The Burning of Chambersburg

The town you are passing through holds a grim distinction in American history. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania is the only Northern community deliberately burned by Confederate forces during the Civil War, and the story of how it happened in the summer of eighteen sixty-four says something dark about both the logic of war and the cost of stubbornness.

By that summer the Shenandoah Valley had been devastated by Union General David Hunter, who torched farms, mills, and the Virginia Military Institute on his march south. Confederate General Jubal Early decided the North would only understand pain if it felt pain. He dispatched Brigadier General John McCausland and twenty-eight hundred cavalry troopers north into Pennsylvania with explicit orders: demand a ransom, and burn the town if it was refused.

On July thirtieth, eighteen sixty-four, McCausland's men rode into Chambersburg and rang the courthouse bell to summon citizens to the square. The demand was read aloud: one hundred thousand dollars in gold, or five hundred thousand in Union greenbacks, or the town burns. The residents of Chambersburg could not comply even if they had wanted to. Stuart's cavalry had raided them in eighteen sixty-two; the Army of Northern Virginia had swept through in eighteen sixty-three. The banks had long since shipped their reserves east. There was no money.

McCausland followed his orders. Fires were set. About five hundred and fifty buildings were destroyed. Three thousand people were left homeless. The loss was estimated at one and a half million dollars. McCausland's raid would be the last time Confederate forces entered Pennsylvania during the war.

Chambersburg had already played an unlikely role in the conflict's prelude. In the summer of eighteen fifty-nine, a bearded man calling himself Doctor Isaac Smith rented rooms in a boarding house on East King Street. He was John Brown, quietly receiving supplies and recruits for his raid on the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Frederick Douglass traveled here to meet him in an abandoned quarry, and refused to join, predicting the plan would end in disaster. Two months later, the raid did exactly that. The town that housed the plan was burned for a war the plan helped start.