Robert James Coffey, a career newspaperman and prolific writer of verse, was born on 14 April 1839 in a place, he later remembered, "Where the landscape is wild and grand; / In that heaven-blessed state of William Penn, /In the Valley of Cumberland." More precisely, he was born in the village of Cleversburg, a little southeast of Shippensburg. The son of James Coffey and his third wife, Eliza Savage Coffey, Robert (he was sometimes called "Rob") learned to work on his father's farm and in his sawmill, and as long as he lived he never ceased to remember his boyhood as a sort of idyll: "I see in the orchard behind the house / The apples ripe and rare, / The glossy plums, the luscious peach, / The golden quince, cherry, and pear. "
At nineteen Coffey became a schoolteacher in Sidetown, Pennsylvania, and the following year (1859), already beginning to embrace mobility as a way of life, he entered business with a partner in Shippensburg and proceeded to share the management of a number of general stores. Only a few months later, however, he was composing a "Farewell to Home: On Going West in the Year 1860." He returned home in 1861, apparently resumed his business interests, and continued to pursue them until the Fall of 1862, at a time when the Confederate army threatened invasion. Both Coffey and his partner signed on with Captain David Middlecoff's Independent Cavalry Company, which was Shippensburg's contribution to the Pennsylvania militia. Formed in response to Governor Curtin's urgent call for fifty thousand fighting man, these forty-six "Minute Men of the Border" were organized on 15 September 1862, only to be discharged on 24 September- after Lee's advance had been stopped during the bloody Battle of Antietam, about fifty miles from Shippensburg.
When Coffey's military commitment was terminated, and despite the mounting violence of the time, he headed West again in May, 1863. This time he traveled through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Minnesota-and did not return to Pennsylvania until August. Thus he happened to be in Minnesota, far from home, when he heard more bad news: in June and July of 1863, Confederate forces invaded Cumberland County twice, occupying Chambersburg on 15-1 7 June and then Coffey's home town, Shippensburg, on 23 June. Not until the end of June did they withdraw in order to join the concentration of General Lee's forces at Gettysburg. As Coffey puts it,
In the year sixty-three came General Lee
With his army vast and grand
Almost one hundred thousand men
To the valley of Cumberland.
But soon came a sound o'er the mountain top,
The booming of heavy guns,
And Gettysburg soil drank up the blood
Of thirty thousand sons.
About a year later, on 20 August 1864, in the village of Lessburg in Cumberland County, Coffey was himself formally mustered into service. The next morning he took a train for Camp Curtin in Harrisburg, and before the week was over he was assigned to the 202nd Pennsylvania Volunteers. A more mature and better-informed man than many of those with whom he would serve, he quickly became one of Co. G's four sergeants.
When it is considered by the highest and best authorities that it requires three years to transform a recruit into a good cavalryman, it can be understood why at the opening of the Rebellion, the authorities at Washington hesitated about organizing a mounted arm of the service.