On July 6, 1863, a 28-year-old artilleryman sat down to write a letter to his wife from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Days earlier, he had been firing double canister shot into the faces of Confederate soldiers charging across the field during Pickett’s Charge. By the time he wrote home, he was helping amputate the limbs of those same wounded enemies — and he admitted that watching arms and legs being cut off no longer affected him any more than “cutting a pound of beef. ”
Albert Corbin, a private in the First New York Light Artillery, Company B, was born in 1835 and lived in Onondaga, New York with his wife and two children before the war.
When President Lincoln called for 300,000 additional soldiers, Corbin answered and enlisted in the artillery. His unit did not reach Gettysburg until July 2, 1863. On July 1, they had been ordered to march to the field at all costs, traveling through the afternoon and evening before stopping just a few miles away. By the time they arrived, the first day of fighting was already over, with the Confederates having gained significant ground.
On July 2, the First New York Light Artillery was placed under the command of Captain James Rorty, who convinced General Hancock to put him in charge. Corbin later complained that Rorty put them in a precarious position. The unit was brought into action near Plum Run as part of the artillery line assembled by Colonel Freeman McGilvery as Union lines began to crumble under pressure from Longstreet’s attack near the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, and the Wheatfield. McGilvery pulled together every artillery piece he could find to form a new defensive line.
Company B was part of that line and fought in the heavy action around the Wheatfield. Corbin saw some of the worst fighting of the battle on that second day. The next day would prove even worse. On July 3, the unit was repositioned near the center of the Union line, along what is now Hancock Avenue.
Corbin and his comrades faced Kemper’s Confederate brigade during Pickett’s Charge. During the initial artillery barrage, they fired single shot at long range. But when the Confederate infantry came within close range, the unit switched to double canister and grape shot, firing directly into the faces of the advancing soldiers. The carnage was devastating.
Corbin watched men lose their heads, arms, and legs as they were blasted to pieces in the field before him. Some Confederate soldiers disappeared entirely, their bodies never recovered — the artillery fire had torn them apart. When the fighting finally ended, the First New York Light Artillery was used up and in need of a break. Corbin was transferred by orders to remain in Gettysburg and learn how to become a medic, helping the surgeons tend to the wounded on the fields and in makeshift field hospitals set up in every barn and house in the area, including the general hospital that now sits beneath a parking lot for a shopping mall.
By July 6, Corbin had already learned so much about medicine that he confidently wrote to his wife that he knew how to properly dress wounds and remove bullets. He had taken bullets from 20 to 30 men and kept some as souvenirs. In his letter, he noted the irony of shooting and killing men, then having to patch them up. The surgeons were busy treating Union soldiers first, so wounded Confederates were often tended by men like Corbin — former artillery privates turned battlefield medics.
He told his wife that he had become so desensitized to the horrors around him that seeing arms and legs amputated, and men screaming in agony, affected him no more than cutting up an animal. After his time as a medic in Gettysburg, Corbin rejoined his unit and fought with them through the end of the war. His postwar life was marked by tragedy. His first wife, the mother of his two children, died in 1866.
He soon married her cousin, who was 10 years younger, and the couple had two children together — but both died in their first year of life, one at just over a year old and the other at eight months. Corbin went on to work for the Union Pacific railroad for 30 years and eventually settled in Nebraska. After retiring, he moved back to New York with his family, where he died just five years after retirement.
He was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic and left behind letters and photographs that offer a rare firsthand account of one man’s journey from artilleryman to medic on the fields of Gettysburg.