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Confederate Brig. General John McCausland, circa 1915.
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Confederate officer, Brig. Gen. John McCausland, post-war image.

Credit: Virginia Military Institute Archives

In 1865, Pennsylvania issued a warrant for John McCausland's arrest, and he went into exile, spending several years in Canada, Europe, and Mexico. Through President Grant's intervention, he returned to the United States, but felt abused by his Unionist neighbors and increasingly mistreated by the press. Although he wrote his own account of the burning of Chambersburg for the Philadelphia Times, he became increasingly reclusive until his death in 1927. Gazing at this photograph of McCausland in old age, it is not difficult to imagine that ‘his version" of the burning of Chambersburg might differ from that of a ‘Yankee's."

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