Another Civil War Site in Old Town Alexandria

A couple of weeks ago I spent the weekend in Old Town Alexandria for a wedding.  I knew that I'd have a few hours of free time while my wife was getting her hair done, so I put together a Civil War walking tour after doing a little research.  The day was gloomy and rainy, but I soldiered on and visited several sites related to the Union occupation of the town.  On Prince Street I located a historical marker which tells a story connected to the "Battle of St. Paul's Church."  The marker is affixed to the restored office of the Alexandria Gazette on Prince Street.  As any good marker hunter would do, I cross referenced the Historical Marker Database (HMdb.org), and seeing no mention of this particular marker, I submitted an entry, which has now been published.  (A shout out to fellow blogger Craig, an editor over at the site, is in order.)  The marker entry on the database can be found here.



St. Paul's Episcopal Church



The Gazette House on Prince Street (SUV is in front)

In short, the so-called "battle" revolved around shenanigans at St. Paul's Episcopal Church.  During services on February 9, 1862, the Rev. K.J. Stewart omitted the prayer for the President of the United States.  Troopers in the church from the 8th Illinois Cavalry demanded that Stewart say the prayer.  When he refused, the Union soldiers arrested him.  The congregation protested loudly, and one woman allegedly dropped a prayer book onto an officer's head.  The Union military governor, General William Montgomery, ordered Stewart released, but protesters began to gather in the streets of Alexandria.  Montgomery demanded that all demonstrations stop under threat of arrest.  The next day, the Local News, published by the editor of the long-running Alexandria Gazette, condemned the arrest.  Later in the evening, the Gazette's offices on Prince Street caught fire under mysterious circumstances.  The building was restored between 1865-67, and the facade replaced in 1922.  The marker on the former Gazette building at 310 Price Street commemorates the blaze, and directly blames Union soldiers for setting it.

The Fairfax Rifles Head to Alexandria

Before the Civil War, volunteer militias were common throughout both the North and South. William Dulany, who later served as a delegate to the Virginia Secession Convention, organized the Fairfax Rifle Rangers in Fairfax Court House on December 1, 1859.  Many such companies of Virginia Militia were formed in the aftermath of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in October of that year.  Dulany became captain of the Fairfax Rifles, which was assigned to the 60th Regiment (Fairfax County) of the Virginia Militia.  One of the earlier members of the Fairfax Rifles was James Jackson, who would achieve infamy across the North for gunning down Col. Elmer Ellsworth of the 11th New York Fire Zouaves in May 1861.

Mobilization of military forces in Virginia gained momentum in the days following the adoption of the Ordinance of Secession. Towards the end of April 1861, the Fairfax Rifles headed to Alexandria, an important port city not far down the Potomac River from Washington. Led by Lieutenant William A. Barnes, the Fairfax Rifles arrived on April 25.  They took up quarters on Prince Street, not far from the intersection with Fairfax Street.

Alexandria buzzed with martial activity. Soldiers from various local units, as well as militia companies from other parts of Northern Virginia, were stationed around town.  The Fairfax Rifles joined Major Montgomery Corse's command, which by the end of April consisted of several state militia companies, including the Mount Vernon Guard, the Alexandria Riflemen, the Old Dominion Rifles, the Alexandria Artillery, the Emmett Guards, the Loudoun Guard, and the Warren Rifles.  On April 27, Corse's units officially became the 6th Battalion of Virginia Volunteers.  The battalion was assigned to the overall command of  Lt. Col. Algernon S. Taylor, who led the state troops in Alexandria.  Taylor was the nephew of President and Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor.

General Montgomery Corse, who in the spring of 1861 was a major leading the 6th Battalion of Virginia Volunteers at Alexandria (courtesy of Wikipedia)

The Virginia militia leaders in Alexandria feared a possible Union invasion after adoption of the Ordinance of Secession.  They watched anxiously as the Union military presence in Washington grew.  The Fairfax Rifles, like other units, was assigned to guard the city streets and to keep an eye out for potential movements by Federal troops.  Life was not completely mundane.  The militia soldiers attracted the attention and admiration of the young women of Alexandria.  And at least one picket station was located in close proximity to a local brewery that kept beer on hand for the thirsty militiamen.

Later, in June 1861, Corse's battalion was organized into the 17th Regiment of Virginia Infantry. The Fairfax Rifles were designated as Company D, under Captain Dulany.  It is ironic that Dulany, who feared that secession would bring war to Fairfax's doorstep, was now actively playing a role in events that would ensure the very outcome he most feared.

Note on Sources

The following sources were useful in compiling this post:

Alexandria in the Civil War by James G. Barber (1988).

American Civil War Armies (5): Volunteer Militia by Philip Katcher & Ronald Volstad (1989).

"History of the Seventeenth Virginia Regiment, C.S.A," from the website of the Fairfax Rifles reenactment unit.

17th Virginia Infantry, from the Virginia Regimental History Series, by Lee A. Wallace, Jr. (1990).

Guest Blogging on My Office Building

The other day I discovered that my employer, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), was looking for someone to write a post for USTR's blog on our office building and the Civil War.  Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity!  I work in the Winder Building, which served a number of purposes during the Civil War.  (The die-hard enthusiasts among you may have heard of this building before.)  I'd been meaning to do a post on Winder for months now, but there never was a good time to take some pictures due to the giant tarp that has been draped over our building for well over a year. 

I had already done quite a bit of digging on the history of  the Winder Building since starting my job at USTR, and uncovered some interesting historical facts and myths.  However, writing the post for USTR's blog gave me the chance to dig deeper and to work with some really great people, including the preservationist and research librarians for the Executive Office of the President. These individuals provided me with valuable research assistance, which I found useful in separating fact from fiction.  I was particularly excited to examine copies of Washington City directories for 1861-65.  These books functioned like the White Pages, minus the phone numbers.  I was actually able to track down what government offices were located in Winder during the war based on these directories.  And now, without further ado, here is the post as it appears on the USTR website (see here):

Civil War History of the Winder Building

The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) occupies the historic Winder Building in downtown Washington, DC. The Winder Building was only thirteen years old when the Civil War erupted in 1861. This year, as the nation begins the commemoration of the Civil War Sesquicentennial, USTR would like to share some of the connections our office building has to that tragic conflict.

The Winder Building, from a photo likely taken about five years after the Civil War

The Winder Building, completed in 1848, stood at 75 feet and had 130 rooms. At the time it was the tallest and largest office building in the nation’s capital. The War and Navy Departments leased office space from owner William H. Winder until 1854, when Secretary of War Jefferson Davis bought the Winder Building at the price of $200,000 for the War Department’s use. Davis would later serve as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.

During the Civil War, the Winder Building – known at the time as “Winder’s Building” – housed several government offices. Occupants included the Navy Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography, the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, and the Second Auditor of the Treasury. The Quartermaster General’s Department, under the capable direction of General Montgomery Meigs, led the massive effort to supply the Union Army from offices in the Winder Building. The Army Ordnance Department was also located there, and President Lincoln sometimes stopped by to learn about new weapons being tested by the Union Army. Later in the war, the Bureau of Military Justice, under Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, moved into the building. When Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, Holt led the investigation and prosecution of the conspirators from the Winder Building. The U.S. Signal Corps also constructed a signal station on the roof of the Winder Building in 1865 that was capable of sending messages by flag to troops in the encampments and fortifications around Washington.

Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs

Washington, D.C. Central Signal Station, Winder Building, April 1865

The war was not kind to the original owner of the Winder Building. At the start of the Civil War, William Winder’s cousin, John H. Winder, resigned as a U.S. Army major, received a commission as a Confederate brigadier general, and was placed in charge of Northern prisoners in Richmond, Virginia. Federal authorities arrested William Winder on suspicion of conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. Government. He was held as a prisoner at Ft. Lafayette in New York and Ft. Warren in Boston, until Winder’s lawyers gained his release in 1862 after fourteen months in jail. Winder was never indicted.

Over the years, various myths have grown up around the Civil War history of the Winder Building. Some of these myths were enshrined on the historical marker that was placed on the building in 1950. According to one legend, Lincoln was fond of visiting the Winder Building to read telegraphs carrying war news from the front. However, historic evidence indicates that the Telegraph Office was located in the old War Department building across the street (site of the present-day Eisenhower Executive Office Building), and that the Winder Building did not have any military telegraph wires connected to it. It is also unlikely that Lincoln reviewed military parades from the building’s wrought-iron balcony.

Another frequent myth is that Confederate prisoners were held in the Winder Building and that Lincoln visited them there. There is no proof that such a basement prison existed, although civilian suspects were sometimes questioned in the basement.

Some accounts indicate that four successive generals-in-chief of the Union Army (Winfield Scott, George B. McClellan, Henry W. Halleck, and Ulysses S. Grant) maintained their headquarters in the Winder Building. However, at the time of the Civil War, most generals had offices in a building at the southwest corner of 17th and F Streets, N.W. (present-day location of the FDIC).

The Winder Building occupies a key place in the history of Washington during the Civil War. The clerks and military officers who worked there played an important role in the Union war effort over the course of four long and trying years. USTR is proud to call the Winder Building home.

The Fairfax Delegate Explains His Vote Against Secession

On April 17, 1861, the same day that the Virginia Convention passed the Ordinance of Secession, William Dulany, the delegate from Fairfax County, rose to explain his vote to fellow delegates.  Readers may remember that although Dulany was elected as a moderate Unionist, the local paper in Fairfax had surmised that he would not oppose secession as a last resort.  However, even in the face of Lincoln's call for volunteers, and the defection of many Union men to the cause of secession, Dulany held firm that day.

Dulany reminded the delegates that he was representing the will of his constituents on the issue:

In voting against the ordinance of secession, I voted in, what I believed to be, strict accordance with the sentiments of the people whom I have the honor to represent here. I voted in strict accordance with my own judgment also upon that subject; because if I had believed that the people of my county were unanimous in favor of such an ordinance, and my judgment did not approve it, I could never have consented to give my vote for it, and would feel bound to resign my seat here and allow my constituents to substitute another who would carry out their will.

Even though Dulany expressed loyalty to his native state, his concern over the impact of war on Fairfax County and his family took precedence:

I thought, sir, according to my poor judgment, that by the passage of this ordinance we were transferring the war, as already commenced, from its present seat to our own State, and especially to the borders of my own native county; and although. . . .  I would willingly offer up the little I have as a sacrifice to preserve the honor of my native State, yet there were ties that bound me to her and to the Union more holy than the mere rights of property, than mere dollars and cents. I do not wish to see an aged mother and sisters, who are dependent upon me, who will be-I say it without egotism-in the first of this conflict-I say I do not wish to see them flying from the county, as I apprehend they will have to do, inasmuch as it is likely to become the seat of the first conflict, being in fact in sight of the emissaries of the Federal Government, and likely to be before long in their exclusive possession.

Dulany concluded that his fears represented the fears of his constituents in the county:

I voted against this ordinance of secession to avoid transferring the seat of war to that section; and I did so, moreover, because, as I have said, I believed that in so doing, I reflected the will and sentiments of the people I represent.

Dulany understood well what war would mean for Fairfax. Before long, Union and Confederate armies would be marching across the county.  And even when the fighting moved elsewhere, citizens experienced the daily hardships of living in occupied territory. 

"Debating the Ordinance of Secession," David Hunter Strother, The Village Magnates, 1861, Pierre Morand Memorial, Special Collections, Library of Virginia (c0urtesy of Library of Virginia).

In the end, Dulany signed the Ordinance of Secession, spoke publicly for ratification, and voted for secession at the polls in May.  A May 22, 1861 article in the Alexandria Gazette on a public meeting in Fairfax provides insight into Dulany's apparent change of heart.  Addressing the crowd, Dulany explained "he had voted against the ordinance of secession, but that he thought now there should be no division.  The course of the administration made it the imperative duty of every loyal son of Virginia to strike for her independence."

Northern Virginia Delegates Divided on Secession

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Virginia Convention's adoption of the Ordinance of Secession.  As recently as the start of April, the Convention had rejected a similar motion.  Now, after the opening of hostilities and Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers, Unionists delegates began to defect to the secessionist camp.  On April 16, Robert Scott of Fauquier County offered a resolution in a last ditch effort to prevent immediate secession.  He proposed to put the question of secession directly to the voters, before the Convention voted on the issue.  The resolution asked voters to choose between secession or holding consultations with the slave states that still remained in the Union.  The Convention, largely whipped into a frenzy over recent events, rejected this resolution by a vote of 77 to 64.

The question of secession was finally put to the delegates on April 17, and the Ordinance of Secession passed by a vote of 88 to 55.  The Northern Virginia camp was markedly divided, compared to the vote just a couple weeks before.  The breakdown was as follows:

Yeas
Robert Scott, Fauquier
Eppa Hunton, Prince William
*John Quincy Marr, Fauquier--Marr was absent for the vote, but announced to the Convention on April 30 that he was in favor of the Ordinance.  The Convention granted him the privilege of recording his vote.

Nays
George Brent, Alexandria
William Dulany of Fairfax
John Carter, Loudoun
John Janney, Loudoun

First signed version of the Ordinance of Secession, April-May 1861 (courtesy of the Library of Virginia)

The Convention prepared a parchment copy of the Ordinance for signature.  All Northern Virginia delegates, with the exception of John Carter, signed the document.  In all, 92 delegates put their signatures on the Ordinance between April 24 and May 1.  The Ordinance was next referred to the voters for ratification on May 23.  However, even before the final verdict was in, Virginia began to mobilize its resources for war. And among those delegates who joined the ranks of Virginia forces were Brent and Dulany, two who had voted against the ordinance on April 17, but whose loyalty to Virginia remained paramount.

What Will Virginia Do?

Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor, April 12 and 13, 1861 (courtesy of Library of Congress)

As we commemorate the opening shots of the Civil War, here is an interesting snapshot from the minutes of the Virginia Convention. In this excerpt, the Convention President informs the delegates of Virginia Governor John Letcher's response to a communication from Francis Pickens, the Governor of South Carolina. Pickens had asked Letcher what Virginia was planning to do in response to the opening of hostilities.  The telegram is also interesting for the confident description of the state of affairs in Charleston Harbor.

COMMUNICATION FROM THE GOVERNOR

The PRESIDENT laid before the Convention the following communication:

EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT,

April 13th, 1861.

Gentlemen of the Convention:
Since your adjournment this morning, I have received another despatch from his Excellency, Gov. Pickens, which is herewith communicated. I consider it a duty to communicate any despatch that may be sent to me by the Governor of a State. In reply to the enquiry with which the despatch closes, I have replied, "The Convention now in session will determine what Virginia will do."

Respectfully, JOHN LETCHER.


CHARLESTON, S. C., April 13th, 1861.

To Governor Letcher:

Received your despatch. It is true that Fort Sumter was bombarded all day yesterday, after refusing to evacuate, and four vessels were off the bar with troops and supplies waiting for the tide to come in, and the Fort was in signal with them.

President Lincoln sent a special messenger, and informed me in writing that supplies would be put in, but asked no reply. Not a man at our batteries was hurt even. The Fort was furious in its fire on us. Our iron battery did great damage to the Fort in the south wall. Our shells fall freely in the Fort; it is not known exactly with what effect, but supposed to be serious, as they are not firing this morning. Our Enfield battery dismounted three of the large Columbiads. We will take the Fort and can keep sixteen ten-inch mortars all the time on it, besides heavy guns which will give no peace, night or day. We can sink the fleet if they attempt to enter the channel. If they land elsewhere we can whip them. I have here, now, nearly seven thousand of the best troops in the world, and a reserve of ten thousand on our railroads. The war is commenced, and we will triumph or perish. This is my answer to you. Please let me know what Virginia will do, as I telegraph to you candidly.

 F. W. PICKENS.

The events that unfolded in the wake of Ft. Sumter helped to propel Virginia towards secession.  Only a few days later -- on April 17 -- Pickens would have his answer when the Convention voted to leave the Union.

President Wilson: Looking at the South Through Rose-Colored Glasses

The other day Eric Wittenberg at Rantings of a Civil War Historian posted an insightful article from Time discussing slavery as the root cause of the Civil War, and how some Americans have tried to obscure this fact.  The article mentions that President Woodrow Wilson's book, A History of the American People, was "tinged with Lost Cause interpretations."  I decided to dig a little deeper and took my 1900 copy of another Wilson book, Division and Reunion: 1829-1889, off the shelf.  Wilson wrote this book when he was still a professor at Princeton University.  There is a lot there to discuss, but as we prepare to commemorate the start of the Civil War, I thought I'd share a few passages with readers that reveal a lot about how Wilson wanted Americans to remember the origins of the war and the secession of the Southern states.

It is no secret that Wilson, born before the war in Staunton, Virginia, held a romanticized view of the American South and the so-called fight against Yankee aggression.  Wilson spent his childhood in Virginia and Georgia.  His father, the Rev. Joseph Wilson, defended slavery from the pulpit and served as a chaplain in the Confederate Army.  Surely this upbringing played a part in forming Wilson's views.  As President, Wilson was far from enlightened on issues of race.  He oversaw segregation in the federal government and even screened D.W. Griffith's infamous film, The Birth of a Nation, at the White House.

Division and Reunion, Wilson's one-volume contribution to the three-volume Epochs of American History series, concentrates on events from the election of Andrew Jackson to end of Reconstruction and the establishment of a "New Union."  Wilson dedicates an entire part of the book to "The Slavery Question."  In this regard, Wilson did not go as far as some Lost Causers and deny the role slavery played in precipitating Civil War.  However, many of Wilson's views towards slavery go by the playbook.  Describing the "Conditions of Slave Life," Wilson remarked:

Slavery showed at its worst where it was most seen by observers from the North,—upon its edges. In the border States slaves were constantly either escaping or attempting escape, and being pursued and recaptured, and a quite rigorous treatment of them seemed necessary. There was a slave mart even in the District of Columbia itself, where Congress sat and northern members observed. But in the heart of the South conditions were different, were more normal. Domestic slaves were almost uniformly dealt with indulgently and even affectionately by their masters. Among those masters who had the sensibility and breeding of gentlemen, the dignity and responsibility of ownership were apt to produce a noble and gracious type of manhood, and relationships really patriarchal. . . .  "Field hands" on the ordinary plantation came constantly under their master's eye, were comfortably quartered, and were kept from overwork both by their own laziness and by the slack discipline to which they were subjected. They were often commanded in brutal language, but they were not often compelled to obey by brutal treatment. (pp. 125-26)

Discussing the climate of Northern hostility towards the South around the time of Lincoln's election, Wilson wants the reader to feel almost sorry for the slaveholding class:

The agitation against slavery had spoken in every quarter the harshest moral censures of slavery and the slaveholders. The whole course of the South had been described as one of systematic iniquity; southern society had been represented as built upon a wilful sin; the southern people had been held up to the world as those who deliberately despised the most righteous commands of religion. They knew that they did not deserve such reprobation. They knew that their lives were honorable, their relations with their slaves humane, their responsibility for the existence of slavery among them remote. (pp. 208-09)

These types of passages demonstrate the Wilson was all too willing to downplay the evil of slavery, almost forty years after emancipation.  This view inverts the victim and victimizer, and sets up a construct to portray the South as justified in leaving the Union and taking up arms against a North set to destroy the Southern way of life.

President Woodrow Wilson (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Not surprisingly, Wilson finds a way to make secession look legally and morally acceptable.  He argues that the doctrine had longstanding roots going back to the start of the Republic, and that the South had stood firmly on principle in choosing to leave the Union, even if the rest of the country disagreed:

The legal theory upon which this startling and extraordinary series of steps was taken was one which would hardly have been questioned in the early of the government, whatever resistance might then have been offered to its practical execution. It was for long found difficult to deny that a State could withdraw from the federal arrangement, as she might have declined to enter it. But constitutions are not mere legal documents: they are the skeleton frame of a living organism; and in this case the course of events had nationalized the government once deemed confederate. . . . The South had not changed her ideas from the first, because she had not changed her condition. She had not experienced, except in a very slight degree, the economic forces which had created the great Northwest and nationalized the rest of the country; for they had been shut out from her life by slavery. . . .  There had been nothing active on the part of the South in this process. She had stood still while the rest of the country had undergone profound changes; and, standing still, she retained the old principles which had once been universal. Both she and her principles, it turned out, had been caught at last in the great national drift, and were to be overwhelmed. Her slender economic resources were no match for the mighty strength of the nation with which she had fallen out of sympathy. (pp. 211-12)

In some ways, it may seem strange to us that a highly educated professor at one of the nation's top universities -- and a future U.S. President -- espoused such a historical interpretation of slavery and secession. But America at that time had a long way to go before the Lost Cause school of thought fell into general disfavor, and Wilson was not exceptional in his views.

Was This Really America?

I recently finished Daniel Sutherland's excellent book, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War.  If anyone out there still has a romanticized view of the Civil War, this book is sure to cure them of that misconception.  Sutherland details the pervasiveness of guerrilla warfare during the war.  Although many guerrilla bands served a military function, by mid-war, numerous gangs of outlaws also roamed the Southern countryside.  Near anarchy and senseless violence descended on many communities.  Even farming became dangerous, as guerrillas robbed and attacked men out working their fields.  And traveling from one city or town to another must surely have been a risky and frightening proposition.  The Union Army reacted predictably by using increasingly harsh tactics to deal with the guerrillas and the civilian populations that were suspected of supporting them.  Commanders ordered summary executions, had property seized, and banished families.

"Guerrilla Depredations -- 'Your Money or Your Life!,'" Harper's Weekly, Dec. 24, 1864 (courtesy of sonofthesouth.net)

All of this got me to thinking about the way we remember the Civil War in light of recent military history.  How many of us have sometimes thought of our Civil War as different from the multitude of  "civil wars" that have plagued other countries in modern times?  Lawless guerrillas and the deaths of innocent civilians are somehow contemporary Latin American or African  problems.  Surely, FARC, machete-wielding fighters, the contras, civilian casualties, or right-wing paramilitaries are a world away from the glories of Civil War battlefields and those Kurtz & Allison lithographs?  We all know that when our boys in blue or gray weren't giving water to dying enemy soldiers, they were exchanging coffee, newspapers, tobacco, and jokes with the other side.  Sutherland's book makes you think twice. Our Civil War was every bit as brutal and unrestrained as the civil wars of recent times.  We shouldn't expect any less when a fratricidal conflict unleashes passions and pent-up frustrations on both sides.  Somehow we may like to think we are different.  But the nature of civil war knows no boundaries.

The April 4, 1861 Vote on Secession: Prince William County Stands Alone

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Virginia Convention's first vote on secession.  During the proceedings on April 4, 1861, Lewis Harvie, the delegate from Amelia County, proposed the adoption of an ordinance of secession.  The Convention was not yet ready to pull the trigger on leaving the Union and defeated the motion by a vote of 90 to 45.  The Northern Virginia delegates voted as follows:

Yeas
Eppa Hunton, Prince William

Nays
George Brent, Alexandria
John Quincy Marr, Fauquier
Robert Scott, Fauquier
John Carter, Loudoun
John Janney, Loudoun
*William Dulany of Fairfax was absent, but Brent indicated that Dulany would have noted "no."

The Virginia State Capitol (courtesy of Civil War Daily Gazette).  The Virginia Convention reconvened here on April 8, 1861 once the legislative session concluded.

Prince William County's delegate was alone among delegates from Northern Virginia in supporting secession.  This result should not be entirely surprising, since Eppa Hunton favored secession from the outset.  The moderate Unionists from other counties were still not convinced that preserving Virginia's honor demanded secession. 

The Library of Virginia has posted this great map superimposing the April 4 vote on top of an 1860 census map of Virginia indicating the state's slave population by county.  The Library points out that in general, delegates in favor of secession lived in those areas where slaves comprised a larger proportion of the general population.  Of course, as I indicated in a previous post on Brent, defending slavery did not necessarily equate with supporting secession.