“I tell you the old cannon balls flew around my head worse than the devil and the musket balls went zip zip around my ears,” wrote Private Sylvester Hower. “I thought they would take me, but they all missed me.”(1) Many Confederate shots found their marks in the Pennsylvanians. By the campaign’s end, the division lost 965 between South Mountain and Antietam.
Even before those battles, the division suffered one of its greatest losses during the campaign: its commander, Brigadier General John Reynolds. The Confederate movement into Pennsylvania in early September 1862 sparked widespread fear among Pennsylvanians that their state would be the next to “welcome” the heels of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. “Our homes were threatened—the horrors of desolating war seemed likely to be brought to our very doors,” said Lewis Richards.(2) To protect his state and its people, Governor Andrew Curtin called for the state’s men to enroll in local militia outfits and to rendezvous at Harrisburg before being sent to the Maryland-Pennsylvania border to repel the invader.
Curtin continually alerted the authorities in Washington about the information his ring of spies and scouts gathered. He hoped to get something in exchange for his state’s dedication to the Federal war effort: veteran soldiers from the Army of the Potomac to come to the state’s aid. President Abraham Lincoln refused. Curtin and other prominent Pennsylvanians settled for a consolation prize: a competent officer–a Pennsylvanian–to lead the Keystone State’s defense. On September 12, 1862, Curtin got his wish. General-in-Chief Henry Halleck ordered Reynolds to report to Harrisburg. Despite objections from army commander George B. McClellan and Reynolds’ corps commander Joseph Hooker, they did not defy Halleck’s decision and Curtin’s panic. Reynolds would go.
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| John F. Reynolds |