As Confederate forces probing the defenses of Harrisburg began to withdraw from the area to concentrate on Gettysburg, New York militiamen under General John Ewen moved forward cautiously. They made contact with the Confederate rearguard of Colonel Milton Ferguson's 16th Virginia and fought a short engagement near Sporting Hill in present day Camp Hill which ended when Union forces brought up a small artillery battery for support. Casualties were estimated as sixteen Confederate dead and a smaller number of Union wounded.  (By John Osborne)

With the Union defenders distracted by the skirmishing around Camp Hill, General Albert Jenkins, along with General Ewell's engineering staff, scouted south of the Union defenses and reached the banks of the Susquehanna at Wormleysburg, across the river from Harrisburg.  Orders for the concentration on Gettysburg were already being delivered, however, and this was the closest Confederate units came to Harrisburg.  (By John Osborne)

Light skirmishing progressed from the afternoon of June 28,1863 into the next day around Oyster's Point, in present day Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, as the cautiously advancing mounted infantry of Confederate General Albert Jenkins made contact with the two regiments of New York militia under Union General William Farrar Smith.  Smith's men were protecting the entrenchments thrown up to defend the eastern shore of the Susquehanna River about three miles from the Pennsylvania state capital of Harrisburg.  Few casualties resulted.  (By John Osborne)

General Ewell's mounted infantry, patrolling out of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, reached Sterrett's Gap in Middlesex Township on the Cumberland-Perry County line. Stopping and resting before turning back at Joseph Miller's farm near the base of the gap, this twenty-man patrol reached the northern limit of the Confederate invasion of central Pennsylvania.  (By John Osborne) 

The Curtin Guards, a Harrisburg militia unit activated just the week before, was the last Union unit in Carlisle.  These raw cavalrymen made an afternoon patrol along the Walnut Bottom Road south of Carlisle to observe Confederate activity.  Near the Stone Tavern, a few miles from town, the 33-man group, led by Lieutenant William A. Fisher, was ambushed by the Confederate mounted infantry of Albert Jenkins and lost thirteen men captured and two wounded. Jenkins' men entered Carlisle early next morning without a fight.  (By John Osborne)

General Rodes' division of Ewell's Second Corps was the occupation force in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  The unit divided its camps between the grounds of Dickinson College, hosting George Doles' brigade, and the Carlisle Barracks, with the three brigades of  S.D. Ramseur, Junius Daniel, and Alfred Iverson.  Those at the barracks enjoyed billets luxurious by the standards of a marching army. It was Daniel's birthday. And Iverson occupied the same room he had been assigned when a young lieutenant at the cavalry school years before.  (By John Osborne)

Captain David Hastings and his 250 man garrison evacuated the Carlisle Barracks in the early evening. Later that night the two New York Militia regiments in rifle pits to the west of the town were awakened, assembled, and marched away towards New Kingston to the east. Confederate troops entered the town unopposed on the morning of June 27, 1863.  Hastings' wife and teenaged son Edgar, a student at Dickinson College, also left the town during the occupation. (By John Osborne)

Brigadier General J.F. Knipe had gathered two New York militia regiments at the fairgrounds north of Carlisle, Pennsylvania and then deployed them about a mile west of the town square where local  home guards and African-American townspeople had already begun entrenchments. Before the Confederates arrived, though, the New Yorkers were ordered back towards Harrisburg and marched away the following evening.  (By John Osborne)

In a London court case with far-reaching ramifications, the decision in the Alexandra Case went against the British Government.  The Crown had set up a test case over the sale of British-built ships to the Confederacy with the April seizure of the Liverpool-built schooner Alexandra. To the consternation of British and United States authorities, the Crown was unable to win a weak case and the schooner was released. (By John Osborne)