Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Read Online Free PDF Page A

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; the14th 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.” 8
    Twenty-two miles to the southwest, the town of Gettysburg lacked even fortifications, much less a river to protect it. The townJames 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, aLutheran theological seminary, three newspapers, and (as the cash cow of the town) ten carriage manufacturers employing “probably 200 skilled workmen.” The GettysburgRailroad 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 novelistJohn 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 farmproperties surrounding Gettysburg. Two of the town’s churches wereLutheran (a third was German Reformed, with the CalvinistHeidelberg Catechism pushing against the LutheranAugsburg 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-IrishPresbyterian 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 byJohn T. McIlhenny,Robert Goodloe Harper, andHenry J. Stahle.
    The ascendency of the town lived along two of the principal streets radiating from the central diamond, onChambersburg Street (running west), where the violent abolitionistThaddeus Stevens had opened his first law office back in the 1830s, and onBaltimore 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, theEvergreen Cemetery, had been laid out in 1855. FromCemetery 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