“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 |
Reynolds was no doubt eager to defend his home, but to leave an active field army closing in on the enemy who threatened that home in the midst of a campaign to command militia lacked luster. Nonetheless, “Reynolds obeyed the order with alacrity, though very much against his will,” recalled the man who succeeded Reynolds’ field post, George G. Meade.(3)
The Pennsylvania general spent the next few days sorting out the militia arriving in Harrisburg and sending them out the other side to concentrate at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, 15 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line. To aid the efforts of the Army of the Potomac in bottling up and driving Lee’s Confederates out of Maryland, Reynolds ordered the militia to march from Chambersburg to Hagerstown, Maryland. Reynolds likely already saw the disparity in experience and battle-readiness between his old division and these new, raw Pennsylvanians, but if he had not, this march showed those differences glaringly.
Some of the militia enrolled with the understanding that they would only be used for the defense of Pennsylvania. Marching into Maryland exceeded that mandate. As units approached the state line, conversations and debates broke out among the marching columns about whether they should–or could–leave their state. Reynolds happened upon one company from Lancaster that “refused to go over the line …” The irate general “told them they might go home and be damned, and disgrace forever would rest on their shoulders.”(4) One company from Petersburg, Pennsylvania, reached the state line with 64 men, but only 17 crossed it. The rest went home.(5)
Once in Hagerstown, Reynolds dispatched some of the militia west of town to block the approaches from Williamsport, Maryland. Army of the Potomac commander General George B. McClellan also ordered the militia to march to the Antietam battlefield and be there by September 18. Reynolds started trekking 2,500 men from Hagerstown toward Sharpsburg on the night of September 17, which was all he could muster. Five regiments refused to march.(6) When one regiment told him they refused to move, Reynolds disgustingly responded, “then let them go to hell!”(7) From all that he had seen so far of the militia’s aptitude and potential ability to engage in battle, Reynolds held dim hopes: “I do not think much can be expected of them–not very much,” he concluded.(8) He would still get a chance to test that.
The troops that Reynolds kept in Hagerstown marched out of the city on September 19 to take positions along the Williamsport Road to block a Confederate force that crossed the Potomac River at Williamsport that day. Outside of one battery of militia artillery, the militiamen present in this line did little shooting. One regiment’s pickets engaged Confederate cavalry. The Southern horsemen nearly overran the picket line, and Reynolds personally rallied them. He worried that without him being there to guide and lead the militiamen, they might have panicked. If another cavalry charge happened that night, the general expressed concern that the militia might not hold a second time.(9)
Fortunately for Reynolds, he would not have to find out. The Confederate force in the militia’s front withdrew into Virginia on September 20. That night and the next day, the militia headed for home.
Reynolds and his staff had seen enough to come away from the experience with a sour taste in their collective mouth about the militia. Charles Veil believed “one regiment of old troops would have demoralized the whole shooting match” if the militia had become seriously engaged.(10) As Reynolds disbanded the militia and prepared to resume his command in the Army of the Potomac on September 26, he told his sisters that he “finally dispersed all the militia to their homes—which they were so exceedingly anxious to defend, only they preferred to wait until the enemy actually reached their own doorsteps before they encountered him.”(11)
Reynolds’ barbs at the militamen did not end then. He followed the accounts and editorials written by militiamen proud of their service. “The militia, I see, are busy fighting their battles over again at home,” he wrote on September 28. “I hope they will succeed in it to their own satisfaction at least if not to that of the public.” The general continued, “My own private opinion is, however, that if the militia of Pennsylvania is to be depended upon to defend the state from invasion, they had better all stay at home, they can be of no use in any military point of view if they are to act as they did here, every man to decide for himself whether he will obey the orders given or not and take his time at that to do it or no.”(12)
Though Governor Curtin praised Reynolds’ conduct in the defense of Pennsylvania, some of the militiamen who served under Reynolds did not conclude their campaign with a favorable view of the general. Charles Rawn reflected on his interactions with Reynolds while serving as a member of Byers’ Independent Cavalry Company: “I consider him rather small potatoes–a great deal more of strut and pretension than good manners, or any apparent qualities worthy of admiration–vulgarity rough–and profane without any adequate cause to excite it.”(13) Most of the negative perceptions of Reynolds from the militia in the ranks stemmed from the fact that he was a Regular Army officer, and they were about as far from the Regular Army as anyone could be. The editors of the Harrisburg Telegraph based their opinion on the accounts of the militiamen “who are respected at home for their courtesy and their veracity,” they stated. From these sources, they determined that “Gen. Reynolds did not elevate himself by his conduct towards the militia of Pennsylvania, during their late demonstration on the border. We have the assurances of several gentlemen, that his conduct was outrageous. So much so, that at one time a revolt was actually threatened by some of the men. When will the officers of the regular army learn that the people are their masters, and that when they rouse in their might, as they did in this state a week ago, it is not to be treated as serfs or dogs.”(14)
Privately, Reynolds brushed off the rebuff. The Harrisburg Telegraph’s editorial “has not in the least disturbed my conscience in the matter,” he said. “I should expect as much from one of this class and there were more than one such case.”(15)
Despite the negative feelings the general held toward the militia under his command and they held toward him, it was a valuable experience for Reynolds. His star ascended in the eyes of the powerful Governor Curtin, who believed Reynolds ably showed he could lead an independent command. But the next time Confederates threatened Pennsylvania, Reynolds would also lead his men from the front and inspire them with his example, though this time, those men following behind him were veterans of the Army of the Potomac.
Notes:
1. Sylvester Hower to "Luther," September 30, 1862, in "Finds Letter Written by War Veteran," Mount Carmel Item (Mount Carmel, PA), April 4, 1917.
2. Lewis Richards, Eleven Days in the Militia during the War of the Rebellion (Philadelphia, PA: Collins, 1883), 5.
3. George G. Meade to Margaretta Meade, September 13, 1862, in George Gordon Meade, ed., The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade (New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913), vol. 1, 309-10.
4. "The Pennsylvania Militia Moving into Maryland," Daily Evening Inquirer (Lancaster, PA), September 20, 1862.
5. "'Honor to Whom Honor is Due,'" Lancaster Daily Enquirer, September 30, 1862.
6. I. Vodges to Henry Halleck, September 18, 1862, 1:00 p.m., OR, vol. 19, pt. 2, 329.
7. "Editorial Correspondence," Columbia Spy, September 27, 1862.
8. John F. Reynolds to Henry Halleck, September 19, 1862, OR, vol. 19, pt. 2, 332.
9. John F. Reynolds to Andrew Curtin, unknown date, Reynolds Family Papers, MS 006, Franklin and Marshall College Special Collections.
10. Herman J. Viola, ed., The Memoirs of Charles Henry Veil: A Soldier's Recollection of the Civil War and the Arizona Territory (New York, NY: Orion Books, 1993), 22.
11. John F. Reynolds to "My dear sisters," September 26, 1862, Reynolds Family Papers, MS 006, Franklin and Marshall College Special Collections.
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