Battle of Carlisle: Stuart Shells the Barracks

On the evening of July first, eighteen sixty-three, while the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg was ending thirty miles to the southwest, Confederate cavalry arrived at the edge of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The force was commanded by General J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee's chief of cavalry, who had spent the previous two weeks on a wide raiding arc around the Union army that had left Lee functionally blind at the worst possible moment.

Stuart demanded the surrender of the town. The Union militia commander, General William F. Smith, refused. His response, according to witnesses, was roughly: "Shell away and be damned." Stuart obliged. His horse artillery, under Captain James Breathed, opened fire on downtown Carlisle and on the military barracks at its edge, the same barracks where Stuart himself had been stationed as a young cavalry officer before the war.

The bombardment continued for several hours. Stuart could not take the town by assault, and he knew it. He had relatively few men, and his mission was not to capture Carlisle but to find and link up with Lee's main army. Then a courier arrived with word that the great battle had already opened at Gettysburg. Stuart broke off the attack. Before withdrawing, he ordered his troops to burn Carlisle Barracks and the town's gas works and a lumberyard. The barracks were damaged but not destroyed.

Stuart's absence at Gettysburg during those critical early days became one of the most analyzed command failures of the war. Lee later said he was in the dark about Union movements because of it. Whether Stuart's ride changed the outcome of Gettysburg is still debated, but that first day of July in Carlisle captures something essential about the campaign: while the fate of the republic was being decided at a crossroads town to the southwest, one of the war's most celebrated cavalrymen was shelling the place where he had once studied his profession.