10/12/2026
A 12-year-old drummer handed him his drum and ran into the battle. He never came back for it.
Albertus McCreary was 14 years old when the Battle of Gettysburg came to his family's front door. His house stood at the corner of Baltimore and High streets — directly in the path of the fighting. Forty-six years later he wrote it all down for McClure's Magazine, and his account remains one of the most vivid civilian records of the battle ever published.
On July 1, the Union army broke and came streaming through town. Albertus and his family handed out water from their porch: "We got great buckets of water and tin dippers, and supplied them as fast as we could... Hundreds thus got a refreshing drink as they fled in full retreat through the town." Then a small drummer boy ran up, "handing me his drum, said, 'Keep this for me.' I took it, ran down the cellar steps, and hid it under a pile of shavings. His name and regiment were printed upon it in red letters. Later I wrote to him, but received no answer. I suppose he had been killed. He looked to be about twelve years old."
An officer rode up and ordered everyone into the cellar — just in time. "We heard fighting all around the house, over the porch where a few moments before we had been handing out water." Through the cellar window he heard a voice say, "Shoot that fellow going over the fence. The order was obeyed, and a shot rang out just by the cellar window."
Then the cellar doors were pulled open and "five Confederate soldiers jumped down among us. We thought our last day had come." One of them — "I can see him yet — with a red face covered with freckles, and very red hair, dirty and sweaty, with his gun in his hand, said, 'We are looking for Union soldiers.'"
For two days the family lived inside Confederate lines. Albertus watched General Lee ride past their house: "He looked very much the soldier, sitting very erect in his saddle, with his short-cropped beard and his Confederate gray." From a trap-door in the roof, he and his brother watched Pickett's charge: "A wonderful thing it was to see that long line of Confederates charge across the fields in good order, until they struck the masked batteries. When these batteries opened on them, everything fell into the greatest confusion, and soon clouds of smoke hid them from our sight." Union sharpshooters mistook the boys' heads for Confederate snipers — "two bullets struck within a foot of my head in the shingles of the roof."
After the battle came the wounded, the hospitals, and the dead. And small mercies: the family's lost cow wandered home a week later with a bullet hole in her neck — alive. Black residents of the town were rounded up by Confederate soldiers; as they were marched past the house, "our old washerwoman called out, 'Good-by; we are going back to slavery.' Most of them were crying and moaning."
Months later, at the dedication of the National Cemetery, Albertus pushed through the crowd and shook Abraham Lincoln's hand: "Mr. Lincoln, will you shake hands with me?" "Certainly," he said, and gave me a good, strong grasp.
Sources:
Albertus McCreary, "Gettysburg: A Boy's Experience of the Battle," McClure's Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 3, July 1909
Photo: Gettysburg from west of the town, near the Theological Seminary," July 1863, Tipton & Myers, Gettysburg, Pa. (Library of Congress, Colorized)
