Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

As he awaited the advance of the enemy's infantry, Colonel Langhorne Wister of the 150th Pennsylvania, Stone's brigade, was startled to see a civilian approach him on the firing line and announce that he wanted to join the fight. He was an incongruous figure, grizzled, well advanced in years, wearing a long linen duster and a high-crowned felt hat and carrying a flintlock musket, a powder horn, and a pocketful of bullets. This proved to be John Burns, age sixty-nine, veteran (noncombat) of the War of 1812, former constable of the borough of Gettysburg, regarded by his fellow citizens as cantankerous and something of a town character. Colonel Wister decided the man was serious but that this was too exposed a place for him. He sent him off to the left, to McPherson's Woods, where he would have cover and be shaded from the midday sun. John Burns went on to make his fight that afternoon with the Iron Brigade—"I pitched in with them Wisconsin fellers," he would say—blazing away from behind a tree until he was nicked by three bullets and concluded his fighting career. He was noticed in General Doubleday's report, would meet Mr. Lincoln, and in the years left to him would be lionized as the "Old Patriot" of Gettysburg.25