The ghosts are legion in the fields around Culpeper, a long-suffering village that endured occupation by both armies in the first years of the war. The town hosted a couple hundred thousand troops from both sides over the winters of 1862-3 and 1863-64.
Longstreet’s Corps wintered over in the vicinity of the hamlet of Winston, occupying the fields around about Refuge Farm.
It was the last season the Rebels would hold Culpeper, since the next winter the Union Army of the Potomac would use the Orange & Alexandria railway to establish a gigantic munitions and logistics dump just north of town at the junction of the old North Carolina Road and begin preparations for the Overland Campaign to take Petersburg and sew up Richmond.
There were many more tit-for-tat exchanges, including the mass cavalry battle to the north at Brandy Station, which shortly pre-dated Lee’s second invasion of the North that came to its bloody conclusion on July 3rd, 1863.
I think about that vaguely every time I am down at the farm, which I am not, due to the curious nature of the personal campaign on which I am embarked, which is to get things moved from one place to another.
I could use a Company of Teamsters, like the one in which my great great grandfather served. A couple solid buckboards would do it, I think, but I am living in reduced times, and my old-lady cart with the wire basket is going to have to do.
A pal out west suggested that I might venture up to Gettsyburg and check out the re-enactors who are gathered to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the pivotal encounter between somewhat ambivalent Union General George Gordon Meade, newly installed by Mr. Lincoln, stopped the force of nature that was Bobbie Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
If I was going to do that, I would stop, not at the famous battlefield, but to see how Raven and Big Mama’s marker looks at the Spring Hill Cemetery in the old home of Shippensburg.
Many have written of the struggle on the fields on either side of the Emmitsburg Road, and I am not going to try it here.
But living in a town that was occupied by so many over the course of years, and the place from which the Gettysburg Campaign began, and to which Lee returned when it was done, I am reminded that the family was occupied, briefly, by the Rebels in their homestead and store in Shippensburg.
The town celebrates their brief brush with destiny every year. In act, they call it the March to Destiny, a reference to the four days that the Army of Northern Virginia took over administration of the village.
They still talk about it at the local Historical Society. A locomotive and rail cars chugged slowly along the tracks of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, which ran down the center of present-day Earl Street, past the family store. Residents knew that the rebels were coming, and tossed their belongings as they could on the train as it moved.
(General Albert G. Jenkins, Congressman and Commander).
General Albert G. Jenkins brigade formed the cavalry screen for Richard Ewell’s Second Corps as it advanced on Chambersburg and Carlisle. Lines of communication useful to the Union were cut whenever possible. The bridge at Scotland Station to the south was a target, and there was no way out of town in that direction.
Around 2 p.m. on the 23rd of June, Captain William Boyd and his Union cavalry moved along Main Street (now King Street) under pressure from the Confederate forces, and by 3 p.m. the Confederates were in possession of the entire town. After clearing Shippensburg of Union cavalry, Rebel troops scavenged the town for supplies.
General Jenkins set up his Confederate headquarters at the intersection of Earl and King Streets, near the family store at what was known as “The Busy Corner.”
Armies in those days as now traveled on their bellies, and the first order of business for Jenkins was to secure rations for his 15,000 troops. My Great-great grandfather was one of several Shippensburg merchants and storeowners who were summoned to a meeting General Jenkins on the evening of 23 June.
His initial offer was to accept $1,800 in greenbacks in exchange for not torching the town. He changed his approach to a “request” for supplies and rations to avoid the need to conduct outright plunder and also generously offered compensation in Confederate dollars.
There was looting, of course, notably the medicine and supplies from the J.C. Altick Drugstore, and the Socotra Busy Corner.
Family lore from my great grandfather William is that as a small boy, he looked down at his father from the upper floor of the family home near Earl Street, as he loaded the store’s wagons with dry foods and goods.
The Rebels scoured the town until the 27th, when they moved out to rejoin the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia, and the town was free again, and relieved that things had not gone worse.
Lee’s main body was in the vicinity of Chambersburg when first contact was made with Union cavalry at Gettysburg on the 1st of July, their forces flowing northwest from Washington to meet the invaders. The battle there commenced and the rest was history.
After Gettysburg, Lee withdrew in good order and returned to Culpeper, intending to lick his wounds and go into winter quarters.
It didn’t work out that way. It was U.S. Grant who spent the winter of 1863-64 as a guest of the town, and stayed much longer than the Rebels stayed in Shippensburg.
That might have been the ancestral home’s biggest brush with the wide world, and people still talk about it as though it was yesterday.
The Rebel commander who occupied the town did not survive the war. General Jenkins was badly wounded on Day Two of Gettysburg, and returned to service in time to be killed at Cloyd’s Mountain in southwest Virginia.
The Socotras were industrious people, and got back to the business of business, not war. They did file a claim with the Federal Government for compensation regarding the supplies taken by the Confederates. I have seen a copy of the claim, which stated that in addition to the theft, the Confederates “despoiled with liquids” the stuff they could not carry away.
The dry words on the petition conveyed to me the image of some Rebs pissing on the flour.
So, on this anniversary of momentous history, I like to think of the smaller story of the family encounter with the Army of Northern Virginia.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com