Gettysburg National Military Park - African American Presence

Abraham Brian’s house on Cemetery Ridge just after the battle and as it appears today

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»	Basil Biggs

By the time the Civil War came to Gettysburg, three decades of growth and economic development had attracted African American workers from Maryland and beyond. In Pennsylvania, north of the Mason-Dixon line, slavery had been abolished and black children could attend school. Still, life was often hard—they coped with social and economic segregation and slave catchers who hunted freedom seekers and sometimes kidnapped free people of color. Nonetheless, some African Americans purchased their own homes and farms. Abraham Brian, for example, (also spelled Bryan or Brien) owned property on Cemetery Ridge at the time of the battle, including a dwelling and barn that still stand, along with a house near Emmitsburg Road he rented to Mag Palm in 1860. James and Sarah Warfield owned a small farm on Seminary Ridge, where James also maintained a blacksmith shop.

When rumor reached Gettysburg of the Confederate invasion in 1863, most black citizens evacuated Adams County. They had more to fear than white residents did, including enslavement. After the war, returning property owners found their farms severely damaged and their homes ransacked. Some, such as Basil Biggs, helped move hastily buried bodies of fallen soldiers to the newly established National Cemetery. The Sons of Goodwill established Lincoln Cemetery in 1867 for black citizens, including those who served in the U.S. Colored Troops.

Staff members of the Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Gettysburg National Military Park. (National Archives)

African Americans also shaped the National Park visitors enjoy today. When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression, he quickly established the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 as part of the New Deal. Two African American units, Companies 385 and 1355, improved and maintained Gettysburg National Military Park. Most of the men hailed from Pennsylvania, including Gettysburg, and Maryland. The Gettysburg units built roads and fences, laid pipe, and groomed the forests and fields of the 26-acre National Military Park. Company 1355 produced an outstanding camp newspaper, the Battlefield Echo.

Gettysburg was also distinguished among CCC camps because of its black leadership. At first, only white officers and foremen supervised the camps. Under pressure to allow black leadership, in 1935 President Roosevelt issued an executive order mandating the change. The War Department and Park Service complied by making Gettysburg a model program with all black leadership. Over the next five years, they appointed African American men as camp commander and staff, superintendent, and engineers that designed CCC projects. The program was deemed successful and black leadership was established in other units as well.

Resources

• Margaret S. Creighton. The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History. Basic Books, 2005.
• Gettysburg National Military Park. War for Freedom: African American Experiences in the Era of the Civil War.
• John C. Paige. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Park Service, 1933-1942: An Administrative History. See especially, “Black Enrollment,” in chapter 3, “The National Park Service Camps.” National Park Service, Department of the Interior, 1985.

People in the Places

Basil Biggs (1819-1906)

Basil and Mary Biggs (Adams County Historical Society)

Born free near Pipe Creek Quaker Meeting in Carroll County, Maryland, Basil’s mother died when he was four and he was bound out to perform hard labor. As an adult he became a teamster, hauling goods and carrying large sums of money between Carroll County and Baltimore. He married Mary J. Jackson, a free black woman raised by white Presbyterian families in nearby New Windsor. In 1858 the Biggs sold their three-acre farm and moved with their children—Hannah, Eliza, Calvin, and William—to Adams County where their children could be educated. The parents could not read or write, but the three eldest children entered school and learned to read. Basil and Mary Biggs had three more children and helped found and build Asbury M.E. Church in Gettysburg.

People fleeing slavery on the underground railroad found safe refuge on the Biggs farm. They rested by day and at night Biggs took them twelve miles north to the black community of Yellow Hill overlooking the Quaker Valley. From there, Edward Mathews helped them connect with Quakers active in assisting freedom seekers in Adams County and beyond. Biggs’s eldest daughter Hannah married Mathews’s son Nelson.

When African Americans in Gettysburg heard about the approaching Confederate Army, most fled North to escape capture and, they feared, death or enslavement. Biggs sent his family away, but did not leave himself until Confederates marched into the town from the west. Biggs borrowed a horse and rode east to York. Confederate forces used his home as a field hospital. He returned to find the graves of forty-five Confederates, the house and garden damaged, and crops, livestock, and household goods taken or destroyed.

With contributions from the northern states whose troops fought at Gettysburg, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania established a National Cemetery there in 1863. Biggs and others exhumed, moved, and reburied over 3,000 dead from makeshift graves to the new cemetery. Biggs used his two-horse team and carried nine coffins at a time. In 1868 he submitted a claim for $1,507 in war damages and was awarded $1,357 but the state never allocated funds to pay. Nonetheless, he bought farmland on Cemetery Ridge, near the field of Pickett’s Charge. A historian persuaded him not to remove the famous copse of trees there. In 1892, Biggs purchased a home at the corner of Washington and High Streets in Gettysburg. For at least thirty years before his death in 1906 he was a licensed veterinary surgeon, in business with his son. He was one of the most renowned and respected citizens of the region.

Resources

• Margaret S. Creighton. The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History. Basic Books, 2005.
• Peter C. Vermilyea, “The Effect of the Confederate Invasion of Pennsylvania on Gettysburg’s African American Community.”
  

Interest-African American, Adams County, Pennsylvania, >African-American, >AF Adams County