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One of the few men of Bucktail Company to survive, he kept an impeccable journal of his war experiences

Sunday, July 06, 2003

By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

On that first terrible morning in Gettysburg, Union infantryman Daniel Appleby watched a cadre of his officers get drunk. Then he saw them lead a disaster.

	Daniel Appleby went into battle with 54 men. Only seven returned unscathed.

Fifty-four soldiers in Appleby's unit, Company I of the 149th Bucktail Regiment, went into battle about 11:30 a.m. July 1, 1863. All but seven would be killed, wounded or captured before sunset.

Appleby, who was 22, had unshakable faith in the commander of his outfit, Col. Roy B. Stone. But Stone was wounded soon after the Union soldiers formed their battle line a half-mile west of Gettysburg, on the edge of the turnpike near McPherson Barn.

Appleby blamed junior officers for much of the carnage that followed. In his diary, he described them as incompetent sots -- slaves to "Master Whiskey."

Chaos began after Stone was hit and incapacitated. Officers who replaced him ordered the Bucktailers to a clearing created by a railroad cut. There they faced a swarm of Confederate soldiers. How many is unclear in Appleby's writings, but the Rebels outnumbered Union soldiers by a sizable margin.

"... The enemy advanced on us and we were compelled to crawl out and fall back to our former position on the pike, with heavy loss, all owing to our drunken leaders," he wrote.

The Union soldiers somehow regrouped and made a second charge, this one more successful. "We filled a ditch two or three deep with Graybacks, and the field on which they fell was literally covered," Appleby wrote.

He could not have known that the battle would turn into the bloodiest ever fought on American soil. What he did realize in those first five hours was that Gettysburg marked the end for most of his unit, which was populated by boys and young men from the village of Shade Gap in Huntingdon County.

Daniel Curlet Montague Appleby, the oldest of five brothers, grew up on a farm there. He was 16 when his father died from a colt's wicked kick. Appleby inherited the job of managing the family farm.

He might never have left his rustic home had civil war not broken out. Appleby enlisted in the army in August 1862, joining others from Shade Gap to form the heart of Company I of the 149th, one of the famous bucktail brigades. Every man wore a bucktail on his cap, giving the unit its name and the Union blues a touch of flair.

Appleby kept a war diary all during 1863, writing in an ornate style that would make a penmanship instructor envious. If he was afraid during the firefights and cannon blasts, as he must have been, he did not reveal it in his entries or letters to his brother, Thomas. Appleby seemed to have the composure of a man sitting at a desk with a feather pen, not an itinerant soldier who ate at a table only once in the first seven months of the year.

His first big battle was at Chancellorsville in May 1863. Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson pounded the Union Army, even though their troops were outnumbered by a 2-to-1 margin. But Jackson, a tactical genius, was one of the South's 14,000 casualties at Chancellorsville. His death would undermine the Rebels' chances at Gettysburg two months later.

Although reeling, the Union Army got a morale boost at Chancellorsville with the appointment of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker as its commander.

Hooker was credited with reorganizing the army to form a cavalry corps. He also tried to invigorate his soldiers with brash talk. "May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none," he said.

But just three days before Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln replaced Hooker with Gen. George Meade.

Union soldiers knew they were about to get another crack at Lee. By the end of June, Appleby and his Bucktailers were back in Pennsylvania, camped at Millerstown in Adams County. On July 1, he and the rest marched seven miles to Gettysburg for the fight of their lives.

"Went into the fight at 11 1/2 a.m. with 54 men. Came out at 4 1/2 p.m. with eight men. ... Lost all our field officers -- none killed but wounded," he wrote.

In a later, longer account of the battle, he amended his statistical summary, saying only seven Bucktailers had survived the day unscathed.

"A sad night it was to those of Company I who were yet unhurt. ... 'Where are the boys?' was the lamentable inquiry. Are they all killed and wounded and lying on the field? Or are they captured?"

Next morning was filled with skirmishes. The third and final day at Gettysburg seemed worse to Appleby, although the Union had made a comeback.

"Skirmish fighting and artillery firing began at daybreak," he wrote. "Musketry and artillery fighting continued all day, doing horrid execution."

Even when the battle ended, life in Gettysburg got no easier for Appleby. He spent July 5 removing the wounded and burying the dead.

The magnitude of Gettysburg was embedded in his memory banks. But he and the other surviving Bucktailers had to move on. They took Hagerstown Pike to the South Mountain, where they would form another battle line, this time for a confrontation that would not materialize.

Appleby came down with typhoid fever in August. He went home to Huntingdon County for rest and recovery, then rejoined the Bucktail brigade in October.

At the end of December, he summed up his life in one sentence: "One more year gone by and a soldier yet." It was a colossal understatement for a man who had fought at Gettysburg.

After the war, Appleby found work in the freight department of the Pennsylvania Railroad. His 20-year career there ended in a flash of violence that did what the war never could.

On Feb. 5, 1903, almost 40 years after the great battle, he was struck by an engine at the East Broad Top Railroad Station near Mount Union. He died instantly.

The diary, letters and photograph of Daniel Appleby used for this story were supplied by his great-niece, Ann Baldwin Taylor of Park Place.

Milan Simonich can be reached at msimonich@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1956.