Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On the morning of Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2013, a small army of Civil War re-enactors, a well-known Lincoln impersonator, federal government representatives, the governor of Pennsylvania and its two senators, its congressional representative and a host of municipal officials gathered at the Gettysburg National Cemetery to mark the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s famous address.

Today the site, located on Cemetery Hill, a key Union defensive position southeast of the town of Gettysburg, is a quiet, peaceful place, with its manicured lawns, grave markers and somber monuments.

It presented a starkly different atmosphere 150 years ago, when thousands of people converged on the still-devastated battlefield for the dedication of the as-yet-incomplete “Soldiers’ National Cemetery.” It was typical weather for southern Pennsylvania in mid-November, according to reports. The ground was muddy from previous days of rain. On that late autumn day the former Massachusetts governor and beloved orator Edward Everett, along with Lincoln, half the president’s cabinet, nine northern state governors, military representatives, the Ministers of France and Italy and as many as 15,000 spectators invaded the small town of about 2,400 residents for a second time.

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Lincoln had arrived the day before and stayed as a guest at the home of a local lawyer, David Wills, who had been appointed by Gov. Andrew Curtin to oversee the cemetery’s development. It was also Wills who formally invited Lincoln to attend the event. That night Lincoln decided to rewrite the second page of his remarks. There was somewhat of a party atmosphere that evening as visitors, townspeople and students from nearby Pennsylvania College and the Lutheran Seminary celebrated.

“These Grounds will [be] Consecrated and set apart to this Sacred purpose, by appropriate Ceremonies, on Thursday, the 19th instant,” says Wills’s invitation. “Hon Edward Everett will deliver the Oration … It is the desire that, after the Oration, you, as Chief Executive of the Nation, formally set apart these grounds to their Sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.”

Wills told Lincoln that it would “be a source of great gratification to the many widows and orphans that have been made almost friendless by the Great Battle here, to have you here personally; and it will kindle anew in the breasts of the Comrades of these brave dead, who are now in the tented field or nobly meeting the foe in the front, a confidence that they who sleep in death on the Battle Field are not forgotten by those highest in Authority.”

When Lincoln, Everett and their retinue arrived, they found a landscape still only beginning to recover from the largest battle ever fought on American soil. In all, the clash of about 164,000 troops left 51,000 casualties – killed, wounded, captured and missing in action. About 10,000 soldiers from both sides were killed during the battle. As many as 1,500 horses and mules died. When Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s troops and equipment, forming a column 12 miles long, retreated from Gettysburg on July 4, 1863, they left behind about 6,800 wounded. About 14,529 wounded Union troops were being treated in the field hospitals by about 650 Union physicians.

“When Gov. Curtin got to the battlefield July 10, he was very concerned about disease, (related to contaminated ground water), seeing not only the dead horses and mules, and dead soldiers who had not been buried, he was very interested in getting the bodies of soldiers buried and the carcasses of horses and mules burned,” said Richard C. Saylor, archivist for the Pennsylvania State Archives of the Historical and Museum Commission and author of “Soldiers to Governors,” an in-depth review of the American Civil War collections held in the archives.

Curtin himself wrote that “the heart sickened at the sights presented themselves at every step. Remains of our brave partially covered with earth, left totally unburied.” Curtin reported that scattered bodies were being dug out of shallow graves and mutilated by dogs, feral hogs and other animals, and skulls were being kicked around like footballs — “and this too, all on Pennsylvania soil.”

Shortly after the battle, families of Union soldiers presumed to be killed in battle traveled to Gettysburg to identify where their loved ones were buried, Mr. Saylor said. Some of those who had died in the hospital were prepared for burial by Army undertakers. Often, the body was packed in ice for transport back to the soldiers’ home states.

Curtin and Wills soon decided that a national cemetery would be an appropriate memorial at Gettysburg. They contracted the job of disinterring Union soldiers from battlefield graves and had them brought back to the 17-acre site where the cemetery would be established. But that work was still far from finished when Lincoln arrived.

Meanwhile, Gettysburg’s populace was left to deal with the carnage and destruction without federal or state assistance. For months, the smell of decaying bodies saturated large portions of the 50 square miles around Gettysburg. Bodies, body parts, dead horses and the remains of military equipment littered the battlefield. Relic hunters immediately became a problem; people would stumble on unexploded ordnance and set it off, resulting in more injuries and death related to the battle.

In fact, the day after the Soldiers’ National Cemetery dedication, Russell M. Briggs of Philadelphia, who traveled to Gettysburg to claim the remains of his son, and who attended the ceremonies, picked up a shell; it exploded, injuring both of his hands and resulting in an amputation.

When Lincoln toured the battlefield during his two-day visit, the skeletal remains of the rib cages of horses remained visible on portions of the field, Mr. Saylor said. Hastily dug battlefield graves of Confederate soldiers were still scattered throughout the battlefield. Some sites were little more than trenches that had been filled with bodies.

It wasn’t until the 1870s through the 1880s, decades after the war, that family members of Confederate soldiers killed at Gettysburg were able to visit the battlefield to search for the remains of their relatives, Mr. Saylor said. Not all the graves could be found – meaning there are undiscovered Confederate remains still interred on the battlefield.

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Sources: Brian A. Kennell, “Beyond the Gatehouse: Gettysburg’s Evergreen Cemetery”; Jeffrey B. Roth, “Civil War Medicine at Gettysburg,” Gettysburg Hospital Quarterly, Spring 1985; The Civil War Trust, “The Battle of Gettysburg Summary and Facts”; The New York Times, Nov. 20, 1863.

Jeffrey B. Roth is a freelance writer.