Soon enough these rumors acquired a certain weight when a small party of Albert Jenkins’s Virginia cavalrymen slipped across the Pennsylvania line and briefly occupied Chambersburg. The roads became choked with dusty columns of refugees, many of them runaway slaves and free blacks trying to evade these outriders of slavery. Those who did not flee quickly enough were ridden down and rounded up by Jenkins’s troopers. Some fifty blacks were formed into a coffle and marched south to be sold into bondage.
