John Cantilion

The House Divided project received permission from the Cumberland County Historical Society to post articles that explore topics related to the Civil War era in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. These essays originally appeared in the Cumberland County History Journal. Right click on the links below and select “save as” to download the article as a PDF file. (Adobe Reader is a free program that is required to vide these documents).

Patricia Coolmeyer, “Southern Sentiments: A Look at Attitudes of Civil War Soldiers ,” Cumberland County History 7 (1990): 68-79.

• Patricia Coolmeyer’s essay explores the different ways that soldiers and residents of southern Pennsylvania saw the South during the Civil War. Coolmeyer uses a wide variety of sources in her account, including letters, diaries, local newspapers, and other nineteenth-century publications.

James A. Holechek, “From Carlisle and Fort Couch: The War of Corporal John Cantilion,” Cumberland County History 10 (1993): 71-80.

• James A. Holechek’s article focuses on Corporal John Cantilion’s experiences in central Pennsylvania during the summer of 1863. Cantilion served in the 4th United States Cavalry and was stationed at Carlisle Barracks in early June 1863. This essay includes transcripts of letters that Cantilion wrote from Carlisle Barracks on June 19 and from Fort Couch on June 23. Holechek also provides the transcript of a letter that Cantilion’s wife, Sarah, wrote in early November 1863. However, Cantilion died on November 12, 1863 and never received that letter. In addition, photographs of John and Sarah Cantilion are reproduced in this essay.

The Battle of Sporting Hill, which was part of the Gettysburg Campaign, took place on June 30, 1863 in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania between elements of the 16th Virginia Calvary Regiment and two New York Militia Regiments. The Confederate forces at Sporting Hill served as a rearguard for General Albert G. Jenkins, whose brigade was stationed several miles away in Mechanicsburg. Early on June 30, however, Jenkins moved out after he received General Robert E. Lee’s order to regroup at Gettysburg. The 22nd and 37th New York Militia Regiments, which were under the overall command of General Darius N. Couch, were out on reconnaissance when they engaged Jenkins’ rearguard. (Union General William F. Smith had ordered a patrol once he realized that Confederates were withdrawing from the area). As John Lockwood recalled, the two New York regiments were:

“ordered out to reconnoiter. Expecting to return in course of the day left everything behind except arms and ammunition and thus passed through rest of campaign! They moved along the Carlisle road to ‘Sporting Hill’ where had a skirmish.”

Union forces forced Confederates to withdraw after they brought in a detachment from Landis’ Philadelphia Battery of Light Artillery, but they were unable to pursue them. Reports indicated that approximately sixteen soldiers died during the engagement. A historical marker is located at the intersection of 31st Street and Market Streets in Camp Hill. You can read more about this battle in an essay on ExplorePAhistory.com, Robert Grant Crist’s article “Highwater 1863: The Confederate Approach to Harrisburg” (Pennsylvania History 1963), and in Wilbur Sturtevant Nye’s Here Come The Rebels! (1965).

Even though Hinton Rowan Helper published The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It in 1857, the book was still a factor in the election of 1860.  While Helper was born in North Carolina to a family that owned more than 200 slaves, he used the Impending Crisis to call for the South to end slavery. That institution, as Helper argued, limited the economic potential of white labor and prevented the South’s economy from developing. In 1859 Helper published the Compendium of the Impending Crisis of the South – a cheaper edition of that reached thousands of readers. By the election of 1860 northern Democratic editors like James Gordon Bennett, who owned the New York Herald, used Helper’s book as evidence that the Republican party was dangerous to the United States. On election day in November 1860 the Herald warned voters that Republicans had “circulated hundreds of thousands of Helper’s handbook of treason.” Prominent Republicans had endorsed the book, which as the Herald explained, were “[distributed] to abolitionize the Northern mind.” If Abraham Lincoln became President, the Herald argued that “one phase of [his] administration [would be] to engender or to inaugurate, if possible, a civil war at the South between the non-slaveholding whites of that section (excited by abolition emissaries) and those who own slaves.” One of the best secondary sources on Helper is David Brown’s Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis of the South (2006).

This weekend, Northfield, Minnesota, has been host to the 2010 Vintage Band Festival.  The four-day festival draws brass bands from as far away as Helsinki, Finland.  One of the highlights of the weekend was a reenactment of a Civil War “battle of the bands,” with two bands in historical costume facing off across the Cannon River, which flows through the middle of Northfield.  On the east side of the river was Newberry’s Victorian Cornet Band, from Maryland, which specializes in music from the period 1870 to 1900.  On the west side of the river was the 1st Brigade Band, from Watertown, Wisconsin, which specializes in music of the Civil War era. The band members play “over the shoulder” instruments, the bells of which face backwards toward the soldiers who were marching behind the band.  You can see an over the shoulder bugle in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art here.

During the Civil War, a “battle of the bands” generally took place in the evening, when two opposing armies had gone into bivouac, and the bands on either side played back and forth across the lines.  Sam Seay, of the 1^st Tennessee Infantry, described one especially poignant “battle of the bands”on the eve of the Battle of Stones River (the Battle of Murfreesboro) on December 30, 1862:

Just before ‘tattoo’ the military bands on each side began their evening music. The still winter night carried their strains to great distance. At every pause on our side, far away could be heard the military bands of the other. Finally one of them struck up ‘Home Sweet Home.’ As if by common consent, all other airs ceased, and the bands of both armies as far as the ear could reach, joined in the refrain. Who knows how many hearts were bold next day by reason of that air?

The modern 1^st Brigade Band was founded in 1964, one hundred years after the original 1^st Wisconsin Brigade Band marched to the sea with Gen. William T. Sherman.  During that campaign, the band found itself in a hard-fought “battle of the bands” with another Union brigade band from Michigan.  Here’s how bandmaster E.O. Kimberly described the “battle”:

“They were a very fair band: they would play a piece and then we would.  After playing 3 or 4 pieces, we then played a new piece we had just learned, a fine thing; after finishing it ,they struck up with the same thing, which of course was considered an insult.  Our boys then swore they would run them out, determined to play the last piece, and the other band also made the same determination that they would play the last piece and run the d….d Badgers out.  Of course on such occasion both bands had been drinking pretty freely and were excited and maddened to no low pitch.  We kept on, as soon as they finished a piece we were ready to start in, playing every piece they did if we had it.  They sent a man over to see what we had to play and we had done the same.  Their colonel was with them and swore that he would hang the first men that gave out.  The whole affair was just like a hard contested battle.  At one o’clock we were still going at it, as quick as they would stop, we would start right in.  We were determined to play until 8 o’clock in the morning if necessary.  The Doctor said he would get us some breakfast.  Liquors were set out on a table for the boys to drink just when they had a mind to.  Both bands kept on until 3 o’clock: it was their turn to play but they failed to come out; we waited patiently.  Our spy came back and informed us they had given up.  We played ‘Yankee Doodle’ double quick.  The boys shouted Victory!  We had whipped them and forced a retreat.”

In Northfield this weekend, the Newberry Victorian Cornet Band retired from the field after a rousing rendition of “Dixie,” which you can listen to here.

You can find a history of the 1^st Brigade Band on the modern band’s website, and photographs of the original band members in the digital collections of the University of Wisconsin.  The Library of Congress American Memory collection has an excellent online exhibit of “Band Music from the Civil War Era,”including audio files of some of the music and downloadable scores.

Click here for a small slideshow (six photos) of the 2010 battle of the bands in Northfield, and here for a video of the battle of the bands during the 2006 Vintage Band Festival in Northfield.

“The war was a good time for the study of the conflict between Athens and Sparta,” Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) wrote in 1897.  “It was a great time for reading and re-reading classical literature in general, for the South was blockaded against new books as effectively, almost, as Megara was blockaded against garlic and salt… The Southerner, always conservative in his tastes and no great admirer of American literature, which had become largely alien to him, went back to his English classics, his ancient classics.  Old gentlemen past the military age furbished up their Latin and Greek.  Some of them had never let their Latin and Greek grow rusty.”

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and received his first schooling from his father, who was a Presbyterian clergyman and newspaper editor.  Young Gildersleeve was reading ancient Greek fluently at the age of twelve, and at nineteen had graduated from Princeton (class of 1849) and had set off for Göttingen, Germany, where he earned a doctorate in classical philology in 1853.  He was a professor of Greek at the University of Virginia from 1856 until 1876, when he left to become the first professor of Greek at the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. 

From 1861 to 1864, Gildersleeve served as a staff officer with General John B. Gordon.  A staunch supporter of the Confederacy, he also contributed regular wartime editorials to the Richmond Examiner, edited by John Moncure Daniel, which have been collected by Ward W. Briggs, Jr. in Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War  (University Press of Virginia 1998).  Gildersleeve’s service with the Confederate army ended in September 1864, during the Valley Campaigns, when a bullet shattered his leg. 

“I lost my pocket Homer, I lost my pistol, I lost one of my horses and, finally, I came very near losing my life,” he later wrote.  General Gordon, in his memoirs, praised Gildersleeve’s “courage and composure” under fire, and Gildersleeve claimed that the general’s praise meant more to him than any of the academic honors he had received.

At Johns Hopkins after the war, Gildersleeve founded the prestigious American Journal of Philology, wrote a Latin grammar that would become a standard for generations to come, and reflected on the Civil War in essays like “The Creed of the Old South,” which promoted the idea of the Lost Cause. (Writing about Demosthenes in the American Journal of Philology in 1906, Gildersleeve called the Greek orator “a champion of a lost cause,” and added, “some of us who have championed lost causes are not so enthusiastic about other people’s lost causes.”) In “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War,” quoted above, Gildersleeve reflects on the American Civil War in light of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict in the fifth century BCE between the northern Greek Athenians and the southern Greek Spartans.

“States rights were not suffered to slumber,” he wrote in that essay.  “The Southerner resented Northern dictation as Pericles resented Lacedaimonian [i.e., Spartan] dictation, and our Peloponnesian War began.” 

For more on Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve online, see James Stimpert, “Hopkins History: First Greek Prof., Basil Gildersleeve,” The Johns Hopkins Gazette, September 18, 2000; and Michael Dirda, “To Understand Ourselves,” Johns Hopkins Magazine, August 27, 2009. Both “The Creed of the Old South” and “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War” can be read on Google Books.

Before going to bed on October 10, 1862, Chambersburg resident William Heyser noted in his diary that he had “secreted some of my most valuable papers.” Confederate cavalry under the command of General J. E. B. Stuart had arrived several hours earlier and forced the town to surrender. Union forces had been caught by surprise and none were available to defend the town. “It would have been an act of madness to have made resistance…and would have involved the total destruction of the town,” as the Chambersburg (PA) Valley Spirit noted. The raid, as the Milwaukee (WI) Sentienel described, “was the most daring adventure of the war” so far. Besides gathering intelligence, one of the Confederate’s other objectives was to take as many supplies as possible. Horses were one key item and Alexander Kelly McClure, an assistant adjutant Union general, later recalled how ten horses were taken from his farm. (You can read McClure’s full account of the Confederate raid – “A Night With Stuart’s Raiders”- here). Yet as one Confederate soldier’s letter revealed, they also seized a number of other supplies. “I got 8 pair of boots, 4 over coats, 5 pair of pantaloons, 2 hats, 6 pair of socks, 6 pr. Draws, 6 over & under shirts, [and] some coffe & sugar” during the raid, as Edward Cottrell told his grandmother. As Confederates left Chambersburg on October 11, they burned warehouses that held government supplies. One contained ammunition and, as Heyser described, “the succeeding explosions of shells and power was tremendous.” While Union forces were dispatched to intercept and capture the raiders, General Stuart evaded them and returned to Virginia without any major engagements. You can read more about the raid in Emory M. Thomas’ Bold Dragoon: The Life of J.E.B. Stuart (1986) and Jeffry D. Wert’s Cavalryman of the Lost Cause: A Biography of J. E. B. Stuart (2008).

While some southern editors argued before election day in November 1860 that a Republican victory would justify secession, the Fayetteville (NC) Observer was prepared to accept Abraham Lincoln as President. The Observer, which supported Constitutional Union candidates John Bell and Edward Everett, believed that there was no choice but to accept the results of an election that they participated in. If “[it was] decided constitutionally,” the Observer explainedthat “we [were] honor bound to abide its results.” Southerners who threatened to secede only created more problems, particularly those who were not prepared to follow through with their threats. “We have had enough of ultimatum-manufacturing,” as the Observer noted. Those southerners had a bad “habit of invariably back out after” issuing ultimatums and, as the Observer argued, the repeated false alarms “[had] made the North believe that the South cannot be kicked out of the Union.” This scenario was dangerous since the Observer, like other unionist papers, did not completely reject secession as an option. If President Lincoln took any action that they considered a threat to slavery, many would support disunion. For the Observer and other ‘conditional’ unionists, the turning point was President Lincoln’s call for volunteers after Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in April 1861. One of the best sources on southern unionists’ perspectives during this period is Daniel W. Crofts’ Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (1989). While Crofts discusses the Upper South, Edward Ayers focuses on southern unionists Augusta County, Virginia in In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 (2003). You can learn more about that community online at the Valley of the Shadow project.

After what could only be mildly described as a tumultuous decade of failed compromises, the rise of a new political party, and a disgruntled citizenry, the 1860 Election season met with the pronounced fears over the future course of the United States. Partisan newspapers relished the opportunity to hack away at their opponents by castigating their political views and theorizing on pressing social fears within the South. The Chicago Press and Tribune noted that the “slave breeders” of the South feared a Republican party in their midst that could claim Founders as part of its political pedigree. The article also cites an undated piece from the New Orleans Courier which speculated that if Republicans proved victorious in the upcoming election, Southerners would have to openly embrace the patronage positions offered them as members of a new Southern Republican “nucleus.” (Ironically, Lincoln and his cabinet maintained their hope in a latent Southern Unionism in Virginia that would dissuade the Upper South from seceding.)  Other fears for the upcoming election literally struck at the belly of the South. Again, the Chicago Press and Tribune stated that a  “poor corn-crop” would precede a potential famine in the upcoming year. Instead of stoking this fear in their hearts, Southerners could remain “patriots and good citizens’ by “behaving themselves” in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s election. However, the Press and Tribune cynically mused that the “dissolution” of the Union would only be averted until the South had a “full crop.” Articles in partisan papers such as the Chicago Press and Tribune reveal the broad spectrum of fears endemic to the United States in the months leading up to the Election of 1860.



After southern Democratic delegates in Baltimore, Maryland refused to accept Senator Stephen Douglas as a candidate for the election of 1860, they nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge on June 23, 1860. Soon after Breckinridge’s campaign biography was published, which one can read online at archive.org. Some editors saw Breckinridge’s campaign and, in particular his supporters, as a serious threat to the Union. The Lowell (MA) Citizen & News, which supported the Republican party, warned that the group’s ultimate goal was secession. “There [were] many prominent southern supporters of Breckinridge and Lane who go for that ticket …[because it] will be most likely to achieve…a dissolution of the Union,” the Citizen & News argued. Southern newspapers like the Charlestown (VA) Free Press, which supported the Constitutional Union party, reached a similar conclusion. “No sane man can doubt that a dissolution of the Union is the ultimate object of the Seceders who put up Breckinridge and Lane as their leaders,” as the Free Press concluded. Editors who backed other candidates wanted Breckinridge to explain what actions he would recommend in the event of a Republican victory in November 1860. After a speech in Lexington, Kentucky, the Richmond (VA) Whig noted that “[Breckinridge] did not say, nor did he dare say, what course he would advise the Seceding and Disunion party…to take in case a Black Republican President” win the election. The (Jackson) Mississippian, however, used the same speech to reach the opposite conclusion. “It [was] a great speech, perfectly overwhelming in its refutation of the charges…of ‘disunion,’” as the Mississippian explained. (The full text of Breckinridge’s speech is available in an articled published on the New York Times’ website). Breckinridge, as the Mississippian argued, “had always been the able and faithful champion of ‘the Union, the Constitution, and the equality of the States.’” Breckinridge attempted to bridge the sectional divide after Lincoln’s victory in November 1860, but twelve months after the election he joined the Confederate army as a brigadier general.

Sam Wilkeson was a war correspondent for the New York Times who had sons in the Union army, including Lt. Bayard Wilkeson, an artillery officer who was mortally wounded on the first day at Gettysburg. The story of Bayard’s death became a northern sensation since he was one of the youngest artillery officers in the army, the son of a prominent journalist and also because he died in a particularly heroic fashion. The young lieutenant covered the retreating forces from the Union XI Corps on the battle’s first day and reportedly had to amputate his own shattered leg when doctors were forced to flee in the face of the oncoming Confederates. The elder Wilkeson, who was married to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s sister, recovered his mangled son’s body in Gettysburg’s aftermath and wrote an angry report in the Times which appeared on July 6. The article began: “Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly absorbing interest –the dead body of an oldest born son, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay.” Unionists later redistributed the moving piece as a pamphlet under the title: Samuel Wilkeson’s Thrilling Word Picture Of Gettysburgh. Artist Alfred Waud also drew a famous sketch of the young Wilkeson directing his battery on the battlefield. The story remains one of the most compelling of the battle. You can read more about it here at a special blog site built by Civil War enthusiast Randy Chadwick. Also, Louis M. Starr’s Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action (1954) provides good context and more detail about Sam Wilkeson, one of the nation’s first embedded war correspondents. A more recent study by Michael A. Dreese, Torn Families: Death and Kinship at the Battle of Gettysburg (2007), provides several descriptive pages (available through Google Books) as part of a fascinating chapter on fathers and sons during the war.

To view a slideshow in Flickr, click on any of the images below: