York’s surrender of 1863: If not owned, a community mistake can be compounded

(This is the second of two columns focusing on the surrender of York to the Confederates in late-June 1863 – a pivotal moment in York County’s story. Civil War historian Scott Mingus served as a resource for this piece, which explores why we’re talking about this moment of capitulation 161 years later - why it matters.)

First installment: Who paid the Confederate requisition after York’s Civil War surrender? And who did not?

The other day at Seminary Ridge Museum in Gettysburg, a Civil War talk turned to the surrender of York in 1863.

An audience member asked at the end of a presentation about a second surrender of York 31 years after that first one in the days before Gettysburg. That came on the March evening in 1894 when the city welcomed back the man who had accepted the surrender after York’s leaders sought him out, retired Confederate Gen. John B. Gordon.

Gordon gained a hero’s welcome and loud applause after his speech at York’s premier public venue, the York Opera House on South Beaver Street.

The Georgian was a leader in the Confederate raid into the county, stealing horses, emptying smokehouses, trampling harvest-ready fields and killing a defender of the Susquehanna River Bridge in Wrightsville. His men terrorized farmers and townspeople in his march to the Susquehanna’s west shore.

Despite these acts, 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 of the Confederacy. Such thinking glorified a 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 counterfeit causes.

A year before Gordon visited York, a Selma, Alabama, newspaper gushed over Gordon’s “Last Days,” lecture: “Every southerner, who cherishes the memory of the ‘Lost Cause,’ should hear Gen. Gordon if it is possible for him to do so … .”

So when prominent York industrialist A.B. Farquhar, the man who catalyzed the surrender of York, wrote that “slavery was better in practice than in theory,” he reflected this Lost Cause philosophy even before the cause – the war – was lost. And he demonstrated that the Lost Cause was still alive and well north of the Mason-Dixon Line when he wrote in 1922.

Indeed, the Civil War is one war in which the loser, not the winner, tells its history. And Gordon, on the losing side, faced a Northern audience eager to hear that story in York.

What is going on here?

Well, when a community makes a bad decision — seeking out the enemy in a theater of war to surrender as did York in 1863 — it’s possible to compound that mistake going forward if leaders and laypeople don’t own up to it.

With family and business connections in Baltimore and points South, the majority in York County supported the Peace Democrat position that called for a negotiated end to the war that would have left slavery in place in the South and on the table as new states were admitted into the U.S.

Why not? Slavery, in their minds, was not that bad. Enslaved people were not prone to rebellion — all they wanted was three meals a day, Farquhar wrote in 1922. The freedom of a whole race of people was not worth splitting a nation.

Chief Burgess David Small’s Peace Democrat newspaper, the York Gazette, regularly carried a headline that summed up the “Copperhead” majority view in York County: “The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is, the Negroes where they are.”

‘Everyone knew who was involved’

This pervasive low view of Black people in York County – the type of opinion that would make it OK to celebrate a former Confederate general known for his racist views – has prompted conflict many times in county history.

Here’s just one example: York’s Black residents rebelled over oppression and unaddressed grievances in the 1960s, contributing to the York race riots, which erupted 55 years ago this week. With the goal of quelling ongoing racial conflict, city and county leadership chose not to prosecute two deaths from 1969.

"Everyone knew who was involved," Mayor Charlie Robertson told Time magazine in 2001. "But everyone just thought it was even. One black had been killed and one white — even."

The through line can be seen between what I call unprincipled pragmatism that led to expediency over justice in 1863 and 1969. Compare Robertson’s summary with Farquhar’s argument to York leaders in 1863 that they should meet the Confederates before they entered town and could see how little property had been moved to safety. He promptly left to cut a deal with the invaders without authorization.

There was a concern about property, not a consideration about righting an injustice with resistance against what the Confederates really were fighting for: securing the institution of slavery.

That through line of expediency over justice reached the 21st century when the race riot assailants were finally brought to trial. Key York leaders unsuccessfully pressured the district attorney’s office and the judiciary to not reopen the case.

“A lot of us misunderstood and viewed reopening the (race riot) investigations as unnecessary,” one leader would say later after another racial incident in 2017. “I don’t think we appreciated the unhealed wound that was still there.”

To their credit, community leadership gathered themselves in the aftermath of that racial incident in 2017 – the calling of police after five Black golfers allegedly played too slowly at a Dover Township golf course.

“There is a disease among us — a cancer that must be attacked — the cancer of division, fear and bias that holds us back as individuals and as a community,” leaders said in a newspaper advertisement. “A diverse and welcoming community is not only just and right for all, but is the underpinning of the most dynamic and highest performing regions in our country. We can do better. Indeed, we must.”

That’s the type of moral certitude missing when our leaders sought out the Confederates to cut a deal and later invited a former Confederate general back to York for a hero’s welcome.

Since this moment of coming clean in 2017, city and nonprofit leadership has denounced other acts of racism, stepped up diversity training and accelerated representation of people of color in top community positions.

After a community does a right thing, it’s more likely to do the next thing right.

Seeking higher purposes

This is a good moment to go more deeply into reasons some people supported the seek-out-and-surrender tactic in 1863 — a position with echoes today.

One argument is that the town was undefended so residents did what was best for their families and property. That line of thinking can be used to justify a decision or ease one’s way out of almost any tough situation. You know, like shutting down prosecution in two riots-era murders a century later.

Aren’t we called as humans to not fall prey to undue pragmatism, to look for higher purposes beyond our own interests? The thousands of York County men who were fighting the Confederates on the ridges of Gettysburg and other battlefields did not use that excuse to escape service.

Jacob Miller, a Black man who sat on the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge pier facing down Gordon’s charging brigade, used his cigar to ignite the fuses to the mined bridge designed to drop a span into the Susquehanna. He put himself at risk to hold Gordon’s 1,800 men at bay. Remember, Gordon and his brigade were the same men who so threatened Farquhar and Small.

Perhaps Miller, as did many other Lincoln supporters among York’s population, understood that Farquhar and Small’s overwrought concerns for properties and families in town meant a lack of concern for other Americans. Those were the families of thousands of Black men, women and children in the South, who would remain enslaved if the Confederates prevailed.

The York County soldiers who were fighting against the likes of Gordon with their blood saw a higher purpose. Their vote in the 1864 presidential election went for Lincoln against their former commander Gen. George McClellan, a Democrat, by a wide margin.

Conversely, at home, York County voters backed McClellan 7,785-4,690. Small’s York Gazette thanked the Democratic voters for making York County “an oasis in the desert” of national and statewide support for Lincoln.

Then, as now, our partisan political views influence our actions. And we tend to look at the polls or party as factors about what is right rather than from a big-picture view. Small was York County’s chief Democrat, and Farquhar, a Southern native who later argued he knew Republican and Democratic presidents, acquired Small’s Democratic newspaper about five years after his death. Their politics were similar to those of the invaders.

Some York voters could point to the 1867 election as justification that their anti-Lincoln vote and pro-surrender decision were right. In that election — a kind of referendum on local decision-making in the war — Democrat David Small won his sixth term against his Republican cousin David Etter Small.

But history shows the majority was wrong. The right view would have been to support David Etter Small, who offered to serve in the military but could not: He had lost his arm in an industrial accident so was not able to rapidly load a gun.

David Etter Small served in another way. The railroad car maker was an operator on the Underground Railroad. Indeed, Black leaders in the Grand Army of the Republic named their post after this David Small. According to local historian Stephen H. Smith, it was rare for a GAR post to be named for a civilian, and this post of Black veterans was possibly the only one in the country named after a white civilian.

David Etter Small saw a higher purpose in the Civil War and did something about it, though in the minority in York County. We can learn from that. It’s right to be involved in politics, but not blind partisanship.

Troubling, terrifying times

So what could have York’s leaders done?

First, they could have let their Union military commanders do their jobs, even with a sparse force.

They could have listened to Union Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin and prepared for the invasion rather than panic when the Confederates stepped on county soil. The native York countian correctly wrote about the approaching invaders, who exacted extensive property damage throughout the county: “His invasion will destroy your property, will degrade you and your country, and if allowed to proceed without strenuous resistance, will make you objects of contempt and scorn to your own country, and the remainder of the civilized war.”

At the worst, York’s leaders could have stayed home, standing beneath the waving flag in York’s square as leaders, two pastors, did in Hanover. When a Confederate commented on the men of military age in that southwestern York County town, one Hanoverian pushed back: "We will all soon join the Union Army.”

Clearly, these were troubling, terrifying times.

But one lesson emerges that is true today: If York’s leaders instead had looked beyond self-interest and party politics and searched out those in greatest need beyond our borders — enslaved people in the South — they would not have felt compelled to seek out the enemy. And the Civil War sacrifices of York’s fighting men on the field and townspeople back home would have become a point of pride as it is in Hanover, Wrightsville, Carlisle and other Northern towns.

What can we do today?

We must realize there’s an impact downstream when partisanship or self-interest overwhelms a crisis. Unprincipled pragmatism can trump the rule of law.

A community that lacked courage and blinded itself to the big picture in the 1860s failed to do the right thing in prosecuting murderers the 1969.

Further, we must stop defending, as some do today, such a humiliating, dishonoring manner of surrender, which has exercised such a devastating downstream community impact well beyond its welcome of Gordon in 1894.

Correcting a mistake

There is one last moment to reflect on, a small moment of clarity when York owned up to its mistaken outreach to the Confederates in the 1863 surrender as well as reaching out its hand to Gordon in 1894.

That moment came in 1988 and helped sparked a renaissance in Civil War writings evident today.

Republican Mayor William J. Althaus got it right when asked to hand over the town’s keys during a reenactment of the surrender on the 125th anniversary of the Confederate occupation.

His reply to the mock demand to surrender?

“Hell no.”

Sources: Scott Mingus’ “Flames Beyond Gettysburg,” James McClure’s “East of Gettysburg,” A.B. Farquhar’s “First Million the Hardest,” YDR files

Upcoming events

Jim McClure will sign copies of his newly published general history of York County, “Never to be Forgotten,” from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Aug. 2, during the formal opening of the new York County History Center Museum, and from noon to 2 p.m. Aug. 3, as part of the museum's opening weekend. He will sign books before and after his presentation about the book and York County’s 275th anniversary at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 14 at Red Land Community Library.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: York’s surrender of 1863: If not owned, a community mistake can be compounded