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XXIII The Bank Clerk I WAS a
clerk in
the Savings Institution. There was one other bank in town. Whenever the
bank
officials got fearful that the place would be raided one or two of us
would go
away with the funds. We had scares all along from the fall of 1862
until late
in 1864, and we carried off the funds eighteen or twenty times. On
several
occasions I went alone, and there was once I took as much as one
hundred and
twenty-five thousand dollars. I'd drive with a horse and buggy by the
old pike
twenty-eight miles to York and then ship the funds by railroad to
Philadelphia.
We were
particularly uneasy before the Battle of Gettysburg, for we'd heard
that
Stonewall Jackson had threatened to lay waste the country when he got
into
Pennsylvania and not leave one brick on top of another. But none of the
whites
were scared quite as badly as were the darkies. I remember a nigger
named Jack
who worked on a farm near the town. At a time when a troop of raiders
was known
to be swooping in our direction he said, "They'll kill all us niggers,
or
take us back to slavery." He was a
bow-legged
nigger who couldn’t make much speed, and he didn’t have any confidence
in his
ability to outrun the raiders. So he crep' under a haystack and stayed
without
a morsel to eat for three or four days. He almost starved. A great
many
refugee darkies passed through Gettysburg going northward. Some would
have a
spring wagon and a horse, but usually they were on foot, burdened with
bundles
containing a couple of quilts, some clothing, and a few cooking
utensils. In
several instances, I saw 'em trundling along their little belongings in
a
two-wheeled handcart. Occasionally there'd be one who was driving a
single
sheep, or hog, or a cow and a calf. They were a God-forsaken looking
people.
The farmers along the roads sheltered them nights. Most of these here
poor
runaways would drift into the towns and find employment, and there
they'd make
their future homes. Just
before the
raid that occurred in the last week of June, 1863, I went off with the
bank
funds, and when I returned I found the Rebels in possession of the
town. They
took me to the bank and made me show 'em that we hadn’t any money
there, and
one of 'em threatened to send me and the treasurer to Richmond. They
had
demanded that Gettysburg should give 'em twenty-five thousand dollars
in money,
ten thousand barrels of flour, and a lot of mess pork and other things,
but
they didn’t get the money or much else in the town. The stores would
have
yielded them a lot of plunder if the proprietors hadn’t guarded against
that
possibility by carrying just as small a stock as they could. However,
the
raiders went out into the country around and stole every farm animal
that
walked, and secured a great deal of corn, oats, hay, meat, etc. Their
teams
were going all the time taking the stuff south into the Confederate
lines. A few days
after
this raid some four thousand of our cavalry came here, and, although we
knew
Lee was near by, we felt then as if everything was safe. Oh, my
goodness, yes!
our belongings were under Uncle Sam's protection, and they were all
right. The
following
morning the battle began on the edge of the town, and all the time more
of our
troops were arriving. They went through the streets in the double-quick
step,
which is next thing to a run. Some of 'em had marched thirty-two miles.
It was
very hot weather, and they'd thrown away much of their clothing. Often
they had
very little on but their pants, and went right into the engagement,
hatless,
shirtless, and shoeless. Some of 'em had welts around their bodies,
where they
wore their belts, three inches wide of blood and gore. Their supplies
never got
here till that night or the next morning, and they made breastworks by
digging
with their knives and spoons and plates. A good
many of us
citizens went out to the battlefield with food. Some of us carried
baskets of
pies and cake, but mostly we took bread in flour bags and broke it up
and gave
it to the soldiers. The heat and the smoke there on the battle line
were
suffocating, and at times the smoke was so thick it obscured the sun
and hid
the enemy from sight. About four
in the
afternoon we food-carriers were ordered back to the town, and soon
afterward
our men retreated and the place fell into the hands of the Rebels. Many
Union
soldiers took refuge in the houses. They were hidden all over town. We
had two
in our cellar until after the battle was over. They came in completely
worn
out, and left their guns and knapsacks by the dining-room fireplace.
Mother had
just time to throw the knapsacks out of sight back of the fireboard,
and to lay
the guns down and push them under the lounge with her foot when there
was a rap
at the door. She opened it, and on the steps stood some Rebels who
asked,
"Are there any Yankees here?" "Do you
see
any?" she said. That
didn’t satisfy
'em, and they searched the house, upstairs and down, but they didn’t
happen to
go to the cellar. We gave the fugitives some blankets to sleep on. One
of 'em
had been wounded in the face by a piece of shell. He ought to have gone
right
to the hospital, but he had such a horror of falling into the clutches
of the
Rebels that he wouldn’t leave the house. Mother put hot water and
camphor on
the wound to relieve the inflammation, and when her supply of camphor
ran out
she grated potato and used it with cold water from the well. But the
treatment
wasn’t effective, and when the fellow did get to the hospital it was
too late,
and he died. All our
schoolhouses, churches, and other public buildings had been converted
into
hospitals, and I was one of the helpers in them during the second and
third
days of the battle, and for some weeks afterward. Sunday morning, the
fifth of
July, the hospital stewards went with wagons and doctors to search for
any
wounded who might have been overlooked. There had been a good rain
Friday night
that was very refreshing to the wounded on the field, and it no doubt
saved
many of their lives. You can't
conceive
what a sight the battleground presented with all its devastation and
wreckage,
and its strewing of dead horses and dead men. Where there had been
severe
fighting in woodland the trees were all splintered and broken, and some
that
had been a foot or more through were shot away till they looked like
pipe-stems. On my
uncle's farm,
just below Big Round Top, eighteen hundred of the dead were buried in a
single
trench. They were covered very shallow, and at night you could see
phosphorescent light coming out of the earth where they were buried.
You might
think the buzzards would have swarmed to the battlefield, and we used
to have a
popular guide here who declared that they gathered from the four
corners of the
earth to prey on the dead. He described how, when they rose from their
horrid
feast, they darkened the sky. Some one asked him why he told such a
yarn as
that. "Oh,
well!" he says, "it amuses the people. They want things made
exciting." Really
there were
no buzzards here, probably because they were frightened away by the
smell of
the powder and the noise of the cannonading. They never made their
appearance
till several months later. Such of
the wounded
as were able to crawl dragged themselves to the streams and to the
shade of
bushes, and they often got to spots so secluded that they were not
easily
discovered. Moving them sometimes opened their wounds afresh, and they
bled to
death. We found two on Tuesday afternoon. One of them, with a compound
fracture
of his leg, lay in a swamp where he had sucked water from the mud. A year
passed away,
and Lincoln came and made his great speech in dedicating the national
cemetery
here. I was within thirty feet of him when he spoke, and I remember
distinctly
how he looked — a tall, awkward figure with one of his trouser's legs
hitched
up on his boot. But his words made a tremendous impression, and that
immortal
speech goes far to compensate for the horrors of the battle. ________________ 1 In his maturer years
he had risen
to the position of bank president, and his residence was the finest in
town.
There I spent an evening with him in one of the handsome rooms.
Roundabout were
beautiful and costly mementoes of foreign travel, and in cases ranged
along the
walls was a wonderful collection of colonial china. |