corn Exchange regiment will have on the field, one more than any other regiment.” The newspaper referred to the 118th’s markers at Big Round Top, Stony Hill, Trostle Woods—and the memorial meant to be erected by Eliza Davids to honor her late husband.
The mystery of the missing marker
Visitors to the battlefield in 1928 might have observed 83-year-old veteran Henry H. Mingus traipsing about the place. A private in Capt. Davids’ Company G who had been wounded at Chancellorsville and escaped injury at Gettysburg, his war stories had captivated listeners for decades. Mingus had visited the battlefield dozens of times, and, according to the Gettysburg Times, this was his 58th pilgrimage.
Mingus was a man on a mission to find the fourth memorial supposedly erected by Eliza on the spot her husband fell. Mingus had spent three summer vacations searching for the marker to his beloved company commander, according to the Gettysburg Star and Sentinel, which noted that the park superintendent could not shed any light on its existence.
Mingus went to his grave in the Soldier’s National Cemetery in 1929 without solving the mystery. However, his efforts sparked the curiosity of park historians, reported the Star and Sentinel in a 1934 article headlined, “Field Marker Erected on Battlefield Is Lost; Officials Puzzled,” which assured readers that “no effort is being spared to uncover the ‘lost’ tablet.”
Details about who picked up the torch and where their journey took them are lost in time. A 1959 article in the Gettysburg Times indicated that the search had continued and that park officials remained bewildered by what appeared to be an unaccounted memorial.
The likely explanation is that, despite Eliza’s intentions, no such tablet was erected.
Any knowledge of Eliza’s plans died with her in September 1888, a year before the third memorial joined the array of stone sentinels at Gettysburg. Her funeral, private and with request for no flowers, concluded with her burial with her husband at East Laurel Hill Cemetery. Her headstone was placed directly behind his.
The family’s fate
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America became electrified as homes and businesses embraced the latest technology to sweep the world. Richard played a part in connecting Philadelphians to the emerging power grid as an electrician in machine and electric lighting shops—a solid job in the working middle class. In his spare time, he followed in his late father’s footsteps as a collector when he joined the local Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, became its secretary and authoring articles on such matters as “Old Watches” and “Old Pewter and its Marks.”
There’s no evidence that he followed through on his mother’s desire to remember his father with a Gettysburg marker. Why he did not act can only be speculated on. He may have lacked the means or the conviction to honor the father he never knew.
Instead, Richard devoted himself to matters of the living, marrying his second cousin, Marion Morris, in 1892, and fathering a daughter in 1895 named Eliza, after his mother.
The family lived a modest life in Bala Cynwyd, another small economic step down from Merion Station. In 1920, after his retirement, he had amassed enough savings, and may have had an inheritance, to allow him to purchase of a summer cottage in Southwest Harbor, Maine.
Richard died at the cottage on July 2, 1940—his 79th birthday and 77 years to the day his father perished in the Trostle Woods. Richard’s remains were returned to Pennsylvania, where he was laid to rest in a plot next to his parents.
Now alone, the lives of Marion and Eliza spiraled out of control. In early October 1942, Eliza tried to convince her mother over breakfast to enter into a suicide pact, proposing that both jump off a bridge together. An emotional Marion refused and retired upstairs. Eliza followed her with a brass fireplace poker. She found her mother leaning over a linen closet, struck her once in the head with the poker, then dragged her to the bathroom and struck her several more times. Eliza then filled the bathtub to drown her mother, and intended afterward to take her own life. But some unnamed person, perhaps the family maid, summoned the police. They arrived in the nick of time. The officers transported Marion to be successfully treated for her injuries to a local hospital and arrested Eliza.
Local newspapers reported the story, and due to its sensational nature and the prominence of the family name, publications as far away as Richmond, Va., picked it up. They reported how Eliza confessed, telling detectives that she didn’t “want any lawyers thinking up excuses why she should live,” but wished to be “electrocuted without a trial” for what she deemed to be a “‘mercy attack’ on her invalid mother,” adding that she was “perfectly sane.”
A county court judge placed Eliza on two-year probation and ordered her to be treated in an institution for the mentally ill. In November 1944, about three weeks after Eliza’s probationary period ended, Marion succumbed to heart failure and was buried next to her husband.
Eliza struggled through life for a dozen more years. On March 12, 1956, she parked her car near Merion’s Flat Rock Dam and leapt to her death in the swift rushing waters of the Schuylkill River. She left a suicide note. She was buried across the river, away from her father, mother, grandparents, and the rest of her storied kinsmen.
By this time, the inscription on her grandfather’s small white marble tombstone was likely mostly gone. One part outlasted the elements, the only mark still visible today. In raised letters crowning the curved top of the monument are the words, “Killed at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863, Aged 38 years.” The memorial appears to be rarely visited; a 1997 publication by a renowned local historian listing the Civil War burials in the Cemetery does not mention Davids’ gravesite.
Perhaps this does not matter; perhaps the remaining reference to the hallowed ground where Captain Davids met his fate is sufficient. As a Maine clergyman intoned in a sermon over an unknown soldier who also lost his life on that field, “Died at Gettysburg! Do you know what that means? … It means ‘Died that the best government on which the sun ever shone might not be bound and powerless’ … It means ‘Died for the land’s salvation; died for the opening of the prison-doors to them that are unjustly bound’ … ‘died, that God’s kingdom might come, that his will might be done, on earth as it is done in heaven.’”
The man of faith concluded: “‘Died at Gettysburg!’ No prouder epitaph need any man covet.”
Special thanks to John Hoptak, National Park Service, for his invaluable assistance in locating several primary sources in the holdings of the Gettysburg National Military Park (GNMP) Library consulted for this article.
References: Acken, Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson; Bigelow, The Peach Orchard, Gettysburg, July 2, 1863; Busey and Busey, Union Casualties at Gettysburg: A Comprehensive Record; Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania at Gettysburg; Gottfried, Brigades of Gettysburg; Kowalis, Died at Gettysburg; Magner, At Peace With Honor: The Civil War Burials of Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; McLaughlin, Gettysburg: The Last Encampment; Survivors’ Association, History of the 118th Pennsylvania Volunteers; Wert, A Complete Hand-Book of the Monuments and Indications and Guide to the Positions on the Gettysburg Battlefield; Wood, Gettysburg, July 2: The Ebb and Flow of Battle; Cattell, An Address at the Unveiling of the Monument Erected by the Commercial Exchange of Philadelphia; Copley Fine Art Auctions, Winter Sale Catalog, 2021; Fanning, “Collectors Who Served in the Civil War,” Numismatist, November 2004; Richard W. Davids Pension File, Fold3; Correspondence, Henry K. Kelly to Wife, June 27, 28, July 4, 5, 1863, 118th Pennsylvania Infantry Vertical File, GNMP Library; Correspondence, Henry Thomas Peck to Mother, July 7, 1863, 118th Pennsylvania Infantry Vertical File, GNMP Library; Correspondence, John L. Smith to Mother, July 7, 1863, Diary of William M. Read, June 29, 1863, 118th Pennsylvania Vertical File, GNMP Library; University of Pennsylvania, One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Annual Commencement Program; Correspondence, George W. Carteret to Gettysburg Monument Commission, Dec. 29, 1888, Gettysburg Monument Commission Papers, GNMP Library; Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Certificate of Death, Mrs. Marion Davids, Nov. 11, 1944; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 8, 1863, Sept. 9, 1884, July 6, 1886, Sept. 21, 1888, Sept. 11, 1889, July 10, 1940, Oct. 7, 1942, Nov. 7, 1942, March 13, 1956; Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, Sept. 21, 1869; Gettysburg Times, July 6, 1928, April 8, 1959; Gettysburg Star and Sentinel, April 14, 1934; Lancaster New Era, Oct. 7, 1942; Richmond News Leader, Nov. 7, 1942.
Charles T. Joyce, an MI Senior Editor, focuses his collection on images of soldiers killed or mortally wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg.
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