Logline: They left as sons, brothers, cousins, uncles, friends, and neighbors. They returned as enemies during one of the most decisive battles of their nation’s history.
Short Pitch
It is called Gettysburg Rebels
It’s a War Drama.
In the vein of Gettysburg
It is like Gone With The Wind meets Titanic
It follows adventurous young soldier Wes Culp
And love-struck young woman Jennie Wade
As they choose sides during a colossal national conflict.
Problems arrive when the Confederate army that Wes is in invades his and Jennie’s hometown of Gettysburg.
Together they will make sacrifices for the causes of their own choosing.
The idea came to me when I was studying the Battle of Gettysburg and found out that there was a connection between the two human interest stories of Jennie Wade and Wes Culp.
My unique approach is a massive, history-changing battle told through the story of common soldiers and civilians on different parts of the field.
A set piece would be when Wes Culp receives a pass from a Confederate staff officer who knows he has family in Gettysburg. He slowly walks down an empty street, no citizens to recognize him and welcome him home since they are hiding from the invading army of which he is a part. He gently knocks on a door, careful not to raise his voice lest the neighbors recognize that of a traitor. The door is slowly unlatched and opened. “Why, Wes!” declares his sister Ann. “You have come!” He embraces his sisters, a sister-in-law, and a nephew. It is a family reunion three years in the making but delayed by war.
Target Audiences would be men and women, teenagers, history and military buffs, war movie fans, and readers of historical romances.
Audiences would want to see it for its meta-narrative of private individuals against the backdrop of an important historical event, and its themes of courage, bravery, friendship, and romance.
Lest We Forget.
Today’s book I would like to recommend as a movie is Gettysburg Rebels: Five Native Sons Who Came Home to Fight as Confederate Soldiers by Tom McMillan, from Regnery History
Henry Wentz was only nine years old when his family moved to Gettysburg. His parents John and Mary bought a weatherboard house along Emmitsburg Road, a mile from the town limits. Henry and his sister Susana spent their childhoods frolicking on two acres adjacent to a peach orchard. Henry matured into adulthood in Adams County, Pennsylvania, and his father sold him nine acres of farmland across the Emmitsburg Road from the orchard. The sale failed to anchor Henry to Adams County, and he moved at twenty-five to northwestern Virginia in 1852.
It is possible that Henry knew the brother of a woman who lived as a tenant on the Wentz property in the late 1840s, a German Immigrant named Charles William Hoffman.
C. W. Hoffman arrived in Gettysburg in the early 1830s. By 1836 he had married and begun a carriage factory. Three sons were soon born: Robert Newton, 1840, Francis William, 1842, and Westly Atwood, 1844.
C. W. Hoffman integrated himself into the community. He was on the board of trustees in the Methodist Episcopal Church on East Middle Street. He served on a committee that established and raised funds for a cemetery called Ever Green on a hill just outside of town.
Two young men who went into apprenticeship at Hoffman’s carriage shop were the brothers William and John Wesley “Wes’ Culp, whose father, Esaias, operated a tailor shop on Baltimore Street. Even though the boys moved to the town when they were young, the Culp family had lived in the area for four generations. Esaias’s first cousin, Henry Culp, inherited the original family farm just outside of town, including a hill that would become known to history as Culp’s Hill.
Another tailor operating on Baltimore Street was Johnston H. Skelly, Sr. One son, Charles Edwin “Ed” Skelly, apprenticed for Hoffman. His son Johnston Hasting “Jack” Skelly Jr., lived across the street from the Culps near the town square. Jack and Wes became friends, bonding over their love of the outdoors and adventure.
Another Gettysburg tailor was James Wade. He had apprenticed under Mr. Skelly and boarded with the family before starting his own shop. In 1843 his wife gave birth to a daughter, Mary Virginia “Jennie’ Wade. Jennie Wade would soon join Wes, Jack, and another boy named Billy Holtzworth in their escapades and become fast friends.
A contemporary of theirs, Matilda (Tillie) Pierce Alleman, recalled their days as idyllic and pastoral…
“Often do I think of the lovely groves on and around Culp’s hill, of the mighty boulders which there abound, upon which we often spread the picnic feast; of the now-famous Spangler’s Spring, where we drank the cooling draught on those peaceful summer days…What pleasant times were ours as we went berrying along the quiet sodded lane that leads from the town to that now memorable hill (What a Girl Saw and Heard of The Battle, p. 18)
One can almost hear the graceful Celtic harp and fiddle of Howard Shore’s “Concerning Hobbits.”
But all was not well. The Wade’s social status in town disintegrated as James was arrested for various crimes. He spent time at the state penitentiary, after which he was declared insane and committed to the Adams Country almshouse. His reputation would overshadow Jennie for the rest of her life.
Then a simmering business feud in which C. W. Hoffman was engaged turned into a physical fight. The church found Hoffman guilty of “immoral conduct and sinful tempers and actions on the part of said and shameful outraged the cause of God” and excommunicated him in March 1854. His career in politics came to a sudden end as well.
Hoffman pulled up stakes and moved to Shepherdstown, Virginia in March 1856, where he bought a farm. Robert Newton, Francis William, and Wesley Atwood went with him. The invitation to move south was extended to the apprentices in the carriage shop. William Culp, twenty-five, married and starting a family, stayed in Gettysburg. Wes, sixteen and restless, chose to follow Hoffman south. Ed Skelly did as well.
Arriving in Shepherdstown, Virginia, Wes and Robert joined the Shepherdstown Light Infantry, later called the Hamtramck Guards, out of both a sense of civic responsibility and for the social life offered. Henry Wentz in Martinsburg also joined a local militia unit known as the Blues. From there he would join the Wise Artillery.
When John Brown’s 1959 raid on Harpers Ferry disturbed the peace, the militias were called out. The Wise Artillery and Hamtramck Guards answered the call to suppress what they feared as a slave rebellion that could result in the murders of innocent women and children. Henry Wentz, Robert Hoffman and quite possibly Wes Culp were among 1,500 militiamen stationed in Chester Town, Virginia, during John Brown’s trial and hanging.
Life continued in peace for the Gettysburg exiles. C. W. Hoffman finished selling his Gettysburg property In January 1858. Robert and Wesley attended Dickerson Academy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, classes of 1861 and 1862, respectively.
Wes Culp moved to Martinsburg to work in a carriage factory. His sisters Ann and Julia paid him visits, during which they met his friend Benjamin Pendleton. Wes returned to Gettysburg a few times, including in 1856 upon the death of their mother. Wes Culp wrote Ann in June 1860 that he was thinking of heading out West…
“…if I git dun work hear in the fall I will go to the west and hunt my fortune and if I cant find it I cin starve but i doant think the people of the west will leave a good lookin boy like me starve..”
He even sent her money. When he heard that their father, Esaias was sick, he sent him five dollars.
Then came Lincoln’s election, and the secession of the Lower South. On February 13, 1861, the Virginia Secession Convention voted 85-to-45 against secession. Northerners began heading home. Ed Skelly had already done so in time to reappear in the 1860 Gettysburg Census. When a group of pro-Union sympathizers asked Wes Culp if he wished to join them on their northern journey, he replied “I am going to stay here, come what may.” On April 17, after the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s unconstitutional call for the states to provide for the troops to invade the South, the Virginia Secession Convention voted 88–55, with nine delegates absenting, for secession.
Robert N. Hoffman enlisted in the Confederate Army on April 18. After two years of courtship, he was finally engaged to Ellen Louisa Humrickhouse, who had two brothers in the Hamtramck Guards and tried to use the threat of war to hasten the marriage date. Ellen Louisa tried to convince him to wait and see if there really was going to be a war. Their argument was settled when the Hamtramck guards were ordered to raid Harpers Ferry. After arriving at the Ferry just in time to see locals putting out the fires started by the Union Army, Robert had to sneak back to marry Ellen on May 16.
John W. “Wes” Culp enlisted with Hamtramck Guards on April 20 after marching 12 miles to Harpers Ferry. His enlistment papers gave his occupation as a tailor and that he had to be given a specially made musket since he was one of the smallest men in the unit, a little over five feet high. That very same day his brother William, his close friend Jack Skelly, and a company of recruits from Gettysburg and Adams County mustered into service for the Union for three months. A 120-foot flagpole called the liberty pole was erected in the town square and was no doubt gazed upon by Jennie Wade, the Culp sisters, and the Wentz family.
On April 19 Henry Wentz followed his militia commander and enlisted in the Wise Artillery in Company B, First Regiment, Virginia Light Artillery. Originally enlisting for one year, he later committed to a term of “three years or the war.” Robert Hoffman and Wes Culp and the Hamtramck Guards were officially mustered into the Confederate Army in early May as Company B of the Second Virginia Infantry under the command of Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson.
Jackson received orders to link up with the Confederate army at Manassas Junction and set his infantry on a forced march. The Union Army shadowed him, hoping to impede the junction. Jackson could only slow down the Union’s advance. At Falling Waters, he deployed the 5th Virginia with Wes and Robert’s Second in reserve. It wasn’t much of a battle, the Confederates slowly giving way.
However, it is of note since it was the first time that Wes almost faced his brother and friends in battle. But by the time the Second Pennsylvania arrived on the field after a hurried three-mile march, it was all over. Jack Skelly wrote home that he had learned that Wes Culp had been among the enemy combatants he nearly had to fight.
Wes Culp and Robert Hoffman arrived at Manassas Junction in time and took part in Jackson’s legendary stand on Henry House Hill that earned him the moniker “Stonewall.” Wentz and the Wise Artillery also took part and played a major role in the Confederate victory. Nineteen-year-old Francis Hoffman, who volunteered for the Markham Guards which were mustered into service on July 1, did not make the battle. In the aftermath, so much artillery was captured from the Union that the Markham Guards were reassigned as the Fauquier Artillery” Company A, Thirty-Eight Battalion, Virginia Light Artillery and began training as artillerists.
William Culp, Jack Skelly, and the rest of the Second Pennsylvania never made it to that battle either. They had expected to return home once their enlistments expired. Instead, they shadowed the Confederates in the Shenandoah, failing in their mission to impede them from reinforcing those at Manassas.
The Second Pennsylvania Infantry was mustered out on July 24. On September 25th, 1861, Lincoln sent out another call for troops. William Culp and Jack Skelly reenlisted in the Eighty-Seventh Pennsylvania Infantry. Jack’s older brother and former Hoffman apprentice, Ed Skelly, and Billy Holtzworth also enlisted.
Robert N. Hoffman went AOWL in late August and returned in early October. Then he was absent without permission several times but would be present at the battles of Kernstown, Winchester, Port Republic, Gaines’ Mills, Malvern Hill, Cedar Mountain, and Second Manassas. The reason for most of these leaves probably had to do with helping his father and wife around the farm. In September 1862 Robert was assigned to the commissary department to drive cattle for the use of the Stonewall Brigade.
Wes Culp was captured in March 1862. Imprisoned in Delaware, he took an oath of allegiance and was released. He wrote his sister Ann in Gettysburg and she in turn broke the news to relatives and neighbors, including Jack Skelly’s mother, Elizabeth. Elizabeth wrote a letter to Jack. “God only knew what he suffered while he was a prisoner. Do you all pity him? Ann tries to excite sympathy.”
Wes rejoined his company in time to take part in Jackson’s Valley Campaign. During the campaign, he was again taken prisoner by Union troops. It was reported by the Adams Sentinel in Gettysburg, which believed that he had joined a band of guerrillas and suggested: “he is good and ripe for summary process, or at least ought to be.” In the same June 3 edition the Sentinel also reported that C. W. Hoffman and his three sons were in the Confederate Army.
Wes was imprisoned in Baltimore where his brother William, stationed nearby with the Eighty-Seventh, visited him. Little is known of their conversation or if they debated about the causes of the war. In William’s letter to their sister Ann, Wes said for her not to be uneasy about him. Wes was transferred to Fort Delaware Prison until exchanged on August 5. He may have been at Second Manassas, but records show he was back in the ranks by October 14.
Wesley Atwood Hoffman enlisted, at Robert’s encouragement, in March 1862, in Company A of the Seventh Virginia Cavalry. His first battle was Second Manassas. After being captured during a patrol in October he spent less than a week at a Union camp before being paroled for exchange. He was treated for possible wounds at Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond. However, despite early harsh experiences with war, he was back in the saddle by November. In the spring of 1863, he took part in William E. Jones’s raid into West Virginia.
Henry Wentz meanwhile became first sergeant. He saw little action except for picket duty and the hanging of a Union spy. His time came at Antietam Creek where his battery guarded the heights over Burnside’s Bridge against the enemy just four hundred yards away. The Federals finally took the hill but at great cost. In October his small unit was disbanded, and Wentz was placed under the command of Edward Porter Alexander. The new unit’s metal was tested at Fredericksburg, repulsing several Union charges. In March 1863, Wentz was placed in the battery of Osmond B. Taylor.
At the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863 Wes Culp and Henry Wentz took part in Jackson’s famous flanking march on May 2. Robert Hoffman was on the staff of the Second Virginia during the battle. By May 6 the Union Army had been soundly defeated and driven back.
Now the Army of Northern Virginia looked north of the Potomac to farmlands untouched by war. The Hoffman family experience encapsulates why General Robert E. Lee saw why such a campaign was necessary.
C. W. Hoffman had bought a farm near Shepherdstown in 1859. At the start of the war, he gave support to the Confederate forces, selling them wagons, horses, and fodder. Receipts showed that he gave 242 bushels of corn, two horses with harnesses, and eighteen sacks of grain. The women sewed uniforms and teamed up with other women to make hats of straw and shucks.
Then the Union troops began raiding the area. They would leave worn-out horses and take the good ones. They took everything they could find to eat, from honeycombs in the cellar, leaving a sticky trail in the kitchen, to meat out of the smokehouse. The Hoffman women did not take lightly to the Union’s depravations. They would cut the ropes with which troops had tied chickens to their saddles and knock the stools from beneath their feet as they reached for supplies. They would also hide the Hoffman men in the attic or cellar or distract the Yankees as the menfolk rode over a nearby ridge.
C. W. was captured by Union troops in the spring of 1862 and sent to prison near Washington, D. C., leaving his young son of 12, Charlie, behind to care for the family. Hoffman was not imprisoned for long, and he returned to Charlottesville to sell his wares. There he was arrested by the Provos Marshall for refusing to take anything but Virginia Bank notes. He was released by late September, having the dubious distinction of having been arrested by both the Union Army and Confederate government in one year.
In order to give the Virginia civilian population a rest and farmers a chance to replenish their crops, Lee would take his army north to take advantage of the barns and farms untouched by war. He also hoped that a decisive battle on northern soil after Yankee civilians had had a taste of war would so demoralize the northern populace that the Lincoln Administration would sue for peace. Standing in his way was Major General Robert H. Milroy and the ring of forts he had built around Winchester, Virginia. Defending one of the forts were thirty-one-year-old Sergeant William Culp, Bill Holtzworth, Jack Skelly, and the other Gettysburg sons of 87th Pennsylvania.
Jack kept up a regular correspondence with Jennie Wade. It was even rumored that they were engaged. At first, Jennie signed her letters with “your true friend and well-wisher,” but she soon began ending “with love” and “I send my love” and even a poem titled “Friends of my Heart, Adieu.”
The ghosts of Jennie’s father returned as Jack’s mother implied in a letter that Jennie was being unfaithful. “The Porter Guards left today,” she wrote on March 14. “They say there was a great time among some of the women and girls and tears flowed freely.” One Porter Guard wrote in his 1907 memoir that Jennie was “well known in our regiment,” that he spent some evenings with her at her house, and that she was “my girl.”
Jack wrote off the rumors, saying he had as much faith in most of the people of Gettysburg as “I have in a worthless set of dogs, and if it was not for the family being there, I would not care whether I ever go there again.“ Jack did write his mother in April 1863 that he had written Jennie about the affair and “she denied part. She denies of keeping company so late, but she doesn’t deny that she had some company… hope that his will be the last of it till I get home anyway, then I will settle it.” He didn’t blame his mother for writing him about it. “It’s over for the present and I hope for the future.” In Jennie’s last surviving letter to “Dearest Jack,” she wrote to him about how they used to celebrate George Washington and ended it with, “May I ever remain your true friend and well-wisher.”
On June 12 William Culp and the Eighty-Seventh were part of a reconnaissance in force assigned to gauge the Rebel presence in the Valley. They inflicted fifty casualties and suffered none. The battle began in earnest on June 13 at eight o’clock. Wes Culp and the Second Virginia were dispatched as skirmishers, scattering Union cavalry patrols. Milroy sent three regiments, including the Eighty-Seventh, to meet the rebel force. The inconclusive skirmish was the first time the Culp brothers and their friend Jack Skelly fired on one another.
On June 14 while the Federal commander was distracted by the Stonewall Brigade, the Confederates unleashed a surprise attack and overran the outer Federal forts. Only darkness ended their attack. Milroy called retreat and pulled out of the town under the cover of night. The Confederates were not fooled and fell upon the retreating Yankees in the morning darkness. Confusion reigned in the dark and Union numbers threatened to outflank the Southerners.
Then the Stonewall Brigade rushed the field in the nick of time, pushing the Yankees into and through a wooded area known as Carter’s Woods. The 87th and six other regiments were forced to fall back. William Culp was one of the fortunate ones who got away. More than two hundred men of the regiment were taken prisoner.
It was not until Union POWs were herded through the ranks of the Second Virginia toward a makeshift prison camp that Wes realized that he had family and friends from Gettysburg among the enemy with whom he had just been locked in mortal combat. He saw his first cousin once removed Bill Holtzworth and called out to him. Billy informed Wes that Jack Skelly was at the edge of the woods, badly wounded. Holtzworth, Jack, and another man had rushed out of the wood hoping to make an escape. But a bullet struck Jack’s upper arm. Wes found him near the edge of the woods. Some versions of the exchange say that Jack had a letter for Jennie Wade. Others that he had a message for his mother.
Wes wrote a letter to Ann in Gettysburg from near Chambersburg around June 25th. He had seen Jack Skelly, he was wounded, and his arm was most likely to be amputated. But to tell Mrs. Skelly that he was comfortable and being well taken care of by the Confederate hospital.
Most Gettysburg residents did not learn of the defeat until about five days after the battle when surviving members of the 87th made the eighty-mile journey home. Among the survivors was William Culp. Many were claiming that their ammunition had run out. For many residents, it was the first time they feared and heard of the death or capture of a loved one or friend. A cloud overshadowed the town as Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia prepared to invade for one final strike to end the war and secure Southern independence.
Among Lee’s invading army was Private Robert N. Hoffman, still rounding up cattle. A Confederate receipt for twenty-five head of beef cattle near Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Robert had briefly attended school there, so he would have been familiar with the surroundings and people. Perhaps a local recognized him and trusted him enough for the transaction. No doubt many more surroundings became familiar as Robert, Francis, and Wesley Hoffman, Henry Wentz, and Wes Culp made their way with their units over the Potomac, through Maryland, into Pennsylvania, and toward Adams County and the town of Gettysburg.
The Battle of Gettysburg began on July 1 and was initially a Confederate success. Union troops retreated in confusion through the web of streets and alleys before reforming near Evergreen Cemetery on a bald eminence that would become known to history as Cemetery Hill.
The Stonewall Brigade with the Second Virginia and Wes Culp arrived too late to take part in the day’s action. Congested traffic slowed Wes and his comrades as they entered the town and marched down Carlisle Street at 7 p.m. M. Most residents of the town had fled or were in hiding, so there was no one to welcome Wes home. Among the hiding civilians were Jennie Wade and her sister Georgia Anna Wade McClellan who had given birth a few days before.
Someone who did recognize Wes as a resident of Gettysburg was his old friend from the Hamtramck Guards, Ben Pendleton. Having been appointed to the staff of Brigadier General James A. Walker, Pendleton was able to obtain a pass for Wes to visit his sisters, whom Pendleton knew from their visits to Virginia. As soon as the regiment had taken up a position east of town on the Confederate far-left flank on Brinkerfhoff’s Ridges and anchored on Daniel Lady Farm, which military records mistook as Culp’s Farm, thus confusing generations of historians, Wes took his pass. Thus, he missed a skirmish near Rock Creek on Wolf Hill.
Wes found his family home on West Middle Street. The house had originally been rented by William but was now lived in by Ann with her husband, Jefferson Meyers, her sister, Julia, and William’s wife and young son, Loren. No one is sure where William was during this time. He did not rejoin the 87th until July 7 at Frederick, Maryland.
Wes knocked softly at the door, cautious about attracting attention lest a neighbor identify him as a traitor. The door was unlatched and opened by his sister Ann. “Why, Wes! You’re here,” she declared. Brother and sisters hugged, joy and sorrow mixed. They talked of the death of their father Esaias in June 1861. When Julia found how that Wes had fought against the 87th Pennsylvania at Winchester, she asked how he could shoot at “Poor Will.” Wes said he did not know that he was fighting William since it was dark. Ann encouraged him to stay the night, saying that they might never see him again. He said he would come back in the morning. He told them about running into Billy Holtzworth and Jack Skelly. He said he would return with a message for Mrs. Skelly.
Wes was killed the next morning, shot through the head advancing with a skirmish line. Popular legend says that he was killed the next day in a charge on his uncle’s farm up Culp’s Hill. However, he was actually killed on neighboring Wolf Hill. He was the only man from the regiment killed during the battle. Some accounts say he was peering over a rock. His comrades told their diminutive friend to stay down, but he ignored them. Perhaps he saw a landmark or someone he recognized. Perhaps he wanted to alert his officers that they were on Wolf Hill instead of Culp’s Hill. Whatever his reasons for rising up to take a look at his boyhood home, it was his last look.
One of the major problems General Lee faced at Gettysburg was a lack of knowledge about the terrain. With General J. E. B. Stuart off glory riding, Lee was practically blind as to the enemy’s numbers and positions. This was most apparent on the second day of the battle when General Longstreet wasted precious hours marching and countermarching until he could find a road out of sight of enemy pickets on the Round Tops. He could have used the help of locals who knew the area. Francis Hoffman was five miles back in Chambersburg with the Fauquier Artillery and Wesley Hoffman was thirty miles away in Greencastle, so they might have been unavailable. However, Robert, called Billy “Billy Yankee” by his comrades because he was from the north, was in the rear of the Stonewall Brigade with the cattle and could have been utilized. Why no search was made among the ranks for soldiers who were from the area, a practice common when Confederate armies were south of the Mason-Dixon Line, remains one of the greatest blunders and mysteries of the war.
It is possible that E. P. Alexander did take advantage of knowledgeable artillerymen among his command since he arrived and had his guns in place undetected long before Longstreet arrived. Perhaps Henry Wentz and a mysterious figure named Henry Wirtz/Werts/Wertz who had studied to be a teacher in Gettysburg during the 1850s were able to direct Alexander to a road where he could move his guns without being detected by Union observers on Little Round Top. The rest of Longstreet’s Corps finally arrived and went into liens of battle.
At four o’clock the Taylor Artillery and fifty-four guns under E. P. Alexander advanced to within six hundred yards of the house where Wentz had spent his boyhood and where his elderly parents and sister lived. His father John had remained while the women had been sent away for safety. Located on the intersection of the Emmitsburg and Millerstown roads, the house was smack dab in the center of the fighting. The peach orchard was filled with Union cannons. Some Union guns were even in the Wentz’s yard. Members of the Second New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry had been placed in the outbuildings as snipers. Union General Dan Sickles had moved his men forward and positioned them in a precarious sharp salient in the Union line near the Wentz house. Jetting out, it could be attacked from two directions and gave the Union troops little room to maneuver. The Confederates took advantage of the weakness in the Union line and attacked. Alexander ordered the cannons to fire canister and spherical case, which was usually reserved for close-range skirmishing.
A New Hampshire soldier reported that “the [Wentz] barn looked like a sieve from the numerous volleys of canister which had passed through it.” The outhouse and fences were destroyed. Tree limbs and other kindling wood covered the ground and caught fire. Twenty-one wounded blue-clad soldiers took shelter in the cellar with John Wentz. Despite the maelstrom, the house itself received little damage from the shells. As Wentz fired on property he had grown up on and even owned, he had no way of knowing that his nephew Henry H. Beamer was fighting nearby in the First Pennsylvania Reserves in the Wheatfield-Little Round Top area.
Wild and impassionate charges by the division of Lafayette McLaws, especially that of William Barksdale’s brigade, drove the Yankees through a peach orchard and wheat field, overrunning the Wentz property. Taylor’s Battery angled through Henry’s land and Wentz took up position in the yard of the house where he had grown up. But the Union army continued to feed fresh troops into the battle and Wentz and the rest of the Confederates were compelled to fall back.
On the morning of July 3 Pendleton visited the Culp sisters. Julia greeted him at the door. “Wes has not come, something has happened.” Pendleton informed the sisters of their brother’s death. He gave the location of his grave as Culp’s Farm.
Meanwhile, James Dearing’s Artillery with Francis Hoffman finally arrived early the same morning, covering the final miles of their track from Chambersburg that began early on July 2. Attached to Pickett’s Division, along with Taylor’s battery to their right, they drove back Yankee skirmishers around ten o’clock of the third day. Hoffman and Wentz were fifteen years apart in age. Hoffman’s aunt had been a tenant on the Wentz property in the late 1840s, so it is possible that they had met.
At 1:07 both Wentz and Hoffman were part of thousands of artillerists firing 150 cannons along Seminary Ridge to soften up the Union center of Cemetery Ridge for the attack of George Pickett and J. Johnston Pettigrew’s divisions. Despite the thousands of shells and balls fired, the cannonade did little damage. Due to the smoke, the gunners could not see that they were overshooting their targets. One cannon ball hit the grave of Esaias Jesse Culp, Wes’ father, in Evergreen Cemetery. Running low on ammunition, the cannoneers provided cover as best they could as they watched the 12,000 to 15,000 men of Pickett and Pettigrew’s divisions be swallowed up in smoke.
Wesley Atwood Hoffman and the Seventh Virginia Cavalry had also finally arrived at the battlefield. They were immediately ordered to guard mountain passes near the borough of Fairfield to keep an escape route opened for Lee’s Army in case of retreat. On their way there the cavalry watched the smoke arise and heard the booming of the cannonade. For a moment they thought the battle had been won. But then they met teamsters from a Confederate wagon train that had been foraging in the area and reported that the Union cavalry had been probing the area.
The Sixth U.S. Cavalry was just about to capture the Confederate wagons. Jones ordered the Seventh Virginia Cavalry to charge the enemy. The charge commenced, but then some of the men halted, faltered, and then retreated. A shameful day in the history of the much-vaunted regiment. Then the Sixth Virginia cavalry charged, and the artillery of Roger Preston Chew opened up, turning the momentum in the Confederate’s favor, scattering elements of the Union cavalry. The Seventh was able to rally and charge the enemy, driving them from the field. Possibly among them in this moment of redemption was Wesley Atwood Hoffman.
Back along Seminary Ridge, Henry Wentz, Francis Hoffman and the rest of the Confederate artillerymen watched as the gray wave that had been Pickett’s charge melted away and the survivors made their return to friendly lines. The artillery continued to provide cover fire for the retreating men and remained in place for the rest of the day in anticipation of a counterattack, which never came.
There were reports that Wentz had been killed and his parents, being good Unionists, refused to look at his body, having disowned their traitorous son. But Wentz was not killed. What most likely occurred is that Henry Wentz went to his house the night of the 3rd, found his father sleeping in the basement, wrote a note saying, “Goodbye and God Bless You!,” and pinned it on his father’s coat. He returned to Taylor’s Battery, which about midnight pulled back to a reformed Confederate line, making him one of the last Confederate soldiers to leave the blood-soaked battlefield. His father awoke the morning of the 4th, walked to a ridge, and watched the Confederate Army retreat. A truly cinematic moment.
And what of Jennie Wade and Jack Skelly? Early on the morning of July 3rd Jennie was baking biscuits when a stray rebel bullet entered the Wade house. It struck her left shoulder, pierced her heart, and exited her chest before lodging in her corset. Jack Skelly, whose photo was in her apron pocket, passed away in a Rebel hospital in Virginia on July 12th. In a battle in which over 50,000 men become casualties, Jennie Wade would be the only civilian mortality.
The Culp sisters searched for their brother’s body. They did find the butt of his gun, in which he had carved “W. Culp.” Because of a shortage of arms, another soldier had probably picked it up from where he was killed and discarded it elsewhere. Despite a tombstone in the Gettysburg Section of Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, bearing his name, neither the sisters nor anyone else was able to find his final resting place. As George T. Fleming wrote in 1913, “On Fame’s Eternal camping ground, somewhere in its vastness is spread the silent tent of West Culp, who came home to die in Battle.”
The rest of the Gettysburg rebels lived out the war, despite wounds and imprisonments. Wentz returned to Gettysburg in 1872 to join his brothers in selling the family property. He passed away in 1875. Wesley Hoffman passed in 1896, Robert in 1901, and Francis in 1920. Wes Culp’s brother William returned to Gettysburg and set up a Grand Army of the Republic lodge named for Jack in a building that had once been the church where the Hoffman family had been members. The cemetery that C. W. had been on the committee and raised funds for would be known to history as Cemetery Hill and from which Abraham Lincoln would deliver the Gettysburg Address. William Culp died in 1882 and was buried in the Culp family plot at Ever Green where a refuted rumor claims Wes was secretly buried.
The story of Henry, Wes, Robert, Wesley, Francis, Jack, and Jennie is prime material for a film that would attract audiences and create interest in history. The human interest story of young people forced into heartbreaking situations and the doomed young loves of Jennie Wade and Jack Skelly, with a possible triangle with Wes Culp, are the perfect meta-narratives to set against an epic historic event to remind today’s young people of the humanity of past generations. There are over a dozen books and a museum about Jennie Wade, and a book, My Country Needs Me by Enrica D’Alessandro, about Jack Skelly that contains his and Jeannie’s letters, so there is plenty of information for filmmakers to work with.
Of course, as a history buff, I would love to see characters and events not covered in Ron Maxwell’s excellent Gettysburg portrayed in a new movie. It could tell the story of John Burns, Dr. J.W.C. O’Neal, Daniel Skelly, Elizabeth Salome (Sallie) Myers, and Tillie Pierce. It could also cover the fighting around Culp’s Hill, The Peach Orchard, The Wheat Field, and Fairfield. While all the girls are crying over Jack and Jennie, I would be crying over Barksdale’s Charge, which some believe to be the true High Watermark of the Confederacy.
Because it is an interesting, powerful and emotionally impacting story of the human cost of war during one of the most important battles in American History is why I believe that Gettysburg Rebels by Tom McMillan should be a movie.
