Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
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Twenty-two miles to the southwest, the town of Gettysburg lacked even fortifications, much less a river to protect it. The town James Gettys laid out seventy years before had grown into the county seat of Adams County, with some 2,390 residents in 1860, along with piped water, gas-lit streets, two banks, a college, seven churches, a Lutheran theological seminary, three newspapers, and (as the cash cow of the town) ten carriage manufacturers employing “probably 200 skilled workmen.” The Gettysburg Railroad Company built a sixteen-and-a-half-mile railroad line to nearby Hanover in 1858, and (wrote one schoolgirl in an essay competition in 1860) “a new future was opened for our native village.” To the more sophisticated eyes of the antislavery journalist and novelist John T. Trowbridge, however, Gettysburg “is but a fair sample of a large class of American towns, the builders of which seem never to have been conscious that there exists such a thing as beauty.” The town “consists chiefly of two-story houses of wood and brick, in dull rows,” with “no special natural advantages” apart from its location at the intersection of “several important roads.”
The outlying farmers of Adams County were overwhelmingly German and Lutheran—Herbsts, Millers, Pitzers, Zeiglers, Leisters, Culps (or Kolbs), Benners, Houcks, Weikerts, Sherfys, and Klingels dotted the quilt of small-scale farm properties surrounding Gettysburg. Two of the town’s churches were Lutheran (a third was German Reformed, with the Calvinist Heidelberg Catechism pushing against the Lutheran Augsburg Confession), as was the seminary and Pennsylvania College, with its whitewashed cupola-crowned “Old Main” building. But the actual levers of economic and political power in Gettysburg belonged to its first-settler Scots-Irish Presbyterian minority. The borough council (all of five members and a burgess in the role of mayor) was dominated by McPhersons, McConaugheys, and Harpers, while the weekly newspapers—the Democratic Gettysburg Compiler, the Republican Sentinel and Star and Banner—were owned and operated by John T. McIlhenny, Robert Goodloe Harper, and Henry J. Stahle.
The ascendency of the town lived along two of the principal streets radiating from the central diamond, on Chambersburg Street (running west), where the violent abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens had opened his first law office back in the 1830s, and on Baltimore Street (running south). The far southern end of Baltimore Street descended (physically and economically) into a working-class shanty village of tanning yards and a hostler’s hotel, until the ground pitched up sharply to a broad, flat plateau where a new town graveyard, the Evergreen Cemetery, had been laid out in 1855. From Cemetery Hill, a ridgeline snaked southward to a pair of desolate, upthrust granite hills, where students from Pennsylvania College went in solitude to practice “an elocutionary gamut” and “gestures that would be some what more graceful than the handle of the town pump in action.”9
Like much of the larger border region between slave and free states, Gettysburg leaned Democratic, and occasionally pro-Southern. The war “struck a blow at every manufacturing business in the county … because it cut off all Southern trade”—and it was for the sake of that trade that unhappy businesses in Gettysburg blamed Lincoln, not the rebels, for their trouble. At the beginning of the Civil War, the townspeople had rallied loyally to the Union, sending off the local militia company (the seventy-man “Gettysburg Blues”) in response of Lincoln’s first call for state militias in 1861. But the loyalties were not always uniform. Young Gettysburg men like Matthew Miller and Wesley Culp followed education and employers into Virginia and ended up serving in the Confederate Army, and frequent scares interrupted the first summer of the war in a town only seven miles from the Mason-Dixon line. The War Department had even considered establishing “cantonments” in Gettysburg and York, twenty-five miles to the east, and the 10th New York Cavalry had been garrisoned in Gettysburg in the winter of 1861–62 as a precaution.10
But nothing more than rumor came close to Gettysburg until the fall of 1862, when J.E.B. Stuart ran one of his notorious raids into the Cumberland Valley. Stuart actually came as close as Cashtown, eight miles west of Gettysburg in one of the principal gaps in South Mountain. But he had then turned away south and west to Fairfield, and galloped out of the ken of Gettysburg for what the town hoped would be forever. Apart from Stuart’s raid, the closest the war impinged on Gettysburg was the deep rumbling of artillery that could be heard from the battle of Antietam, ten months before this newest invasion. “No one had ever seen a Confederate,” wrote Leander Warren, a thirteen-year-old in 1863 living on Railroad Street, “and everyone imagined that they were wild men.”11
To the black population of Gettysburg, wild men, and worse, were exactly what the Confederates were likely to be. One hundred and eighty-six free blacks appeared on the 1860 census in Gettysburg, with another 1,500 scattered through Adams County. Slavery was abolished as an institution in Pennsylvania in 1780, but emancipation in the Commonwealth was to be gradual—all slaves were to be free by July 4, 1827—and there were loopholes in the statute which meant that as late as 1840 there were sixty-four black Pennsylvanians who were still legally chattels of their owner. But it hardly mattered whether Pennsylvanians were slow or fast about bringing in freedom; once free, whites had no intention of regarding blacks as little better than the same low-caste laborers they had been in slavery. The Scots-Irish McAllisters, who operated a mill south of the town, sheltered fugitive slaves, and a small knot of students at Pennsylvania College organized a clandestine abolitionist fraternity, the Beta Deltas, or “Black Ducks.” But abolition lecturers got cold receptions in Gettysburg, and even those Gettysburg whites who opposed slavery did so in the hope that emancipation would be at once followed by the colonization of all blacks to Africa.12
Gettysburg’s blacks had no one to look out for their interests but themselves, although in a few cases those interests had prospered in a modest way. Jobs were plentiful in Gettysburg and schooling free, and the hope they proffered balanced the risk of living so close to the upper boundary of slavery. The light-skinned Owen Robinson, who served as the groundskeeper for the Presbyterian church on Baltimore Street, “kept a little restaurant” at the corner of Washington and High streets, “where he sold oysters in the winter and ice cream in the summer,” and managed to become a “well-to-do Negro.” Basil Biggs had been a free black teamster in Baltimore until he moved to Gettysburg in 1858 so that his children could take advantage of Pennsylvania’s Free School Act. He farmed at first as a tenant and then bought a property south of Cemetery Hill in 1865. Abraham Bryan spent twenty years scrimping and saving as a “laborer” until he was finally able to buy a twelve-acre farm on the west side of Cemetery Hill. But the threat of the fugitive hunters always hovered over these small edges of ease. Owen Robinson always carried his free papers (dating from 1817, when he was emancipated in Maryland) around with him as legal insurance. Mag Palm, who rented a small house on Abraham Bryan’s farm, had nearly been carried off in 1860 by “a group of men” who hoped to sell her for “quite a profit.”
And as soon as Winchester fell and the Confederate invasion wave lapped up to the Pennsylvania border, Gettysburg’s blacks concluded to take no chances, gathered up their handfuls of belongings, and fled north and east toward Harrisburg and York. Matilda (or, as she was called by her family, Tillie) Pierce, a white girl living on Baltimore Street, remembered seeing black women “with bundles as large as old-fashioned feather ticks slung across their backs” hurrying out the Bonneautown road on foot, “crowding, and running against each other in their confusion.” One of George Arnold’s bank clerks, Samuel Bushman, also noticed the pathetic parade of blacks “on foot, burdened with bundles containing a couple of quilts, some clothing and a few cooking utensils … trundling along their little belongings in a two-wheeled handcart” or “driving a single sheep or hog or a cow and a calf.” Twelve-year-old Mary Montfort saw her mother’s hired help, Rebecca Johnson, pack up and leave: Yo ol’ Aunt Beckie is goin’ up into de hills. No rebel is gonna catch me and carry me back to be a slave again. Even as far east as Lancaster,
“every negro has left or is leaving the place.”13
It soon enough became the turn of white Gettysburg to panic, too. “We had often heard that the rebels were about to make a raid,” remembered Tillie Pierce, “but had always found it a false alarm.” What, asked one Gettysburg woman, “would the rebels ever want to come to Gettysburg for?” That question stopped being asked after Winchester, and after Curtin’s and Lincoln’s emergency calls. A fire in Emmitsburg, eleven miles south, touched off a crying panic that “the Rebels are coming and burning as they go.” The next day, eighty-three Gettysburg boys (including sixty-one students from Pennsylvania College) signed up as a company of “emergency militia” and took the train north to Harrisburg to be mustered in (as Company A of the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia). A staffer from General Couch, Maj. Granville Haller, arrived a day later to call a public meeting at the courthouse on Middle Street and “take into consideration the subject of placing the county in a state of military organization.”
A small company of horsemen more or less commanded by a thirty-three-year-old farmer, Robert Bell, was deputized to watch the roads around Gettysburg, reinforced by a company of the First City Troop from Philadelphia (a gorgeously uniformed team of what were otherwise purely ceremonial city militia). Day after day, there were repeated scares of the-rebels-are-coming. Major Haller became convinced that Confederate scouts were infiltrating the area, and on June 23rd, he wired Couch to ask for “a Regiment of Infantry” to “restore confidence and rally the people to arms.” Couch had little enough in the way of infantry to spare from defending Harrisburg, so he sent the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia, together with its Gettysburg company, off to Gettysburg. Six miles out, their train hit a cow and derailed.14
The cycle of alarm and reprieve soon began “to be an old story,” and in the town people “tried to make ourselves believe that they would never come.” But real danger was nearer than they expected. Dick Ewell’s third division, under the irascible Jubal Early, split off from Ewell’s advance up the Cumberland Valley on June 22nd. Early’s division (accompanied by Col. William French’s 17th Virginia Cavalry and Elijah White’s 35th Virginia Battalion for screening) hugged the western slope of South Mountain through the hamlets of Waynesboro, Quincy, and Mount Alto and then turned due east, heading for York and the bridges crossing the lower Susquehanna at Wrightsville. There, unless Robert E. Lee issued a recall order, Early (followed at some distance by Powell Hill) would cross the river and join with Ewell in taking Harrisburg.15
Square in Jubal Early’s path to York, however, was Gettysburg. The town’s only defense on June 26th were the six-day soldiers of the 26th Pennsylvania (who finally made it to Gettysburg on a second train that morning, to be greeted with a lavish breakfast), the Philadelphia cavalry troopers, Robert Bell’s home guard horsemen, and several of David McConaughy’s civilian scouts. The home guards had already traded a few shots with Early’s cavalry screen at Fairfield and the Monterey Gap, and Major Haller had set farmers to felling trees as obstructions on the road from Cashtown to Gettysburg. None of this was likely to do more than annoy Early’s 6,500 hungry, confident veterans, but Major Haller was determined to make at least some sort of flourish, and although it had now begun to rain, the 26th Pennsylvania and the gaggle of scouts, home guards, and the finely dressed troopers from Philadelphia marched sullenly westward, out the Cashtown Pike.16
Jubal Early took no more notice of what was reported as “a large force of Pennsylvania militia” than he did of the weather. Between noon and two o’clock, he sent one of his three brigades, under a grandiloquent Georgian, John Brown Gordon, straight along the Cashtown Pike to where the 26th Pennsylvania was deployed behind Marsh Creek, three miles from the center of Gettysburg, and then hooked his two other brigades and William French’s cavalry northward, to the left, along the Hilltown Road. The entire encounter could not have lasted more than twenty minutes. “The militia, who no doubt had previously resolved to die if need be in defense of their homes and friends,” wrote a sardonic Confederate staff officer, “changed their minds when they caught a glimpse” of Gordon’s infantry. The 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia broke and ran for their lives, some hoping to reach the train station in Gettysburg to make a quick exit eastward, others struggling north and east with French’s cavalry regiment in pursuit. The home guards also bolted back to the town, where Captain Bell told them to disband and fade back to their homes. Major Haller, the author of this little affair, took off in the direction of York, accompanied by the First City Troop in all their finery. All told, Gordon and French scooped up 175 prisoners; one of Bell’s home guards, George Washington Sandoe, was shot and killed by Confederate cavalry just south of Gettysburg, thus earning a fatal nomination as the first soldier (of sorts) to die at Gettysburg.17
The home guards were also the first to gallop through Gettysburg with the news that “the Rebels” were now indisputably coming. Miss Carrie Sheads’ girls school on the Cashtown Pike was dismissed and the girls sent running and crying into town, where they sought refuge in the lobby of the Eagle Hotel on Chambersburg Street. Hugh Scott, who operated the town telegraph office out of his parents’ home on Chambersburg Street, promptly disconnected the telegraph, strode out the door, and drove off frantically in the direction of York in a borrowed horse and buggy. Shelves in John L. Schick’s clothing store on the diamond had advertised a “great variety” of gloves, glasses, parasols, umbrellas, and the best “dress trimmings” at “prices to defy competition,” but on this afternoon the shelves had been swept clean and the stock sent off to Philadelphia.
Then, around four in the afternoon, Elijah White’s battalion of “Comanches” galloped wildly into town from the west, along Chambersburg Street, “yelling most unearthly, cursing,” noisily firing carbines and revolvers into the air “like so many savages from the Rocky Mountains” and “not caring whether they maimed man, woman or child; and rushing from stable to stable in pursuit of horses.” Doors slammed shut, window shutters closed, horses were rounded up off the streets, heads peered nervously out of second-story windows. They stalked into George Arnold’s Farmer’s and Mechanics Savings Institution and demanded that Samuel Bushman, the clerk, clean out the vault, and when Bushman rapidly explained that everything had been sent to Philadelphia by train for safekeeping, one “Comanche” threatened to “send me and the treasurer to Richmond.”18
Presently, along came Early’s infantry into town, slopping through the mud and drizzle, in line with Jubal Early himself, “tall and well-looking … with the stars of a major general decorating his collar, and a capacious brown felt hat, looped up at the right side, resting easily on his head.” Riding into the diamond, Early demanded to speak to “the mayor of your town,” only to be told that the town burgess, Robert Martin, had beaten a prudent path out of Gettysburg. Very well, what about the town council? David Kendlehart, the council president, had stayed put at his boot shop on Baltimore Street, and was pulled out to negotiate with Early. The brusque Confederate snapped off a list of requisitions—flour, bacon, sugar, coffee, salt, onions, hats, and a thousand pair of shoes. This was impossible, Kendlehart pleaded. “The quantities required are far beyond that in our possession.” Fine, replied Early, then we will take whatever we can lay hands on ourselves.
For the rest of the rainy afternoon, parties of Confederate soldiers ransacked “barns, stores and chicken coops” for everything from hatfuls of candy from Peter Winter’s candy shop on Chambersburg Street to horseshoes from the blacksmith’s shop behind Sarah Barrett King’s house. Some simply demanded to be fed. Others “had a pile of hats on their heads, looking comical, strings of muslin and other goods trailing to the ground” and “blankets, quilts and shawls … piled up on their horses.” John Wills, whose father ran the Globe Hotel, actually recognized one of Early’s staffers as a spy who had been earlier scouting the region to supply Jedediah Hotchkiss with mapmaking data. They did not look the part of either cavaliers or devils. They were �
�clad almost in rags,” wrote Tillie Pierce, and “covered with dust,” and prim Michael Jacobs, one of the five regular members of the Pennsylvania College faculty, was almost nauseated from their smell. But at least they did not “molest the women,” and the worst Jubal Early devised for a dispirited crowd of prisoners from the 26th Pennsylvania was a lecture on the folly of going so ill-prepared to war. “You boys ought to be home with your mothers,” Early snarled, “and not out in the fields where it is dangerous and you might get hurt,” and then paroled them.19
The carnival, punctuated by regimental bands thumping out “Dixie” “and other Confederate airs,” lasted till eleven o’clock, when the last Confederates staggered off to their bivouac northeast of the town. Early had no more time to spend looting, and since “I had no opportunity of compelling a compliance with my demands,” the next morning his division was up and on the road to York—although not before men of Gordon’s brigade had chopped down the town flagpole, burned the modest wooden bridge on the east side of town, and boasted that they intended “to remain all summer” in Pennsylvania and meant “to go as far as Philadelphia.” But most of them would have trouble just getting to York, since “the men having too free access to liquor, of which there were large quantities in Gettysburg, many of them were drunk,” and caused Early’s staffers “much trouble to make them keep up with the column.”
Those who weren’t drunk in Gettysburg soon had the opportunity elsewhere. Elijah White’s “Comanches” passed through McSherrystown, on the Hanover Road, and emptied a dry goods store of $400 worth of clothing and ten gallons of whiskey, then torched “the railroad buildings” at Hanover Junction “and a bridge or two south of it on the Northern Central.” As they continued eastward, the wide fan of looters and foragers discovered that advance parties of swindlers had been at work ahead of them. As soon as the Army of Northern Virginia crossed into Pennsylvania, “agents” of the shadowy underground Knights of the Golden Circle began circulating through Adams and York counties, offering “for von tollar” to induct farmers into the Knights, and show them the secret order’s “signs and grips” to ward off Southern plunderers. These “agents” were, of course, con men, and when farmers tried out “de grip, de passwords and everytings” on mystified Confederate soldiers, the rebels fell all over themselves with laughter—and took everything they could lay hands on.20