Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  Perhaps the true answer to this question is inherent in Dorsey Pender’s remark in his June 23 letter—“It is stated on all sides that Hooker has a small army and that very much demoralized. The General says he wants to meet him as soon as possible….” General Lee’s contempt for Fighting Joe Hooker (“Mr. F. J. Hooker”), and for Hooker’s army, had only been reinforced by Chancellorsville; Lee never grasped how much Dame Fortune had shaped his victory on that battlefield. Jeb Stuart had no doubts at all that he could ride around or even through the hapless Yankees to achieve all General Lee wanted of him, to a harvest of glory, and Lee fully subscribed to his attitude. The very concept of Stuart’s expedition was fueled by overconfidence and misjudgment at the highest command level. As soldier-historian Porter Alexander judged the matter, “We took unnecessary risk, which was bad war, & the only bad war, too, I think, in all our tactics.” 20

  The first day of Stuart’s march, June 25, brought numerous and sobering surprises. The unexpected presence of Yankee infantry forced the troopers to detour through the more southerly Glasscock Gap in the Bull Run Mountains. Then they encountered the marching infantry of the Federal Second Corps. Efforts to knock a gap in the column with the horse artillery failed. Scouting during the day to the south and east revealed one road after another filled with marching Yankees. Stuart fell back to the mountains for the night.

  Lee’s orders stipulated that Stuart pass around the enemy without hindrance; surely here were hindrances enough to send him back to the main army. Stuart only became more determined; contempt for the enemy overcame reason. On the 26th he looped farther south by east until at last he found a clear path toward Fairfax Court House, Joe Hooker’s recent headquarters. In forty-eight hours Stuart had covered but 35 miles. Twice he sent dispatches to Lee reporting that the Federals were on the march. Neither courier got through. So far as the Army of Northern Virginia was concerned, Stuart’s cavalry had entered a total eclipse.

  At 3:00 A.M. on June 28 Stuart’s 5,000 horse soldiers completed a difficult crossing of the Potomac at Rowser’s Ford, 8 miles from Rockville, Maryland. They had managed to pass by the rear of the Federal army, but it had consumed seventy-four hours, and their appointed rendezvous with Ewell’s corps in Pennsylvania lay 70 miles to the north. Meanwhile, during those seventy-four hours, the campaign had changed dramatically.21

  THE CONFEDERATE INFANTRY’S crossings of the Potomac, at Shepherdstown and Williamsport, were occasions for celebration and symbolic observances. Bands played “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and “Dixie” and especially (and repeatedly) “Maryland, My Maryland.” The Rebel yell echoed from shore to shore. Randolph Shotwell of Pickett’s division watched the columns splashing through the waist-deep waters, with “colonels on horseback, flags fluttering, and the forest of bright bayonets glistening in the afternoon sun….” When General George “Maryland” Steuart reached the far shore, he dismounted and kissed the ground of his native state. This inspired another chorus of “Maryland, My Maryland.” During General Lee’s passage of the Potomac, a steady rain failed to deter a band from saluting him with “Dixie.” Lee was greeted as Maryland’s deliverer by a delegation of local ladies, who attempted to adorn Traveller with an enormous wreath. The horse balked, however, and it was agreed that one of the general’s aides would carry the wreath henceforth. 22

  Lieutenant Colonel Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, in America to observe the hostilities, had attached himself to the Army of Northern Virginia for the march north. Colonel Fremantle was struck by the confidence he found among all ranks. In his diary he recorded a conversation with two Louisiana officers: “At no period of the war, they say, have the men been so well equipped, so well clothed, so eager for a fight, or so confident of success….” As to their equipment, Fremantle remarked on the large number of wagons and cannon in every column he encountered that bore U.S. markings. It appeared that the Rebel army depended upon Washington as much as Richmond for its transport and artillery. And he questioned how well clothed the men were. Hood’s division of Longstreet’s First Corps, he noted, was composed in part “of Texans, Alabamians, and Arkansians, and they certainly are a queer lot to look at. They carry less than any other troops; many of them have only got an old piece of carpet or rug as baggage; many have discarded their shoes in the mud; all are ragged and dirty, but full of good-humour and confidence in themselves and in their general, Hood.”

  In an interview with Longstreet, the general explained to Fremantle that the army intended to live entirely off the enemy’s country, but no more than that: “Whilst speaking of entering upon the enemy’s soil, he said to me, that although it might be fair, in just retaliation, to apply the torch, yet that doing so would demoralize the army and ruin its now excellent discipline.” It proved quite true that the Confederates did not apply the torch to Pennsylvania, except in the case of certain military targets, nor did they leave a trail of deadly mayhem. Yet they laid a very heavy hand on the inhabitants—a far heavier hand, in matters of officially sanctioned confiscation, than anything the Army of the Potomac had inflicted during any campaign in Virginia.23

  Dick Ewell, playing the role of commissary for the expedition, performed efficiently and with all required promptness. On the morning of Monday, June 22, Robert Rodes’s Second Corps division, with Albert Jenkins’s cavalry in the van, led the historic march across the Maryland-Pennsylvania border into the enemy’s country. The brief dash of Jenkins’s cavalry into Chambersburg on the 15th had served to tip off the inhabitants as to Confederate intentions, and local merchants and bankers and farmers had rushed to hide their goods and valuables or to send them off to safer places. Still, when the Second Corps crossed into Pennsylvania a week later, there remained more than plenty to gather up in that bounteous land.

  Greencastle was the first Pennsylvania town called upon for tribute. The requisition list included 120 pistols, 100 saddles and bridles, 1,000 pounds of leather, 2,000 pounds of lead, 200 currycombs, 12 boxes of tin, and such foodstuffs as onions, potatoes, radishes, and sauerkraut. The town council threw up its hands at these demands, after which the Confederates simply collected all they found or were offered and marched on. That proved to be the pattern among the main Rebel army units—they seized whatever they could of their tribute demands, but without resort to violence. The majority of the reported depredations were committed by less disciplined cavalrymen.

  The outraged Lancaster Daily Express was not inclined to draw fine distinctions among these exemplars of Southern chivalry. By its way of thinking, “If highway robberies, profanity, vulgarity, filthiness and general meanness are the requisite qualifications for constituting a high-toned gentleman then indeed may the southern soldiers claim the appellation.”

  When a final tally was made of foodstuffs collected by the Rebel army over the course of two weeks in Maryland and Pennsylvania, it approximated 6,700 barrels of flour, 7,900 bushels of wheat, 5,200 cattle, 1,000 hogs, 2,400 sheep, and more than 51,000 pounds of cured meat. No count seems to have been made of horses seized, but they were a favorite target and totaled well into the thousands. These figures for the most part covered only booty gathered by officially designated foraging parties. An uncountable volume of good things to eat must be credited to an uncountable number of Rebel soldiers foraging on their own accounts.24

  Southern soldiers writing of the Pennsylvania campaign filled their letters with fulsome descriptions of the bounty they found in barns and smokehouses and kitchen larders; many of these men had never eaten so well in their lives. If this kept up, said General Ewell, “we will all get fat here.” Mississippian Edward Burruss wrote of McLaws’s division camping near Chambersburg, “where we lived on the very fat of the land—milk, butter, eggs, chickens, turkeys, apple butter, pear butter, cheese, honey, fresh pork, mutton & every other imaginable thing that was good to eat.” Georgian Joseph Hilton assured his sweetheart that he and his comrades “have inflicted serious injury upon the corpulent Dutch farmers
of that loyal state in the destruction of bee gums, fowls, eggs, butter, cherries, green apples, cider and apple butter. It will take at least three seasons to replenish the stock, besides playing sad havoc with their horses and cattle.” As Captain Benjamin Farinholt, 53rd Virginia, wrote his wife, with satisfaction, “Our Army will not cost the Confederacy a great deal as long as we remain in Pa.”

  After crossing into Pennsylvania, the men got into the habit of marching up to the front doors of farmhouses and townhouses and asking, with rifles in hand but politely enough, for something to eat. Cowed householders almost invariably accommodated the enemy. One of Harry Hays’s Louisiana Tigers discovered a particular source of their fright. As a housewife was preparing him a meal, she asked him his regiment. Seventh Louisiana, he replied, at which she collapsed in a faint. It seemed that the raucous 35th Virginia cavalry battalion, known as the “Comanches,” had earlier ridden through the town exclaiming that “the Louisiana Tigers would kill, burn and destroy everything and everybody in the country.” This was an extreme example of a widespread impression. In Greencastle, wrote North Carolinian Louis Leon, “We got the ear of one or two ladies, and after proving to them that we were not wild animals or thieves, they gave us what we wanted….“25

  This area of south-central Pennsylvania was largely settled by Germans, frugal, skilled farmers with enormous barns and intensively cultivated fields who (as a 7th Virginia soldier put it) “will do anything to save property or their hides.” During these crisis weeks they did not, on the whole, act the part of staunch Unionists. Colonel Fremantle considered them unpatriotic, in contrast to those in the Southern states he had recently visited. These Pennsylvania Germans, Fremantle wrote, “openly state that they don’t care which side wins, provided they are left alone.”

  That indifference was not limited to the invaded areas of Pennsylvania. Businessman George Fahnestock found a similar attitude in Philadelphia. “Thousands of able bodied young fellows are ever parading the streets, but no enlistments go with spirit,” Fahnestock entered in his diary on June 27. “These chaps can lounge and dress, swinging canes, or twirling moustaches, but they have no patriotism in their souls.” This apathy was in sharp contrast to the patriotic spirit Philadelphia had displayed nine months earlier when Lee first marched north. Now, as his second invasion pushed across the Mason-Dixon Line, militia recruiting continued to lag. War-weariness had taken its hold on the Keystone State. Just that spring the Democratic majority in the General Assembly had condemned Lincoln’s running of the war and called for restoring the Union through a constitutional convention. It appeared that General Lee had little to fear from any popular uprising in Pennsylvania. 26

  Edwin Forbes pictured Baltimore citizens barricading their streets on June 28 to repel Rebel cavalry raiders. (Library of Congress)

  What Lee’s invasion did trigger was a tidal wave of refugees flooding toward the Susquehanna and Harrisburg. Merchants bearing their goods, bankers carrying their deposits, farmers driving their stock, free blacks evading Rebel slave-catchers, families fleeing the imagined horrors of military occupation—all rushed to the capital from southern Pennsylvania. Not to be outdone, there was a simultaneous exodus farther northward by Harrisburg’s citizens.

  The city’s railroad stations, reported Charles Coffin of the Boston Journal, “were crowded with an excited people—men, women, and children—with trunks, boxes, bundles; packages tied up in bed-blankets and quilts; mountains of luggage—tumbling it into the cars, rushing here and there in a frantic manner; shouting, screaming, as if the Rebels were about to dash into the town and lay it in ashes…. There was a steady stream of teams thundering across the bridge; farmers from the Cumberland valley, with their household furniture piled upon the great wagons…; bedding, tables, chairs, their wives and children perched on the top; kettles and pails dangling underneath….” At a second Susquehanna bridge a massive traffic jam formed while the bridgekeeper insisted on collecting the regular toll. It took the intervention of General Couch to persuade the bridge company to waive the tolls in the emergency.

  Another witness to the chaotic scene in Harrisburg was a touring pianist named Louis Gottschalk. “The panic increases,” Gottschalk wrote. “It is no longer a flight—it is a flood…. Carriages, carts, chariots, indeed all the vehicles in the city have been put into requisition. The poor are moving in wheel-barrows. A trader has attached to his omnibus, already full, a long line of carts, trucks, buggies, whose owners probably had no horses…. The confusion is at its height. Cattle bellowing, frightened mules, prancing horses, the noisy crowd, the whistling locomotives, the blinding dust, the burning sun.“27

  The pursuit and capture of blacks, initiated by Jenkins’s cavalry in Chambersburg, continued as the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Pennsylvania line. In Mercersburg, for example, Professor Philip Schaff recorded in his diary that “public and private houses were ransacked, horses, cows, sheep, and provisions stolen day by day without mercy, negroes captured and carried back into slavery (even such as I know to have been born and raised on free soil), and many other outrages committed….“Dr. Schaff attributed these captures to the partisan bands of John H. McNeill and John’S. Mosby and the cavalry irregulars under John D. Imboden. In one instance, it is recorded that a dozen blacks were swept up in one of Mosby’s forays into Pennsylvania.

  Slave-catching was practiced by Confederate infantry as well. William’S. Christian, colonel of the 55 th Virginia in Harry Heth’s division of the Third Corps, wrote his wife from Greenwood on June 28, “We took a lot of negroes yesterday. I was offered my choice but as I could not get them back home I would not take them.” Colonel Christian went on to say, “In fact, my humanity revolted at taking the poor devils away from their homes,” and he turned them loose. Such gestures were apparently not widespread. Slave-catching, whether or not it was officially sanctioned, was without question widely and officially tolerated. Three days later, Longstreet’s adjutant, in a dispatch to General Pickett, made note that “The captured contrabands had better be brought along with you for further disposition.” The number of free or fugitive blacks condemned to slavery during these weeks can only be estimated, but widespread testimony suggests that it was in the hundreds. Of various ugly incidents stemming from Lee’s Pennsylvania invasion, this was surely the ugliest. 28

  On June 22, just beyond Greencastle, Robert Rodes was briefly alarmed by a rumor that General McClellan was approaching at the head of a 40,000-man army of home guards. The reality was a brush with a scouting Union militia company, a brush that cost Corporal William F. Rihl his life. Rihl, a Pennsylvanian, was the first to die defending his state against invasion.29

  By the 25th Dick Ewell had his three divisions at or near Chambersburg, and he called his lieutenants together to plan their marches over the next days. By its location, Chambersburg served as a strategic keynote in Robert E. Lee’s invasion scheme. At the heart of the bountiful Cumberland Valley, 15 miles north of the Maryland border, sheltered from Federal forces by South Mountain to the east, Chambersburg became the jumping-off point for the advance of Ewell’s Second Corps and the rendezvous point for Longstreet’s First Corps and A. P. Hill’s Third.

  At their meeting, Ewell instructed Rodes, followed by Allegheny Johnson, to continue north by east down the Cumberland Valley, by way of Shippensburg and Carlisle, toward Harrisburg and the Susquehanna. Ewell himself would travel with this column. Jubal Early’s division was to turn due east, cross South Mountain by the Cashtown Gap, and, passing through Gettysburg and York, reach the Susquehanna at Wrightsville, 25 miles downstream from Harrisburg. Early’s task was to cut the North Central Railroad at York, then burn the Columbia Bridge over the Susquehanna at Wrightsville, thus severing Hooker’s rail links with Harrisburg. His work of destruction finished, Early would rejoin Ewell at Carlisle to plan for the next move, against Harrisburg. Already Imboden’s cavalry had torn up the Baltimore & Ohio; occupying Harrisburg would add the Pennsylvania Central’s main lin
e to the list of destroyed Yankee railroads.30

  Jubal Early, “Old Jube,” fierce-minded and cantankerous, quickly set the tone for his march. At South Mountain he came upon the Caledonia Iron Works, the property of abolitionist Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. The works superintendent tried to convince General Early that Stevens only kept the unprofitable furnace and rolling mill and forge open as employment for the local working poor. “That is not the way Yankees do business,” Early scoffed, and ordered the place burned to the ground. He did so, he later wrote, because Congressman Stevens “had been advocating the most vindictive measures of confiscation and devastation” against the South. 31

  On the afternoon of June 26 the veteran 35th Virginia cavalry battalion, the Comanches, leading Early’s column into Gettysburg, skirmished briefly with the 26th Pennsylvania militia. Recognizing how greatly they were overmatched, the raw militiamen promptly fled the scene. “The officers were running around waving their swords, shouting and swearing, but no one dreamed of obeying them,” a militiaman wrote; “the men … were falling in behind the fences, and others streaking off over the fields.” During the subsequent pursuit, twenty-year-old Corporal George W. Sandoe, of the local Adams County cavalry, was shot down and killed, becoming the first Federal soldier to die at Gettysburg.

  Several citizens, hoping to pacify the Comanches, unwisely offered them liquor. Professor Michael Jacobs of Pennsylvania College recorded the consequence: “The advance guard of the enemy, consisting of 180 to 200 cavalry, rode into Gettysburg at 3% P.M., shouting and yelling like so many savages from the wilds of the Rocky Mountains; firing their pistols, not caring whether they killed or maimed man, woman, or child….” General Early now rode into the town to levy his tribute—7,000 pounds of bacon, 1,200 pounds of sugar, 1,000 pounds of salt, 600 pounds of coffee, 60 barrels of flour, 10 barrels of onions, 10 barrels of whiskey, 1,000 pairs of shoes, and 500 hats; or, alternatively, $5,000 in cash. The town fathers, pleading poverty, opened the stores to the invaders, but few of their demands could be met. “Some horses were stolen, some cellars were broken open and robbed, but so far as could be done, the officers controlled their men, and all those in and around the streets behaved well,” a Gettysburg woman wrote. The following morning, after paroling their militia prisoners, the Rebels set off eastward on the turnpike to York.32