Bushwhackers
In a recent post, I mentioned the cryptic comments from Confederate records in the Louisiana State Archives that a soldier from that state was “supposed to have been killed by the citizens of Penn.” In scanning through old CSA letters, diaries, journals, etc. from men in the Gettysburg Campaign, I have found dozens of accounts of Keystoners hiding in out-of-the-way places to take potshots at passing columns of troops, and one account of two Rebel stragglers being apprehended by McConnellsville residents and murdered.
Just west of Cashtown, farmer Henry Hahn and three compatriots fired from ambush at Jubal Early’s column, mortally wounding a soldier, who was carried to the Cashtown Inn to die. The incident was featured in an old issue of Blue & Gray magazine and led rise to the “Haunted Cashtown Inn” stories. One Georgia colonel thought the bushwhacking had at least one redeeming value, as it “keeps the men in line” and discourages straggling. There are perhaps a dozen such accounts, which I am weaving into a future article for Gettysburg Magazine.
In reading local York County accounts, as well as those of the Southern soldiers they passed through here, I have found no such incidents, which were relatively common in Franklin and Adams counties early in the campaign. Major General Jubal Early threatened to burn Cashtown to the ground of the perpetrators were not handed over to him. They weren’t and he didn’t, but after that incident, accounts of bushwhacking cease, except for the alleged East Berlin murder.
