After the Battle of Gettysburg, New York Times war correspondent Samuel Wilkeson Jr. trudged through the rain-soaked Pennsylvania battlefield on a solitary quest. He was searching for his teenage son, Bayard, a Union lieutenant said to have had his leg blown off.

Wilkeson believed the defeat of the Confederacy was necessary to end slavery, but the human cost lay strewn before him. He found his son in the muck, and grief and duty melded into a singular force. Two days later, The Times published his eyewitness account, regarded as a singular piece of American reportage, lacing the intimate with the universal.

His dispatch, published July 6, 1863, may have informed the Gettysburg Address delivered four months later by President Abraham Lincoln. "My pen is heavy," Wilkeson wrote. A star reporter with connections to power, he had risen to Washington bureau chief for The New York Tribune before joining The Times. His wife, Catherine, was sister to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Chuck Raasch's 2016 book "Imperfect Union" chronicled the Wilkeson family's story at Gettysburg, noting Wilkeson cultivated access not only to record events but to shape them.