On July 1, 1863, just yards from where General John Reynolds fell dead at the edge of Herbst Woods, another man went down with a bullet through the chest. Nearly everyone remembers Reynolds, the Union corps commander whose death at Gettysburg became one of the great legends of the battle. Almost nobody remembers Sergeant Theodore Bond of the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry, who was shot about thirty yards from the same spot, at nearly the same moment, and who somehow dragged himself off the field and back toward the town of Gettysburg to save his own life. Bond belonged to the Iron Brigade, the famous Western regiments known for their black Hardee hats and stubborn fighting reputation.
On that first day at Gettysburg, the brigade was about to make itself a myth, though the men themselves did not know it yet. They were ordinary men, farmers and laborers and immigrants, thrown into one of the most pivotal fights of the Civil War. The morning had opened with Union cavalry under John Buford holding the ridges west of Gettysburg against advancing Confederate infantry. Buford’s men fought dismounted, falling back from one ridgeline to another, buying time for the Union First Corps to reach the field.
Reynolds arrived with his infantry just in time, put his men into position, and ordered the black hats forward. The 2nd Wisconsin moved across the fields in line, surging toward the Confederate position near the woods. Almost as soon as the fight began, Reynolds was hit by a sharpshooter’s bullet and died within minutes. The identity of the man who fired the shot remains debated to this day, with some Confederate units, including Archer’s Tennesseeans, claiming the honor.
Bond was advancing with the 2nd Wisconsin at almost exactly that moment. Reaching the ridgeline near where Reynolds had fallen, he took a bullet in the lower left chest. It was a severe wound from a Minié ball, the kind of injury that often proved fatal. His regiment pressed on without him.
He lay on the field in agony while the attention of the army turned to the fallen general. With the Confederates surging forward and the fight still raging, Bond had to find a way out. Somehow, wounded as he was, he made his way back toward the Lutheran Seminary and then into Gettysburg itself. He ended up in the Adams County Courthouse, which had been converted into a hospital for the battle’s wounded.
For the rest of the fighting at Gettysburg, he remained there under the care of surgeons and nurses, his wound too serious to move him anywhere else. Eventually, he was transferred to the U. S. Army General Hospital in York, Pennsylvania.
When he came around in that hospital, he realized he was in the town where his life had begun. About thirty years earlier, Bond had been born on a farm near York. His early years were decent enough, but when he became a teenager, his mother died. His father sent him west to Wisconsin to live with an uncle and help with the farm.
That is how a Pennsylvania farm boy ended up enlisting in the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry and becoming part of the Iron Brigade. This was not Bond’s first serious wound. Two years before Gettysburg, at the First Battle of Bull Run, he had been hit in the right shoulder, just below the base of the neck. That bullet put him out of action for a long time.
He served in a reserve corps while he recovered, then transferred into the engineer corps, working to regain his strength. In January 1863, he rejoined the 2nd Wisconsin. Six months later, he was back in Pennsylvania, on Seminary Ridge, facing the largest battle the continent had ever seen. The 2nd Wisconsin’s fight on July 1 pushed forward to the regiment’s farthest position, where it faced the 26th North Carolina and other Confederate units alongside the Iron Brigade’s other regiments.
The fighting was brutal and close. But Bond was not part of that final surge. He was already out of the picture, lying in the courthouse hospital while his brothers in the regiment pushed on. Eventually, the Union line was overwhelmed, and the survivors of the 2nd Wisconsin fell back through the streets of Gettysburg to the cemetery ridge south of town.
The monument to the 2nd Wisconsin on the Gettysburg battlefield records the regiment’s losses: 302 killed, 26 wounded, and 155 missing on July 1 alone, an effective strength that was nearly destroyed in a single afternoon. Over the course of the war, the regiment’s total casualties were staggering, with hundreds of men killed in action, hundreds more wounded, and dozens dying of disease. Those numbers are what remained after men like Bond had bled on these fields. In February 1864, Bond found himself in the reserve corps, working as a clerk for a surgeon in York, Pennsylvania.
He had come home again. He was eventually discharged from the U. S. military because of his disabilities, the wounds at Bull Run and Gettysburg having taken their permanent toll.
After the war, he built a new life. He started a business, a millinery, married a woman named Hattie, and raised two children. He died in 1912, at about seventy-eight years of age, from pneumonia, leaving behind his wife and children. In his old age, Bond was active in the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organization, and by all accounts he remained a devoted soldier of the cause well after the fighting ended.
His war effectively finished at Gettysburg. The rest of his service was spent helping other men recover, getting them healthy enough to return to the front, until his enlistment finally expired and he went home for good. Sergeant Theodore Bond was not unlike thousands of other soldiers who fought in the Civil War. He was ordinary in the ways that mattered most, and he was forgotten in the flood of legends that grew up around the battle.
Tour buses still roll past the field where Reynolds fell, and the story of the dead general is told again and again. But it was men like Bond, the common soldiers of the Iron Brigade, who made that fight what it was. They were the ones who held the line, took the bullets, and carried themselves off the field when they could. Sergeant Theodore Bond’s name does not appear in the grand histories the way Reynolds’s name does.
But on July 1, 1863, he bled on this field just the same, and he carried that wound with him for the rest of his life.