USA > Pennsylvania > Pennsylvania in American history > Part 18
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24
WAR OF THE REBELLION
367
twenty States in 1861 by the secession of fourteen of the Southern States which formed a new govern- ment under the title of the Confederate States of America, upon a permanent basis the corner-stone of which is African Slavery ;" and that "under the in- fluence of slavery, which is the corner-stone of her . governmental fabric, the Confederate States has just commenced a career of greatness." The Confed- erate States met in congress at Montgomery, Ala., and adopted a constitution on the IIth of March, 1861, which was at that time there printed. If the question uppermost in their minds had been the preservation of state sovereignty and the right of secession, when occasion demanded its exercise, a provision to this effect would have certainly appeared in definite and comprehensive phrase. This state paper contains no language which will bear such in- terpretation. Six of its one hundred and four clauses relate to slavery and the extension of that institution into new territory, and clause 4 of section 9 provides that "No bill of attainder, ex-post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of prop- erty in negro slaves, shall be passed." In other words, it was made a part of the fundamental law that even
368
WAR OF THE REBELLION
if the people of the confederacy should wish in the future to modify the institution they should be with- out power to accomplish such a purpose.
Desperate as were the struggles of the war, and grim as were its features, it had its phases of humor. " Personne," who was the army correspondent of the Charleston Courier, published at Columbia, S. C., in 1864, a book of war anecdotes, called " Margin- alia," which well illustrate the spirit of the time upon the side to which he belonged. In it he tells in all soberness this marvelous story : "Sergeant Gray, of Captain Wood's company of Scott's Thirty- seventh Virginia regiment, captured in one of Jackson's recent battles a Yankee captain, lieutenant and eleven privates. He overhauled them and com- manded a halt, when the captain ordered his men to fire. They did so without inflicting serious injury upon Gray, who rushed upon the captain, took his sword from him, and told him if he did not com- mand his men to surrender he would kill him in- stantly. The gallant captain succumbed, when each private marched singly up to Gray and laid his arms at the conqueror's feet. After he had secured all he shouldered the eleven muskets and marched the
369
WAR OF THE REBELLION
thirteen Yanks into camp. This is what one resolute man did." Those of you who remember that you had enough to do to carry with ease one musket, and that you regarded the second, which some comrade may have handed you temporarily, as a grievous burden, can well sympathize with the difficulties of this poor sergeant, wounded, though not seriously, in his ef- forts, with eleven muskets upon his sturdy shoulder, to corral thirteen Yankees and drive them into camp.
The war presents to us many and remarkable incongruities. There was one congressman, who, when his state had attempted to secede, refused to be controlled by the action of his people; who alone after all of his colleagues and the other members from the seceded states had departed, remained in the performance of his duties until the end of his term, participating in every military measure of the early part of the struggle. Does his name fill a niche in our history, and are our children taught to revere this solitary and remarkable instance of stead- fastness, character and love of country? He died an outcast, driven from the home to which he was never permitted to return, and his memory has perished from the recollections of men. At this re-
370
WAR OF THE REBELLION
mote time, and in this distant city, let me offer my tribute to the manhood of John Edward Bouligny, of the state of Louisiana.
There was one locality in the very heart of the south, covering a large part of a state, whose people continued true to the cause of the nation throughout the whole of the long and dreary years of the war. Though they were shot in their homes, hanged from trees and bridges, hunted with bloodhounds, with armies of their foes swaying to and fro across their land, their courage never faltered and their strength never failed. What the province of La Vendée was to the throne during the French revolution these people with loyalty unconquerable were to the union during our rebellion. And finally the cause for which they had suffered so much was triumphant. Its success brought to them neither wealth nor power, nor even conspicuous recognition and enduring rep- utation. In the working out of broad lines of policy, amid the exigencies of reconstruction, they were abandoned to the control and tender mercies of their old antagonists; and the heroism of East Tennessee, without example in our annals, is but a memory fading rapidly into the distance.
371
WAR OF THE REBELLION
It was the only war recorded in history which to the victors was all loss and to the vanquished was all gain. The mighty north, after winning the struggle by the outlay of billions of dollars and the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, inflicted no punishment, imposed no additional burden, and added not one foot to its territory, not one cent to its resources, and nothing to its political advantages. The beaten south, relieved of the indebtedness it had incurred, freed despite its efforts from an incubus which for generations had been sapping its resources and undermining its prosperity, without the payment of indemnity or the curtailment of privilege, with large increase of political power due to the enfran- chisement of its citizens, started upon a career of renewed promise and activity.
It has been often observed that Pennsylvania, founded and long controlled by a sect devoted to the principles of peace, has alone of the states vied with Virginia in the production of soldiers of eminence and skill. The war made especially conspicuous, in a military sense, the state wherein, a century before, independence had been declared and the constitution had been framed. At half after four o'clock on the
372
WAR OF THE REBELLION
morning of the twelfth of April, 1861, the rebels opened fire upon Fort Sumter. Before the day had closed came the answer of the north, in resonant tones, from Pennsylvania. In the early morning an act calling the people to arms was introduced into the House of Representatives of this state and passed, sent to the Senate and referred to the finance com- mittee, reported back under a suspension of the rules, made the special order for an evening session and was passed, and signed by the governor. It provided :
"SECTION 4. That for the purpose of organ- izing, equipping and arming the militia of this state, the sum of five hundred thousand dollars, or so much thereof as may be necessary to carry out the pro- visions of this act, be and the same is hereby appro- priated, to be paid by the state treasurer out of any money not otherwise appropriated.
" SECTION 5. . . . And should the president of the United States at any time make a requisition for part of the militia of this state for public service, the adjutant-general shall take the most prompt measures for supplying the number of men required and having them marched to the place of rendez-
373
WAR OF THE REBELLION
vous, and shall call them by divisions, brigades, reg- iments, or single companies, as directed by the Commander-in-chief."
This first step of the war on the part of the north, quick as a flash, three days earlier than the call of the president for troops, followed by New York on the 15th, and the other states later, fixing the attitude of the loyal people toward the rebellion, and which, from beginning to end, was urged and directed by a still living member of this post,* is one of those momentous and overpowering events that determine the fate of nations and affect the future of all the inhabitants of the earth. What crossing the Rubicon meant to Cæsar, what the dinner of the Beggars of the Sea was to the Dutch in their eighty years' war with Spain, what Lexington was to our Revolution, this legislative call upon the people of the commonwealth to arms, and tender to the gov- ernment of military support, was to the war of the rebellion.
In response and obedience, the first troops, con- sisting of five companies from the towns of Reading, Pottsville, Allentown and Lewistown, reached Wash-
* Alexander K. McClure.
374
WAR OF THE REBELLION
.
ington on the 18th of April. On the 19th, the Seventh Pennsylvania and the Sixth Massachusetts regiments were attacked in Baltimore, and the first blood was poured out upon the streets of that city where the Star Spangled Banner had been written. Another fateful crisis soon occurred. After the army had been defeated at Bull Run and had fled to Washington, the president and his cabinet sat within the capital awaiting with each moment the approach of the victorious rebels. The direful effect which the threatened capture would have had in leading to complications abroad and depression at home is manifest. The battle was fought upon the 21st of July. Before the 25th seventeen thousand Pennsyl- vanians, armed, equipped and disciplined, were there to defend the intrenchments. Mr. Lincoln came to the depot to express his personal gratitude for the safety they ensured-and the danger passed.
Pennsylvania furnished two of the five com- manders of that magnificent force, the army of the Potomac, upon which, after awarding due credit to other organizations, we must concede the burden of overthrowing the rebellion was cast-McClellan, who gave it form, and Meade, under whom it won
375
WAR OF THE REBELLION
its greatest victory and its final success. Upon her soil were born fourteen army and corps commanders: Meade, McClellan, Hancock, Reynolds, Humph- reys, Birney, Gibbon, Park, Naglee, Smith, Cad- walader, Crawford, Heintzelman and Franklin; and forty-eight general officers, including Hartranft, the hero of Fort Steadman, and Geary, who fought above the clouds at Lookout Mountain. Simon Cameron was secretary of war at the beginning of the struggle and Edwin M. Stanton at the close. No other state had an entire division in the army, and all of them were below her in the percentage of those killed in battle. A single Pennsylvania family sent into the war two generals, an adjutant-general, four colonels, a lieutenant-colonel, two surgeons, two assistant surgeons, an adjutant, nine captains, seven lieutenants and one hundred and sixteen sergeants, corporals and privates, including the most youthful of American generals,-in all one hundred and forty-five men, and, so far as has been ascertained, an unequalled contribution to the great struggle.
The decisive battle of the war, among the most fiercely contested combats of all time, requiring the utmost exertion combined with the largest capacity
376
WAR OF THE REBELLION
and the highest technical skill, whose result was of more moment to the future generations of mankind than Canna, Agincourt or Waterloo, was fought at a village in Pennsylvania by one of her own sons, famous forever after among the soldiers of America and the world. The opening gun of the contest was fired by Hofmann's Fifty-sixth Pennsylvania regiment, and the battle begun by Reynolds was continued by Hancock the superb and by Humph- reys. Gregg upon the right flank won a great and distinctive cavalry battle which saved the line from assault in the rear. And when Pickett led his divi- sion from the Emmettsburg road across the low land, in that charge destined to be futile but to be immortal, because never again did the waves of re- bellion surge so far, by some strange chance he was turned away from the clump of trees and he hurled his command to destruction against the Philadelphia Brigade at the bloody angle of the stone wall. It so happened in the providence of God that this mighty convulsion of battle, these throes of tremen- dous forces, in mass and in detail and in all their incidents but tested the courage and character and added to the glory of our native state.
377
WAR OF THE REBELLION
The purpose of those who appealed to arms was to disrupt the ties which held the states to- gether in union. It was a vain hope. The blows that were intended to dissever and break into fragments but welded the mass into closer association. Laws were passed under the pressure of military necessity which had never before been even suggested and became precedents for the future. Powers were exercised which had never before existed and which never again will be called in question. When was it that this country became a nation? It was not, as has sometimes been alleged, at the time of the adoption of the constitution. After the execution of the agreement came the action under it and the interpretation of its terms. Never in the history of human affairs has the mere underwriting of a paper made a government. Governments are the results of germination and growth, of development from conditions, of the working out of consequence from existing cause. It was not in the debates upon the floor of the Senate, when the logic of Webster con- fronted the fallacy of Hayne, important as were the results of that great effort in teaching the Amer- ican people the value of the union into which they
378
WAR OF THE REBELLION
had entered. Nor was it in the decisions of that august tribunal, the supreme court of the United States, amid the conflicting opinions of John Mar- shall and Roger B. Taney. The philosophical historian of the future, carefully analyzing our in- stitutions and reading events from the safe vantage point of distance, secure in the certainty of results attained, will tell the generations yet to be that the American people never became a nation until that skilled and masterful soldier, George G. Meade, wrote with his sword the final interpretation of the constitution of his country upon the crests of Round Top, Kulp's Hill and Cemetery Ridge.
Comrades, my story is told and I have done. Thirty-five years have rolled away upon their course since Lee, broken and dismayed, retreated from the battlefield of Gettysburg, and the American people are again confronted with the perils and trials of war. The fife and the drum once more are heard upon our streets, and the waves of the summer seas are disturbed with the roar of cannon. Great as are the calamities of war, they are not entirely unrelieved, and without compensation. To forget for a time the pursuit of money and the spur of
379
WAR OF THE REBELLION
ambition, to abandon for a space, however brief, the trivialties and amusements of life, while we offer sacrifice to the welfare of the country and the maintenance of a just cause, is to strengthen the national purpose and to chasten the national char- acter. Regret it as we may, the pathway of human progress is stained at every step with the blood of human victims. England exists to-day in the plen- itude of her power, and Europe is free from the blight of the dark ages, because the Dutch under William of Orange dared to meet the Spaniard when he ruled the land and the sea. If we are able to remove the clutch of the same weakened but still mailed hand from an abused and oppressed people, lowly though they be, near our own shores, we need not stop to count the lives nor to reckon the cost. And it is a happy and propitious omen that at the very dawn of the contest the breezes from the south bear to our ears the names of an- other Lee of Virginia, and Brooke of Pennsylvania, who, not forgetting but overlooking and disregard- ing the dissensions of the past, meet together upon the front line to strike at the same foe in behalf of a common cause and a thoroughly united country.
380
WAR OF THE REBELLION
Much benefit has the unwitting Spaniard conferred upon us, since he has removed the last trace of those resentments which the victories and defeats of the civil war left lingering in the hearts of our people.
GETTYSBURG
[Introducing Mr. Roosevelt, May 30, 1904.]
T HE battle of Gettysburg, momentous in its exhibition of military force and skill, tre- mendous in its destruction of human life, had consequences which in their effect upon the race are limitless. As the seeds of the cockle are sown with the wheat, so in the constitution adopted by the fathers in 1787 lay the germs of an inevi- table struggle. Two antagonistic forces grew in vigor and strength, side by side in one household, and like Ormuzd and Ahriman they must strive for the mastery. Upon this field the struggle came to a determination and the issue between them was here decided with cannon and musket. The rebel- lion was undertaken by the followers of the doc- trines of Calhoun and Davis with the purpose to rend the nation asunder and break it into fragments. Alas for the futility of the expectations of men! The Lord who holds the peoples in the hollow of his hand, and who since the dawn of history has taken them up by turns in the search for one fit for
382
GETTYSBURG
broad dominion, did not forsake us. The extraor- dinary powers exercised for the maintenance of the national life in that dire time of war became fixed as the principles of the national government. The flame of strife but tested the virtue of the metal. The blows intended to dissever, only welded the sovereignties together more firmly, for future wider effort. The nation as it exists to-day arose when Pickett failed to drive the Philadelphia Brigade from the stone wall on Cemetery Hill. A seer sitting on that dread day upon the crests of Big Round Top could have figured in the clouds of smoke rolling over the Devil's Den and the Bloody Angle the scenes soon to occur in Manila Bay, at Santiago and San Juan Hill, the beaming of a new light at Hawaii and in the far Philippines, the junction of the two mighty oceans and the near disappearance of English control of the commerce of the world.
The presidential office is so great a station among men that those who fill it are not to be re- garded as personalities. Their individuality is lost in its immensity. They become the manifestations of certain impulses and stages of development of the national life. Jackson represented its rough,
GETTYSBURG
383
uncouth and undisciplined strength. Lincoln looms up above all other Americans bearing the burden of woe and suffering which fate laid upon his broad shoulders in its time of stress and trial. Blessed be his memory forevermore! No people can look for- ward to the fulfillment of such a destiny as events seem to outline for us save one alert and eager with the enthusiasm and vigor of youth. No other pres- ident has so stood for that which after all typifies our life-the sweep of the winds over broad prai- ries, the snow-capped mountains and the rushing rivers, the sequoia trees, the exuberance of youth conscious of red blood, energy and power painting our bow of promise-as does Theodore Roosevelt. He has hunted in our woods, he has enriched our literature, he has ridden in the face of the enemy, he has maintained our ideals. Upon this day, devoted to the memories of the heroic dead,-in Pennsyl- vania a sad Decoration Day,-the achievements of the prolific past and the promise of the teeming future confront each other. To-day for the first time Theodore Roosevelt treads the field made im- mortal by the sword of George Gordon Meade and hallowed by the prose dirge of Abraham Lincoln.
26TH PENNSYLVANIA EMERGENCY INFANTRY
[Address delivered September 1, 1892, at the dedication of the monument on the battlefield of Gettysburg. ]
O N the morning of the 26th of June, 1863, General Jubal A. Early, with his division of the rebel army, numbering 6,368 men, sup- ported by White's battalion of cavalry and Jones's battalion of artillery, consisting of four batteries with an aggregate of thirteen guns,* started from Greenwood, upon the Chambersburg pike, on the way to Gettysburg .; It was the advance of that great host which two days later began to concen- trate upon this historic town. The purpose of the movement plainly appears. Its object was to hold in check the army of the Potomac, then mov- ing northward on the east side of the mountains,
* Jones's Report, War of Rebellion, No. 44, P. 493. + Early's Report, War of Rebellion, No. 44, p. 464.
385
EMERGENCY INFANTRY
while Lee should continue his operations in the Cumberland valley and be enabled to reach Harris- burg. Lee says in his official report: "In order, however, to retain it (the army of the Potomac) on the east side of the mountains, after it should enter Maryland, and thus leave open our communications with the Potomac through Hagerstown and Will- iamsport, General Ewell had been instructed to send a division eastward from Chambersburg to cross the South mountain. Early's division was de- tached for this purpose."*
On the same morning a Pennsylvania infantry regiment, numbering in all 743 men, arrived in Gettysburg and, under the order of Major Granville O. Haller, U. S. A., the representative of Major General D. N. Couch at this place, marched out the Chambersburg pike to confront the approaching host. The men upon whom this duty was imposed, coming from the field, the college, and the home, had been in the service just four days; not long enough to have acquired a knowledge of the drill, hardly long enough to have learned the names of their officers and comrades. It has always seemed to
* Lee's Report, War of Rebellion, No. 44, P. 307.
386
TWENTY-SIXTH PENNSYLVANIA
me that the situation had in it much of the heroic. Untrained, untried, and unused to war, they were sent to meet an overwhelming and disciplined force, not in some Grecian pass or mountain defile of the Swiss or Tyrol Alps, but in the open field with the certainty that they could make no effectual resist- ance. These young men, in their unsoiled uniforms, and flushed with enthusiasm, were to be thrown as a preliminary sacrifice to the army of Northern Vir- ginia for the accomplishment of a military end. The order setting before them this hopeless task has been criticised, but it was correct. In an artistic sense it was needful that Pennsylvania, in the pre- liminary movements leading up to the decisive battle of the war fought upon her soil, should take the first step. In a moral sense it was required of her to resent the invasion by a blow even though it should be impotent in effect. From a military point of view I hope to be able to show that the movement of the regiment produced results of im- portance in the impending struggle. It marched cheerfully and even gaily out the Chambersburg pike as far as Marsh creek, and then the inevitable happened. The rebel General Ewell, in his official
EMERGENCY INFANTRY
387
report says, sententiously : " In front of Gettysburg White charged and routed the Twenty-sixth regi- ment Pennsylvania militia, of whom 170 were taken and paroled."*
Who were the men whose fate it was to be thus suddenly caught up in the whirlwind of that momentous crisis? On the 15th of June President Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for fifty thou- sand men from Pennsylvania, to be organized under the regulations of the volunteer service, to repel a threatened invasion of the state. It was supple- mented upon the same day by a proclamation from Governor Curtin: "An army of rebels is approach- ing our border. . .. I now appeal to all the citi- zens of Pennsylvania, who love liberty and are mindful of the history and traditions of their revo- lutionary fathers, and who feel that it is a sacred duty to guard and maintain the free institutions of our country, who hate treason and its abettors, and who are willing to defend their homes and their firesides, and do invoke them to rise in their might and rush to the rescue in this hour of im- minent peril. The issue is one of preservation or
* Ewell's Report, War of Rebellion, No. 44, p. 443.
388
TWENTY-SIXTH PENNSYLVANIA
destruction." "* In response to these urgent appeals the men of Pennsylvania began to collect at Harris- burg in large numbers, expecting to enter the service of the commonwealth and to remain until the danger should disappear. On reaching that place, how- ever, they learned that they would only be accepted for a term of six months, and that they must be sworn into the service of the United States. Many of them, perhaps the larger number, returned to their homes. Simon Cameron appears to have been the first to suggest to the government at Washing- ton the propriety of accepting troops for the "emer- gency."+ The suggestion met with little favor, but when the clouds upon the border had rolled nearer and become more ominous, it was adopted, and Secretary Stanton telegraphed to General Couch, " Muster them in whichever way you can."# Eight regiments of infantry, two batteries, six companies of cavalry, and four independent companies of in- fantry entered the service for the "existing emer-
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.