Two years later, with the Civil War at an end and slavery on the verge of being officially abolished nationwide, Lyles emerged from captivity and set to work recovering the life the Confederates had taken from her. With the help of the famously antislavery Stevens, she hoped to leave the place of her confinement, go to Richmond, Virginia, where she’d been forcibly parted from her children, and finally to “take them home with me.”
When Confederate forces approached Caledonia in the summer of 1863, Stevens had fled before their arrival. This was probably a wise choice for a man whom their commander, General Jubal Early, labeled an “enemy of the South” for his support of emancipation and advocacy of vigorously prosecuting the war against the Confederacy. Unable to vent their rage directly against Stevens’ person, Rebel soldiers settled for burning his furnace to the ground and carrying off the materials, provisions and animals needed to operate it.
Stevens estimated his losses at a whopping $75,000 (around $1.5 million today), an amount the Confederate press considered the “punishment due for his enormous crimes against the happiness of the human race”—in other words, his opposition to human bondage. The congressman wore his losses as a badge of honor. “We must all expect to suffer by this wicked war,” he wrote to a relative. “If, finally, the government shall be re-established over our whole territory, and not a vestige of slavery left, I shall deem it a cheap purchase.”
For Lyles and her children, the destruction of Caledonia was anything but “cheap.” In addition to wrecking the forge, Confederate soldiers carried off its Black inhabitants for enslavement in Virginia and beyond. The Rebels who invaded Pennsylvania waged war to ensure that slavery would endure not merely in “vestige,” but in totality. These agents of the slaveholders’ republic considered the African American residents of Maryland and Pennsylvania fugitives from slavery, fair game for capture and enslavement.
As historian Allen Guelzo writes in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, “To have left [them] in undisturbed freedom would have been tantamount to denying the validity of the whole Confederate enterprise.” Well before the Confederate soldiers arrived at Caledonia, therefore, one local observed them “scouring the country in every direction … for horses and cattle and Negroes.” Rebel civilians followed behind the men in gray, pursuing people they considered “their stolen Negroes,” ensnaring what a journalist recorded as “gangs of Negroes … captured in the mountains in Maryland and Pennsylvania.” A diarist reported that the Rebels were “driving them off by droves … just like we would drive cattle.”