The Civil War in Virginia was markedly different from the experience of other Confederate states in its position as a front line state that was actively defended throughout the duration of the conflict by resident Confederate armies defending against repeated, not to say continuous Union incursions.
We begin this blog with “Notes from the Ground” assessing the rise of the scientific agriculturists including the Fire Eater secessionist Edmund Ruffin. The motives and morale of Virginians and how they changed over the course of the war are addressed in “Why Confederates Fought [in Virginia]”. The Confederate Constitutional regime as described in “Southern Rights” was less protective of individual liberties than the old U.S. Constitution.
Two local histories cover the duration of the Civil War in Virginia from secession through surrender and aftermath. “Defend This Old Town” chronicles the war experience of Williamsburg, Virginia, occupied by Union troops continuously from Spring 1862, and “Beleaguered Winchester” narrates the home front existence of townspeople in a transportation hub that changed hands over seventy times.
For more book reviews at TheVirginiaHistorian.com in this historical era addressing other topics, see the webpage for Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction Era (1820-1883). General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Notes from the Ground
Benjamin R. Cohen wrote Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil and Society in the American Countryside in 2009. It is now available from the Yale University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
Around 1830 the number of agricultural, horticultural and floricultural societies exploded. Prominent agriculturists included Edmund Ruffin of Virginia who celebrated agricultural labor, local experience and systematic experimentation. First hand experience with the soil, even for a short period of time, took on a critical meaning, and knowledge of the soil became a way of credentialing public officials, and a common metaphor in public expression.
Through the pages of publications by the Albemarle Agricultural Society and the Agricultural Society of Virginia, chemistry, or “composition” emerged as the critical element of soil fertility or infertility. Its proper manipulation brought the promise of restoration for exhausted lands with surplus slaves and hard scrabble yeomanry.
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*Brugger, Robert J. Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South (1978). About a Virginian Fire-Eater secessionist jurist and essayist. It is now out of print but available online used. Learn more to “Beverley Tucker” on Amazon.com https://amzn.to/2IB5NGQ.
Why Confederates Fought (Virginia)
Aaron Sheehan-Dean wrote Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia in 2007. It is now available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new in hardcover and paperback.
The Confederate Virginia among whites was remarkably mobilized for wartime service, perhaps 89 percent of eligible men, and after 1862 it suffered relatively low levels of desertion until the final months of 1865. Commitment to the Cause was manifested in a “diehardism”, so there was a distinction between initial and sustaining motivation. In Virginia the “War of Northern Aggression” was lost because the weight of Union arms destroyed it, as Robert E. Lee had explained in his fair well to the Army of Northern Virginia.
Throughout there was a racial preoccupation which saw military service as a means of protecting families, and that was extended during Reconstruction in a first massive resistance to the first race-based civil rights movement. The barely demobilized Confederate Army in Virginia continued to march together in politics as a continuation of war by other means to preserve Virginia as a white man’s country. In a way it was an obverse phenomenon of the “Bloody Shirt” and “Vote as You Shot” in the North.
To buy “Why Confederates Fought” on Amazon, click here.
Southern Rights
Mark E. Neely wrote Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism in 1999. It is now available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.
Secessionists had promised at the outset of their independence movement to protect southern rights and individual liberties. In a study of 4,100 civilian prisoners held by Confederate military authorities from 1861 to 1865, Neely argues that the Confederate government curtailed civil liberties in a political community that docilely submitted to the sacrifice of their freedom on a daily basis. By the autumn of 1862, Jefferson Davis abandoned the writ of habeas corpus when citizens of Maryland and Kentucky failed to join secession in sufficient numbers to claim their states for the rebellion.
Life in the Civil War South was under the rule of a virtual police state marked by military guards posted across the landscape to ensure order. The passport system used to control internal travel for whites as well as enslaved blacks was imposed by military fiat and was maintained throughout the war despite post-war Lost Cause rhetoric to the contrary. In this and other circumstances, the demands of war led the Confederacy to deny liberties to its citizens that they had enjoyed under the United States Constitution.
To buy “Southern Rights” on Amazon, click here.
Defend This Old Town
Carol Kettenburg Dubbs wrote Defend This Old Town: Williamsburg during the Civil War in 2002. It is now available from the LSU Press and online new and used.
Dubbs investigates the Civil War’s impact on the people and community of Williamsburg, Virginia in a balance of military and social history. The series of battles around Williamsburg at the onset of Union General McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign saw the emergence of military commanders such as George Custer, Winfield Hancock, Joseph Hooker, opposed by A.P. Hill, James Longstreet and J.E.B. Stuart. Union troops would occupy Williamsburg from May 1862 to the end of the war except for intermittent Confederate forays.
Dubb’s story of Williamsburg is one of an occupied southern town. William and Mary burns in September 1862, townspeople’s homes are raided, secessionists deported. The ransacking of the Wythe House lost papers of George Wythe from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Williamsburg’s society is studied from the wealthy to the enslaved, including secessionists and Union sympathizers. The story extends to the aftermath of the war. Although the College reopened in October 1865, it never fully recovered as a private institution.
To buy “Defend This Old Town” on Amazon, click here.
Beleaguered Winchester
Richard P. Duncan wrote Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861–1865 in 2007. It is now available from the LSU Press, on Kindle and new in hardcover.
Beginning in March 1862, Winchester may have changed hands between Federals and Confederates seventy-two times, more than once on some days. By the end of the Civil War, it was impoverished and badly battered. Both armies imposed martial law and confiscated property and supplies.
With each occupation came additional physical destruction, food shortages, economic inflation, sickness and death. The alternating occupations forced an uncertainly that townspeople reacted to by pragmatically befriending one another whether rebel or Unionist. Duncan’s narrative includes slavery and slaves, guerrillas and countryside.
To buy “Beleaguered Winchester” on Amazon, click here.