Gettysburg, a Reporter Captured a Nation's Loss, and His Own

On July 6, 1863, The New York Times published a firsthand account by war reporter Samuel Wilkeson Jr., after he searched the aftermath of Gettysburg for a Union soldier said to have had his leg blown off—his own teenage son, Bayard. Wilkeson reached the battlefield’s muddy devastation on the Fourth of July, where the dead and wounded lay in blue and gray amid heavy rain. Instead of writing with distance, grief and duty blended as he began to pen what he had seen. The dispatch later fed into the wider memory of the war, arriving four months before Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.