User:Wild Wolf/Harrisburg Battles


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During the Gettysburg Campaign, Confederate Lt. General Richard S. Ewell’s Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia advanced to Harrisburg, the state capital of Pennsylvania. This is regarded by many as the high water mark of the Gettysburg Campaign.

The Confederates’ Arrival
On June 28, 1863, Confederate Brigader General Albert G. Jenkins led his cavalry brigade into Mechanicsburg, eight miles west of Harrisburg. He deployed the 2nd Baltimore Light Artillery and the 14th Virginia Cavalry and 34th Virginia Battalion around Peace Church. There was a brief artillery duel but no serious damage.

Battle of Oyster Point
The next day, Jenkins pushed the16th Virginia Cavalry and 36th Virginia Cavalry Battalion, along with two cannons, towards Union positions around Oyster Point. Lt. Col. John Elwell held the Union line with one company each from the 8th, 23rd, and 56th New York, supported by Miller’s battery. Around 11 a.m., one or two companies of the 34th Virginia Cavalry Battalion advanced to Oyster Point, only to be turned back with two wounded.

This skirmish masked a reconnaissance made by Jenkins and some staff officers. They reached a spot overlooking the fortifications of Harrisburg (in what is today the Drexel Hills development of New Cumberland. After fifteen minutes, they returned to Ewell and reported their findings. Ewell ordered Major General Robert E. Rodes to prepare his division to attack the Union militia and seize Harrisburg. That same day, General Robert E. Lee send Ewell a message ordering him to march south towards Gettysburg. Lee had found out that the Army of the Potomac was much closer than Lee previously thought and he wanted the Confederate army, then scattered over miles of Pennsylvania territory, to be concentrated to met the enemy’s advance.

Ewell started moving his corps out that day. Jenkins followed on the 30th, leaving behind the 16th Virginia Cavalry and the 36th Virginia Cavalry Battalion, along with two cannons. These units, under the command of Colonel Milton J. Ferguson, were ordered to serve as a rearguard as well as tear up railroad tracks. Ferguson gathered his command at the McCormick farm, at a spot known locally as Sporting Hill.

Brigadier General William F. Smith, commanding the 1st Division of the Department of the Susquehanna, sent out a company of the 3rd U.S. Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Frank Stanwood, to find out where the Confederates had gone. The cavalry was followed by the 22nd and 33rd New York Militia, both commanded by Brigadier General John Ewen.

Battle of Sporting Hill
Ewen reached Ferguson’s position mid-afternoon. As the 22nd New York moved over the hill, it came under fire from Confederates located in McCormick’s barn and in a belt of trees nearby. Ewen immediately deployed his regiments and moved towards the Confederate positions. The skirmish was stalemated until 5 PM, when two guns from Landis' Philadelphia militia battery arrived. Their first shot hit the barn squarely in the middle, sending the Confederates inside back into the woods. The Union artillery then turned its attention to the cavalrymen in the woods. After a bombardment, the Confederates mounted up and retreated towards Carlisle.

Ewen lost eleven men wounded in this short fight. Confederate casualties are uncertain, since Ferguson didn’t file a report. Local farmers and Ewen reported sixteen Confederates killed and a larger number wounded (the Union army reported a total of 20 or 30). Many of these wounded were taken with the Confederates when they retreated (some of them might have died on the way.) Ewen suffered one officer and 19 enlisted men wounded.

Fight at Carlisle
On July 1, Ewen, joined by the brigade of Colonel William Brisbane (composed of the 32nd and 33rd Pennsylvania and Landis’ battery, set out for Carlisle. Captain William H. Boyd’s company of the 1st New York Calvary arrived ahead of the infantry. The scene, according to one witness, was “that of a merry picnic.” The celebrations were cut short when Major General J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry division arrived and started bombarding the town, which lasted until 3 a.m. the next day. After this, Stuart pulled out, moving towards Lee’s army now concentrated at Gettysburg. He lost eight men during the bombardment, while killing one Federal and wounding a dozen in the process. A lumber yard, the local gas works, and the town's famous U.S. Cavalry barracks were destroyed.

The skirmishes around Harrisburg during the Gettysburg campaign resulted in less than 100 casualties and didn’t have much of an impact on the war in general. But they do represent the farthest north that any Confederate army had reached. Had it not been for the Battle of Gettysburg, Lee very well could have continued to push on and capture Harrisburg. The capture of a Northern state capital would have been a great moral booster for the Confederates and a disappointment for the Union. Being an important rail center between routes heading both to eastern and western Pennsylvania, the loss of Harrisburg would have also hampered any response the Union army would have attempted to drive Lee back south. A Confederate victory at Harrisburg might not have won the war for the Confederacy but it would have made the Union cause that much harder to achieve.