Back from the Dead: Alfred E. Lee's Return Home After Gettysburg

Captain Alfred E. Lee’s return to Delaware, Ohio in July 1863 caused a sensation among the citizens of that small middle Ohio town. On Friday the 10th, the Delaware Gazette newspaper reported somberly that “we regret to notice among the deaths in the late battle at Gettysburg our friend and correspondent Captain A.E. Lee. He was a young man of decided ability, a good soldier, and his whole heart was enlisted in the cause for which he gave up his life.”

            At the Battle of Gettysburg while commanding his company in the 82nd Ohio on July 1, 1863, he was wounded and left for dead upon the field by his retreating comrades. [see "Alfred E. Lee and the 82nd Ohio at Gettysburg."] “The enemy taking possession of the ground, one of Jubal Early’s aides carried him off the field with certain Rebel wounded and deposited them in an obscure farmhouse where he had no means of communication with his regiment or friends,” recalled Emma Janes.

Captain Alfred E. Lee through the years: at left as a young captain in late 1862; as a wounded and war-weary veteran staff officer of the 20th Army Corps in 1865 at center; and a successful newspaper editor and Republican party player in 1885. Captain Lee later served as secretary of Ohio's Gettysburg Memorial Commission and wrote extensively of the war. A collection of Lee's wartime letters was published by the author in 2018. 


            The obscure farmhouse was the John S. Crawford House where he remained a few days with hundreds of wounded Federals including General Francis C. Barlow. After the Confederates retreated, Captain Lee was moved to 11th Corps field hospital, being deposited in the haymow of the George Spangler barn. Lee wasn’t there long; soon he was sent to a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Local physicians predicted the Ohioan would need at least three months to recover from his painful hip wound, so Lee procured a leave of absence from Middle Department commander (and fellow Ohioan) General Robert Schenk. Then he took the long train ride home to Delaware, Ohio where he arrived on Saturday morning, July 11, 1863, checking into the American Hotel. It had been ten days since his wound.

            His friends in Delaware knew none of this. “The news of his death reached Delaware, Ohio where he had graduated in 1859 [from Ohio Wesleyan] and where he was much beloved,” continued Emma Janes. “His obituary was published in the Delaware Gazette and Professor McCabe had prepared a eulogy upon him to be delivered July 12th, the Sunday of commencement week in connection with other exercises appointed for the day.”

Captain Lee's obituary as it appeared in the July 10, 1863, edition of the Delaware Gazette. Captain Lee recently began sending regular correspondence back to the Gazette, a practice he would ramp up after Gettysburg such that his regular weekly letters became a 35-part series entitled "Notes in Dixie."  

            “An immense crowd gathered in the Williams Street church,” she continued. “After the opening of the exercises, Captain Lee, as pale as a ghost, unconscious of the thrill his presence would excite, hobbled in on crutches and took a quiet seat among the worshippers. He had been left behind by his captor in the haste with which the enemy retreated on July 4th. Not knowing himself reported dead, he had come quietly home to Delaware to recover, reaching there unannounced late on Saturday night.”

            “Those were days of intense dramatic experience, days of death in life, and life in the midst of death,” she continued. “Though every heart of those who knew him leaped for joy at seeing him, the decorum of God’s house was preserved. The meeting was turned into a missionary anniversary, Rev. Dr. Harris, then missionary secretary but now a bishop of his church. When donations to the missionary fund were in order, this young soldier, a poor man pale and faltering, rose in his crutches and said briefly, “In token of gratitude for God for having spared my life upon the field of Gettysburg, put me down for $100.” I do not think there was a dry eye in all that assembly, certainly not mine,” she offered.

A week later, the Delaware Gazette welcomed their correspondent home. "he is shot through the upper part of the thigh and as the bone is not supposed to be touched, the injury will not be likely to prove a permanent one." It didn't work out that way; Lee suffered from the painful effects of the wound for the rest of his life, walking with a pronounced limp.  

            Captain Lee would spend the next few months in Delaware recovering from his wound but was hardly 100% when he reported back to the army in September 1863. Hearing rumors that the 11th Corps was being deployed to the western theater [see "Joining Rosecrans' Army."], Lee rushed his recovery to rejoin his beloved regiment in Tennessee and took his place at the head of his company. But it wasn’t long before his brigade commander, General Hector Tyndale (a wounded veteran of Antietam, see "Hector Tyndale at Antietam.") tapped Lee to serve as his acting assistant adjutant general, a position Lee would hold for the remainder of the war under Tyndale then under General James Robinson who, like Lee, had been wounded and left behind at Gettysburg.

        The warm reception Lee received from the citizens of Delaware prompted him to ramp up his correspondence with the editor of the local newspaper. Writing under the nom-de-plume A.T. Sechand, Lee's weekly missives provided incredible detail of the war in the western theater. 

            “Captain Lee, a quiet soldier citizen, seldom alludes to that passage in his life and never unless questioned,” said Janes. “The impression it has left is too deep for language. It is a solemn thing for a man to have no nearly faced death as to have to read his own obituary and funeral eulogy. He still suffers and, at times severely, from his wound.”

 In January 1876, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes hired Captain Lee, then editor of the Ohio State Journal, to serve as his private secretary. Lee played an important role in helping to negotiate the compromise of 1877 which landed Hayes in the White House.

Sources:

“Hayes and Workingmen,” Letter from Emma Janes, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle (New York), October 16, 1876, pg. 3 [Special thanks to Jim Ogden at Chickamauga National Military Park for sharing this source with me.]

Masters, Daniel A. Alfred E. Lee’s Civil War. Perrysburg: Columbian Arsenal Press, 2018, pgs. 109-115


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