Gettysburg's Other Battle
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Gettysburg's Other Battle

The Ordeal of an American Shrine during the First World War

Mark A. Snell

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eBook - ePub

Gettysburg's Other Battle

The Ordeal of an American Shrine during the First World War

Mark A. Snell

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About This Book

Gettysburg is known as the second bloodiest battle of the 19th century and as the site of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 speech that gave new meaning to America's Civil War. By the turn of the next century, the battlefield was enshrined as a national park under the jurisdiction of the War Department. In 1913, graying veterans commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the momentous battle, dubbed the "Peace Jubilee, " a unity celebration largely administered by the U.S. Army. Four years later, the Army returned to establish a Regular Army infantry-training cantonment on the battlefield. The Tank Corps took over in 1918, and the area was dubbed "Camp Colt."

Gettysburg's Other Battle is the account of Gettysburg's citizens and its tens of thousands of temporary guests during the Great War, a drama that took place on the most significant stage in American historical memory. It goes beyond the story of the training camps by using the Great War as a window-in-time to examine a unique community, one in the throes of modernization while at the same time trying to capitalize on, yet preserve a part of, the nation's past.

Gettysburg's residents, like all Americans during World War I, experienced measures such as conscription, food conservation, and censorship. As the nation applied Progressive reforms to the war effort, Gettysburg followed suit. Unlike other American towns and cities that hosted mobilization camps, Gettysburg was hallowed ground, and an earlier generation already had felt the ravages of war like few other American communities. Gettysburg was desecrated both unwittingly and intentionally-it took years for the national park to recover from this environmental catastrophe. Today, the only reminders of Gettysburg's Great War heritage are a tiny marker, memorial tree, and wayside exhibit to commemorate Camp Colt, along with a small exhibit in the museum. Had Ike Eisenhower not commanded that camp in 1918, it doubtless would not be remembered at all.

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CHAPTER 1

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Between Two Wars

Gettysburg, 1865–1914

Most American community histories begin with the prehistory of the area and a description of the region’s natural features, including a sketch of its aboriginal inhabitants. This is followed by a discussion of European colonization and habitation (and, depending on the region, forced African relocation and settlement), the basis of the colonial economy (such as subsistence farming or tobacco growing), the social and cultural backgrounds of the colonists and their interactions with the native peoples, settlement patterns based on the availability of land and geography, and the framing of the colonial government, followed by political struggles eventually leading to the War for Independence. Then, these studies examine their communities’ places of within the structure of laws created by newly adopted state and federal constitutions. (Gettysburg and the southcentral Pennsylvania region also would undergo a short stint of military occupation during the Whiskey Rebellion, and the town became the seat of local government in 1800, when Adams County was carved out of existing York County.) Next, the evolving social and economic growth of the area usually is discussed, key personalities (normally defined by a person’s socioeconomic or political standing) are highlighted, and then the “inevitable” events leading up to the Civil War are laid out before the reader. Finally, the community’s response and sacrifices in the Great Rebellion (if it is a history of a northern town or county) or the Late Unpleasantness (if the community was part of the Confederate States of America) are described, usually in prodigious detail.
Historical minutiae and background of this sort are absolutely imperative for a comprehensive county or community history, but for the microcosmic study found within the covers of the current volume, this level of detail is a bit superfluous.1 Until the shattering events of the Civil War, and most especially the momentous battle of 1863, Gettysburg was not much different than the new Republic’s other rural-Pennsylvania county seats, such as York, Scranton, Chambersburg, Lancaster, Bedford, Carlisle, and Lewistown, or, for that matter, nearby Maryland seats of government, like Westminster, Frederick or Hagerstown, and even towns farther to the south and north, like Staunton, Virginia, or Morristown, New Jersey. (The major exception to the similarity of communities in the antebellum northern and southern states was the continuing existence of slavery in the South.) But momentous historical events tend to overshadow just about everything else in a town’s history, especially those communities that witnessed decisive or especially bloody battles. Just as the 1781 siege defined Yorktown, Virginia, and the 1916 slaughter defined Verdun, France, the clash between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia defined Gettysburg and set it apart from the other American communities and, for that matter, the rest of the world. And when, on November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln paid tribute to the fallen Union soldiers, he redefined not only the battle but the war in general, thus bequeathing to Gettysburg lasting international fame.2 Though he was unaware of the significance of his words in 1863, the sixteenth president was placing Gettysburg on history’s pedestal along with other villages, towns, or cities like Agincourt and Waterloo; or future battlefield communities such as Stalingrad, Sainte-Mùre-Église, and Bastogne.
The great battle had forever changed Gettysburg and Adams County. Its two institutions of higher education, the Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary and Pennsylvania College, had suffered battle damage, and their buildings had been used as field hospitals. The town’s churches had also served as hospitals. Citizens whose property had been damaged by Union soldiers could seek restitution from the federal government, but each property owner had to prove that northern soldiers had caused the destruction or had confiscated livestock, grain, fence rails (for firewood), or other personal property. Property owners could file claims with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for damages sustained from Confederate activity (minus the loss of livestock and poultry). Few residents, however, were successful in recouping their losses from either level of government. Battle damage to the surrounding area was widespread, and the detritus of combat, including human and horse remains, could be seen for many years afterward. Trees were so badly damaged from small arms and artillery fire that in some areas of the battlefield, such as Culp’s Hill, few would survive, stripped of their life-sustaining bark.
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Effect of musketry on trees at Culp’s Hill, July 1863 (Library of Congress)
On July 2 and 3, Federals intentionally set ablaze the Bliss Farm—situated between Union and Confederate lines on Cemetery and Seminary Ridges—to prevent Rebel sharpshooters from using it to snipe at blue-clad officers. These farm buildings, along with the Sherfy Barn about a half mile to the south, which caught fire from battle action, were the only structures totally destroyed, but any that stood in the way of the opposing forces sustained damage. Bullet-riddled fences and trees, discarded or abandoned equipment, and soldiers’ graves remained—even after the majority of Union dead were moved to the Gettysburg National Cemetery.3
A year after the battle, the county’s populace was reminded that the war had not ended just because the contending forces had departed in July 1863. Confederate general Jubal Early staged a raid into Maryland in the summer of 1864, culminating with the Battle of Monocacy on July 9, followed by an attack three days later on Fort Stevens in the District of Columbia. On July 30, Early’s cavalry force, under the command of Brig. Gen. John McCausland, burned nearby Chambersburg to the ground, partly for its citizens’ inability to pay a ransom but primarily in retribution for Union army depredations in the Shenandoah Valley.4
When the war finally came to an end in the spring of 1865, Adams County’s returning soldiers, many from Companies F and I, 87th Pennsylvania Infantry; Companies B and G, 138th Pennsylvania Infantry; Company K, 1st Pennsylvania Reserves and Company C, Cole’s Maryland Cavalry (whose veterans, along with Company K, 1st Reserves, actually had fought at Gettysburg) came home to tend to their shops, farms, and families. Years later, these men and others—some three thousand county residents served in the Union forces—would organize a veteran’s society, Post 9, Pennsylvania Department, Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). The society named it the Corporal Daniel Skelly Post in memory of a Gettysburg resident and soldier in the 87th Pennsylvania who had been mortally wounded during the 2d Battle of Winchester in the opening phase of the Gettysburg campaign. The unfortunate soldier, who went by the nickname Jack, had been a friend of John Wesley “Wes” Culp—a Gettysburg youth who had moved south before the war and enlisted in the 2d Virginia Infantry in 1861. Too, Jack was romantically involved with Jennie Wade, the town’s only battle fatality. Culp found a mortally wounded Skelly in a Confederate hospital after the Winchester battle. He then marched to Gettysburg with the rest of his command but once engaged in battle he was shot in the head and killed outright, near the hill that bore his family name. Thus, all three of these young Gettysburgians failed to survive the campaign. Culp and Wade were killed on July 3, and Skelly passed on July 12, one of the 178 Adams County Federal soldiers who did not survive the war.5
The region’s postwar economy remained primarily agricultural, as it had been in the century leading up to the sectional conflict, but tourism eventually competed with farming and fruit growing. In the immediate decades following the war, fruit production and processing leapt to center stage, especially north and west of Gettysburg. In the immediate postwar decades, the manufacturing industry was not as important to the local economy as agriculture and tourism and was limited primarily to garment-sewing, furniture production, and brickmaking. By the turn of the century, cigar manufacturing became the most swiftly growing business in Adams County. In 1912 alone, some fifteen new cigar manufactories began operations in McSherrystown, a mostly Catholic enclave in the southeast corner of the county. Additional rail spurs were built and county and municipal roads were upgraded in the early twentieth century to withstand heavier loads caused by automotive traffic, and electric streetcars plied Gettysburg’s streets and hauled visitors to battlefield sites.6 Thus, improved transportation not only benefitted Adams County commerce, and especially its orchard owners and canning-plant operators, but it also conveyed an increasing number of tourists to the town and catered to their needs.
Some of the earliest visitors—bereaved loved ones of the fallen, journalists, curious onlookers, and relic seekers—came before the war even had concluded, but in the postbellum decades they were followed by countless throngs of sightseers. Residents and outsiders quickly grasped the historic significance—and economic benefits—of the battleground and began their efforts to preserve the most significant pieces of terrain soon after the armies departed. David McConaughy, Pennsylvania College graduate, local attorney, and entrepreneur, was the driving force behind the movement to memorialize the fields of mortal strife. He started buying parcels of the battlefield almost as soon as the smoke cleared, and on April 30, 1864, he succeeded in having the Pennsylvania Assembly legally incorporate his Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association (GBMA). The association purchased additional land as funds became available both from the legislature and private concerns. The GBMA erected wooden observation towers, improved the existing remains of defensive works, and even attempted to historically interpret the battlefield by marking and describing important locations, such as Cemetery Hill, Little Round Top, and the so-called Bloody Angle. By 1880, the national GAR took over controlling interests in the GBMA, but it continued McConaughy’s vision of constructing tour roads and placing regimental memorials on the field.7
Another Pennsylvanian, although not a Gettysburg resident at the time of the battle, likewise played a critical role in preserving and interpreting the battlefield, especially the area where Pickett’s Charge was thwarted during the afternoon of July 3. John Bachelder did not serve in the Union army, but he did accompany the Army of the Potomac as an artist during the 1862 Peninsula campaign. He returned to Pennsylvania at the unsuccessful conclusion of that campaign, but when Lee’s army was defeated at Gettysburg, he packed his bags and traveled to Adams County within days of the battle’s end. He would spend his remaining years chronicling and interpreting the terrible trials of July 1863, as well as preserving the land where those momentous events had transpired. Bachelder became a board member of the GBMA and in 1883 was appointed the association’s official “superintendent of tablets and legends,” a position that allowed him to control a balanced historical interpretation of the battle for the growing number of northern and southern pilgrims, veterans, and tourists coming to the battlefield.8
Hotels, restaurants, guest houses, private museums, livery stables, souvenir and relic dealers, photographic studios, and battlefield guides became important parts of Gettysburg’s economy, and eventually automobile service stations and garages were built and benefitted from the increased tourist flow, too. An alleged medicinal spring was discovered near McPherson’s Woods, site of hand-to-hand combat during the battle’s first day, and in 1869 the Gettysburg Katalysine Springs Hotel was built just west of Willoughby’s Run, serving as a spa and resort and taking advantage of health-conscious visitors and battlefield pilgrims as well. The Springs Hotel stayed in business until the turn of the century, when vacationers began spending their summers at Atlantic and Chesapeake resorts instead.9
While the Springs Hotel and the battlefield were attracting tourists to Gettysburg in the postwar decades, but before automobile transportation, railroads brought visitors and manufactured goods to the area, not just to Gettysburg but to other Adams County towns like Fairfield, Biglerville, New Oxford, Littlestown, and East Berlin. By 1890, three main railroads were servicing the county: the Western Maryland; the Pennsylvania Railroad; and the Gettysburg & Harrisburg (a spur of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad). In addition, the East Berlin Branch of the Western Maryland stretched from a point about a mile east of New Oxford, skirting the York County border for about ten miles northward to East Berlin. A separate trolley line connected Littlestown, in southeastern Adams County, to Hanover, in southwestern York County.10 In 1884, a spur of the Gettysburg & Harrisburg, a new line just completed from the state capital, was laid from its Gettysburg terminal across the fields of Pickett’s Charge, crossing the Emmitsburg Road, to its terminus near the Taneytown Road just east of Little Round Top, to service the growing tourist trade. Farmers also took advantage of this spur to ship their products to distant markets.11
The year that brought the fiftieth anniversary commemoration to Gettysburg carried news that a Lincoln Memorial Highway would be built, eventually stretching from New York City to San Francisco. From the York County border at Abbottstown, through the town square in New Oxford to Gettysburg’s traffic circle and westward across Seminary Ridge, traversing the battlefield of July 1, making its way past Cashtown and then across the South Mountains to the Franklin County line and points west, the Adams County section of the concrete highway was completed in 1922. What came to be called “America’s Main Street” spanned Adams County from its eastern to western border for thirty-one miles, thus officially ushering Gettysburg into the modern automotive era. Eventually, the Adams County section of the highway would be part of U.S. Route 30.12
After the Civil War, the majority of Adams County voters tended to cast their ballots for the Democratic presidential candidate. Even the war hero Ulysses S. Grant, who had toured the Gettysburg Battlefield and National Cemetery in 1867 as the 1868 Republican candidate, did not receive the majority of Adams County’s votes in that year’s election. Then, as the incumbent running against Horace Greeley in 1872, Grant garnered only 51.4 percent of the county’s vote. (Grant probably got the majority of the popular vote in Adams County that year because Greeley, the Democratic candidate, also was the candidate of the Liberal Republicans, a minor third party.) In fact, in only three of twelve presidential elections between 1868 and 1912 did Adams County voters cast their majority for the Republican candidate: Grant in 1872, William McKinley in 1896, and Teddy Roosevelt in 1904. In 1912, Teddy and the new, short-lived Progressive Party hurt Republican incumbent William Howard Taft in the national election, ensuring a victory for Woodrow Wilson. In Adams County, Taft received only 11 percent of the votes. Historian Robert Bloom concluded that the 1912 election “was the nadir of Republican strength in any Adams County election.” Nonetheless, because of Roosevelt and his Bull Moose followers, Wilson received only a 51 percent majority in the county. Between the Civil War and the Great War, Democratic gubernatorial candidates normally could count on Adams County’s support as well—except for in 1894, when a terrible recession that had begun in the previous year hurt the Democrats nationwide. In local elections during the same period, Democrats carried 70 percent of the voters; most of these contests, however, were won before 1890. The next year, Republicans began to make steady progress at the local level of government. By 1906, eleven county towns...

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