Civil War and The Underground Railroad History of the Mason-Dixon 1200

From 1861 into 1865 the ground covered by the Mason-Dixon brevet was heavily contested terrain of great strategic significance to the warring armies of the Union and Confederacy. It has been more than 150 years since a war was waged in the mainland United States, giving our citizens the luxury of forgetting the mayhem suffered when living in a war zone. The war zone, however, was very much a reality for the civilians in the Mason-Dixon region.

Harpers Ferry is a town in West Virginia. Paths wind through Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, which has 19th-century buildings, a Civil War Museum and John Brown’s Fort, a key site in an 1859 abolitionist raid. The location where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet, known as The Point, offers views of Maryland and Virginia.

The same region had experienced the striving of enslaved humans for freedom via the “Underground Railroad” for a century or more before the Civil War. Prior to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, crossing the Mason-Dixon Line from south to north provided a measure of freedom to escaping blacks, which Congress intended to reverse with that Act. The Underground Railroad, however, remained active.

There is no straightforward description of how the Civil War unwound in the Mason-Dixon terrain. Armies marched north and south, east and west, across the Potomac River and back, sometimes without engaging their enemy at all. The geographical history of the Underground Railroad is easier to understand, as generally a movement from south to north and east to west. We summarize this history for the use of our riders by focusing more on geography than on chronology.

The Mason-Dixon 1200 begins in Leesburg, VA and traverses the Virginia Piedmont east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, for about 150 miles, before going over the mountain and entering the Shenandoah Valley. That Valley is defined by the Blue Ridge to the East and the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachian Mountains to the west. We first ride “up” the Valley (north to south) from Waynesboro to Lexington, before turning “down” the Valley as we ride northerly on its western side.

Our ride focuses on the Shenandoah Valley, just as the warring armies did. Staunton Day 1 & 2), Strasburg (D2), and Winchester (D2) each saw repeated battles and troop movements. The Confederates particularly liked moving up and down the Shenandoah, because the Blue Ridge Mountains that form the eastern edge of the Valley made their movements hard to detect. Civilians paid a price for the desirability of the ground, whether the trampling of their crops, property, and livelihoods was intentional or not.

In September 1862 the Antietam battle (D2) provided a turning point for the war. After defeating the Union Army at Second Manassas/Bull Run, General Robert E. Lee wanted to take the war to Maryland and Pennsylvania. Maryland was a slave state that did not secede, and Lee was looking for support in the form of volunteers and materiel where he hoped to find sympathy. Lee also wanted to take the war away from the Shenandoah Valley at harvest time. He moved his army across the Virginia Piedmont to Leesburg (our start/finish) and crossed the Potomac nearby, although he sent his supplies down the Valley with less exposure to Union forces. In Maryland Lee headed north to Frederick (D4) on a line similar to ours on Day 4, though in the opposite direction. Ultimately the opposing forces converged on Sharpsburg, MD (D2), where on September 17, 1862 the Antietam battlefield saw the greatest loss of American lives in a single day of battle, before or since. The Confederates were defeated, and withdrew through Shepherdstown, WV (D2), which also served as an impromptu field hospital for them. We will ride the few miles that run straight between Sharpsburg and Shepherdstown. Abraham Lincoln used the occasion of this battle victory to announce the Emancipation Proclamation.

The competing armies’ next major engagement was near Richmond, VA, the capital of the Confederacy. In early summer 1863 Lee withdrew his army and marched north in the Piedmont, opposite our travel on Day 1, before crossing into the Shenandoah and starting down its eastern side. Union forces garrisoned in Winchester (D2) were surprised and easily defeated as the Confederates headed north down the Valley again. From there the Confederates headed into the Cumberland Valley, and on to Chambersburg (D2) and Shippensburg (D2 & 3).

In fact, Lee dispersed forces all over Franklin, Cumberland, Adams, and York counties in south central Pennsylvania (D3). Some traveled through Gettysburg, headed to York, and made it all the way to Wrightsville, on a line similar to the one we will ride (D3). One Confederate goal was to cross the Susquehanna River to Columbia just where we will (D3), but the bridge was destroyed before the invading forces crossed. The loss of this bridge was yet another major disruption of civilian life the war created.

This tier across southern Pennsylvania, including its extension east of the Susquehanna (D3 & 4), forms the major geographical nexus between the Underground Railroad and the Mason-Dixon 1200. Just a few miles to the east of the Day 3 Lancaster Loop lies the site of the 1851 Christiana Riot, where a failed effort to recover four slaves was followed by 41 federal treason charges against local citizens and the escaped slaves. After the first defendant was acquitted in 15 minutes by jurors apparently unsympathetic to the Fugitive Slave Act following a 17-day trial, the charges against the remaining defendants were dismissed.

Significant Underground Railroad sites on our course include Columbia (D3 &4), where escaping slaves crossed the Susquehanna, and York, where prominent freedman Wm. Goodrich used rail cars he owned to transport both materials and humans. Likewise, from the Ritner home in Chambersburg, just off our path leaving Mercersburg (D2), a railroad conductor used that post to move human cargo out of bondage. Just west of our path through the Gettysburg battlefield lies McAllister Mill, which provided shelter to hundreds of freedom seekers in the years before the war.

Returning to the war narrative, as the larger Union Army lumbered north for a momentous battle, Lee ordered his forces to reunite at Gettysburg (D3), a likely meeting place for the enemies because of the profusion of roads that converge there. Day 1 of the battle began northwest of town, which is the place our route takes us into Gettysburg. Confederate forces pushed the Union back into town, where there was fighting in the streets. The Confederates succeeded on that day, but by Day 2 the opposing forces had formed battle lines south of Gettysburg, with the Union line to the east, capped at each end by high ground. The Confederates were to the west, which you will ride as Confederate Avenue, with a longer, thinner line of forces. The most decisive battles on Day 2 were on the high ground the Union defended, with the Confederates just failing to take Little Round Top on the south end (you will ride there), and taking but not holding Culp’s Hill on the north end.

Day 3 of the Gettysburg battle saw the famed Pickett’s Charge, where Lee sent troops across open ground to the center of the Union line, near where  Union and Confederate soldiers fight at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. American Civil War. Illustration published in First Lessons in Our Country’s History by William Swinton, A.M. (Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, & Company, New York and Chicago) in 1872.[/caption]Pennsylvania Monument now stands. The Confederates briefly breached the Union Line, at what is known as the High Water Mark of the Confederacy, but they could not hold the advantage.

Union and Confederate soldiers fight at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. American Civil War. Illustration published in First Lessons in Our Country’s History by William Swinton, A.M. (Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, & Company, New York and Chicago) in 1872.

Both sides lost a third of their large armies, in the deadliest multi-day battle in American history. Lee retreated across the Potomac at Williamsport (D2). The major fighting for the remaining 18 months of the war was largely away from our course, though some fighting continued in the Shenandoah Valley. Confederate General Jubal Early directed some mayhem there at the Union in the summer of 1864, which crossed our route multiple times.

Early’s forces entered the Valley at Lexington (D1), our southernmost reach, and rode as we do to Shepherdstown (D2), where he crossed the Potomac and headed for Frederick (D4) on the way to D.C. Just south of Frederick we cross Early’s route, where he fought the Battle of the Monocacy to the east of our path. Early made it to the outskirts of D.C., where the defenses looked too stiff, so he headed to Leesburg and then back into the Valley, and started marching north again. From there he again attacked Union soldiers in Winchester (D2), rummaged back into Maryland, and then crossed the Mason-Dixon Line to sack Chambersburg, with fighting also in

Mercersburg (D2), before retreating into the Valley yet again. In his final pass “up” the Valley, Early was defeated upon his return to Winchester after protracted fighting there, and retreated all the way to Staunton (D1 &2), from which he was finally ejected from the Valley for good. In Waynseboro (D1) the Union finally brought Early’s forces to heel. The Union forces took the opportunity to engage in mass destruction in the Valley, burning 2,000 barns, 700 flour mills, running off 4,000 head of livestock, and killing 3,000 sheep to feed the army. The plan was for the area between Winchester and Staunton to “have little in it for man or beast.”