by Quint, Ryan;
The burning of the town looked almost apocalyptic to one sketch artist, who reproduced the scene for Harper’s Weekly. (hw)
By the time the Union forces were withdrawing from Chambersburg, McCausland held a meeting with General Johnson and his staff in the house of Henry Greenwault, a mile of west of town. McCausland relayed Early’s orders to Johnson: the town was to be ransomed or burned to the ground.
At around 5:30 a.m., the two guns of the 2nd Maryland (Baltimore) Light Artillery fired a salute to announce the arrival of the Confederates in Chambersburg. Although the shells didn’t cause any deaths or immediate damage to the area, one of the three shots struck the house of Jacob Eby on New England Hill, going through one window and passing out another on the opposite wall.
Around the same time, the Confederate troopers entered the downtown area of Chambersburg and began to disperse throughout the town itself. Many civilians were shocked when Confederates troopers barged into their shops and businesses to take whatever they wanted. Around 6:30 a.m., McCausland went to the Franklin Hotel for breakfast and did very little to control the “progress” his men were making through the town.
As soon as word leaked out about the ransom demands, the officials for the Bank of Chambersburg could not be found. Some civilians realized the gravity of their situation and tried to pay out of pocket, but the town as a whole was only able to amass about $50,000. When the ransom could not be met, McCausland ordered Johnson, who ordered Gilmor, to burn the town.
Squads of Confederate troopers spread out to fulfill the orders. “They would burst in the door with iron bars or [a] heavy plank, smash up any furniture with an ax, throw fluid or oil upon it, and apply the match,” one observer recalled. A Confederate soldier remembered “the shrieks of women and children” and that “Cows, dogs, and cats were consumed” by the flames.
While the soldiers burned the town, they also looted extensively. Some, after entering homes, “would present pistols at the heads of inmates, men and women, and demand money or their lives.” Brigadier General Bradley Johnson even criticized some of the Confederate troopers when he wrote, “Every crime in the catalog of infamy has been committed, I believe, except murder and rape.” Johnson continued, “Highway robbery of watches and pocket-books was of ordinary occurrence.”
Nearly 2,500 Chambersburg residents were affected by the plundering and destruction. A total of 278 residences and businesses, 98 barns and stables, and 173 outbuildings were destroyed. The losses totaled nearly $1.63 million dollars. Some reports say there were five free blacks who were kidnapped as contraband during the raid to be sold back into slavery, but no source can be found to support that claim. There is also no substantial record of any civilians being killed or wounded during the raid and burning. Major A. Caulder Bailey, the adjutant of the 8th Virginia Cavalry, was the only Confederate soldier killed during the incident. After the burning commenced, a drunken Bailey was shot dead by a bakery store owner after the officer became separated from the rest of his unit.
A memorial and fountain stand at the center of the Chambersburg town square as a testament to the town’s compelling Civil War history. (cm)
McCausland’s force withdrew from Chambersburg around noon on July 30 while nearly one-third of the town remained in flames in the 88-degree heat. The Confederates soon headed back south into West Virginia by crossing the Potomac River at the McCoy’s Ferry.
Upon hearing about the burning of Chambersburg, Union Maj. Gen. David Hunter reinforced General Averell’s depleted forces with another cavalry division and sent the horse soldiers after the withdrawing Confederate raiders. Averell’s forces eventually caught up with McCausland’s and Johnson’s forces at the town of Moorefield, West Virginia, on August 7. Averell’s smaller force of 1,760 men surprised and smashed the combined force of 2,800 under McCausland. Federals captured more than 38 officers and 377 enlisted men, severely crippling the Confederate cavalry presence in the Shenandoah Valley for the rest of the war. It was considered the first instance of Union retaliation for the burning of Chambersburg, as many of the Confederates responsible were killed or captured at the battle of Moorefield.
Overall, the burning of Chambersburg was destructive, and many of the townspeople felt the Union high command was partially responsible for the incident since they did not protect them as well as they should have. However, Union forces— such as the Army of the Shenandoah under Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan—used Chambersburg as a rallying cry as they wrought destruction through the Shenandoah Valley for the rest of the year.
AVERY LENTZ graduated from Gettysburg College with a Bachelor’s Degree in history and from Shippensburg University with a Master’s Degree in applied history. He has worked as a park historian for Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park and a guest services assistant for the National Museum of Civl War Medicine.
Constructed by Wallace in 1895, this impressive building became his personal study. Today it is home to the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum. (loc)
The Literary Legacy of Lew Wallace
APPENDIX F
BY RYAN T. QUINT
It can generally be said for the commanders during the Civil War, that conflict became the defining feature of their lives. Some of them, of course, continued with prosperous lives after the war, and some, like Ulysses S. Grant and his acclaimed memoirs, published to great acclaim. None of them, however, reached the level of Lew Wallace. Tens of millions have read Wallace’s works or seen famous film adaptions of the books, and for them, Wallace’s Civil War experience is but little more than a footnote.
How is it that a general who fought one of the most important defensive stands of the entire war is more known for his literary works?
Wallace’s interests in writing started in the wake of a devastating moment in life: the death of his mother when he was only seven years old. With his father serving as the governor of Indiana and later as a prominent judge, Wallace found himself largely left to his own devices. First he poured his energy into painting, but he was soon faced, as he later wrote, by his father who lectured, “I suppose you don’t want to be a poor artist—poor in the sense of inability as well as poverty.” Wallace nonetheless continued to draw and paint for his entire life—as evidenced by sketches done of the conspirators in the Lincoln Assassination trials, sketches that he drew to keep himself occupied in the more mundane moments—but as a young man, he needed to find a new vocation.
As one of Wallace’s earliest biographers, Irvin McKee wrote, “now sixteen, [Wallace] turned to the novel.” The teenaged Wallace threw himself into a project he entitled “The Man-At-Arms: A Tale of the Tenth Century,” a project that, when he finished it, totaled some 250 pages of narrative. According to Wallace, “With respect to quality . . . was sophomoric; for the sentimentalism which ruled me in those days was of the fervid kind . . . the kind to keep a boyish imagination in lurid glow.” The manuscript of the book, tucked away, “was somehow mislaid” and was never published.
As Wallace wrote “The Man-At-Arms,” he also poured over the recently published Conquest of Mexico by William Prescott. Detailing Hernán Cortes’s campaign against the Aztec civilization, Prescott’s history captured Wallace’s imagination, providing inspiration to the first work of Wallace’s that would be published, The Fair God. Service as a young volunteer officer in the Mexican War in the 1840s gave Wallace a chance to see some of the sites he had read about in Prescott’s book, and he added to and revised The Fair God throughout the 1850s and ’60s, culminating with the book’s publication in 1873.
Lew Wallace, much younger than most people are used to seeing him, at about 21 years old—around the same time he served during the Mexican War. By this point in his life, he had already started to experiment with novel writing, a road that would lead to Ben-Hur. (lw)
The Fair God did moderately well for Wallace, but it was a train ride in 1876 that would fundamentally change his life, and that of American literature, forever. Making his way to a pol
itical convention in Indianapolis on an overnight train, Wallace was hailed by Robert Ingersoll. Ingersoll, a Civil War veteran like Wallace, invited Wallace to conversation, to which, as long as Ingersoll “let me dictate the subject,” Wallace acquiesced.
Sitting down, Wallace asked, “Is there a God?” It was a question that the nationally famed agnostic Ingersoll, was probably readying himself for. Having filled lecture halls, Ingersoll had made a name for himself as one of the nation’s most prominent thinkers on religion. A key point here is that Ingersoll identified as an agnostic, not an atheist, as he is sometimes misattributed. Looking to engage Wallace, Ingersoll answered the initial inquiry, and every one of Wallace’s follow-ups with “I don’t know: do you?” Playing the devil’s advocate, Ingersoll sought to get Wallace thinking about a statement that Ingersoll went back to time and time again in his speeches on religion: “We do not know.”
With all of Wallace’s questions answered with another question, Ingersoll set into his argument. “He was,” Wallace later wrote, “in prime mood; and beginning, his ideas turned to speech, flowing like a heated river.” Two hours later, when the train arrived at Indianapolis, Ingersoll and Wallace separated, leaving Wallace bewildered by the agnostic’s rhetoric.
“I was in a confusion of mind not unlike dazement,” Wallace wrote later, recollecting his walk through Indianapolis’s streets, almost in a trance. “Was [Ingersoll] right? What had I on which to answer yes or no? He had made me ashamed of my ignorance: and then . . . as I walked on in the cool darkness, I was aroused for the first time in my life to the importance of religion.”
Robert Ingersoll, the famed agnostic who sat with Wallace on a train and discussed religion. Out of their conversation, Wallace set to re-examining perceptions about religion. Ingersoll had served in the Civil War as a colonel of cavalry and had even fought at Shiloh, the same battle that proved so troublesome for Wallace. Ingersoll died in 1899. (loc)
Wallace set himself on answering Ingersoll’s questions.
The end result made him internationally famous: the 1880 publication of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
Wallace had already started work on the novel while he served as the territorial governor of New Mexico years earlier, but the train ride with Ingersoll gave Wallace a renewed energy. With the protagonist Judah Ben-Hur, Wallace introduced the reader to the life of Jesus Christ; Ben-Hur’s life of vengeance for being wrongly accused is replaced by forgiveness as the titular character continues to meet with Jesus. In writing his magnum opus, Wallace had his answer for Ingersoll, resulting in “a conviction amounting to absolute belief in God and the divinity of Christ.”
A month into his administration, President James A. Garfield read Ben-Hur and worked to get a position for Wallace in the Ottoman Empire. On July 2, 1881, Garfield was shot by a mentally unstable Charles Guiteau and died on September 19, eleven weeks later. The railroad station Garfield was in when he was shot was later razed and is today the site of the West Building for the National Gallery of Art. During the Civil War, Garfield had served as Chief of Staff for William Rosecrans during the Chickamauga campaign in the fall of 1863. (loc)
Ben-Hur swept the United States within just two years of publication. Copies flew off the shelves, earning Wallace, by 1886, $11,000 annually in royalties. Within six years, Ben-Hur could barely be kept in stock, selling about 4,500 copies a month.
Ben-Hur made it into the hands of the nation’s most powerful people and opened more paths of advancement for Wallace. On April 19, 1881, President of the United States James A. Garfield wrote a letter to Lew Wallace. Addressing his letter “Dear General,” Garfield scribbled, “I have this morning finished reading Ben-Hur and I must thank you for the pleasure it has given me.” Only a little more than a month into his administration, Garfield found himself overwhelmed by the rush of the presidency. “With this beautiful and reverent book you have lightened the burden of my daily life,” he praised.
Garfield went further than just praising Wallace—he offered him a job. A jack-of-all trades similar to Wallace, Garfield wondered if a book similar to Ben-Hur and its teachings of Christianity could be done for Islam. With that as an objective, Wallace found himself appointed as the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. In 1885, at the end of his term, Wallace set himself to writing the book Garfield had envisioned. Wallace had published, in 1893, The Prince of India: Or Why Constantinople Fell. Garfield never got to the see the book, having been slain by an assassin’s bullet (and questionable medical care) in 1881.
The former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, read Ben-Hur and sat up through the night to finish it with his daughter. (loc)
President Garfield was not the only noteworthy reader of Ben-Hur. Even prominent foes of Wallace’s read his work, perhaps most notably Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy. By candlelight Davis and his daughter, Winnie, read the novel “until daybreak,” but even that was not good enough for Davis, who “did not go to rest until he had finished it.”
The Prince of India added to Wallace’s bibliography, but did not prove to be as popular as Ben-Hur. By the end of the nineteenth century, Ben-Hur replaced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the best-selling American novel of the century, and it held onto the title until the 1930s when it was replaced by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.
Ben-Hur proved an easy choice to be adapted to the screen, and film producers clamored for the rights to Wallace’s creation. In 1924 producers got the rights to Ben-Hur for the astronomical sum of $600,000 (equivalent of $10 million in 2008), and the ensuing silent film cost another $3.9 million to bring the epic to life. More famously, in 1959, with Charlton Heston in the lead role, audiences were reintroduced to Judah Ben-Hur in one of the most successful films of the twentieth century. A 2016 big-budget remake introduced twenty-first century moviegoers to the character.
Retiring to Crawfordsville, Wallace lived out the rest of his life, writing to the very end. His massive two-volume Autobiography was still unfinished when he died in 1905. Looking over his pages to finish it for him posthumously, Wallace’s wife Susan found the last section he had written about: the battle of Monocacy.
A poster for the 1959 film adaption of Ben-Hur starring Charlton Heston. Costing more than $15 million, the epic became famous for its scenes depicting the climatic chariot race and naval battles. The film easily recouped its production costs and is ranked 72nd on the list of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Great American Films. (loc)
Touring the Battlefield
The best place to start touring the Monocacy battlefield is at the National Park Service Visitor Center, located at 5201 Urbana Pike, Frederick, Maryland 21704. Visitors should pick up one of the park’s maps. This book does repeat some of the park’s stops, but it adds some of its own, as well. Inside the visitor center on the ground floor are rest rooms, a water fountain, and a bookstore. An excellent gallery upstairs includes a fiber-optics map that portrays the fighting on July 9, 1864.
GPS: 39°22’625” N, 77°23’737” W
TOUR STOP 1: Monocacy Battlefield Visitor Center
This area looks much the same as it did in 1864: open, rolling countryside. On July 9, 1864, this became the staging area for Maj. Gen. Stephen D. Ramseur’s division of Confederate infantry for its attacks against the Federal skirmish line that took shelter near the Monocacy Junction of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The single cannon next to the visitor center approximately marks the location of some of the artillery belonging to Lt. Col. William Nelson, whose battalion included the first Confederate cannons to fire during the battle. Leading from the parking lot is a quick loop trail that brings you down to the location of the Federal skirmish line along the railroad tracks. Please do not cross the railroad tracks as the line is still very active with freight trains.
In your car, turn left onto the Urbana Pike and drive 0.31 miles. Turn to your right onto the National Park access road to the Best farm. Follow the road to the par
king area.
GPS: 39°22’14’1” N, 77°23’55’0” W
TOUR STOP 2: Best Farm
The main home of the Best farm dates to the very late eighteenth century and was owned by the Vincendiere family—French refugees who fled Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) during the Haitian Revolution. Settling outside of Frederick, the Vincendieres named their home L’Hermitage. They brought along some of their slaves from Haiti, and evidence points to the Vincendieres as being ruthless slave masters—a man traveling by the property in the early nineteenth century wrote that, from the Georgetown Pike (modern Urbana Pike) he could see “farm instruments of torture, stocks, whips, etc.” The National Park Service has recently, through archaeology, unearthed a row of slave houses near the Urbana Pike.
Opened in 2007 to replace a previous contact station, the Monocacy National Battlefield Visitor Center is the best place to start one’s trip around the battlefield. Exhibits such as Lew Wallace’s coat (right) adorn the walls. (cm)(cm)
During the Civil War, the Best family lived on the property, from whom it gets its name today, but they did not own the land or home; rather, they rented from Charles E. Trail, who lived in nearby Frederick. In 1862, during the Maryland campaign that culminated at the battle of Antietam, a copy of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders 191 were lost on the Best farm and subsequently discovered by Union soldiers from the 27th Indiana Infantry.
On July 9, 1864, Confederates used the Best farm as both an emplacement for artillery pieces as well as a nest for sharpshooters. The cannon near the main home represents a section of Cpt. John Massie’s Fluvanna Artillery. Union gunners in the Baltimore Light Artillery opened fire on the Confederate sharpshooters located on the Best farm, burning down a barn (see Chapter Seven).
