Second Battle of Hagerstown

Six days after Federals failed in their first attempt to seize Hagerstown while pursuing General Robert E. Lee's Confederate army retreating to Virginia after the Battle of Gettysburg, a decisive development came on Sunday morning, July 12, 1863, when the Union army moved to secure its northern flank by assigning the capture of Hagerstown to General George Armstrong Custer and his Michigan cavalry brigade. Custer's Wolverines rode into town from the east, scattering and capturing stunned Confederates, taking almost 100 prisoners, and freeing nearly 40 Federal soldiers who had been missing since the fighting of July 6 and had been sheltered by local citizens sympathetic to the Union cause. After Custer led his victorious column through town, doffing his hat to handkerchief-waving ladies, XI Corps commander General Oliver O. Howard climbed into a church steeple and for the first time saw the extensive Confederate fortifications west and south of town. Captain James Kidd of Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade recalled Hagerstown as a hornet's nest of sharpshooters armed with telescopic rifles whose bullets sounded like the buzz of a bumble bee, while a July 14 diary entry by Louise Kealhofer recorded the intense anxiety of July 12, the Yankees' occupation of the town, crowded streets full of horses, reports that the Rebels had crossed the river, and fear that the Rebels had been seen for the last time.

Hagerstown, Maryland · United States