Perhaps the only thing that held Harrisburg's improvised defense force together was the professionalism of key principal officers: Couch, the able Brigadier General William F. "Baldy" Smith, Lieutenants Edward Muhlenberg and Rufus King of the U.S. Artillery, and Captain William H. Boyd of the U.S. Cavalry.

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Approaching Couch's green, piecemeal force was a Confederate army of legendary skill and experience. As Lee's troops fanned out across south central Pennsylvania, they formed an arc approximately 100 miles long, centered a few dozen miles north of Gettysburg at Carlisle. To the west, Rebel troops were in McConnelsburg and Chambersburg, and to the east they occupied York and Wrightsville. Lee had already ordered Lieutenant General Richard Ewell, commander of his 2d Corps at Carlisle, to capture Harrisburg if he "had the means."

The "means" at Ewell's disposal were formidable ones, and the corps commander had soon put them to work preparing to capture the capital city. Major General Jubal E. Early, one of Ewell's division commanders, was to cross the Susquehanna over bridges at Wrightsville, capture Lancaster, in the midst of Pennsylvania's most fertile agricultural region, cut the main railroad to Philadelphia, and then attack Harrisburg from the rear. Major General Robert E. Rodes's division would attack the city's front simultaneously. By the closing days of June, Ewell had his corps within striking distance.

Before any confrontation with Rebels happened, a running battle broke out between some of the residents of central Pennsylvania and the New York militiamen who had come to defend them. The Empire Staters were galled by the high prices the locals charged them for food and water. The historian of the 23d New York State National Guard called the area's residents "poltroons" who sold their goods at "ruinous prices, and who were thinking of nothing…except how to escape with their worthless lives and…property."

In another example of this homespun profiteering–a practice in no way unique to Pennsylvania–the owners of a bridge over the Susquehanna charged the Union army a hefty sum to use the span. The "Camelback" Bridge, a wooden covered bridge with a somewhat humpy profile, was the only feasible supply route from Harrisburg to defenses on the river's western bank. The federal government eventually paid $3,028.63 for the privilege of using the bridge, thereby doubling the bridge's stockholders' dividends for the year.

There was, of course, another side to the civilian-soldier feud. Locals claimed that Federal soldiers stole more from them than the Southern invaders eventually did. A resident named John Mater accused the soldiers of taking all but about a dozen of his chickens, and the survivors were saved only because he had hidden them under a box. Mater and some of his friends stood on the box while the soldiers searched for more chickens. "I guess the chickens knew it and kept quiet," he concluded.

The real confrontation, the showdown between Union and Confederate troops, finally began on the evening of Saturday, June 27, when Captain Frank Murray's Federal cavalry unit, known as the Curtin Guards, sighted Ewell's pickets east of Carlisle and five miles from Mechanicsburg, a town nine miles west of Harrisburg. The enemy troops exchanged shots. At 8:30 the next morning, Murray reined up at the telegraph office in Mechanicsburg and wired a report to Smith. Fifteen minutes later, Murray led his troopers out of town, followed by a rear guard. At 9:00 a.m., according to an account published in the local Cumberland Valley Journal on July 23, 1863, "two butternuts, bearing a flag of truce, dashed into town, and halting at the square, inquired for the civil authorities and the flag" that had been flying before their arrival. The Rebels captured the Stars and Stripes.

These Confederates belonged to Brigadier General Albert G. Jenkins's cavalry brigade, serving with Ewell's 2d Corps. Jenkins divided his command into two contingents of 700 and 800 men each. He put M.J. Ferguson, commander of the 16th Virginia Cavalry, in charge of the contingent that included the 16th, the 26th Virginia Cavalry Battalion, and Captain William L. Jackson's Virginia Battery, and sent it north on Hogestown Road to the Carlisle-Harrisburg Pike, which ran directly past the Union forts en route to Harrisburg. Jenkins himself oversaw the other contingent, and occupied Mechanicsburg with the 14th Virginia Cavalry, the 34th Virginia Cavalry Battalion, and Captain W.H. Griffin's 2d Maryland Battery. He took over the Ashland House hotel and demanded that 1,500 rations be delivered to the town hall.

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