Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Few things puzzled these rebels more than the indifferent response they received from Marylanders along their routes, given that Marylanders were, after all, Southerners and denizens of a slave state. Robert Emory Park, a private in the 12th Alabama, thought that “a majority of the people” were “unionists.” Or at least the males seemed to be: in Hagerstown, one of Ewell’s North Carolinians thought that “here the men greeted us very shabby, but the ladies quite the reverse.” It was “the ladies” whom the 5th Alabama noticed “wav[ing] handkerchiefs & some Confederate flags,” and young Park was delighted the next evening to be invited to a party, where he heard “young ladies just from a Pennsylvania female college … play and sing Southern songs.” The weather posed disappointments of another sort, since it began raining on June 19th, and then turned into full-blown thunderstorms till the 22nd, drenching the men in Longstreet’s corps “in the hardest rains I ever saw, pouring down during the entire night.” The “disagreeable” rain started again on June 24th, and Powell Hill’s corps had to march through Hagerstown in the downpour, the bands of the North Carolina regiments “playing lively tunes” but sans ladies’ handkerchiefs.7

  The next day brought a more sobering event. A deserter from the 18th Virginia, John Riley, had been recaptured, tried, and sentenced to death, and on the evening of the 25th the men of his brigade (in Pickett’s division) were paraded in a three-sided square near Hagerstown to witness a twelve-man firing squad execute “the poor unfortunate.” Charles Blackford noted in a letter to his wife that “there were four like executions, I was told, in Rodes’ division,” and another in Longstreet’s corps, in the 56th Virginia on June 26th. The effect on any others contemplating an unplanned flight homeward, as one observer wrote dryly, “was beneficial.” In Longstreet’s other divisions and in Hill’s corps, the execution news was anesthetized with a liberal “quantity of whiskey,” and “about one-third got pretty tight.” In Carnot Posey’s brigade of Mississippians, “nearly all the brigade” was “more or less inebriated and boisterous,” while a captain in the 17th Georgia estimated that it took only “thirty minutes” before “Hood’s division presented the liveliest spectacle I ever saw.”8

  Morale in an army is a compound of attitudes—satisfaction with food, clothing, equipment, assigned duties; confidence in the competence and empathy of officers; a fairly enforced code of behavior; and a level of training, individually and as a group, that imparts a sense of the reliability of others in a tight place. With so many parts, morale in an army quivers like the needle of a delicate compass, and any failure to keep the needle steady, especially in democratically minded armies of short-term volunteers in the nineteenth century, could be fatal to the army’s survival. Robert E. Lee, like other professional soldiers of his generation, feared the ease with which morale could disintegrate in an American army, and how little could be done by officers to restrain it—in fact, how little restrained the officers were from becoming the cause of disintegration themselves. If the soldiers were ill-fed and ill-clothed, or if their officers were characterless clowns, or if their training had never succeeded in making them think of themselves as a unit rather than as freebooting individuals, then the evaporation of morale would only be quicker. Lee had nearly come to disaster at Antietam largely because so much of the Army of Northern Virginia had evaporated into wholesale straggling and left him with perilously reduced numbers to face the Yankees; he could not afford to let that happen this time.

  The problem was that freebooting was going to be difficult to resist. As the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac, it was putting itself beyond “the last point where we will be in railroad communication with Richmond.” The Confederates would be fed and clothed only by what they carried in their wagons—and by what they could take from the countryside. “Beef we can drive with us,” Lee warned Dick Ewell, “but bread we cannot carry, and must secure it in the country.” If that taking was not carefully controlled, it would encourage the taking of everything, and soon the army would become so lawless that it would be unable to fight.9

  Click here to see a larger image.

  For the moment, however, the morale of the army, as it crossed the Potomac and headed for Pennsylvania, seemed to soar. Rodes’ division, still in the lead of Dick Ewell’s corps, crossed the Maryland-Pennsylvania state line on June 22nd, marched through Middleburg, and occupied Greencastle without any opposition. Longstreet and Hill closed up behind Ewell, and as they crossed the state line, too, a triumphant sense of hilarity broke out. In John Bell Hood’s division, the stone boundary marker beside the road set off waves of rebel yells. In the Texas brigade, one extrovert staged a little pantomime, pivoting out of column to hail his captain, William Martin: “Captain, I have fallen back for reinforcements. I want you to help me capture the State of Pennsylvania.” Martin laughed indulgently. “All right, sonny. Show me the Keystone and we’ll smash her into smithereens.” Linking arms, they stepped over the state line and “invaded the United States.” In Powell Hill’s corps, three men of the 9th Alabama stopped at the state line, straddled it “with one foot in Maryland and the other in Pennsylvania,” and drank a toast from their canteens.10

  They might well drink a toast to Pennsylvania, although they did not mean this as a compliment to its people. “Such long head men I never saw,” wrote a Georgian in Hood’s division, “and the features of the women would have made vinegar ashamed of itself for sourness.” Another Georgian thought “the Girls of Pennsylvania are the ugliest set of mortals I ever saw—longfaced, barefooted, big nosed, and everything else that it takes to constitute an ugly woman.” Even the “well-dressed ones … showed unmistakable signs of lowness and vulgarity.” But the richness and beauty of the countryside offered such a contrast to the overworked and war-ravaged farmlands of the South that nearly every Confederate who wrote about the Gettysburg campaign felt compelled to mention it. “Country fine, houses & barns good. The crops look well,” scribbled a soldier in the 2nd Mississippi. One man in the 4th Texas wrote more expansively that this was “the most beautiful country I ever beheld … the entire landscape covered with the most magnificent farms, orchards and gardens, for miles along the road.” “We saw the finest kind of wheat all along the road, & some fields of Oats, rye & barley,” wrote Samuel Pickens of the 5th Alabama. “Also the richest fields of Clover & hay grasses. This is a great country for small grain & stock.”

  One feature in particular took Southerners’ notice, and that was the comparative smallness of the landholdings, as defined by the endless interweaving of miles and miles of wooden fences. In Virginia, the 500-acre plantation was the rule, making up by acreage what the thin soils of the South could not produce by their own strength; in Pennsylvania, wrote Charles Blackford, the soil supported “small farms divided into fields no larger than our garden and barns much larger than their houses.” All of it—“orchards, meadows, fields of grain”—was surrounded by “substantial fences” and “above all the mighty barns, which are the glory of the Pennsylvania farmer.” These Southerners scarcely reflected upon a larger reason for the miniature checkerboard of Pennsylvania’s farmland. The state had mandated the gradual emancipation of its slaves in 1780, which drove downward the size of farmholdings that could be managed by a single owner or tenant. Lee’s soldiers also missed the significance of the multitude of “substantial fences” needed to enclose those small free-soil farms; these fences would play a role of their own in defeating slaveholding’s bid for independence on a hot July afternoon not much more than a week away.11

  What delighted the eye of an invading army might also destroy it, if the men in that army enjoyed plundering those delights enough to lure them from the march, from roll call, from fatigue duty, from the commands of officers, from the soldiers’ communion with one another. On June 21st (while Longstreet’s and Hill’s corps were still waiting to cross the Potomac), Robert E. Lee issued the first of two general orders, demanding that “no private property shall be injured or destroye
d by any person belonging to or connected with the army.” Only authorized staff personnel, whether commissary, quartermaster’s, or medical staff, would “make requisitions … for the necessary supplies” on local authorities or inhabitants for “necessary supplies,” and they were to pay “the market price for the articles furnished,” with receipts issued in duplicate.

  In years to come, this order would be the source of limitless satisfaction to Lee’s veterans, who would point to it as evidence of the South’s gentlemanly and civilized restraint in the making of war. What was forgotten was that Lee’s restraining order only offered Confederate paper money for the requisitions; that those who were disinclined to take Confederate paper would be offered receipts and the supplies taken anyway; and that anyone trying to “remove or conceal property necessary for the use of the army” would have it confiscated outright. This did not provide as much security as it seemed for the farmers and shopkeepers whose inventories were thus rendered fair game. But as the order was passed down from corps to division headquarters throughout the army, it did create a disciplined process which would keep the ordinary Confederate soldier from deputizing himself as his own chief provider. It was not plundering that was undesirable, but uncontrolled plundering that led to uncontrollable soldiers sprawled across the countryside. After all, Lee had already given orders to strip the Baltimore & Ohio workshops at Martinsburg of “tools, machinery, and materials much needed by the railroads of the Confederacy,” and one of his principal rationales for coming north was to feed his army on the vast buffet of Pennsylvania farming. Plunder could be good—provided it was regulated.12

  Keeping up that caveat seems to have been harder than anyone expected. “General Lee has issued orders prohibiting all misconduct or lawlessness and urging the utmost forebearance and kindness to all,” wrote an Alabamian. But no sooner had the army crossed the state line than the march descended dangerously close to a free-for-all. After all, “the rebel officers and men” declared to anyone along the way who would listen that “they had been fighting this war long enough in the South, and they were going to Pennsylvania to make it the battle-ground”—which included “taking what they pleased without paying for it.” An apprehensive Dorsey Pender wrote to his disapproving wife on June 28th, “Until we crossed the Md. Line our men behaved as well as troops could,” but now “they have an idea that they are to indulge in unlicensed plunder.” Once encamped, rebel soldiers dispersed to “forage after chickens, eggs, butter, vegetables, apple butter, honey, etc.” Lee might issue “orders against … unauthorized taking,” admitted one artillery lieutenant, but “our boys lay waste the land on the sly.” Jeremiah Tate marveled in a letter to his wife that “when we first arrived in Pennsylvania we saw a fine time we got evry thing to eat that hart cood wish, such as milk and butter apple butter chickens honey molases sugar coffee tea chease and Whiskey wines of all kindes, everything was cheap all it cost us was to go after it.” Soldiers could get away with this because all too many officers preferred to invent excuses for ignoring Lee’s order rather than invite outright disobedience. In Evander McIvor Law’s Alabama brigade, “there were ninety-five sheep skins in Law’s camp.” When “someone spoke to” Law about the suspicious skins, “he said that no man’s sheep could bite his men without getting hurt.” John Bell Hood was even more indulgent: “Boys, you are now on the enemy’s soil, stack your arms and do pretty much as you please.”13

  Once Ewell’s corps reached the town of Chambersburg, the pillaging became even easier, given the concentration of stores and warehouses in a town of 5,000 inhabitants. At nine o’clock on the morning of June 24th, Robert Rodes’ division pulled itself together sufficiently to parade into Chambersburg, with a band tooting a reprise of “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” Dick Ewell, who had been traveling in a carriage with his crutches and prosthesis, set up command at the town bank, where he presented his formal requisition for supplies: 5,000 jackets and trousers, 50,000 pounds of bread, 500 barrels of flour, 5,000 bushels of grain, and so forth. A hastily assembled civilian committee tried to bargain with Ewell, but to no avail. Squads of Confederate soldiers began breaking open locked-up stores, and Chambersburg’s “grocery, drug, hardware, book and stationery, clothing, boot and shoe stores were all relieved of most of their remaining contents.” Ewell’s stepson, Campbell Brown, and another veteran staffer did some private foraging of their own in Chambersburg’s shops, since Brown’s mother had sent him off with a list of goods to pick up in Pennsylvania. Ewell’s chief engineer also had a list thoughtfully provided by his wife, which included “about $100 worth of calico, wool delaine, bleached cotton, hoops, gloves, bread, gingham, pins &c &c” to be piled onto empty wagons heading south for resupply.14

  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.”15

  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.”16

  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.17

  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.18