Civil War Primer — by Pat Granstra

 You know about Jennie Wade, the only civilian casualty of the Battle of Gettysburg, but did you know another Wade girl was responsible for Jenny’s name going down in history?  

At Gettysburg  Jennie Wade is both an icon and an industry.  Each year thousands of tourists make hers the most-visited grave in Evergreen Cemetery.  They also journey to the house on Baltimore Street where a bullet tore through two doors before killing her as she stood making biscuits for hungry Union soldiers.  A surprising number, hoping to connect with Jennie’s spirit, return to the house at night on ghost tours.   

Indeed,  Jennie Wade and the circumstances of her death are the stuff of which myths are made. Young, pretty, and patriotic, she died with a pocketful of pathos in the form of an image of  Jack Skelly.  A  longtime friend who may have been Jennie’s fiance, Skelly was a Union infantryman.  Wounded on June 15 while fighting in Virginia, he lay in a Confederate hospital as the epic battle raged in Gettysburg.  Skelly died on July 12, unaware of Jennie’s death.  

 A romantic story claims that the mortally-wounded Skelly met with Wesley Culp, a Gettysburg friend who had moved to western Virginia before the war and was serving in the Confederate army.  Supposedly, Skelly gave Culp a message to deliver personally to Jennie.  Culp made it to Gettysburg but was killed on July 3, the day Jennie died.  No message for her was found.

Facts and speculation have thus combined to mythologize Jennie Wade.  However, if it had not been for the other Wade girl, it is unlikely that history would have taken special note of Jennie.

The other Wade girl was Georgia, Jennie’s older sister.

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The oldest of the Wade children, Georgia was born on July 4, 1841.  On April 15, 1862, she married John Louis McClellan, a veteran of a three-month enlistment in the 2nd Pennsylvania at the start of the war.   In October of 1862, only six months after their wedding, McClellan re-enlisted for a nine-month stint in Company E of the 165th Pennsylvania Infantry.  He may not have known that Georgia was pregnant when he left for service in Virginia.

The summer of 1863 found Georgia living on Baltimore Street near East Cemetery Hill.  Although her husband was away, she was comfortable in her first home, the north half of a two-story brick duplex.  A seamstress and milliner, she likely continued working as she awaited the birth of her first child.

On the afternoon of June 26,  Confederate troops under General Jubal Early arrived in Gettysburg.  They were the vanguard of the rebel army, clearing a path toward the object of Lee’s Northern invasion, Pennsylvania’s capital city of Harrisburg, forty miles to the northeast.  Along the way they were destroying bridges and railroads to slow the Federal army moving north from Washington, D. C.  They were also looking for badly-needed supplies.  In Gettysburg they found a railcar filled with rations, ransacked stores, and appropriated whatever livestock remained in town.  

While this frightening but bloodless drama was playing out, Georgia Wade McClellan gave birth to a son, Louis Kenneth.  An elderly doctor, her mother, and possibly other townswomen assisted with Georgia’s labor and delivery.  However, these individuals, concerned about the welfare of their own families, left shortly after the delivery.  Margaret S. Creighton, in The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History, quotes Georgia as saying, “I was locked in the house alone.”

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 Following Robert E. Lee’s orders to do no damage to personal property and to meet commisary needs by requisitioning items from local authorities or paying for them with Confederate currency, Early’s troops left Gettysburg unscathed, albeit poorer.  Aware that a large clash between the invading rebels and the Army of the Potomac was imminent, the residents of Gettysburg assumed it would take place in the vicinity of  Harrisburg and attempted to resume their daily routines .

Between June 27 and July 1,  Georgia’s mother, Mary Ann Wade, probably spent most of her time caring for her daughter and grandchild, leaving twenty-year-old Jennie in charge of the home on Breckenridge Street.  At the time the Wade household consisted of Jennie; twelve-year old Samuel;  eight-year-old  Harry; and Isaac Brinkerhoff, a six-year-old physically handicapped boy for whom the Wades provided 24-hour care during the week.  John Wade, aged seventeen, had enlisted in Company B of the 21st Pennsylvania Cavalry and ridden out of Gettysburg with his unit shortly before Early’s troops arrived on June 26th.

On July 1, the Battle of Gettysburg began when Confederates approaching from the west exchanged fire with dismounted Union cavalrymen beyond the northwest edge of the village.  Reinforcements from the west and north bolstered Confedrate numbers, while additional Union forces came from the south.

 Mrs.  Wade was at Georgia’s house on Baltimore Street at the onset of the fighting.  Hearing the gunfire, Jennie thought that location, several blocks south and east of the Wade home on Breckenridge Street, would be safer and decided to take the children there.  John White Johnston, who consulted with Georgia McClellan when writing The True Story of “Jennie” Wade: A Gettysburg Maid,  says Jennie carried Isaac to Baltimore street, then returned home, packed some personal items, and walked back to the McClellan house with Harry. (Johnston makes no mention of Samuel’s being with the rest of the family.  However, he earlier noted that the lad was employed as an errand boy for a butcher named James Pierce.  In The Jennie Wade Story, Cindy Small says that Samuel was probably with Pierce throughout the battle.)

At the end of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the McClellan home housed Georgia and her 5-day-old son, Mary Ann, Jennie, and Harry Wade, and Isaac Brinkerhoff.  They all slept– at least, they tried to sleep– in the parlor. Georgia, her mother, and the baby were in a bed brought from upstairs earlier, probably during Georgia’s pregnancy, so that she did not have to climb the steep, narrow stairs and sleep in the stifling upper level. The boys were on trundle beds, Jennie on a lounge.

Unwittingly, the Wades and McClellans had gathered in one of Gettysburg’s most dangerous locations.  The first day of the battle had gone well for the Confederates.  By evening the  Union forces were retreating southeast through town to establish battle lines on Cemetery Hill, the Rebels following in hot pursuit. 

Georgia’s home sat precisely in the crossfire of Union skirmishers to the east and Confederate sharpshooters in buildings 300 yards to the northwest; her half of the dwelling–the north half– would bear the brunt of the Confederate fire. 

During the evening of the first day and throughout the second day, the brick shell of the McClellan home absorbed many minie balls.  However, in the early afternoon of July 2, an errant Confederate artillery shell ripped through the roof of Georgia’s upper east room.  It pierced the dividing wall between the north and south halves of the structure, ultimately embedding itself in the outer brick wall on the south side.  It did not explode.

The third day of the battle brought more horrors.  Wounded Union soldiers near the house screamed and moaned, unnerving  the sleep-deprived inhabitants.  Around 7:00 a.m., heavy firing from the north shattered all the widows on that side of McClellan home.  One bullet passed through a window, crossed the parlor, splintered a post on the bed, and finally came to rest only inches from Georgia and her baby.

The worst, of course, was yet to come.  Around 8:30 a.m., as  Jennie worked in the kitchen making biscuits for soldiers, a minie ball came through Georgia’s kitchen door on the north side of the dwelling.  It then passed though the door separating the kitchen and parlor, a door Jennie had swung open in order to converse with the family as she worked.  Finally, it struck Jennie in the back and pierced her heart, killing her instantly.

Johnston reports that Georgia screamed loudly when Mrs. Wade told her of Jennie’s death, and that the screams brought Union soldiers into the house.  (They placed themselves in danger by coming through the door penetrated by the fatal  bullet only minutues earlier.)  Realizing that the lives of Georgia and the rest of her family were in great danger, the soldiers devised an impromtu but ingenious plan for taking them to safety.

Each half of the house had its own cellar, which could be accessed only  through an outside entrance.  The door to Georgia’s cellar was on the building’s north– and most dangerous– side.  Using it to remove a woman recovering from a difficult childbirth, a crippled child, and a corpse would  invite catastrophe.

Instead, the soldiers went upstairs and enlarged the opening made by the artillery shell so that the household could enter the south half of the house, descend to its first floor, exit via its kitchen door on the safer south end of the building, and finally enter the cellar. 

Johnston reports that Georgia not only walked up the steep stairs but also carried her baby, relinquishing him to a soldier only long enough to crawl through the hole to the adjoining side.  So that Georgia would  have some degree of comfort in the basement, a soldier carried a rocking chair for her. Other soldiers carried Jennie’s body, wrapped in a quilt Georgia had pieced when she was five years old.

Around 5:00 p.m. on July 4, Jennie Wade’s body, still wrapped in Georgia’s quilt, was placed in a coffin abandoned by the retreating Confederates and buried in the garden behind Georgia’s home.

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July 4, 1863 was Georgia Wade McClellan’s twenty-second birthday, one she could not celebrate because it was the day she saw her sister buried.  And Georgia knew that if it had not been for her living in that house on Baltimore Street, Jennie Wade would not have been Gettysburg’s single civilian victim.

Trivia

Jennie’s name was really Mary Virginia Wade, and her nicknames were Ginnie and Gin.  An early newspaper account of her death mistakenly identified her as Jennie.

Georgia Wade’s given name was probably Georgiann.  Although she is listed as Georgiana on the 1860 Adams County,  Pennsylvania census, she signed several legal documents as Georgiann.  Her nicknames were Georgia and George.

What You Can Do

• Plan a trip to Gettysburg and include visits to the site of Jennie’s birthplace on Boston Street, Georgia’s home on Baltimore Street (now called the Jennie Wade House), and Jennie’s grave in Evergreen Cemetery.  (Of course, you’ll find scores of  other sites to see in and around Gettysburg!)
• Check out www.gettysburgdaily.com to see photographs of Georgia McClellan’s home from many angles.  Look for “McClellan House (Jennie Wade House) Battle Damage ” in the Archives section. This site lets you get to know Gettysburg without being there.
• Learn what Georgia Wade McClellan did with the rest of her life by reading The Other Wade Girl:  Part II.   

Tags: Georgia Wade McClellan, Jennie Wade