Bayard Wilkeson, U.S. Army

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Photo retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, (digitally restored), Public Domain

Hometown: Buffalo, NY
Branch: U.S. Army 
Unit: Battery G, 4th US Artillery
Date of Sacrifice: July 1, 1863 - KIA in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania 
Age: 19
Conflict: Civil War, 1861-1865

Bayard was born to a prominent family in Buffalo, New York. His grandfather, Samuel Wilkeson Sr., served in the New York Assembly and State Senate. Samuel was a founder and later mayor of Buffalo (1836-37), a merchant, and a shipbuilder for the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. The elder Wilkeson is credited with bringing the Erie Canal’s western terminus to Buffalo, rather than to rival Black Rock, New York.

Bayard’s father, Samuel Jr., was a prominent attorney who left the practice of law to pursue a career in journalism. He purchased the Albany Evening Journal newspaper and later became the Washington bureau chief for The New York Times. After the Civil War (1861-1865), Samuel Jr. went on to be an executive with the Northern Pacific Railroad and is considered to be one of the founders of Tacoma, Washington.

Besides the family’s success in business and politics, the Wilkesons have a long heritage of military service in every American conflict going back to the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). The Wilkesons hated the institution of slavery and were active, vocal abolitionists. Eight Wilkeson cousins served with distinction in the Civil War, with three of them giving their lives for the cause.

Bayard was born in Buffalo on May 17, 1844, to Samuel Wilkeson, Jr. and Catherine (Cady) Wilkeson. He joined his older sister, Margaret, and the family later welcomed two more sons: Samuel and Frank.

At the age of 18, Bayard enlisted in the U.S. Army and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant assigned to Battery G, 4th United States Regular Light Artillery on October 22, 1861. He fought valiantly at the Battle of Deserted House (Suffolk, Virginia), and the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

He was promoted to 1st Lieutenant on August 14, 1862. On July 1, 1863—the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—Lt. Wilkeson was in command of the six-cannon artillery unit.

Brigadier General Francis C. Barlow ordered Wilkeson’s unit to move to higher ground—now known as Barolow’s Knoll—where superior numbers of Confederate troops overwhelmed Union forces.

Commanding his unit from horseback, Lt. Wilkeson’s artillery unit was surrounded on three sides. A cannonball struck his right leg and killed his horse. Wilkeson was taken to the nearby Adams County Almshouse, which had been pressed into service as a battlefield hospital. As Confederate troops advanced, surgeons fled the Almshouse. Wilkeson, at age 19, succumbed to his wounds.

The account of Bayard Wilkeson gained national attention because his father, Samuel, was a special correspondent for The New York Times—assigned to report the details of the fighting at Gettysburg. Knowing that his son was in the battle that produced an estimated 50,000 casualties (combined Union and Confederate), Samuel spent days searching the gruesome battlefield for news of Bayard, finally finding his son among the shallow graves.

In his page 1 dispatch for The New York Times, Samuel wrote:

My pen is heavy. Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburg have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battlefield with his feet and reaching fraternally and lovingly up to heaven. His right hand opens the gates of Paradise — with his left he beckons to these mutilated, bloody, swollen forms to ascend.

Some historians speculate that Samuel Wilkeson’s “second birth of Freedom” phrase was an inspiration for President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “…we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Bayard Wilkeson was posthumously promoted on March 13, 1867, by President Andrew Johnson “to brevet lieutenant colonel for gallant and meritorious services in the Battle of Gettysburg, Pa.”

He is laid to rest at Forest Lawn in his family’s cemetery plot in Buffalo, with a headstone in the shape of an upright Napoleon cannon.

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