Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Read Online Free PDF

some what more graceful than the handle of the town pump in action.” 9
    Like much of the larger border region between slave and free states, Gettysburg leaned Democratic, and occasionally pro-Southern. The war “struck a blow at every manufacturing business in the county … because it cut off all Southern trade”—and it was for the sake of that trade that unhappy businesses in Gettysburg blamed Lincoln, not the rebels, for their trouble. At the beginning of the Civil War, the townspeople had rallied loyally to the Union, sending off the local militia company (the seventy-man“Gettysburg Blues”) in response of Lincoln’s first call for state militias in 1861. But the loyalties were not always uniform. Young Gettysburg men likeMatthew Miller and Wesley Culp followed education and employers into Virginia and ended up serving in theConfederate Army, and frequent scares interrupted the first summer of the war in a town only seven miles from theMason-Dixon line. The War Department had even considered establishing “cantonments” in Gettysburg and York, twenty-five miles to the east, and the10th New York Cavalry had been garrisoned in Gettysburg in the winter of 1861–62 as a precaution. 10
    But nothing more than rumor came close to Gettysburg until the fall of 1862, when J.E.B. Stuart ran one of his notoriousraids into the Cumberland Valley. Stuart actually came as close as Cashtown, eight miles west of Gettysburgin one of the principal gaps in South Mountain. But he had then turned away south and west to Fairfield, and galloped out of the ken of Gettysburg for what the town hoped would be forever. Apart from Stuart’s raid, the closest the war impinged on Gettysburg was the deep rumbling of artillery that could be heard from thebattle of Antietam, ten months before this newest invasion. “No one had ever seen a Confederate,” wroteLeander Warren, a thirteen-year-old in 1863 living on Railroad Street, “and everyone imagined that they were wild men.” 11
    To the black population of Gettysburg, wild men, and worse, were exactly what the Confederates were likely to be. One hundred and eighty-six free blacks appeared on the 1860 census in Gettysburg, with another 1,500 scattered through Adams County.Slavery was abolished as an institution in Pennsylvania in 1780, but emancipation in the Commonwealth was to be gradual—all slaves were to be free by July 4, 1827—and there were loopholes in the statute which meant that as late as 1840 there were sixty-four black Pennsylvanians who were still legally chattels of their owner. But it hardly mattered whether Pennsylvanians were slow or fast about bringing in freedom; once free, whites had no intention of regarding blacks as little better than the same low-caste laborers they had been in slavery. The Scots-Irish McAllisters, who operated a mill south of the town, shelteredfugitive slaves, and a small knot of students at Pennsylvania College organized a clandestineabolitionist fraternity, the Beta Deltas, or “Black Ducks.” But abolition lecturers got cold receptions in Gettysburg, and even those Gettysburg whites who opposed slavery did so in the hope that emancipation would be at once followed by the colonization of all blacks to Africa. 12
    Gettysburg’s blacks had no one to look out for their interests but themselves, although in a few cases those interests had prospered in a modest way. Jobs were plentiful in Gettysburg and schooling free, and the hope they proffered balanced the risk of living so close to the upper boundary of slavery. The light-skinnedOwen Robinson, who served as the groundskeeper for the Presbyterian church onBaltimore Street, “kept a little restaurant” at the corner of Washington and High streets, “where he sold oysters in the winter and ice cream in the summer,” and managed to become a “well-to-do Negro.”Basil Biggs had been a free black teamster in Baltimore until he moved to Gettysburg in 1858 so that his children could take