Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (16 page)

Confiscation soon degenerated into robbery. “A group of ‘Louisiana Tigers’ ” stopped men on the streets and demanded their hats and boots; the pastor of the
German Reformed Church,
Benjamin Schneck, “one of the best citizens of the place,” was stripped of his gold watch and $50 in cash. Soon enough, the robberies turned into simple vandalism. Several Confederates broke into the
Odd Fellows Hall and “cut to pieces and destroyed a greater portion”
of the lodge’s regalia, “broke open several of the desks and drawers, and mutilated everything they could lay their hands on.” A “respectable” soldier in the 15th Georgia said “the streets of Chambersburg are strewn with gloves and fragments of goods.”
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From there, the vandalism veered into kidnapping of a very specific and lucrative sort. In 1860, some 1,700 free black people lived in and around Chambersburg, Mercersburg, and Greencastle. A few were fugitives from
slavery, and “free” only in fact, and for them the descent of the Army of Northern Virginia on south-central Pennsylvania was the beginning of “a regular slave hunt.” But not even those blacks whose families had been free for generations in Pennsylvania expected the Confederate armies to spend any time distinguishing between who was legitimately free and who was not. Free black civilians working under Union Army contracts, as well as
“contrabands” who found refuge within Union Army camps, were all alike to the rebels, and when Harpers Ferry was overrun by Confederates in 1862, black fugitives “who thought … the hour of freedom” had come, and who “had gathered under the flag which to them was its starry symbol,” were roughly lined up along with the garrison’s black teamsters, cooks, grooms, and ostlers, while Confederate soldiers and officers strolled down the lines, free to claim any of them as “their property.”
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A year later, the same opportunity presented itself in Chambersburg. When Albert Jenkins’ rough-hewn cavalrymen made their initial foray into the Cumberland Valley in mid-June, “they took up all [the people of color] they could find, even little children, whom they had to carry on horseback before them” to be claimed or sold in the slave markets in Richmond. One prosperous Chambersburg farmer,
William Heyser, was shocked to discover that the Confederates had taken with them “250 colored people again into bondage.” The infantry of Ewell’s corps who followed on June 24th were even less fastidious about sweeping up any black people they could lay their hands upon. George Steuart’s
Maryland brigade, looping westward to Mercersburg and McConnellsburg, threatened to “burn down every house which harbored a
fugitive slave, and did not deliver him up within twenty minutes,” and in Mercersburg twenty-one blacks were rounded up and driven south, including “two or three” who “were born and raised in this neighborhood.” A local magistrate who protested taking “free negroes” was abruptly told, “Yes, and we will take you, too, if you do not shut up!” This might, in the larger scheme of the campaign, have seemed a waste of military time, but slaves were a valuable commodity. As one farmer was told by Confederates who were escorting “four wagon loads of women & children between Chambersburg & the Maryland line,” even the children “will bring something.” This was, after all, an army whose cause was inextricably bound up with the defense of
black enslavement. To have left Pennsylvania’s blacks in undisturbed freedom would have been tantamount to denying the validity of the whole Confederate enterprise.
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Robert E. Lee was not amused by this boys-out-of-school behavior. It belied his own self-cultivated image of the dispassionate master-general, not to mention indulging precisely the crimes for which he had long indicted his Federal opponents in
Virginia. When he arrived in Chambersburg with Longstreet’s corps on June 27th, Lee issued a second general order, chiding the army for “instances of forgetfulness, on the part of some,” of his first directive against looting. His principal concern, however, remained the discipline of the troops, not the offense of pillaging or kidnapping. He was perfectly happy to see
John Imboden’s horsemen round up “the cattle and sheep you have sent to the Valley,” even while Imboden continued to tear up the
Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad, and urged Imboden to “make every exertion to collect all the supplies you can.” Undirected thievery was what worried Lee. “It is absolutely necessary … to our salvation that our army not become demoralized,” wrote Longstreet’s senior division commander,
Lafayette McLaws, “which would be the case should our men be permitted to rob and take at pleasure.” It would bring down “disgrace” on the army, and become “subversive of the discipline and efficiency of our army, and destructive of the ends of our present movement.” But even wanton looting sometimes passed without Lee’s rebuke.
Taliferro Simpson of the 3rd South Carolina (in Longstreet’s corps) remembered that “Lee seemed to disregard entirely the soldiers’ open acts of disobedience.” Simpson saw the henhouses of a roadside farm being emptied by “a party of some thirty or forty men” when the “old lady” of the house caught sight of Lee and “bawled out in a loud voice, ‘Genl Lee, Genl Lee, I wish to speak to you sir.’ ” But Simpson saw Lee only raise his hand and say, “Good morning madam,” and ride on.
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But even if Lee had wanted to intervene, he simply did not have the staff needed to review and regulate every infraction of his anti-plundering orders. “Our staff organizations were never sufficiently extensive and perfect to enable the Commanding General to be practically present every where,” complained Porter Alexander years after the war. On the Peninsula, Lee complained angrily that McClellan “will get away because I cannot have my orders carried out.” And once again, the proof was in the numbers. Partly because of the statutory restraints invented by the Confederate Congress and partly as a matter of his own personal taste, Robert E. Lee functioned on a daily basis with only six personal staffers—his chief of staff,
Robert Chilton (who wrote out the fatal “lost orders” before Antietam); his adjutant and principal aide,
Walter H. Taylor; his two military secretaries,
Armistead Lindsay Long and
Charles Marshall; the army’s inspector general,
Charles Venable; and
Thomas Talcott, Lee’s aide and later engineer.
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There was also a somewhat larger general staff—Lee’s personal spiritual friend, the elderly
William Nelson Pendleton, who served as chief of artillery;
James Lawrence Corley, the army’s quartermaster general; Col.
Robert G. Cole, the army’s commissary general; the chief medical officer,
Lafayette Guild; Col.
Briscoe Baldwin, Lee’s chief ordnance officer; and his engineers, Col.
William Proctor Smith and Capt.
Samuel R. Johnston. But that, together with two companies of escort cavalry and the clerks who assisted the staff, was all that Lee relied upon to administer the Army of Northern Virginia. Their average age was only thirty, and their burdens were not light. “I am harassed by an accumulation of miserable paper calling for my attention,” wailed Walter Taylor. No one in those circumstances had time to chase after hat stealers and watch stealers, leaving
Lafayette McLaws to reflect years later that “The great defect in our army was in staff organization & its practices.”
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Lee and his shorthanded staff had larger matters to occupy them in Pennsylvania. Thus far, Lee’s invasion had moved almost effortlessly across two major rivers, through two small battles, and through three states, and he was pleased enough with this remarkable degree of success to authorize the next stage of the invasion
and
to renew his pleas to
Jefferson Davis to release the two brigades around Richmond, under
Micah Jenkins and
Montgomery Corse. Just as he had predicted in May, Federal “apprehension for the safety of Washington and their own territory” had caused the
Army of the Potomac to fall back from the
Rappahannock riverline, while other Federal invaders were being evacuated from coastal
North Carolina and from
Kentucky. This was the moment, Lee politely suggested, for Joe Johnston to take the Confederate armies in the West on the offensive, and magnify the pressure on the Lincoln government by invading Kentucky, perhaps even
Ohio. In fact, it might not be a bad idea if Davis called up the Confederate forces
Pierre Beauregard was sitting upon down in the Carolinas and bring them up to Culpeper, “even in effigy,” to distract the Army of the Potomac still further. (Both Beauregard and the skeptical Secretary Seddon at once began stuffing Davis’ incoming mail with notices of renewed Federal activity in the Carolinas and on the
James River peninsula.)
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Lee’s most immediate concern was the next phase of the Pennsylvania invasion, and on June 22nd he was satisfied enough with the Army of Northern Virginia’s progress to instruct Dick Ewell to begin moving his corps north in a great right-turning arc, up through the Cumberland Valley and along the line
of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, until by June 28th he would be poised on the western bank of the Susquehanna, opposite Harrisburg. Longstreet and Hill would continue to move up behind him, but it would be up to Ewell to determine the exact “progress and direction” of his forces, just as it had been at Winchester. And like Winchester, “If Harrisburg comes within your means, capture it.”
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Using Albert Jenkins’ cavalry brigade as his forward screen, Ewell decided to duplicate the Winchester strategy—as well as lighten the traffic burden of his corps on just one road—by splitting his corps. Rodes’ and Allegheny Johnson’s divisions, together with the corps wagon trains, would move north and east through Shippensburg and Carlisle toward Harrisburg.
Jubal Early’s division, however, would split sharply to the east, passing through the cover of
South Mountain at the
Cashtown Gap and following on a straight line from there to York and the Susquehanna, where he could then cross the Susquehanna, turn north, “levy a contribution on the rich town of Lancaster, cut the [Northern] Central Railroad, and threaten Harrisburg from behind and below while General Ewell was advancing against that city from the other side.”
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This time, there was no Federal cavalry and no Brandy Station to threaten the Confederate line of march. Apart from the out-of-reach wig-wagging of Union signalers on the peaks of South Mountain and small parties of mounted observers, “there were no indications of any enemy near us and the march was entirely without molestation.” There had been a brief skirmish with a detachment of New York cavalry just north of Greencastle on June 22nd (which resulted in the death of one New Yorker, the first fatality of the invasion in Pennsylvania, Corporal
William H. Rihl), and some minor bushwhacking by cleaned-out farmers determined to revenge themselves on Confederate stragglers. Otherwise, Ewell’s path to Carlisle was largely unobstructed, and having covered nearly fifty miles in two days, Rodes’ division marched in late on the afternoon of June 27th, with the band at the head of the division column thundering “Dixie.”
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Carlisle happened to be a minor homecoming for Dick Ewell: the town had been a military settlement even before the American Revolution, and the
U.S. Army had maintained a barracks, a depot, and a cavalry training school, where Ewell, as a newly coined second lieutenant, had his first posting. (
James Longstreet had also been assigned there in 1848; so had Robert E. Lee’s nephew
Fitzhugh Lee, whom the Carlisle newspapers would shortly be denouncing as an “incarnate fiend.”) The citizens of Carlisle, represented by two members of the town council,
William N. Penrose and
Robert Allison, went out of their way to assure Ewell that there would be no resistance.
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The
Carlisle Barracks consisted of thirteen buildings, including five two-story,
wide-verandaed barracks, an enormous U-shaped stable, and a post hospital. But since its main purpose had for years been to provide training for recruits, it was protected only by an eight-foot-high wooden
fence, and the Barracks’ commandant, Capt.
Daniel H. Hastings, had already evacuated the entire establishment of 268 men across the Susquehanna to Harrisburg two days before. Ewell, with three of Rodes’ brigades, camped in the Barracks, while
George P. Doles’
Georgia brigade took possession of Carlisle’s other major institution,
Dickinson College, and Rodes’ last brigade camped two miles outside the town.
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Carlisle was, by all accounts, the most comfortable billet the Confederates would enjoy in the entire campaign. “This city is certainly a beautiful place,” marveled one North Carolinian, “we were treated very good by the ladies.” The next day, a Sunday, the Reverend
Beverly Tucker Lacy, the fierce-faced
Presbyterian clergyman who served as Stonewall Jackson’s unofficial chaplain-at-large, conducted services at the Barracks and preached “an excellent sermon” for the troops, while the Methodist chaplain of the 30th
North Carolina,
Alexander Davis Betts, preached in the afternoon and “baptize[d] five by pouring.” The invaders “were bountifully supplied with provisions and forage by the citizens,” who surprised the men of Rodes’ division by looting the abandoned barracks themselves of “a sofa … chairs, tables &c” and “plunder of all sorts.” One Virginia artilleryman strolled into Carlisle, “had ice cream,” and stopped to visit “a residence near the barracks,” where he had seen “some nice girls.” But there were also holdouts. An Alabamian took himself into town and found dinner at the
National Hotel, where “an unfriendly and scowling crowd of rough-looking men” looked on silently. “The dinner was quite a poor one,”
Robert Emory Park wrote, “and was rather ungraciously served by a plump, Dutchy looking young waitress.” He paid her “in Confederate money.”
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So much of this invasion had gone so well that even Robert E. Lee was becoming more relaxed and talkative about his plans. To
Jefferson Davis, he hinted that if “I can throw General Hooker’s army across the Potomac and draw [Federal] troops from the south,” it might prove the saving of the western Confederacy. Once he had forced the Yankees to relax their grip on Vicksburg and
Tennessee he could then “return” to Virginia at his leisure. “Our true policy is, as far as we can, so to employ our own forces as to give occupation to his at points of our selection.” That much, Lee knew, would satisfy Davis and Seddon. But if Harrisburg should turn out to be as ill-defended as Winchester had been (and Ewell’s scouting reports on June 29th all confirmed that it was), then Ewell was to ford the Susquehanna; Longstreet would move up behind Ewell; and A. P. Hill would follow
Jubal Early’s division through York and cross the Susquehanna to cut “the communications of Harrisburg
with Philadelphia, and to co-operate with General Ewell, acting as circumstances might require.” The weeping and anxiety this would induce across the North would have vast political consequences in the fall elections in
Ohio and Pennsylvania, and if those states moved into the Democratic column, their governors would have the leverage to demand that Lincoln open negotiations.