At first, the archaeologists did not think there was a body in the pit they were excavating on the battlefield in Northern Virginia.
They thought they would find only discarded limbs that had been amputated by Civil War surgeons.
But as they worked with trowels and brushes, the fragile bones of a young Union soldier lying on his back gradually emerged from the dirt. His coat buttons were there. So was the comb that had been in a back pocket, and the lead ball that struck him in the neck and probably killed him.
He was about 17, and stood about 5 feet 2 inches tall when he was mortally wounded by Confederate artillery in August 1862. “He was just a kid, really,” said National Park Service archaeologist Joshua Torres.
On Nov. 4, more than 160 years after he perished during the war’s second battle of Bull Run, the remains of the unidentified soldier are scheduled to be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
His casket will be borne to his grave on a horse-drawn caisson, escorted by a platoon of soldiers, the cemetery said. His modern-day comrades will fire three rifle volleys in salute. A bugler will sound taps.
He was “a young man who gave his life in service to the country,” said Torres, who headed the 2024 excavation on the historic field outside Washington. “It’s really touching and very moving.”
He was probably wounded elsewhere on the battlefield, carried to a makeshift hospital, and died there, or en route, “fighting for his life on the way,” he said.
The off-center placement of his coat buttons, which bore a New York state seal with the motto “Excelsior,” indicated that his coat was open when he died, Torres said in a recent interview. None of the cloth survived.
The soldier had been struck by the explosion of an artillery shell that blasted out lead balls like a large shotgun shell, experts said.
And he may have been wounded during a doomed uphill charge against Confederates hiding in an unfinished railroad cut, the archaeologists said.
He is the third soldier whose remains have been found in the same area on the battlefield where thousands of men were killed and wounded in the bloody encounter in the second year of the war.
Two other northern soldiers buried together were discovered a few feet away in 2015. In 2018 they were laid to rest in Arlington’s section 81. The third soldier will be buried in the same section, a cemetery spokeswoman said.
The shallow burials are believed to have been next to a field hospital beside which bodies of the dead and amputated limbs of the wounded were hastily placed.
Such discoveries are extremely rare, historians say. The bodies of most slain soldiers were eventually removed by families or the government. These men were missed.
The remains of the three had evidence of the brutality of the battle.
One man from the earlier discovery still had a Confederate bullet embedded in a shattered thigh bone. The other had been hit with three bullets, including one that smashed into his right arm.
“We were able to determine for all three of them exactly how they were killed,” said Brandon S. Bies, a Park Service military archaeologist who worked on both digs. “And it was gruesome and horrible and their families never found out what happened to them.”
None of the soldiers has been identified.
The archaeologists also found at both burial sites numerous severed limbs of other soldiers that had been amputated and discarded by surgeons. Amputation of a damaged arm or leg was a common remedy for a traumatic injury in Civil War medicine. And many men survived it.
Torres said that, for now, the Park Service is retaining the limbs.
The Second Battle of Bull Run was at that point the largest battle ever in the Western Hemisphere, Bies has said. It involved almost 125,000 combatants.
It was fought Aug. 28 through 30, 1862, over much of the same ground as the First Battle of Bull Run a year before.
About 1,700 Union soldiers and 1,200 Confederates were killed, and a combined total of more than 14,000 were wounded. The battle was a victory for the Confederates, and the Union army was forced to retreat.
The archaeological project — which now spans 12 years — began after human bone fragments were found in 2014 during the excavation for a water line near a building in the Manassas National Battlefield Park.
The dig began the next year.
After the bodies and limbs were recovered in 2015, the excavation was closed.
Archaeologists suspected there was more to be found but further work was beyond the project’s scope and time frame, Bies said.
After a hiatus, caused in part by the need for funding and planning, and by the covid pandemic, the project resumed in March 2024, said Torres, the archaeologist for the Park Service’s national capital region.
Ground-penetrating radar had already suggested there were probably more limbs present in the area.
The radar showed “a small anomaly a few feet away,” Bies said. “The working concept was that there were probably a handful of additional amputated limbs in the space.”
But as the new dig proceeded, “inch by inch” over several days, Bies said, they came upon two leg bones side by side. “I’ve got a feeling about this,” he remembers remarking.
Slowly other bones of the soldier were uncovered, along with seven coat buttons, and buttons from his cuffs and trousers, Bies said.
Using a hand-held metal detector, he also zeroed in on a metal object in the dirt that was resting against one of the soldier’s neck vertebra. It turned out to be a crude ball from the exploded artillery shell.
The soft lead had been deformed from hitting flesh, or his uniform, or bone, he said.
“When you see the object that killed someone, that ended their life on the battlefield, it is extremely sobering and humbling and emotional,” Bies said.
The soldier will now rest near his comrades about 30 miles from where they were killed.
The post Young Union soldier, struck down in Civil War battle, finally gets his funeral appeared first on Washington Post.
