Joseph was born on September 21, 1856 into a classic Pennsylvania Dutch farm family. Sarah, born August 20, 1860, was descended primarily from Ulster Scots. Both of their families had been in the area for generations.
Granddaughter
Phyllis’s notes say that Joe was kind and gentle. He worked as a tax assessor
in addition to his farming and fretted much over being fair. Phyllis said he
died of “blood poisoning from a carbuncle on his cheek” at the age of 75, when Phyllis
was only five; his 1931 death certificate said “thrombosis of the brain and
prostration.”
Phyllis
knew her Grandmother Bream better, because she lived with Phyllis's family for a
while at the end. She thought her grandmother was “the sweetest woman, always
willing to help, never asked a thing, made quilts and read her Bible until she
was nearly blind.” Sarah did not fear death. She would, in fact, tell her
granddaughter that she was eager to go see “my Joe” again.
Sarah’s parents owned a farm near Gettysburg, which wasn’t
the best place to be in July 1863. Sarah was not quite 3 years old, but even as
an old woman, she still remembered the incident. On August 22, 1950, The Harrisburg Evening News ran the following story:
Camp Hill – Cannons of the Civil War still echo in the memories of Mrs.
Sarah Taylor Bream, of Camp Hill, who celebrated her 90th birthday
Sunday.
During the Battle of
Gettysburg, a New York regiment passed through “The Narrow” near Arendtsville, where
Mrs. Bream lived as a girl. The soldiers were on their way to Gettysburg from
Chambersburg. When the family refused to tell where the father was keeping the
horses, which the soldiers badly needed for their trip, they took her brother
with them.
The family was frightened, but the boy was returned later unharmed.
Her mother was also forced by the soldiers to bake bread using her entire
supply of flour. Mrs. Taylor wept. The soldiers were moved by her tears and
gave her some of their own flour.
I
heard the story in a little more detail from my mother Phyllis, who must have
heard her grandmother tell it several times.When
it became clear that the armies were heading their way, Sarah’s father, Levi,
had taken the horses into the woods, while Sarah’s mother, Catherine, stayed
with the children. Levi did not tell Catherine precisely where he was going, so
that she could honestly tell the soldiers she didn’t know.
First to visit the
farm was a regiment from North Carolina. Catherine’s mother found them
frightening, of course, but well-mannered. They took only half her flour,
sugar, and other staples, and paid her for them. True, the payment was in
worthless Confederate cash, but they were polite.
Later, New Yorkers arrived. They were very rude; took all
the flour; and didn’t offer to pay. They told Catherine that she could either
tell them where the horses were or they would take her ten-year-old son, Harvey. She
couldn’t tell them, so they took the boy when they left. Of course, they had no
use for an ten-year-old, so they put him off the horse about a mile from the farm
and told him to go home.
Nearly
three-year old Sarah remembered hiding under the kitchen table while all this
was going on, and ever afterward “New Yorker” was an epithet in the
Taylor/Bream household.
Sarah
and Joe met when Sarah was forced to quit school to help with the family’s
income. She was hired out to work at the Andrew Bream farm. The couple lived on
the Bream farm for many years, and had three children: our ancestor Esta (#6),
her sister Carrie and, sadly, a son who was stillborn during a blizzard while
Joe was out trying to fetch a doctor.
Checking the family story against the official history of the battle, it seems most likely that the Confederate soldiers were with Major General Robert Rodes' division, who were on the road from Chambersburg to Gettysburg on June 30. (History records no Union troops in that area, either before or after the battle.)
Unfortunately, it's possible that the polite North Carolina soldiers met their end the next day. On July 1, Rodes'
division arrived at the north end of Gettysburg atop Oak Hill, engaging
the Union I Corps on Oak Ridge. Rodes deployed four brigades to strike the Union line, including a frontal assault by Alfred Iverson’s North Carolina Brigade, which was devastated in the assault. Despite the heavy losses, Rodes regrouped and eventually
helped push the Union forces back into the streets of Gettysburg that
afternoon. Rodes's Division suffered
the second-highest losses of any Confederate division at Gettysburg, despite being left in reserve for the rest of the battle.
So who were those New Yorkers, if no Union regiments ever marched that far northwest of Gettysburg? It's probable that they were deserters or stragglers. Had it been a detachment foraging for supplies under orders,
an officer or sergeant would have been present, and the soldiers would have been more disciplined. They would have paid for what they took or at a minimum left the
family with instructions about how to get reimbursed and most definitely
would not have kidnapped our 10-year-old great granduncle Harvey, even
for an hour or two.
Desertion is not an outlandish possibility. It was not severely punished during the Civil War, and overall desertion rates appear to have
been around 9-10% at the baseline, but rose higher immediately
before, during, and after battles, when Northern generals reckoned that
at least one soldier in five was absent from his regiment. In the chaos of a three-day battle
involving roughly 90,000 Union troops, the number of men who were
unaccounted for, straggling, or had simply walked away from their units
at any given moment was substantial.
Further, New York had a higher desertion rate than any other
state--in fact, the NYC draft riots occurred shortly after the battle of
Gettysburg. Irish
and German immigrants lacked the $300 fee that would have excused them from the
draft and so were serving under economic
pressure. With limited stake in the war's ideological stakes and limited
loyalty to officers and units they may have only recently joined, the New York conscripts disproportionately produced exactly the kind of men who
might desert in the aftermath of a brutal battle and behave with the
lawlessness Catherine experienced. Class resentment would also likely have played a role in the poor urban soldiers' conduct when they reached the prosperous Adams County farms.
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Daughter: Esta Bream
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