The Confederate then inquired Barlow’s name and, assuming he would not survive, asked if he had any final requests. ‘I shall probably live but a short time,’ the badly wounded Yankee replied. ‘Please take from my breast pocket the packet of my wife’s letters and read one of them to me.’ Gordon complied, after which Barlow asked that he destroy the letters, as he did not want them to fall into anyone else’s hands. Gordon tore up the missives and inquired if there was anything else he could do for his grievously stricken enemy. Barlow replied affirmatively. ‘My wife is behind our army,’ he explained. ‘Can you send a message through the lines?’ ‘Certainly I will,’ Gordon replied, and directed that Barlow be carried off to the shade of a tree in the rear.

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Later in the day Gordon succeeded in getting word to the Army of the Potomac that Barlow was badly wounded and asked that his wife be informed. Despite all professional prognostications, Barlow recovered from his wound and went on to play a major role in the ferocious fighting of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland campaign and the siege of Petersburg in 1864. The story then proceeds to a heartwarming conclusion. According to the popular account, Gordon simply assumed Barlow had died. Barlow later heard that a General Gordon had died and was certain this was his Gettysburg Samaritan, though it was actually Gordon’s cousin, Brig. Gen. James B. Gordon, who was killed at Meadow Bridge, Va. The story of the Barlow-Gordon encounter ended with the unexpected meeting of the two former opponents at a dinner party hosted by Democratic Congressman Clarkson N. Potter in 1879. Upon being introduced to each other, Gordon said (here again, the exchange became more elaborate in later versions), ‘General Barlow, are you related to the officer of your name who was killed at Gettysburg?’ ‘I am the man,’ Barlow replied. ‘Are you related to the Gordon who is supposed to have killed me?’ ‘I am the man,’ Gordon said. The two officers expressed mutual surprise and fell into hearty conversation, beginning a friendship that would endure until Barlow’s death in 1896.

The Gordon-Barlow story appealed to late Victorian sentimentality and the prevailing desire to heal the wounds of the war. It was frequently reprinted and became even more elaborate in some later accounts. A rendition with extended chivalric dialogue appeared in McClure’s Magazine in the 1880s. That version was reprinted in Campfire and Battlefield, a popular history published in 1894. Yet another variant appeared in James A. Scrymser’s 1915 book In Times of Peace and War, in which both Early and Gordon discover Barlow lying on the battlefield. In that account, Gordon asked whether something should be done for him, to which Early responded, ‘No, he is too far gone.’ On hearing this, Barlow raised himself up, somehow recognized the Confederate division commander, and shaking his fist vowed, ‘General Early I will live to lick you yet, damn you.’ This alleged exchange was repeated in the volume New York State issued in 1923 to commemorate the unveiling of a statue of Barlow on what had been renamed from Blocher’s to Barlow’s Knoll.

But it was the tender encounter between Gordon and Barlow that continued to evoke the most interest. The exchange was accepted and repeated, apparently without contradiction or challenge into the 1970s. James Montgomery’s The Shaping of a Battle: Gettysburg (1959) recounted the battlefield meeting, including all the sentimental Victorian dialogue. Ezra Warner’s Generals in Blue (1964) contains a brief mention of the story.

In 1985 William F. Hanna challenged the accepted truth about Barlow’s fate at Gettysburg in his article ‘A Gettysburg Myth Exploded’ that appeared in Civil War Times Illustrated. Hanna charged that no such meeting had occurred, and made a strong case to support his thesis. Since that time, it has become common to consign the Barlow-Gordon encounter to the category of fable.

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