Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Read Online Free PDF Page B

advantage of Pennsylvania’s Free School Act. He farmed at first as a tenant and then bought a property south ofCemetery Hill in 1865.Abraham Bryan spent twenty years scrimping and saving as a “laborer” until he was finally able to buy a twelve-acre farm on the west side of Cemetery Hill. But the threat of the fugitive hunters always hovered over these small edges of ease. Owen Robinson always carried his free papers (dating from 1817, when he was emancipated in Maryland) aroundwith him as legal insurance.Mag Palm, who rented a small house onAbraham Bryan’s farm, had nearly been carried off in 1860 by “a group of men” who hoped to sell her for “quite a profit.”
    And as soon as Winchester fell and the Confederate invasion wave lapped up to thePennsylvania border, Gettysburg’s blacks concluded to take no chances, gathered up their handfuls of belongings, and fled north and east toward Harrisburg and York. Matilda (or, as she was called by her family, Tillie) Pierce, a white girl living onBaltimore Street, remembered seeing black women “with bundles as large as old-fashioned feather ticks slung across their backs” hurrying out the Bonneautown road on foot, “crowding, and running against each other in their confusion.” One ofGeorge Arnold’s bank clerks,Samuel Bushman, also noticed the pathetic parade of blacks “on foot, burdened with bundles containing a couple of quilts, some clothing and a few cooking utensils … trundling along their little belongings in a two-wheeled handcart” or “driving a single sheep or hog or a cow and a calf.” Twelve-year-oldMary Montfort saw her mother’s hired help,Rebecca Johnson, pack up and leave:
Yo ol’ Aunt Beckie is goin’ up into de hills. No rebel is gonna catch me and carry me back to be a slave again
. Even as far east as Lancaster, “every negro has left or is leaving the place.” 13
    It soon enough became the turn of white Gettysburg to panic, too. “We had often heard that the rebels were about to make a raid,” remembered Tillie Pierce, “but had always found it a false alarm.” What, asked one Gettysburg woman, “would the rebels ever want to come to Gettysburg for?” That question stopped being asked after Winchester, and after Curtin’s and Lincoln’s emergency calls. A fire in Emmitsburg, eleven miles south, touched off a crying panic that “the Rebels are coming and burning as they go.” The next day, eighty-three Gettysburg boys (including sixty-one students from Pennsylvania College) signed up as a company of “emergency militia” and took the train north to Harrisburg to be mustered in (as Company A of the26th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia). A staffer from General Couch, Maj.Granville Haller, arrived a day later to call a public meeting at the courthouse on Middle Street and “take into consideration the subject of placing the county in a state of military organization.”
    A small company of horsemen more or less commanded by a thirty-three-year-old farmer,Robert Bell, was deputized to watch the roads around Gettysburg, reinforced by a company of the First City Troop from Philadelphia (a gorgeously uniformed team of what were otherwise purely ceremonial city militia). Day after day, there were repeated scares of the-rebels-are-coming. Major Haller became convinced that Confederate scouts were infiltrating the area, and on June 23rd, he wired Couch to ask for “a Regiment of Infantry” to “restore confidence and rally the people to arms.” Couch had little enough inthe way of infantry to spare from defending Harrisburg, so he sent the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia, together with its Gettysburg company, off to Gettysburg. Six miles out, their train hit a cow and derailed. 14
    The cycle of alarm and reprieve soon began “to be an old story,” and in the town people “tried to make ourselves believe that they would never come.” But real danger was nearer than they expected. Dick Ewell’s third division, under