JANET McCABE
presents
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For three hot summers after the Battle of Gettysburg, Rufus Weaver toiled to retrieve Confederate soldiers’ remains from crude battlefield graves. His efforts to get paid for his hard work proved to be nearly as difficult.
In 1889, Weaver wrote to his friend, Ada Egerton: “Over 16 years have now passed away and today over twelve thousand dollars (including interest) is due me without a line from any of those interested in the debt—debt which you have often truly said is one of ‘Sacred honor.’”
Weaver certainly had a right to be aggrieved, for $12,000 in 1889 is the equivalent of more than $350,000 today.
How did this happen? How could an obligation of this size have been created? Weaver was not some Wall Street financier or speculator in land or railroad stocks. He was a physician and a lecturer in human anatomy at a medical school in Philadelphia. Who could possibly owe him a sum of that size?
The original obligation was created in the decade following the end of the Civil War, when Southern women sought to provide proper resting places for their fallen husbands, sons, and fathers. At the end of the war, tens of thousands of soldiers’ graves dotted battlefields from Pennsylvania to Louisiana. Soldiers were generally buried where they fell, and any farmer’s field was likely to contain a grave.
Janet McCabe will discuss Rufus Weaver's efforts and the practices associated with the removal of Confederate dead in her presentation to our Round Table.
Source https://www.historynet.com/hundreds-of-confederates-were-buried-in-gettysburgs-fields-this-mans-task-was-to-send-them-home/
Janet McCabe earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Virginia and a Master of Business Administration degree from the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College. Although she spent her professional career in the financial services industry, she has been fascinated by the American Civil War since her father took her to her first battlefield when she was eight years old.
Ms. McCabe currently serves as a docent at the George Spangler Farm and Field Hospital outside Gettysburg, and her retirement goal is to become a Licensed Battlefield Guide there. Her recent article on removing the Confederate dead from Gettysburg was published in the April 2022 issue of Civil War Times magazine. Since that article was published, she has researched and written two additional articles which she hopes will be published soon.
