At about noon on July 1, 1863, the 26th North Carolina Infantry moved up from a creek crossing on the western edge of Gettysburg and into the woods along a ridgeline. The men had already marched through the heat and rain of a long campaign, and now they were advancing into one of the hardest fights of the war. Before the day was over, the regiment would suffer the highest casualty count of any Southern unit on the field, and a young farmer named Eli Setzer would be mortally wounded in the struggle. The 26th North Carolina had been a strong fighting unit throughout the war.
It had taken part in some of the largest battles in Virginia and had earned a reputation as a dependable Confederate regiment. Eli Setzer had enlisted early in North Carolina and eventually made his way into its ranks. He was young, a farmer by trade, and he happened to be serving alongside several relatives who had also joined the regiment. His family connections ran deep in the unit, as they did for many men who fought here.
Brothers, cousins, and neighbors often served together, and they often fell together. The setting for this part of the battle was open farmland, cut by creeks and bordered by woods. The Confederate forces under the command of General Henry Heth had been pushing forward through fields and over ridgelines, driving Union forces before them. On this July day, the weather was muggy and wet.
The ground was soft, and the terrain was steep and difficult. The men of the 26th had to cross bodies of water, climb wooded hills, and then emerge into wide open ground where the enemy could see them coming. Opposite them stood the 24th Michigan, part of the Union’s famed Iron Brigade. These men were known by their distinctive black hats, and they were among the toughest soldiers on the field.
When the 26th North Carolina advanced, they came out of the woods about 600 yards west of the Michigan position and moved directly into a heavy sheet of rifle fire. The first volleys cut men down almost immediately. Officers fell, privates fell, and the regiment’s commanding officer was among the early casualties. When he went down, the next officer in line had to take command, and the regiment continued to press forward.
The fighting in this section became a brutal tug-of-war, with soldiers pushed back and forth through the woods and fields. Neither side could gain an easy advantage. The 26th kept pressing against the Iron Brigade, but the cost was terrible. Men from both sides lay dead and wounded across the ground.
The Michigan men were eventually driven back, and the Confederate attack gained ground. By the end of the day, the Union forces had been pushed through the town of Gettysburg and had fallen back to the high ground south of town. The first day ended as a Confederate victory, but it was a victory purchased at an enormous price. Eli Setzer was wounded multiple times during the fighting.
Gunshots struck him in the body and in his limbs. At some point, he watched a cousin fall with a leg wound. Then Setzer himself was hit with shots so close to the hip that the large bone in his leg was splintered. He could not walk, and there was no way to save the leg.
Amputation was not possible. A relative who was serving behind the lines came up, found him, and called for stretcher bearers to take him off the field. He was carried back to a field hospital beyond the lines. There, the surgeons realized there was nothing they could do for him.
His wound was too severe. They could only wait and let death take its course, which is exactly what happened. The battle also took the life of another prominent figure on the Union side. General John Reynolds, one of the most promising officers in the Union army, had been directing the deployment of his troops on the edge of the woods when he was shot by a sharpshooter.
According to the account, he urged his men to drive the Confederates out of the woods, and shortly afterward he was struck down and killed on the field. The identity of the sharpshooter is described as uncertain, but the general’s death was a significant blow to the Union command at a critical moment in the battle. There was another twist of fate connected to the 26th North Carolina. Zebulon Vance, who later became the governor of North Carolina during the Confederacy, had served in this regiment.
Had he not been elected to the governorship in 1862, and had he survived the earlier battles of the war, he likely would have been present at Gettysburg with the men of the 26th, fighting on the same ground. Instead, Vance was elsewhere, and the fate that preserved his life did not protect Eli Setzer. Setzer’s younger brother later named a son after him, but that child did not live past his first birthday. The name passed on no further.
The 24th Michigan had its own costly experience on this field. The regiment had arrived just before noon south of the woods and had charged across the stream and up the heights beyond it. They captured a number of Tennessee soldiers during their advance. Later, as the Confederates poured across the fields, the Michigan men were broken and flanked, forced to fall back beyond the tree line and eventually beyond the town itself.
On July 2 and July 3, the Confederate forces moved to Culp’s Hill, where they remained for most of the rest of the battle. The fighting there was equally hard, and the regiment suffered heavy casualties of its own. In the end, the Union army was victorious at Gettysburg. The Confederate army was defeated and made its way back south into Virginia.
The battle did not end the war, but it marked a turning point in the campaign and in the larger conflict. The cost to the men who fought here, however, was measured in the dead and wounded who covered the fields. For the 26th North Carolina, the price was especially high. The regiment suffered the greatest losses of any Confederate unit at Gettysburg.
The men who survived would carry the memory of that day with them for the rest of their lives. The ones who did not survive lay where they fell, in the fields and woods on the western edge of the town. The story of Eli Setzer is one of many individual stories buried within the larger history of the battle. Like so many soldiers on both sides, he was a young man with a life ahead of him, a farmer from North Carolina who had dreams and plans that ended in the muddy fields of Gettysburg.
His family members who fought alongside him went home changed by what they had seen. His name did not carry forward through a son, and the story of his death became part of the broader cost of the battle. Gettysburg remains one of the most visited and most carefully marked battlefields of the Civil War. Tens of thousands of men fought here over three days in July 1863, and the ground itself tells the story of their movements, their sacrifices, and their fates.
For those who come to walk the fields, the story of the 26th North Carolina and the men of the Iron Brigade is one of the central narratives of the fight. It is a story of terrain, determination, and loss. And within that larger story are the individual men, like Eli Setzer, whose lives ended here and whose names survive only in the memory of the battle itself.