Chambersburg: The Town the Confederates Burned

Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, sits in the Cumberland Valley, and its position on the natural highway through the mountains made it a target in nearly every major Northern invasion of the Civil War.

Confederate forces passed through twice on their way to Antietam in eighteen sixty-two and Gettysburg in eighteen sixty-three. They commandeered horses, food, and shoes. They burned a railroad machine shop. But Chambersburg mostly survived those years physically intact.

Then came the summer of eighteen sixty-four. Confederate General Jubal Early was conducting a diversionary raid through the Shenandoah Valley and into Pennsylvania, hoping to pull Union troops away from the siege of Petersburg. On July thirtieth, Early sent two cavalry brigadiers, John McCausland and Bradley Johnson, to Chambersburg with explicit orders: demand one hundred thousand dollars in gold, or five hundred thousand dollars in United States currency. If the town refused, burn it.

The town could not pay. Chambersburg had perhaps three thousand inhabitants and no treasury approaching that sum. McCausland gave the townspeople a short window to comply. When no payment arrived, Confederate troopers moved through the streets with torches.

Three-fifths of the town burned. More than five hundred buildings were destroyed, including the courthouse, the bank, churches, and hundreds of homes. Three thousand people were made homeless in a matter of hours. It remains the only Northern town burned by Confederate forces during the Civil War.

The damage was estimated at more than one and a half million dollars, an enormous sum in eighteen sixty-four. Congress never authorized full reparations, though the state of Pennsylvania eventually provided some relief.

Chambersburg rebuilt quickly. The downtown that rose in the late eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies, built of brick rather than the wood that had burned so easily, is largely what survives today. A memorial square in the center of town marks the burning, and the town carries the distinction of that survival, the grim pride of a place that was tested and did not disappear.