6/2/2023 0 Comments The gettysburg address copyAs befitted a Stephens protégé, Wills was a pro-abolition Republican. That same year Wills became the first superintendent of the Adams County Public Schools. An 1851 graduate of Pennsylvania College, David Wills studied law under the noted abolitionist and congressman Thaddeus Stevens, gaining admission to the bar in 1854. Just a week after the battle, Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin visited Gettysburg and appointed Wills to coordinate the removal of all Pennsylvanians killed in the battle. Clearly, the bodies could not long remain in their hastily dug graves. It many instance arms and legs, and sometimes heads, protrude, and my attention has been directed to several places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them.” Additionally, only a portion of the soldiers were properly identified, making it impossible to return the remains of most to their families. At the end of July local lawyer David Wills wrote: “Our dead are lying on the fields unburied (that is no grave being dug), with small portions of earth dug up alongside of the body and thrown over it. Initially the dead were buried where they fell, often in shallow graves. Lincoln was invited to speak at Gettysburg in 1863 to commemorate the cemetery that would hold the bodies of the Union’s dead from the great battle that raged July 1-3, 1863.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |