Hidden History of Civil War Williamsburg

By Carson O. Hudson Jr.

Each year, thousands of visitors visit Colonial Williamsburg to learn about the past and walk where the Founding Fathers walked.

The fact that the same ground was later soaked with the tears and blood of their children and grandchildren during our tragic Civil War is frequently forgotten. In this expanded and revised version of Yankees in the Streets: Forgotten People and Stories of Civil War Williamsburg, local historian Carson Hudson tells the stories of this hallowed ground and the people who walked it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781439667088

Carson O. Hudson Jr.

Carson Hudson has been passionate about history since he was a young boy growing up in Virginia, surrounded by Civil War battlefields. He is a practicing military and social historian, author, Emmy Award-winning screenwriter and circus fire-eater. He lectures regularly at museums and colleges on a wide variety of subjects, but his particular interests are the Civil War and colonial witchcraft. He performs regularly as part of the old-time music duo Hudson & Clark and with the Cigar Box String Band.

Book preview

2018

PROLOGUE

The sun rose bright into a cloudless sky on the morning of May 6, 1862. The last twenty-four hours had been filled with a constant rain, so the warmth of the sun drying everything out was a welcome sight. Mockingbirds appeared and sang out in the woods and fields. Unfortunately, around the old town of Williamsburg, there were many who could no longer enjoy the heat of the sun or the music of a bird. The Battle of Williamsburg had taken place the day before, and there were thousands of dead and wounded soldiers from both the North and the South scattered around the town.

Williamsburg, along with the rest of Virginia, had joined the Southern Confederacy the year before. Now, a Federal army (under General George B. McClellan) was on the Virginia Peninsula attempting to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond and end the rebellion. Unfortunately, Williamsburg stood in the way of the Federal advance. With a battle fought just to the east of town, the inhabitants were getting a close look at what war really meant.

The entire town seemed to be a hospital. Overrun with sick Confederate soldiers in the preceding months, Williamsburg’s residents had already converted their churches into hospitals to accommodate those who could not be treated at the two military hospitals located at the Female Academy and the College of William & Mary at either end of the mile-long main street, which was officially called the Duke of Gloucester Street; however, in the nineteenth century, many inhabitants of the town just called it the main street.

Now, every public building in town became a hospital for the wounded. When that proved inadequate, people opened their private homes, and wounded soldiers were even placed in the open on the public greens. The wounded were everywhere.

With the departure of the Confederate army, Williamsburg also became a town of women, old men and young boys. And with the arrival of Federal troops, the female population of the town had much to say about the current state of affairs. Cynthia B.T. Coleman, residing at the home of her late father, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, on the town’s central green, wrote about the appearance of the invaders as she watched them march up the main street:

First in line comes the Artillery as fresh to all appearances and richly comparisoned as though no battle had been fought, no cannon taken the day before. Then follows the infantry in one unbroken line of twenty-eight Regiments with bands of music playing Dixie, Yankee Doodle, Hail Columbia and John Brown’s Body. They pass on up the Duke of Gloucester St. which in its time has echoed to the tramp of Hessians, English, French, Continental troops, felt the noiseless foot-fall of the stealthy Indian. The Cavalry possess themselves of the Palace Green covered with its golden shower of buttercups. Supply wagons camp upon the Courthouse Green. Indignant faces look out from behind closed blinds upon the desecration, as they feel it to be, of their beautiful old town.

Twenty-three-year-old Harriette Cary was even more emphatic in her hatred of the North, writing:

The repudiated Stars and Stripes are now waving over our Town, and humiliated I feel, we bow our heads to Yankee despotism. God grant our Southern Patriots may soon relieve us of this degrading yoke.

Union soldier Alfred Bellard, of the Fifth New Jersey Infantry, wrote of an encounter with one of Williamsburg’s female patriots as his regiments passed through the town:

We marched through the city, with bands playing and colors flying much to the disgust of the secesh women, one of whom said that she wished we would never get back.

Most of the Federal troops didn’t stay very long. They marched straight through the town in pursuit of the retreating Confederates. Within a month, they would be outside of Richmond and engaged in heavy fighting.

Some Federal troops remained, however, and with the establishment of a Federal provost marshal in town, the city came under martial law. Williamsburg’s white females now went out of their ways to irritate their conquerors. Captain Henry Blake of the Eleventh Massachusetts Infantry remembered:

The women…took advantage of the uniform courtesy of the ‘Yankees’, whom they despised and hated.… They compressed their dresses whenever they met an officer or enlisted man, so that the garments would not touch the persons they passed. They pulled their hats over their faces to preclude scrutiny. But these precautions were useless, for their cadaverous features and lank forms were sometimes seen; and all were satisfied that the Southern beauties about whom so much has been written did not reside in Williamsburg.

Thus began one of the darkest and most traumatic periods for the old colonial capital. It would last for more than three years. Throughout that time, the town’s inhabitants would labor under what they considered to be a foreign occupation. Federal troops, in turn, would struggle with the resistant townspeople, Confederate guerrilla raids and the slavery question. The events and daily happenings of this tragic period would affect Williamsburg until well into the twentieth century.

SECESSION

With the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, seven states of the Deep South, led by South Carolina, decided to leave the Union. By April of the next year, they had formed a government in Montgomery, Alabama, and created a new nation, the Confederate States. Although most Virginians sympathized with their sister states to the south, moderates in the Old Dominion initially kept her from joining the new Confederacy. Several prominent Virginians, among them ex-president John Tyler, attempted to calm the heated atmosphere by calling for a conference to peacefully resolve issues. On April 12, 1861, however, matters took a turn for the worse as Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.

When President Lincoln called upon the states to furnish seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the rebellion, Virginia’s governor, John Letcher, officially informed the president that

I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object -- an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution or the act of 1795 -- will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited towards the South.

Virginia governor John Letcher. Library of Congress.

The same day Governor Letcher replied to Lincoln’s request, a state convention voted 88 to 55 for a secession ordinance (subject to popular referendum). Southern nationalism had risen to such a point that Virginia was effectively out of the Union.

An inhabitant of Williamsburg, a young widow named Cynthia Beverly Tucker Washington, was in Richmond during the secession convention. She was the daughter of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, a noted jurist and professor of law at the College of William & Mary, and the granddaughter of St. George Tucker, who had served with George Washington at Yorktown.

Her father, a firm believer in states’ rights (and one of the foremost secessionist fire-eaters in the South before his death in 1851), had published a two-volume novel entitled The Partisan Leader in 1836. The book had foretold a civil war during which Virginia would be invaded by Federal troops.

Although Nathaniel Tucker had not lived to see the moment, his daughter found herself amidst the great events that would accomplish her father’s dream. Cynthia had traveled to Richmond to contract a new edition of her father’s work, and upon learning of Virginia’s decision to leave the Union, she immediately wrote to her young daughter in Williamsburg:

You never saw anything like the number of secession flags, they are flying from the tops of houses and from the windows too.…Tell Mrs. Sully that she must not forget to illuminate my room to-morrow night, for Virginia has gone out, and is a secession state—thank God.

In Williamsburg itself, the population watched the momentous events sweeping the country with great interest. Secession flags began to fly as early as December 1860, when South Carolina left the Union. Students at the College of William & Mary hung banners and flags from several buildings on campus until the college president, Benjamin Ewell, ordered their removal. Born in Washington, D.C., a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and the brother of future Confederate general Richard Ewell, President Ewell considered himself to be a Virginian but did not favor secession.

Cynthia Beverly Tucker as a young woman. In 1861, she married a Williamsburg neighbor, Confederate surgeon Charles Coleman. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (used with permission from Mrs. Robert S. Barlow).

The Wren Building of the College of William & Mary in 1856. This was the college’s main building. Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

However, after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the voters in the state referendum did not echo Ewell’s feelings. On May 23, 1861, the citizens of Williamsburg cast their votes 135 to 0 in favor of secession, joining their fellow Virginians in officially carrying their state out of the Union.

As the news spread, Virginia state flags and secession banners now appeared at the town’s newspaper office, then throughout the city. But amidst the waving of flags, there was serious work to be done. After refusing Lincoln’s call for volunteers, Governor Letcher had issued his own proclamation:

I, JOHN LETCHER, Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, have thought proper to order all armed volunteer regiments or companies within this State forthwith to hold themselves in readiness for immediate orders, and upon the reception of this proclamation to report to the Adjutant-General of the State their organization and numbers, and prepare themselves for efficient service. Such companies as are not armed and equipped will report that fact, that they may be properly supplied.

Around Williamsburg, men flocked to the new national flag, the Stars and Bars, and overnight, the old colonial capital city became a Confederate town. At the college, Benjamin Ewell watched as his students jubilantly decorated the college buildings once again with secession flags and banners. This time, however, he didn’t order the removal of the flags. Instead, he quietly offered his military services to the State of Virginia.

Military companies began forming, with many of the town’s men of military age joining the Williamsburg Junior Guard, the James City Artillery and the James City Cavalry, among others. Sallie Galt, the sister of Dr. John Minson Galt II, the superintendent of the Eastern State Lunatic Asylum, commented, I never saw anything equal to the uprising of the people, as one man they defend the ‘dear old Dominion.’ For those who were too young to don a uniform, there were other ways to help. Ten-year-old John S. Charles of Williamsburg later wrote of his experiences at this time. As an old man, Charles recalled that the Confederates had taken over a barn at the asylum and constructed therein additional stables and feed rooms. He remembered:

This was used to take care of the horses of soldiers who were absent from duty on account of sickness or other causes. The large number of horses kept there made it necessary to take them to the creek for water. This furnished great sport to many boys of the town (one of them was the writer) who were invited to take a horseback ride down to the College Landing, over a mile distant, three times daily for a long period. When this fine sport was broken up by the withdrawal of the Confederates in the spring of 1862, there was great lamentation among the boys of the town.

Benjamin Ewell was president of the College of William & Mary in 1861. He opposed secession but became a Confederate colonel when Virginia left the union. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

On July 4, 1861, the Richmond Enquirer made no reference to it being Independence Day but offered this letter from a resident of Williamsburg:

A word from Williamsburg, I am sure, will be welcome. This antique town—or perhaps I should say, this ancient city—is too intimately associated with the old revolution, too closely identified with Virginia’s first struggle for freedom, not to be a place of interest in this, the opening of another era of the times that try men’s souls. In the brave old days of ’76, Williamsburg was conspicuous as the theatre of stirring words and exciting scenes. And now, as then, the resolute tramp of men in arms, and the stern, determined mien of patriots enrolled for their victory or death, impart the true poetic charm of chivalric love of liberty to the old city and its surroundings. The College and the Court House have been converted into barracks- illustrative, you observe, of the maintenance by the sword, of the patriotism inculcated, and the laws enforced in times of peace.

In this, the most sublime struggle for the principles of liberty the world has ever witnessed, the peninsula between the York River and the James, seems destined to be again the scene of most important acts in the bloody drama of revolution…

The old revolutionary redoubts at Yorktown are again in use. Who would have thought it? What dreamer would have dreamed it? The first revolution ended there. God grant the second may close as gloriously on the same sacred spot. We were fighting for liberty then; and we are enlisted in the same cause now. The issue is a mighty one- the prize is priceless- our men are brave- our women are watching with anxious eyes—our cause is just—God is with us, and our success is certain.

In the heady days