Bruce W. Ingram represents his great-great-grandfather James Kinsella as a Re-enactor with Company C of the 71st Pennsylvania Volunteers, which was James Kinsella’s company.
He has participated in re-enactments at New Market, Cedar Creek, and the 140th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Thoughts on the 140th Anniversary Reenactment at Gettysburg, August 8, 9 and 10, 2003
By Susan C. Ingram
The tears were a surprise. Not the emotion, but the tears. My brother didn’t cry very often. Not even not very often. Almost never.
But there he was, talking about the reenactment. How things hadn’t gone at all, or much, like he and his captain had planned. His little band of 71st Pa. Vols., who hadn’t fallen back to the high water mark stayed at the wall. The 69th Pa. were supposed to be hard on their left, but they were farther down the rock barrier. And off to their right, the Rebs started streaming over the rocks, right at the angle of the Angle.
Not like it was supposed to happen. Not like it happened in 1863.
The Rebs were supposed to hit the middle, where the remaining handful of the 71st’s Co. C were, at which point, once they were surrounded and all hope of prevailing was gone, they upturned their muskets-a sign of surrender-and were captured and allowed to live. No small victory for our family, who wouldn’t have ever lived had James decided to try to kill one last Confederate and had gotten killed in the process.
In any case, the tears came later, not because things had gone wrong, or mostly wrong. Although Bruce, in his inimitable style was able to salvage the situation and waited for a Reb, any Reb to get within spitting distance and then he upturned his rifle and surrendered. The Rebs were confused, he said, with looks of part skepticism, part wonder that any re-enactor – let alone a Union boy with good cover behind a rock wall and the high ground – would just up and turn himself over to the enemy. 
But there were the tears anyway, when he said it was a good thing that things had gotten kind of mucked up, because if they had gone perfectly as planned – based on Kinsella’s actual history – he said he would have just crumpled up and lost it right there on the field. And he cried just thinking about it. Well, spent much effort trying not to cry, but the tears were there just the same. Tears he said later, he really didn’t understand, as he didn’t know James Kinsella, and neither did Mom nor I, so why should he be so emotional.
But these tears, I suspect, came from the utter chance of it all, the utter amazement that with all the death and dying and lead flying around that day that James stayed at that wall and lived. He was close enough to look the Rebs in the eye and at a certain point perhaps he saw the logic in the situation. Perhaps, he thought, I could pull the trigger one more time and die. Or I can stop shooting right now and maybe live. Maybe live, because, of course, there was always the chance that in the white heat of battle, with the fear and hatred, animosity and adrenaline on both sides of that wall that one of the Rebs would take one look at those dirty Yankees with their guns upside down, defenseless, and think, how many of my brothers have you killed today you damn Yankee? 
A moment ago you would have been perfectly satisfied and perhaps justified to put a Minie Ball between my eyes, so damn you, I don’t care if your musket is upside down. You die. I have a chance to take slow and easy aim and make sure I get you with one shot. And you die. Right now. For all my brothers dying around me, piled around me on this field.
But, he didn’t, they didn’t. Whoever he was and whoever they were, they didn’t take careful aim and put a bullet between James Kinsella’s bonnie blue eyes. As perhaps they had every moral right to do.
But he didn’t. They didn’t.
After surviving that terrible march across that bloody, bodystrewn field, they did the right and honorable thing. They followed the rules. Rules. As if the savagery of war and killing and dying could ever really cleave to any rules at all. They followed the rules.
Maybe they were tired of the killing and the dying. Maybe they didn’t want to take one more step, reload that musket one more time, or aim at one more blue coat. Maybe they just wanted to turn around and walk back across that field. Because if they stopped now to take these prisoners – this handful of probably mostly Irish boys, who weren’t even proper damn Yankees – if they stopped to take these prisoners they could walk away from the bodies piled even beneath their own worn and tattered boots. Walk away from the spiky Armageddon of bayonets spraying lead and smoke and death. They could walk back to that distant line of trees. They could lie in the cool shade. Have a drink from their battered canteens and close their eyes to the horror of that sunny July afternoon.
More thoughts on the 140th
By Margaret Ingram
Three hot and sunny days in August and I survived! A real test for an almost 72-year-old woman with a gimpy leg that did not give out. But what an experience I might have missed if I had decided I was too old or it was too hot or that it was too risky to even try.
It was an historic moment for all us. To have found that our James Kinsella was not only a Civil War veteran, but had fought and was wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg, returned to his company and participated in the biggest battle of the war, was at The Angle, the high-water mark of the Confederacy–and survived–is mind-boggling.
How much we owe to the grit and determination of that young man–and to many others who had helped him: the Rebs who captured him after that long trek across the field facing Cushing Guns; General Pickett who put him on his honor and gave him “equal liberty with my own soldier boys;” his fellow captives at Belle Isle who must have taken him to hospital; the Southerners who cared for him there; and the care he received, not only at Camp Parole and Baltimore, Md., but at the Hoffman Farm hospital after Antietam. He was blessed and so are we.
Then my rational mind took over and I marveled at the logistics of not only the re-enactment, but also the movement of both armies into Maryland.
The re-enactors are doing a great service bringing this to the public–not a carnival as some disgruntled sutler was quoted as saying–but as truly living history. The care the people involved took to recreate it accurately was amazing.
I think of the many people we talked to who are caught up in the moment, who research and relive their history.
One of the first people I talked to was Harlan Hinkle of West Virginia who had been a re-enactor for many years and has just written a book entitled West Virginia Grayback Mountaineers: The Confederate side of West Virginia. He told me that he and his friends had researched the unit they decided to re-enact and it turned out to be one associated with General George W. Paton’s father.
He also told me that W.Va., contrary to popular opinion was evenly divided between North and South supporters, even though there were few if any slaves there. He told me that today’s re-enactments had been started in 1963 by the Federal Government on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Manassas and that park rangers continue to train re-enactors in living history weekends in the parks.
Another historian we talked with, of course, was Don Ernsberger has just published Paddy Owens Regular’s: A History of the Pennsylvania “Irish” Volunteers. It was he who told us of another harrowing experience of our James–his stint at Belle Isle, where by 1863, there were 3,000 tents for 10,000 prisoners. This too could have resulted in his death. Reading Walt Whitman’s observations about the prisoners there gives me chills: Walt Whitman’s question when he saw prisoners returning from Belle Isle can give us some insight into the human suffering endured there. He said; “Can those be men?” “Those little livid brown, ash streaked, monkey-looking dwarves? – are they not really mummified, dwindled corpses?”
From Don we also learned that Parole, Md., which we have driven through many times, began as Camp Parole.
We also shared the excitement of the other spectators who were watching sons and brothers and friends who were also re-enacting. The seriousness and the obvious time, effort, and expense many of them have put into this piece of living history is impressive and inspiring.
Searching for James Kinsella: Irish Yankee 