Confederate Invasion of the West Shore - 1863

Preface

With Civil War papers already a white plague, why add to the epidemic? The answer involves mention of another disease, local pride. But should we be proud or not?  No one in a full 100 years has marshalled the facts of 1863, when the Confederate army rolled to the West Shore of the Susquehanna River.

This study proceeds from the assumption that local pride must be fed fact or it will grow fat on fiction. And most of the facts are scattered. Take Oyster Point, then and now. Then it was a fact that alarmed the Secretary of War and the President of the United States. It was the tip of a dagger aimed at the vitals of the nation.  It was the front line of the war to thousands of subscribers to the New York Times, the Philadelphia Press and Harper’s. Now scarcely a soul either locates the Point with precision or tells its story with perception. The savants do little better— a recent doctoral dissertation identified the Point as a headland projecting into the waters of the Susquehanna.

If the facts here do come through to the readers, it is because so many delightful people insisted and assisted: Christine Myers Crist, R.W. Crist, Hubertis Cummings, William C. Halfpenny, Charles Coleman Sellers and Raymond A. Wert. Three others gave graciously of their talents: William A. Hunter in guidance, W. S. Nye in insight and John E. Myers in encouragement.

But the book is written for a very little guy who lived with the project during its two years and his. Jeff tramped the forts, gazed wide-eyed through long interviews with old-timers and shared his room with a father and a typewriter while note became paragraph and scribble became citation.

Chapter One

In 1863 the forward splash of the Confederate highwater dropped on Lowther Manor, ancient name for that part of Cumberland County immediately west of Harrisburg. Despite two weeks of flood warning, Pennsylvania was not prepared.

Typically swept from his footing was a resident of the Manor, W. H. H. Smith, who was visiting his brother-in-law, George Oyster, at a farmhouse which once stood facing west on what was later named County Club Road, one-half mile north of Oyster Point. Like so many of his Cumberland County neighbors he had enlisted and had been sent out of the area. Un­ like others in June 1863, he happened to be home on furlough. "I was sitting on the back porch,” Smith remembered, “leaning against the house about half asleep when I was discovered to be in the rebels’ hands.  They said, ‘Yank, what are you doing here?’ They took me up the pike about one mile west from there to where my Uncle John Sherban lived [on the hill over Orr’s Bridge] to the headquarters of the Confederate General Jenkins ...”,¹

William Henry Harrison Smith, more than one likes to admit, typified the people left in the counties along the Susquehanna and bordering the Mason-Dixon Line in June 1863—at home slumbering in the sun blandly accepting the invasion. With the highwater mark of the Confederate advance being set there on a porch, one mile and three furlongs from the capital of Pennsylvania, some of the community slept. With one third of Lee’s army in Cumberland County, much of Central Pennsylvania leaned on its pitchfork, raised the price of its shoddy and apathetically watched the militia of New York rush to the defense of the capital of the Keystone State.

The threat of war, of course, was not new to the Valley. The previous autumn units designated the "1^st” through "25^th Emergency” Regiments had rushed to Harrisburg. Places of business had ceased functioning in mid-afternoon so that employees could drill.

Engineers in 1862 had drafted elaborate plans for a chain of forts linking the Conodoguinet and Yellow Breeches Creeks, and certain work may have been begun on the ground to dig trenches on the height of land at the western end of the river bridges.² Tenting there, a Pennsylvania Zouave regiment found war on its campground one foggy night when a Cumberland Valley Railroad train ploughed into a shifting engine and spilled fifty-eight casualties into the murk. Otherwise, the war did not reach the area, and the militia returned home safely to await the paychecks which never came.

When June 1863 began, the war was still long marches from Harris­ burg. For a fortnight the Valley farmers eagerly watched the hay ripen in a rising market spurred by army buying. Meanwhile, they took fresh peas and butter at eighteen cents per pound into Carlisle Market House.³ Across High Street Sheriff Thomas Rippey checked a cell where he held a female infanticide.⁴ On to the east where the High became the Mud Road, Henry Irvine watched other young women of Irving Female College, in Mechanicsburg, prepare for their final examinations in geometry, mental and moral philosophy.⁵

Five miles farther the Mud Road, here known as Trindle Spring Road, joined the Carlisle and Harrisburg Turnpike at a V-shaped intersection which after 1814 became known as Oyster Point for the Tavern operated there by the Oyster family.⁶ Here began White Hall, named for the large Academy which until 1863 had operated in the little village. To the delight of Polly Oyster and the fifteen other households, Professor David Denlinger had recently switched to merchandising and opened a general store in the Academy building. The hamlet ended three hundred yards farther east at the square home built by Robert Whitehill at modern 19th Street.⁷ After a mile of open country the Turnpike emptied into Bridge­ port, fourteen buildings at the western end of the Camelback Bridge to Harrisburg.⁸ Here an old sawmill had just been renovated for six families to occupy, and a tavern operated.

Across the covered bridge lay a quiet capital hardly aware of the few soldiers garrisoned beyond its northern boundary at Camp Curtin. The news in the city was the market building which William Verbeke was constructing in West Harrisburg nine blocks south of the Camp and the lantern show offered nightly to the east at the "State Lunatic Asylum.’’

Into Harrisburg on June 8 slipped Frank Blair, former member of Andrew Jackson’s "Kitchen Cabinet’’ and now presumably the harbinger of information which would soon affect every citizen, from W. H. H. Smith to Sheriff Rippey, but particularly old Polly Oyster and Professor Denlinger. Blair conferred in Harrisburg with its most famous citizen, the ousted Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, before hastening back to Washington.⁹ Two days later orders sped out of the War Department creating a new Military Department of the Susquehanna with boundaries extending from the peak of the Alleghenies at Johnstown eastward to the Delaware River. Appointed commander was Major General Darius Nash Couch, a West Pointer with the fervent wish to serve, but not under Joseph Hooker, commander of the Army of the Potomac.¹⁰ Couch carried instructions to expand his forces from the 250 invalids convalescing at Harrisburg and York into an entire army corps. With him came only paper power, no manpower. The War Department chose to keep its experienced troops with Hooker squatting stubbornly between Lee and Lincoln.

Arriving in Harrisburg June 11, Couch conferred with Governor Andrew G. Curtin and departed for Chambersburg to establish a field headquarters athwart the presumed invasion route. He needed no special insight into the mind of Lee to know that the Confederates would use the Cumber­ land Valley to invade the North. In fact, both North and South had already made extensive preparations for such an eventuality. In 1861 engineers employed by the Philadelphia Home Guard had surveyed the Susquehanna Region thoroughly, assuming that the enemy would eventually encounter that area after their ride up the Valley. In their study of the river barrier from Duncannon to the Chesapeake Bay, the engineers concluded that the most feasible place to cross would be at Harrisburg, where there were two bridges and a ford. They observed: "The Cumberland Valley Turnpike is a fine, wide road. ... The Ford at Harrisburg was two feet deep at low water with excellent, smooth, sandy and stone bottom. ... It starts from a red stone on the [East] shore a little below the railroad bridge and makes a direction for the lower part of Forster’s Island. After the Island the crossing is almost dry shod...”¹¹

General Lee, utilizing an agent, Jedediah Hotchkiss, who knew the Valley intimately, as early as February 1863 directed the preparation of maps of the approach route which would lead him to the nearest Northern capital, Harrisburg. Hotchkiss pieced together several maps from civilian sources, including the H. F. Bridgens Company 1858 Map of Cumberland County, so that the Confederate troop commanders rode into the North with documents showing both the road network and the stream patterns, as well as the location of virtually every farmhouse and black­ smith shop.¹²

The route, therefore, was assumed by both sides. The surprise came in the timing. Writing about the crossing of the border, the editor of the Greencastle Pilot explained that the people had become accustomed to the warnings and were banking on the experience of the previous year when Longstreet had taken a full week to march the twenty-four miles from Frederick to Hagerstown. When he looked up from his printery stone and saw Lieutenant General Richard Ewell riding past in a carriage reading a map and "looking pale and delicate, ’’ the editor was flabbergasted at the pace of the advance.¹³

President Abraham Lincoln reacted June 15 to the crossing of the Mason-Dixon Line by issuing a proclamation which called the Pennsylvania militia into the national service. Simultaneously he appealed to the Governors of New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Ohio and West Virginia to provide help. Then, as if to confound the President and justify the hesitation of the Pennsylvania farmers to enlist, the threat disappeared.

In its first phase, thus, the invasion was but a two-day cavalry raid directed by Brigadier General Albert Gallatin Jenkins, whose brigade of men had been detached from "Jeb’’ Stuart’s command and given to Ewell as a reconnaissance force. Jenkins on June 15 rode north through Chambersburg to Scotland, half way to Shippensburg, where he burned a bridge to hamper the ability of the defenders to reinforce any troops which they might send toward the border via the Cumberland Valley Railroad. Hearing that forces were approaching on the 17th, Jenkins faded back almost to the State line. He need not have withdrawn. The units consisted only of the ambulatory cases among Couch’s 25 0invalid troops, who limped as far as Shippensburg, and Stanwood’s "Regulars.”¹⁴ The latter were "regular” only in that they had enlisted for long-term service but were still recruits awaiting uniforms and assignment at the Carlisle Barracks.

In New York the organized militia regiments missed the news of Jenkins’ withdrawal. Mobilization machinery had begun cranking out men for Pennsylvania and worked without ceasing.15Within forty-eight hours two regiments were in Harrisburg; within ten days, twenty regiments and 12,091 men.¹⁶ First to bounce into the capital, via the Camden and Am­ boy and the Pennsylvania Railroads, were the two National Guard regiments which became the First Brigade. Both had turned out for the Battle of Bull Run two years before, where the London Times correspondent spoke the highest praise of the performance of one. Both retained a substantial nucleus of veteran soldiers. Both drilled regularly in their New York City armories. The 8th Regiment, known as the "Washington Grays’’ since 1847,¹⁷ dated from 1808 and continued into the 1950’s as the 258th Field Artillery Battalion.¹⁸ The 371 men who made the trip to Harrisburg June 17 served under Colonel Joshua M. Varian, who initially doubled as Brigade commander. Distinguishing the 71^st Regiment were their blue uniforms and black belts. They made a point of enlisting for ninety days rather than the thirty of other regiments. Colonel Benjamin Trafford commanded the 737 men who ultimately reached Cumberland County.¹⁹

On June 18 the people of Harrisburg looked out their shop windows to see the 23rd Regiment of New Jersey march into the southern end of town. Their Colonel, E. Burd Grubb, formerly of Lancaster County, supervised their digging "Fort Yahoo’’ in Harris Park, before they de­ parted for home. Their three days’ service in Central Pennsylvania was reported in their regimental history as an unpleasant experience be­ cause of the cool attitude of the civilian population.²⁰

June 19 saw a Brooklyn Regiment, the 23^rd New York State National Guard, Colonel William Everdell commanding, disembarking in a rain storm which soaked the gray uniforms on the march to the heights above Bridgeport.²¹ Delayed because they had a band and were paraded in Philadelphia, was the sister regiment, the 22^nd, which arrived June 20. This unit was under the command of 33-year-old Colonel Lloyd Aspin wall, who had helped to organize it two years before with the assistance of a $16,435 contribution from several banks and insurance companies. The 22nd wore army blouses and trousers with a gray cap, army brogans and Enfield rifles bought in England.²²

Arriving with the 22^nd were their brigade mates, the 11^th and 37^th Regiments. The former was an artillery command without artillery, and the latter a unit of infantry 693-strong under Colonel Charles Roome. The 52nd and 56th soon arrived to be brigaded with the 23rd. A dozen other New York units came to Harrisburg, but those who served on the West Shore battlefront were the 8^th, 11^th, 22^nd, 23^rd, 37^th, 52^nd, 56^th and 71^st, all National Guard.²³

Couch first manned the forts above Bridgeport but later ordered units such as the 12th, 13th and 28th Regiments into Perry County to do picket duty and to man defenses that had been hastily dug at the two railroad bridges which spanned the Susquehanna at Marysville. Here marching over and sleeping on Perry County shale were hundreds of city boys, including the fanatic Boston Corbett, who later shot John Wilkes Booth. Perhaps he got satisfaction in strutting the streets of Duncannon, home town of the father of the vice president of the Confederacy, but his chance of confronting a Southern soldier there was very small, although not non-existent.²⁴ Unofficial accounts tell of the presence of scattered Southern squads combing the area, the official reports told of "bushwackers under former officers defending the Perry County mountain passes.” The 65th and 75th Regiments were even sent as far as Mount Union in Huntingdon County, which some thought would be an inter­ mediate goal for Lee, who was by some supposed to be making a semi­ circular pass through the Commonwealth on a large-scale raid. Tellico Johnson, of Bellefonte, for example, told Penn State students after the War that he had marched sixty undergraduates to "The Shades of Death” south of Huntingdon where they erected a barricade and intercepted a small party of Confederate scavengers.²⁵

In any event, New York responded brilliantly to Lincoln’s call. Not only did organized regiments of pre-enlisted men rush to Harrisburg, but also others volunteered to fill the ranks. Thus did forty employees of the New York Herald respond to a plea from their own correspondent: "We want men.” They became the "Herald Guard” of the 11^th Regiment. Even more would have been ordered into Central Pennsylvania if they had been needed, as can be deduced from a passage in the 7^th Regimental History: ". . . at Philadelphia we received orders to report to Baltimore, that city being in danger of an attack and its successful defense being of more importance than Harrisburg.” ²⁶

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