The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian/04 The War
CHAPTER IV
The War
IN the year 1858 a comet of vast proportions swept
across the sky and its tail, spread out like a curved fan,
extended over perhaps one-third of the visible heavens.
Such appearances in ages past always portended war,
and while the superstitions, which were once realities in
their effect upon the conduct of men, had waned, the mental
impressions made by them are yet uneffaced. In the inland
villages people looked at the heavens and, with smiles of
assumed incredulity, shook their heads and said trouble
was coming for the country.
In 1860 another great comet appeared, and to those inclined to view the apparition as a foreboding, the recurrence had much more than duplicated significance. There were other warnings of coming events more tangible and some of them nearer at home.
The boys of the Grovemont Seminary were one day playing ball in the road in front of the house when the startling news came that a man named John Brown had invaded the South in an effort to free the slaves and had captured the arsenal at Harper's Ferry. In the main the sentiment in the school was Republican and opposed to slavery. Roger B. Taney, who, as Chief Justice, had rendered the Dred Scott decision, they flouted. A mile away, at the Corner Stores, Elijah F. Pennypacker, a Quaker, six feet four inches in height and straight as an arrow, at one time president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, had a station on the Underground Railroad and when, as occasionally happened, an unknown negro was met wending his way northward, he was bidden “Godspeed.” While, therefore, the effort of Brown could not be justified by logic or reconciled with the duty to obey the law, there was an undercurrent of hope that in some way he might succeed, and when he was captured, tried and hanged, the result was accepted with the sense that the incident had not been altogether closed.
Jesse Conway lived in a little stone house at the entrance of the bridge which crossed the Schuylkill and there gathered the tolls—one penny for a foot passenger, five cents for a one-horse carriage and ten cents for a two-horse carriage. He and our neighbors, the Jacobs family, were Abolitionists. The men of the Whitaker family, old-line Whigs turned adrift, supported Fillmore in 1856 and Bell in 1860, but the women, more emotional, agreed with the Jacobs family, and I shouted in 1856 as loudly as I could for Fremont. John Jacobs subscribed for the New York Tribune, which daily lay at the toll house until he called for it, and there I managed to read doctrine which could not be found at home. One day I sat on the wooden bench in front of the toll house and read a speech delivered the night before at the Cooper Institute in New York by a man named Lincoln, from Illinois. It made a great impression upon me and when John Jacobs came along I called his attention to it as the argument of a man of great ability and absolutely unanswerable.
The political feeling became intense, for the reason that the issues had been swept away from questions of mere sordid interest and now appealed to the underlying human sympathies. John Hickman, the member of Congress from Chester County, a lifelong Democrat, no doubt somewhat influenced by the Quaker sentiment surrounding him abandoned Buchanan when the President supported the Lecompton Constitution maintaining slavery in Kansas, and established a national reputation. He was a slim, dark-eyed man with a power for vigorous, sarcastic and even vindictive eloquence. When he made a speech something or somebody was rended. A story whispered around over the country at the time said he had inherited some of his characteristics from Indian ancestors, and only within the last few years I have discovered original contemporary evidence that one of the Lenni Lenape employed about the iron works at Coventry, in Chester County, in 1726, bore the name of “Indian John Hickman.” Whatever may have been the truth or want of truth of this story, the bit of romance detracted nothing from his influence. We were all proud of him and of the reputation he had won, and when we saw a reference to him in a journal published so far away as New York, or mayhap Boston, we felt a sense of reflected importance. More than once the thought came to me that if ever I could be of consequence enough to be sent to Congress the ambitions of life would be sated. At the next congressional election there were three candidates—a Lecompton Democrat; Hickman, the anti-Lecompton Democrat, and John M. Broomall, the regular Republican. Most of the Republicans supported Hickman and he was re-elected. The contest grew very bitter. On one occasion the Democrats of Tunnel Hill concluded to erect a pole on the south side of the creek, near the Eight Square school-house. It was regarded as a sort of invasion. The pole, of huge proportions, consisting of a heavy tree for a butt and a long sapling for a top, lay on the ground ready to be spliced and erected the next morning. Suspicious of trouble, a selected squad of those interested came to keep watch. The night turned out to be dark, cold and wet and the watchmen sought the shelter of the school-house, where, perhaps, they had something to provide for warmth and comfort. When morning dawned the top of the pole had disappeared entirely, and the butt was found bored through with auger holes. The top had been carried to the Schuylkill and thrown into the river. So far as I know no contemporary whisper hinted at those who indulged in this escapade, but among the participants were Richard Denithorne, Ashenfelter and myself.
In the Presidential campaign of 1860 another ominous event occurred. At the political meetings held by the Republicans, clubs called “Wide Awakes,” never before known, wearing oilcloth caps and capes as a sort of uniform, carrying torches upon the end of long staffs often used as bludgeons, drilled to march and go through the maneuvers of the manual of arms in a semi-military way, appeared all over the North and were everywhere greeted with enthusiastic approval. I do not know that their significance was recognized, but a philosophical observer could well have forecasted that when men instinctively turned to military organization, war was approaching.
When Lincoln came to Philadelphia on his way to Washington to be inaugurated, my grandfather and I went to the city and from a second-story window watched him as he passed in a barouche bowing to the crowds, anxious but earnest, who lined the streets. The next morning we heard him make his speech in which he alluded to the possibility of assassination, and saw him raise the flag over Independence Hall. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and pulled at the rope, hand over hand, in a way which led my grandfather to ejaculate, “I think he will do.”
The rebels opened fire upon Fort Sumter on the 12th of April, 1861. That event put an end to uncertainty. Everybody knew what it meant. The great North, untrained in the handling of arms, without an organized militia, intent upon the gainful pursuits of life, had a new task to perform. In the earlier days some generous person had given the field at Paoli to the militia and there they had annual encampments. I could remember that once, when a child, my father took me there to see the soldiers. Some drunken fellows in the course of the day undertook to pull Colonel William F. Small from his horse. He drew his sword, sliced the ear off of one of them and established the reputation of a hero which has remained with me even unto this day. Dr. Walker, a handsome, companionable young fellow, who read medicine with my father, had became the major of one of the regiments. We had heard that Levi P. Knerr, born in Phœnixville, had been a lieutenant in the war with Mexico.
But all of this activity had disappeared for years, Paoli was overrun with mullen and jimson (Jamestown) weeds, and military affairs had fallen into desuetude. Prior to the firing upon Sumter, the North was dull, inert and waiting only. It hoped, even expected, that some way would be found to avoid the difficulty. There had been threats before, but the danger had been postponed if not averted. There had been a Missouri Compromise. Later Daniel Webster, who spoke well enough against Hayne, had lain down and consented to be trampled upon. Something like it might be done again. As a psychological phenomenon, the effect of the firing upon Fort Sumter was most impressive. The torpor disappeared at the instant. No one any longer thought of yielding or compromise. The Union, whether or not, was to be preserved. The rebels, if they resisted, were to be shot. The Copperheads, as those of the North who opposed the war were called, were to be silenced by use of such force as might be necessary, and in the meantime they must fly the flag from the windows and chimney tops of their houses. In their hearts many men resolved that slavery, that vile institution which had brought all of this trouble upon us, should be driven from the earth. Every man began to brace himself and set his teeth. He hunted up and polished the old fowling piece which had been rusting in the garret. The young girls looked through their music books for the “Star Spangled Banner” and “Hail, Columbia!” Red, white and blue neckties were tied around their throats. They sent letters to their lovers in envelopes which displayed the same colors and other patriotic devices. Recruiting stations appeared in the taverns and corner groceries and every young man expected, and was expected, to bear his part in the struggle. The sounds of the drum and fife were heard everywhere in the streets. Instead of hammers and tacks, weapons were displayed in the windows of the hardware stores. From the pulpits preachers told the stories of Joshua and of Judith. The women organized themselves into societies, the object of which was to make uniforms and to pick lint and to prepare for nursing.
At this time my uncle, Joseph R. Whitaker, lived at Mount Pleasant, in Maryland, about a mile and a half from Havre de Grace, and my uncle, William P. C. Whitaker, with a family of five daughters, lived in Havre de Grace. It looked for a time as though Maryland would follow the other states of the South into the maelstrom of secession, and the clouds gathered darkly up to the very borders of Pennsylvania. My grandfather, anxious to communicate with his sons and grandchildren there, and to make some provision for them, on the 22d of April went to Philadelphia, intending to go by train to Havre de Grace, and he took me with him. At the depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad in Philadelphia, we learned that the bridges over the Gunpowder and Bush rivers emptying into the Chesapeake Bay, had been burned in an uprising of secessionists, and that the train could go no farther than Wilmington, Delaware. Returning home with additional cause for excitement and uncertainty, we held a council. It was determined that Michael Weldon, the hired man, with Bridget, his wife, should drive with the two-horse carriage across Chester and Lancaster counties to the Conowingo bridge over the Susquehanna, and thence across Harford County in Maryland to Havre de Grace. I was to be the agent of communication. The journey down occupied two days. On our way in Lancaster County, Mike and I dropped the reins, chased a raccoon across two fields, captured him and put him in the carriage box and brought him safely back to Mont Clare, where he was finally killed by the dogs. The secessionists of Maryland had contemplated burning the Conowingo bridge, but finally concluded to station a party of horsemen at the northern end to prevent the passage of all who were objectionable and burn it if necessary. We were halted by this party, who, guns in hand, surrounded the carriage. It was the first hostile force I had ever confronted and I was curious as well as uneasy. My story, however, had been already concocted. I had been at school at Nottingham in Chester County. The troubles of the time had made my parents uneasy and they had sent the servants for me to take me home to Havre de Grace. The tale was plausible enough and we were permitted to cross the bridge. We reached Uncle Joseph at Mount Pleasant without any further adventure. The events occurring around were sufficiently stirring. The Union men and the secessionists were both aroused and bitter in their antagonism and were about evenly divided. Uncle George P. Whitaker of Principio was a resolute Union man; his son-in-law, Joseph Coudon, was a determined secessionist. They quarreled and severed relations and the latter, on one occasion, only escaped some infuriated opponents by the help of a back window. Another uncle, Washington Pennypacker, living on the Deer Creek, in Harford County, raised the stars and stripes over his home, and as I have written before, was driven out of the state.
On the 18th of April, five companies from Pennsylvania, the advance of a mighty host, had gone through to Washington. The next day Colonel Small, to whom I have referred in connection with Paoli, at the head of the Seventh Pennsylvania Regiment, and the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, were attacked in Baltimore. Among the wounded was Henry C. Dodge, a printer in the office of the Weekly Phœnix, the Phœnixville newspaper, who returned home with a cut across the hand and established his reputation as a hero. The immediate danger at Havre de Grace soon disappeared. When we reached there a camp had already been established at Perryville, on the opposite side of the Susquehanna, and Union troops were collecting there in great numbers. Among those I remember seeing were Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin Schall, of the Fourth Pennsylvania Regiment, and John F. Hartranft, later to become famous as a major-general, the organizer of the National Guard of Pennsylvania and Governor of the Commonwealth, so dark in complexion that he was at times called “Black Jack Hartranft.” With piercing black eyes, erect and vigorous, an exceptional horseman, taciturn, endowed with courage and great executive capacity, he ought to have been President of the United States at the time Hayes was elected, and would have been had not the bad Pennsylvania habit of opposing her own prevented.
The destruction of the railroad bridges had separated Washington from the North, and Perryville has the honor of being the earliest outpost of the war. A great outcry ran through the camp about the poor quality of the “shoddy” clothing, and there was much denunciation of the civil authorities. In the hurry of the time, clothing had to be secured in every possible way and at the outset it was very imperfect, but ere long it came to be of the most durable texture, and a workman who could secure a pair of old army-blue pantaloons felt that he was fortunate indeed.
Brigadier-General Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts came to take command of the camp. At that time the railroad trains ran on to the top of a huge steamboat and it carried them across the river between Perryville and Havre de Grace. One morning when the boat was about to leave the wharf, Butler, complying with orders sent him by Major-General Patterson, the Department Commander, with a part of his force, marched on board and the boat started for the opposite shore. In mid-stream he ordered the captain to take his boat down the Chesapeake. The captain objected strenuously and gave many reasons why such a move would be impossible, but in the end was compelled to succumb. Butler landed at Annapolis, opened communication with Washington, cut off Baltimore from the south and, working backward, soon had possession of that city and the secession movement in Maryland failed.
At the end of my mission, I took the raccoon and returned to Mont Clare, having seen the opening phases of the war in its nearest approach to our own homes.
When I was a child about seven years of age, my father one day took me to a house on Nutt's Road on the north side about a half mile from Phœnixville and within a short distance of the Corner Stores. In the house was a modest, diffident boy, perhaps a little larger than myself. My father said to me: “Sam, this is your cousin, Galusha Pennypacker,” and we played together about the yard. As he grew toward manhood, he found employment in the printing office of the Village Record at West Chester. At the very beginning of the war, he enlisted as a private, having declined the position of first lieutenant because he felt himself incompetent. When the company left West Chester a wise bystander said to his friend: “There is one man in that company who will never fight.”
“Who is it?”
“That young Pennypacker.”
At the close of the war he returned a brigadier-general and brevet major-general of volunteers, at twenty-two years of age, the youngest man who had ever held such high rank since the organization of the Government. He had been shot seven times in eight months. Commanding a brigade in the assault upon Fort Fisher, the only fortification taken by storm during the war, when the color-bearer of the regiment, of which he had been the colonel, had been killed, he seized the flag and planted it upon a traverse of the fort. At this moment a rebel placed a rifle at his thigh and fired. He was supposed to be dead. The main nerve
had been severed. He lay at Fortress Monroe for a year 
Brevet Major General Galusha Pennypacker, U. S. A.
brigadier-general and brevet major-general in the regular army—likewise the youngest man who ever held those ranks. For a time he commanded the Department of the South. He was in command at New Orleans at the time that a commission was sent to investigate the conditions which led to the Hayes-Tilden electoral dispute. Grant refers to him in his Memoirs and no history of the war is written which does not tell of his heroic services. He is one of three of his family and name who have been suggested for the governorship. He represented the American army at Berlin at the review of the German army at the close of the war with France and received much attention from the Emperor and Count Bismarck. Tall, big-boned, with much courtesy of manner, with native intelligence and great power of will, he is a remarkable character.
A company of Irishmen from Tunnel Hill enlisted in the Seventy-first Pennsylvania Volunteers and were with Webb at the bloody angle at Gettysburg. A company from the south side of the town became Company G of the First Pennsylvania Reserves. Among the first to enlist was Josiah White, a bright, lively and muscular young fellow, engaged to be married to Kate Vanderslice, and he became first lieutenant of Company G. When his body was brought to Phœnixville, from the Wilderness battlefield, where he was killed, in accordance with a custom which still lingered, Lloyd, Ashenfelter and I watched over it all night, and we carried him to his grave in the Dunker graveyard, at the Green Tree. Kate Vanderslice, his fiancée, soon died, and in a gloomy and sombre poem which I wrote in early life, I endeavored to tell the tale of their misfortunes.
The pretty young woman who later became my wife, along with the other girls of her age, made in the hall of the Young Men's Literary Union the uniforms which Company G wore to the front. My mother made rusk and sent it in boxes to the army and the hospitals, and my aunt, Mary A. Pennypacker, a proud and good woman, after the Battle of Gettysburg, went to the field to nurse the wounded and spent weeks amid the miseries there. The spirit of willingness to sacrifice self which was everywhere developed was one of the compensations for the struggle. The flag floated over almost every household. If any man dared to give utterance to hostility to the Government, he did it at the risk of physical violence then and there. Currency became scarce. As a means of overcoming this difficulty postage stamps were put up in small envelopes, labeled on the outside with the amount and this led to the gradual evolution of the fractional postal currency which for years was the only kind seen. Coin entirely disappeared. Prices of all commodities soon began to advance. At home we occasionally used rye as a substitute for coffee without much success. The Phœnix Iron Company adapted their mill to the manufacture of a cannon, invented by John Griffen, their manager, made of layers of twisted metal. These guns, before being sent to the Government, were tested by firing shells across the Schuylkill into the hillside north of Mont Clare, on the top of which now quietly stands a graveyard. From this source of supply, gathering balls and slugs, with an old fowling piece of large bore, I practiced marksmanship. The military impulse had arisen and I wanted to enlist, but I was my mother's dependence, and she persuaded me to wait. She consented to my going to West Point. The vacancy controlled by our Congressman, William Morris Davis, had been filled, but he offered me the appointment to Annapolis, which I declined. To that vacancy he then appointed a young friend of mine who is now Rear-Admiral Stockton of the Navy, who has been president of the Naval War College and of the George Washington University. Mr. Davis suggested that I might obtain a West Point cadetship by securing one of the appointments at large in the control of Mr. Lincoln. The Congressman from Harford County, Maryland (I think his name was Howard), came to his help, and Richard Yates, the Governor of Illinois, who was under obligations to my grandfather, used his influence. On the day of the Battle of Bull Run, I was again at Mount Pleasant to go with my Uncle Joseph, grandfather and great-uncle, George P. Whitaker, to Washington to meet the President. The time was most inopportune for the purpose we had in view, but rich in the opportunities it gave for reminiscences. In Havre de Grace I saw a soldier shot and killed. A regiment of Maine lumbermen on their way to the South halted in the town and threw out their guards. One of the men tried to force his way across the line, and the guard, on the point of being overcome, fired his musket. The ball did not touch the offender, but passed through the lungs of another member of the regiment, through two sides of a car and buried itself in a stone wall. The stricken man bled to death. Hardly had this occurrence ended when great excitement arose through the efforts of the soldiers to hang a German baker in the town accused of having sold them cakes filled with ground glass. With difficulty he escaped, getting over a fence in the rear of his garden and being hidden by some of the townsmen. The charge was probably entirely unfounded.
In Washington we stopped at Willard's Hotel and found the city in a state of the utmost excitement and confusion expecting the approach of the rebels. The army were scattered about the streets of the city, the men of different regiments mingling together just as they happened to meet. Aides and messengers in uniform were galloping hither and yon and indicating by their acts and manner the tense state of their nerves. I saw one who, in his haste and excitement, ran his horse directly upon the tongue of an artillery carriage coming the other way, and the horse, with penetrated breast, fell dead. Upon the floors of Willard's lay a number of the New York Fire Zouaves who told us rather highly colored narratives of their encounter with the Black Horse Cavalry. Around each narrator gathered a knot of eager listeners whose interest was heightened by the consciousness each possessed of the surrounding uncertainties. General Winfield Scott, whom we saw upon horseback, seemed both too old and too corpulent for responsibility in such a crisis. My grandfather and his brother were both concerned for the fortunes of General McDowell, for the personal reason that he had married a daughter of Burden of Troy, New York, of whom they were the business representatives in Philadelphia. We had influence enough to get from Drake DeKay, whose autograph was apparently made with a pair of tongs, a pass to enter the various fortifications which were being rapidly constructed for the defense of the city. We likewise drove across the Long Bridge and to Arlington, which was then not a cemetery, and to Alexandria, where we saw the house in which the rebel tavern-keeper, Jackson, had shot Colonel Ellsworth and had himself fallen a few minutes later. It is difficult for those of the present day to understand what a wave of intense emotion spread over the land when Ellsworth was killed, but they can secure some idea of it by observing what a number of living men bear the name Elmer E. He was young, courageous and attractive, and became one of the earliest sacrifices offered up to the moloch of slavery. At the capitol I was introduced to Emerson Etheridge, one of the congressmen from Tennessee, who remained loyally at his post, notwithstanding the action of his state. Dark-eyed, slight in build and voluble, he spat tobacco juice right and left over the beautiful marble which adorned the fireplace of the committee-room. I also met Potter of Wisconsin—short, chunky and muscular—who was then in great repute, because when Roger A. Pryor of Virginia, a cadaverous fireeater, challenged him to a duel, he accepted and selected bowie knives as the weapons. Thereupon Pryor withdrew upon the theory that they were not the weapons of a gentleman. It was the general opinion that Potter would have cut Pryor, who had more assertiveness than strength, into pieces. In the Senate John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who maintained the ethically indefensible attitude of participating in the legislation of the Government while making his arrangements for command in the rebel army to fight against it, attracted much attention. Tall and of good proportions, handsome, dark as an Indian, with straight black hair, he walked up and down the chamber with slow step and with his hands clasped behind him, giving to all a good view of his imposing person. Later he became a major-general in the rebel service and in a number of defeats was still conspicuous, though I believe a brave soldier. I also met John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, then old, thin and a little withered and wrinkled, who had made an earnest effort to avert the inevitable struggle. Much of the conversation about the capitol concerned those congressmen who had gone in a barouche to view the battle and had fallen into the hands of the enemy.
We returned home, having failed in the object of our visit, but I had been in the midst of the most trying and critical situation of the entire war. If the rebels had advanced upon Washington after their success at Bull Run, the whole history of the world might have been changed. The prevalent feeling in Washington at the time was that we were in immediate danger and that the final outcome was in grave doubt.
In 1863 I was a private in Company F of the Twenty-sixth Pennsylvania Emergency Regiment which met Early's division of Lee's Army as it advanced upon Gettysburg before the coming of the Army of the Potomac under Meade. I do not intend to give here the details and incidents of that campaign, for the reason that I wrote at the time a full description of it, afterward published in my Historical and Biographical Sketches, and for the further reason that in my address at the dedication of the monument erected on the field I made a thorough study of the contemporary orders relating to it showing its unique importance. The address may be found in the two volumes of Pennsylvania at Gettysburg published by the state. It is my purpose here only to fill in a few additional features and to make some comments rather philosophical than historical. I went as a sergeant with a company from Phœnixville to Harrisburg in June. I had never been in that city before, and that night I slept on the stone steps of the capitol wrapped in a red horse blanket. In view of my election to the governorship of the state, this incident has certain dramatic features, of which the Honorable Hampton L. Carson made good use in the nominating convention. When it was discovered that the men were required to be sworn into the service of the United States, the company with which I had come, composed of my friends, declined to be so sworn and returned to their homes. I went as a private into the Pottstown company among strangers.
It is certainly remarkable that a boy should leave his quiet country home and within a few days' march, as it were, direct to Gettysburg, not only the pivotal point of that tremendous conflict, but the scene of the most important events in all American history.
It seems almost as though there were a fatality which determined that affairs should so be shaped. If my own company had not gone home, I should not have been in the regiment which went to Gettysburg, and I would have experienced nothing of consequence. The Pottstown company had decided to connect themselves with another regiment in the camp, and only after much persuasion and considerable delay were prevailed upon by Colonel Jennings to change their association and unite with him. Had they not made this change I should not have gone to Gettysburg. The delay was likewise essential. The regiments were sent forward as organized, each going further to the southward than its predecessor. If Colonel Jennings had succeeded with the Pottstown company at the outset, his regiment would have been filled and he would have taken the place part way up the valley to which Colonel Thomas' regiment was sent. We constituted the first and one of eight regiments sworn into the service of the United States for the existing emergency. We were the only body of troops during the entire war which entered the military service of the Government for a period of uncertain duration, and, with Lee invading the state, that period might well have extended into the indefinite future.
When we arrived at Gettysburg we found Major Granville O. Haller, of the United States Army, in command there, and the only force at his disposal was our regiment. On the other side of the mountain in the Cumberland Valley, not ten miles away, was Lee with the Army of Northern Virginia. Rodes, being in the advance, marched toward Harrisburg to carry the war into the heart of the state and possibly to Philadelphia. Early, with a division—artillery, cavalry and infantry—was sent over the mountain by the Chambersburg pike to Gettysburg. On the 26th of June, in the early morning, in obedience to the order of Major Haller, we marched out the Chambersburg Pike to confront the approaching host. To this regiment of seven hundred and thirty-two men who had left their homes only a few days before, unacquainted with their officers and comrades, and unfamiliar with the ways of warfare, was assigned the task of stopping the progress of the army of Lee. The order has often been criticised, but it was absolutely correct. The occasion required that what they were capable of doing, whether much or little, should be done. The reports of Early show that they held back his division an entire day. On the Hunterstown Road we had an engagement with the rebels lasting over half an hour in which we lost some wounded and one hundred and seventy-six men captured. The rebel general, John B. Gordon, in his reminiscences of the Civil War, calls it a “Diminutive Battle” and claims that because of it he gained knowledge of great value to him and his cause in the coming contest. After encountering the enemy on the Chambersburg Pike, and again at Dillsburg, after escaping threatened capture, the regiment, by hard marches across a country filled with foes, found its way to Harrisburg. The men had lost all of their baggage and equipments. From Friday morning until Saturday night they had been without food, and until Sunday afternoon almost without rest. They had fired the first shots and drawn the first blood upon the battlefield of Gettysburg. Students of the history of the war have been attracted by the unique relation of the regiment to that decisive battle and some of them have regarded it as an essential factor. Circular No. 8, Series of 1894, of the Loyal Legion of the United States, says: “It was the only emergency regiment which participated in that decisive battle of the war and it is an historical fact that owing to the advance movement of Colonel Jennings' regiment, Gettysburg became the battle ground.”
Spear, in his The North and the South, after pointing out that the coming of a scout with news of the approach of Meade did not lead to the concentration of Lee's army, as Lee wrote, for the reason that the order was given at 7.30 A. M. on June 28th, and the scout did not arrive until the night of that day, declares that the concentration was the result of our combat on the 26th of June. He says, page 97: “It was the beginning of a series of events which colored and determined all the issues of this campaign in a military sense. This regiment was as unconscious of the resultant consequences of its action as was Lee himself. It was one of those insignificant events that so often are the important factors in great results.”
On the wall at Pennypacker's Mills there hang together the knapsack I carried, the shoes I wore, a broken carbine made in Richmond in 1862 and picked up at the scene of our conflict, and a ramrod I found in a rebel camp a few days later at Chambersburg on our way to join Meade.
The bronze figure of a young man clutching a musket, who has just run up upon the top of a native boulder, stands at the point where the Chambersburg Pike leaves the town of Gettysburg to commemorate the services of the regiment.[2] The names of those enrolled on it, cut in a bronze tablet, will be placed in the Pennsylvania Memorial on the battlefield before the close of the present year. When I returned home, I was at once drafted. I had no idea of returning to the service in this way and my grandfather, who was much pleased with the outcome of my military experience, paid $300 for a substitute at Norristown only too willing to go to the front in my stead. I do not know of his name or his fate.
In the fall of 1863 I went to Philadelphia and boarded with a Miss Mary Whitehead on Chestnut Street below Fifth, where my Uncle Joseph had two rooms. We had a wood stove in the back room, the wood for which I threw into the cellar from Chestnut Street and there cut into pieces. Right opposite to us was the office of The Age, a newspaper which represented the Copperhead proclivities then gaining strength over the North. One of its witticisms I recall; “A Union League is three miles from any battlefield.” Richard Vaux, who had been mayor of the city, and in his youth had danced with Queen Victoria, pointed out as the man who never wore an overcoat or carried an umbrella, and who kept a long beard tucked away under his clothing, also found a Union League obnoxious. He made it a point of conduct never to walk in the square in which this club had its quarters. Perhaps the most conspicuous and at the same time the most disliked of those regarded as Copperheads in the city were William B. Reed and Charles Ingersoll. Both of them were lawyers. Reed, smooth-faced and intellectual, had been district attorney and Minister to China; an old-line Whig, become a Democrat at the most inopportune time. With a lack of financial judgment, which has characterized the whole family from the time of its origin, he deserves appreciation for his literary attainments and for the fact that we owe to him the earliest of the real biographies of the Revolution. He lost his practice, his money and his social position, and, drifting to New York, died in poverty as a writer on the New York World. Ingersoll, a tall, slim figure, with dark eyes and a long neck, wore a stock and a collar five or six inches wide. His manner was courtly, but ever suggested idiosyncracy. While crossing the ocean some years later, he died and was buried at sea. Time and again from my room on Chestnut Street I watched a psychological phenomenon characteristic of the time and illustrating the prevailing temper. The billboards at the newspaper offices announced a defeat or check which had happened to one of our armies and the hurrying newsboys cried aloud the disheartening event. Instantaneously almost, an angry crowd gathered. With a common impulse, and with stones, bits of iron or whatever could be grasped, broke in the doors and windows and destroyed the property of The Age.
One of the features of the time was the provost guards who tramped the town, and I have seen them firing upon a fugitive at the corner of Sixth and Chestnut streets in the very heart of the city. Courtland Saunders, my old schoolmate in West Philadelphia, who went out as a captain in the Corn Exchange Regiment, met his death within a very few days at Shepherdstown. Another playmate of my boyhood, J. Henry Workman, with whom I have maintained a friendship all through life, joined the cavalry regiment known as Rush's Lancers, and before they left for the front I saw him a number of times in camp in the northern part of the city. While away he wrote me many letters of army life which I still preserve. He became a captain, but had a sad experience. All of his family were in the South and rebels, and in one of his campaigns he came unexpectedly upon the grave of his brother, killed in the Southern army. Taken prisoner, he was confined for a time in Libby Prison. On his return home, at the close of the war, he became a member of the important shipping firm of Workman & Co. But a grievous wound upon the head brings recurrent attacks of mental excitement and his life given to his country has been a continuous sacrifice.
He has lived long enough, however, to see later generations teach the doctrine that it makes no difference whether men were right or wrong in that tremendous struggle, and erect statues to Wirz in Georgia and Lee in Washington. The logic of the instruction is that should the nation again incur danger, let each youth fight upon whichever side is most to his interest and trust his fame to confusion of thought and chance.
In 1864, the same year that I saw McClellan ride on horseback through the town, a fair for the benefit of the United States Sanitary Commission was held in Logan Square. The proceeds netted over a million dollars. Emily Schomberg, regarded by the men as the most beautiful creature in the city and decried by the women as being no longer as young as she had been, told the fortunes, by palmistry, of those who sought the opportunity, at five dollars a piece. I agreed with the masculine judgment as to her beauty. She was over the average height, slim, with dark eyes and much richness of color. She recalled the houries of the Arabian Nights and of Lalla Rookh. Her talents as well as accomplishments were extraordinary. I saw her many times on the street and at entertainments, and on one occasion was present when a play was given in a private theater on Seventeenth Street in which she and Daniel Dougherty took the leading parts. Rumor had it that she rejected fifty suitors on the average every year. She finally married an Englishman, of minor rank in the army and little personal consequence, and her later career was not altogether happy. The male beauty with somewhat similar points who played havoc with the hearts of the society buds of the period was a son of Dr. Leonard R. Koecker, a Walnut Street dentist. I have sometimes wondered what became of him.
At the fair I saw again Abraham Lincoln, who had come from Washington to participate.
Having gone to the camp at West Chester to bid farewell to my friends in Company G of the First Pennsylvania Reserves, when they started forth in 1861, I went to the Cooper Shop and Volunteer Refreshment Saloon to see those who survived fed on their way home—bronzed and experienced veterans in 1864. White, Armitage, Bradley and many more were not among them. Their captain, John R. Dobson, still a captain after three years of service, soon became a major-general of militia.
One morning in April, 1865, the news came that Mr. Lincoln had been assassinated the night before, at Ford's Theatre in Washington, by one of a band of rebel plotters, and attempts had been made upon the lives of members of his cabinet. No such event had ever before occurred in America. Its effect was to arouse all the undercurrent of animal passions. Along with the warm glow of love for one who had been so gentle, considerate and wise, arose the desire to tear into pieces those who had harmed him. Personally I felt that I wanted to set my teeth in the throat of some rebel and that the inability to gratify the impulse was a deprivation. In a remarkable way the war revealed to men how thin is the gloss of civilization and how below seethe the primary passions which have ever swayed them.
Perched on the roof of a building on south Broad Street, the catafalque that bore his body passed before me and thousands of others and the next morning I arose early to go to Independence Hall. Forming in line, we walked two by two along the north side of Chestnut Street from Fifth Street to the Delaware River and there crossed over to the south side of Chestnut and after hours reached Fifth, only to find that there the line had been broken up by the undisciplined crowd. Not to be balked, I fought my way with some of the more fortunate to the hall where the body lay in state, and so it happened that I saw Lincoln both upon the first and the last time that he came to the Pennsylvania State House.
In my early days, in every community existed what was called a literary society, composed of young men who there experienced themselves in the arts of composition, declamation and debate. With such facilities as they afforded, many a youth strengthened himself for the later and perhaps more serious combats of life. They seem now to have been abandoned and if so it is a distinctive loss. At home I had belonged to and been president of the Young Men's Literary Union. In the city a number of such organizations were doing their work. In 1864 I hunted up and joined the Bancroft Literary Society, named for the historian who had given it a set of his works. At this time, or very soon thereafter, I formed the acquaintance among its members of Frank K. Sheppard, a Democrat, on the editorial staff of the Ledger; Joel Cook, likewise connected as correspondent with the Ledger, who had written a book on the McClellan Campaign on the James, also a Democrat, who afterwards grew rich and became a Republican member of congress; W. A. Sliver, a long, white-haired declaimer, who afterward went on to the stage under the name of Marsden, married, and finally killed himself; Nathaniel K. Richardson, who had a great gift as an elocutionist; Jerome Carty, who came to the bar and whose career, like that of the swallow of the ancient Bede, came into the light of the hall for a while, but began in darkness and ended in darkness; John I. Rogers, related to my Irish friends on Tunnel Hill, who made money at the bar and as president of the Philadelphia Base Ball Club, and became a colonel on the staff of Governor Pattison; Chester N. Farr, a brainy fellow who became private secretary to two governors—Hartranft and Hoyt—and John Sword, who, after editing some law books with great ability, entered the Church, became a devotee and has given his life to celibacy, charity and genuflexions.
I also met there Alfred Rochefort Calhoun, a Steerforth, in another line of life, who had temporarily considerable influence over all brought into contact with him. As a character, he forms an unsolvable but interesting study. About five feet nine inches in height, with black hair and blue eyes, with muscles hard as iron, measuring forty-six inches around the chest, he had a ball in his lungs, the healed gash of a sabre cut across his hand and he walked with a limp upon an artificial foot. Few ventured to compete with him in strength of will or of muscle. He had a gift of fiery oratory which appealed to the passions, and sympathy went out to one who bore the evidence of many a combat in the war, so that it was difficult for either man or woman to resist him. He had the title, and presumably the rank, of major. The slightest provocation found him ready to fight. Any indication of sympathy with the South angered him, and I have heard him bring more than one discussion to an end by calling his opponent “a damned liar.” At this time the road to political preferment was through service in the war, and about this time the Grand Army of the Republic was organized. Among the old soldiers, none had greater influence than Calhoun, and he commanded Post 19 and later became Department Commander of the Grand Army in the State. A friend of Bayard Taylor, who gave him an autograph copy of the translation of Goethe's Faust, he had the Post named for Colonel Charles Frederick Taylor, who was killed at Gettysburg. He wrote a play called “The Color Guard” which became popular and is still enacted for the benefit of the Posts. He was accepted on terms of relationship among the descendants of the South Carolina Calhouns, and he told me he was also related to Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, with whom he corresponded and who saw to the publication of some of his articles in European magazines. I spent a couple of days with him at Cedarcraft, where Bayard Taylor entertained us, although the poet spent most of his time in discussing his Picture of St. John, just published, and in painting a picture in oil on which he was then working. Calhoun invited me to a luncheon which he gave to one of the daughters of Governor Curtin. He started A. Wilson Norris, afterward Auditor General of the State, upon his career, giving him the opportunity to make his first public address. Grant, when President, appointed Calhoun Pension Agent in Philadelphia, in which office he had to give a bond in $600,000. Among his bondsmen were Ario Pardee, Simon Cameron, John F. Hartranft, Bayard Taylor, and I persuaded my grandfather to go upon it for $30,000. I attended to the preparation of the bond and together Calhoun and I saw Simon Cameron at his home in Harrisburg, a white-haired, erect old man, who blandly signed the paper to the extent of $50,000 without the faintest suggestion of any sort of return or obligation. Men began to say that Calhoun would be the next Republican candidate for Governor. Then trouble began. Norris became a bitter enemy. Captain Singer, who had been to him an obedient and even servile Achates, quarreled with him about a woman and Singer married her. Cameron withdrew from the bond and Calhoun was compelled to find other security. It began to be whispered that his name was not Calhoun, that he had never been in the Union army, that he was a rebel spy among the prisoners in Libby. The Grand Army expelled him from its ranks and he retired to Georgia, where he edited a fiery paper and again encountered troubles. Many years later he lived in New York and wrote stories for the periodicals. I leave him as one of the mysteries I have encountered in life and as a reminiscence of the great struggle.
Somebody suggested the idea of holding a convention of the literary societies of the city. As president of the Bancroft, I was sent as a delegate and with me were Rogers, Farr and Calhoun. When this convention met on Spring Garden Street, there appeared, asking admission, a delegation from the Banneker Institute, a society of colored men in the lower part of the city, at the head of which was a very light and very bright negro named Octavius V. Catto. The times were not ripe and it was like casting a firebrand. In the midst of a fierce discussion the convention adjourned. All of our delegation except Rogers favored the admission of the negroes. He succeeded in getting our society to pass a resolution instructing us to vote against their admission. We informed the society we would not so vote. They then passed a resolution vacating our seats and appointing another delegation. We denied their right and appeared before the convention, where we had had a majority. The situation had, however, in the meantime changed. A man in town named A. B. Sloanaker, a fat, oily politician, when Andrew Johnson quarreled with his party and apparently had friends nowhere, took to him a basket of wax flowers ostensibly from the schools of Philadelphia, and Johnson thereupon appointed him Collector of Internal Revenue in New Orleans. Hence he received the sobriquet of “Wax Work Sloany.” This gentleman improved the period of adjournment by organizing literary societies all over the city, and when again the convention met the hall was filled with delegates. We were refused admission and the Banneker delegates likewise. I saw much of Catto, who was an intelligent school teacher. He was afterwards murdered, losing his life in another effort to advance his race.
Through Calhoun I became a member of Post 19 and in 1869 was elected its commander, thus attaining the rank in the Grand Army of a colonel. I delivered Decoration Day orations at Laurel Hill, Christ Church-yard and Kennett Square, and in May of 1870 rode at the head of seven hundred men to Mount Moriah Cemetery and conducted the ceremonies. With this service such connection as I had with the war may be said to have ceased. I have, however, maintained my relations with the Post, and a few years ago its members presented me with a handsome decoration as Post Commander.
- ↑ From the wound then received, General Pennypacker, on October 1, 1916, nearly fifty-two years afterward, bled to death, within a month after the death of Governor Pennypacker.
- ↑ It was Governor Pennypacker who suggested that the statue should show the trousers tucked into the boot-legs to indicate the sudden change from peaceful life to the battlefield.