He was rejected for combat duty in the latter war due to his advanced age, but he served as a teamster in support of the Union Army.

[4] On the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863, Burns took up his flintlock musket and powder horn and walked out to the scene of the fighting that morning.

His somewhat peculiar dress consisted of dark trousers and a waistcoat, a blue "swallow tail" coat with burnished brass buttons (as would have been seen on a well-to-do gentlemen four decades prior), and a high black silk hat, from which most of the original gloss had long departed, of a shape to be found only in the fashion plates of the remote past.

[6] Despite his skepticism about the request, Chamberlin referred him to the regimental commander, Colonel Langhorne Wister, who sent the aged Burns into the woods next to the McPherson Farm, where he would find better shelter from the sun and enemy bullets.

[8] He fought beside these men of the famous Iron Brigade throughout the afternoon, serving effectively as a sharpshooter, in one case shooting a charging Confederate officer from his horse.

[12] According to Burns's biography in Appleton's Cyclopedia, during the last two years of his life his mind failed, and his friends were unable to prevent his wandering about the country.

He was found in New York City on a cold winter's night in December 1871, in a state of destitution, and was cared for and sent home, but died of pneumonia in 1872.

Reacting to a proposal by a Pennsylvania chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans, the state enacted legislation to provide funds for a fitting monument.