Harvest of Death and the Ghoul of Gettysburg: The Little Known Tragedy Behind the Aftermath of the Civil War's Greatest Battle

 When thinking about the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg--the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere--most of us can easily conjure up images of row upon row of white headstones laid out in perfect symmetry.  

Many of us, if we think about the battle at all, may think of Victorian Era martial monuments made out of granite or marble, or of brass cannon and wooden fences scattered across lush Pennsylvania farmland.  And of course all of us learned as elementary school students, and we are always reminded whenever Gettysburg is mentioned, of President Abraham Lincoln and his famous address which he gave on the site of the battle in November of 1863 only a mere four months after the guns had fallen silent.

But there is a more grisly and horrific side to the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, aside from monuments, orderly cemeteries and Abraham Lincoln that few, if any of us, ever think about  today.  However, the horror of the aftermath of the battle in the summer of 1863 may have been one of the most traumatic occurrences in American history, perhaps even more so than the three days of actual combat that comprised the battle itself.

Anyone who was there once the armies left would never forget the carnage that was left behind and the horrors that they witnessed.  In July of 1863 in the immediate aftermath of the battle, the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, and its surrounding environs, was the scene of death and devastation on a scale the likes of which the world had never had to grapple with before.  

According to the National Park Service, which runs the battlefield site today--America’s most visited National Battlefield Park--the battle, “Brought utter devastation to the fewer than 3000 residents of Gettysburg.”

Dead on the Battlefield at Gettysburg

Newspapers in the days and weeks after the battle reported that the smell of thousands upon thousands of rotting men and horses on the fields outside of Gettysburg was so awful that it caused the residents of York, Pennsylvania--a much larger city located approximately forty miles from Gettysburg--to gag and vomit whenever they left their homes and went outdoors.

It took weeks for hundreds of civilian workers, mostly made up of residents local to Gettysburg, to gather up the thousands of dead bodies and tens of thousands of pounds of rotting human and horse flesh and load it into mule driven wagons where it could be transported to York and to larger surrounding towns where the detritus could be properly incinerated in large furnaces and in bonfires.

The residents of Gettysburg called this horror The Harvest of Death.

According to the acclaimed (and entertaining!) podcast “Strange Familiars” in Episode 296 from February of 2022--even over 150 years after the battle, every July thousands of vultures descend upon the fields outside of Gettysburg and return to the site of the battle.  The vultures migrate there each July because so great was the feast of flesh that they had in the immediate aftermath of the battle that successive generations of vultures each have a permanent genetic memory of Gettysburg and its location programmed in their brains!

A rare photo of destruction and the residents of Gettysburg

Over 40,000 Americans became casualties during the Battle of Gettysburg between July 1st and the 3rd of 1863.  More than 8,000 soldiers died there and over 30,000 were wounded, with many if not most, forever leaving behind severed limbs on the Pennsylvania farmland.  Most of the dead were either incinerated in massive pits miles from the battlefield or were buried in unmarked mass graves along with the rest of the battle’s detritus, including thousands of dead horses and mules, right near where they had fallen.  

It was only years later, beginning primarily in the 1880’s with the establishment of the Gettysburg National Battlefield Park that the War Department of the United States (now known as the Department of Defense) undertook the massive task of attempting to identify all of the men that had fallen there.  The War Department constructed neat and orderly cemeteries, both Union and Confederate, near the site of the battle.  Most of the Confederate dead and many of the Union fallen were never accurately accounted for, and today the memories of these soldiers north and south alike, is marked only by thousands of nondescript tombstones that read simply “Unknown Soldier USA” or “Unknown Soldier CSA”.  In the summer of 1863 thousands of young souls simply vanished off the face of the earth and all that remains of them are the ghosts that are said to haunt the Battlefield at Gettysburg each and every night to this very day.

The scale of death and devastation left behind by the battle is almost unimaginable and incomprehensible.  Mere words and numbers simply don’t, and I suppose, really can’t do something so horrific any justice.  For that very reason, you will notice that this article began with a sepia toned picture of a single haggard, forlorn and odd looking man--the so-called “Ghoul of Gettysburg”.

Carnage on the Battlefield

The tragedy behind his picture, the vicious unverified rumors behind his identity which remains largely unknown to this very day and the speculation about the horrors that he supposedly committed, the ones that earned him the nickname in the press “The Ghoul of Gettysburg” I believe serve to represent the pity and tragedy of war more than any mere words or numbers.

It all began with a single sepia toned photograph.  The photo is an old mid-nineteenth century type of picture called a CDV which is an abbreviation for Carte de Visite (or visiting card) which was a type of small photograph, almost like a wallet sized picture, that was  produced on metal like a tintype and invented in 1854 in Paris by Andre Adolphe Eugene Disdien.

These CDV photos as mentioned were the size of what we would call small trading cards and much like trading cards today they were, during the Civil War Era, meant to be purchased as souvenirs or gifts and traded from person to person to be placed in albums as part of a photographic collection.

As far as we know only one small copy of the CDV photo of the so-called “Ghoul of Gettysburg” is known to still exist and it is the one at the top of this article.  That photo was supposedly taken in a photographer’s studio, obviously judging by the posing pedestal in the photograph which was designed to allow the subject to stand as still as possible for as long as possible because of the long exposure times necessary for early photography, in the days and weeks immediately after the Battle of Gettysburg in July of 1863 while the cleanup effort on the battlefield known as the Harvest of Death was still ongoing.

Only recently has this photo, after not being talked about for nearly 150 years returned to prominence after the Gettysburg Museum of History posted it to their Facebook page in 2016.  The caption, courtesy of the Gettysburg Museum of History reads:

“A very rare CDV photo of “The Ghoul of Gettysburg”.  This unidentified man according to local lore was arrested for robbing dead bodies on the Gettysburg Battlefield in the days following the battle.  Little is known about this person or event.  Copies of his photo were sold by local photographers.  There was also a stereoview version of this that has the caption, ‘A Battlefield Vulture, Godfor by name--one of those inhuman creatures who follow in the wake of armies, robbing the field of blankets and clothing and turning the pockets of the dead.’ It was not a very popular view so few were sold and even fewer exist today.”

Gettysburg National Battlefield Cemetery (courtesy Wikipedia)

As the Gettysburg Historical Museum caption says, “few were sold,” but still some were definitely sold, most probably in November 1863 when President Lincoln came to give his famous address and consecrate the memory of those who died on the battlefield.  How anyone could ever have thought that a picture of such a beaten down and forlorn looking man could have been a “popular view” for souvenir collecting is beyond me and  it begs the question--If Godfor was a real name at all, was he along with the Harvest of Death the greatest tragedy of America’s Civil War, our nation’s bloodiest conflict, or was the real tragedy the existence of those who tried, and in many instances did, profit off of such human suffering and misery?