Archivist’s finding sheds light on famous note among the roses
Confederate Gen. John B. Gordon,
recipient of bouquet shrouding a note from a spy.
Archivist Lila Fourhman-Shaull was researching a routine request for information about York’s St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in the York County Heritage Trust’s library. She was working through Paul J. Kane’s 1986 A History of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church.
As was customary for the Civil War enthusiast, her eyes moved to that era of the church’s history when she found a letter from the pastor’s son, Charles Baum, which gave an eyewitness account of the Confederate invasion of York on June 28, 1863. She read the oft-told incident in which Gen. John B. Gordon received a large bouquet of flowers from a girl. The note exposed Union troop positions in Wrightsville, where Gordon was heading. One sentence riveted her eyes to the page:
“The girl was said to have been the daughter of William Small of South George St., York, Pa.”
The archivist immediately tried to recall whether the girl or her family had ever been identified. She rushed to the 1850 map of York and saw that William Small lived right next to St. Paul’s church. June Lloyd, library volunteer and former Heritage Trust archivist, joined Fourhman-Shaull on the multi-week research project to identify the girl and understand more about the William Small family. The formidable duo deftly unraveled the apparent identity of the girl, Margaret Small. Their findings formed the basis for an article that appeared in the York Sunday News on January 21.
For Fourhman-Shaull, her answer to a longtime York County — and national — riddle was gratifying, akin to seeing National Archive documents handled and signed by famous generals.
“The hairs were up on the back of my neck,” Fourhman-Shaull recalled about her discovery.
Their research helped bring forth the following story in the York Sunday News on January 21:
Discovery suggests York's rebel helper
Civil War mystery now centers on author
of note hidden in girl's roses
By James McClure
Daily Record/Sunday News
Jan 21, 2007 — One of York County's most compelling whodunits now appears to have an ending.
Who was that young girl who handed a bouquet of flowers to the Confederate general as his rebel brigade marched through York toward Wrightsville and its coveted covered bridge in late June 1863?
This story has been told and retold since Gen. John B. Gordon recounted the tale of the anonymous floral gift in his 1904 auto- biography.
It's not just a local mystery. Biographers and military historians writing about the famed Confederate general often tell the tale. Now they apparently have a name to attach to the story: 12-year-old Margaret Small, part of an obscure branch of York's most prominent 19th-century family.
It wasn't the flowers that made the moment important. Many belles socialized with butternut-and-gray-clad invaders during the 40-plus hours they were in and around York.
The bouquet hid a note showing Union troop defensive positions in Wrightsville and the best route to go around breastworks to capture the mile-long bridge.
The charm of the story surrounding the note written with a dainty hand, construed by Gordon to have been penned by a woman, shrouds the traitorous information it disclosed.
As it turned out, Union troops barely had time to torch the monstrous wooden structure and bar the Confederates from reaching the Susquehanna River's east bank. Had the rebels crossed, they would've had a clear shot at Lancaster or Harrisburg's lightly defended rear.
And at least two Union defenders lost their lives in fighting around Wrightsville. Nine men in blue were wounded. A rebel cannonade and flames spreading from the burning bridge damaged or gutted numerous buildings in the town.
The story is, in a sense, a murder mystery.
The 6,000 or more battle-hardened Confederates invading lightly defended York County in those days before the Battle of Gettysburg terrorized residents.
The note, apparently delivered by Margaret Small, abetted the enemy. But her identity puzzled Civil War researchers until December.
Lila Fourhman-Shaull, York County Heritage Trust archivist, discovered an account stating that the then-unnamed girl was reportedly a young daughter of storekeeper William Small. She learned of this Small link in reviewing Charles Baum's eyewitness account of the invasion described in a history of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in York.
Following this lead, Fourhman-Shaull and archivist emeritus June Lloyd then gathered pieces of the Small puzzle, identifying young Margaret as the likely message bearer.
In the process, more questions emerged.
Why did the daughter of William Small deliver the note? Who gave it to her? Was it indeed in female handwriting? And how did the writer get such detailed positions and troop strength?
Such questions may never be solved. But the quest to find answers reveals a lot about York County in the 1860s when the ominous gray cloud covered most of its 900 square miles.
Gordon and his men, perhaps a quarter of the rebel force invading York County, marched into Paradise Township on June 27, 1863, on their way east to the Susquehanna. That night, the town's fathers surrendered York to Gordon at his headquarters in Farmers, 10 miles west of York.
The next morning, General Gordon's advance guard entered undefended York and took down the 35-foot flag in the town's Centre Square. Now that York was officially in Confederate hands, the general rode along East Market Street toward his brigade's destination that day: Wrightsville and its bridge about 12 miles east.
The general stopped to address young women gathered on the porch of leading York businessman P.A. Small's East Market Street house. In his best courtroom address, the lawyer-general reassured the belles that he would have the head of any soldier who destroyed property or even insulted a woman.
Gordon slowly proceeded east and presently observed a girl, maybe 12 years in age, running up to his horse.
The rebel occupation caused churches all over town to cancel services. St. Paul's Evangelical English Lutheran Church on West King Street was the exception. Its pastor, the Rev. William M. Baum, was a staunch Unionist. In recent weeks, he had been drilling with other citizen-soldiers, carrying a wooden gun.
Jan 21, 2007 — One of York County's most compelling whodunits now appears to have an ending.
Who was that young girl who handed a bouquet of flowers to the Confederate general as his rebel brigade marched through York toward Wrightsville and its coveted covered bridge in late June 1863?
This story has been told and retold since Gen. John B. Gordon recounted the tale of the anonymous floral gift in his 1904 auto- biography.
It's not just a local mystery. Biographers and military historians writing about the famed Confederate general often tell the tale. Now they apparently have a name to attach to the story: 12-year-old Margaret Small, part of an obscure branch of York's most prominent 19th-century family.
* * *
 |
| Young Girl Standing in Doorway Knitting Meyer von Bremen(1863) |
The bouquet hid a note showing Union troop defensive positions in Wrightsville and the best route to go around breastworks to capture the mile-long bridge.
The charm of the story surrounding the note written with a dainty hand, construed by Gordon to have been penned by a woman, shrouds the traitorous information it disclosed.
As it turned out, Union troops barely had time to torch the monstrous wooden structure and bar the Confederates from reaching the Susquehanna River's east bank. Had the rebels crossed, they would've had a clear shot at Lancaster or Harrisburg's lightly defended rear.
And at least two Union defenders lost their lives in fighting around Wrightsville. Nine men in blue were wounded. A rebel cannonade and flames spreading from the burning bridge damaged or gutted numerous buildings in the town.
The story is, in a sense, a murder mystery.
* * *
The 6,000 or more battle-hardened Confederates invading lightly defended York County in those days before the Battle of Gettysburg terrorized residents.
The note, apparently delivered by Margaret Small, abetted the enemy. But her identity puzzled Civil War researchers until December.
Lila Fourhman-Shaull, York County Heritage Trust archivist, discovered an account stating that the then-unnamed girl was reportedly a young daughter of storekeeper William Small. She learned of this Small link in reviewing Charles Baum's eyewitness account of the invasion described in a history of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in York.
Following this lead, Fourhman-Shaull and archivist emeritus June Lloyd then gathered pieces of the Small puzzle, identifying young Margaret as the likely message bearer.
In the process, more questions emerged.
Why did the daughter of William Small deliver the note? Who gave it to her? Was it indeed in female handwriting? And how did the writer get such detailed positions and troop strength?
Such questions may never be solved. But the quest to find answers reveals a lot about York County in the 1860s when the ominous gray cloud covered most of its 900 square miles.
* * *
Gordon and his men, perhaps a quarter of the rebel force invading York County, marched into Paradise Township on June 27, 1863, on their way east to the Susquehanna. That night, the town's fathers surrendered York to Gordon at his headquarters in Farmers, 10 miles west of York.
The next morning, General Gordon's advance guard entered undefended York and took down the 35-foot flag in the town's Centre Square. Now that York was officially in Confederate hands, the general rode along East Market Street toward his brigade's destination that day: Wrightsville and its bridge about 12 miles east.
The general stopped to address young women gathered on the porch of leading York businessman P.A. Small's East Market Street house. In his best courtroom address, the lawyer-general reassured the belles that he would have the head of any soldier who destroyed property or even insulted a woman.
Gordon slowly proceeded east and presently observed a girl, maybe 12 years in age, running up to his horse.
* * *
The rebel occupation caused churches all over town to cancel services. St. Paul's Evangelical English Lutheran Church on West King Street was the exception. Its pastor, the Rev. William M. Baum, was a staunch Unionist. In recent weeks, he had been drilling with other citizen-soldiers, carrying a wooden gun.
Baum and seven others other worshipped that morning. One missing family, a prominent St. Paul's name, was that of William Small. And the Smalls did not have far to travel. They lived next door to the church on South Beaver Street.
* * *
The young girl reached up and handed Gordon a big bouquet of flowers. But the general did not pause to admire the roses. Inside, he found an unsigned note written in delicate hand.
He read and reread it on his journey east. He found it bereft of politics, but its urgency and attention to details inspired his confidence.
* * *
Dr. Charles Baum, son of St. Paul's pastor, was fond of recounting the Confederate invasion he witnessed as a youngster.
Word got around that a member of St. Paul's flock had wandered away that day to hand the bouquet to Gordon. In fact, one of the daughters of William Small, Baum's former neighbor, was at the center of the rumors.
If Gordon was any judge of age - he had 4- and 6-year-old sons - 12-year-old Margaret Ann probably was the girl. If his aim was low, her next oldest sister was 15-year-old Laura Catherine.
Their father had established himself as a butcher, passed that business on to his son and then tended a store. He was a respected businessman, though an undistinguished distant cousin to the mighty P.A. Small. And his wife, Catherine, was a Lanius, one of York County's most respected families.
But had he and his family walked the few steps to St. Paul's that day, Margaret might have been in church instead of handing flowers to Gordon.
* * *
Nearing Wrightsville several hours after passing through York, Gordon mounted the high ridge, probably Strickler's Hill, prompted by the note. A look through his field glasses verified the message. He scanned the defenders in blue crouched in curved trenches and the bridge beyond them.
And he saw the ravine, known to locals as Kreutz Creek, skirting the enemy's left flank all the way to the river. That ravine would be hard to defend and offered an opportunity to outflank the thin blue line. The correspondent, Gordon concluded, had displayed a genius for war.
If presented the opportunity, he wrote, she might have equaled Catherine the Great, powerful Russian empress of the late 1700s.
* * *
Most Union defenders hustled to safety across the bridge in the face of Gordon's best assault. An attempt to blast a span into the Susquehanna failed, and the defenders set it on fire. The rebels would march no further east.
Gordon's commander, Gen. Jubal Early, later assessed his men's performance, with 20 hot-weather miles on their legs that day:
" ... (T)he enemy beat him running."
That, despite the note among the roses that had given the Confederates a head start.
* * *
William Small's apparent association with the deliverer of the bouquet did not appear to harm his community standing. It was likely common knowledge that his daughter gave Gordon the roses. The streets were crowded that day, and her handoff would have been observed. That would have been enough to spark comment among the Unionists.
Its enclosed note also likely became public, small towns being as they are. But his daughter's link to the note does not mean William Small or his wife were behind it.
In fact, Gordon could have been wrong that a woman wrote the note. Extant documents from that era show that men penned finely written documents, too.
Perhaps someone else surveyed Wrightsville's defenses, committed the details to paper and rushed back to York. They could have handed the bouquet to Margaret, an innocent bystander, for delivery. Perhaps Margaret never knew the bouquet bore a note.
The county teemed with potential correspondents empathetic with the politics of their gray-clad visitors. Indeed, thousands of them.
The Confederate invasion presented just a brief intermission in York County's own civil war. That conflict pitted Peace Democrats, called Copperheads, versus Lincoln men. Copperheads felt a war over slavery was unconstitutional. Unionists countered that the constitution did not permit secession.
In his memoirs, A.B. Farquhar, the young factory owner who catalyzed York's surrender, summed up the county's ambivalence toward the war:
"The beginnings of the events which developed into the Civil War did not much move us. York was distinctively Northern but not bitterly anti-Southern."
Put another way, a majority in York County backed the so-called Copperhead slogan, "The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is and the Negroes where they are."
* * *
The local civil war reached its high-water mark after Gordon's men withdrew to fight in and around Gettysburg just days after dipping their boots in the Susquehanna.
Copperheads blamed Unionists for giving up the town to protect their business interests. Union supporters ostracized their Democratic neighbors for associating with the rebels.
As years turned into decades, no known investigations emerged to find the writer of the note and the deliverer of the bouquet to Gordon. In fact, when Gordon returned to give a speech some years after the war's end, he received a hero's welcome.
In that sense, the rebels won York County's civil war.
As late as the 1960s, historian W.S. Nye noted, Wrightsville-area residents lacked curiosity about the penman.
Or penwoman.
* * *
These swirling, opposing county political forces possibly blew away criticism of William Small and his family.
Small remained a respected businessman and an exemplary member of St. Paul's.
And young Margaret Small, if she was indeed the flower bearer, perhaps did not live long enough to realize the deadly implication of her actions.
She did not survive far into her teens, common for that day. Her death the next year drew just a brief notice in the newspaper.
Straight from the source
'This girl was said to have been the daughter of William Small of South George St., York, Pa. As the parsonage was not in condition to receive a new pastor, our family resided for some months with Mr. Isaac Kepner, whose next door neighbor was the said William Small.'
Charles Baum
A History of St. Paul's Lutheran Church
by Paul J. Kane
"As we moved along the street after this episode, a little girl, probably twelve years of age, ran up to my horse and handed me a large bouquet of flowers, in the centre of which was a note, in delicate handwriting, purporting to give the numbers and describe the position of the Union forces of Wrightsville, toward which I was advancing. I carefully read and reread this strange note. It bore no signature, and contained no assurance of sympathy for the Southern cause, but it was so terse and ex- plicit in its terms as to compel my confidence.
"The second day we were in front of Wrightsville, and from the high ridge on which this note suggested that I halt and examine the position of the Union troops, I eagerly scanned the prospect with my field-glasses, in order to verify the truth of the mysterious communication or detect its misrepresentations. There in full view before us, was the town, just as described, nestling on the banks of the Susquehanna...
"Not an inaccurate detail in that note could be discovered. I did not hesitate therefore, to adopt its suggestion of moving down the gorge in order to throw my command on the flank, or possibly in the rear, of the Union troops and force them to a rapid retreat or surrender..."
John B. Gordon
Reminiscences of the Civil War
"As we moved along the street after this episode, a little girl, probably twelve years of age, ran up to my horse and handed me a large bouquet of flowers, in the centre of which was a note, in delicate handwriting, purporting to give the numbers and describe the position of the Union forces of Wrightsville, toward which I was advancing. I carefully read and reread this strange note. It bore no signature, and contained no assurance of sympathy for the Southern cause, but it was so terse and ex- plicit in its terms as to compel my confidence.
"The second day we were in front of Wrightsville, and from the high ridge on which this note suggested that I halt and examine the position of the Union troops, I eagerly scanned the prospect with my field-glasses, in order to verify the truth of the mysterious communication or detect its misrepresentations. There in full view before us, was the town, just as described, nestling on the banks of the Susquehanna...
"Not an inaccurate detail in that note could be discovered. I did not hesitate therefore, to adopt its suggestion of moving down the gorge in order to throw my command on the flank, or possibly in the rear, of the Union troops and force them to a rapid retreat or surrender..."
John B. Gordon
Reminiscences of the Civil War
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