We arrived at Washington that evening, had some coffee and hard tack, crossed the Potomac River and went into camp for the first night at Arlington, Virginia.  It was raining.

Next morning President Lincoln came to the camp to ask us to do him a great favor; to go under a flag of truce to the battlefield of Bull Run to cover some three thousand dead boys whose bodies had lain in the hot sun for six days.  We would have three days time to do the work in and be off the battlefield or go to some Rebel prison.

The battle had taken place August 28th and 29th.¹⁾Conrad’s dates do not always correspond with other sources.  He was writing this more than 50 years after the fact.  We arrived September 3rd at night.  The Confederates held the field.  It surely was some job for us boys.  It was hard for me to believe that so many dead men could lie on a front of four miles, and yet I was to see much worse.  Our dead had been robbed by the Rebels; they had no clothes.

About four hundred of our regiment took sick and were unfit for work.  It was terrible.  One sergeant in Company I, was playing off sick and our Captain reduced him to ranks and placed me in charge of his men.  To tell the truth I felt some sick myself, but I did not want to be called a coward.

~ Conrad Smith²⁾My Early Life and The Civil War, Conrad Smith, 1920 pg 23

The dead in the battle of Bull run were still unburied, and this regiment was sent to the field under flag of truce to perform the mournful duty of consigning them to the earth.  For three days it was incessantly employed.  Several days had now elapsed since the dead had fallen, the battle having commenced on the 27th of August, and the corpses exposed to a summer sun were in a loathsome condition.  Very few of the rebel dead had been left unburied, but the Union soldiers lay as they fell, scattered over all the field in every conceivable position.  Many had been robbed of hats, coats, and shoes, and in many instances stripped entirely naked.  One thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine Union soldiers were committed to graves, the best, in view of their condition, that could be given them.³⁾History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-5, Samuel P. Bates, page 378

Next morning we went to work with a will, in squads of twenty men.  On the second morning I found a lot of bodies among some elder bushes.  In the hand of one of those dead boys was a letter; I stooped down to take it and when I got up, a big Colt’s revolver was pointed at me.  All the Rebel had to say was, “Drop that letter, you damn Yank,” and I did.⁴⁾My Early Life and The Civil War, Conrad Smith, 1920, pg 24

The companies of the 139th took turns at the work.  Adjutant Albert Harper wrote a letter describing the scene on one of his breaks:

I am at the ground formerly occupied as the Hospital… I am now waiting until one of the company that has been gone… to return and then to detail another company for the very unpleasant duty to bury the dead of last Saturday’s battle.  Within 50 feet of me lat the bodies of 14 soldiers who have been dead so long that they are perfectly black and alive with maggots – the smell was terribly offensive but now… I have become accustomed to it and do not smell it excepting an occasional puff when the wind blows.⁵⁾“The Crack Regiment of Pittsburgh”, The Men and the Community of the 139th Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1860-1865, Sam Bartlett, April 12, 1996, page 82

Robert Guyton, of Company F, wrote home on September 10th relaying that on the 5th they made a march of “about twenty miles through the most desolate piece of country that I have ever seen… with dead horses and broken wagons and ammunitions [sic]of war.”⁶⁾Bartlett, page 81  When he got to the battlefield Guyton reported that there was one particular place where “there was seventy-five [men] buried in one pile… the rebels had stripped all our men and they were mortified and we found that it was impossible to move them and we just covered them over with dirt as they lay.”⁷⁾Bartlett, page 82

Major General D. B. Birney

Despite being brand new soldiers and working under terrible conditions, Union General D. B. Birney was not happy with their work:

“I sent two officers and 50 men, with a wagon, loaded with shovels and picks to the Bull Run battlefield, to bury the dead.  It seems that the 139th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, detailed for that duty, contented themselves with throwing a few clods of dirt over the dead, leaving them uncovered hands and feet.  The slight rains have since uncovered them.”⁸⁾Official Reports, Series I, Vol. XIX, Part I, page 1091

In his report to the Surgeon General of the Army in Washington of September 11, 1862, Medical Inspector Richard H. Cooper remarked:

A few ambulances were employed in conveying stores and food to the several field depots, and fresh beef was sent to Centreville.  From that moment trains of ambulances, each with food and stores, arrived in rapid succession.  The supply was superabundant.  The bread, which otherwise would have spoiled, and one of the beeves, which I did not need, and which I could not feed, were given to the 139th Pennsylvania, which had come to bury our dead, and had failed to bring rations.⁹⁾Official Reports, Series I, Vol. 19, Pt. II, page 263

But Albert Harper believed that some good came from the work.  “Bull Run,” he wrote, “had had a good effect on our men.  They look on death as quite a common thing and say they are anxious for a fight.”¹⁰⁾Bartlett, page 82

The day we came on the field, the Rebels took our money, watches and other junk and told us we would get it back when our work was done, but when we came off the field, we were told that the company that had it had left the day before. We went back to Camp Arlington absolutely broke. It was twenty-seven miles from Washington to Bull Run, so that was a march of fifty-four miles and three hard days work with very little rest at night. The ground was plenty soft enough to sleep on when we got back to camp.¹¹⁾My Early Life and The Civil War, Conrad Smith, 1920, pg 24