There are some who won’t admit it, but not all the commanders who served in the Confederacy were chivalrous knights.  
To wit, the 1864 burning of Chambersburg, Pennsyl-vania appears to be as heinous a war crime as any ever attributed to the Union commanders.
An 1864 eyewitness account by Reverend BS. Schneck, D. D. (1865) describes the deliberate destruction of a defenseless and non-strategic Pennsyl-vania border town by General John McCaus-land’s Virginia brigade of Jubal Early’s corps.
As horrifying as the published account is by the eyewitnesses - three ministers, a judge, and two lawyers - the more amazing aspect is that the Confederate general who carried out the town’s razing was speedily pardoned by none other than President Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union Army commander.
How could such a premeditated, barbaric act receive an unconditional pardon in the wake of America’s most divisive war?
For nearly a 150 years Southerners have fumed about Sherman’s scorched-earth tactics.
Every true southerner knows at least three tales relating to the atrocities of Sherman’s “Bummers,” those lawless defectors from the Union ranks who plundered, pillaged, and burned homes over the heads of defenseless southern women and children.
So in the spirit of fair play, here’s the story of General John McCausland, C.S.A., and the swath of pillage and arson cut by his Virginians through eastern Pennsylvania in July, 1864.
Facts reveal that John McCausland was a second generation American de-scended from Irish immigrant parents, and that his youth had been spent in the sprawling, brawling saloon town that was the gateway to the West - St. Louis.
The boy who later became the notorious Con-federate was uncommonly bright and industrious as a lad and ended up at Virginia Military Institute.
McCausland was First Honor graduate in the valorous VMI Class of 1858.
The Institute immediately hired young graduate McCausland to teach mathematics - alongside a crusty Army Major named Thomas J. Jackson, later to become famous under the nom de guerre “Stonewall.”
When the War of Disunion erupted in 1861, almost all of VMI’s math instructors were made colonels on the spot and sent to recruit their own regiments in central and western Virginia.
McCausland’s regiment was drawn from nearby Rockbridge County.
These were the lads who endured the brunt of the fighting in the Shenandoah Valley.
These were Stonewall Jackson’s famed “foot cavalry,” the 17,000 men who confused and defeated triple their number of Union adversaries in 1862.
Frustrated at their inability to corner Robert E. Lee and destroy Richmond in the summer of 1864, Union commanders such as Phil Sheridan and David Hunter began a policy of vindictive raids on the personal properties of the higher-ups in the Confed-erate’s chain-of-command.
Mrs. Edmund I. Lee, wife of one of General Lee’s kinsmen, was an early target of Sheridan’s wrath.
In a letter hand-delivered through the lines to General David Hunter, U.S.A., Mrs. Lee curtly demands: “Gen. Hunter, Yesterday your underling, Capt. Martindale, of the First New York Veteran Cavalry, executed your infamous order and burned my house.
You have had the satisfaction ere this of receiving from him the information that your orders were fulfilled to the letter, the dwelling and every outbuilding, seven in number, with their contents, being burned.
I, therefore, a helpless woman, whom you have cruelly wronged, address you, a major general of the United States army, and demand why this was done? What was my offense?”
Adding insult to injury, Union General Hunter’s niece was being sheltered in the Edmund Lee home at the time it was torched.
Numerous homes in northern Virginia were likewise torched, as was the proud, old Virginia Military Institute in Lynchburg. VMI was viewed as a reasonable target of Union reprisal - but what civilized man could justify the destruction of private homes?
If war weren’t the ultimate in man’s barbarity, then it’d be the most fiendishly competitive match where real life chess pieces toppled their adversaries with lightning-swift strokes.
Even the gallant Lee quipped, “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.”
The long and the short of the dastardly Chambers-burg raid is that Confederate General Jubal Early sought to draw Union forces away from Lee and his stubborn defense of Richmond in 1864. Early struck into Maryland - toward Hagers-town - and then into eastern Pennsylvania.
Most northern turnpike roads were gravel-paved and the barefoot southerners’ feet had taken a beating in the 1863 Gettysburg campaign. There were shoe factories in the eastern Pennsylvania region so Early tried to force the Yanks to back off of Lee in Richmond.
At the same time Early planned to threaten Wash-ington, D.C..
However, Union General David Hunter decided to make Jubal Early pay a bitter price for shifting the war northward. Hunter torched the homes of private citizens west of Richmond, all in hopes of causing southern angst against Jubal Early for leaving them defenseless.
Regrettably, the “tit for tat” mentality of the warrior class propelled Early to issue a retaliation order saying that Chambersburg should be held as ransom for the acts of Hunter or burned if the town did not comply.
The ambitious brigadier of Early’s southern cavalry, John McCausland, age 27, was tasked with the Chambersburg raid.
And it was a foray that McCausland’s Rockbridge veterans performed with a particular relish. Cham-bersburg homes were looted. Citizens were robbed of wallets, rings, and watches, and the town was reduced to rubble.
Union General Hunter’s commander, General Phil Sheridan, once boasted in the Shenandoah that he’d “ravage that valley and leave it so desolate that even a crow would have to pack provisions to fly across it.”
He was a hardened fighter.
While fighting Indians in the West, Sheridan snarl-ed, “If I owned both Hell and Texas, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell.”
The Early-versus-Sheri-dan feud brought out the rawest elements in both Northerners and Southern-ers.
Opposing subalterns McCausland and Hunter brought home the horrors of war - just as did the Union siege of Vicksburg, and the starvation of Union prisoners at Andersonville.
However, President Ulysses S. Grant didn’t bat an eye at pardoning Mc-Causland after the War. Northerners wanted Mc-Causland hanged. Grant understood the miserable business of war — and the harsh duty of following orders.
Jubal Early never apologized for Chambersburg, and McCausland survived to be the last Confederate general, dying in 1927.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com.)

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The ruins of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania after McCausland’s cavalry burned it in July, 1864.

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Brigadier General John McCausland, CSA, has the same reputation in the North that General W.T. Sherman, USA, has in the South.