On a hot Monday afternoon, July 6, 1863, Nancy and George Hoover looked out from their farm near Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles west of Gettysburg, and saw Confederate troops moving onto their land. Only seventy-two hours had passed since the great battle ended in the rebels’ defeat. Disappointed yet defiant, the Southern soldiers encamped in the fields around the Hoover homestead. At some point, a group of Confederate officers entered the house and made themselves comfortable.
Mrs. Hoover later told a local historian that they sat at her husband’s table, sharing his hospitality, discussing the great battle, and pointing out the causes of their defeat and the mistakes they had made. During the conversation, Lieutenant Ransom W. Wood of the 20th Georgia Infantry reached into his coat and pulled out a Bible.
He had taken the testament from the pocket of a dead Union captain during the fighting. At nearly the same time, roughly 250 miles away in New York State, a farmer named John Nickel learned that his eldest son, a Union Army captain, had been killed at Gettysburg. Captain Isaac Nickel was twenty-three years old, born in New York City and raised sixty miles north in the Orange County village of Blooming Grove. In the summer of 1862, he recruited a company of volunteers, and the men elected him their captain.
The unit became Company G of the newly formed 124th New York Infantry. On the eve of his departure, his father later recalled, the ladies of the town presented him with a handsome sword, not through a formal ceremony but simply accompanied by a letter. The regiment headed to war in September 1862. The New Yorkers joined the Army of the Potomac and were assigned to the Third Corps.
They received their baptism of fire during the disastrous Union attacks at Fredericksburg in December 1862. Five months later, at Chancellorsville, the 124th suffered heavy casualties in the crushing Union defeat, with Nickel’s company especially hard hit. One third of his men, twenty-two of sixty, were listed as casualties, but Nickel missed the battle, away on a ten-day furlough while his first lieutenant led the company into action. At Chancellorsville, the regiment earned the nickname Orange Blossoms from its colorful colonel, Augustus Van Horn Ellis, a former steamboat captain who had wandered off to California during the gold rush.
Captain Charles H. Weygant, one of Ellis’s subordinates, recounted the regiment’s history years later. He wrote that during the battle, the New Yorkers encountered an officer from the staff of Third Corps commander Major General Daniel E. Sickles.
The staff officer was trying to rally the remnants of broken regiments, and when he saw the 124th, he called on it in the name of General Sickles to retake the woods from which one of the Union batteries had just been driven. Ellis, with no other reply than “Hi, hi, my Orange Blossoms,” gave the order. The men obeyed, took the position, and held it until overwhelmed and forced to withdraw. Two months later at Gettysburg, General Sickles advanced the 124th and the rest of the Third Corps about a half mile ahead of their assigned position, creating a deadly gap between his forces and the main Union line.
Alert Confederates promptly exploited the blunder. Nickel and his comrades occupied Houck’s Ridge, a rise of rocky ground anchored at its southern end by a prominent outcropping of boulders known as Devil’s Den. Weygant later wrote that they had not yet learned the inestimable value of breastworks. Instead of rolling the loose stones together and piling earth into a bulletproof line, they lounged on the grass and rocks, quietly awaiting the coming shock, which many declared themselves ready and anxious to receive.
But there were undoubtedly those among them, he added, who ardently wished, and perhaps secretly prayed, that when the battle opened it might rage most furiously along some other part of the line. Nickel’s thoughts at that moment are not known. But a couple of weeks earlier, on June 21, he had written a heartfelt request on the flyleaf of the very Bible he carried in his pocket: “In case I’m killed and my body left on the field, the finder of this testament will please send it to my father, John Nickel, Blooming Grove, Orange County, New York, and confer a great favor on me. ”
Around three in the afternoon, the roar of enemy artillery signaled an attack.
Long lines of gray infantry appeared on the horizon, Texans and Arkansas men belonging to General James Longstreet’s corps. Weygant described the moment: the Union line held its position unsupported, and the enemy’s superiority in numbers seemed overwhelming. The Confederates advanced in four distinct lines under rapid fire from the Union batteries. As the leading line neared the base of the hill, it seemed to halt for a minute, then surged forward again.
With fierce yells, the rebels began ascending the slope, and an opening crash of rifle fire along the Union front brought down hundreds of them. Still they came on, but slowly, only a few feet at a time. The New Yorkers fought the rebels to a standstill, with only about twenty yards separating the two forces. At this critical moment, Major James Cromwell of the 124th saw an opportunity to break the Confederate line and asked Colonel Ellis for permission to order a countercharge.
Ellis gave a simple nod. Cromwell waved his sword twice above his head, lunged forward, shouted the charge, and, putting spurs to his horse, dashed forward through the lines. The men ceased firing for a moment, then, with bayonets ready, rushed after him. Ellis sat still in his saddle, watching in what Weygant described as proud admiration, until the regiment was fairly underway, and then he rushed with them into the thickest of the fray.
Captain Nickel was with them, leading his company into the inferno. Weygant wrote that the conflict at that point defied description. Roaring cannon, crashing rifle fire, screeching shots, bursting shells, hissing bullets, cheers, shouts, shrieks, and groans were the notes of the song of death greeting the grim reaper as he leveled down the field of scarlet human grain. The charge broke the Confederate line, but the success lasted only a flash.
A second gray line advanced, a solid line of Georgians, including Lieutenant Wood’s regiment, who poured in a terrible fire that in an instant brought down a full quarter of the New Yorkers. In the center of the maelstrom, Major Cromwell took a fatal bullet wound to the chest. Ellis cried out, “My God, my God, men, your major’s down. Save him.
Save him. ” Soon after, a bullet struck Ellis in the head and he toppled from his saddle, falling among the rocks as his horse galloped into the enemy lines. Nickel joined his major and colonel in death. Weygant recorded that he was pierced by three balls, one in his neck, one in his shoulder, and one in his breast, and lived but three minutes after receiving the injuries.
He lay wedged between two large rocks at the farthest point of the advance. Two of his comrades were wounded or killed during an attempt to recover his body while the firing continued. Others eventually managed to recover the remains of Cromwell and Ellis. By then, the Confederates had surged forward and compelled the New Yorkers to withdraw.
The staunch resistance of the Orange Blossoms and other Federals in that sector slowed the rebel advance and bought precious time for Union forces hastily arraying for battle along the ridge of nearby Little Round Top. The Confederates occupied the abandoned position, and the dead Federals were systematically stripped of their shoes and other valuables. It was probably about this time that Lieutenant Wood removed the testament from Nickel’s pocket. According to a story in a New York newspaper, the Confederates discovered a Masonic symbol inside the Bible.
Nickel had joined the fraternity before leaving New York, and the bonds of masonry were stronger than the divisions separating the disunited states. In light of this connection, the rebels provided the decent rights of sepulcher, giving Nickel a proper burial that included evergreens, the Masonic symbol of immortality of the soul, and a headboard inscribed with his name, regiment, and a Masonic mark. Nickel’s father told a different version. Learning from his son’s comrades, he noted that after the Confederates abandoned Houck’s Ridge and Devil’s Den, Union forces reoccupied the ground, and a brother officer found the body, buried it where it fell, and erected a board at its head with his name, regiment, and company inscribed upon it.
A few days later, at the Hoover farmhouse, Lieutenant Wood passed the book around the table. His comrades took turns thumbing through its pages, which contained many notes and underscored passages. Nancy Hoover recalled that one of them remarked, “This testament contains a request within it which should be observed. ” He was reading the note Nickel had inscribed.
Mrs. Hoover, looking over the scene, read the request herself and suggested that the Confederates leave the book with her. She promised to send it to Nickel’s father in honor of the request. Lieutenant Wood complied.
Shortly after the officers departed, Mr. Hoover mailed the testament to John Nickel with a letter explaining the circumstances under which he had come to possess it. John Nickel replied to the Hoovers on July 24, 1863. He called it a precious relic of a dearly loved and highly honored son.
Looking over its pages, he discovered memorandums made up to the day before his son’s death, which, despite the long marches and fatigues of war, had been devoted to its perusal. The testament, conveyed by his own hand in view of the uncertainty of life and the necessity of preparation, constituted its greatest value. He wrote, “This testament conveyed by his own hand in view of the uncertainty of life and the necessity of preparation constitutes to me its greatest value. You can therefore appreciate the value I place upon this book, the cherished companion of his weary marches and lonely hours.
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Mr. Nickel recovered his son’s body and returned it to Blooming Grove. The remains were buried in a cemetery in nearby Washingtonville, New York, in October 1863. After the war, the Grand Army of the Republic established posts across the country, and the Washingtonville chapter was named the Isaac Nickel Post in honor of the fallen captain.
John Nickel followed his son in death in 1874. Seven years later, on a hot summer’s day in 1881, veterans from area GAR posts assembled in Blooming Grove for a ceremony to honor a new memorial dedicated to townsmen who served in the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The monument, noted a local newspaper, was a simple but handsome one of granite, surmounted by a bronze eagle resting on a cannonball and crossed cannon. An inscription on the face of the pedestal read, “To the memory of Captain Isaac Nickel, Company G, 124th Regiment, New York Volunteers, and the men from Blooming Grove who fought in the War for the Unity of the Republic, 1861 to 1865.
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