Years after the Civil War, York surrendered a second time to Confederates
It was a late-winter evening in 1894, and the 87th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment’s band accompanied a stately gentleman with a soldier’s bearing along South Beaver Street to the York Opera House.
The theater wore the crown as the leading venue in town, and decorators were up for the grand occasion. An American flag was draped over the stage ready for the orator. Potted plants added a flourish to the set.
It was a scene befitting a Union Army general from the Civil War, which ended 29 years before, or a Medal of Honor winner from York County or beyond.
The York Gazette did the reveal of this orator in this way: “The great personage was John B. Gordon, of Georgia.”
Gordon’s first York visit
That’s Gen. John Brown Gordon, a leader of the Confederate raid of York County in late June 1863, before the Battle of Gettysburg.
He was the Confederate general who accepted York’s surrender after town fathers approached him in a remote farmhouse 10 miles west of York. It was considered by some as a humiliating, game-changing moment for a proud community. His men marched into York the next day, June 28, and took down the American flag in York’s square.
Gordon and his men marched on to Wrightsville. In that Susquehanna River town, his 1,800 men overwhelmed a ragtag group of Union defenders and lobbed cannon shot on the town filled with civilians. One of the cannonballs killed a Black Union defender in the trenches.
Then his men lost a foot race to tug the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge from Union control, but Yankee forces set ablaze the milelong span, stopping the Confederate advance.
In the meantime, his men stole horses crucial for harvest, damaged crops, stole unhidden supplies, burned bridges and pulled down telegraph wires. They terrorized York County’s people.
York lost its honor in seeking out Gordon to give him the keys to the surrendered city. At least 600 county men died on the battlefield and in camp in the war.
In short, the Georgian was part of the 11,200-troop Confederate maul that smashed into the county.
Gordon masked some of this brute force in gallant words to York’s women, offering the public an officer’s glove covering a battle-hardened fist.
Lobbied Black people
After the war, his life and actions belied his gallantry. To this day, historians associate him with the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, which fought Reconstruction efforts to fold Southern states and the new freedmen into the United States.
In one South Carolina campaign on behalf of the Democrats — opponents to Reconstruction in 1868 — he tried to win over Black people. Their vote was needed for Democratic candidates to beat Republicans, the party of Lincoln.
He reminded Black people in his South Carolina audience that in wartime: “We were all opposed to your freedom.”
Why?
“We did not do this because we were your enemies but because we had bought you and paid our money for you.”
Later in the speech, he extended his hand of friendship to Black people with a grave threat:
“If you attempt to inaugurate a war of races, you will be exterminated.”
That was Gordon in his 30s. Surely, the general, coming to York as a U.S. senator in his 60s, had changed his views on slavery and race.
Lost Cause thinking
But when he mounted the opera house’s stage to deliver his “Last Days of the Confederacy” speech, he was given a pulpit to preach a sermon on the Lost Cause.
Such thinking, still around today, glorified an idealized society of honor and chivalry in the prewar South, contending that enslaved people were not mistreated. Lost Cause thinking shifted the authentic impetus for the war away from slavery to states’ rights and other spurious causes.
So when prominent York industrialist A.B. Farquhar wrote in 1922 that “slavery was better in practice than in theory,” he reflected this Lost Cause philosophy, demonstrating that it was alive and well north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The Selma, Alabama, newspaper gushed over Gordon’s “Last Days,” lecture in 1893: “Every southerner, who cherishes the memory of the ‘Lost Cause,’ should hear Gen. Gordon if it is possible for him to do so … .”
Further, in 1893, Gordon was serving as commander in chief of the United Confederate Veterans. A preview of a reunion in which Gordon would be at the top of the bill stated: “The stars and stripes and the stars and bars and the blue and gray will be more harmoniously blended than ever were before.”
This points to thinking in the South that the war really ended in a tie and that the Northern and Southern ideals had equal merit and thus could be blended.
Political pact with South
So why did York give such an exuberant welcome to this white supremacist who had exacted such damage to their farms, terrorized their families and glorified a system that embraced slavery?
The Democrats in York County held a majority in the 1800s, and that was the party of Gordon and the South. This meant political accord between York County, a border county in a border state, and the South.
There are other possible reasons: Amid the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, York’s people simply had moved on from the war. York residents thought Gordon had accepted the Southern Army’s defeat, and he had fought valiantly for the Confederacy’s stars and bars and would do so for the stars and stripes. And Gordon’s national celebrity intrigued county residents.
What could be wrong with Gordon’s national tour of reconciliation between North and South? It simultaneously carried an affirmation of nationalism and the Lost Cause. Indeed, Ralph Lowell Eckert, Gordon’s biographer, notes that the ex-general was a foremost leader of Lost Cause thinking.
“It is difficult to exaggerate the central role Gordon played in the southern quest for vindication,” he wrote. “As the living symbol of the Confederacy, he became the principal ceremonial figure in the Confederate celebration, the embodiment of the Lost Cause.”
Gordon somehow thought he could vocally advocate for a new undivided nation while promoting the myth of the old South.
“Although the incongruity appears obvious today,” Eckert wrote, “neither Gordon nor his contemporaries saw the apparent contradiction.”
Gordon wanted reconciliation on his and the South’s Lost Cause terms, seeking consensus that slavery was misunderstood and wasn’t the real cause of the war in the first place. That was at odds with many in the North who believed that slavery was wrong and that the war’s outcome had decided the matter.
Gordon’s hero’s welcome in a politically sympathetic York, a land that he had trampled, meant that his position and its implied racism were winning. And it’s still resident in York County today, with its 45-mile border with the old South, occasional racist eruptions and Confederate flags hanging from houses and affixed to vehicles
One could almost wish that York County, then and now, was distant from the Mason-Dixon Line and Southerners like Gordon. And east of the Susquehanna where the Northern influence of Philadelphia would be at play instead of the Southern city of Baltimore.
Standing against Confederacy
But we are here, so we need the moral courage of a Wrightsville woman who stood up to Gordon, even when York’s town fathers failed in 1863 and 1894.
In fact, Gordon referred to Mary Jane Rewalt, wife of a Union physician, in his York speech as the “Heroine of the Susquehanna.”
Gordon’s men saved Rewalt’s Wrightsville home from burning from the fire that had spread from the blazing bridge in 1863.
To say thank you, Rewalt offered Gordon breakfast.
The general was able to draw out how Rewalt felt about the war.
“I must tell you …,” she said, “my husband is a soldier in the Union army, and my constant prayer to heaven is that our cause should triumph and the Union be saved.”
So we see a contrast: a woman who stood against the Confederacy and what it represented.
And a town that surrendered to Gordon and 31 years later welcomed the former Confederacy’s main advocate. And what he represented.
At the York Opera House in March 1894, well, York surrendered to Gordon a second time.
Further reading about John B. Gordon: Scott Mingus’ “Flames Beyond Gettysburg,” James McClure’s “East of Gettysburg,” Ralph Lowell Eckert’s “John Brown Gordon,” and Allen P. Tankersley’s ”John B. Gordon, A Study in Gallantry.”
Jim McClure is the retired editor of the York Daily Record and has authored or co-authored nine books on York County history. Reach him at jimmcclure21@outlook.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Years after Civil War, York surrendered a second time to Confederates
