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:
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:
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:
Some of your points are very well taken.
In the Gettysburg campaign Lee “paid” for most of the officially requisitioned supplies, but it was in money that had little or no value. Great propaganda for the CSA, but not much help to those who had their stuff taken. They would be reimbursed only if and when the CSA won their independence, and possibly not then.
However, your description of how southern soldiers behaved is very similar to the way northern soldiers had behaved in the South. And they were steadily getting less restrained in their behavior as the war went on.
Can’t find a reference at the moment, but but I remember an anecdote where Lee himself was approached by a PA farmer complaining about his property being taken without compensation.
Lee replied something like, “Yes, it’s very sad, but this is exactly what has been happening in Virginia for two years now.”
In which there is much truth.
Soldiers have always and everywhere behaved this way in enemy territory, and generally in friendly territory too.
The difference is that for most of our Civil War the theft and plundering was not supplemented by casual assault, rape and murder of civilians. Which historically most wars, especially civil wars, have been.
IOW, your general comments on this thread appear to be that Union soldiers misbehaved in the South in retaliation for CSA misbehavior for the comparatively limited periods when they were operating in Union areas. This is, I believe, exactly backwards.
Chambersburg was burned by Early in 1864 explicitly in retaliation for Hunter’s misbehavior in the Valley. It was the only goodsized northern town so treated. Quite a few southern towns burned.
When one man views another man as inferior or a slave, this type of behavior results and has at every stage of human history, including our modern era. If we were talking about Democrats or Jihadis there wouldn’t be any argument.
As Lee’s soldiers moved into enemy territory, many of them were surely tempted to pillage and plunder Northern towns and fields in retaliation for the destruction Virginia had been enduring for close to two years. However, in general the Confederates behaved themselves during their invasion of Pennsylvania.
Recognizing the need to avoid turning public opinion against his troops, General Lee on June 22 had issued General Orders Number 72, admonishing his men to avoid injuring or destroying private property. The order also placed the army’s quartermaster corps in charge of appropriating goods for military use, all of which it would pay for in Confederate money, which, however, was worth only a fraction of Northern currency. If the owner refused to accept such payment, officers were to issue a receipt that enumerated the goods taken. Owners refusing to comply with requests for supplies would have their goods seized, but receipts would still be issued.
For the most part,the Southerners obeyed this order, but there were a number of exceptions. General Early contravened it when he burned the Caledonia Furnace, which was owned by Pennsylvania’s Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Throughout the Confederate sojourn in Pennsylvania, relatively little violence took place between soldiers and white civilians.
www.explorePAHistory.com