Rebels in Pennsylvania!

The spearhead of Lee’s army was about to strike a lethal blow at the very heart of the Keystone State when the Battle of Gettysburg interrupted.

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BY UZAL ENT

Gettysburg was a small rural town with no special significance or importance, like the thousands of other small towns that dotted the American landscape of the 19th century. Then came General Robert E. Lee, with his 75,000-strong Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, marching into Pennsylvania in June 1863. When Lee’s men stumbled onto Major General Joseph Hooker’s 95,000-man Union Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg on July 1, the tiny country town suddenly became synonymous with one of the greatest battles ever fought in the Western world.

If Lee had had his way, however, Gettysburg would have remained nothing more than it had ever been. In those few weeks before his fateful encounter with Hooker’s pursuing army, Lee seemed to have his sights set on Harrisburg, the Keystone State’s capital and stepping stone to the huge port city of Philadelphia. And before the Battle of Gettysburg changed his plans, Lee very nearly had his prize in his hands.

Northern officials swung into action with an urgency bordering on panic when reports of Lee’s invasion first came in. On June 12 and again on the 16th, Pennsylvania Governor Andrew G. Curtin issued a call for volunteers to defend the state. President Abraham Lincoln issued a similar call on June 15, for 100,000 militiamen from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, and West Virginia. But these efforts at raising an impromptu militia to fend off Lee’s battle-tested veterans came to nothing, and for good reason: Curtin’s call stated that recruits would be put on standby for active duty in the Department of the Monongahela in western Pennsylvania or the Department of the Susquehanna in the east, depending on where they lived, but it had no cap on how long the term of service could continue. Lincoln offered a six-month term, but without the bounty usually paid to men who enlisted for army service. And because Congress had not appropriated money for the militia force, there was a chance that the men might not be paid at all.

Curtin and Lincoln finally shortened their proposed terms of service to three months, and when the governor called for volunteers again on June 26, he pledged that, if the Rebel threat was gone before 90 days were up, the men could return home early. The federal government would provide the men with arms, ammunition, transportation, and subsistence–everything but uniforms.

While the president and the governor waited in vain for a force of any size to materialize, a glimmer of hope came from New York. The Empire State, whose militia was better organized than those of most other states, offered 8,000 to 10,000 men from New York City to serve immediately, but only for three months. Union Secretary of War Edwin Stanton accepted the New Yorkers at once, and so it was that the defense of Pennsylvania’s capital fell almost entirely to New York troops.

By June 28, Major General Darius Couch, commander of the Department of the Susquehanna, would have some 11,000 to 12,000 Northern troops at his disposal. Thirteen regiments of New Yorkers tramped off rail cars in Harrisburg–eight of them to be deployed around the city, one to remain within the city, and four to guard two rail bridges over the Susquehanna River at Marysville, seven miles north of Harrisburg on the opposite riverbank. Five Pennsylvania regiments, along with assorted company-sized units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, bolstered the city’s defenses.

Civilians from the Harrisburg area joined with soldiers to dig defensive positions on the heights across the Susquehanna from the capital. The principal defense, Fort Washington, was protected by an outwork named Fort Couch, about 700 yards farther from the river on the same ridge. These forts were far from formidable. Each mounted a miscellany of poor-quality cannon, mostly 6- and 12-pounders. The inadequacies did not stop with the hardware, either. Except for a contingent of sailors who served a howitzer battery, the training of most of the artillerists was as lacking as their combat experience. In fact, most of the Northern troops had little training and less experience.

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