| Anaconda
Plan |
 The
Anaconda Plan was the nickname attached to Lieutenant General Winfield Scott's
comprehensive plan to defeat the Confederacy at the start of the American
Civil War (1861–1865). Scott called for a strong defense of Washington,
D.C., a blockade of the Confederacy's Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and a massive
land and naval attack along the Mississippi River aimed at cutting the Confederacy
in two. Although United States president Abraham Lincoln immediately instituted
a naval blockade, he bowed to political pressure in 1861 and shelved the
rest of the plan. In retrospect, Scott's strategy seems broadly prescient,
although it aimed at political conciliation and did not anticipate the hard
war fought in Virginia and elsewhere. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Anderson,
Joseph Reid (1813 - 1892) |
| Joseph
Reid Anderson was an iron manufacturer and Confederate army officer during
the American Civil War (1861–1865). In 1848 he purchased the Tredegar
Iron Company, the largest producer of munitions, cannon, railroad iron,
steam engines, and other ordnance for the Confederate government during
the Civil War. One of Anderson's most notable decisions was to introduce
slaves into skilled industrial work at the ironworks, and by 1864, more
than half the workers at Tredegar were bondsmen. Anderson served as a brigadier
general for the Confederate army, and fought and was wounded during the
Seven Days' Battles. He resigned his commission in the Confederate Army
in 1862 to resume control of the ironworks, and after the war, Anderson
was a strong proponent for peace, hoping to keep the Union army from taking
possession of the ironworks. He failed, but regained control of Tredegar
after he was pardoned by U.S. president Andrew Johnson in 1865. By 1873
Anderson had doubled the factory's prewar capacity, and its labor force
exceeded 1,000 men, many of them black laborers and skilled workmen who
received equal pay with white workers. Though Tredegar failed to make the
transition from iron to steel production late in the nineteenth century,
the company survived into the 1980s. Anderson was a well-known member of
the Richmond community, serving multiple terms on the Richmond City Council
and in the House of Delegates before and after the war. Read
Entire Article |
|
| The
Appomattox Campaign (March 29 - April 9, 1865) |
| The
Appomattox Campaign, March 29–April 9, 1865, consisted of a series
of engagements south and west of the Confederate capital at Richmond that
ended in the surrender by Robert E. Lee of the Army of Northern Virginia
during the American Civil War (1861–1865). During his Overland Campaign
the previous spring, Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant had relentlessly
pursued Lee before settling into a ten-month siege of the Confederate transportation
hub at Petersburg, south of Richmond. Grant was finally able to dislodge
Lee's army at the Battle of Five Forks (1865), allowing him to take Petersburg
and then Richmond. The Confederates fled to Southside Virginia in an attempt
to unite with Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee, but Grant maneuvered
Lee into a trap near the village of Appomattox Court House. There, on April
9, the Confederate general received terms of surrender from Grant. In short
order, the remaining Confederate armies also laid down their arms and the
war ended. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Armistead,
Lewis A. (1817 -1863) |
 Lewis
A. Armistead was a Confederate general in the Army of Northern Virginia
during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Decorated for bravery during
the Mexican War (1846–1848), the West Point dropout and widower earned
a reputation as a tough, soft-spoken, and highly respected leader at such
battles as Seven Pines (1862), Antietam (1862), and Malvern Hill (1862),
and was known to his friends, ironically, as "Lo," short for Lothario.
At Gettysburg, on July 3, 1863, he helped to lead the frontal assault that
came to be known as Pickett's Charge. When Armistead, at the head of his
brigade, reached the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge that protected the Army
of the Potomac's Second Corps, he was shot and wounded more than once. The
Union troops who fired the fatal shots happened to be commanded by one of
Armistead's closest friends, Winfield Scott Hancock. His death was immortalized
in the 1993 film Gettysburg and has come to symbolize the Lost Cause-influenced
"brother versus brother" view of the war so celebrated in American
culture. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Army
of the James |
| The
Army of the James was an independent Union command during the American Civil
War (1861–1865). Established in April 1864, it consisted of two corps,
along with a small cavalry division, and was led by the largely inept political
general Benjamin F. Butler. The new Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant
had created the force with the intention that it assist in his Overland
Campaign by approaching the Confederate capital at Richmond from the south
and east. The Army of the Potomac under George G. Meade would attack from
the north. Butler stalled on the Bermuda Hundred Peninsula, however, and
historians have largely blamed his bungling for the army's ineffectiveness.
Still, the Army of the James was important for its technological innovations
and for the large number of African American troops in its ranks. Black
troops in the army's Twenty-fifth Corps were among the first Union troops
to enter Richmond on April 3, 1865. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Army
of the Valley |
| The
Army of the Valley was a detachment of Confederate forces, commanded by
Jubal A. Early, which Robert E. Lee ordered to the Shenandoah Valley in
1864 for independent operations. As Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant
and the Army of the Potomac pressed Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in the
Overland Campaign, Lee desperately needed to relieve pressure on his dwindling
Confederate forces, divert attention away from the capital at Richmond,
and open a second front in Virginia. This newly created Army of the Valley
broke camp with Lee's main army on June 13, 1864, and moved toward the Valley
to begin one of the most critical campaigns of the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Ashby,
Turner (1828 - 1862) |
 Turner
Ashby was a Confederate cavalry general who served under Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862 during the American Civil
War (1861–1865). An expert horseman whose dead mounts were kept as
romantic relics, Ashby was arguably the Confederacy's most renowned combat
hero before his death in 1862. His competency for high command and potential
for growth are still debated among military historians, but it's clear that
his presence in the Shenandoah Valley was a powerful catalyst to the Confederate
military effort there during the war's first year. Indeed, his presence
resonates even now, as many Shenandoah localities celebrate Confederate
Memorial Day on June 6, the day of his death. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Association
for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities |
 Organized
in 1889, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA),
currently known as APVA/Preservation Virginia, was the nation's first statewide
historic preservation organization. Spearheaded by an elite mix of female
antiquarians and their "gentlemen advisers," it became a sanctioned
instrument of conservatives who strove to counter social and political changes
after the American Civil War (1861–1865) by emphasizing southern history
and tradition. The APVA enshrined old buildings, graveyards, and historical
sites—many of which were forlorn, if not forgotten—and exhibited
them as symbols of Virginia's identity. As the national preservation movement
evolved, the APVA became less overtly political and now identifies itself
as a professional organization dedicated to preserving and promoting the
Commonwealth's heritage. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Bagby,
George William (1828–1883) |
 George
William Bagby was a licensed physician, editor, journalist, essayist, and
humorist. He is best remembered as the editor who, on the advent of the
American Civil War (1861–1865), turned the Southern Literary Messenger
from a respected literary journal into a propagandistic tool that endorsed
secession and the Confederate cause. After the war, Bagby attempted but
failed to make a living as a humorist. As assistant to the secretary of
the commonwealth—which, by law, also made him state librarian—Bagby
wrote his most well-regarded essay, "The Old Virginia Gentleman"
(1877). Many of his essays reflect his personal conflicts with Virginia
and the South: at times he is objective, even critical; at others he is
sentimental and celebrates the "old days" of a better (pre-Civil
War) Virginia. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Baldwin,
John Brown (1820–1873) |
| John
Brown Baldwin was an attorney, member of the Virginia Convention of 1861,
member of the Confederate House of Representatives (1861–1865), and
Speaker of the House of Delegates (1865–1867). After attending the
University of Virginia, Baldwin studied law in his native Staunton and became
politically active on behalf of his law partner and brother-in-law Alexander
H. H. Stuart, a Whig Party candidate for presidential elector in 1844. Baldwin
served a term in the House of Delegates and, during the secession crisis
of 1860–1861, was a staunch Unionist who, as a delegate to the secession
convention, voted against leaving the Union, even meeting privately with
U.S. president Abraham Lincoln in an attempt to find a compromise. After
a brief stint in the Confederate army at the beginning of the American Civil
War (1861–1865), he served in the Confederate Congress. After the
war, he was a Conservative Party leader and, as Speaker of the House of
Delegates, became such an expert on parliamentary law that the rules of
the House became known as Baldwin's Rules. He was a moderate who supported
limits on the rights of African Americans and, in 1869, as a member of the
so-called Committee of Nine, met with U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant to
negotiate the end of Reconstruction in Virginia. He died in 1873. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad During the Civil War |
| The
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, an early leader in the transportation revolution,
provided the country with a more efficient means of travel. The rail line's
construction began on July 4, 1828, and eventually expanded into thirteen
states. In 1861 the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad maintained 188 miles in
Virginia and independently offered a direct connection to both eastern and
western Virginia. The railroad was primarily northern with only a portion
of its line in northern Virginia. During the American Civil War (1861–1865),
the once-vast and continuous line was broken into sections and was subject
to a number of raids by both Union and Confederate forces. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Boyd,
Belle (1844-1900) |
 Belle
Boyd was one of the most famous Confederate spies during the American Civil
War (1861–1865), repeatedly and under dangerous circumstances managing
to relay information on Union troop strengths and movements to Confederate
commanders in the field. According to Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson, the intelligence she provided helped the general to win victories
in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862. Authorities suspected her of
being a spy almost from the start, and the Union imprisoned her multiple
times, but Boyd was a master of manipulation. Her ability to exploit a soldier's
sense of chivalry and the Victorian male's natural deference to "ladies"
became legendary and may help explain why so many of the war's best spies
were women. In 1864, she fled to London, England, where she married one
of her captors and later penned a memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and in Prison
(1865), that detailed her exploits and attracted international attention.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Braxton,
Carter Moore (1836–1898) |
| Carter
Moore Braxton was a civil engineer, businessman, and a Confederate artillery
officer during the American Civil War (1861–1865). A Norfolk native,
he fought in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia's major campaigns,
from the Seven Days' Battles outside Richmond in 1862 to the Gettysburg
Campaign in 1863 and the Overland Campaign in 1864. One account claimed
that he had seven horses shot from under him, but he was never wounded in
the fighting. Following the war, he published a map of the battlefield at
Fredericksburg. In June 1866 Braxton became president of the Fredericksburg
and Gordonsville Railroad, and later formed his own engineering construction
firm, Braxton, Chandler, and Marye, in Newport News. Braxton also founded
a railway company and was vice president of both a bank and a gas company.
He died of Bright's disease in Newport News in 1898. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Bread
Riot, Richmond |
| The
Richmond Bread Riot, which took place in the Confederate capital of Richmond
on April 2, 1863, was the largest and most destructive in a series of civil
disturbances throughout the South during the third spring of the American
Civil War (1861–1865). By 1863, the Confederate economy was showing
signs of serious strain. Congress's passage of an Impressment Act, as well
as a tax law deemed "confiscatory," led to hoarding and speculation,
and spiraling inflation took its toll, especially on people living in the
Confederacy's urban areas. When a group of hungry Richmond women took their
complaints to Virginia governor John L. Letcher, he refused to see them.
Their anger turned into a street march and attacks on commercial establishments.
Only when troops were deployed and authorities threatened to fire on the
mob did the rioters disperse. More than sixty men and women were arrested
and tried, while the city stepped up its efforts to relieve the suffering
of the poor and hungry. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Breckinridge,
Cary (1839–1918) |
| Cary
Breckinridge was a Confederate cavalry officer during the American Civil
War (1861–1865), who suffered five wounds, including at the Second
Battle of Manassas (1862), reportedly had five horses shot from under him,
and was captured and briefly imprisoned in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington,
D.C. Following the war, Breckinridge farmed, possibly worked in banking,
and served in the House of Delegates (1869–1871). Physically imposing
and from a prominent family, Breckinridge remained active in Conservative
Party and Democratic Party politics and served as the superintendent of
public schools for Botetourt County from 1886 until 1917. He died in 1918
at his home in Fincastle. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Brock,
Sarah Ann (1831–1911) |
| Sarah
Ann Brock, a writer who often published under the pseudonym Virginia Madison,
published numerous editorials, historical articles, reviews, essays, letters,
travel sketches, short stories, biographies, and translations in her career.
She is best known for her memoir of life in Richmond during the American
Civil War (1861–1865), Richmond During the War: Four Years of Personal
Observation (1867). Published anonymously, the book, which is still in print,
offers intelligent analysis and detailed description of the Confederate
capital in wartime. In addition, Brock edited a collection of southern poetry
about the war, in which she contributed verse about Confederate general
Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. Brock also published a novel, Kenneth,
My King (1873) modeled after Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre;
however, it was poorly reviewed, and after Brock married in 1882, her literary
output diminished. She died in 1911. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Brown,
John (1800 - 1859) |
 John
Brown was a fervent abolitionist who was accused of massacring pro-slavery
settlers in Kansas in 1856 and who, in 1859, led an unsuccessful raid on
Harpers Ferry, Virginia (in what is now West Virginia), in an attempt to
start a slave insurrection. On October 16, 1859, Brown and his men occupied
the federal arsenal in the northern Shenandoah Valley and were quickly surrounded
by the combined forces of local militias and a detachment of United States
marines led by Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart. After a thirty-six-hour
shoot-out, Brown and his surviving men surrendered. At the insistence of
Virginia governor Henry Wise, Brown was tried in state, not federal, court.
At the end of a gripping trial held in Charles Town, he was found guilty
of conspiracy, of inciting servile insurrection, and of treason against
the state. He was hanged on December 2, 1859. Brown's raid (and the fact
that five of his "soldiers" were African Americans) touched off
a frenzy among Southern slave-owners and, in the estimation of many historians,
set the nation on an irreversible course toward civil war. Read
Entire Article |
|
|
Burial of Latané, The |
| The
Burial of Latané was one of the most famous Lost Cause images
of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Painted by Virginian William
D. Washington in Richmond in 1864, the work shows white women, slaves, and
children performing the burial service of a cavalry officer killed during
J. E. B. Stuart's famous ride around Union general George B. McClellan's
army during the Peninsula Campaign in 1862. The incident first inspired
a poem and then the painting, which became a powerful symbol of Confederate
women's devotion to the Confederate cause. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Burnside,
Ambrose E. (1824-1881) |
 Ambrose
E. Burnside was a major general in the Union army during the American Civil
War (1861-1865). Instantly recognizable for his bushy sideburns (the term
itself is derived from reversing his last name), Burnside was one of four
men to command the Army of the Potomac in Virginia. Offered the job twice
previously-following George B. McClellan's failed Peninsula Campaign in
1862 and following the Second Battle of Manassas later that summer-he turned
it down, citing his own lack of experience and encouraging his peers and,
subsequently, historians to question his self-confidence. When he did take
command of the army, he led it into disaster at the Battle of Fredericksburg
(1862), perhaps the Union's most lopsided defeat of the war. After his corps
was badly defeated at the Battle of the Crater (1864) he went home on a
leave of absence from which he was never called back to duty. Burnside's
dismal reputation is probably unfair, however. He was an innovative engineer
but an unlucky general who was often made a scapegoat for larger failures.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Butler,
Benjamin F. (1818–1893) |
| Benjamin
F. Butler was a controversial, self-aggrandizing, and colorful politician
who served as a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
A state senator in Massachusetts, Butler was a delegate to the 1860 Democratic
National Convention, where he briefly supported Jefferson Davis. Always
popular, he was nevertheless dogged by charges of corruption, abuse of power,
and, when he accepted a general officer's commission from Abraham Lincoln
in 1861, incompetence. Even his appearance inspired commentary. A Union
staff officer penned in his diary how Butler cut "an astounding figure
on a horse! Short, fat, shapeless; no neck, squinting, and very bald headed,
and, above all, that singular, half defiant look." During the Civil
War, Butler made substantial contributions to the Union war effort, including
a policy that allowed the United States government to skirt the provisions
of the Fugitive Slave Law by claiming that escaped slaves were "contraband
of war." In this way, he was able to put African American refugees
to work on fortifications and helped to pave the way for emancipation. He
also served as a military administrator for occupied regions in Virginia
and Louisiana—where he was particularly hated—before a lackluster
performance as commander of the Army of the James during the Petersburg
Campaign (1864–1865). After the war, Butler was elected governor of
Massachusetts. He died in 1893. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Carter,
Robert Randolph (1825 - 1888) |
| Robert
Randolph Carter was a naval officer who is perhaps best known for his diary
of an eighteen-month voyage to the Arctic seas in 1850–1851. The expedition's
goal was to rescue a missing Briton, Sir John Franklin, who had sailed in
search of the Northwest Passage; Franklin was never found. After serving
in the U.S. Navy's Pacific Squadron during the Mexican War (1846–1848),
Carter joined the Confederate States Navy at the start of the American Civil
War (1861–1865). He spent the first part of the war on the James River
and the latter part in England, aiding Confederate agent James D. Bulloch
(an uncle to future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt) in equipping ships.
Following the war, he worked as a prosperous farmer, dying in 1888 from
injuries sustained in an accident. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Chancellorsville
Campaign |
| The
Chancellorsville Campaign, which culminated in the Battle of Chancellorsville,
fought May 1–6, 1863, produced one of the most stunning and ambivalent
Confederate victories of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Confederate
general Robert E. Lee had trounced the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg
the previous December, but since then, Joseph Hooker had thoroughly reorganized
and revitalized his dispirited Union troops. Declaring that he had created
"the finest Army on the Planet," he set into motion an elaborate
plan designed to quietly turn the left flank of the outnumbered and underfed
Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which was camped not far from Fredericksburg.
In the face of Hooker's attack, Lee dangerously divided his army, sending
Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson through the Wilderness, a wild and
tangled woodland, and around Hooker's right side in what became one of the
most famous flanking maneuvers of the war. A combination of bad Union generalship
and good Confederate luck forced Hooker to retreat across the Rappahannock
River. Jackson was accidentally killed by his own men in the fighting, and
while his death may have been devastating for the Confederacy, so were the
additional 13,459 casualties. Combined with the shocking losses at Gettysburg
two months later, they nearly destroyed the army's offensive capabilities.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Charlottesville
During the Civil War |
| Charlottesville
provided the Confederate war effort with swords, uniforms, and artificial
limbs during the American Civil War (1861–1865). It was also home
to a 500-bed military hospital that employed hundreds of the town's residents,
cared for more than 22,000 patients, and was superintended by Dr. James
L. Cabell, a professor of medicine at the nearby University of Virginia.
In the summer of 1861, the 19th Virginia Infantry Regiment was organized,
recruiting most of its members from Charlottesville and Albemarle County.
The unit served with the Army of Northern Virginia all the way through to
the Appomattox Campaign (1865), including at Pickett's Charge (1863), where
it lost 60 percent of its men. African Americans, both enslaved and free,
who composed a majority of the town and county's population, were the subject
of heightened white fears of violence, their movements controlled by a curfew.
In 1863, black members of the biracial First Baptist Church established
the Charlottesville African Church. Although the war's fighting stayed mostly
to the east and west, a raid led by Union general George A. Custer was stopped
just north of the city in the spring of 1864. Early the next year, town
leaders surrendered Charlottesville to Custer, preventing the community's
destruction. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Chimborazo
Hospital |
| Chimborazo
Hospital, located in the Confederate capital of Richmond, was the largest
and most famous medical facility in the South during the American Civil
War (1861–1865). The hospital admitted nearly 78,000 patients suffering
from battlefield wounds and diseases. Of this number, approximately 6,500
to 8,000 died, resulting in a mortality rate of about 9 percent. Few hospitals
in the Confederacy had lower mortality rates, and those that did generally
received patients who were further along in their recovery. The best-staffed
and -equipped Union hospitals, in comparison, achieved a 10 percent mortality
rate. With no model to draw on, Chimborazo Hospital's success can be attributed
to a combination of its open-air, pavilion-style design; the comparatively
good quality of care; innovative practices; and the supreme dedication of
the caregivers—men and women, black and white, slave and free. Their
efforts contributed to one of the great advancements in mid-nineteenth-century
medicine: the acceptance of hospital care for the sick and injured, which
was a concept not embraced in America prior to 1865. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Civil
War Battlefield Preservation |
| Though
Virginia has always been considered a focal point of the American Civil
War (1861–1865), battlefield preservation in the state initially lagged
far behind other areas. Virginia witnessed the greatest number of battles,
engagements, and skirmishes, not only because of its geographic location
but also because it was home to the Confederate capital in Richmond. Moreover,
most of the postwar historiographical disputes, at least in the decades
just after the war, focused on Virginia battles and Virginia generals, especially
Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. That Virginia
battlefields fell decades behind others in Civil War battlefield preservation
is ironic, then, even startling. Major battleground states, such as Tennessee,
Mississippi, Georgia, and even other Eastern Theater states, such as Maryland
and Pennsylvania, saw their battlefields preserved comparatively soon after
the war. Despite success in other areas to memorialize the war, such as
establishing the Museum of the Confederacy and erecting memorial statues
along Monument Avenue, both in Richmond, it took sixty years to establish
the first park in Virginia. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Cocke,
Philip St. George (1809–1861) |
| Philip
St. George Cocke was a wealthy plantation owner in Powhatan County, Virginia
and in Mississippi, who accumulated hundreds of slaves and thousands of
acres of land. He became a leading advocate of agricultural interests, serving
as president of the Virginia State Agricultural Society from 1853 to 1856,
and promoting agricultural education. Cocke served as a lieutenant in the
United States Army during the South Carolina Nullification Crisis in 1832,
and in 1860, organized a cavalry troop in response to John Brown's raid
on Harpers Ferry. When volunteers were combined into the Confederate army
following the start of the American Civil War (1861–1865), Cocke's
rank was reduced from brigadier general to colonel. He took offense and
later complained bitterly when Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard
did not praise him enough during the First Battle of Manassas (1861). In
a state of despondency and mental anguish over what he regarded as poor
treatment by General Robert E. Lee and others, he committed suicide on December
26, 1861. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Colored
Shiloh Baptist Association |
| The
Colored Shiloh Baptist Association was a union of individual black congregations
in central Virginia formed on August 11, 1865, just after the end of the
American Civil War (1861–1865). A similar association had been formed
in Norfolk the year before, but the Richmond-based Colored Shiloh Baptist
Association was soon larger and more influential, with both groups helping
to provide blacks the opportunity to worship on their own terms. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Conway,
Moncure Daniel (1832-1907) |
 Moncure
Conway was a Methodist minister, Unitarian minister, abolitionist, free
thinker, and prolific writer who the historian John d'Entremont describes
as "the most thoroughgoing white male radical produced by the antebellum
South." Born into a prominent Virginia slaveholding family, he nevertheless
became an outspoken critic of the South's "peculiar institution,"
anguishing over how to reconcile his background with his antislavery convictions
in his younger years. He first openly allied himself with abolitionists
in July 1854 in the wake of the capture in Boston, Massachusetts, of fugitive
slave Anthony Burns, whom Conway claimed to have known in Virginia. During
the American Civil War (1861-1865), Conway accompanied thirty-one of his
father's slaves, all of whom had escaped to Washington, D.C., on a harrowing
train ride to freedom in southwestern Ohio. There he established what came
to be known as the Conway Colony; many African Americans continue to live
in the area and identify their ancestors as Virginia slaves. In addition,
Conway traveled in high literary circles, authoring as many seventy published
works, including popular book-length arguments against slavery and important
biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Paine. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Cooke,
John Esten (1830 - 1886) |
 John
Esten Cooke was a novelist, biographer, and veteran of the American Civil
War (1861–1865). One of the most important literary figures of nineteenth-century
Virginia, Cooke was the prolific author of historical adventures and romances
in the tradition of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. His most famous
and perhaps best work, The Virginia Comedians: or, Old Days in the Old Dominion
(1854), follows the aristocratic cad Champ Effingham in Virginia before
the Revolutionary War (1775–1783). In fact, Cooke saw himself as a
critic of aristocracy, but that criticism was rarely particularly sharp,
and after the Civil War, his work unselfconsciously glorified the Confederacy
in the tradition of the Lost Cause. "Come!" Cooke wrote in Surry
of Eagle's-Nest (1866). "Perhaps as you follow me, you will live in
the stormy days of a cavalier epoch: breathe its fiery atmosphere, and see
its mighty forms as they defile before you, in a long and noble line."
A relative by marriage to Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart, Cooke served
with the cavalryman during the war and wrote hagiographic biographies of
generals Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Cooke,
Philip St. George (1809–1895) |
| Philip
St. George Cooke was a Virginia-born Union general during the American Civil
War (1861–1865). A West Point graduate and a lawyer, Cooke served
on frontier duty and fought in both the Black Hawk War (1832) and the Mexican
War (1846–1848). In addition, he helped to protect settlers on the
Oregon Trail, fought Apache in New Mexico Territory, helped subdue Sioux
in Nebraska Territory, helped restore order in Bloody Kansas, and led an
expedition against Mormons in the Utah Territory. When the Civil War began,
Cooke was one of the Regular Army's top cavalrymen and he chose to stay
with the Union, writing, "I owe Virginia little; my country much."
It was a decision that caused a long estrangement from his son, John Rogers
Cooke (1833–1891), and a rift with his son-in-law, the future Confederate
general J. E. B. Stuart. During the war, he led a controversial cavalry
charge at Gaines's Mill (1862) and eventually left the Army of the Potomac,
claiming its commanders were inept. Following the war, his involvement in
a massacre of Lakota Sioux further tarnished his reputation. He wrote two
memoirs and a cavalry manual and in the 1880s reconciled with his son. Cooke
died in Detroit, Michigan, in 1895. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Corprew,
E. G. (ca. 1830–1881) |
| E.
G. Corprew was an African American pastor who, during the American Civil
War (1861–1865), lobbied for emancipation in Virginia. He was a missionary
for the American Baptist Home Mission Society and may also have served in
the 1st United States Colored Cavalry, although the historical evidence
is ambiguous. Following the war, Corprew became pastor of the Zion Baptist
Church in Portsmouth, Virginia, and moderated the Colored Shiloh Baptist
Association, the state's largest and most important black Baptist association.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Cox,
Lucy Ann White (d. 1891) |
| Lucy
Ann White Cox was a vivandière, or daughter of the regiment, during
the American Civil War (1861–1865). In 1862 Cox married James A. Cox,
a member of Company A of the 30th Virginia Infantry Regiment. She joined
his unit in an unofficial capacity, and acted as a cook, laundress, nurse,
and general helpmate for the men in Company A for nearly the duration of
the war. The 30th Virginia fought most notably in the 1862 Maryland Campaign
and at the Battle of Fredericksburg (1862) and during the Petersburg Campaign
in 1864. Although few specific details are known about Cox's life, the celebration
of her wartime service after her death earned her recognition from many
Confederate memorialists. Confederate Veterans and Sons of Confederate Veterans
participated in her funeral in 1891. Later, Cox was specifically cited in
an 1894 speech calling for the erection of a monument in Richmond to the
women of the Confederacy, and the Fredericksburg chapter of the Order of
Southern Gray, a Virginia women's Civil War preservation organization, bears
her name. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Crater,
Battle of the |
| The
Battle of the Crater, part of the Petersburg Campaign, was the result of
an unusual attempt, on the part of Union forces, to break through the Confederate
defenses just south of the critical railroad hub of Petersburg, Virginia,
during the American Civil War (1861–1865). For several weeks, Pennsylvania
miners in Union general Ambrose E. Burnside's Ninth Corps worked at digging
a long tunnel, packed the terminus with explosives, and then on the morning
of July 30, 1864, blew it up. In the words of a Maine soldier, the sky was
filled with "Earth, stones, timbers, arms, legs, guns unlimbered and
bodies unlimbed." Burnside had initially planned to send a fresh division
of black troops into the breach, but his superiors, Ulysses S. Grant and
George G. Meade, ruled against it. That role—literally via a short
straw—went to James H. Ledlie, a hard-drinking political general who
spent the day well behind the lines as his white soldiers piled into the
explosion's deep crater rather than go around it. Unable to escape, and
followed by Burnside's other three divisions, they turned into what one
New Hampshire soldier described as "a mass of worms crawling over each
other"—easy targets for Confederates. The battle was a Union
disaster and marked by particularly cruel treatment of the black troops
who participated, many of whom were captured and murdered. Although Congress
later blamed Meade for the loss, it was Ledlie and Burnside who lost their
commands. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Cross
Keys, Battle of |
| The
Battle of Cross Keys, while not a full-fledged battle, was, nevertheless,
an important Confederate strategic victory that came near the end of Confederate
general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Shenandoah Valley Campaign
of 1862 during the American Civil War (1861–1865). On June 8, 1862,
three Confederate brigades under the command of Richard S. Ewell held off
a much larger Union force under John C. Frémont in order that they
might then unite with the rest of Jackson's army seven miles to the southeast
at Port Republic. There on the following day, Jackson successfully attacked
another Union force under James Shields, marking the end of what had been
a remarkable campaign. After initial setbacks in western Virginia, Jackson
had temporarily secured the valley for the Confederacy, confused and demoralized
the politicians in Washington, D.C., and freed himself to reinforce General
Robert E. Lee ahead of the Seven Days' Battles in front of the Confederate
capital at Richmond. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Crutchfield,
Stapleton (1835–1865) |
| Stapleton
Crutchfield was a professor of mathematics at the Virginia Military Institute
and a Confederate artillery officer during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
When the war began, Crutchfield served briefly as temporary superintendent
of VMI before joining the Confederate army. He served in various Virginia
infantry regiments before, in 1862, his friend Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson, with whom he had taught at VMI, appointed Crutchfield his chief
of artillery. He served under Jackson in all of the Army of Northern Virginia's
major battles until, on May 2, 1863, he and Jackson were both wounded at
Chancellorsville. Jackson died, while Crutchfield recovered, teaching again
briefly at VMI before rejoining the army in January 1865 at Chaffin's Bluff
on the James River. Crutchfield was killed at the Battle of Sailor's Creek
during the Appomattox Campaign on April 6, 1865, just three days before
Robert E. Lee's surrender. Read
Entire Article |
|
| C.S.S.
Virginia |
 The
C.S.S. Virginia was an ironclad ship in the Confederate navy during the
American Civil War (1861-1865). The first American warship of its kind-prior
to 1862, all navy vessels were made of wood-it was constructed in order
to attack the ever-tightening Union blockade on the Confederacy's major
Atlantic ports and harbors. The C.S.S. Virginia's launch in March 1862 provided
one of the first truly unmistakable signs of a revolution in naval warfare
that would transform the conduct of war at sea during the nineteenth century.
It quickly met its match, however, in a hastily constructed, Swedish-engineered
Union ironclad, the U.S.S. Monitor, at the Battle of Hampton Roads (1862).
By April 1862, the Confederacy's 3,500 miles of coastline were largely lost
(only Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina, remained
under Confederate control), and in May of that year, the Virginia was intentionally
destroyed. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Culp's
Hill and Wesley Culp (1839 - 1863) |
 Culp's
Hill is located about three-quarters of a mile south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
It forms the barb of a fishhook-shaped series of hills and ridges on which
the fiercest fighting took place during the second and third days of the
Battle of Gettysburg (1863) during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
It was also near, if not on, Culp's Hill that Private John Wesley Culp of
Company B, 2nd Virginia Infantry Regiment, Stonewall Brigade, was killed.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Culpeper
County During the Civil War |
| With
a population of 12,063, Culpeper was the forty-seventh largest of Virginia's
148 counties in 1860. More than half of that population was African American,
including 6,675 slaves. The majority of citizens in this prosperous community—its
principal commercial crop being wheat—had wished to avoid war. The
county voted by a margin of one vote for John Bell and the Constitutional
Union party over John C. Breckinridge and the Southern Democrats in the
U.S. presidential election of 1860. Like most of Virginia, however, Culpeper
endorsed secession on May 23, 1861, a month after U.S. president Abraham
Lincoln called on the state for volunteers to put down the rebellion. The
men of Culpeper served most prominently in five Confederate regiments: the
7th, 11th, and 13th Virginia Infantry, and the 4th and 6th Virginia Cavalry.
Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Dabney,
Robert Lewis (1820–1898) |
| Robert
Lewis Dabney was a Presbyterian minister who, during the American Civil
War (1861–1865), emerged as one of the most influential leaders of
the southern Presbyterian Church. Born in Louisa County, he was educated
at the Union Theological Seminary and served on the school's faculty, becoming
chair of theology in 1859 and preaching Calvinist orthodoxy. Dabney opposed
secession but served as chaplain to the 18th Virginia Infantry Regiment
and, for several months in 1862, as adjutant, or chief of staff, to Confederate
general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. Ill health forced him to
return to the seminary, but he later wrote a biography of Jackson. Dabney
was an ardent defender of slavery and the Old South, opposed the Progressive
Movement, and was skeptical of modern science. As an important Presbyterian
leader in the South, he opposed reunifying the southern church with its
northern counterpart. In 1883, he left Virginia to teach at the new University
of Texas, in Austin, where he helped to found the Austin School of Theology.
He died in Victoria, Texas, in 1898. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Davis,
Jefferson (1808 - 1889) |
 Jefferson
Davis was a celebrated veteran of the Mexican War (1846–1848), a U.S.
senator from Mississippi (1847–1851; 1857–1861), secretary of
war under U.S. president Franklin Pierce (1853–1857), and the only
president of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil
War (1861–1865). Tall, lean, and formal, Davis was considered to be
an ideal leader of the Confederacy upon his election in 1861, despite the
fact that he neither sought the job nor particularly wanted it. Davis was
a war hero, slaveholder, and longtime advocate of states' rights who nevertheless
was not viewed to be a radical "fire-eater," making him more appealing
to the hesitating moderates in Virginia. Still, Davis's reputation suffered
over the years. Searing headaches, caused in part by facial neuralgia, exacerbated
an already prickly personality. "I have an infirmity of which I am
heartily ashamed," he said. "When I am aroused in a matter, I
lose control of my feelings and become personal." The challenges inherent
in holding together a wartime government founded on the idea of states'
rights didn't help, either, nor did critics like E. A. Pollard, editor of
the Richmond Examiner, who charged after the war that the Lost Cause was
"lost by the perfidy of Jefferson Davis." Robert E. Lee, however,
spoke for many when he said, "You can always say that few people could
have done better than Mr. Davis. I knew of none that could have done as
well." Read
Entire Article |
|
| Davis,
Varina (1826 - 1906) |
 Varina
Howell Davis was the second wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis
and the First Lady of the Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
She was manifestly ill-suited for this role because of her family background,
education, personality, physical appearance, and her fifteen-year antebellum
residence in Washington, D.C. (She once declared that the worst years of
her life were spent in the Confederate capital at Richmond while the happiest
were in Washington.) A native of the urban South, she always preferred the
city to the country, and after her husband died in 1889, she moved to New
York, where she resided until her death in 1906. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Delany,
Martin R. (1812-1885) |
 Martin
R. Delany was an African American abolitionist, writer, editor, doctor,
and politician. Born in Charles Town, Virginia, he was the first black field
officer in the United States Army, serving as a major during and after the
American Civil War (1861-1865), and was among the first black nationalists.
A fiercely independent thinker and wide-ranging writer, he coedited with
Frederick Douglass the abolitionist newspaper North Star and later penned
a manifesto calling for black emigration from the United States to Central
America. He also authored Blake; Or, the Huts of America, a serial publication
about a fugitive slave who, in the tradition of Nat Turner, organizes insurrection.
In his later life, Delany was a judge and an unsuccessful candidate for
lieutenant governor of South Carolina. Despite all this, he remains relatively
unknown. "His was a magnificent life," W. E. B. DuBois wrote in
1936, "and yet, how many of us have heard of him?" Historians
have tended to pigeonhole Delany's contributions, emphasizing his more radical
views (which were celebrated in the 1970s), while giving less attention
to the extraordinary complexity of his career. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Early,
Jubal A. (1816-1894) |
| Jubal
A. Early was a lawyer, a politician, and a Confederate general in the Army
of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). An
excellent brigade and division commander, he was quick and aggressive on
the offensive and steady and tough on the defensive. While, at times, he
was outstanding in independent command or temporary corps command, especially
at Chancellorsville (1863), he was less successful leading the Army of the
Valley during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864. Known as "Old
Jube," Early was opinionated and critical of others but slow to see
his own faults. In an army famous for its religious revival, he was notoriously
quick-tempered, witty, and profane; Robert E. Lee called him "my bad
old man." Prematurely bent by arthritis, he was described by one Confederate
in 1861 as "a plain farmer-looking man … but with all, every
inch a soldier." In his later years, Early became preeminent in debates
over the war, working to venerate Lee and isolate James Longstreet, who
had once been Lee's second in command. In so doing, Early helped to invent
the highly influential Lost Cause view of the war. As long as Early was
alive, one of his former soldiers wrote, "no man ever took up his pen
to write a line about the great conflict without the fear of Jubal Early
before his eyes." Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Emory
and Henry College During the Civil War |
| Emory
and Henry College, located in the town of Emory in Washington County, is
the oldest college in southwestern Virginia and was attended by the future
Confederate cavalry general J. E. B. Stuart. During the American Civil War
(1861–1865), the school was closed while many of its students fought
in the Confederate army, and the Confederate government used its buildings
to establish the Emory Confederate States Hospital. After the nearby Battle
of Saltville in October 1864, wounded Union soldiers, including members
of the 5th U.S. Colored Cavalry, were treated there. On the morning of October
3, Confederate soldiers reportedly killed several black troopers and their
white lieutenant in what has come to be known as the "Saltville Massacre."
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Ewell,
Richard S. (1817-1872) |
 Richard
S. Ewell was a Confederate lieutenant general during the American Civil
War (1861-1865) who apprenticed under Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson
during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862, and later took charge of
the Army of Northern Virginia's Second Corps after Jackson's death. Nicknamed
"Old Bald Head" and said to be "blisteringly profane,"
Ewell courted controversy with his decision not to attack Cemetery Hill
on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg (1863). Some historians have
claimed that Ewell's inaction in this episode cost the Confederates the
battle, although Robert E. Lee's orders on the matter were vague and it
is unclear whether Ewell's men could have carried the day in any case. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Family
Life During the Civil War |
| Family
life in Virginia and across the South suffered devastating effects during
the American Civil War (1861–1865). Few households, whether slave
or free, or located in the Tidewater, Piedmont, or mountainous Southwest,
could remain insulated from a war fought on their lands and in their towns.
Many families were uprooted as they witnessed the destruction of their homes
and landholdings. Most profoundly, all families dealt with the ordeal of
separation. The war pulled white families apart in unprecedented ways, as
a large proportion of men enlisted and fully one in five white men who fought
for the Confederacy died. And while the chaos of war similarly dispersed
the state's large population of African Americans, it also offered a chance
for those families to overcome the longstanding separations wrought by slavery.
Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Fathers,
The (1938) |
| The
Fathers (1938) is the only novel by Allen Tate, a Kentucky-born poet most
famous for his "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1928). Set just
before and during the American Civil War (1861–1865), the book details
the tragic fall of two families joined by marriage—the Buchans, of
Fairfax County and the Poseys, of Georgetown in the Distict of Columbia.
Their violent and psychologically complex story, narrated by the elderly
doctor Lacy Buchan, is intended to mirror the decline of "Old Virginia"
and the rise of a new society unbound to traditional, agrarian codes. The
Fathers was initially well received by critics, with the Washington Post
calling it "a sensitive and successful re-creation of the divided moods
of Virginia at the outbreak of the Civil War," and the New York Times
labeling it "a quiet yet relentless exploration of the darker places
of human character." The novel soon fell out of favor, however, with
critics arguing that it was lifeless and overly symbolic and abstract. The
novel's current critical neglect may reflect the social and political eclipse
of Tate's Southern Agrarian ideology, which extolled the moral virtues of
the antebellum South against encroaching modernity. Far from being a mere
Lost Cause tract, however, The Fathers is widely considered to be an enduring,
if flawed, piece of art. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Floyd,
John B. (1806-1863) |
 John
B. Floyd was governor of Virginia (1849-1852), secretary of war in the administration
of United States president James Buchanan (1857-1860), and a Confederate
general during the American Civil War (1861-1865). As governor, he helped
usher in the apportionment and suffrage reforms proposed by the constitutional
convention of 1850-1851, but at Buchanan's War Department his reputation
plunged because of various corruption scandals. His good name would never
recover. At Fort Donelson, Tennessee, in February 1862, he held off the
forces of Union brigadier general Ulysses S. Grant for two days. Rather
than personally surrender, however, he and his Virginia soldiers fled by
steamboat in the middle of the night, leaving the duty to his third in command.
Floyd was relieved of his command a month later. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Ford,
Antonia (1838-1871) |
 Antonia
Ford was a Confederate spy during the American Civil War (1861-1865), credited
with providing the military information gathered from her Fairfax Court
House home during the First Battle of Manassas (1861) and in the two years
following. In October 1861, Confederate cavalry general J. E. B. Stuart
issued an order declaring her an honorary aide-de-camp. The document was
used against Ford in 1863, however, when she was accused of spying for John
Singleton Mosby, whose partisan rangers famously captured the Union general
Edwin H. Stoughton in his headquarters. Mosby later denied that Ford ever
spied for him. After several months in prison, Ford was released and married
one of her captors, Union major Joseph C. Willard. Ford stopped spying,
Willard resigned from the army, and they returned to managing the Willard
Hotel in Washington, D.C., and had three children. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Fort
Monroe During the Civil War |
| Fort
Monroe is a military installation located in Hampton Roads, Virginia, on
the Peninsula overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. It was the only federal military
installation in the Upper South to remain under United States control throughout
the American Civil War (1861–1865). Early in the war, the fort became
an outpost of freedom within the Confederacy when Union commanders used
it to house refugee slaves. The fort also headquartered the Union Department
of Virginia and North Carolina, and several significant military campaigns
and combined operations were launched from the installation. Most notably,
it served as the staging area for Union major general George B. McClellan's
ill-fated Peninsula Campaign of 1862. After the war, the fort served as
a destination for another brand of fugitive. Following his capture in May
1865 until his bail bond was accepted two years later, Confederate president
Jefferson Davis was imprisoned at Fort Monroe. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Fredericksburg,
Battle of |
| The Battle
of Fredericksburg at the end of 1862 included what was perhaps the Confederacy's
most lopsided victory of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Union
Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, charged with aggressively pursuing and
destroying General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, instead led
his own Army of the Potomac to what was perhaps its greatest defeat. On
December 13, Burnside sent six Union divisions across an open field against
Lee's well-fortified line, causing such slaughter that Burnside wept openly
at the outcome and Lee was inspired to utter his famous remark to his subordinates,
"It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it."
The Fredericksburg defeat was one of the lowest points for Union fortunes
in the war. Eight months later, when Confederates experienced a similar
fate at Gettysburg, jubilant Union troops were heard to yell, "Fredericksburg!
Fredericksburg!" Read
Entire Article |
|
| Free
Blacks During the Civil War |
| Free
blacks in Virginia numbered 58,042 on the eve of the American Civil War
(1861–1865), or about 44 percent of the future Confederacy's free
black population. Of the slave states, only Maryland had a larger population,
with 83,942. Free blacks were concentrated in Virginia's cities. According
to the 1860 census, the greatest number, 3,244, resided in Petersburg, followed
by Richmond with 2,576, Alexandria with 1,415, and Norfolk with 1,046. Free
blacks included men and women of African descent who were born free or who
gained their freedom before the war through manumission. Virginia officially
required freed slaves to leave the state after 1806, but many remained in
violation of the law. Of course, many more African Americans became free
during the war, escaping the fighting as refugees or claiming legal freedom
through the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Although Confederate propagandists
insisted that free blacks would support the Confederate cause, their service
was often rendered only by the threat of violence. In the meantime, concerns
about their loyalty combined with their disproportionate wartime suffering
contributed to Virginia's internal divisions and exposed the weaknesses
of Confederate ideology. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Freeman,
Douglas Southall (1886-1953) |
 Douglas
Southall Freeman was a biographer, a newspaper editor, a nationally renowned
military analyst, and a pioneering radio broadcaster. He won the Pulitzer
Prize twice: the first, in 1935, for his four-volume biography of the Confederate
general Robert E. Lee; and the second, posthumously in 1958, for his six-volume
biography of George Washington, with a seventh volume written by John Alexander
Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth after Freeman's death in 1953. The son of
a Confederate veteran, Freeman is best known as a historian of the American
Civil War (1861-1865) and, in particular, of the high command of the Confederate
Army of Northern Virginia. His description of Lee, Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson, and their compatriots as "men of principles unimpeachable,
of valour indescribable" suggests that his work was influenced by the
Lost Cause view of the war that was in part founded by his former neighbor,
Jubal A. Early. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Gaines's
Mill, Battle of |
| The
Battle of Gaines's Mill, fought on June 27, 1862, and one of the Seven Days'
Battles, was a Confederate victory and remembered by many of its participants
as the most intense fight of the American Civil War (1861–1865). As
Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson arrived with
his troops from the Shenandoah Valley, Robert E. Lee determined to take
the offensive against Union general George B. McClellan and his Army of
the Potomac, which threatened the Confederate capital at Richmond. On June
26, Lee was turned back at Mechanicsville, but McClellan retreated anyway.
The following day at Gaines's Mill—named for the nearby grist mill
of Dr. William Gaines—Lee attacked again, finding Union troops positioned
behind a stream that was entirely absent from Confederate maps. While Richmond's
elite looked on, Confederate generals A. P. Hill and Richard S. Ewell charged
up a steep hill, suffering horrific casualties, before Jackson's men—late-arriving
and slow to engage—finally joined the fight. At dusk, the battle turned
in the Confederates' favor, and an evening cavalry charge led by Union general
Philip St. George Cooke was a costly failure. In nine ghastly hours of fighting,
Union and Confederate casualties totaled about 15,000 men. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Garnett,
Richard B. (1817 - 1863) |
| Richard
B. Garnett was a Confederate general in the Army of Northern Virginia during
the American Civil War (1861–1865). The first to take over the Stonewall
Brigade after the promotion of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson,
Garnett was well-regarded by his men but ran afoul of Jackson after the
Battle of Kernstown (1862), when he ordered an unauthorized retreat. Jackson
placed him under arrest and eventually ordered, but never completed, a court-martial.
Robert E. Lee reassigned Garnett to the command of George E. Pickett's former
brigade, and he spent much of the following year worried about his reputation
and looking for opportunities to demonstrate his courage. He found one on
the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), when he died while helping
to lead the doomed assault known as Pickett's Charge. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Garnett,
Robert S. (1819–1861) |
| Robert
S. Garnett was a brigadier general in the Confederate army during the American
Civil War (1861–1865). An 1841 graduate of the United States Military
Academy at West Point, he had a distinguished career in the United States
Army, including service in the Mexican War (1846–1848), when he was
an advisor to the Virginia-born general and later U.S. president Zachary
Taylor. Garnett also designed the Great Seal of the State of California.
After resigning from the Army to join the Confederacy, Garnett led Confederate
troops on July 13, 1861, at the Battle of Corrick's Ford in what is now
West Virginia. During the closing phases of that engagement, Garnett was
shot and killed, becoming the first Confederate general killed during the
Civil War. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Gettysburg
Campaign |
| The
Gettysburg Campaign, which culminated in the Battle of Gettysburg (July
1–3, 1863), was the most ambitious offensive attempted by the Confederacy
during the American Civil War (1861–1865). In June 1863, Confederate
general Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia invaded the North
in hopes of relieving pressure on war-torn Virginia, defeating the Union
Army of the Potomac on Northern soil, and striking a decisive blow to Northern
morale. George G. Meade had commanded the Union army only three days when
his advance columns collided unexpectedly with Confederates at the small
town of Gettysburg in southeastern Pennsylvania. Fighting raged for three
days, inflicted a combined 51,000 casualties, and climaxed on July 3 with
the doomed Confederate frontal assault known as Pickett's Charge. After
retreating across the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia was never again
an offensive force, and Lee's aura of invincibility was shattered. Historians
have long argued that this, along with the capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi,
on July 4, was the war's turning point. It was also a turning point for
how the war would be perceived by generations to come. In the immediate
postwar years, Virginians in particular began a debate over generalship
during the battle, often seeking to prop up heroes like Lee and to destroy
supposed villains, such as Lee's South Carolina–born lieutenant, James
Longstreet. These arguments formed the basis of the Lost Cause view of the
war. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Glendale,
Battle of |
 The
Battle of Glendale, fought on June 30, 1862, was the second-to-last conflict
during a series of engagements known as the Seven Days' Battles, which occurred
at the tail end of the Peninsula Campaign during the American Civil War
(1861–1865). Union major general George B. McClellan, charged with
capturing the Confederate capital of Richmond, instead found himself in
retreat from General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. While withdrawing
back toward the James River, the Union army successfully stopped Lee's forces
from overrunning its retreat, repulsing the Confederates outside the village
of Glendale in eastern Henrico County, some eighteen miles east of Richmond.
This resistance allowed McClellan to move his troops safely to a highly
defensible position on Malvern Hill. The battle went McClellan's way in
part because of intricate plans that were not well executed by Lee's lieutenants,
in particular Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, who spent part of
the day's fighting asleep under a tree.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Gordonsville
During the Civil War |
| Gordonsville,
Virginia, in Orange and Louisa counties, was founded as a stop on a stagecoach
route and the site of a tavern. By the time of the American Civil War (1861–1865),
it was a key railroad stop connecting the Shenandoah Valley and the Confederate
capital at Richmond, and as such, it attracted attention from both Confederate
and Union troops. The Exchange Hotel in Gordonsville was also used by the
Confederacy as an important military hospital. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Gorgas,
Josiah (1818-1883) |
| Josiah Gorgas
was a Confederate general and chief of the Ordnance Bureau during the American
Civil War (1861–1865). Born in Pennsylvania, Gorgas was a veteran
of the Mexican War (1846–1848) who married into a prominent political
family in Alabama. His new Southern connections, along with dissatisfactions
with his army career, helped fuel his decision to join the Confederacy.
In 1861, he was the only experienced ordnance officer available to Confederate
president Jefferson Davis's new government, and he almost single-handedly
created a department charged with supplying Confederate armies with weapons
and ammunition. He bought all the arms and supplies available in Europe
and created a fleet of blockade-runners to transport them to Southern ports.
At the same time, he worked to build Confederate industry and reinforce
its railroads so that by 1863 the Confederacy was self-sufficient in military
hardware. Following the war, Gorgas suffered financial difficulties and
served briefly as president of the University of Alabama. He died in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, in 1883. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Grant,
Ulysses S. (1822-1885) |
| Ulysses S.
Grant rose from command of an Illinois regiment to general-in-chief of all
Union armies during the American Civil War (1861–1865), and served
as the eighteenth president of the United States (1869–1877). Victor
at important battles in the western theater, Grant arrived in Virginia in
March 1864 as a newly minted lieutenant general and the military leader
of all Union forces. He took the field with the Army of the Potomac rather
than running the war from a desk in Washington, D.C., and provided de facto
direction of that army from May 1864 until April 1865. Grant's stature as
the preeminent Union general catapulted him into the White House for two
terms, and his legacy, though still debated, remains that of the soldier
who won the war for the Union. Read
Entire Article |
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| Guerrilla
Warfare in Virginia During the Civil War |
|
Although guerrilla warfare did not ravage Virginia to the extent that
it did some other Confederate states during the American Civil War (1861–1865),
nevertheless it did play a significant role in shaping the nature of the
conflict. Guerrilla fighters, by definition, are combatants who operate
outside the formal constraints of the military and, therefore, outside the
laws of war. In Virginia, guerrillas took up arms as a natural response
to Union invasion—especially where conventional Confederate troops
were too few or too distant to oppose the enemy—and as a favored means
of intimidating perceived enemies within small, usually rural, communities.
What resulted, first in Unionist northwestern Virginia and then in Confederate
Virginia, was often a "neighborhood" war, where residents brutally
fought one another, rather than outsiders, for local control. Partisan leaders
such as John D. Imboden and John Singleton Mosby made names for themselves,
the latter described as having "danced on the nerves of opponents where
they were most vulnerable." At times, however, the conflict's violence,
which sometimes included terrorist tactics directed at civilians, seemed
to rage out of control and alarmed Confederate authorities. Where the authorities
had once encouraged the guerrillas, by 1862 they sought to bring them under
Confederate control, creating sanctioned "partisan rangers." Efforts
to rein in the guerrilla fighters were only partially successful. Read
Entire Article |
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| Hampton
Roads Conference |
 The
Hampton Roads Conference convened on February 3, 1865, in an attempt to
find a negotiated settlement to the American Civil War (1861–1865).
As Confederate prospects for survival deteriorated, leaders on both sides
met aboard the River Queen at Union-controlled Hampton Roads, Virginia.
They included U.S. president Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William
H. Seward, as well as Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens,
Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, and Confederate Senator Robert
M. T. Hunter of Virginia. In spite of such high-level participation, the
meeting lasted only four hours and accomplished little. Read
Entire Article |
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| Harland,
Marion (1830 - 1922) |
| Marion Harland
was a writer of novels, short stories, biographies, travel narratives, cookbooks,
and domestic manuals whose career stretched across seven decades of sectional
conflict and great change in American life. Harland chronicled much of that
change, penning novels that suggested her own divided loyalties between
North and South before establishing herself as an expert and often a sly
and sarcastic commentator on the domestic arts of homemaking. Read
Entire Article |
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| Harpers
Ferry During the Civil War |
 Harpers
Ferry, in what is now West Virginia, lies at the confluence of the Potomac
and Shenandoah rivers and serves as the gateway to the Shenandoah Valley.
Before and during the American Civil War (1861–1865), this small,
isolated town was an economically thriving community with great strategic
importance because of its location along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal,
and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and its firearms industry—including
the United States Arsenal and Armory and Hall's Rifle Works. In 1859, Harpers
Ferry emerged onto the national stage when the radical abolitionist John
Brown and a small band of followers raided the armory in an attempt to ignite
a slave insurrection. The town also became an object of intense military
interest immediately after Virginia's secession in April 1861, during the
Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862, the Maryland Campaign of 1862, and the
Valley Campaign of 1864.
Read
Entire Article |
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| Harrison,
Burton, Mrs. (1843 - 1920) |
 Mrs.
Burton Harrison, also known as Constance Cary Harrison, was a prolific American
novelist late in the nineteenth century who came from a prominent Virginia
family. As a young woman, she witnessed the destruction of the American
Civil War (1861–1865) and nursed the Confederate wounded in Manassas
and Richmond. After the war, Harrison toured Europe, eventually married,
and settled down in New York City. She was active in elite New York society
and produced a large body of work, much of it popular serialized fiction
and sentimental romance, in which she recorded the social mores of her time.
The author of more than fifty works, including short stories, articles and
essays, children's books, and short plays, she is best known for her 1911
autobiography, Recollections Grave and Gay. Read
Entire Article |
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| Heth,
Henry (1825-1899) |
 Henry
"Harry" Heth (pronounced "Heeth") was first a brigade
then a division commander in the Confederate army during the American Civil
War (1861-1865). He distinguished himself during Braxton Bragg's Kentucky
campaign (1862) before being transferred, by order of Robert E. Lee, to
the Army of Northern Virginia, where he served under A. P. Hill. As one
of the most popular officers in an unusually tight-knit army, Heth is said
to be the only general Lee addressed by his given name. Heth took over a
division at the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863) and is best known for
his role in precipitating the Battle of Gettysburg (1863). His generalship
was distinguished by a tendency toward aggressiveness that produced mixed
results. Read
Entire Article |
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| Hill,
A.P. (1825-1865) |
| A.
P. Hill was a Confederate general in the Army of Northern Virginia during
the American Civil War (1861–1865). Behind Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson and James Longstreet, "Little Powell," as he was sometimes
called, was Robert E. Lee's most trusted lieutenant, best known for leading
his Light Division in headlong charges but just as effective when making
stubborn defensive stands. Though usually reserved and courteous, he also
was notoriously short-tempered. An argument with Longstreet almost led to
a duel, while a dispute with Jackson put Hill under arrest as his division
entered Maryland in 1862. Still, he fought hard and well at Antietam (1862)
and Chancellorsville (1863), and after Jackson's death he took over the
army's new Third Corps. For the remainder of the war, Hill's generalship
and administrative skills were sometimes lackluster, at other times inspired,
and he was forced to miss parts of campaigns due to illness. Exactly a week
before Lee's surrender at Appomattox, he was killed outside Petersburg.
Read
Entire Article |
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| Hooker,
Joseph (1814-1879) |
 Joseph
Hooker was a Union general during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and,
for the first half of 1863, commander of the Army of the Potomac. Nicknamed
"Fighting Joe," Hooker was a Regular Army veteran with a checkered
reputation-rumors of drunkenness dogged him for much of his career-and a
talent for political infighting. When he took over the army from Ambrose
E. Burnside after the debacle at Fredericksburg (1862), the Army of the
Potomac's morale was at an all-time low and desertion an all-time high.
He reorganized its forces, virtually halted desertion, established reliable
intelligence gathering, and, most important, boosted confidence. He also
developed an elaborate plan secretly to flank Robert E. Lee and the Army
of Northern Virginia on the south side of the Rappahannock River, boasting
to his army that "certain destruction awaits" the Confederates.
At the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863), however, it was Hooker who was
famously flanked and eventually forced to retreat. He then became a victim
of infighting, and a few days before the Battle of Gettysburg (1863) gave
up his command to George G. Meade. Read
Entire Article |
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| Hotchkiss,
Jedediah (1828–1899) |
| Jedediah
Hotchkiss served as a staff officer to Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson during the American Civil War (1861–1865). A New York native,
Hotchkiss opened a school in 1859 in Augusta County. His specialty, however,
was mapmaking, and his topographical skills proved to be crucial to Jackson's
success during his famous Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862. Thanks to
Hotchkiss's maps, Jackson always had ample knowledge of the geographic setting
within which he was operating and a good appreciation of the terrain he
would put to use against the enemy. Read
Entire Article |
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| James
River During the Civil War |
| The
James River begins where the Cowpasture and Jackson rivers join in the western
part of Virginia. It flows approximately 340 miles, passing over the falls
at Richmond, and on to Hampton Roads. The James ranks near the Mississippi
River in its significance during the American Civil War (1861–1865)
and in importance to the Confederacy. Using the James River and Kanawha
Canal system, boats moved materials such as pig iron and coal from Virginia's
Shenandoah Valley and Piedmont regions to the capital. After the loss of
Norfolk, Richmond became the state's major port, naval base, and shipbuilding
facility. South and east of Richmond the James saw significant combat, including
actions between the Confederate and Union navies. In addition, the river
aided large-scale movement of Union troops and military supplies. Read
Entire Article |
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| James
River Squadron |
| The
James River Squadron was one of the eight major forces that the Confederate
States Navy created to defend its rivers and waterways during the American
Civil War (1861–1865). At its apogee, the squadron consisted of three
steam-powered ironclad warships—including the CSS Virginia, which
famously dueled the Union's ironclad USS Monitor at the Battle of Hampton
Roads (1862)—and more than a half-dozen small gunboats, converted
civilian vessels, and torpedo boats. As was true with the Confederacy's
other naval forces, the James River Squadron saws little action and was
destroyed by its own men as a result of the defeat of Confederate land forces.
Read
Entire Article |
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| Johnston,
Joseph E. (1807–1891) |
| Joseph
E. Johnston was a veteran of the Mexican War (1846–1848), quartermaster
general of the United States Army, a Confederate general during the American
Civil War (1861–1865), a member of the U.S. House of Representatives
(1879–1881), and a U.S. railroad commissioner in the first administration
of U.S. president Grover Cleveland (1885–1889). The highest-ranking
U.S. Army officer to resign his commission at the start of the Civil War,
Johnston helped lead Confederates to victory at the First Battle of Manassas
in July 1861; a month later, however, when Confederate president Jefferson
Davis appointed five men to the rank of full general, he was only fourth
on the list, igniting a bitter feud with the president that would last the
war and even spill into his postwar memoir, Narrative of Military Operations
(1874). Historians, meanwhile, have split on his military performance, with
some dubbing him "Retreatin' Joe," citing, among others, his retreats
in the face of General George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac on the
Peninsula in 1862. Johnston was wounded on June 1, 1862, at the Battle of
Seven Pines, and Davis turned the Army of Northern Virginia over to General
Robert E. Lee, who led it for the remainder of the war. Other historians
have argued that Johnston's strategy of withdrawal saved Confederates from
destruction during the Atlanta Campaign (1864); nevertheless, Davis replaced
him then, too. Read
Entire Article |
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| Kilpatrick-Dahlgren
Raid |
| The
Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid (February 28–March 3, 1864) was an ambitious
attempt by Union cavalrymen to assault the lightly defended Confederate
capital at Richmond, Virginia, and free prisoners of war during the American
Civil War (1861–1865). The brainchild of the flamboyant Brigadier
General H. Judson Kilpatrick, the raid turned into a fiasco when Kilpatrick's
men were stopped northwest of the city and a supporting column, under the
command of twenty-one-year-old Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, was routed to the
east. Dahlgren was killed, and papers found on his body, which were subsequently
published by the Richmond press, detailed plans to burn the city and assassinate
Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his cabinet. Public opinion in
both the North and the South was inflamed, and historians continue to debate
the authority behind these so-called Dahlgren Papers. When she read of Dahlgren's
corpse being mistreated, Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union spy in Richmond, used
her contacts secretly to exhume the body and rebury it elsewhere. Read
Entire Article |
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| Ladies'
Memorial Associations |
| Ladies'
Memorial Associations were locally organized groups of southern white women
who, following the American Civil War (1861–1865), tracked down the
scattered remains of Confederate soldiers and reinterred them in Confederate
cemeteries. Following Robert E. Lee's surrender in April 1865, more than
260,000 Confederate war dead were buried throughout the South, a majority
of them in Virginia. Most of these soldiers would not be returned home;
instead, they eventually would be placed in Confederate cemeteries. But
these cities of the dead were not to be furnished by the federal or state
governments; neither were they to be organized by Confederate veterans.
Instead, the associations created Confederate cemeteries, which served as
final resting places for approximately 80 percent of the fallen soldiers.
Read
Entire Article |
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| Lee
Chapel |
 Lee
Chapel, whose spired clock tower rises above the tree-shaded campus of Washington
and Lee University (formerly Washington College) in Lexington, Virginia,
is the final resting place of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and is popularly
known as "The Shrine of the South." Lee commanded the Confederate
Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
During his tenure as president of Washington College from October 1865 until
his death in October 1870, he recommended the construction of and helped
design a new chapel for worship and assembly. His wife, Mary Custis Lee,
selected the chapel as Lee's burial site, and he was interred in a vault
in the chapel basement. A mausoleum addition was dedicated in June 1883
that housed sculptor Edward Valentine's evocative memorial statue of the
recumbent Lee. The nondenominational chapel was named a National Historic
Landmark in 1961, and continues to accommodate large gatherings and special
events. A museum on the basement level and tours of the chapel are available
to the public. Read
Entire Article |
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| Lee,
Robert Edward (ca. 1806–1870) |
 Robert
Edward Lee was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865)
who led the Army of Northern Virginia from June 1862 until its surrender
at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Descended from several of Virginia's
First Families, Lee was a well-regarded officer of the United States Army
before the war. His decision to fight for the Confederacy was emblematic
of the wrenching choices faced by Americans as the nation divided. After
an early defeat in western Virginia, he repulsed George B. McClellan's army
from the Confederate capital during the Seven Days' Battles (1862) and won
stunning victories at Manassas (1862), Fredericksburg (1862), and Chancellorsville
(1863). The Maryland and Pennsylvania campaigns he led resulted in major
contests at Antietam (1862) and Gettysburg (1863), respectively, with severe
consequences for the Confederacy. Lee offered a spirited defense during
the Overland Campaign (1864) against Ulysses S. Grant, but was ultimately
outmaneuvered and forced into a prolonged siege at Petersburg (1864–1865).
Read
Entire Article |
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| Letcher,
John (1813–1884) |
| John
Letcher was a lawyer, newspaper editor, member of the United States House
of Representatives (1851–1859), and governor of Virginia (1860–1864)
during the American Civil War (1861–1865). In a career that lasted
decades, he weathered radical shifts of opinion and power by consistently
positioning himself as a moderate, supporting, for instance, increased commercial
ties between the eastern and western portions of the state and more political
representation for western counties, codified in the Convention of 1850–1851.
He advocated for a gradual emancipation of slaves and resisted the entreaties
of radical secessionists while still arguing on behalf of states' rights.
Western support and a divided Whig Party helped him narrowly win the governorship
as a Democrat in 1859, but his term was often a difficult one. He ably mobilized
Virginia for war and then threw the state's tremendous resources behind
the Confederacy. But his willingness to requisition for the Confederacy
needed supplies such as salt caused controversy at home, as did his support
of impressments. Letcher returned to Lexington in 1864, ran for the Confederate
Congress and lost, and was briefly imprisoned at the conclusion of the war.
After his release, he resumed his law career, returning to state politics
before dying in 1884. Read
Entire Article |
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| Lexington
During the Civil War |
| The
town of Lexington is the seat of Rockbridge County in the Shenandoah Valley.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), it was home to Washington
College (now Washington and Lee University) and the Virginia Military Institute.
Although not of great strategic importance, the town nevertheless smoldered
in the atmosphere of war long before many other Virginian communities felt
the conflict. In November 1859, a detachment of its resident corps of cadets
from the Virginia Military Institute was deployed to Charles Town (in what
is now West Virginia) to provide security at the execution of the infamous
John Brown for his raid on Harpers Ferry. Unionist sentiments prevailed,
however, until U.S. president Abraham Lincoln's call for troops, when many
of Lexington's male citizens enlisted in service of the Confederate States
of America. Events such as the burial of Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson and Union general David Hunter's fiery raid brought the quiet mountain
town momentary attention from the wider world, but the demands of the Civil
War also siphoned its resources on a daily basis. Read
Entire Article |
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| Libby
Prison |
| Libby
Prison, in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, housed Union prisoners
of war during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Beginning as a hospital
and general prison in 1861, Libby was converted into an officers-only facility
in 1862, while also serving as a processing center for all Union prisoners.
(Union enlisted men were often routed to Belle Isle on the James River.)
The officers who stayed at Libby were crowded inside a three-story former
tobacco factory in sparsely furnished rooms that exposed them to the elements;
they often also suffered from severe food shortages. Their guards, in turn,
struggled with controlling a large prison population. In February 1864,
109 prisoners escaped by tunnel, with 59 eventually reaching Union lines.
A few weeks later, Union cavalry general H. Judson Kilpatrick and his one-legged
protégé Colonel Ulric Dahlgren mounted an ambitious but disastrous
rescue attempt, prompting Libby officials to dig a mine, fill it with explosives,
and threaten to destroy the facility if any prisoners attempted to escape.
Shortly thereafter, Confederate officials began transferring Libby's population
to Georgia, with the facility being used as a place of temporary confinement
for the next year. After Richmond fell on April 2, 1865, former Confederate
officials became Libby's newest inmates. Read
Entire Article |
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| Limber,
Jim |
 "Jim
Limber" or James Henry Brooks—his legal name and his life dates
are uncertain—was a free, mixed-race child in the Confederate capital
of Richmond during the American Civil War (1861–1865) who lived for
slightly more than a year in the household of Confederate president Jefferson
Davis. Contemporary accounts suggest that he enjoyed an intimate relationship
with the Davis family, leading some modern observers to make unverified
claims that he was "adopted" and effectively became a member of
the family. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the child has
become a symbol of the Confederate first family's supposed liberality on
racial issues. Read
Entire Article |
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| Longstreet,
James (1821 - 1904) |
 James
Longstreet was a Confederate General who served as Robert E. Lee's second-in-command
for most of Lee's tenure as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia during
the American Civil War (1861–1865). Longstreet fought in many of the
most important battles of the conflict and ended the war as a respected
figure. Lee affectionately called him "my old war horse," while
his soldiers nicknamed him "the old bulldog" and "the bull
of the woods." In the postwar period, however, Longstreet drew criticism
for his support of Republican policies during Reconstruction (1865–1877),
and controversy erupted over his conduct years earlier at the Battle of
Gettysburg (1863). As southerners in general and Virginians in particular
enshrined Lee's memory, Longstreet became a scapegoat for Lee's failures
and the central figure in the emergent Lost Cause mythology white southerners
developed to explain the loss of the war. Read
Entire Article |
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| Loring-Jackson
Incident |
| The
Loring-Jackson incident refers to the acrimonious quarrel between Confederate
generals Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and William W. Loring during
the Romney Expedition in the winter of 1861–1862 during the American
Civil War (1861–1865). The winter campaign resulted in the Confederate
occupation of the strategic Shenandoah Valley town of Romney on January
14, 1862. The Loring-Jackson incident unfolded when Loring, believing that
Jackson had treated his men unfairly during the expedition in western Virginia,
campaigned to have his men recalled from Romney. When Confederate secretary
of war Judah P. Benjamin granted Loring's withdrawal request, Jackson offered
his resignation. Less than one month after capturing Romney, Loring's men
abandoned Romney, which subsequently allowed Union forces to regain their
stronghold in the Potomac River Valley. Read
Entire Article |
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| Lost
Cause, The |
| The
Lost Cause is an interpretation of the American Civil War (1861–1865)
that seeks to present the war, from the perspective of Confederates, in
the best possible terms. Developed by white Southerners, many of them former
Confederate generals, in a postwar climate of economic, racial, and gender
uncertainty, the Lost Cause created and romanticized the "Old South"
and the Confederate war effort, often distorting history in the process.
For this reason, many historians have labeled the Lost Cause a myth or a
legend. It is certainly an important example of public memory, one in which
nostalgia for the Confederate past is accompanied by a collective forgetting
of the horrors of slavery. Providing a sense of relief to white Southerners
who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was largely accepted
in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be a useful
tool in reconciling North and South. The Lost Cause has lost much of its
academic support but continues to be an important part of how the Civil
War is commemorated in the South and remembered in American popular culture.
Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Lynchburg
During the Civil War |
| Lynchburg,
Virginia, is located just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the banks
of the James River, where its founder, John Lynch, established a ferry service
in 1757. On the eve of the American Civil War (1861–1865), Lynchburg
was Virginia's sixth-largest city and a major transportation center, with
access to the James River and Kanawha Canal, as well as the Virginia and
Tennessee, the Southside, and the Orange and Alexandria railroads. In addition,
the city was a major manufacturer of plug tobacco and, by the 1850s, the
second-wealthiest city per capita in the United States. During the war,
Lynchburg women established the Ladies' Relief Hospital, and the Confederate
military made the city a major hub of supplies and transport, which Union
troops attempted to disrupt at the Battle of Lynchburg in June 1864. After
the fall of Richmond in April 1865, the state government relocated to Lynchburg
briefly, only to return after Robert E. Lee's surrender a few miles to the
east at Appomattox. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Magill,
Mary Tucker (1830-1899) |
 Mary
Tucker Magill was a Virginia educator and author whose work portrays the
generation of Virginians who endured the hardships of defeat following the
American Civil War (1861-1865) and looked ahead to the next century by embracing
innovative ideas on health and well-being. Magill wrote two conservative
textbooks on Virginia history and a forward-thinking manual of exercises
for women. She was also a novelist and short-story writer whose fiction,
like her historicism, depicted an idealized version of plantation life in
the Old South. Read
Entire Article |
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| Martin,
Thomas Staples (1847–1919) |
| Thomas
Staples Martin was a railroad attorney, a longtime U.S. senator from Virginia
(serving from 1895 until 1919), and an architect of the state Democratic
Party machine that during his time was known as the Martin Organization.
A quiet, behind-the-scenes political player, Martin rose through the party
ranks largely due to his influence with powerful railroad interests. Under
the leadership of Martin's mentor, John S. Barbour Jr., Democrats reestablished
control of state politics that, since Reconstruction (1865–1877),
had been in the hands of Republicans and Readjusters. Then, in 1893, in
a huge and unexpected upset, Martin defeated former Confederate general
and Virginia governor Fitzhugh Lee for election to Barbour's U.S. Senate
seat, allowing him to take control of the party and, to a large extent,
the state. Accused by his critics of bribery and corruption, Martin stayed
in power and managed to rise to the position of Senate Majority Leader at
least in part because of his pragmatic willingness to forge coalitions between
the competing conservative and progressive wings of the Democratic Party.
As a result, Martin's political machine and its successor, the Byrd Organization,
dominated Virginia politics until the 1960s. Read
Entire Article |
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| Martinsburg,
Virginia During the Civil War |
| Martinsburg,
Virginia (now West Virginia), the county seat of Berkeley County, was in
1860 the Shenandoah Valley's second largest town, with a population of 3,364.
Located in the northern portion of the valley, Martinsburg enjoyed a booming
economy because of its location along the paved Valley Pike and because
it was a major depot along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The same strategic
location that made Martinsburg economically prosperous prior to the American
Civil War (1861–1865), however, also spelled its wartime demise. The
town changed hands between Confederate and Union forces thirty-seven times,
was the site of two battles, and played host for a time to the intrigue
of Confederate spy Belle Boyd, who was born there. Read
Entire Article |
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| Maury,
Dabney Herndon (1822–1900) |
| Dabney
Herndon Maury was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
The nephew of renowned scientist Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, he fought
in the Western Theater, rising quickly in the ranks after the battles of
Pea Ridge, Iuka, and Corinth in 1862. As commander of the District of the
Gulf in the war's last two years, he became known for his tenacious defense
of the port of Mobile, Alabama. After the war, however, he struggled with
poverty. In 1869, he helped to found the Southern Historical Society, which
became an important institution for advocates of the Lost Cause view of
the war. His 1894 memoir, Recollections of a Virginian in the Mexican,
Indian, and Civil Wars, was marked by Maury's distinctively intelligent
affability. In fact, he was rare among former Civil War officers on either
side for his willingness to maintain an equitable view of the Civil War.
Read
Entire Article |
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| McCausland,
John A. (1836 -1927) |
| John
A. McCausland was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Known as "Tiger John," the former mathematics professor was hailed
as a hero by the citizens of Lynchburg, Virginia, for repulsing an attack
by the Union general David Hunter in June 1864. A month later, however,
McCausland was condemned as a villain by the citizens of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania,
for acting on the orders of Jubal A. Early and burning their Cumberland
Valley town in retaliation for Union actions in the Shenandoah Valley. The
incident followed the famously unreconstructed McCausland through the rest
of his long life, forcing him to leave the country for a time after the
surrender at Appomattox, and becoming the headline of his many obituaries
in 1927. Read
Entire Article |
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| McClellan,
George B. (1826-1885) |
| George
B. McClellan was a major general in the Union army during the American Civil
War (1861–1865). Styled the "Young Napoleon" by the press,
his battlefield successes and failures were eclipsed by controversies that
arose between him and his superiors, especially U.S. president Abraham Lincoln.
Following the Union debacle at the First Battle of Manassas in July 1861,
McClellan formed and took command of the Army of the Potomac, expertly training
it and earning the love and devotion of his men. He led the army first through
the unsuccessful Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days' Battles outside
Richmond in 1862, and then through the climactic Battle of Antietam on September
17, 1862, which forced Confederate general Robert E. Lee to abandon his
invasion of the North. Lincoln, however, was dissatisfied with McClellan's
lack of aggression and relieved him of command. McClellan, a Democrat, responded
by challenging the Republican president in the 1864 election. It was both
the logical culmination of his advocacy for a limited-war strategy, and
perhaps the clumsiest confirmation of his critics' accusations that his
military caution was politically motivated. After McClellan lost his run
for the presidency, he retired first to Europe and then to New Jersey, where
he became governor. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| McDowell,
Battle of |
| The
Battle of McDowell is sometimes considered the opening battle in Confederate
general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's brilliant Shenandoah Valley
Campaign of 1862. Jackson determined to attack two of Union general John
C. Frémont's brigades in Highland County. On May 8, 1862, Jackson
closed in and engaged Union troops under generals Robert H. Milroy and Robert
C. Schenck near the village of McDowell. Although a small battle compared
with the carnage inflicted later in the conflict, it provided a much-needed
boost to Confederate morale and demonstrated that the South was still very
much in the war, while also setting the stage for Jackson's conquest of
the Shenandoah Valley. Read
Entire Article |
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| Meade,
George Gordon (1815-1872) |
 George
G. Meade was a Union major general and one of the most important commanders
of the American Civil War (1861-1865). He defeated Robert E. Lee and the
Army of Northern Virginia in the Battle of Gettysburg (1863) and led the
main Union army in Virginia until the end of the war. Still, U.S. president
Abraham Lincoln was often dissatisfied with the prudence and caution that
characterized Meade's generalship. That, combined with a prickly personality
that led some to refer to Meade as a "goggled eyed snapping turtle,"
played a significant role in Ulysses S. Grant's decision to assume principal
direction of the Union war effort in Virginia from 1864 to 1865. Read
Entire Article |
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| Military
Executions During the Civil War |
| More soldiers
were executed during the American Civil War (1861-1865) than in all other
American wars combined. Approximately 500 men, representing both North and
South, were shot or hanged during the four-year conflict, two-thirds of
them for desertion. The Confederate Articles of War (1861) specified that
"all officers and soldiers who have received pay, or have been duly
enlisted in the services of the Confederate States, and shall be convicted
of having deserted the same, shall suffer death, or such other punishment
as, by sentence of a court-martial, shall be inflicted." The General
Orders of the War Department (1861, 1862, 1863) directed that those men
convicted of desertion were "to be shot to death with musketry, at
such time and place as the commanding General may direct." Read
Entire Article |
|
| Military
Organization and Rank During the Civil War |
| The
Union and Confederate armies employed similar systems of organization and
rank during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
company – one
hundred men, commanded by a captain
regiment – ten companies, commanded by a colonel
brigade – four to six regiments, commanded by a brigadier general
division – three to four brigades, commanded by a brigadier general
or major general
corps – several divisions, commanded by a major general
army – several corps, commanded by a major general or lieutenant
general
department – the bureaucratic overseer of armies in the field; Union
departments were often, but not always, named for rivers, Confederate
departments for states or regions. Read
Entire Article
|
|
| Minnigerode,
Charles (1814-1894) |
| Charles
Minnigerode was a professor of Latin and Greek and, for thirty-three years,
the rector of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond. During the American
Civil War (1861–1865), Saint Paul's was sometimes called "the
Cathedral of the Confederacy," and its parishioners included Confederate
president Jefferson Davis and Confederate general Robert E. Lee. In 1862,
Minnigerode, who immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1839, baptized
Davis, and in 1864, he performed the funeral rites for Confederate general
J. E. B. Stuart. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Mourning
During the Civil War |
| Mourning
is the process of grieving the death of a loved one. In the mid-nineteenth
century, middle- and upper-class Americans observed an elaborate set of
rules that governed behavior following the death of a spouse or relative.
The astronomical rate of death during the American Civil War (1861–1865)
often hindered the mourning process, transformed the ways in which individuals
and communities responded to death, and heightened women's public role in
mourning traditions. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Museum
of the Confederacy |
| The
Museum of the Confederacy opened in the former Confederate capital of Richmond
in 1896 as the Confederate Museum. One of Richmond's oldest museums, it
is the only institution in Virginia that began as a Confederate shrine and
transformed itself into a modern history museum. The museum was a preservation
effort on two levels: it rescued from destruction the former Confederate
executive mansion and displayed in the mansion's rooms the artifacts—"relics"
as they were called in the 1890s—of Confederate soldiers and civilians
from the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the postwar Lost Cause
era. Read
Entire Article |
|
| North
Anna, Battle of |
| The
Battle of North Anna was fought May 23–26, 1864, during the American
Civil War (1861–1865). It came three days after the bloody Battle
of Spotsylvania Court House during the Overland Campaign of 1864, the spring
offensive in which the Union army's new general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant,
stubbornly pursued Confederate general Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern
Virginia all the way to the Confederate capital of Richmond. A number of
small engagements along the North Anna River in central Virginia rather
than a single pitched fight, the battle marked one of many instances when
Lee managed to outmaneuver his more powerful foe. Still, the Battle of North
Anna highlighted the exhaustion of both armies and led Grant to believe
that the Confederates were nearing defeat. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Numbers
at Pickett's Charge |
| Pickett's
Charge, which might be better understood either as Longstreet's assault
or the Trimble-Pickett-Pettigrew Charge, was a failed Confederate frontal
assault on July 3, 1863, on the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg
during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Although it is the most
famous attack of the war, many of its basic facts remain unclear. "For
a pivotal moment in military history replete with eyewitnesses," the
historian Carol Reardon has written, "consensus on many aspects of
the afternoon's events is surprisingly hard to reach." In particular,
historians continue to disagree on the following: a) how many Confederate
artillery pieces participated in the pre-attack bombardment, b) how long
the artillery fired, c) how many Confederate troops participated in the
attack, and d) how far they marched to reach the Union lines on Cemetery
Ridge. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Pendleton,
Alexander S. (1840-1864) |
 Alexander
S. Pendleton was a Confederate staff officer in the Army of Northern Virginia
during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Nicknamed Sandie, he was
best known for his service under Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson, who died following the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863), but he
also served under Jackson's successors Richard S. Ewell and Jubal A. Early.
Henry Kyd Douglas, a fellow member of Jackson's staff, called him "the
most brilliant staff officer in the Army of Northern Virginia and the most
popular with officers and men." Read
Entire Article |
|
| Petersburg
Campaign |
| The
Petersburg Campaign was one of the final campaigns in the eastern theater
during the American Civil War (1861–1865). It began on June 15, 1864,
with the sustained contest to control the city—Virginia's second largest
and the supply center for the Confederate capital at Richmond—and
concluded with its occupation by Union forces on April 3, 1865. The campaign
included parallel actions north of the James River, east of Richmond, and
was inextricably linked with simultaneous military actions elsewhere, most
directly in the Shenandoah Valley. Union armies under Ulysses S. Grant failed
to storm Petersburg from June 15 to 18 and on July 30, following the Battle
of the Crater, in which a mine was exploded under the Confederate works.
Southern forces led by Robert E. Lee, aided by an elaborate system of field
fortifications that eventually stretched thirty-seven miles, fought on the
strategic defensive, gradually surrendering the city's supply lines to a
series of Grant's offensives. Grant at last shattered Lee's defenses on
April 2, 1865, leading to the evacuation of Richmond and Petersburg that
night. Within a week, Lee would surrender the Army of Northern Virginia
to Grant at Appomattox Court House, ninety miles west of Petersburg, for
all practical purposes ending the Civil War in Virginia. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Petersburg
During the Civil War |
| Petersburg,
located in south central Virginia, was the second-largest city in the state
at the outset of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Originally sharing
the conservative political stance of most business-oriented cities in the
Upper South, Petersburg's white citizens eagerly embraced the Confederate
cause after Virginia's Convention of 1861 voted to secede in April 1861.
The city hosted a variety of Confederate installations, particularly hospitals,
and served as headquarters for a number of Confederate military departments
that bore responsibility for southern Virginia and eastern North Carolina.
Petersburg experienced its first nearby combat in the spring of 1864 during
the Bermuda Hundred Campaign and then became the focal point of the Petersburg
Campaign between June 1864 and April 1865. The city capitulated to Union
forces on April 3, 1865, initiating the Appomattox Campaign and just six
days before Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox
Court House, ninety miles west of Petersburg. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Photography
During the Civil War |
| During
the course of the American Civil War (1861–1865), more than 3,000
individual photographers made war-related images. From Southerners' first
pictures of Fort Sumter in April 1861 to Alexander Gardner's images of Richmond's
ruined cityscape in April 1865, photographers covered nearly every major
theater of military operations. They documented battlefields, soldiers'
activities and movements, and the destructive effects the conflict had on
civilians. Virginia and Virginians figured prominently in Civil War–era
photography. Brothers Daniel and David Bendann, who began their careers
in Richmond, for example, photographed noted Confederates, including Robert
E. Lee, while scores of wartime images featured Virginia landmarks and landscapes.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Pickett's
Charge |
| Pickett's
Charge was the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), and one of the
most famous infantry attacks of the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Lasting about an hour on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, it pitted 12,000
Confederates—including three brigades of Virginians under George E.
Pickett—against half that number of Union troops. On July 2, Robert
E. Lee had unsuccessfully attacked the Union flanks; in what even some of
his own men perceived as a desperate gambit, he now attacked the center,
asking his troops to cross an open field nearly three-quarters of a mile
long. They were bloodily repulsed, losing half their number. Controversy
resulted, as Confederate veterans struggled to lay claim to honor and glory,
pitting Virginians against North Carolinians in efforts to explain why the
attack had failed. Many Southerners came to believe the charge represented
the "High Water Mark" of Confederate hopes for independence, a
view cultivated by proponents of the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil
War. Meanwhile, twentieth-century popular culture transformed Pickett into
a soldier as "gallant and graceful as a knight of chivalry riding to
a tournament," in the words of his wife, LaSalle Corbell Pickett. And
films like Gettysburg (1993) glorified the attack even while historians
continued to debate Lee's decision, sometimes comparing it to Union general
Ulysses S. Grant's equally futile attacks at Cold Harbor in Hanover County
in 1864. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Pickett,
George E. (1825-1875) |
| George
E. Pickett was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865)
and one of the most controversial leaders in the Army of Northern Virginia.
Described by his admirers as swashbuckling, he was famous for his tailored
uniforms, gold spurs, and shoulder-length brown hair. (His contemporary
admirers were relatively few in number, however, and this image of Pickett
is likely more myth than fact.) Confederate general James Longstreet commented
on his friend's "wondrous pulchritude and magnetic presence" and
is said to have mentored Pickett, who was last in his class at West Point.
At Gettysburg (1863), Pickett's name became permanently linked, in both
fact and myth, with Pickett's Charge, the doomed frontal assault on the
battle's third day. He had little responsibility for the attack's planning
or its failure, and the loss of his division, which he partly blamed on
Robert E. Lee, devastated him. Accused of war crimes for executing twenty-two
Union prisoners in 1864, Pickett ended the war broken and in bad health.
His reputation, however, was thoroughly rehabilitated after his death by
his third wife, LaSalle Corbell Pickett, whose writings turned the often
incompetent general into an idealized Lost Cause hero. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Pickett,
LaSalle Corbell (1843-1931) |
| LaSalle
Corbell Pickett was a prolific author and lecturer, and the third wife of
George E. Pickett, the Confederate general best known for his participation
in the doomed frontal assault known as Pickett's Charge during the American
Civil War (1861–1865). After her husband's death in 1875, she traveled
the country to promote a highly romanticized version of his life and military
career that was generally at odds with the historical record. George Pickett
emerged from the war with a strained relationship with Robert E. Lee—whom
he partly blamed for the destruction of his division at Gettysburg (1863)—and
accused of war crimes. But in his wife's history, Pickett and His Men (1899),
this not-always-competent soldier was transformed into the ideal Lost Cause
hero, "gallant and graceful as a knight of chivalry riding to a tournament."
This image largely stuck in the American consciousness, leaving historians
to spend much of the next century attempting to separate Pickett from his
myth. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Pierpont,
Francis H. (1814-1899) |
| Francis
H. Pierpont was a lawyer, early coal industrialist, governor of the Reorganized
State of Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865), governor
of Virginia (1865–1868) during the first years of Reconstruction (1865–1877),
and a state senator representing Marion County in West Virginia (1869–1870).
Pierpont was an antislavery member of the Whig Party and delegate to the
First and Second Wheeling Conventions in 1861, during which Unionist politicians
in western Virginia resisted the state's vote to secede by establishing
the Reorganized State of Virginia. The second convention unanimously elected
him governor. Although never actually governor of West Virginia, he is still
remembered as one of the state's founding fathers. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Pope,
John (1822–1892) |
 John
Pope was a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865)
with a reputation for outspokenness and arrogance. After serving in the
Mexican War (1846–1848) as an engineer, the West Point graduate fought
well in the West during 1861 and 1862, prompting U.S. president Abraham
Lincoln to transfer him east. There, he exacerbated his already bad relations
with Union generals George B. McClellan and Fitz-John Porter by issuing
a proclamation trumpeting his own generalship. When he declared that he
would make his "headquarters in the saddle," some quipped that
he had mistaken his hindquarters for his headquarters, and when he announced
a series of hard-war policies aimed at punishing Confederate civilians,
Confederate general Robert E. Lee labeled him a "miscreant." At
the head of the new Army of Virginia, Pope got the opportunity to confront
Lee at the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862 but was soundly defeated.
Pope was transferred to the Dakotas, where he fought against Indians in
the aftermath of the Sioux Uprising (1862). During Reconstruction (1865–1877),
he held military administrative posts in the South. He died in 1892. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Popular
Literature During the Civil War |
 With
the formation of the Confederacy at the beginning of the American Civil
War (1861-1865), the Southern literary establishment foresaw the dawning
of a new literature. Southern audiences would no longer, in the words of
the editor of the Richmond-based Southern Illustrated News, be compelled
to read "the trashy productions of itinerant Yankees." Instead,
he predicted, the region would enjoy "Southern books, written by Southern
gentlemen, printed on Southern type, and sold by Southern publishing houses."
And, indeed, by the end of 1862 that newspaper made the claim that the Richmond
firm of West & Johnson had published more books from original manuscripts
during the past year "than any firm in Yankee land." Nevertheless,
the output of belles letters in the Confederacy was what historian Elisabeth
Muhlenfeld has characterized as "the perennial poor relation of Southern
literature." Read
Entire Article |
|
| Poverty
and Poor Relief During the Civil War |
| Poverty
and poor relief, especially in times of acute food shortages, were major
challenges facing Virginia and Confederate authorities during the American
Civil War (1861–1865). At first, most Confederates were confident
that hunger would not be a problem for their nation. Southern farms and
black slaves were expected to produce ample quantities of food while white
men fought to secure independence. The reality, however, was quite different.
The suffering of soldiers' families and the lower classes in cities resulted
in a bread riot in the Confederate capital at Richmond, stimulated desertion
from the army, and threatened the entire war effort. Governments at the
local, state, and federal level responded with unprecedented efforts to
control prices, supply provisions, and ease suffering, and yet neither the
Confederate government nor the Virginia state government found a way to
take effective action against inflation, speculation, or extortion. Direct
relief, free markets, city-sponsored stores, and other innovative measures
came into being. Nevertheless, these efforts proved inadequate, and the
very idea of being dependent on charity was unsatisfactory to the yeoman
class. Consequently, the problems of poverty seriously undermined the war
effort in Virginia and throughout the Confederacy. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Randolph,
George Wythe (1818–1867) |
| George
Wythe Randolph was a lawyer, Confederate general, and, briefly, Confederate
secretary of war during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The grandson
of former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson, Randolph hailed from an elite
Virginia family but largely shunned public life until John Brown's raid
on Harpers Ferry in 1859. He supported secession, founded the Richmond Howitzers,
joined the Confederate army, and fought at the Battle of Big Bethel (1861).
Appointed the Confederacy's third secretary of war in March 1862, he helped
to reform the War Department at a time when the Confederate capital at Richmond
was threatened by Union general George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign
(1862). Randolph helped to improve procurement and authored the Confederacy's
first conscription law, having already done the same for Virginia. His independence
and focus on the strategic importance of the West put him into conflict
with Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and he resigned in November
1862, his health failing. He died of tuberculosis in 1867. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Reams
Station, Battle of |
| The
Battle of Reams Station, fought on August 25, 1864, marked the culmination
of Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant's fourth offensive during the
Petersburg Campaign of the American Civil War (1861–1865). The combat
swirled around a small depot on the Petersburg (Weldon) Railroad, some eight
miles south of the central Virginia town of Petersburg, a key to the nearby
Confederate capital of Richmond. This rail line linked Wilmington, North
Carolina, with Petersburg, Richmond, and Confederate general Robert E. Lee's
Army of Northern Virginia, and provided the goal of Grant's offensive. Although
the Confederates won the engagement, the Union Army of the Potomac retained
control of the railroad, seized a week earlier during the Battle of the
Weldon Railroad, August 18–21. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Refugees
During the Civil War |
| Virginia
possessed the largest number of the estimated 200,000 Southerners who fled
their homes during the American Civil War (1861–1865). There were
three broad classes of refugees in Virginia during the war—slaves,
white Unionists and other dissidents, and Confederates—although historians
have tended to focus only on Confederates. These three groups shared some
of the same dislocations, but their experiences of the war differed dramatically.
White and black Unionists and dissidents who fled to Union lines contributed
to the Northern war effort. Confederates, in contrast, bitterly resented
the Union invaders, but the hardships of refugee life exacerbated feelings
of war weariness. This, combined with social divisions inside Virginia,
factored into Confederate defeat. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Religion
During the Civil War |
| As
many as two-thirds of all Virginians attended a Protestant church before
the American Civil War (1861–1865). These men and women witnessed
intense conflict within their congregations and denominational councils
before, during, and after the war. All Virginia churchgoers saw their congregations
torn asunder at least once during the sectional conflict, whether in the
process of dividing from Northern churches before the war, when they sent
their sons to fight, or upon the secession of black members from biracial
communities. On a more ideological level, even many Virginians who were
not connected with a particular church interpreted the Civil War in religious
terms. All Virginians who faced death in the field or on forced labor projects—or
who experienced the deaths of loved ones—wondered why God permitted
such extraordinary suffering. In addition, white Virginians found Union
victory a disturbing challenge to their belief that God had favored both
slavery and the Confederacy. Black Virginians, on the other hand, found
Union victory a resounding affirmation that God had heard their prayers.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Religious
Revivals During the Civil War |
| Religious
revivals during the American Civil War (1861–1865) were characterized
by surges in religious interest and observance among large numbers of soldiers
in both the Union and Confederate armies. Although they came not long after
the Second Great Awakening, which was primarily a Baptist and Methodist
phenomenon, the soldier revivals tended to be ecumenical and to cross class
boundaries. They were often marked by frequent, fervent, and heavily attended
religious ceremonies, including preaching services, organized prayer meetings,
and "experience meetings," or gatherings in which individual soldiers
took turns sharing with the group how God had brought them to faith in Christ.
They were also evidenced by much private Bible reading and small informal
prayer meetings among the troops. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Richmond
During the Civil War |
| Richmond,
Virginia, was the capital of the Confederate States of America during the
American Civil War (1861–1865). It also served as the capital of Virginia,
although when the city was about to fall to Union armies in April 1865,
the governor and General Assembly moved their offices to Lynchburg for five
days. Besides being the political home of the Confederacy, Richmond was
a center of rail and industry, military hospitals, and prisoner-of-war camps
and prisons, including Belle Isle and Libby Prison. It boasted a diversified
economy that included grain milling and iron manufacturing, with the keystone
of the local economy being the massive Tredegar Iron Works. From the start
of war, Confederate citizens flocked to the capital seeking safety and jobs,
leading to periodic civil unrest, manifested most notably in the Bread Riot
of April 1863. Because of its economic and political importance as well
as its location near the United States capital, Richmond became the focus
for most of the military campaigns in the war's Eastern Theater. In a sense,
its success—especially in mobilizing, outfitting, and feeding the
Confederate armies—predestined it to near-destruction in 1865. Just
as ironic, that destruction was largely caused by Confederates, although
images of the city's ruins have become iconic representations of the cost
of war. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Richmond
Howitzers |
| The
Richmond Howitzers is a military unit formed in Richmond not long after
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry late in 1859. During the American Civil
War (1861–1865), three companies organized as the Richmond Howitzer
Battalion and served in most of the campaigns of the Confederate Army of
Northern Virginia. The Howitzers reorganized in 1871 and saw active duty
during both World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945).
It is now a unit in the Virginia National Guard. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Ruffin,
Edmund (1794–1865) |
 Edmund
Ruffin was a prominent Southern nationalist, noted agriculturalist, writer
and essayist, and Virginia state senator (1823–1827). After dropping
out of college and serving briefly in the Virginia militia during the War
of 1812, Ruffin began a long career farming along the James River and studying
the soil. He published the results of his experiments and founded a journal,
the Farmers' Register, in 1833. During these years, Ruffin's politics also
became radicalized, first around banking issues, and then around states'
rights, slavery, and secession. After John Brown's failed raid on Harpers
Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859, Ruffin began speaking out against what
he considered to be Northern aggression, and he even joined cadets from
the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington so he could attend Brown's
execution. Ruffin continued to agitate for secession during the United States
presidential election of 1860, and he is erroneously credited with firing
the first shot on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, starting
the American Civil War (1861–1865). A popular hero in the South, Ruffin
nevertheless suffered financial setbacks during the war, as well as declining
health, and in 1865, following the Confederates' defeat, he killed himself.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| Saltville
During the Civil War |
| Saltville
is a small town that lies mostly in Smyth County in southwestern Virginia,
between the Holston River and the Tennessee and Virginia Railroad. During
the American Civil War (1861–1865), Saltville was of strategic importance
for two reasons: the railroad provided an important link between the eastern
and western theaters of the war, and the town's salt mines were crucial
in supplying provisions for the Confederate army. As such, Saltville was
the target of numerous Union raids. It was also the site of a battle on
October 2, 1864, when outnumbered Confederate cavalry troops repulsed the
advance of Union troops, including members of the 5th U.S. Colored Cavalry,
under the command of General Stephen G. Burbridge. The next day, according
to some accounts, Confederate soldiers killed a number of the wounded black
troopers, who were being held as prisoners of war at nearby Emory and Henry
College. The notorious and still-disputed incident is known as the "Saltville
Massacre." Read
Entire Article |
|
| Scott,
Winfield (1786-1866) |
| Winfield
Scott was a hero of the Mexican War (1846–1848), the last Whig Party
candidate for U.S. president, and commanding general of the United States
Army at the start of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Known as
"Old Fuss and Feathers" for his equal love of discipline and pomp,
Scott by 1861 had served in the military for more than fifty years and under
fourteen U.S. presidents. He had been severely wounded in battle, avoided
several wars with his diplomatic skills, and commanded the army that conquered
Mexico City in 1847, all of which made him the most admired and famous soldier
in America. Less well known is the fact that Scott was convicted by court-martial
for conduct unbecoming an officer, was investigated by a court of inquiry,
once was accused of treason, and several times offered his resignation from
the army. When the Civil War began, the Dinwiddie County native remained
loyal to the Union, and while age had so reduced his once-towering frame
that he could no longer even mount a horse, his ego and intellect were still
intact. Scott's Anaconda Plan for winning the war proved to be prescient
but politically out of step, and he eventually lost control of the army
to George B. McClellan. He soon retired, published a two-volume memoir in
1864, and died in 1866. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Shenandoah
Valley During the Civil War |
| The
Shenandoah Valley in western Virginia stretches about 140 miles north to
south between the Allegheny Mountains on the west and the Blue Ridge Mountains
on the east. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the strategically
important Valley was the site of two major campaigns and numerous battles
and represents, in microcosm, many of the military, social, and cultural
factors that ultimately explain why the Union won and the Confederacy lost
the war. Confederate control of the Shenandoah helped prolong the Confederate
war effort until 1864, while the region provided sustenance to Confederate
stomachs and succored Confederate nationalism. When those connections were
destroyed by Union general Philip H. Sheridan and his Valley Campaign in
the autumn of 1864—a campaign that culminated in what residents called
"the Burning," and that also helped U.S. president Abraham Lincoln
win re-election—victory for the Union and defeat for the Confederacy
were all but assured. The Valley, meanwhile, was largely stripped, but for
years it had been steeped in mythology—known as the "Granary
of the Confederacy," it was considered the very heart of the South.
That mythology would survive Sheridan and even the war. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Shepherdstown,
Battle of |
| The
Battle of Shepherdstown, fought on September 19 and 20, 1862, was the bloodiest
battle in what would become West Virginia. Although often overlooked by
historians because, as one Union soldier termed it, Shepherdstown "was
not much of a battle as modern battles go," it had important consequences.
First, it marked the end of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's first invasion
of the North, which had been effectively repulsed at the Battle of Antietam,
near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17. In addition, the Battle of Shepherdstown,
where Lee's army retreated back into Virginia, convinced Union general George
B. McClellan that a second invasion was possible, paralyzing the Army of
the Potomac in Maryland for the next month and allowing Lee's army time
to regroup. Furthermore, it contributed to U.S. president Abraham Lincoln's
decision to remove McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Shoes
at Gettysburg |
 One
of the most persistent legends surrounding the Battle of Gettysburg (1863),
which took place during the American Civil War (1861–1865), is that
it was fought over shoes. Ten weeks after the battle, Confederate general
Henry Heth, a Virginian whose troops were the first to engage on July 1,
filed a now-famous report in which he explained why he had sent a portion
of his division into the small Pennsylvania town. "On the morning of
June 30," Heth wrote, "I ordered Brigadier General [Johnston]
Pettigrew to take his brigade to Gettysburg, search the town for army supplies
(shoes especially), and return the same day." That parenthetical phrase
"shoes especially" has taken on a life of its own over the years.
A 1997 newsletter of the American Podiatric Medical Association is typical—it
claimed, perhaps due to its interest in foot health, that footwear was the
battle's causa belli, adding, "There was a warehouse full of boots
and shoes in the town." Read
Entire Article |
|
| Sigel,
Franz (1824–1902) |
| Franz
Sigel was a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Born in Germany and a leader of the failed insurrections of 1848, Sigel
rallied German-Americans to the Union cause in 1861 with the slogan, "I
goes to fight mit Sigel." As a general, however, he was only modestly
successful and his relationship with his superiors was so contentious that
he resigned from the army twice before returning; only his ties to the politically
important German-American constituency saved him. In addition, those ties
allowed him to be promoted to command of the Department of West Virginia
in 1864, but he led his troops to a disastrous defeat at the Battle of New
Market on May 15, 1864, against Confederate forces that included cadets
from the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. When a Confederate army
under Jubal A. Early was able to reach the outskirts of Washington, D.C.,
a month later, Sigel was relieved of command and he resigned from the army
a year later. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Southside
Railroad During the Civil War |
 The
Southside Railroad, completed in 1854, was one of the most important supply
routes in southern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
With tracks laid east to west across the state, the railroad began at City
Point in Hopewell on the James River and extended westward through Petersburg,
Burkeville, Farmville, Appomattox Station, and finally Lynchburg, in western
Virginia, for a total of about 132 miles. The Southside Railroad was imperative
to the Confederate army for the transport of food, military supplies, and
troops throughout the war. Behind the lines of battle, the Southside line
saw little damage for the first few years of the war; as the conflict moved
south in 1864 and 1865, however, the railroad incurred heavy damage from
both the Confederate and Union army as each sought to cut the supply lines
of the other. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Speculation
During the Civil War |
| Speculation,
which involved driving up prices on desperately needed consumer goods, was
both rampant and roundly condemned in the Confederacy during the American
Civil War (1861–1865). Along with conscription, the so-called Twenty
Slave Law, and impressment, speculation helped to undermine support for
the war among the less wealthy, in particular. Appalled at soaring prices,
Virginians looked for explanations. The Union blockade of the Atlantic coast
was partly to blame, and so was the Confederate Congress. Beholden to a
states' rights philosophy and suspicious of a strong federal government,
lawmakers refused to levy the taxes necessary to finance the war, thus guaranteeing
high inflation. The victims of that inflation, however, preferred to point
fingers at greedy speculators, or "extortioners." Such individuals
certainly existed, but government attempts to regulate or punish them were
either not forthcoming or proved to be ineffective. Accusations of speculation,
meanwhile, were sometimes accompanied by anti-Semitism, challenges of patriotism,
and, in one instance, arson. Read
Entire Article |
|
| States'
Rights |
| States'
rights is a political philosophy that emphasizes the rights of individual
states to fight what proponents believe to be the encroaching power of the
United States government. Although the discourse around states' rights dates
from the American Revolution (1775–1783) and the writings of Thomas
Jefferson, it became critically important first during the Nullification
Crisis (1828–1832), when South Carolina attempted to overrule a federally
imposed tariff, and then during the Secession Crisis (1860–1861),
when South Carolina and a number of other Southern states, including Virginia,
seceded from the Union rather than accept the election of Abraham Lincoln
as U.S. president. In theory, states' rights generally favors state and
local control over federal control. During the 1850s, however, it was a
malleable political philosophy that both Northerners and Southerners employed
to advance their sectional interests. Deep South politicians acquiesced
to federal power when it protected slavery but cited states' rights when
questioning federal attempts at regulating the spread of slavery into new
territories. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the philosophy
served both as a pillar of Confederate propaganda and, at times, as a drag
on Confederate unity. Ironically, Confederate president Jefferson Davis
had little trouble expanding the central government in order to prosecute
the war. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Staunton
During the Civil War |
| Staunton,
Virginia, the seat of Augusta County, was a key target in two major campaigns
during the American Civil War (1861–1865), and remained strategically
important throughout the entire war. With a population of about 4,000 in
1860, Staunton was situated at a vital transportation crossroads in the
Shenandoah Valley, and the Confederacy sought to utilize and protect its
infrastructure and wealth from the recurrent threat of destruction by Union
forces. Various Confederate leaders, including the generals Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson and Richard S. Ewell, used the town as their headquarters, and it
served almost continuously as an army depot, quartermaster and commissary
post, and training camp. Union troops targeted Staunton for more than two
years before they were able to break the Confederates' protective hold and
lay waste to much of the town and miles of nearby railroad track. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Stonewall
Brigade |
 The
Stonewall Brigade was a collection of five Virginia infantry regiments and
an artillery battery in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during
the American Civil War (1861-1865). Trained and first led by Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson, it was perhaps the most accomplished-and certainly one of the most
famous-units of its kind in American military history. The brigade saw action
in many of the bloodiest battles of the war, from First Manassas (1861)
to Antietam (1862) to Gettysburg (1863) to Spotsylvania Court House (1864),
losing only a single engagement under Jackson's command but also losing
more than 96 percent of its men by 1865. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Stuart,
J. E. B. (1833–1864) |
 J.
E. B. Stuart, popularly known by his nickname "Jeb," was the chief
of cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War
(1861–1865). A Regular Army veteran who participated in the capture
of John Brown at Harpers Ferry in 1859, Stuart fought well at the First
Battle of Manassas (1861) but became a Confederate hero the following summer
when he led 1,200 troopers in a famous ride around Union general George
B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac. In particular, he was praised for his
ability to gather intelligence and act as Robert E. Lee's "eyes and
ears," leading a second long ride later that year. At Chancellorsville
(1863), Stuart temporarily led Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's
corps when both Jackson and A. P. Hill were wounded, and helped to push
Joseph Hooker's forces back across the Rappahannock River. Stuart cultivated
himself as the epitome of Virginia's mythical Cavalier, sporting a long
beard and a plumed hat. He enjoyed staging elaborate reviews like the two
near Brandy Station, Virginia, in June 1863, which attracted many local
women. The day after the second review, Stuart's troopers fended off a surprise
attack in the largest cavalry battle of the war, but soon after, another
long ride around the Union army failed, hampering Lee's intelligence at
the Battle of Gettysburg (1863). Stuart was wounded at the Battle of Yellow
Tavern and died one day later on May 12, 1864. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Taylor,
Walter H. (1838 - 1916) |
| Walter
H. Taylor served for most of the American Civil War (1861–1865) as
adjutant to Robert E. Lee, overseeing the paperwork and administrative functions
of the Confederate general's commands. A businessman and banker before and
after the war, Taylor is best known for writing books that defended the
reputations of Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, books that today are
considered to be important contributions to Lost Cause literature. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Terrill,
James B. (1838–1864) |
| James
B. Terrill was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
As the longtime colonel of the 13th Virginia Infantry Regiment, Terrill
fought in nearly every major battle of the Eastern Theater. Confederate
general Robert E. Lee called the 13th Virginia "a splendid body of
men," while Confederate general Richard S. Ewell noted that it was
"the only regiment in my command that never fails." Jubal A. Early
declared that the unit "was never required to take a position that
they did not take it, nor to hold one that they did not hold it." Noted
for his bravery and respected by superiors, Terrill was killed at the Battle
of Bethesda Church the day before his appointment to brigadier general was
confirmed by the Confederate Senate. Two of Terrill's brothers also died
in the war, one fighting for the Confederacy, the other for the Union. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Terrill,
William R. (1834–1862) |
| William
R. Terrill was a Virginia-born Union general during the American Civil War
(1861–1865). Three of his brothers fought for the Confederacy, two
of whom died, including James B. Terrill, who was killed in 1864. Disowned
by his family, William Terrill distinguished himself in the Western Theater
of the war, including at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862. A strict disciplinarian,
he was "a drunken old tyrant" in the words of one soldier. Others
were more sympathetic, with a Union captain arguing that he was "a
first rate fighting man." Terrill was promoted to brigadier general
in September 1862 and, in October, commanded a brigade at the Battle of
Perryville, Kentucky, where he struggled with coordinating both infantry
and artillery, raw recruits and professional soldiers. He was killed in
the fighting. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Thomas,
George H. (1816-1870) |
| George
H. Thomas was a Virginia native, a veteran of the Mexican War (1846–1848),
and a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865) who
earned the nickname "the Rock of Chickamauga" after his defensive
stand at the Georgia battle in 1863. He won an early Union victory at the
Battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky (1862), and decisively defeated the Confederate
Army of Tennessee during the Battle of Nashville (1864). He also served
as a subordinate at the Battle of Stone's River (1862–1863) and the
Chattanooga Campaign (1863) in Tennessee and, under his West Point roommate
William T. Sherman, the 1864 Atlanta Campaign. Thomas was a slave owner
before the war, but his experience commanding African American soldiers
led him to change his views, and he became a staunch defender of civil rights
during Reconstruction (1865–1876). As senior military commander in
Kentucky and Tennessee from 1865 until 1869, he fought to protect African
Americans from the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups. He died
of a stroke in 1870. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Tiernan,
Mary Spear (1836-1891) |
 Mary
Spear Tiernan was a novelist, essayist, and occasional poet who wrote primarily
about central Virginia before and during the American Civil War (1861-1865).
She published three novels, as well as short stories, which appeared in
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, Century Magazine, and
the Southern Review, among others. Her fiction vividly depicted wartime
Richmond , and her novel Homoselle (1881) was based on a Virginia slave
revolt and can be distinguished for Tiernan's remarkable sympathy for African
Americans. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Twenty-Slave
Law |
| The
Twenty-Slave Law, passed by the Confederate Congress on October 11, 1862,
during the American Civil War (1861–1865), created an exemption to
military conscription for the owners of twenty or more slaves. The law was
controversial in much of the South, where it served to exacerbate certain
social rifts and led to claims by drafted soldiers that they were fighting
a "rich man's war." The law did not generate as much opposition
in Virginia, home to the Confederacy's largest population of slaves. Supporters
viewed the law as essential in guarding against slave rebellion and in maintaining
agriculture and industry and, therefore, the nation's ability to carry on
the war effort. The Confederate Congress later amended the law to alleviate
concerns, limiting the ability of plantation owners to evade military service.
Read
Entire Article |
|
| United
Daughters of the Confederacy |
| The
United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) was formed in 1894 to protect
and perpetuate Confederate memory following the American Civil War (1861–1865).
According to the group's founding documents, it sought "to fulfill
the duties of sacred charity to the survivors of the war and those dependent
upon them … to perpetuate the memory of our Confederate heroes and
the glorious cause for which they fought." Through chapters in Virginia
and other southern states (and even a handful in the North), members directed
most of their efforts toward raising funds for Confederate monuments, sponsoring
Memorial Day parades, caring for indigent Confederate widows, sponsoring
essay contests and fellowships for southern students, and maintaining Confederate
museums and relic collections. The context of these efforts was the Lost
Cause interpretation of the Civil War, which emphasized states' rights and
secession over slavery as causes of the war and was often used to further
the goals of white supremacists in the twentieth century. The organization
continues to perform memorial work, its national headquarters located in
the former Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Read
Entire Article |
|
| United
States Presidential Election of 1860 |
| The
United States presidential election of 1860 was perhaps the most pivotal
in American history. A year after John Brown's attempted slave revolt at
Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the national debate over slavery had reached a
boiling point, and several Southern states were threatening to secede should
the Republican Party candidate, Abraham Lincoln, win. Along with its Upper
South neighbors, Virginia struggled with both the perceived threat of Northern
abolitionism and the fear that secession would trigger war. The four major
candidates, meanwhile, reflected a political system in chaos. At its convention,
the Democratic Party split into two factions, with the Northern Democrats
nominating U.S. senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, a moderate on slavery,
and the Southern Democrats nominating the U.S. vice president, John C. Breckinridge
of Kentucky, on a proslavery, states' rights platform. After the demise
of the Whig Party, many of its former members went to the Constitutional
Union Party, which nominated John Bell of Tennessee and advocated compromise.
The Republicans, who opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories,
best exploited the circumstances, winning 180 electoral votes and 39.8 percent
of the popular vote. Reflecting Virginia's moderation, however, the state
was one of only three to favor Bell. In the end, Lincoln's election led
directly to South Carolina's secession and the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Van
Lew, Elizabeth L. (1818 - 1900) |
| Elizabeth
Van Lew was a Richmond Unionist and abolitionist who spied for the United
States government during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Leading
a network of a dozen or so white and African American women and men, she
relayed information on Confederate operations to Union generals and assisted
in the care and sometimes escape of Union prisoners of war being held in
the Confederate capital. Van Lew, who worked with invisible ink and coded
messages, has been called "the most skilled, innovative, and successful"
of all Civil War–era spies. While some historians have claimed that
she was open about her Unionist politics, deflecting suspicion by behaving
as if she were mentally ill, others have argued that these "Crazy Bet"
stories are a myth. After the war, Van Lew served as postmaster of Richmond
during the administration of U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, one of the
generals to whom she had once fed information. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Virginia
Convention of 1861 |
| The
Virginia Convention of 1861, also known later as the Secession Convention,
convened on February 13, 1861, to consider whether Virginia should secede
from the United States. Its 152 delegates, a majority of whom were Unionist,
had been elected at the behest of the Virginia General Assembly, which also
directed that their decision be ratified by a statewide referendum. Several
states in the Deep South, beginning with South Carolina, had already left
the Union in response to the election in November 1860 of Abraham Lincoln
as United States president. Virginia, however, hesitated, and debate raged
on for months. On April 4, secessionists badly lost a vote but prepared
for the possibility of war nevertheless. Former Virginia governor Henry
A. Wise worked behind the scenes and outside the legal process to secure
the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry by military means, a move that prompted
a furious objection from Unionist delegate John Baldwin of Staunton. After
the fall of Fort Sumter on April 13 and Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers
on April 15, the momentum turned toward secession, and the convention voted
on April 17 to leave the Union. Virginians expressed their agreement at
the polls on May 23. The state had joined the Confederacy. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Virginia
Military Institute During the Civil War |
| The
Virginia Military Institute (VMI) is a state-funded military academy founded
in 1839. Located in the Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, it was only
the second governmental military academy in the United States, after the
United States Military Academy at West Point, New York (founded in 1802),
and represented increased educational opportunity for non-elite southern
men. Future Confederate generals Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson
and John McCausland were VMI instructors during John Brown's raid on the
U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, and they led cadets to his execution
in Charles Town, where they helped to provide security. During the American
Civil War (1861–1865), approximately 1,800 VMI graduates served (including
19 in the U.S. Army), with about 250 of them killed in action. Cadets famously
were called to fight in the Battle of New Market, contributing to the Confederate
victory on May 15, 1864. In June, Union general David Hunter ordered the
school burned, and the cadets relocated to Richmond, where they helped to
defend the Confederate capital. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Weather
During the Civil War |
| Weather
was influential in shaping events during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
For instance, concerns about weather helped determine overall strategy as
well as tactics on the battlefield. Generals looked to the skies to decide
when to begin spring campaigns, cursed at flooded rivers for impeding progress,
and pushed their men to endure the extremes of the Southern climate. Weather
also colored the war experience for soldiers and civilians. Becoming a veteran
soldier meant being seasoned by the weather as much as being transformed
by combat. Meanwhile, men and women in Virginia and across the nation religiously
recorded meteorological events in diaries, letters, and newspapers, knowing
how decisive this force of nature, so completely beyond human control, could
be on wartime events. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Weldon
Railroad, Battle of |
| The
Battle of the Weldon Railroad (or Globe Tavern) was fought August 18–21,
1864, and provided the key element of Union general-in-chief Ulysses S.
Grant's fourth offensive during the Petersburg Campaign of the American
Civil War (1861–1865). This Union victory resulted in the permanent
capture of one of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's most important supply
lines. On August 18, the Union Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac seized
a portion of the vital railroad that connected Petersburg with Wilmington,
North Carolina, at a point three miles south of Petersburg. A determined
Confederate counterattack the following day battered but did not break the
Union troops' hold on the tracks, and a second Confederate assault on August
21 failed miserably. Read
Entire Article |
|
| West
Virginia, Creation of |
| West
Virginia was recognized by the United States government as the thirty-fifth
state on June 20, 1863, an event that was the culmination of more than sixty
years of heated sectional politics and legislative maneuverings. From the
first political rumblings of new-state advocates at the turn of the nineteenth
century through the formative sessions of the Wheeling conventions held
from 1861 until 1863, the creation of West Virginia was a complex and contentious
process that divided the residents, communities, and political leaders of
Virginia. Spearheaded by northwestern Virginians, the statehood movement
began as an effort to expand western political influence and the region's
growing industrial economy. Final approval of West Virginia's statehood
was forged amid the chaos and divisiveness of the secession debate and the
bloodshed of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Read
Entire Article |
|
| Whig
Party in Virginia |
| The
Whig Party was a political party in Virginia and across the United States
that was founded in 1833 in opposition to the policies of U.S. president
Andrew Jackson—a Democrat who was criticized for his expansion of
executive powers—and in support of states' rights and, eventually,
the sectional interests of the South. Whigs, especially in the North, vigorously
opposed the Mexican War (1846–1848), a conflict that led to increased
sectional friction as the federal government attempted, without great success,
to strike a balance between the interests of North and South, free and slave,
when admitting the newly captured territory into the Union. By 1856, that
friction had destroyed the party, both within the state and nationally,
forcing its members to affiliate with different parties dictated largely
by their stance on slavery and secession. In the years leading up to the
American Civil War (1861–1865), many prominent former Virginia Whig
Party members, such as John Minor Botts, were vocal in their resistance
to Democratic calls for secession. Other prominent Virginia Whigs included
Mexican War heroes Zachary Taylor, who served as U.S. president from 1849
until 1850, and Winfield Scott, who ran unsuccessfully for the office in
1852. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Wilderness
During the Civil War |
| The
Wilderness of Spotsylvania was a tightly forested area nearly twelve miles
wide by six miles long; it was located south of the Rappahannock and Rapidan
rivers, ten miles west of Fredericksburg, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), two major battles were
fought there: Chancellorsville, in May 1863, where Confederate general Thomas
J. "Stonewall" Jackson famously outflanked Union forces under
Joseph Hooker; and the Wilderness, in May 1864, where the Union's new general-in-chief,
Ulysses S. Grant, initiated the Overland Campaign. The topography of the
Wilderness—dense woods and thick undergrowth broken up by a number
of small clearings—made the maneuvering of large armies particularly
difficult and the experience of fighting claustrophobic. In both battles,
burst shells ignited the woods, burning wounded soldiers. At Chancellorsville,
Jackson was killed by a volley from his own men and, a year later, Confederate
general James Longstreet was wounded, also by friendly fire. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Wilderness,
Battle of the |
| The
Battle of the Wilderness, fought May 5–6, 1864, was the opening engagement
of the Overland Campaign during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
The newly appointed general-in-chief of the Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant,
personally led the Army of the Potomac south across the Rapidan River in
what he hoped would be a quick maneuver around the right flank of Confederate
general Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. Instead, Lee engaged
Grant where he had engaged Joseph Hooker almost exactly a year earlier—in
the seventy-square-mile patch of tangled undergrowth known as the Wilderness.
The battle that resulted was uncoordinated, bloody, and often confused,
with a testy Grant pressing Lee's men on May 5 and very nearly breaking
through the Confederate lines on May 6. Lee was famously restrained by his
men from leading a countercharge, and his top lieutenant, James Longstreet,
was seriously wounded when he was accidently shot by Virginia troops near
the spot where, at Chancellorsville the year before, Thomas J. "Stonewall"
Jackson had been similarly wounded. Unlike Jackson, Longstreet survived,
and amid burning trees the Confederates won a tactical victory. Grant, however,
refused to turn back, confronting Lee again and again until finally stalling
before Petersburg. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Winchester
During the Civil War |
| Located
in the Shenandoah Valley, Winchester was the most contested town in the
Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861–1865), changing hands
more than seventy times and earning its reputation (in the words of a British
observer) as the shuttlecock of the Confederacy. Three major battles were
fought within town limits and four others nearby. In 1862, Confederate general
Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson won a victory there during the Shenandoah
Valley Campaign that solidified his reputation as the Confederacy's first
hero. Following Jackson's death in May 1863, Richard S. Ewell took over
his corps and, on the way to Gettysburg, scooped up the Union garrison at
Winchester, suggesting to many that he might have the stuff to replace the
fallen Stonewall. The Third Battle of Winchester (1864) was a Union victory,
part of Union general Philip H. Sheridan's successful Valley Campaign against
Jubal A. Early. The war, meanwhile, brought huge changes for the town's
residents, including rampant inflation, often harsh measures imposed by
occupiers, and the destruction of slavery. By 1865, the town was largely
destroyed. Read
Entire Article |
|
| Winder,
John H. (1800–1865) |
| John
H. Winder was a Confederate general who served as provost marshal of Richmond
(1862–1864) and commissary general of Confederate prisons (1864–1865)
during the American Civil War (1861–1865). A career military officer,
Winder served with distinction during both the Second Seminole War (1835–1842)
and the Mexican War (1846–1848), but faced criticism from Union officials
and, subsequently, historians for his management of Richmond's wartime prisons
and, beginning in June 1864, the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia.
Described by his biographer as "short-tempered" and "aloof,"
Winder was responsible for the Castle Thunder, Belle Isle, and Libby prisons
when they became infamous in the North for their poor conditions. While
he was at Andersonville, the mortality rate of Union prisoners surged as
a result of overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and poor rations. Winder's
defenders argue that he struggled with an inefficient Confederate bureaucracy
and scarce resources, and that he instituted policies, late in the war,
that reduced the number of prisoner deaths. He died of a heart attack in
February 1865; his subordinate at Andersonville, Henry H. Wirz, was hanged
later that year. Read
Entire Article |
| Top
|
| Wise,
Henry A. (1806-1876) |
| Henry
A. Wise was a lawyer, a member of the United States House of Representatives
(1832–1844), U.S. minister to Brazil (1844–1847), governor of
Virginia (1856–1860) during John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and
a brigadier general in the Confederate army during the American Civil War
(1861–1865). Born in Accomack County on Virginia's Eastern Shore,
Wise rose to national prominence during the political turmoil of the late
antebellum period. A fiery politician and gifted orator with a mercurial
temperament, he advocated a number of progressive positions, including capital
improvements in western Virginia, broadening Virginia's electoral base through
constitutional reform, and public funding for universal elementary education.
Wise also was a stout defender of slavery and eventually became an ardent
secessionist. Perhaps best known for being governor when Brown attempted
to spark a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Wise had the authority to commute
Brown's death sentence. Instead, he allowed the execution to take place,
making possible the radical abolitionist's ascension to martyrdom. After
Virginia's secession in 1861, Wise served in the Confederate army. In 1872,
he supported U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union general-in-chief,
in his campaign for reelection. Read
Entire Article |
| |
| Women
During the Civil War |
| Although
women were not permitted to bear arms on the battlefront, they made invaluable
contributions to and were deeply affected by the American Civil War (1861–1865).
This was particularly true of women living in Virginia, since they witnessed
more battles than did the women of any other state engaged in the conflict.
The removal of hundreds of thousands of men from their homes, farms, and
businesses necessitated the vastly increased participation of women, both
black and white, in areas that they had been previously discouraged, if
not forbidden, from pursuing. Differences of race and class, however, sometimes
sharply divided their views and experiences. Some devoted everything they
had to the service of the Confederacy, while others openly rebelled against
it. The end of the war brought the collapse of both the Confederate government
and slave society, and while freedom created a new commonality between the
races and between women and men, it challenged them to redefine themselves
and their society. In the words of diarist Lucy Buck from Front Royal, "We
shall never any of us be the same as we have been." Read
Entire Article |
|