150 Years Later: A Historic Look at Emergency Management after the Battle of Gettysburg

By Leischen Stelter

July 1-3, 2013 marks the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Thousands of people are expected to visit the grounds of this historic battle site that changed the course of U.S. history. While the majority of people are fascinated by the leadership and battle tactics, Jim Redick, director of emergency preparedness and response for the City of Norfolk, VA, has taken a different approach to understanding this event.

Redick is an adjunct professor of Emergency and Disaster Management at American Military University. For the last several months, he has been working on a research project about how the borough of Gettysburg responded to and recovered from this devastating battle. “The focus [of this research] is on the challenges Gettysburg faced and overcame – as a community, long before federal assistance was ever available or expected,” he said.

Redick first became interested in researching the community response to the Battle of Gettysburg when he visited the site while attending a course at the Emergency Management Institute in nearby Emmitsburg, MD.

“As an emergency manager, I typically ask what if?” Redick said. “I empathize with the situation in Gettysburg and wonder: What if I my locality had experienced such an event, how would I have coordinated the recovery and brought everyone together to get past such a significant event?  I also enjoy the historical aspect and learning what resources they had – or didn’t have – at their disposal.”

Those who assisted in the recovery after the battle have been greatly overlooked. “I’m learning about the folks who played an active role in the response, and whose names you typically don’t read in history books,” he said. David Wills is one such individual. He is credited with performing many emergency management duties after the battle.

The situation Wills and others faced after the battle was gruesome. Farmer’s crops had all been ravaged so there were limited food supplies. No new supplies could be transported to the area since the railroad system had been destroyed by the Confederates and would require time (and resources) to rebuild.

There was also a lack of medical supplies as well as a general lack of medicinal knowledge. “Every building—schools, homes and farms—were set up as makeshift hospitals,” he said. More than 7,800 people were killed and 27,000 wounded during the three-day battle, making fatality management nearly impossible. Dirt washed away, exposing decaying corpses and the stench of rotting bodies permeated the town, he said. And, there was no one to help them. The federal government couldn’t provide any assistance to Gettysburg since all resources were put towards the war.

As thousands of people descend on Gettysburg this summer to remember the pivotal battle that ended the South’s invasion of the North, Redick hopes his research will shed light on an overlooked and underappreciated aspect of the battle: The amazing resiliency and recovery efforts of a community in time of disaster.