A REMINISCENCE OF CHAMBERSBURG.
Friday afternoon, August 18th, I left Gettysburg for Chambersburg, by
stage, over a rough turnpike, which had been broken to pieces by Lee’s
artillery and army wagons two years before, and had not since been
repaired.
We traversed a sleepy-looking wheat and corn country,
“Wherein it seemèd always afternoon,”
so little stir was there, so few signs of life and enterprise were
visible. Crossing the Blue Ridge, we passed through a more busy land
later in the day, and entered the pleasant suburbs of Chambersburg at
sunset.
The few scattered residences east of the railroad were soon passed,
however, and we came upon scenes which quickly reminded us that we had
entered a doomed and desolated place. On every side were the skeletons
of houses burned by the Rebels but a little more than a year before. We
looked across their roofless and broken walls, and through the sightless
windows, at the red sunset sky. They stared at us with their empty
eye-sockets, and yawned at us with their fanged and jagged jaws. Dead
shade-trees stood solemn in the dusk beside the dead, deserted streets.
In places, the work of rebuilding had been vigorously commenced; and the
streets were to be traversed only by narrow paths between piles of old
brick saved from the ruins, stacks of new brick, beds of mortar, and
heaps of sand.
Our driver took us to a new hotel erected on the ruins of an old one.
The landlord, eager to talk upon the exciting subject, told me his story
while supper was preparing.
“I had jeest bought the hotel that stood where this does, and paid eight
thousand dollars for it. I had laid out two thousand dollars fitting it
up. All the rooms had been new papered and furnished, and there was
three hundred dollars’ worth of carpets in the house not put down yet,
when the Rebels they jeest come in and burnt it all up.”
This was spoken with a look and tone which showed what a real and
terrible thing the disaster was to this man, far different from the
trifle it appears on paper. I found everybody full of talk on this great
and absorbing topic. On the night of July 29th, 1864, the Rebel cavalry
appeared before the town. Some artillery boys went out with a
field-piece to frighten them, and fired a few shots. That kept the
raiders at bay till morning; for they had come, not to fight, but to
destroy; and it was ticklish advancing in the dark, with the suggestive
field-piece flashing at them. The next morning, however, quite early,
before the alarmed inhabitants had thought of breakfast, they
entered,—the field-piece keeping judiciously out of sight. They had come
with General Early’s orders to burn the town, in retaliation for General
Hunter’s spoliation of the Shenandoah Valley. That they would commit so
great a crime was hardly to be credited; for what Hunter had done
towards destroying that granary of the Confederacy had been done as a
military necessity, and there was no such excuse for burning
Chambersburg. It seemed a folly as well as a crime; for, with our armies
occupying the South, and continually acquiring new districts and cities,
it was in their power, had they been equally barbarous, to take up and
carry on this game of retaliation until the whole South should have
become as Sodom.
Chambersburg had suffered from repeated Rebel raids, but it had escaped
serious damage, and the people were inclined to jeer at those
neighboring towns which had been terrified into paying heavy ransoms to
the marauders. But now its time had come. The Confederate leaders
demanded of the authorities one hundred thousand dollars in gold, or
five hundred thousand dollars in United States currency; promising that
if the money was not forthcoming in fifteen minutes, the torch would be
applied. I know not whether it was possible to raise so great a sum in
so short a time. At all events, it was not raised.
Then suddenly from all parts of the town went up a cry of horror and
dismay. The infernal work had begun. The town was fired in a hundred
places at once. A house was entered, a can of kerosene emptied on a bed,
and in an instant up went a burst of flame. Extensive plundering was
done. Citizens were told that if they would give their money their
houses would be spared. The money was in many instances promptly given,
when their houses were as promptly fired.
Such a wail of women and children, fleeing for life from their flaming
houses, has been seldom heard. Down the hardened cheeks of old men who
could scarce remember that they had ever wept, the tears ran in streams.
In the terrible confusion nothing was saved. In many houses money, which
had been carefully put away, was abandoned and burned. The heat of the
flames was fearful. Citizens who described those scenes to me considered
it miraculous that in the midst of so great terror and excitement, with
the town in flames on all sides at once, not a life was lost.
The part of the town east of the railroad is said to have been saved by
the presence of mind and greatness of spirit of a heroic lady. As her
house was about to be fired, she appealed to a cavalry captain, and,
showing him the throngs of weeping and wailing women and children
seeking refuge in the cut through which the railroad passes, said to
him, with solemn emphasis,—
“In the day of judgment, sir, you will see that sight again; then, sir,
you will have this to answer for!”
The captain was touched. “It is contrary to orders,” said he, “but this
thing shall be stopped.” And he stationed a guard along the track to
prevent further destruction of the city in that direction.
The homeless citizens crowded to a hill and watched from its summit the
completion of the diabolical work. The whirlwind of fire and smoke that
went roaring up into the calm, blue heavens, soon over-canopied by one
vast cloud, was indescribably appalling. Fortunately the day was still,
otherwise not a house would have been left standing. As it was, three
hundred and forty houses were burned, comprising about two thirds of the
entire town.
The raiders were evidently afraid of being caught at the work. The
smoke, which could be seen thirty or forty miles away, would doubtless
prove a pillar of cloud to guide our cavalry to the spot. Having hastily
accomplished their task, therefore, with equal haste they decamped.
Three of their number, however, paid the penalty of the crime on the
spot. Two, plundering a cellar, were shot by a redoubtable apothecary,—a
choleric but conscientious man, who was much troubled in his mind
afterwards for what he had done; for it is an awful thing to take human
life even under circumstances the most justifiable. “He was down-hearted
all the next day about it,” said one. In the meanwhile the dead
marauders were roasted and broiled, and reduced to indistinguishable
ashes, in the pyre they had themselves prepared.
A major of the party, who had become intoxicated plundering the
liquor-shops, lingered behind his companions. He was surrounded by the
incensed populace and ordered to surrender. Refusing, and drawing his
sword with maudlin threats, he was shot down. He was then buried to his
breast outside of the town, and left with just his shoulders protruding
from the ground, with his horrible lolling head drooping over them.
Having been exhibited in this state to the multitude, many of whom, no
doubt, found some comfort in the sight, he was granted a more thorough
sepulture. A few weeks before my visit to the place, a gentle-faced
female from the South came to claim his body; for he, too, was a human
being, and no mere monster, as many supposed, and there were those that
did love him.
The distress and suffering of the burnt-out inhabitants of Chambersburg
can never be told. “For six weeks they were jeest kept alive by the
provisions sent by other towns, which we dealt out here to every one
that asked,” said my landlord. “And I declare to fortune,” he added,
“there was scoundrels from the outside that hadn’t lost a thing, that
would come in here and share with our starving people.” These
scoundrels, he said, were Germans, and he was very severe upon them,
although he himself had a German name, and a German accent which three
generations of his race in this country had not entirely eradicated.
Besides the charity of the towns, the State granted one hundred thousand
dollars for the relief of the sufferers. This was but as a drop to them.
Those who had property remaining got nothing. The appropriation was
intended for those who had lost everything,—and there were hundreds of
such; some of whom had been stopped in the streets and robbed even of
their shoes, after their houses had been fired.
“This was jeest how it worked. Some got more than they had before the
fire. A boarding-house girl that had lost say eight dollars, would come
and say she had lost fifty, and she’d get fifty. But men like me, that
happened to have a little property outside, never got a cent.”
It will always remain a matter of astonishment that the great and
prosperous State of Pennsylvania did not make a more generous
appropriation. The tax necessary for the purpose would scarcely have
been felt by any one, while it would have been but a just
indemnification to those who had suffered in a cause which the whole
loyal North was bound to uphold. Families enjoying a small competency
had been at once reduced to poverty; men doing a modest and comfortable
business were unable to resume it. Those who could obtain credit before
could now obtain none. Insurance was void. Householders were unable to
rebuild, and at the time of my visit many were still living in shanties.
Nearly all the rebuilding that was in progress was done on borrowed
capital.
But there is no loss without gain. Chambersburg will in the end be
greatly benefited by the fire, inasmuch as the old two-story buildings,
of which the town was originally composed, are being replaced by
three-story houses, much finer and more commodious. So let it be with
our country; fearful as our loss has been, we shall build better anew.