Uncovering Civil War mysteries: Lessons from the short life of a young lieutenant colonel

Among the weathered and once-cracked headstones in Michigan ’s historic Brighton Village Cemetery, the dual grave markers for Lt. Col. John Gilluly stand out.

It was a late summer day when I was drawn to Gilluly’s resting place by one of the intricate Victorian silhouettes displayed throughout the city of Brighton that depict its 19th century residents. The highly colored graphic near Gilluly’s headstones showed a grieving widow and her two small daughters. On close examination, text beside the images explained that Union officer Gilluly had perished in the Civil War while “leading his troops in the disastrous Battle at Fredericksburg” on Dec. 13, 1862.

I knew the battle well. In 2009, during a College of William and Mary course on how wars are commemorated, I walked the Fredericksburg battlefield near the Sunken Road where more than 10,000 Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing after a single day’s battle. When I was preparing to enter the intelligence community 18 months later, I walked through the Confederate positions in Marye’s Heights, which are now the resting place for 15,000 Union dead. Remembering the steep costs of battle seemed a fitting way to prepare for the solemn task of advising senior practitioners of the global war on terrorism. I thought often of the lieutenant colonel who had fought in defense of his country.

Divisions past and present

On July 22, after Ohio state Sen. George Lang said it would “take a civil war to save our country” if former President Donald Trump were not elected in November (Lang later recanted), I felt that the timing was ripe to take another look at Gilluly’s, and our nation’s, past.

I set out to recall a deadly battle and to find answers about Gilluly’s life and death. Along the way, I also found several mysteries that may never be answered. In the pandemonium of war, neat facts and tidy endings are in short supply.

Jim Vichich, president of the Brighton Area Historical Society, shared a story that resolved the immediate mystery of Gilluly’s two graves. He explained that Gilluly had been beloved by local Civil War veterans after his death, with camps from both the Grand Army of the Republic and the Sons of Union Veterans naming themselves after their hero and working to honor his memory.

Labors of love

Gilluly’s original ornate headstone, like many others in the Brighton Village Cemetery, was “smashed” by teenagers who took advantage of the overgrown and unmaintained cemetery for acts of mischief and romance between the 1950s and 1980s.

Believing that the broken, discolored remains of Gilluly’s stone were beyond repair, the Gilluly-Kingsley Camp of the Sons of Union Veterans raised funds in 1992 for a thick marble headstone to stand beside the marker that lay buried in sod above its namesake’s grave.

To preserve the remainder of the dilapidated markers, Vichich and his society gained the city manager’s permission to revitalize the Brighton Village Cemetery in 2009. Vichich wanted “to have these headstones rebuilt, restored, and stand tall again because many of the people buried there are very simple people. They were not famous for doing anything, and so the only recognition of them being on our planet is that headstone. If that headstone perishes, that person’s existence disappears.”

Historical society volunteers devoted around 2,000 hours to cut back overgrowth and clean up the cemetery site. In 2012, they began the 3,300-hour endeavor of fixing 240 leaning and 170 broken headstones.

In 2014, Gilluly’s original headstone was repaired, restored to its original gleaming white, and anchored into 1,500 pounds of concrete. Standing directly behind the new marble marker, it is now unrecognizable from the stone once deemed irredeemably broken. Vichich said the historical society did not know “whether Gilluly is actually buried here or on the battlefield.”

Before I traveled to the battlefield, Brighton District Library genealogy librarian Jordan Sprunger helped me find several local accounts of Gilluly’s life and his Civil War service. Numerous accounts confirmed that Gilluly worked as a teacher prior to receiving his law degree at the University of Michigan. Gilluly practiced as a local Brighton attorney and was elected to the Michigan Legislature in 1859. Local sources note that Gilluly owned a 50-acre plot and home in rural Pettysville, near the Hamburg Pond.

Following the Confederates’ April 13, 1861, attack on Fort Sumter, Gilluly and his fellow Livingston County residents assembled on April 30 to create the Livingston Volunteers, according to Livingston County Civil War expert Richard G. Hutchins in Livingston North Goes to War 1861-1865. Gilluly, commissioned as a captain, was selected as the company commander.

In May, the Livingston Volunteers were combined with around nine other militia entities to create the Fifth Michigan Regiment, Thomas E. Sebrell explained in his dissertation on the “Fighting Fifth” Michigan Infantry Regiment.

Off to war

Only about a quarter of the approximately 900 enlisted men in the regiment were native to Michigan. Over 200 soldiers hailed from New York, and 1 in 10 came from Canada. Seven men came from the Southern states of Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Virginia but “decided to take up arms against their native states,” Sebrell wrote. Eight members of the regiment were Jewish. Sebrell also found that “one-third of the men were foreign-born,” hailing from “Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, Bohemia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Prussia, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, Wales, and the West Indies.”

Around March 1862, the Fifth Michigan was sent to Alexandria, Virginia, to join Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Of the 500 members of the regiment who fought in the May 5 Battle of Williamsburg, 144 were killed, wounded, or missing. Gilluly may be among three captains forced to relinquish company command after the battle due to sickness or wounds. Gilluly tendered his resignation on May 5. His resignation was rejected when Gilluly was found to be suffering from diarrhea, according to the Brighton Village Cemetery’s walking tour brochure, which provides details about and locations for the 46 Civil War veterans interred within the cemetery.

The Fifth Michigan’s next battle at Fair Oaks Station between May 31 and June 1 also incurred high losses, with 155 casualties among 320 participating soldiers. Early losses jangled nerves. Fifth Michigan Regiment Pvt. Jim Foreman spent much of June burying the dead and observing piles of amputated limbs by the regiment’s hospital. In his journal, Foreman wrote that he developed “the shakes” after combat. His treatment included quinine and opium. Fatalism had set in. “[I] presume when I write again I shall either be in Richmond, back at Fort Monroe, or killed. God knows which,” Foreman told his wife.

After the Peninsular and Seven Days campaigns that followed Fair Oaks Station, Gilluly was given command of the Fifth Michigan on July 18 and promoted to lieutenant colonel for his “bravery and gallantry,” the Brighton Village Cemetery walking tour brochure states.

Sebrell’s account of the Fifth Michigan Regiment ends before the Battle of Fredericksburg. He does note that by war’s end, the unit took the fifth-most casualties of any Civil War regiment.

As I made my way to the Fredericksburg battlefield, I immersed myself in accounts of the battle from Francis Trevelyan Miller’s The Photographic History of the Civil War and Shelby Foote’s inimitable The Civil War: A Narrative.

The plan of battle was conceived by Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, newly appointed commander of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862. Burnside hoped to cross through Fredericksburg on a path to take the Confederate capital in Richmond and obtain a Union victory. He may have succeeded, were it not for a logistical snag. The pontoon bridges he ordered to enable troops to cross the Rappahannock River into Fredericksburg were severely delayed. As his troops massed in wait in early December, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate soldiers dug into their fighting positions and “had the opposite ridges bristling with guns,” Foote wrote.

Union forces crossed the river on Dec. 11 under heavy rifle fire from the Confederates. For the next day and a half, Union soldiers ransacked Fredericksburg, stirring the anger of the rebels.

Fateful battle

After a heavy fog lifted in the late morning on Dec. 13, Union troops prepared for battle. Some troops were sent south along a stretch of the Old Richmond Stage Road to attack the Confederates who were positioned along an elevated Mine Road and in the wooded hills fronting it.

Other Union soldiers were positioned outside the city along a vast, open expanse of field that eventually butted up against a long stone wall around 4 feet high. The wall bordered Telegraph Road, now called the Sunken Road, a dusty length of road deeply rutted by the wheels of horse-drawn wagons that often traversed it. Dug in between road and wall were Confederate troops stacked four men deep who were prepared to issue a steady stream of fire into any Union troops that made their way into the open field. In the steep hills of Marye’s Heights that rose up directly behind the Sunken Road, Confederate cannons prepared to launch artillery into advancing Union soldiers.

Even with such heavy defenses, Lee worried over the sheer quantity of Union troops on the field. Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, in command of troops along the Sunken Road, reassured Lee presciently. “General, if you put every man now on the other side of the Potomac in that field to approach me over that same line and give me plenty of ammunition, I will kill them all before they reach my line,” Longstreet said. “Look to the right. You are in some danger there. But not on my line.”

The soldiers preparing for battle hailed from a multitude of states. Around 118,000 Union troops included units from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Connecticut, Minnesota, Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, Rhode Island, Vermont, and the territory that would become West Virginia. The 78,000 Confederates came from Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. If the mélange of backgrounds the Fifth Michigan Regiment boasted is any indication, the assembled men (and several women in disguise) came from further-flung locations than their statehood alone would indicate.

At noon, Union troops launched their first assault on the Sunken Road. In the course of the day, they would make multiple charges on the Confederate lines. Longstreet’s men repelled each charge, thickly littering the open field with blue-robed Union soldiers. Later groups of assaulting Union soldiers would be forced to clamber over their dead and wounded brethren on their way to, and in retreat from, their objective.

“It is well that war is so terrible,” Lee said of the massacre below. “We should grow too fond of it.”

Though the bloodshed was primarily confined to the field opposite the Sunken Road, the battle was not. Foote described how at around 1 o’clock, Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin sent 4,500 Pennsylvanian soldiers from his Left Grand Division at the Confederates lined up to Longstreet’s right along the mine road. Their brief incursion “scattered a second-line brigade of startled rebels,” though in the Confederates’ corresponding attack, Foote estimated a third of Franklin’s troops were lost.

By evening, there were 12,653 Union and 4,201 Confederate soldiers wounded, dead, or missing.

Lee anticipated renewed attacks in the morning. In fact, Burnside personally planned to lead a final assault on the Sunken Road on Dec. 14, but his generals convinced him that any further attacks were ill-advised.

The day passed without additional charges. That night, the aurora borealis filled the sky with brilliant color. Northern and Southern soldiers found meaning in the celestial display in accounts provided by National Park Service Ranger Mary O’Neill. A Confederate soldier said the heavens were “hanging out banners and streamers and setting off fireworks in honor of our victory.” Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine Regiment described how the Union dead were being “lighted to burial by the meteor splendors of their Northern home!”

Throughout the evening, Confederate troops in dire need of shoes, cloaks, and blankets snuck onto the battlefield to strip the commodities from the lifeless souls who no longer needed them. In the morning, Foote wrote, the “ground in front of the sunken road, formerly carpeted solid blue, had taken on a mottled hue, with patches of startling white” that were the naked Union dead.

A truce negotiated on Dec. 15 allowed Union soldiers to pick up their fallen and tend to their wounded. Up close, the carnage turned stomachs. Foote cited one soldier who described “one [body] without a head, there one without legs, yonder a head and legs without a trunk; everywhere horrible expressions, fear, rage, agony, madness, torture; lying in pools of blood, lying with heads half buried in mud, with fragments of shell sticking in oozing brains, with bullet holes all over the puffed limbs.”

When I met O’Neill at the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center, she led me to a table in the entrance hallway that held laminated battle maps the size of a small dinner table. My eye immediately searched for the dozens of Union elements lined up outside the city, prepared to assault the Sunken Road.

“The Fifth Michigan is actually on the other side,” O’Neill said, demonstrating another section of the battlefield, miles from the field of slaughter, where a tiny blue square marked with a white No. 5 and flanked by the blue letters "Mi" stood near the Old Richmond Stage Road.

O’Neill explained that Gilluly’s men were part of an incursion that neither Foote nor Miller mentioned, in which elements of the Third Brigade of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s Center Grand Division charged in to repel the Confederate counterassault on Franklin’s troops.

The fourth of five battlefield maps depicting changing troop positions during the Dec. 13 battle showed the Fifth Michigan in front of the Old Richmond Stage Road between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. as they charged on Confederate troops who had broken out into open territory. In the fifth map, which shows positions between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., the Fifth Michigan is no longer visible. “When your leader is killed in action, that really throws a regiment into chaos,” O’Neill explained. “Here, they just get absorbed.”

A report from Third Brigade commander Brigadier-General of Volunteers H.G. Berry noted that at around 2 p.m., “it was evident that our forces were being driven in.” When “the enemy came within range, the Fifth Michigan, Thirty-seventh New York, One hundred and first New York, and Seventeenth Maine poured a withering fire into their ranks, which sent them to the right about.” Though this “ended the infantry fight,” Berry reported that the men were “subject, until night, to a heavy artillery fire.” Later in the same report, Berry makes “honorable mention of the Fifth Michigan Volunteers,” whose “brave chief, the gallant Lieutenant-Colonel Gilluly, fell at the head of his regiment in repelling a charge of the enemy upon the battery which his regiment was supporting.”

Fifth Michigan Pvt. William Gilson also referenced his commanding officer’s death in a Dec. 18 letter to his wife. “Saturday morning we was marched in to the field and we layed and supported a battery, till one oclock and the shells and bullets struck on all sides of us and at one oclock we was marched on a double quick in front of the battery within ten rods of three regiments of rebels and the second voley we pored in on them they broke from us and retreated to a piece of woods we pored in the bullets as fast as we could as long as thare was a reb to be seen,” Gilson wrote. “We lost our colonel and ten men killed and seventy wounded out of our regiment.”

The combined sources led O’Neill to believe that Gilluly was struck by enemy fire during the charge at around 2 p.m.

With his timing and manner of death mostly settled, I asked O’Neill whether there was any way to confirm a suggestion from one Brighton account that Gilluly died on his horse. She said it was a reasonable possibility. “You have to physically be above [your men] to give orders. Civil War battles were very visual things, so officers on horseback were targets.”

Sunken Road

O’Neill and I left the air-conditioned visitor center for a tour of the battlefield. She pointed out re-created and original sections of the stone wall that had once protected Confederate troops. We soon reached the Innis House, a home situated between the wall and the assaulting Union forces. Still pocked inside and out with bullet holes from the day of battle, it remains heady with the rich scents of solid plank floors and the soot from old fires that once burned in a blackened mantel before it became a memorial of gruesome conflict on Dec. 13, 1862.

While we continued to walk through the Sunken Road, I asked O’Neill about Burnside’s culpability in what has been written as a decisive Union failure. O’Neill reminded me that the battle may have ended differently had Franklin devoted more troops to attack the Confederates and broken their weaker line by the Mine Road.

O’Neill also pushed back on Miller’s assertion that Union forces were unaware of the existence of the Sunken Road. She explained that Union troops had occupied Fredericksburg during the summer of 1862. “They really know Fredericksburg. They know the Heights surrounding the town, and they know that the Confederates have established a defensive line along the Heights.”

O’Neill said correcting these false records remains important today. “With hindsight, it can be easy to see the failure at the Battle of Fredericksburg and just see human error. It’s harder to let go of those initial judgments and try to understand what happened here: the decision-making process of the commanders, the experiences of soldiers on the ground, the social and political contexts that were unique in December of 1862. Understanding those complications is a challenge. Resisting the urge to assert that this failure was simply a case of inferior judgment is very much a test of our capacity for empathy.”

With so many of my questions about the battle answered, I still did not know the location of Gilluly’s body. O’Neill said there was no record of Gilluly being buried in Fredericksburg. Because of the heavy casualties on the Sunken Road battle site, O’Neill said many bodies were “buried in mass graves.” On account of his rank and because the field where he perished was less chaotic, O’Neill said it was likely that Gilluly “would have been pulled off pretty fast and his body identified.”

Finally, O’Neill led me into Marye’s Heights and into the Fredericksburg National Cemetery, which was created in 1865. Around 15,000 Union soldiers who died at Spotsylvania, Battle of the Wilderness, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Mine Run, and North Anna are dug into the hills. About 80% of the dead were unidentified, with many interred in mass graves.

Inside the cemetery, we passed placards bearing moving verses of " Bivouac of the Dead ," large gravestones holding names of the fallen, and smaller square-topped stones simply displaying an identification number followed by the number of corpses contained beneath the soil. In the stifling humidity, we found Gilson’s grave.

As we walked back to the Visitor Center, I asked O’Neill if any Confederates had been buried in the hills. Several had been, she said, by accident.

Kurt Vonnegut’s words resounded in my head. “So it goes.”

Lessons of war

Before leaving Fredericksburg, I followed O’Neill’s directions to find the approximate location where Gilluly met his fate. As I drove up into the Mine Road, I saw the unmistakable remnants of the Confederates’ trenches. Next, I noticed large depressions where Confederate cannons had been dug into the earth. Nearby signs warned passersby not to disturb the earthworks.

O’Neill had warned me that visibility would be low due to the midsummer growth in the heavy woods, but between the stands of trees, I could see patches of open field across from a rail line that stood between the Old Richmond Stage Road and the Mine Road. I imagined Gilluly on the far side of the tracks, sitting atop his horse, leading his men into battle before perishing at just 38.

During my search to learn about Gilluly, I never definitively discovered his resting place.

Vichich told me that he believed Capt. George W. Rose was assigned the duty of bringing Gilluly’s body back to Brighton after his death. He said Rose perished before he could fulfill that promise. Rose is also buried at the Brighton Village Cemetery. According to the Brighton Village Cemetery brochure, Rose died 15 days after being wounded in the May 1864 Battle of the Wilderness. Because his wife perished a year before Rose did, the officer’s death left his two children orphaned.

The Fowlerville Observer ascribed the duty of returning Gilluly’s remains to the Fifth Michigan’s quartermaster, Capt. H.B. Blackman. The Fowlerville Observer alleged Blackman successfully returned Gilluly’s body to Michigan.

Gilson, as it turns out, could also be tied to Gilluly’s death. The private died about a week after writing to his wife about the Battle of Fredericksburg. Pension documents filed by his widow cite his cause of death as “congestion of the brain” from being “exposed to bad weather on or about Dec. 13, 1862.” A document from the National Park Service that notes all members of the Fifth Michigan buried in Fredericksburg contains a misspelling of the private’s last name as “Gillson.” The document notes a mysterious “listing for a Lt. Col. of the same name in SR, who died on 13 Dec.”

Gilluly was the only Fifth Michigan officer to die on Dec. 13, leaving a new possibility: that he was buried under the wrong identity and thus resides permanently at Fredericksburg. O’Neill believes the scenario is unlikely, given that grave markers for both Gilluly and Gilson are correct. She admitted that “there’s a lot of confusion around these records, so it is possible that they two may have gotten confused at some point.”

Short of exhuming Gilluly and subjecting his remains to DNA analysis, there is no way to ensure where his body resides.

Though Gilluly’s life ended with the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Civil War did not.

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There would be more than 618,000 deaths in pursuit of an enduring peace. In the past, Americans have tried to gloss over this bloody history by focusing on moments of brotherhood. Created in the 1960s, a large bronze memorial looming over the Fredericksburg slaughter field stands in honor of a Confederate soldier, posthumously identified as Richard Kirkland, who is said to have brought water to wounded Union soldiers. Important, but also an aberration the gore and mayhem that ensued when the North and South took up arms against each other.

The lessons of the Civil War still loom large. To improve our great nation, we must work together rather than heed calls to tear one another apart.

Beth Bailey ( @BWBailey85 ) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and the co-host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into nearly two decades of war and the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.