Day 122. June 30, 1862.
122
make it possible for each side to feel that it is combatting some form of evil….
—Monday 30―
Quite warm this morning. I went down to Canoe Valley and Water Street & Spruce Creek. Came up to Arch Springs and home. Cool this evening
Note: By the end of June, over 42,000 of McClellan’s men are out sick. The hunger, heat, the flies, the bad water. In May and June, Jackson lost just 2,500 men compared to 7,000 Union casualties. Nearly half Jackson’s casualties were caused by Shields’ forces. Alas, today Ephraim’s feeling better and is able to finally get out and see some sights.
As well, June 30 will be the Battle of White Oak Swamp during the Seven Days Battles. Union surgeon Thomas Ellis puts down in his diary: “The men fought well, however, though half dead with heat, thirst, and weariness. Some broke for the river and plunged in the cool water for an instant, then emerging, rushed back to the fray and fought like lions.” (American Civil War Museum)
Ken Burns’s the Civil War: Historians Respond Robert Brent Toplin P. 116-117 “Ken Burns and the Romance of Reunion” Eric Foner
“The final episode presents the veterans’ reunions as moments of “brotherly love and affection,” embodiments of the fact that northerners and southerners (at least white ones) had come to recognize their common heroism and humanity. As former Congressman James Symington comments, both sides “shared a common love of liberty” even though (in a homey but incoherent metaphor) they gave it “different English as it spun through their lives” In a speech during the war, Abraham Lincoln offered the best answer to this kind of sophistry:
We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name– liberty… [Today] we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.
Neither Symington nor the narrator quite gets around to appreciating Lincoln’s point that the southern definition of liberty rested on the power to enslave others, for this would suggest that the South fought for slavery as much as for freedom.
All in all, ignoring Reconstruction or casting it as an unfortunate era of corruption and misgovernment, and expelling blacks from the account of the war’s aftermath, are not so much oversights, but an exercise in selective remembering not unlike that practiced by white Americans of the post-Civil War generation. Rather than subjecting it to critical analysis, Burns recapitulates the very historical understanding of the war “invented” in the 1890s as part of the glorification of the national state and the nationwide triumph of white supremacy. The final episode is not so much an account of how and why a particular understanding of the meaning of the Civil War flourished in post-Reconstruction America but an embodiment and reinforcement of that very understanding.”
Ken Burns’s the Civil War: Historians Respond Robert Brent Toplin P. 43-45 “How Familiarity Bred Success: Military Campaigns and Leaders in Ken Burns’s The Civil War.” Gary W. Gallagher
“Although Burns consulted a number of prominent historians, many parts of The Civil War betray, curiously, an ignorance of modern scholarship. The first episode sets the military stage with a flawed examination of resources at the opening of the conflict. Stressing the North’s industrial capacity and vastly larger pool of manpower, Burns concludes that “the odds against a southern victory were long.” True as far as it goes, this approach overlooks important Confederate advantages that evened the initial balance sheet. The Confederacy had only to defend itself and could win if the North did nothing; moreover, its armies could stand on the defensive while Union forces faced the task of conquering and occupying the South. The immense size of the Confederacy (at 750,000* square miles double the size of the American colonies during the Revolutionary War) and its 3500-mile coastline posed daunting obstacles to northern arms. In works such as James M. McPherson’s Ordeal by Fire and Battle Cry of Freedom and Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones’s How the North Won, Burns had readily available analyses of each side’s strengths and weaknesses. Inexplicably, he chose to overlook their insights.
Burns’s appraisal of resources drapes a mantle of hopelessness over the Confederate resistance, imparting an especially tragic quality to the costly battles that follow. Here The Civil War echoes Lost Cause writers such as Jubal A. Early, who often attributed Confederate defeat to the enemy’s material strength. Gallant struggle against impossible odds elevated Confederate soldiers, as Early suggested in an 1872 address on R.E. Lee: “General Lee had not been conquered in battle… [H]e surrendered… the mere ghost of the Army of Northern Virginia, which had been gradually worn down by the combined agencies of numbers, steam-power, railroads, mechanism, and all the resources of physical science.” This interpretative tradition extends back to Lee himself, who had assured his soldiers at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, that the enemy’s “overwhelming numbers and resources” had compelled him to surrender.
Other passages reinforce the initial image of badly outnumbered Confederates. In episode III, for example, Burns describes Lee’s army on June 26, 1862, as a “tiny force” facing a juggernaut in George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. The ensuing Seven Days battles assume the character of an underdog southern force vanquishing a much larger but inept opponent– a conception at odds with the facts. When Lee took charge of Confederate troops outside Richmond in early June 1862 he summoned reinforcements from many quarters. By the end of the month, he commanded approximately 90,000 soldiers in the largest army ever fielded by the Confederacy. Although McClellan’s federals outnumbered the Confederates by 10,000 to 15,000 men, Lee came nearer to parity with his opponent than in any other subsequent operation. Far from a mismatch, the Seven Days witnessed two roughly equal antagonists square off on ground that should have favored the Confederacy.”
*750,000: The casualty count held to be accurate until just recently upped to 750k. That would have made it one man per each mile in the war. Hell’s half acre stretched like a trip wire. All that is both real & inconceivable. The numbers themselves eventually crack open & bleed.
Note: All along, 3 levels of war had been clear: the strategic, the operational, the tactical. Leading to the Culminating Point of Victory.A force that goes by a strong will can beat another with far superior resources. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. And Saddam Hussein had 9 months to dance his mess around https://youtu.be/L19onxnn0PM before a multinational force finally tipped him down a trap door https://dailymotion.com/video/x3cl4da. Then there were the Continental troops versus the entire British Navy. Battle of Warsaw, 1920. And Finland, 1939, the worst winter, uh, 45 below, & outnumbered by Russians 8 to 1. Then in WWIII, after D.C. got nuked, the Wolverines routed the Russki Empire, saved democracy from the bear’s clutches. After all that, 46% at Rotten Tomatoes. And after all that, 4 years of hell, there’s this: “The South could have won simply by not being conquered. It did not have to occupy a foot of ground outside its own borders.”
Memory and American History David Thelen “The Timeless Past” by David Lowenthal P. 137
“Both sides seem unaware that the Founding Fathers did not create their society de novo, but were born into it, imbibed its values from childhood, and sought to codify most of them. They were folk of their time, no less than we of ours; for them to see slaves and women as inferior was not hypothetically discordant, but comfortably accordant, with their professions of liberty.”
Note: Hmmm, ask slaves & women about that, about the men with bad morals.
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 91
“The real causes of war still remain out of range of our rational thought; but the minds of nations at war are invariably dominated by myths, which turn the conflict into melodrama and make it possible for each side to feel that it is combatting some form of evil. This vision of Judgment was the myth of the North. If we study the Civil War as a political or an economic phenomenon, we may fail to be aware of the apocalyptic aspect it wore for many defenders of the Union; but this myth possessed the minds of the publicists, the soldiers and the politicians to an extent of which the talk about “Armageddon” at the time of the first World War can give only a feeble idea….’”
Note: In 1870, Frederick Douglass says upon Lee’s death: “From which we are to infer, that the liberation of four millions of slaves and their elevation to manhood, and to the enjoyment of their civil and political rights was more than he could stand, and so he died.”
Memory and American History David Thelen P. 46-47 “Frederick Douglass and the Memory of the Civil War” David W. Blight
“Douglass embraced his role in preserving an abolitionist memory of the war with a sense of moral duty. In an 1883 speech in his old hometown of Rochester, New York, he was emphatic on that point.
You will already have perceived that I am not of that school of thinkers which teaches us to let bygones be bygones; to let the dead past bury its dead. In my view there are no bygones in the world, and the past is not dead and cannot die. The evil as well as the good that men do lives after them. . . . The duty of keeping in memory the great deeds of the past, and of transmitting the same from generation to generation is implied in the mental and moral constitution of man.”
Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War Gary W. Gallagher P. 31
“Douglass found particularly distasteful the manner in which some northerners responded to Robert E. Lee’s death in the autumn of 1870. Indeed, many newspapers in the North were so admiring of various elements of Lee’s life and career that J. William Jones, one of the general’s indefatigable hagiographers, later quoted from them in his Life and Letters of Robert Edward Lee: Soldier and Man. For example, the New York Sun termed Lee “an able soldier, a sincere Christian, and an honest man,” while the New York Herald breathlessly stated that Lee “came nearer the ideal of a soldier and Christian general than any man we can think of.” The New York Times mentioned Lee’s “unobtrusive modesty and purity of life”after the war, noting that he had “won the respect of even those who most bitterly deplore and reprobate his course in the rebellion.” Douglass would have none of this.” Is it not about time that this bombastic laudation of the rebel chief should cease?” he asked. Offended by “nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee,” Douglass sarcastically suggested that “the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven.”
P. 33
The achievements of black men in blue uniforms went largely unnoticed in the fourth interpretive tradition—a movement toward reconciliation that gained power in the late nineteenth century and remains widely evident today, The Reconciliation Cause included major military and political figures who advocated a memory of the conflict that muted the divisive issue of slavery, avoided value judgments about the righteousness of either cause, and celebrated the valor and pluck of white soldiers in both Union and Confederate armies. It was because of American traits showcased on Civil War battlefields, the reconciliationist interpretation maintained, that a United States economic colossus stood poised by 1900 to assume a central position on the world stage. Reconciliationists often pointed to Appomattox, where Grant and Lee behaved in a way that promoted peaceful reunion, as the beginning of a healing process that reminded all Americans of their shared history and traditions. Although sometimes combining with elements of the Union Cause and even the Emancipation Cause, the Reconciliationist Cause most often was characterized by a measure of northern capitulation to the white South and the Lost Cause tradition.
Although reconciliationists achieved considerable success, it is important to stress that many Americans, South and North, remained resolutely unreconciled into the twentieth century.”
Note: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858019522444 Army Life in a Black Regiment, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
The New York Age, quoted in the Richmond Planet June 7, 1890:
“‘Robert E. Lee was one of the greatest generals of modern times. But he was a traitor, and gave his magnificiant abilities to the infamous task of disrupting the union and to perpetuating the system of slavery. Where then is the wisdom or the propriety of wasting any sentiment on Robert E. Lee? Let the unconstructed Democracy of the South glorify him and his memory as they will, but let the patriots of the nation indulge in none of it.
Richmond Planet, June 7, 1890: The Negro was in the Northern processions on Decoration Day and in the Southern ones, if only to carry buckets of ice-water. He put up the Lee Monument, and should the time come, will be there to take it down.’”
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War Daniel Aaron P. 310 F.M.. Cornford, 1907
“It suggests the transformation which begins to steal over all events from the moment of their occurrence, unless they are arrested and pinned down in writing by an alert and trained observer. Even then some selection cannot be avoided- a selection, moreover, determined by irrelevant psychological factors, by the accidents of interest and attention. Moment by moment the whole fabric of events dissolves in ruins and melts into the past; and all that survives of the thing done passes into the custody of a shifting, capricious, imperfect human memory. Nor is the mutilated fragment allowed to rest there, as on a shelf in a museum; imagination seizes upon it and builds it with other fragments into some ideal construction, which may have a plan and outline laid out long before this fresh bit of material came to the craftsman’s hand to be worked into it, as the drums of fallen columns are built into the rampart of an Acropolis…. The facts work loose; they are detached from their roots in time and space shaped into a story. The story is moulded and remoulded by imagination, by passion and prejudice, by religious preconception or aesthetic instinct, by the delight of the marvellous, by the itch for the moral, by the love of a good story; and the thing becomes a legend. A few irreducible facts will remain; no more perhaps, than the name of persons and places… F.M. CORNFORD, 1907”
Americans Remember Their Civil War Barbara A. Gannon P. 105
“One of the most popular aspects of nineteenth-century Civil War memory was drawn, not written. Mark E. Neely Jr., Harold Holzer, and Gabor S. Boritt pioneered the study of The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause (1987), among the examples they used the famous Lost Cause portrait, The Burial of Latané (1864). In this painting, which was later a popular print, women on the home front buried a Confederate captain. In addition to loyal women, the print included faithful slaves who assisted at the burial and joined in the bereavement. Neely and Holzer analyzed the art created during and immediately after the war to “revive and sustain Confederate identity after the collapse of the Confederacy, providing a visual accompaniment to the embracing and enduring myth of the Lost Cause.” Half of this book examined postwar art demonstrating its popularity. Similarly, Holzer and Neely looked at the art of the Union Cause in The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (2000); in contrast, artists drew the vast majority of these works during the war and much less afterward. The same factors that made the Lost Cause more memorable than the Union Cause affected the popularity of Union themes after the war.
If federal supporters had created art to commemorate their cause, it might not have sold well in the twentieth century; the strength of the Lost Cause persisted in images in everything else. Gary W. Gallagher in Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (2008) assessed Civil War art in the second half of the twentieth century. He did not survey museums. Instead, he examined advertisements for popular art in Civil War magazines starting in the 1960s and ending in 2005. Gallagher considered Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Confederate forces as representative of the Lost Cause; among those he believed evocative of the Union Cause were Grant, Lincoln, and images of Union soldiers. Gallagher calculated that the Lost Cause was 2.5 times more likely to be commemorated in these images; Lee and Jackson being number one and number two in popularity. In contrast, when Grant appeared, he was usually with Lee at Appomattox. Gallagher also found that the Confederate battle flag played a much more prominent role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than it did in the nineteenth. He attributed this evolution to Confederate supporters’ angry response to removing it from public spaces. Similarly, modern prints revealed a more intense religiosity; images of Jackson praying were popular, reflecting a resurgence of evangelical faith in recent decades. More recently, the North prints experienced an increase in popularity. The hero of The Killer Angels and the movie Gettysburg (1993), Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, emerged as the new star of the Civil War art demonstrating the interaction of different types of popular culture. Despite the rise of Chamberlain, based on Gallagher’s survey, the Lost Cause won the battle of Civil War memory in art.”
Robert E. Lee and I Have a Staring Contest
“And a white person says racism is dead.
and a white person jokes about slavery
and a white person lives unbothered
and a white person screams about immigrants
and a white person asks if I speak African
and a white person touches what is not theirs
and all I see is white people taking what is not theirs
and a white person bumps into me
and a white person bumps into me
and a white person bumps into me
and a white person walks through me
but I can’t stop staring at Robert
and I can’t stop crying
and I can’t stop help feeling like
and the concrete swallows me whole
and Robert E. Lee is still standing.”
M. Kamara
This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War Bruce Catton P. 248
“Gettysburg was a dot on the map marking a place where all the roads crossed; a pleasant little town lying amid rolling hills and broad shallow valleys, a blue mountain wall rising a score of miles to the west, rival armies moving toward it without design, as if something in the place drew them irresistibly.”
Note: Few Pennsylvanians, when they heard Lee was coming, went to fight. They just didn’t answer the call to show up to be one of the 23k N dead, 28k S dead in a town of just 24k. 46,000-51,000 casualties over three days, the worst in U.S. history. They knew in their blood. This is what it seemed. This is what it seems. So instead of walking around & joining the town, they sank in the dirt. Like the original town was lifted up, disappeared in the ether never to be in that place it was again. On the other hand, see pages 130-142 in Soldiers of Blair County by Hoenstine for discussion of the Minute Men assembled prior to Lee’s arrival. See in this manuscript June 15, too. Hoenstine states (P. 131): “Discontent was spread among certain elements in the north through the efforts of the “Copperheads,” and the rebels’ spy system kept them well informed of the conditions throughout the northern States. Foreign supplies, guns and munitions of war had been received and the hopes of the southern confederacy were bright, while the north was disheartened and tired of the prolonged war. Recruiting was at a standstill, as evidenced by the fact that not a single company had been raised in Blair County since the previous summer and many soldiers had returned from the service on account of the termination of their enlistments.” Note too that at this point in June, no one (“well informed circles” according to some historians) thought Confederates would really show up in PA.
Note: As I wrote earlier, at least 2,200 Pennsylvanians fought in the Confederacy. As the crow flies, Gettysburg was only 30 miles from Ephraim’s farm, which meant he heard the battle, because reports from 120 miles away were made about the sound. It must have been like someone walking over his grave. (There were at least 350 cannons going, mainly 12 pound Napoleans, some of which still dot the land there. On July 3, 150 went off at once on Cemetery Ridge, considered the largest firepower ever in the Western Hemisphere.) Ephraim must have been afraid, along with other Pennsylvanians, throughout June as it was well-known Rebels were set to cross the river then invade SE PA. soon. According to Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War the state was divided. Ephraim’s area had a lot of Secesh, including the editors at his local newspaper, Harrisburg’s daily The Patriot & Union, a four-page broadsheet with six columns of news on each page. It was a copperhead-run, anti-Lincoln paper. Four journalists were taken to D.C. under Henry Halleck’s (Lincoln’s General-in-Chief) orders and imprisoned without hearing for sedition in August, 1862. “Their offense? The Patriot & Union’s print shop had printed a handbill– a hoax that got posted all around Harrisburg– that announced abolitionist James Lane was in town to recruit local black men for the Union Army. According to a recent article in America’s Civil War by Barrett’s great-great-grandson Doug Stewart, “If taken seriously, the handbill might have sparked a race riot.” The announcement promised:
“Arms, equipments, uniforms, pay, rations, and bounty the same as received by White Soldiers, and no distinction will be made.”
Black recruitment and black equality were incendiary topics in Pennsylvania– especially in midstate– in 1862. The newspaper men claimed that the handbill was a practical joke “got up by frolicsome printer boys without knowledge of the editors or proprietors.”
(Donald Gilliland pennlive.com “Living on the Wrong Side of History? The Harrisburg Patriot & Union’s notorious ‘review’ of the Gettysburg Address” which was, btw, on paper is seven½ x 9½ paper, & 272 words)
Likely Ephraim also read the Hollidaysburg Register, the Blair County Weekly News, plus the Huntingdon Journal, Huntingdon’s Globe, and the Altoona Tribune, plus any papers he could get his hands on out of Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia, or even New York. Ephraim’s main paper The Daily Patriot and Union said of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.”
It will take until 2013 for the paper to retract the editorial. No word yet on the handbill.
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 Edward Ayers P. 271
“The “unexpected and startling news of the retreat of Gen. Banks’ division” threw Franklin County “into a high state of excitement,” the Valley Spirit admitted. “At an early hour in the morning the drums were out and large crowds of people were collected on all the corners, and at public places reading the extras, and circulating the order issued by the Governor calling out the militia and Volunteers.” The Federal army appearing to have failed, “many of our most patriotic citizens at once commenced getting up volunteer companies to proceed to Washington for the protection of our National Capitol, or to march to any point for the defence of the border.’”
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 Edward Ayers P. 395-397
Note: Confederate Habeas Corpus history: “The Confederate Congress authorized the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus from February 1862 until February 1863 and again from February 1864 until August 1864, and afterward authorized Confederate president Jefferson Davis to suspend the writ as he saw fit.” https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/civil-liberties-in-virginia-during-the-civil-war
“News quickly arrived in Chambersburg about the disaster in Winchester. “Our town is in an uproar,” William Heyser glumly noted the day after Milroy’s defeat. Even though the residents could not believe everything they heard, “we all feel Pennsylvania will be invaded. Many families are hiding their valuables, and preparing for the worst…. The stores are packing up their goods and sending them off, people are running to and fro.” Alexander K. McClure wrote a leading Republican: “If the Rebels come they will come much stronger than before, and I doubt not with a much more destructive purpose. Our raiders south have been wantonly destructive with private property….”
Philip Schaff, a theologian who taught at the Mercersburg Seminary, viewed the looming Confederate invasion through the lens of Scripture. “It seems to me that I now understand better than ever before some passages in the prophetic discourses of our Savior, especially the difference between wars and rumors of wars.” Schaff could see the effect of rumors, “conflicting, confused, exaggerated, and frightful.” The “whole veteran army of Lee, the military strength and flower of the Southern rebellion is said to be crossing the Potomac and marching into Pennsylvania. We are cut off from all mail communication and dependant on the flying and contradictory rumors of passengers, straggling soldiers, run-away negroes and spies.” As a result, “all the schools and stores are closed; goods are being hid or removed to the country, valuables buried in cellars or gardens and other places of concealment.”
With the pending invasion, the worst in people came out. Pennsylvanians, Schaff regretted to say, turned against one another. “Political passions run high; confidence is destroyed; innocent persons are seized as spies; the neighbor looks upon his neighbor with suspicion, and even sensible ladies have their imagination excited with pictures of horrors far worse than death.” With these effects of the rumors of war, Schaff found himself thinking that “it would be a positive relief of the most painful suspense if the rebel army would march into town.”
The next day the Confederates did arrive in Mercersburg, a dozen miles south of Chambersburg. “They rode into town with pointed pistols and drawn sabres, their captain (Crawford) loudly repeating: “We hear there is to be some resistance made. We do not wish to disturb private citizens; but if you wish a fight, you can have it to your heart’s content. Come out and try.’” The Rebels had already been to a nearby town, where they took 200 cattle and 120 horses “of the best kind,” Schaff notes, worth perhaps eleven thousand dollars. They also carried with them two or three “negro boys.” None of the citizens resisted.”
Schaff, a brilliant scholar born in Switzerland and educated in Germany and destined to emerge in a few years as a leading American and European theologian, talked with the officer in charge of the raid, Colonel Ferguson. The Southerner spoke with “great decision, though courteously.” The Confederate officer told the professor: “I care nothing about the right of secession, but I believe in the right of revolution. You invaded our rights, and we would not be worthy the name of men if we had not the courage to defend them. A cowardly race is only fit for contempt.” Ferguson thought the North lived “under a despotism; in the South the Habeas Corpus is as sacredly guarded as ever. You had the army, the navy, superiority of numbers, means, and a government in full operation; we had to create all that with great difficulty; yet you have not been able to subdue us, and can never do it. You will have to continue the war until you either must acknowledge our Confederacy or until nobody is left to fight. For we will never yield. Good-by, I hope when we meet again we will meet in peace.” Schaff thought the officers of the Confederate army “intelligent and courteous, but full of hatred for the Yankees.”
Schaff had to admit that he “felt deeply humbled and ashamed in the name of the government.” The Union had apparently concluded to fortify Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, and to leave all Southern Pennsylvania exposed to plunder and devastation, instead of defending the line and disputing every inch of ground. No forces of any account this side of Harrisburg, and the Rebels pouring into the State with infantry and artillery. The government seems paralyzed for the moment. We fairly, though reluctantly, belong to the Southern Confederacy, and are completely isolated.’”
P. 412
“Philip Schaff wanted to know what sort of person the famous partisan ranger, the famous guerrilla, Imboden was. The professor got his chance when the “large, commanding, and handsome officer” told the people of Mercersburg what drove him as he led the most destructive force in Lee’s army. “You have only a little taste of what you have done to our people in the South,” Imboden told the Northerners. “Your army destroyed all the fences, burnt towns, turned poor women out of house and home, broke pianos, furniture, old family pictures, and committed every act of vandalism. I thank God that the hour has come when this war will be fought on Pennsylvania soil.” Schaff noted that every Southern soldier with whom he spoke “has his tale of outrage committed by our soldiers upon their homes and friends of Virginia and elsewhere. Some of our soldiers admit it, and our own newspaper reports unfortunately confirm it. If this charge is true, I must confess that we deserve punishment in the North.” Imboden went further than most in his longing for vengeance, saying that “if he had the power he would burn every town and lay waste every farm in Pennsylvania.”
Rather than burn the towns of Franklin, John Imboden stripped them of all he could. He presented a long list of items for the people of Mercersburg to gather for his men: 5,000 pounds of bacon, 20 barrels of flour, 2 barrels of molasses, 2 barrels of sugar, 2 sacks of salt, and 150 pairs of shoes. As men gathered these items, a Confederate messenger rode into town “on a dead run,” bearing a message from General Robert E. Lee to John Imboden. After quickly reading the message, the partisan leader commanded his men to march immediately. They left the piles of provisions gathered by the citizens in the middle of the street. The Confederates were heading to a nearby town, a town of the border, Gettysburg.”
hear many things in these parts that kindles our eire….
It was a dark madness that swept over them, their rights, their rights, only ever their rights, never not only their rights, never anyone else’s rights rights rights. Madness took over, just madness. Like the Walking Dead, a rabid feral fever 160 years ago. Everyone declares, like a word with a directly opposite meaning, their liberty, their their their &c., &c., &c.
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