A week after the guns fell silent at Gettysburg, a man named Robert Nevin departed the battlefield by riding atop a packed railroad car bound for Baltimore. The next day, still shaken by what he’d seen in the woods and fields where two massive armies had tried to destroy each other, he wrote a letter to his wife Elizabeth.
The letter, written in precise script, is now held at the Heinz History Center’s Detre Library and Archives. It’s a deeply moving and at times disturbing document, penned by a Pittsburgh man who would soon become a highly respected newspaper editor and poet. And it helps us to understand the horror of what happened in Gettysburg during the first three days of July 1863.
Nevin begins his letter by describing scenes of misery in the hospital camps hastily erected on the Gettysburg battlefield.
He writes, “The rebels in one of the camps lie in a woods, on the bare ground, the hot sun shining on them — wounds in their necks, legs, bellies, and on their faces, with, actually, maggots crawling in them, and yet all of them alive.”
One man, with half of his face shot away, begs Nevin for water. The man drinks, Nevin writes, “with what apparent rapture.”
Most disturbing is Nevin’s detailed account of an amputation.”Good God, but it was horrible!” he writes. A video of his account is part of the Post-Gazette’s interactive exploration of the battle.
Nevin lived near Sewickley. Pittsburgh directories from the 1860s indicate he and his brother owned a paint supply company at 26 Wood Street, the address listed on the letter. But Nevin also was a writer with a strong sense that something of great significance was happening. Most likely he traveled to Gettysburg to write dispatches for local newspapers.
To Elizabeth he wrote, “Won’t you forgive me for staying so long away? I long to be with you, and yet the vast event that is impending — the greatest, perhaps, that history will have to record for a hundred years to come — urges me to tarry a little longer.”
He tells his children to behave and obey their mother: “Suppose the rebels should happen to catch me up, tomorrow, as prisoner, and I should be kept away from you for weeks or months, wouldn’t I be very unhappy if I thought you would be giving annoyance to your mother?”
Certainly capture was a threat. His nephew John Nevin, a Union soldier from Sewickley, had spent six months in a Confederate prison camp.
Robert Nevin later became editor of the Pittsburgh newspapers The Leader and then the Times. More than a century later, few people outside of the Sewickley area remember him. His son Ethelbert, however, achieved great fame as one of America’s leading composers and was featured on a 10-cent stamp in 1940.
Robert Nevin died in 1908 and is buried in Sewickley Cemetery.
