The American Revolution: The Race to the Dan (1781)

 

General Nathanael Greene

The legendary “Race to the Dan”, was one of the most dramatic episodes of the American Revolutionary War.

 In December of 1780, the British Army under the command of Lord Charles Cornwallis was on the verge of victory in the Southern theater of war. Cornwallis had captured Charleston and had destroyed an American army at the Battle of Camden (South Carolina). 

General Washington sent the able General Nathanael Greene to North Carolina to retrieve the situation. Although outnumbered, Greene was both aggressive and smart, as he fought a guerilla campaign against the British.

On December 21, 1780, Greene sent General Daniel Morgan, a Virginian, into South Carolina with one wing of his army to harry the enemy. Morgan set a clever trap.

He allowed the British under Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton to pursue his force until out of range of Cornwallis’ main army. He then turned and decisively defeated Tarleton at the Battle of Cowpens.

Morgan utterly smashed Tarleton’s force and retreated north into North Carolina with huge numbers of prisoners as well as much needed weapons and supplies.

General Greene re-united the two wings of his army in North Carolina as an enraged Lord Charles Cornwallis set out after the Americans with the bulk of his forces, intent on recapturing the prisoners taken by Daniel Morgan and smashing the Americans for good.

Greene’s objective now was to keep his smaller army out of the reach of the British.

The Dan River, was a significant natural barrier near the boundary of North Carolina and Virginia. If the Americans could reach the Dan, they could prevent the British from crossing.

The “Race for the Dan” was on.

The Americans pushed the prisoners forward as rapidly as possible. The British burned their slow moving supply wagons and pursued with remarkable speed, sometimes being only a few hours behind the Americans. Both sides were playing for high stakes.

On February 14, 1781, the American army reached Boyd’s Ferry on the Dan River.   Anticipating the arrival of General Greene’s army, a flotilla of small boats had been assembled to carry men, supplies and cannon to safety. When the British arrived, they could only look with frustration at the impassable river.

Treasure Legends of Virginia

Westover Plantation in the American Revolution

William Byrd III

 

Charles City County - Westover Plantation: At the time of the Revolution this was the home of William Byrd III. Byrd inherited a large fortune which he turned into a very small fortune, through his lavish lifestyle and addiction to gambling. On July 6, 1774, Byrd made his will, disposing of an estate that “thro’ my own folly and inattention to accounts the carelessness of some entrusted with the management thereof and the villainy of others, is still greatly encumbered with debts which embitters every moment of my life.”

   Byrd deplored the “frantic patriotism” sweeping Virginia and urged moderation and continued loyalty to the king. On July 30, 1775, he wrote offering his service to the king. In November 1775, however, he changed his mind after Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to slaves who ran away and joined the fight against the Virginia revolutionaries.

   This was too much for Byrd, who now sought appointment as colonel of the 3^rd Virginia Regiment. This came to nothing, as did his attempt to persuade the Continental Congress to appoint him as a Major General. In early January 1777, the embittered Byrd killed himself at Westover.

   During Benedict Arnold’s 1781 raid on Richmond, the British made Westover their base of operations for a week. William Byrd’s widow, Mary Willing Byrd, was a cousin of Benedict Arnold’s wife, Peggy Shippen.

Treasure Legends of Virginia

Virginia's Civil War Ghosts

 

   Do ghosts from the American Civil War still walk amongst us, or are reported spectral visions and unearthly things that go bump in the night the product of over active imaginations?  Virginia experienced twenty-six major battles and four hundred smaller engagements on her soil during the course of the war, giving ample opportunity for the creation of disgruntled spirits among those who died in battle.

   The Spotsylvania battlefield is one place that the ghosts of Civil War soldiers appear.  A fierce battle raged around Spotsylvania Court House on and off from May 8 through May 21, 1864.  Over four thousand soldiers were killed.  The Bloody Angle was the site of the longest, most savage hand-to-hand combat of the Civil War.  In recent years, American Battlefield Ghost Hunters Society has investigated paranormal activity around the Bloody Angle, often sprinkling the area with pieces of beef jerky and chewing tobacco, which would have been luxuries at the time of the Civil War, to lure the spirits of dead soldiers to the spot.  The group claims to have recorded the sounds cannonballs and musket fire, and has photographed misty figures said to be ghosts.

   The Manassas Battlefield, in Prince William County, is also home to a number of Civil War spirits.  During the Second Battle of Manassas, in 1862, the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry [Zouaves] sustained devastating losses.  One veteran wrote, “Where the Regiment stood that day was the very vortex of Hell.  Not only were men wounded, or killed, but they were riddled.”  One of the dead may still haunt the area.  A phantom Zouave soldier has been seen repeatedly on the battlefield’s New York Avenue Field.  The phantom beckons the onlooker to follow him into the woods.  To date, no one has taken the ghost up on the offer.

    Near the New York Avenue Field, a structure known as the old Stone House is also said to be haunted.  Originally a tavern, the house served as a field hospital during both the battles of First (1861) and Second (1862) Manassas.  Strange lights have been seen in the house at night, although it is locked every night by park rangers.  Strange sounds, like screams and groans are also said to come from the house.

   The Cold Harbor Battlefield in Hanover County is said to top the list of haunted battlefields in Virginia.  Here in 1864, thousands of Union troops were killed as wave after wave of men were repeatedly thrown in frontal assaults against fortified Confederate positions.  Today, some visitors claim to have felt the thunder of artillery and to have smelled burned gunpowder while exploring the battlefield.  Once again, the shouts and cries of unseen combatants echo through the woods.  Visitors report the sudden appearance of a dense fog on the battlefield, which just as quickly disappears.  The ghostly fog has driven away many who seek the safety of their cars, even as they hear unearthly footsteps behind them and sense unseen eyes upon them.

   Hauntings are also reported in buildings used during the Civil War as hospital.  One house in Brandy Station, Culpeper County, was used as a hospital after the Battle of Brandy Station (June 9, 1863).  The patients scrawled their names and other thoughts on the walls, thus the house is now known as the Graffiti House.  So troubling were the ongoing ghostly occurrences at the Graffiti House that the Virginia Paranormal Institute was called in to conduct an investigation.  One investigator felt an unseen force tightening around her wrist.  Another person saw a picture frame move on its own.  The team’s electrical instruments raced out of control.

   Another Civil War hospital of long standing was set up in Gordonsville, Orange County.     Gordonsville Virginia’s Exchange Hotel opened in 1860 and provided an elegant stopping place for passengers on the Virginia Central Railway.  In March, 1862 the Confederate army transformed the hotel into the Gordonsville Receiving Hospital.  Dr. B.M Lebby of South Carolina was the director of the hospital and its operations continued under his leadership until October 1865.

   The wounded and dying from nearby battlefields such as Cedar Mountain, Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, and the Wilderness were brought to Gordonsville by the trainloads. Although this was primarily a Confederate facility, the hospital treated the wounded from both sides. By the end of the war, more than 70,000 men had been treated at the Gordonsville Receiving Hospital and over 700 were buried on its surrounding grounds and later interred at Maplewood Cemetery in Gordonsville.

   The Exchange Hotel Civil War Medical Museum, as the structure is known today, has experienced more than one ghostly occurrence.  Screams and groans are heard, doors close on their own and eerie orbs appear suddenly in rooms.  Some have claimed they have encountered nurses, garbed in black, wandering the halls.

 Treasure Legends of the Civil War

1. Virginia Legends and Lore 

Virginia, the Birthplace of American Slavery

An 18th Century Slave Cabin in Northern Virginia

The population of England rose from three million in 1500 to four-and-one half million in 1650 without any corresponding growth in the capacity of the island’s economy to support the people. Colonization efforts were, among other things, an effort to alleviate demographic pressures in England.

At first, Virginia absorbed the new immigrants and appeared to be successfully creating a New World community on the English model. An emerging planter class, speculating in land, however, constrained access to good land in Virginia by the many.

The development of slavery in Virginia set the pattern for the development of slavery throughout the South and laid the foundations for the development of race relations in America.

In the late summer of 1619 a storm beaten Dutch ship (possibly a pirate ship) appeared in the harbor at Jamestown.  The ship had nothing to trade except twenty Africans recently taken from a Spanish vessel.  An exchange for food was made and the Dutch ship sailed away.  It is not clear if the Africans were considered slaves or indentured servants by the English settlers. There was no precedence in England for enslaving a class of people for life and making that status inevitable.  It is clear, however, that by 1640, at least one African had been declared a slave. This African was ordered by the court "to serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere."

Although blacks were held in hereditary servitude long before Virginia laws specifically recognized slavery, a large number of Virginia’s blacks worked as servants for a limited term or otherwise earned their freedom just like whites.  White and black servants worked together in the fields, shared the same punishments, the same food, and the same living quarters.  The most remarkable evidence of a racially open society comes from the records of Northampton County.  These records indicate that some twenty nine per cent of the county’s blacks were free and that a least two of these, Francis Payne and Anthony Johnson were planters (Johnson even becoming a slave owner himself). 

During the second half of the 17th century, the British economy improved and the supply of British indentured servants declined as poor Britons had better economic opportunities at home.  To lure cheap labor to America, terms of indentures became fixed and shorter.  By the 1670s Virginia had a large number of restless and relatively poor white men (most of them former indentured servants) threatening the established order of the wealthy and propertied.  A popular revolt in 1676, the so called Bacon’s Rebellion, led Virginia planters to begin importing black slaves in large numbers in preference to the more expensive and politically restive white indentured servants. 

The increasingly high price of free labor was incompatible with the profitable running of plantations. The landowners turned to slave labor, encouraging the first massive introduction of slaves from Africa in 1698.  The new labor force was more controllable because blacks, as a group, were not normally thought to be naturally guaranteed the “rights of Englishmen” accorded to white freemen.  In short, the system was to be based purely on force, and Virginia’s laws soon reflected this.

The need for long term forcible control of a large slave population (some 40% of the population of Virginia by the late 1700s) was an unintended consequence of short term decisions made by many individual for their own immediate economic gain.  From sometime ambivalent views about dark-skinned people held by Virginia’s whites, racism quickly developed as a buttress to the economic institution of slavery.

Hidden History of Northern Virginia

Read about the Rebel blockade of the Potomac River, the imprisonment of German POWs at super-secret Fort Hunt during World War II and the building of the Pentagon on the same site and in the same configuration as Civil War, era Fort Runyon. Meet Annandale's "bunny man," who inspired one of the country's wildest and scariest urban legends; learn about the slaves in Alexandria's notorious slave pens; and witness suffragists being dragged from the White House lawn and imprisoned in the Occoquan workhouse. 

Secrets of Early America 1607-1816

These are the often overlooked stories of early America. Stories such as the roots of racism in America, famous murders that rocked the colonies, the scandalous doings of some of the most famous of the Founding Fathers, the first Emancipation Proclamation that got revoked, and stories of several notorious generals who have been swept under history’s rug.

Shoes! Shoes! Shoes! Prada Shoes!

John Brown at Harpers Ferry: Psychology and History

John Brown

The culminating event of the 1850s was John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. To white Virginians, Brown’s raid was emblematic of an evil outside influence trying to disrupt the harmony enjoyed by Virginia’s white and African American communities.

“ Not a Slave Insurrection!”, proclaimed an editorial in the Alexandria Gazette,

“ The recent outbreak at Harper’s Ferry was, in no sense, an insurrection. The slaves had no part nor lot in the matter, except in so far as some of them were forced to take part ….There were five free negroes engaged in the affair, but not a single slave! And even the free negroes thus engaged were not Virginia free negroes”

Two days later, the editor of the Alexandria Gazette elaborated on his claim that the Brown raid was not an insurrection. The editor asked, “What single feature or circumstance characterized it as an ‘insurrection’?” After pointing out that “abolition invaders” found not “one single abettor or sympathizer in the State”, the editor pointed out that to call John Brown’s raid an insurrection disguised the enormous truth, “that Virginia has been invaded…actually, deliberately, and systematically invaded…by an organized band of miscreants, white and black, from Free States, under the lead of a Kansas desperado, at the instigation and appointment of influential and wealthy Northern Abolitionists!”

The sense of being surrounded by enemies, without and within, had become so intense that even white Virginians could be held under suspicion.   In October 1859 T.H. Stillwell of Alexandria while in some in conversation with some gentlemen on the subject of the Harper’s Ferry incident , “…expressed sentiments denunciatory of Southern institutions and people, and of a seditious nature, for which a peace warrant was issued for his arrest at the instance of the Commonwealth’s Attorney”.  Stillwell was required to post a bond of $500 to keep the peace.

In 1959, Stanley M. Elkins’ Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life compared slavery in the United States to the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps.  Elkins delved into the psychology of slavery and soon found himself challenged by most other historians who found his conclusions too simplistic.   Elkins did however raise an important issue, the importance of taking individual and group psychology into account when analyzing historical events. Actions are informed by values.  These values are manifestations of personal psychology.  It is, therefore, important to appreciate the forces at work on both individual and group psychology to understand what motivates action in a society.  A need for a sense of economic well-being and moral legitimacy, coupled with fears of internal violence and external incursions had tremendous psychological impacts on antebellum Virginia which manifested themselves in concrete responses by Virginians towards both slaves and Northerners.

Abolitionist by aiding slave escapes were carrying on what amounted to psychological warfare against slaveholders.  Abolitionists believed that by assisting escapes they would render “property in slaves…so insecure that it would hasten emancipation.” Writings of the time indicate that slaveholders were very vulnerable to this type of psychological warfare, especially regarding the issue of runaway slaves.  Ultimately the psychological tensions produced by the internal contradictions of slavery as it faced both economic modernization and hostile outside forces found catharsis in secession and war, a war which cost 600,000 lives (six million lives today if the number of dead is calculated as a percentage of population). 

Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Civil War

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in the Civil War. The book covers courtship, marriage, birth control and pregnancy, divorce, slavery and the impact of the war on social customs.

The Great Northern Rebellion of 1860 (alternate history)

In 1860, disgruntled secessionists in the deep North rebel against the central government and plunge America into Civil War. Will the Kingdom survive? The land will run red with blood before peace comes again.

Gifts for Dogs and Dog Lovers

The First Civil War Peace Jubilee

President Taft addresses the Peace Jubilee

On July 21, 1911, the town of Manassas, Virginia hosted a Peace Jubilee to mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil War's first great battle. George Carr Round, a Union veteran who settled in Manassas, is credited with organizing this gesture of reconciliation.

According to a contemporary account, “The Peace Jubilee, when a northern President, William Howard Taft, and a southern Governor, William H. Mann, of Virginia, shook hands during the exercises, like the 1,000 veterans of blue and gray present, symbolized the cementing of the two sections.”  This was the first time in history when survivors of a great battle met fifty years after and exchanged friendly greetings at the place of actual combat.

At noon on July 21, the 50^th anniversary of the Battle of Manassas, the veterans moved to the top of Henry Hill. When the signal was given, the veterans marched forward with hands outstretched.  For five minutes they shook hands.  The day was capped off by an address by President Taft. 

According to Major Archibald Butt, President Taft’s military aide, once at the Peace Jubilee the President gave, “…a flub dub speech about the Blue and Gray which brought tears to the eyes of the veterans of both sides and smiles to the faces of politicians.  Every politician has a canned speech up his sleeve for these reunions, and while they all smile while someone else makes them, yet they take themselves most seriously when making them themselves.”

                                                   

Wars and Invasions (Four alternative history stories)

General George S. Patton once said, “Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.” Here are four stories about the history of the world IF wars we know about happened differently or IF wars that never happened actually took place.

Virginia's Civil War Generals

Civil War historian Don Hakenson gives insights into Virginia's greatest Civil War generals.

Time Travel 21 - Your portal to the Past, Present, and Future

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Marriage in Early America

The first permanent English colony in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia on May 14, 1607 by the Virginia Company of London. The party consisted of 104 men who came to America not to settle but to become rich. Within a short time it became apparent to the colony’s sponsors that their great venture in the New World was in danger of being wrecked, “…on the shoals of dissolute, irresponsible, manhood.” It was not until the fall of 1608 that “the first gentlewoman and woman-servant” arrived. The gentlewoman was already married to colonist Thomas Forrest; the servant, Ann Burrus, would soon marry John Laydon, the first marriage to be solemnized in Virginia. More women crossed the Atlantic to Virginia and Maryland in the next several years, but they remained relatively few in number. By 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, petitioning that wives as well as husbands be eligible for grants of free land, argued that in a new colony, “it is not known whether man or woman be the most necessary.”

The Virginia Company’s London recruiters began searching for women of marriageable age, offering free passage to Virginia and trousseaus for girls of good reputation. New husbands reimbursed the company with 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco when they married. The first shipment of ninety “tobacco brides” arrived in Jamestown in the spring of 1620. The youngest was Jane Dier, aged fifteen. The oldest was Alice Burges, aged twenty-eight.

Some over eager British merchants, hired to provide the colonies with wives simply kidnapped any young woman who came to hand. In October 1618, a warrant was issued for one Owen Evans, who was kidnapping young women from their villages and sending them off to be sold in Virginia as indentured servants. As time went on, most of the single women who came to the Chesapeake Bay colonies voluntarily sold themselves as indentured servants. They re-paid the cost of their passage with a term of four or five years in service. At the end, the women were supposed to receive food, clothing, and tools to give them a start in life, then emerge into a world filled with wife-hungry young men and take their pick.


 

Link to: Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America

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Civilian Life in the Civil War

CIVIL WAR CIVILIAN LIFE: MANASSAS, VIRGINIA 

Alexandria and Northern Virginia were the first areas to feel the fury of the Civil War. The New York Herald war correspondent observed, “Many hamlets and towns have been destroyed during the war, Alexandria has most suffered. It has been in the uninterrupted possession of the Federals. . . . Alexandria is filled with ruined people; they walk as strangers through their ancient streets, and their property is no longer theirs to possess. . . . these things ensued, as the natural results of civil war; and one’s sympathies were everywhere enlisted for the poor, the exiled, and the bereaved.”

Part 1


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Part 3



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