A wounded Union lieutenant from the 142nd Pennsylvania Infantry, Jeremiah Hoffman, was shot in the hip during the first day of fighting at Gettysburg and carried by horseback to the Lutheran Theological Seminary while the building and its grounds were still under Union control. By the end of that day, Confederate forces had seized the position, making Hoffman and his fellow wounded soldiers prisoners of war. Hoffman, seen in an original photograph wearing his uniform and holding his sword, later recounted his experiences in a narrative written before his early death in 1867. The account, titled “An Ordeal at the Lutheran Theological Seminary” by Michael A.
Dreese, was published in the Gettysburg Magazine in 2000, offering detailed stories of life inside the seminary during the battle’s terrifying days and the immediate aftermath. Hoffman wrote that during the early days of the fighting, Confederate soldiers used captured Union men to collect rifles and other equipment. One captured Union soldier waited for his chance and shot a guard directly in the heart, an act carried out so quickly that it went undetected. Another Union man was lost under similarly unjust circumstances.
A captured, uninjured Union soldier was carrying a badly wounded comrade when a nearby Confederate raised his rifle and shot the healthy man in the heart. The Confederate pulled his hat over his eyes and slipped away. Some Union men reported the incident to Confederate officers, but the culprit never returned, and the prisoners were never able to point him out again. Among the Confederates, Hoffman described a tall, thin, ignorant mountain man from North Carolina who seemed to have left his family with great reluctance when called up by the rebel conscription.
The man lived in constant fear of everyone and everything. He was afraid to fight and afraid to run away, fearing that residents of the areas he passed through would kill him. The North Carolina man confided his fears about the “Pennsylvania Dutch” to one of the prisoners. He believed they were terrible people, ready to kill him on sight.
He thought they were a kind of wild, wandering gypsy people who would not hesitate to kill a human being as casually as another might kill a goose. Hoffman quickly tried to correct this impression, telling him that the Pennsylvania Dutch were very kind-hearted people, mostly farmers, and among the most honest and peaceful people imaginable. Hoffman admitted he may have erred toward perfection as much as the Confederate’s ideas had erred the other way toward vice. The conversation left an impression.
After the Confederate army had been gone for a full day, a wounded man and a nurse told Hoffman that his North Carolina acquaintance was still wandering around the lower part of the building, showing no fear whatsoever of mingling with any of those Dutch. The man had saddled his own horse and escaped the Confederate army. There were a number of men from the 1st South Carolina Regiment in the room. At one point, the prisoners and their captors discussed the merits of the secession cause.
Hoffman noted they debated with less animosity than political discussions sometimes provoke in community debates. The Confederates voluntarily admitted one thing: that the Union army’s position at Gettysburg rivaled their own position at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Two men among the Southerners claimed they had belonged to the regular U. S.
artillery and had deserted from Captain Abner Doubleday’s battery at Fort Sumter. Hoffman did not believe them at first. He asked them about Doubleday, who by then was a major general commanding their division. The men gave such an accurate description of him and imitated his manner of giving orders and his other characteristics so well that Hoffman could not help but believe they knew Doubleday.
He told them Doubleday’s current rank and that he had fought against them that first day. The men seemed amused to hear of their old commander’s defeat. Their hats bore the insignia “1 SC,” the regiment and state in large yellow letters, though the hats were so worn they looked more like cloth than felt on their heads. By July 4, there was only skirmishing and picket firing at the ends of the line.
The Confederates had plenty of time to linger, and those on the line near the seminary building spent considerable time in the rooms talking with the wounded and bringing them water. They were willing to give the prisoners plenty of flour biscuits, obtained from a mill a few miles from Gettysburg. They had found a good quantity of grain there and forced the miller to grind it all for their use. The Confederates were desperately eager for coffee.
Hoffman gave one North Carolina man about a quill’s worth of ground coffee. The man turned it over in his hands repeatedly, smelled it, and concluded his expressions of astonishment by saying he had not seen coffee in two years. He was delighted to learn he could make it stretch for far more meals than people usually thought. The prisoners told him how little he needed for a tin cup and that he could boil the grounds again.
As was common in such hospitals, the warm weather helped worms multiply, and they quickly spread throughout the place. In the lower floor especially, they were very abundant. An Irish sergeant from the 121st Pennsylvania Regiment was brought to their room on the fourth. He had lain exposed to the sun for over a day without water until a compassionate Confederate soldier pulled him under a tree and filled his canteen.
A bullet had shattered the bone in his right thigh, and he could not drag himself because of it. Worms had badly infested his wounds, but the noble man remained in high spirits. Had he remained another day exposed to the elements and lacking food, it would have been enough to finish him. Another man from the 121st Regiment in their room had worms jumping from his wound with remarkable speed.
He had been hit in the side, and the bullet had passed around his body under the skin before lodging in his back. Hoffman’s account offers a vivid picture of the inside of the seminary building, where soldiers of both North and South interacted with one another as they had throughout the war. What makes the situation particularly unusual is that these exchanges happened while the battle raged around them.
On July 4, Hoffman noted how relaxed the Southern soldiers seemed around the building that day, a detail that aligns with the fact that the Confederate army was beginning its withdrawal from Gettysburg, heading back to Virginia.