Not Left Out
of several major battles, including Antietam and Gettysburg, artillerist George Bucknam was wounded during the Wilderness fighting of May 5-7, 1864. “Through the carelessness of one of our own men,” he explained later, “my gun prematured, as I was driving out my sponge staff after ramming a 12-lb. shot in the gun, and blowed my right hand off above the wrist, and three fingers of my left hand.” In a narrative submitted to a left-handed penmanship contest in 1867, Bucknam detailed the effects of the explosion: “[It] burst the drum of my
