Gettysburg Relics of the Confederate Dead at Pickett's Charge | American Artifact Episode 28

[Music] well if you have watched the history traveler series uh you know that to me there there is nothing like uh getting out on the ground where big events in history have taken place and right now uh i am in gettysburg and i'm following the same path that the 11th mississippi regiment took on the third day of the battle of gettysburg in what has famously become known as pickett's charge and the the 11th mississippi got very very close to the union lines and made it all the way up to this point as a matter of fact there's there's a monument here that i'll show in a bit that shows how far these guys from mississippi made it and today we are bringing a battlefield relic back out on the field to the exact spot where it was discovered in the late 1800s [Music] we're standing at the property line between the bryant farm and the david ziegler farm the david ziegler farm is behind me it's no longer standing but it was purchased by the peppers in about 1865 or 66 and the peppers worked this land for decades and so this was the property line approximately pepper farm is over here kind of across from where mcdonald's and those restaurants are over there and they owned up through ziggler's grove now ziggler's grove was very rocky they had orchards there they farmed some of this land but certain seasons they would farm uh other tracks of land meaning they would lease them they would farm the bliss farm which is across the street area and sometimes they would farm the bryant farm and in 1887 fred peffer accidentally plowed up a burial trench that was undiscovered i'm going to show you where that was all right well here is the monument to the 11th mississippi that shows the the furthest point of advance on july 3rd of 1863 and as you can see here shows 393 combatants killed in action or died of wounds 110 and then wounded and wounded and captured 193 i mean so and it says non-casualty 53 so out of 393 combatants 53 were non-casualty and then if we go over here to the back side well here you can see on the flag there's there's a little bit of a little bit of detail here whenever you come to see this monument you can see bullet holes that have been uh depicted in the flag of the 11th mississippi and those guys made it all the way to this point right here so [Music] so during pickets charge the confederates attacked across the emmitsburg road here and the 11th mississippi landed about here and they got to the wall their colors were captured a bunch of them were killed and wounded and captured right around here so in 1887 when fred peffer was plowing he accidentally hit a burial trench and he dug up accidentally seven mississippi soldiers and we know that and this happened in 1887 and it happened right around here near the 12th new jersey monument which is up there the buck and ball regiment and we know they were mississippi soldiers because after he tried to identify the bodies and failed to do so he one of the methods he used they had no identification discs or anything like that on them but they did have mississippi buttons on them and he reinterred the bodies behind the barn and i'll show you where that is but i'm going to show you i brought this out we have some of the items that had fallen off when they reentered the bodies and he kept some of the buttons and a few other items and it was not grave robbing he didn't do it to for monetary value or anything but it was it was in case at some point they could possibly make an identification of those remains and so what you see here and i put the one button in backwards so you can kind of see it there's a star there and it says mississippi and there is an eye for infantry and the buttons also had chunks of the uniform stone because you know this was um you know in 1887 so it's not that long after the battle and so there was still some of the cloth attached and there was some of the leather goods so the pepper family kept these items and hoping that maybe at some point they could they could identify the remains they made they made an attempt to have the remains moved to um the confederate cemetery and at hollywood cemetery in richmond and um nobody wanted to pay for it you know it you know there was no one you could go to to try to have that happen and you know the peppers were farmers they didn't have the money to to do that and and so what he did was he reburied the remains and when i was a kid i grew up with this story and my grandfather always told me it was behind the barn meaning the bryant farm barn which you see right here in 1888 a confederate soldier came back and this this story made it into the newspapers and and both of gettysburg's newspapers we have copies of those and um a confederate soldier came back in 1888 for the reunion the next year and of course this was fresh in everyone's mind and he had claimed to have buried his brother um on the fields of pickett's charge and he was looking for the remains because his brother never came home and the bodies were never exhumed and so um he found my grandfather through talking to people in the town and apparently his story was or the story passed down to me was he was captured at the wall his brother was killed and he asked permission as a pow to bury his brother because he i guess he could see him laying out there and he knew that because he buried the body that his brother was shot through the hip and mike he found my great great grandfather fred pepper and came out there and he asked if he could view the remains so they he and my grand great great grandfather dug him up and again and he one of the skeletons had a cracked hip bone a bullet had gone through the hip bone so he was satisfied that that was the correct remains of his brother and um he took him home to mississippi now there's no record of this this is just family lore but it was passed down directly from my grandfather who got it from his grandfather so it's um it's a pretty pretty solid story um we do have the tangible artifacts from the from the graves a few years ago um i was doing a training exercise with cadaver dogs now at the gettysburg museum of history we have a lot of blood relics and things like that you know we have lincoln's blood we have kennedy's blood and they were testing some cadaver dogs on old blood and they set up a experiment with some cages and they would hit on certain areas and it was really fun to watch and these dogs had worked on some of the big cases like the 911 stuff they were looking for remains so they asked if they could come out and look for the the graves and i got i asked one of my park ranger friends if we could do it if we and he said just don't make a mess you're not gonna dig them up or anything i said no no nothing like that but i just want to try to confirm the story so they had they had three dogs i think it was and uh this is about 10 years ago and um each one went out and they they went around this whole area and i told them behind the barn so they went all over and all three of them hit on a spot out there [Music] okay we've moved back here into the museum temporarily we're gonna go back out to the battlefield here in just a little bit now if you watched the history traveler series where i was here at the museum uh eric talked about the pepper collection from from his ancestors and there's all kinds of interesting artifacts so we've dodged back in here real quick uh to take a look at a few of the the news articles and also some of the our uh the artifacts that his that his family extracted from the ground and then we're gonna go back out to the battlefield so we have some of the other artifacts that were found with the mississippians by frederick and edward peffer uh what you have here are more of the buttons with pieces of the confederate uniform on there and that comb now when i was a kid my grandfather had these items in this old tobacco bag they were just in there and i i was fascinated by them and um this is this is one of the cartridge or pieces of the cartridge box that was found with with the remains and there's also some canteens and some other small items um this photo or this illustration shows frederick pepper my great-great-grandfather discovering the remains and i had an artist do that and he's looking at one of the buttons right there and saying hmm must be mississippians and then this is a period photo from the 1870s showing the pepper family that's frederick pepper who is my great great grandfather and his wife and all his children and this man here is edward peffer who is my great grandfather who he was also present when this event happened and there were there are actually two newspaper articles and the first one says seven bodies found on tuesday in plowing mr frederick pepper came upon the remains of seven soldiers supposed mississippians near the 12th news new jersey monument on the south side of the emmitsburg road the bones were re-buried and then the second newspaper article says last week edward peffer who is his son whilst plowing a field east of the emmitsburg road which is actually the correct location unearthed the remains of seven confederates who probably fell in front of pettigrew's division their bones were reinterred in the remains of of the cartridge box were about 50 bullets and he also obtained some mississippi buttons and again they weren't grave robbing they took these items to get them out of the ground because the the the bones were all mashed together so they kept them to possibly help identify and we will go out to the field and i will show you that spot and talk about what happened afterwards [Music] so just to give you an idea of where we are on the battlefield and to give you a sense of space uh here is the the bryant house right over here on the other side of this white fence that is where eric was telling us the pepper farm was here is the barn and then right over here on the other side of that stone wall is the mississippi monument and then just to the left is where the graves of the mississippi soldiers would have been okay so so during the battle they were just burying soldiers wherever they fell so all over the fields of gettysburg you would have had graves scattered all throughout this place and there was a burial map that was made it's now called the elliott map that tells us a little bit more about where those graves were [Music] so this is the historic fence line that was put back by the park service and this is we assume this is fairly correct because i think they got this from one of the maps and all three of those dogs hit right here in this area and it and it corresponds with my grandfather's story saying that they buried him behind the brian barn this is technically behind the brine barn and it would make sense if you're a farmer and you want to re-enter some remains on a property and don't want to risk disturbing them again with your plow a good place to do it is along a fence line you know you're not going to plow directly up to a fence you're going to plow a little bit beyond that so if they line them up here that's a good spot and it makes sense now this is all just speculation i mean we don't know this 100 we've not done ground penetrating radar or any of that kind of stuff but i do believe there are some there is something here i don't know how much there's no record of of any of these seven skeletons being removed except for the one that is a family story so i believe there's some remains down there [Music] all right i'll tell you what to to be able to travel to a place where a major event in history occurred is something else to be here with a battlefield relic uh that hasn't been here since 1887 uh really adds an extra layer of realism to it and uh really kind of connects you to to what happened here uh yeah very very cool uh anyway we're going to be going around to different places on the battlefield eric has all kinds of different relics at the museum that we're going to take back to their original spots and talk about how they connect us with history [Music] uh [Music]

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 1,349,518

Keywords: history, history traveler, history underground, civil war, civil war history, civil war documentary, gettysburg, battle of gettysburg, gettysburg documentary, pickett's charge, longstreet's assault, mississippi civil war, new jersey civil war, high water mark, gettysburg museum of history, erik dorr, battlefield relics

Id: ucnfDYy-_s0

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2022