Samuel Wilkeson Jr..

About Samuel Wilkeson Jr.

Samuel Wilkeson Jr. was a 19th-century journalist and newspaper editor, and in later life, railroad executive and real-estate developer. While serving as the New York Times' Washington correspondent and reporting on the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, he found his own son, Lt. Bayard Wilkeson, dead on the battlefield. Wilkeson had previously reclaimed the dead body of John Wilkes Wilkeson, his brother's son, from the field at the Battle of Seven Pines.My pen is heavy. Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburg have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battlefield with his feet and reaching fraternally and lovingly up to heaven. His right hand opens the gates of Paradise—with his left he beckons to these mutilated, bloody, swollen forms to ascend.