Since the Union armies were in Southern territory during most of the war, there is plenty of opportunity to find where Union soldiers did bad things."
Thanks again, your posts never disappoint!
Somehow, overall behavior of Confederate troops has been obscured by mythology, such as: that Marse Robert's troops in the North paid for everything they requisitioned...
This report comes from Guelzo's recent book on Gettysburg, Lee's army marching north crosses into Pennsylvania, June 1863:
- "What delighted the eye of an invading army might also destroy it, if the men in that army enjoyed plundering those delights enough to lure them from the march, from roll call, from fatigue duty, from the commands of officers, from the soldiers' communion with one another.
- 5,000 jackets and trousers,
- 50,000 pounds of bread,
- 500 barrels of flour,
- 5,000 bushels of grain
- and so forth
On June 21 [1863] (while Longstreet's and Hill's corps were still waiting to cross the Potomac), Robert E Lee issued the first of two general orders demanding that "no private property shall be injured or destroyed by any person belonging to or connected with the army."
Only authorized staff personnel, whether commissary, quartermaster's, or medical staff, would 'make requisitions... for the necessary supplies' on local authorities or inhabitants for 'necessary supplies' and they were to pay 'the market price for the articles furnished,' with receipts in duplicate.
In years to come, this order would be the source of limitless satisfaction to Lee's veterans, who would point to it as evidence of the South's gentlemanly and civilized restraint in the making of war.
What was forgotten was that Lee's restraining order only offered Confederate paper money for the requisitions; that those who were disinclined to take Confederate paper would be offered receipts and the supplies taken anyway; and that anyone trying to "remove or conceal property necessary for the use of the army" would have it confiscated outright.
This did not provide as much security as it seemed for the farmers and shopkeepers whose inventories were thus rendered fair game.
But as the order was passed down from corps to division headquarters throughout the army, it did create a disciplined process which would keep the ordinary Confederate soldier from deputizing himself as his own chief provider.
It was not plundering that was undesirable, but uncontrolled plundering that led to uncontrollable soldiers sprawled across the countryside.
After all, Lee had already given orders to strip the Baltimore & Ohio workshops at Martinsburg of 'tools, machinery, and materials much needed by the railroads of the Confederacy,' and one of his principal rationales for coming north was to feed his army on the vast buffet of Pennsylvania farming.
Plunder would be good -- provided it was regulated.
Keeping up that caveat seems to have been harder than anyone expected.
'General Lee has issued orders prohibiting all misconduct or lawlessness and urging the utmost forbearance and kindness to all,' wrote an Alabamian.
But no sooner had the army crossed the state line than the march descended dangerously close to a free-for-all.
After all, 'the rebel officers and men' declared to anyone along the way who would listen that 'they had been fighting the war long enough in the South, and they were going to Pennsylvania to make it the battle-ground' -- which included 'taking what they pleased without paying for it.'
An apprehensive Dorsey Pender wrote his disapproving wife on June 28th, 'Until we crossed the Md. Line our men behaved as well as troops could,' but now 'they have an idea that they are to indulge in unlicensed plunder.'
Once encamped, rebel soldiers dispersed to 'forage after chickens, eggs, butter, vegetables, apple butter, honey, etc.'
Lee might issue 'orders against... unauthorized taking,' admitted one artillery lieutenant, but 'our boys lay waste the land on the sly.'
Jeremiah Tate marveled in a letter to his wife that 'when we first arrived in Pennsylvania we saw a fine time we got everything to eat that hart cood wish, such as mild and butter apple butter chickens honey molasses sugar coffee tea chease and Whiskey wines of all kindes, everything was cheap all it cost us was to go after it.'
Soldiers could get away with this because all to many officers preferred to invent excuses for ignoring Lee's order rather than invite outright disobedience.
In Evander McIvor's Law's Alabama brigade, 'there were ninety-five sheep skins in Law's camp.'
When 'someone spoke to' Law about the suspicious skins, 'he said that no man's sheep could bite his men without getting hurt.'
John Bell Hood was even more indulgent: 'Boys, you are now on the enemy's soil, stack your arms and do pretty much as you please.'
Once Ewell's corps reached the town of Chambersburg, the pillaging became even easier, given the concentration of stores and warehouses in a town of 5,000 inhabitants.
At nine o'clock on the morning of June 24th, Robert Rhodes division pulled itself together sufficiently to parade into Chambersburg, with a band tooting a reprise of 'The Bonnie Blue Flag,'
Dick Ewell, who had been traveling in a carriage with his crutches and prosthesis, set up command at the town bank, where he presented his formal requisition for supplies:
A hastily assembled civilian committee tried to bargain with Ewell, but to no avail.
Squads of Confederate soldiers began breaking open locked-up stores, and Chambersburg's 'grocery, drug, hardware, book and stationery, clothing, boot and shoe stores were all relieved of most of their remaining contents.'
Ewell's stepson, Campbell Brown, and another veteran staffer did some private foraging of their own in Chambersburg's shops, since Brown's mother had sent him off with a list of goods to pick up in Pennsylvania.
Ewell's chief engineer also had a list thoughtfully provided by his wife, which included 'about $100 worth of calico, wool delaine, bleached cotton, hoops, gloves, bread, gingham, pins &c&c' to be piled onto empty wagons heading south for resupply.
Confiscation soon degenerated into robbery.
'A group of Louisiana Tigers' stopped men on the streets and demanded their hats and boots; the pastor of the German Reformed Church, Benjamin Schneck, 'one of the best citizens of the place,' was stripped of his gold watch and $50 in cash.
Soon enough, robberies turned into simple vandalism.
Several Confederates broke into the Odd Fellows Hall and 'cut to pieces and destroyed a greater portion' of the lodge's regalia, 'broke open several of the desks and drawers, and mutilated everything they could lay their hands on.'
A 'respectable' soldier in the 15th Georgia said 'the streets of Chambersburg are strewn with gloves and fragments of goods.
From there, the vandalism veered into kidnapping of a very specific and lucrative sort.
In 1860, some 1,700 free black people lived in and around Chambersburg, Mercersburg, and Greencastle [neighboring towns].
A few were fugitives from slavery, and "free" only in fact, and for them the descent of the Army of Northern Virginia on south-central Pennsylvania was the beginning of 'a regular slave hunt.'
But not even those blacks whose families had been free for generations in Pennsylvania expected the Confederate armies to spend any time distinguishing between who was legitimately free and who was not.
Free black civilians working under Union Army contracts, as well as 'contrabands' who found refuge within Union Army camps, were all alike to the rebels, and when Harpers Ferry was overrun by Confederates in 1862, black fugitives 'who thought... the hour of freedom' had come, and who 'had gathered under the flag which to them was its starry symbol,' were roughly lined up along with the garrison's black teamsters, cooks, grooms, and ostlers, while Confederate soldiers and officers strolled down the lines, free to claim any of them as 'their property'.
A year later, the same opportunity presented itself in Chambersburg.
When Albert Jenkins' rough-hewn cavalrymen made their initial foray into the Cumberland Valley in mid-June, 'they took up all [the people of color] they could find, even little children, whom they had to carry on horseback before them' to be claimed or sold in the slave markets in Richmond.
One prosperous Chambersburg farmer, William Heyser, was shocked to discover that the Confederates had taken with them '250 colored people again into bondage'.
The infantry of Ewell's corps who followed on June 24th were even less fastidious about sweeping up any black people they could lay their hands upon.
George Steuart's Maryland brigade, looping westward to Mercersburg and McConnellsburg, threatened to 'burn down every house which harbored a fugitive slave, and did not deliver him up within twenty minutes,' and in Mercersburg twenty-one blacks were rounded up and driven south, including 'two or three' who 'were born and raised in this neighborhood.'
A local magistrate who protested taking 'free negroes' was abruptly told, 'Yes, and we will take you too, if you do not shut up!'
This might, in the larger scheme of the campaign, have seemed a waste of military time, but slaves were a valuable commodity.
As one farmer was told by Confederates who were escorting 'four wagon loads of women & children between Chambersburg & the Maryland line.' even the children 'will bring something.'
This was, after all, an army whose cause was inextricably bound up with the defense of black enslavement.
To have left Pennsylvania's blacks in undisturbed freedom would have been tantamount to denying the validity of the whole Confederate enterprise."
Similar events are recorded for other Pennsylvania towns, for example, York:
- [Confederate General]" Early made his headquarters in the York County Court House, and once again the division quartermaster published the requisitions:
- 165 barrels of flour or 28,000 pounds of baked bread
- 3,500 pounds of sugar
- 1,650 pounds of coffee
- 300 gallons of molasses
- 1,200 pounds of salt
- 32,00 pounds of fresh beef or 21,00 pounds of bacon or pork
- 2,000 pairs of shoes or boots
- 1,000 pairs of socks and 1,000 felt hats
- and $100,000 in cash."
