Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (21 page)

T
HE COLLAPSE OF
W
INCHESTER
into Dick Ewell’s hands on June 14th was the signal for Abraham Lincoln to issue a proclamation calling out 100,000 militia from
Maryland,
Pennsylvania,
Ohio, and
West Virginia “to serve for the period of six months.” It was obviously not a good sign: “Such a call surely would not have been made except under the pressure of a grave emergency,” speculated one Washington newspaper. Two new military departments were declared by the War Department, one to cover Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania (known as the Department of the Monongahela) and the other the Department of the Susquehanna for central Pennsylvania, with its headquarters at Chambersburg—although by the time anyone was able to do anything about it, Chambersburg was already in the hands of the Confederates.
¹

The Confederate crossing of the Potomac also poured a violent flood of panic northward through the Cumberland Valley to Harrisburg and then spilling east and south to Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. Anxious Northerners thought it made perfect sense for Lee to “make a bold push for Pittsburgh” and then to “strike across there and then to Cincinnati” while Union forces struggled to fortify the
railroad lines Lee would surely destroy in his wake. Every bulletin of Confederate advance over the next ten days generated fresh swells of fear and flight across eastern Pennsylvania and Maryland. All through the Cumberland Valley to the Susquehanna, “inhabitants who had scarcely decided whether war had broken out or not” now were “aroused to a sense of danger” by the prospect of “their cattle and horses flying southward, urged on by southern bayonets.” Pittsburghers began digging
fortifications on Mount Washington and “on the outer side of the Allegheny” River, and summoned “Colored Men of the City” to “turn out en masse” to complete them. In Baltimore, “they were expecting Lee to come in a few days. Every street was barricaded with large hogsheads filled with sand—just room in the middle of the streets for one vehicle to pass through, and the streets were full of artillery, all double-shotted at these barricades.” The Baltimore police impressed “about one thousand colored persons from different sections of the city” to shore up “the defensive works” of the city.

On the east side of the Susquehanna, “refugees from the seat of war … & other counties the other side of the river” choked the roads toward Philadelphia, camping “along the roads with horses, cattle & wagons loaded with grain and familys.” In Lancaster, “all business is suspended … Every negro has left or is leaving the place, and nearly every white person,” while the roads between the river and Lancaster were “strewn with citizens and vehicles, trudging along to the north and east.” The governor of
New Jersey angrily warned Lincoln that “the people of New Jersey are apprehensive that the invasion of the enemy may extend to her soil,” and the former Republican governor of New York beseeched Secretary of War Stanton to “take immediate measures for the defense of the harbor of New York.” Everywhere, gloated
Robert Kean, the chief of staff for the
Confederate War Department in Richmond, “Yankeedom is in a great fright at the advance of Lee’s army to the Potomac, and considers this part of
Pennsylvania south of the Susquehanna as good as gone.”
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Kean would have gloated still more had he been privy to the divided counsels that prevailed in Philadelphia, the second largest city in the country. As a commercial entrepôt with close economic ties to the South, Philadelphia had been “the great emporium of Southern commerce,” recalled
Alexander McClure. Although it had been the home of the earliest American anti
slavery society, in the election
of 1860 Philadelphia gave Abraham Lincoln only a token majority of 2,039 votes out of over 76,000. If “the Union is to be divided,” announced Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice
George Woodward, “I want the line of separation to run north of Pennsylvania.” To date, Philadelphia’s most significant contribution to the war had been its favorite son, George B. McClellan.
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But after the fall of Winchester, the City Council “suddenly discovered that the city was without protection.” Mayor
Alexander Henry called in the “lieutenants of the several Police districts” and deputized them to “enroll … volunteers … for city defense.” Stores were to be shut down “for the purpose of enabling their employees to drill,” churches were opened for congregations to debate “the plan best to be pursued, and their duty in this, our darkest hour,” and a city-wide patriotic rally convened on Independence
Square. But the recruiting details trudging through the near-empty streets “with drum & flag” were followed only by “a few ragged boys.” When Major General
Napoleon Dana arrived in the city on June 26th to take command of the
Military District of Philadelphia, he found only 400 Union soldiers on hand to defend the city (with another 600 reinforcements available from the ambulatory patients in the city’s military hospitals) and some rudimentary entrenchments. The money markets behaved accordingly: by June 12th, “the stock market was unsettled and irregular” and the price of an ounce of gold was pushing up from 141
³
⁄
₈
on June 13th to 147⅛ three days later. By the 30th of June, “a great depression of almost all securities” prevailed.
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Composure was also in short supply in Pennsylvania’s capital city, Harrisburg. Governor
Andrew Gregg Curtin was (like Lincoln) a lawyer and an old-line Whig who had gone over to the Republicans after the death of the
Whig Party in 1856, and been nominated and elected as a Republican in February 1860. He was a handsome and talented administrator who had kept the Commonwealth firmly aligned with Lincoln’s policies, and rallied to repeated calls on Pennsylvania for militia in 1861 and again in the fall of 1862. But Curtin was in political trouble now—one of the numerous political troubles Robert E. Lee was hoping to capitalize upon this summer—and even as the Confederates surged northward, Pennsylvania Democrats were in the process of nominating
George Woodward as Curtin’s challenger.

The prospect of a Confederate invasion only sharpened Curtin’s anxieties. Even before the fall of Winchester, Curtin nervously issued a call of his own for a “corps” of “emergency militia” for “the defense of our own homes, firesides, and property from devastation.” But, to Curtin’s embarrassment, the response was negligible. Lincoln’s militia proclamation on June 15th crossed wires with Curtin’s emergency militia call, and potential recruits were suddenly uncertain whether they were being mustered into state service or Federal service, how long they would be expected to serve, and who would be paying them. On June 26th, Curtin had to issue a second proclamation for 60,000 emergency militia, specifying that they would only be in state service for ninety days and begging Pennsylvanians not to “undergo the disgrace of leaving your defense mainly to the citizens of other States.” But by the 29th, there were only about 16,000 ill-sorted volunteers on hand to defend Harrisburg, and a “wearied and disappointed” Curtin seemed to a New York reporter to be “resigned to the fate that awaits the capital of the glorious old Commonwealth.”
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The truth was that more people were trying to get out of Harrisburg as refugees than to get there as its defenders. “People of the Keystone State,” exhorted the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
, with a deliciously satirical appeal to pure self-interest:

The American-born piano virtuoso
Louis Moreau Gottschalk arrived in Harrisburg as part of a concert tour he was taking through the North that season, and though he drew a surprisingly “respectable audience” to his performance, he was more entertained himself by the frantic rage of most of Harrisburg’s population to leave town. The scene “at the depots,” gibbered the
Washington National Intelligencer
, “was indescribable if not disgraceful. A sweltering mass of humanity thronged the platform, all furious to escape the doomed city.” The roads were packed with “carriages, carts, chariots … spring carts, trucks, buggies,” and even “wheelbarrows” were trundling out of the city, piled high with “trunks, boxes, bundles of clothes, furniture, mattresses, kitchen utensils, and even pianos,” a great deal of which soon ended up on the side of the road. In the state capitol, clerks “in their shirt-sleeves” hurriedly packed records, books from the state library, and portraits of former governors for shipment to safety.
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The solitary circle of calm in Harrisburg’s circus of terror was
Darius Nash Couch, who until May had been the commander of the
2nd Corps of the
Army of the Potomac and the army’s senior major general under Joe Hooker. A New Yorker by birth, Couch had been a classmate of McClellan’s at West Point and had served in the
Mexican War, but left the service in 1855 after a dispute with then–secretary of war
Jefferson Davis. A moderate pro-war Democrat, Couch had put a uniform back on and risen from regimental command to senior corps command at Chancellorsville. But Hooker’s erratic behavior at Chancellorsville convinced Couch that any further service under Hooker was futile, and on May 22nd he offered to resign in disgust. The president instead appointed Couch to take control of the newly created Department of the Susquehanna, effectively promoting Couch to Hooker’s equal.
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Couch arrived in Harrisburg on June 11th, finding little more on hand
than a hastily outfitted staff of worried civilian politicians and a temporary office in the state capitol. Unflappability was Couch’s long suit, and he at once signed up 3,000 workers to dig entrenchments, including “priests, pastors, rectors, ministers of all denominations,” who were soon “engaged in wheeling barrows full of earth and in digging pits for sharpshooters.” Once Dick Ewell’s corps occupied Carlisle on June 27th, Couch calmly confessed to Stanton that he fully expected the Confederates to “ford the river” either above or below Harrisburg.

He would not have to wait all that long to find out, either. On June 28th, Ewell’s small cavalry brigade (under Albert Jenkins), exploring routes for Ewell’s advance to the Susquehanna, brushed some of Couch’s militia out of Mechanicsburg, only seven miles from the river; the
14th Virginia Cavalry actually closed to within sight of Harrisburg from “a dominating hill” and an accompanying battery of horse artillery fired a few rounds in the capital’s general direction. Ewell was already preparing Rodes’ division to move out from Carlisle toward the Harrisburg river crossings. “We are here and the Yankees can’t run us away,” a Confederate surgeon wrote on the 28th. “I … suppose we will go to Harrisburg.” It might be fortified, and the militia “may make a stand there, but judging from the way they have been doing it is very doubtful.”
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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.”
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