Gettysburg: The Last Invasion by Allen C. Guelzo Read Free Book Online Page A

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, making it possible for “the red glare of the conflagration to be seen for many miles.” Jubal Early, who was just then riding out from York to join Gordon, saw it first as an “immense” funnel of smoke “rising in the direction of the Susquehanna,” and soon guessed what this would mean to his plans for crossing the river. The bridge burned all night, and “some of the timbers, as they fell into the stream, seemed to form themselves into rafts, which floated down like infernal ferry-boats of the region pictured by Dante.” Flying embers from the fire lodged in roofs in Wrightsville, setting homes and stores ablaze, and shortly Gordon’s Confederates had stacked their rifles and were passing buckets in long lines to save the town, as though all thought of the war which had brought them there had been forgotten. 26
    In military terms the burning of the bridge was only a reprieve. There were other bridges within marching distance of Early’s division, and although the Susquehanna was wide, it also grew shallow as it descended toward the Chesapeake Bay, and it would not have taken Early too long to have found another way to cross over. As it was, he had more than enough on June 29th to occupy him in stockpiling the requisitioned supplies that York’s merchants tremblingly hauled to the town’s market for his troops. Yet, on the morning of the 30th, the rebels were gone. “Early, with 8,000, left York this morning,” Darius Couch excitedly telegraphed Halleck that afternoon, bound either “westerly or northwesterly.” Not only had Early disappeared from all “other points on theSusquehanna river,” but so had Ewell from Carlisle. Lincoln was dumbfounded. “I judge by absence of news that the enemy is not crossing, or pressing up to the Susquehannah,” he wired Couch. “Please tell me what youknow of his movements.” Couch could only confirm that the “Rebel infantry force left Carlisle early this morning.” Why, and where they were going, neither Couch nor anyone else on the east side of the Susquehanna seemed to know. All that Couch could tell the president was that, from what he could learn, “Rebels at York and Carlisle yesterday [were] a good deal agitated about some news they had received.” 27
    Even in the dark and disguised as a tramp,James Longstreet knew the man who came out of the dripping rain as his most “active, intelligent, enterprising scout”—which meant, “more properly, a
spy
.” Longstreet eagerly reached out his hand: “Good Lord, I am glad to see you! I thought you were killed!”
    The “ragged, weather-beaten” man wasHenry Thomas Harrison, a Tennessean who had served briefly in aMississippi regiment in the West, and early on demonstrated more than a little knack for “secret, perilous adventure.” TheConfederate War Department brought him east and assigned him to operations inside the occupied Federal zone in coastalNorth Carolina, and it was there, while Longstreet’s corps was wintering around Suffolk in early 1863, that he came to Longstreet’s attention. Since Robert E. Lee preferred to keep spies at sniffing distance, Longstreet and his staff became Harrison’s controllers and paymasters (at the extravagant sum of $150 a month), and in June 1863 Harrison was armed with Confederate treasury gold and sent off to Washington, to slip into the capital and glean what he could from pliable or drunken Union officials, and scout the general path of Joe Hooker’s pursuit. Longstreet gave him a long leash. He told Harrison that “I did not care to see him till he could bring information of importance.” Now, on the night of June 28th, Harrison had the report he thought Longstreet needed to hear, and allowed himself to be “arrested” by Longstreet’s pickets around Chambersburg and brought before Lee’s “war-horse.” 28
    “Truly,” wrote Longstreet’s chief of staff,Moxley Sorrel, Harrison’s “report was long and valuable.” The spy had a