Edwin Washington Project

EWP 14 2013 About Joseph Rivers Union Spy

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EWP 14 2013 About Joseph Rivers Union Spy

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About Joseph Rivers, a Union spy. by Scott Thompson, B.A. A Thesis In History Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

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Oatlands, Joseph Rivers, Union Spy

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Virginia

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1007479

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1007479_EWP_Joseph_Rivers_Spy_Pg_61Thesis.pdf

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2024-01-07

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Loudoun County Public Schools

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English

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Their Homes were in the Enemy’s Lines: Loyalty, Military Occupation, and Irregular
Warfare in a Northern Virginia Border County, 1861-1865

by
Scott Thompson, B.A.
A Thesis
In
History
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Tech University in
Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
Master of Arts
Approved
Dr. Barton Myers
Chair of Committee
Dr. Gretchen Adams

Dr. Barbara Hahn

Dominick Casadonte
Interim Dean of the Graduate School

August, 2013

Copyright 2013, Scott Thompson

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to many who have helped me complete this project. Though I
have used tremendous amounts of intellectual energy and spent countless hours
researching and writing, completing this thesis would not have been possible without
those who have assisted me along the way. I thank the Texas Tech University
Department of History for providing me with much-needed funding for my research
trip to Virginia and Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2012. I extend my gratitude
to Loudoun County archivists/historians John M. and Bronwen C. Souders for letting
me borrow and make copies of their private collection of diaries. I appreciate the help
of the archivists at the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg, Virginia, the National
Archives in Washington, D.C, and the Museum of the Confederacy in the former
Confederate capitol of Richmond. Their essential help enabled me to adequately
capture the voices of my subjects.
I could not have asked for a better graduate advisor/committee chair to help
guide me through the beginning, course, and completion of this thesis. Dr. Barton
Myers made sure that I had found a topic during my first semester here at TTU and
that I had completed and defended my proposal by my second semester. His written
guide for how to write a good thesis/dissertation proposal serves as the perfect model
of its kind. Even before I decided that I wanted to write my thesis on loyalty, military
occupation, and irregular warfare in Loudoun County, Virginia, he pointed me to and
navigated me through various Civil War subfields in order to help me figure out how
to ground my project in a scholarship whose massive number of works could fill an
entire library. He gave me helpful advice on how to conduct a research trip. Myers’
critical comments regarding my arguments, methodology, sources, and writing style
have made me a much better historian, scholar, and writer over the last two years. I
thank him for setting aside great amounts of time in his busy schedule to talk with me
about my latest progress and any questions I had. I hope to build on the skills Myers
has taught me in my future work. I would also like to thank fellow graduate student
and Army Ranger historian James Sandy for reading over an earlier draft of Chapter
ii

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
III. I would also like to express my gratitude to other committee members Dr.
Gretchen Adams and Dr. Barbara Hahn for their critical comments on the project and
for their decision to work with me.
In addition to those who directly helped me produce this work, I also deeply
thank the individuals who provided me with encouragement and advice during the
stressful yet rewarding life of a graduate student trying to write a thesis while also
doing course work and grading exams and papers. The friends and colleagues here at
Tech who have helped me in this way include Bennett Kimbell, Lorin Scott, Caitlin
Guard, Amber Batura, Amanda Lancaster, James Sandy, Jenny Burns, and Tiffany
González. The emotional support of old undergraduate friends also made this thesis
possible: Chelsea McNerney, Victoria Miranda, Kristy Garry, Deann Lawrence, Jess
Gagliardi, Gabby Aragon, and Kat Wilson. Finally, I am grateful for the support of my
parents Janet and Rod Thompson, my brother David Thompson, my grandmother
Mary Ulrich, my uncles Mike Qaissaunee and Paul Salerno, and my aunts Lau
Qaissaunee and Beth Salerno. Much of the credit for my ability to endure the grueling
work that went into writing this thesis goes to my parents, who instilled thrift and
industry in me at a young age. I could not be happier that my successes in college and
graduate school have made my family and friends extremely proud.

iii

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ii

I. INTRODUCTION

1

II. HOW LONG WILL SUCH TYRANNY AND ANARCHY PREVAIL?: THE
UNIONIST AND SECESSIONIST CIVILIANS OF LOUDOUN COUNTY 13
III. MORE LIKE A SLAUGHTER PEN: THE IRREGULAR WAR IN
LOUDOUN COUNTY

73

IV. EPILOGUE: RECONSTRUCTION LOUDOUN COUNTY

131

BIBLIOGRAPHY

152

iv

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Shortly before 3 a.m. on August 27, 1862, Captain Elijah V. White, with
twenty of his Loudoun County Confederate irregulars, twenty-six regular Confederate
soldiers, and six civilian pilots, galloped to the village of Waterford. Sometime earlier,
a group of Waterford’s secessionist civilians, in an effort to rid their neighborhood of
enemy soldiers who wanted to crush their government’s struggle for southern
independence and who would harm their person and property, had informed White’s
company about an encampment of the Loudoun County Independent Rangers, a Union
irregular unit, in the town. An unidentified slave arrived at the Rangers’ camp and
informed the commanding officer that this Rebel force was riding in the direction of
the camp, but he gave no weight to the information. 1
Several hours later, the regular Confederates evaded the Yankee pickets,
surrounded the camp, and caught the attention of the Rangers, of whom twenty-three
were present. In response, Lieutenant Luther W. Slater formed a battle line. Hidden
behind buildings and vegetation, the Confederates were hardly visible to the Rangers.
When Slater demanded that they identify themselves, they fired their carbines,
wounding a proportion of the line, including Slater in several places. The Rangers
answered with carbine fire of their own, before they fell back to the inside of a nearby
Baptist church. Slater continued to command the Rangers while bleeding from his
wounds on the church floor. When he began to undergo significant blood loss, he
transferred command to drillmaster Charles A. Webster. White’s irregulars then
arrived to the scene, dismounted, and fired through the church’s walls and windows.
Private Briscoe Goodhart recalls how “the Rangers returned the fire as vigorously as
circumstances would permit,” despite many laying “around in the church pews
weltering in their blood, making the place look more like a slaughter pen than a house
of worship.” Amidst this gruesome ordeal, the Rangers could hear their wounded
1

John W. Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, ed. Melvin L. Steadman, Jr.
(Annandale: Turnpike Press, 1967), 11.

1

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
crying for water. The Confederates used the house of secessionist Lydia A. Virts,
located across the street from the church, as a cover from which they fired on the
Rangers. Virts delivered two flags of truce to the Rangers, both of which they refused.
The depletion of his force’s ammunition convinced Webster to accept the third offer of
surrender, the conditions of which were immediate parole with the officers retaining
their side arms. 2
The unionist Quaker citizens of Waterford, who depended on the Loudoun
Rangers to liberate them from Confederate persecution and to help restore the Union,
nursed the wounded Federals. As soon as White’s force departed, physician Thomas
Bond and other villagers proceeded to the church to gather the wounded. P. S.
Chalmers treated Private Henry Dixon until his death. The Duttons’ cared for Private
Edward Jacobs, who would later be discharged for his injuries. Lieutenant Slater
received treatment from three residences. He first went to carpenter William
Densmore’s home for one week, after which farm manager George Alders cared for
him for three weeks. Ten of Alders’ neighbors then attached a pole on each side of his
rocking chair, “in which position they carried him to his father’s residence, near
Taylortown.” After two weeks, Slater was removed to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
where he finished his recovery. 3
This episode of a small, bloody engagement between two irregular units whose
soldiers enlisted from the same area and received aid from loyal civilians living in the
midst of two warring armies occurred in Civil War-era Loudoun County, Virginia.
Scholars have, for the most part, neglected Loudoun in their numerous histories of the
conflict. Other works treat events in the county as mere examples in broader studies of
various aspects of the Civil War, but in no piece of scholarship yet produced has

2

Briscoe Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers. U.S. Vol. Cav. (Scouts)
1862-65 (Washington, D.C.: Press of McGill & Wallace, 1896), 33-34; Ibid., 11, 25; Frank M. Myers,
The Comanches: A History of White’s Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, Laurel Brig., Hampton Div., A.N.V.,
C.S.A. (Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co., Publishers, 1871), 99; D. S. Miles to Halleck, August 27, 1862, O.
R., Volume 12, Part 3, 705.
3
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 35-36; John E. Divine, The Virginia
Regimental Histories Series: 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry (Lynchburg: H. E. Howard, Inc, 1985), 9.

2

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Loudoun been the sole geographic area of study and in no work has the county’s
ordeals in the war been the sole focus. Since concentrating on this particular county
provides insights into multiple themes related to the Civil War that cannot be covered
in a more extensive work, a complete and thorough community study concentrating on
Loudoun is warranted. Loudoun and the surrounding area constituted an important
area during the war. Situated on the Potomac River, the county bordered the Union
state of Maryland, while also near the District of Columbia, the Blue Ridge
Mountains, Harper’s Ferry, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and what would become
West Virginia. As such, in addition to being a county within a Confederate state,
Loudoun was in the vicinity of two Union border states and two rival national
governments. Due to Loudoun’s unique location, the Union and Confederate armies
frequently crossed through and occupied the county during operations. Also, the
county was home to a civilian population divided between those who supported the
Confederacy and those who cast their lot with the Union. A number of these unionists
and secessionists formed irregular military units which fought numerous skirmishes
with each other. Each of these elements comprising the Loudoun County Civil War
experience plays a part in expanding the Civil War field’s understanding of how
civilians and soldiers endured irregular war and military occupation in a borderland
and how these combatants and non-combatants constructed and expressed loyalties.
Located farther north than Washington, D. C., Civil War-era Loudoun County
encompassed twenty-three towns and villages. The Blue Ridge Mountains constitutes
the county’s entire western border with West Virginia, and the Potomac River
separates northern and northeastern Loudoun from Maryland. Across from the
county’s southern-most boundary is Fauquier and Prince William Counties, while
Fairfax County shares a border with southeastern Loudoun. The northernmost
settlements were Taylorstown and Lovettsville, both of which were a couple miles
from the Potomac River. A road extending south from Lovettsville is Wheatland and
Waterford. In northwestern Loudoun is the Short Hill Mountain ridge. A narrow piece
of land called “Between the Hills” separates the Short Hill from the Blue Ridge.
3

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Within the area between the two mountain formations are the towns of Hillsboro and
Neersville. In central Loudoun, extending west to east is Snicker’s Gap, Round Hill,
Purcellville, Goose Creek, Hamilton, and the county seat of Leesburg. Between
Leesburg and Fairfax County is the Alexandria, Loudoun, and Hampshire Railroad,
along which is Farmwell Station and Guilford Station. Cutting across northern
Loudoun to just above Leesburg and east of Waterford is the Catoctin Mountains.
Southwestern Loudoun consists of Bloomfield, Philomont, Union (also called
Unison), and Mountville. Aldie and Gum Spring can be found in southeastern
Loudoun. Upperville, Rector’s Crossroads, and Middleburg fall along the LoudounFauquier border. 4
This work makes numerous contributions to Civil War scholarship. It is a
community study that employs the methodology of microhistory. 5 This is a work of
military, political, and social history that will engage five major, often overlapping
areas of Civil War historiography: Virginia, borderlands, loyalty, the civilian
experience, and irregular warfare. It asks various questions regarding the importance
of Loudoun County in the overall war and in Civil War historiography. Where does
this study of Loudoun fit within Virginia’s overall Civil War experience and in the
wider Virginia historiography? How does the border county of Loudoun compare with
the border states? Why did some southerners support and fight for the Confederacy,
while others maintained an allegiance to and fought for the Union? What forms did
4

Map in Stevan F. Meserve, The Civil War in Loudoun County, Virginia: A History of Hard Times
(Charleston and London: The History Press, 2008), 10; inside cover of Margaret Ann Vogstberger, The
Dulanys of Welbourne: A Family in Mosby’s Confederacy (Berryville: Rockbridge Publishing
Company, 1995).
5
Various definitions of “microhistory” are discussed in Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much:
Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (June 2001): 129144; Richard Brown, “Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge,” Journal of the Early Republic 23,
no. 1 (April 2003): 1-20. Lepore defined “microhistory” as a methodology in which an “individual’s life
serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole,” with detective work and the
use of slim records. Among Brown’s descriptions is “the exhaustive investigation of a particular locality
over an extended period of time” and of a subject in a way that “the microhistorian commands the
evidence on that subject beyond challenge.” While some American microhistorians examine a single
event, individual, or group of people as a window into a larger culture, phenomenon, or military
conflict, this work joins those scholars who take the community study approach, which focuses on a
small geographic region for the purpose of exploring larger issues and questions. In particular, this
project uses Loudoun County to explore broad questions related to the Civil War.

4

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
these loyalties take? What impact did these loyalties have on the war? How did Union
and Confederate policies towards Loudoun’s civilian men and women compare with
those of the rest of Virginia and the South? What does Loudoun’s civilian experience
say about Union and Confederate civilian policy in general? Why is Loudoun County
important in the study of small, irregular conflicts and the phenomenon of irregular
warfare in general?
Loudoun County experienced divided loyalties among its residents,
occupations by conventional and unconventional military forces that passed through it,
and irregular warfare among locally-raised military units. These constitute five themes
studied by Civil War historians in recent decades that help us learn that there was
much more occurring during the Civil War than its battles and campaigns among
conventional troops and commanders. Civilians, rather than being detached, often
witnessed the war up, close, and personal; southern loyalties in the war were divided
and complex, not unified and only for the Confederacy; and, for many combatants,
military service was less formal and more personal than that of the masses of regular
blue and gray soldiers who clashed in epic engagements and who make the war so
popular in the American imagination. Since all five themes can be seen in a single
county and a small geographic area, a study of Loudoun is essential. Loudoun County
mirrors the larger worlds of the state and section in which it resided. As such, this
work places Loudoun County’s wartime experiences in the context of the rest of
Virginia, the border states, and the Confederate South.
Both of this works’ chapters engage the scholarship on Civil War Virginia and
address Virginia from the vantage point of Loudoun County. William Blair’s
Virginia’s Private War analyzes Campbell, Albemarle, and Augusta Counties, arguing
that Virginians were ideologically devoted to the Confederate cause through a
Confederate Virginian identity, under which they fought for both the Confederacy and
their homes. 6 Secessionist Loudouners also formed a local Confederate identity
6

William Blair, Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

5

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
whereby they fought for their single county, in addition to their new republic and their
state. Meanwhile, Loudoun’s unionists formulated a rival Union version of this
identity, a type of loyalty Civil War Virginia historians have ignored.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean studies enlisted Virginian soldiers and their families
during the war in Why Confederates Fought. He devotes attention to why white
Virginians fought for the Confederacy, arguing that they fought for their families,
localities, region, state, country, and for slavery; as the war developed in its
destructiveness and the Union pursued emancipation, this patriotism intensified and
became more refined. Loudoun County constitutes a place in which one can see each
of those loyalties among unionist and Confederate soldiers and civilians on a local
level. This thesis also engages the Virginia at War series, five volumes of essay
collections highlighting the Old Dominion as the central theater of the Civil War and
the Civil War as a central feature of Virginian life. They devote attention to the
transformative experience of the civilian population in the state and to war-time
Virginian culture, in addition to the military and political events, for each year that it
was a member of the Confederate States of America. This work presents a new
account of “Virginia at war” by analyzing the four themes of loyalty, civilian
experience, borderlands, and irregular warfare as they played themselves out in one of
Virginia’s counties. 7
Throughout the Virginia scholarship, Loudoun is barely or briefly mentioned;
the main focus has been on Confederate Virginia as a whole. While unionists receive
attention in these works, they constitute parts of discussions of the secession crisis’
unionists, West Virginians, or passive unionists in other Virginian counties, the last of
which refers to those who remained loyal to the Union but never militarily resisted the
7

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); William C. Davis and James I Robertson, Jr. ed.,
Virginia at War, 1861 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005); William C. Davis and James I
Robertson, Jr. ed., Virginia at War, 1862 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); William C.
Davis and James I Robertson, Jr. ed., Virginia at War, 1863 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2009); William C. Davis and James I Robertson, Jr. ed., Virginia at War, 1864 (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2009); William C. Davis and James I Robertson, Jr. ed., Virginia at War, 1865
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

6

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Confederacy. Thus, these scholars are ignoring a militant unionist population in a
northern tip of the state. Moreover, the Battle of Ball’s Bluff and John S. Mosby’s
irregular war are the only military activities in Loudoun to receive substantial attention
in the Virginia historiography. 8 The findings of this thesis reflect the above scholars’
accounts of the general Virginian civilian experience, namely, that they suffered the
destruction and theft of their property at the hands of invading or occupying armies.
Yet, this work departs from the Civil War Virginia scholarship in that it studies how
unionist Virginians, in particular, experienced and responded to military occupation
and examines three other irregular units from the state that are neglected by historians.
It is therefore the task of this thesis to tell an aspect of Virginia’s story through
Loudoun. Such a work on Loudoun County is needed as a new addition to the Virginia
scholarship because of the contributions this work makes in each of the themes of
loyalty, the civilian experience, borderlands, and irregular warfare. This thesis’
particular contributions to the scholarship of these four themes are covered in the
following chapters.
While other local borderlands existed and the phenomena of divided loyalties,
military occupation, and irregular warfare can be seen throughout the Civil War South,
the case of Loudoun County reveals new forms of each. Loudoun is the only locality
in which a divided community of unionists and secessionists formed their own rival
partisan military units. These commands, in turn, shed light on how sentimental ties to
one’s home county could motivate men to fight in a small, independent company
detached from the regular army. Though Loudouners of both sides killed each other in
this service, the unionist and secessionist civilians who never enlisted conducted
relatively peaceful relations with each other, which contrasted with violent relations in
other southern counties. Loudoun’s military occupation is also unique in that the
8

Byron Farwell, Ball’s Bluff: A Small Battle and Its Long Shadow (McLean: EMP Publications, 1990);
Virgil C. Jones, Ranger Mosby (Chapel Hill, 1944); Kevin H. Siepel, Rebel: The Life and Times of John
Singleton Mosby (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983); Jeffry D. Wert, Mosby’s Rangers: The True
Adventures of the Most Famous Command of the Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster
Paperbacks, 1990); Hugh C. Keen and Horace Mewborn, 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry: Mosby’s
Command (Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, 1993); James A. Ramage, Gray Ghost: The Life of Col. John
Singleton Mosby (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999).

7

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
county was situated on a section of the Union-Confederate border forty miles away
from the U.S. capital and one hundred twenty miles from the Confederate capital.
Loudoun was in closer proximity to the seats of the two national governments than the
borderlands of Kentucky and Missouri. Thus, military forces that crossed through the
county were on their way to battlefields strategically important for each government.
Using the totality of these circumstances and events as evidence, this piece of
Civil War history argues that the war in Loudoun County was both a microcosm of the
larger war and its own separate, unique local conflict. Loudoun constituted a
microcosm because acute elements of the Civil War seen throughout the South—
divided loyalties, military occupation, borderlands, and irregular warfare—collectively
characterized the county’s experience. Like Virginia as a whole, Loudoun was split
between a region whose residents wanted their geographic area to rejoin the Union and
a region whose residents embraced the Confederacy. The moderate politics of most
antebellum Loudouners resembled the border states of Kentucky and Missouri. Also,
the antislavery views of the county’s unionist minority reflect those of northern
abolitionists. Meanwhile, the lack of civilian violence in the county and the particular
nature of Loudouners’ allegiances, which combine localism and ideology, separate
Loudoun County from the rest of the Civil War South. As will be seen in the coming
chapters, while each of the thematic topics have vast fields of scholarship, a small
geographic area in northern Virginia adds to all of them. It is this combination of
significant similarities and illuminating differences between Loudoun County and the
overall war that makes this project an important contribution to Civil War
historiography.
Loudoun was home to a population torn over which side to support during the
military conflict. It was a county divided between a unionist minority confined to its
northern towns and villages and a secessionist majority that resided in the county’s
group of southern towns and villages. Though pro-Union and pro-Confederate citizens
lived throughout the county, the communities in the northern part of the county
comprised a unionist stronghold and the communities located in southern Loudoun
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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
constituted a secessionist bastion. Those in both camps subscribed to a loyalty based
on ideology, race, religion, and ethnicity. White unionist Loudouners believed that the
federal government should have supremacy over the states comprising the compact
called the Union; secessionists adhered to the notion that states could freely depart
from this compact. The geographic layout of Loudoun County’s allegiances resulted
from eighteenth century migration patterns. Nonslaveholding farmers from
Pennsylvania settled in northern Loudoun, while English slaveholders migrated to
southern Loudoun. The descendants of these two groups continued this pattern of
slaveownership. Loyalists, living in an area populated with nonslaveholding farmers
or farmers who held a small number of slaves, tended to oppose slavery. African
American unionist Loudouners, both slaves and free blacks, supported the Union war
effort’s emancipationist component and sought to topple the republic whose leaders
owned members of their race as property. Loudoun’s slaves tried to free themselves
from bondage by running across the Potomac border to freedom. The pro-Confederate
Loudouners, who included a tiny population of both small and large slaveholders,
tended to support the peculiar institution and feared the Union army’s threat to it.
Members of the Society of Friends overwhelmingly sided with the Union for religious
reasons. White Loudouners descending from a German and Scots-Irish migration in
the eighteenth century supported the United States, while most of those who could
trace their lineage to the English settlement of the previous century held an allegiance
to the Confederate States.
Although no major battles took place in Loudoun, due to the county’s location
within a Confederate state bordering two Union states and including the Confederate
capital, it was a hotly-contested county between the Union and Confederate armies.
Loudoun was one of the first areas the Union army needed to enter when it invaded
Virginia. Likewise, whenever the Confederate army launched an invasion of the
North, Loudoun was one of the last areas through which it crossed before entering
U.S. territory. As a result, Loudoun’s unionists and secessionists lived under a military
occupation for four years. Loudoun County constituted a “no man’s land,” an area
9

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
over which neither side possessed complete control. By “control,” this thesis refers to
the ability of either the Union or Confederate armies to maintain a presence in the
county without or with little resistance from forces of the opposing side. Through such
control, either side could thereby extend the territory over which its respective
government had authority and oppress civilian supporters of the enemy republic. For
most of the war, the Union and Confederate armies jointly occupied Loudoun,
temporarily garrisoning towns and crossing through farmland, either on scouts or
along the way to large battlefields in Pennsylvania, Maryland, or central Virginia.
Troops from both sides frequently entered towns one after the other and clashed with
each other. Out of military necessity or as punishment for supporting the other
republic, civilians endured foraging raids, voter suppression, arrest, imprisonment,
assault, and conscription. Also during the occupation, Loudouners fled to Maryland to
escape oppression. They expressed their loyalty when they published a pro-Union
newspaper, waved flags, and cheered for, fed, and nursed soldiers of the republic they
supported. The local circumstances in which Loudouners lived added a new
component to their loyalties. They opposed either the Union or Confederacy for
putting themselves, neighbors, and families in danger. Likewise, they supported the
country that defended them and their communities from persecution.
To defend their local area from enemy invasion and occupation, a number of
Loudouners enlisted in one of three unconventional military units. A group of
unionists formed the Loudoun Rangers and a portion of the secessionists enlisted in
Elijah White’s Thirty-fifth Cavalry Battalion and John Mobberly’s guerrilla band.
Using the tactics of hit-and-run attacks, scouts, and ambushes behind enemy lines and
along the Potomac River border area, the Federal and Confederate irregulars fought
for their respective republics through defending their local area, to which they had a
sentimental attachment. They loved living in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains
and next to the Potomac River. These soldiers served in independent units possessing
the freedom to fight only in and around Loudoun and objected to fighting anywhere

10

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
else. When their government threatened to end or limit their local, independent
borderland service, they angrily protested and/or mutinied.
Loudoun County’s irregular warfare had three different, distinct types:
“guerrillas,” “partisans,” and “regular cavalry raiders.” The first term refers to
disorganized, armed groups of civilians or soldiers lacking any connection to or
control by the regular army of the side for which they fought. The second term
encompasses organized, mostly independent irregular companies or battalions not
connected to a regiment or brigade and subject to special orders from their government
and regular army. Partisans were, like regular troops, formally mustered into their
units, wore uniforms, received military pay, and officially represented a government.
Yet, they fought with guerrilla tactics. The third type of irregular was composed of
conventional cavalry soldiers from a regiment or brigade who occasionally left their
units for raids in which they enacted irregular tactics. The Loudoun Rangers consisted
of partisans. Elijah White’s Thirty-fifth Virginia began as a partisan command in 1862
and switched to the regular cavalry raider type in 1863. A group of Elijah White’s
partisans formed John Mobberly’s guerrilla band after they, with the White’s
authorization, broke off of the battalion to fight their own irregular war. Being home
to a local civil war involving such types of units, Loudoun represents a unique area in
the Civil War South; here was a place where if a civilian sought take up arms in
defense of the country he supported, he joined an official unit. The irregular war in
and around Loudoun will be put into the context of similar wars throughout the Civil
War South and border states.
This work utilizes a wide range of sources. A large collection of diaries, letters,
and postwar reminiscences capture the thoughts, worries, joys, and hardships of
Loudoun County’s unionist and secessionist civilian population as it endured four
years of war. Another set of documents that describe the civilian experience is the
records of the Southern Claims Commission (SCC). A federal government body that,
in the 1870s, reimbursed southern unionists for property damaged and destroyed by
the Union army, the SCC extensively details the depredations both armies inflicted on
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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Loudoun’s unionists. 9 Local newspapers help shed light on the political situation in
the county in the lead up to the war. Though only one irregular soldier wrote a diary
and just a single soldier letter can be found, the troops of the Loudoun Rangers and
White’s Cavalry thoroughly narrated their military service and combat motivations in
postwar unit histories. 10 A widow’s pension record and a short memoir supplement
this work’s account of the county’s irregular war. The population, slave, and
agricultural schedules of the 1860 federal census enabled the author to construct
socioeconomic profiles of Loudoun’s civilians and soldiers. In addition to this wealth
of primary sources, a rich source is the scholarship of Loudoun’s local historians.
This work’s chapters are divided thematically. The first chapter analyzes
Loudoun’s loyalties and the experience of its civilians; the second chapter examines
the county’s irregular war. The Virginian, borderlands, and southern contexts
permeate throughout both chapters. Each spans the period from the late antebellum
years to the end of the war in 1865. Though they examine the same chronological
period, they each look at Loudoun’s Civil War experience from a different vantage
point. Concluding the work is an epilogue discussing Loudoun during Reconstruction.
For both the secessionists and the unionists of Loudoun County, the Civil War
brought economic hardship, harassment, bloodshed, tyranny, anarchy, and acts of
kindness. As Loudoun became a war zone, civil government collapsed, to be replaced
by martial law. Some reacted passively, hoping for the day when enemy soldiers
would leave them in peace. Others played a more active role in which they petitioned
their favored government for help or donned a uniform and violently resisted the
hostile government whose military intruded into their homes, neighborhoods, and
communities. Regardless of their chosen side or particular role in the war, for four
years, the people of Loudoun County found themselves caught up in a national
struggle that, for them, also became a local conflict.
9

Gary B. Mills, Southern Loyalists in the Civil War: The Southern Claims Commission (Baltimore:
Clearfield, 1994), viii-ix.
10
Frank M. Myers Diary; John Stephenson to Brother, October 22, 1864, John Stephenson Service
Record, 8, NARA, www.fold3.com.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013

CHAPTER II
HOW LONG WILL SUCH TYRANNY AND ANARCHY
PREVAIL?: THE UNIONIST AND SECESSIONIST CIVILIANS
OF LOUDOUN COUNTY
During the summer of 1863, the Union army arrested Loudoun County
secessionists Henry Ball and Campbell Belt for refusing to take an oath of allegiance
to the United States and imprisoned them at Fort Delaware. According to Ball and
Belt, the U.S. government was one “to whom they owed none, and which was
incapable of protecting them in it if they did.” In retaliation, Confederate Secretary of
War James Seddon ordered Elijah White and his cavalry battalion to arrest two
unionists from the same county. White’s party chose Quakers William Williams and
Robert Hollingsworth, sent them to Richmond’s Libby Prison, and declared they
would be incarcerated there until U.S. authorities released Ball and Belt. White’s
soldiers attempted to capture Asa Bond as well, but Asa’s daughters Laura Bond and
Rachel Means struck them with broomsticks, rolling pins, and clubs. Means then “ran
to her residence…got her revolver, and fired two shots, when the terrified rebels fled
in confusion” and abandoned the effort. Though the Federals and the Confederates
eventually released their respective hostages, these four men underwent punishment
for the crime of supporting one of two warring republics while living in a borderland
between both. Meanwhile, the two women took matters into their own hands to resist
the oppression that such a borderland brought to its residents. 1
Such an episode illustrates the divided loyalties among and wartime
experiences of the civilians of Loudoun County, Virginia, during the American Civil
War. The term “loyalty” in the case of Loudoun County generally refers to citizens’

1

Frank M. Myers, The Comanches: A History of White’s Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, Laurel Brig.,
Hampton Div., A.N.V., C.S.A. (Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co., Publishers, 1871), 220; Memoir of
William Williams, 1888 (unpublished); Briscoe Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia
Rangers. U.S. Vol. Cav. (Scouts) 1862-65 (Washington, D.C.: Press of McGill & Wallace, 1896), 130;
Baltimore Yearly Meeting, fall 1862, quoted in Samuel M. Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, Late
of Lincoln, Loudoun County, VA, A Minister in the Religious Society of Friends (Philadelphia: Friend’s
Book Association, 1890), 205, 207.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
support for either the United States or the Confederate States and a desire for their
chosen side to win the war. Unionists wanted the Federal army to crush the rebellion
and preserve the Union; secessionists longed for the Confederacy to win its
independence. This chapter borrows Thomas G. Dyer’s definition of disloyalty: when
southerners were loyal to one side, they were also disloyal to the opposing side.
Loudoun’s unionists possessed a disloyalty to the Confederacy; for the county’s
secessionists, disloyalty took the form of opposing the Union. These Loudouners
endured continuous military occupation as both armies crossed through the county on
their way to larger battlefields or to suppress disloyal sentiment. 2
By examining the allegiances, the expressions of these allegiances, and the
general experiences of Loudoun’s civilian population, this chapter will engage the
historiography on southern unionism, secessionism, the southern civilian experience,
and Civil War military occupation. This study of Loudoun County’s divided loyalties
joins that of other scholars who have focused on political, class, and localism-based
loyalties in community studies: Philip Paludan, Jonathan Sarris, Victoria Bynum,
Martin Crawford, John Shaffer, Judkin Browning, and Thomas G. Dyer. Loudoun
County’s Civil War loyalties both reflected and contrasted with those of the various
regions of the Civil War South studied by other historians. Ideology rooted in prewar
political, religious, and economic developments determined Loudoun loyalties. The
unionists and secessionists in the county subscribed to the constitutional form of
loyalty that James McPherson locates among Union and Confederate soldiers. The
unionists’ antislavery views and the proslavery sentiments of the secessionists
resemble Chandra Manning’s argument that Civil War soldiers identified slavery as
the central issue of the war from its beginning. However, as in the Appalachians and
Jones County, Mississippi, concerns about their safety and that of their neighbors and
communities also shaped Loudouners’ loyalties. After they chose to support one of the
two rival republics, the actions of soldiers in their neighborhoods reinforced their

2

Thomas G. Dyer, Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta (Baltimore and London:
John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 268.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
political allegiances. Thus, while historians identify either localism or ideology as the
nature of Civil War loyalties, the civilians of Loudoun County subscribed to an
allegiance that mixed both. 3
A recent trend in the occupation literature views the Civil War in a way that
refutes the earlier historiographical notion that it became a “total war” comparable to
3

Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1981); Jonathan Dean Sarris, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain
South (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006). Victoria Bynum, The Free
State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina
Press, 2001); Victoria Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and its Legacies
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War
(Charlottesville and London: University Press of London, 2001); John Shaffer, Clash of Loyalties: A
Border County in the Civil War (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2003); Judkin
Browning, Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Ibid. Paludan analyzes western North Carolina, a divided
area in which a mixture of race and class determined loyalties. Using the northern Georgia counties of
Fannin and Lumpkin, Jonathan Sarris contends that it was predominantly local issues, such as
community safety, that determined who fought for either the United States or Confederate States during
the Civil War. In Victoria Bynum’s study of Jones County, Mississippi, nonslaveholding people, many
of whom had supported secession or even enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861, became unionists
because of disaffection with the Confederacy over its policies. Bynum details how Jones County’s
unionists concluded that their new country’s conscription policy and crack-down on deserters would
remove farmers needed to produce food, was coercive, and exempted wealthy slaveholders, causing
them to resent and violently resist the Confederate government for harming their local area. Crawford
studies the soldiers and families encompassing a Confederate majority and unionist minority in Ashe
County, North Carolina. Like Loudoun, Ashe County had a geographical unionist stronghold: the North
Fork district. Unionist families had Tennessee roots; Confederate families were Virginian. Shaffer’s
Clash of Loyalties looks at Barbour County, located between the unionist and secessionist areas of West
Virginia and almost evenly divided in allegiances. Browning’s Shifting Loyalties traces loyalties in
Craven and Carteret Counties in southeastern North Carolina, which moved from conditional unionism
after Lincoln’s election, secessionism following Lincoln’s call for troops, support for the U.S. during
Union military occupation, and then finally back to pro-Confederate sentiments in response to Union
policies that elevated the position of blacks. Thomas Dyer’s Secret Yankees provides insights into Civil
War loyalty and disloyalty by documenting the experiences of a small unionist circle in Atlanta during
the war as they committed treason and suffered persecution. He asserts that abstract patriotism
motivated loyalties, pointing out that Atlanta unionists clung to U.S. patriotism and that Atlanta
Confederates replaced loyalty to the Union with a new Confederate patriotism. Dyer adds complexity to
loyalty by showing that, in Atlanta, religion and patriotism fused and self-interest and multitudes of
personalities often determined which side one supported. James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades:
Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Federal
soldiers fought to preserve the Union. They believed that the rebellion threatened to destroy the Union’s
republican experiment and what they viewed as the best government that ever existed. Confederate
soldiers fought for the independence of their new republic in order to protect southern liberty from
northern oppression. Confederates also served to defend their homeland from Union invasion. Chandra
Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage
Books, 2007). According to Manning, Union soldiers thought that slavery violated the Union’s
experiment in republican liberty and self-government. The Confederates held the North’s antislavery
agenda to be destructive to the South’s way life.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
the horrors of the twentieth century’s conflicts, a view with which this work concurs.
This chapter’s findings on Loudoun’s war experience reflect those of Noel Harrison’s
work on the other northern Virginian counties of Fairfax and Alexandria, namely, that
the Union and Confederate armies harassed civilians and damaged their property in
the first full year of the war. Throughout the war, both armies conducted what Mark
Grimsley identified as a pragmatic civilian policy, which involved whatever actions
were deemed necessary to win the war, protecting friendly civilians, and punishing
enemy civilians. This chapter reveals that Loudoun County constituted what Stephen
V. Ash referred to as a “no man’s land,” an area in the occupied South over which
neither side possessed complete control. By “control,” this chapter refers to the ability
of either the Union or Confederate armies to maintain a presence in the county without
or with little resistance from forces of the opposing side. Through such control, either
side could thereby extend the territory over which its respective government had
authority and oppress civilian supporters of the enemy republic. For most of the war,
the Union and Confederate armies jointly occupied Loudoun County, temporarily
garrisoning towns and crossing through farmland, either on scouts or along the way to
large battlefields in Pennsylvania, Maryland, or central Virginia. Troops from both
sides frequently entered towns one after the other and clashed with each other. 4
4

Wayne Wei-Sang Hsieh, “Total War and the American Civil War Reconsidered: The End of an
Outdated ‘Master Narrative,’” The Journal of the Civil War Era, Volume 1, Number 3, September
2011, 394-408; Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern
Civilians, 1861-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Mark E. Neely, The Civil War
and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007). Noel Harrison,
“Atop an Anvil: The Civilians’ War in Fairfax and Alexandria Counties, April 1961-April 1862,” in
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 106, No. 2, 1998, 133-164; Stephen V. Ash,
When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Wayne Wei-Sang Hsieh’s article challenges the
“total war” interpretation, pointing out that the evidence for this is scant. Mark Grimsley argues that
Union policy evolved in three stages: conciliatory, pragmatic, and hard war. The first sought to protect
and compensate for Southerners’ property, while the second involved whichever actions were deemed
necessary to win battles, protected unionists and passive civilians, and punished secessionists. The third
stage constituted a policy under which the Union tried to demoralize Southerners through the
widespread, routine destruction of their resources and property. However, Grimsley maintains that the
Union continued to differentiate between the three groups of civilians and exercised restraint, opposing
the killing of civilians and thus disproving a twentieth century “total war.” Mark Neely argues that the
war’s destructiveness was constrained when compared to other nineteenth century conflicts that
witnessed racial antagonisms.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
This chapter argues that an ideological allegiance to one of the two republics,
localism, ethnicity, geographic location, and religion determined Loudoun’s loyalties
during the Civil War. The ethnic component refers to descendants of different
European groups tending to support one side. Geography’s influence on loyalty meant
that most unionists lived in one section of the county and that secessionists tended to
reside in another area in Loudoun. The religious aspect means that a particular
religious group overwhelmingly chose a single side. The most dominant elements of
Loudouners’ loyalties were ideology and local ties; the ethnic groups, the residents of
Loudoun’s different geographic areas, and the religious society that supported one of
the two governments each rooted their loyalties in these two elements.
The county both mirrored and differed from the South, the border states, and
Virginia in terms of voting behavior during the 1860 presidential election and
secession ordinance vote, as well as the existence of loyalty divisions. However,
Loudoun departed from the larger geography in which it was located in terms of the
degree it supported candidates and the level of violence between civilians of each
allegiance. From the time of Virginia’s secession until war’s end, pro-Union and proConfederate citizens expressed their allegiances, received punishments from the
opposing army for their loyalties, and lived in a borderland that both armies occupied
and over which neither had complete control. The civilians of both sides competed
with each other for political power in the county and endured pillaging from their own
army out of military necessity. This chapter will begin with a brief account of
antebellum politics, the 1860 election, and the secession crisis in Loudoun, before
exploring the tenets of Loudouners’ Civil War loyalties. The last section will trace
civilians’ various expressions of these loyalties over the entire course of the conflict
and examine the general ordeals of civilians on both sides as they lived through a war
zone for four years.
In the midst of the escalating sectional conflict over slavery during the 1850s,
late antebellum Loudoun County was a unionist and moderate Whig stronghold, even
after the disintegration of the national Whig Party in the second half of the 1850s.
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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
While the Democratic Party dominated Virginia state politics under and after the end
of the Second Party System, many Old Dominion Whigs joined the Know-Nothing
Party and maintained a minority of seats in the state legislature. Loudouners voted for
Whig candidates in every state and national election from the birth of the party in 1832
until 1860, a time period in which Virginia as a whole was a Democratic stronghold.
In the 1856 presidential election, Loudouners cast their ballots for Know-Nothing
Party candidate and favorite among former Whigs Millard Fillmore by a vote of 1,979
to 858. During the state and congressional elections of 1859, Whig candidates
received triple the number of Loudoun County votes as did Democratic candidates.
Celebrations among Leesburg’s Whigs in the wake of this electoral victory reached
such a level of jubilation that The Democratic Mirror told Democrats to be “a little
shy of” towns inhabited by the “Know-nothing-Whigs.” The Whigs of Virginia in
general and Loudoun in particular would later choose Constitutional Union Party
candidate John Bell in the 1860 presidential election. 5
Resembling the border states of Missouri and Kentucky, Loudoun County’s
residents denounced the two extremes of abolitionism and secessionism prior to the
war. Prewar Loudouners tended to be proslavery unionists; secessionism was confined
to a minority of Democrats. On February 22, 1850, Whigs and Democrats met at the
county courthouse in Leesburg to respond to conditions in the post-Mexican Cession
United States. They passed resolutions opposing the Wilmot Proviso, demanding that
fugitive slaves be returned to their owners, and proclaiming that, while the North had
mistreated the South by interfering with slavery, southern secession was unjustified.
W. S. Hough, the editor of the Whig newspaper The Loudoun Chronicle, denounced
those who condemned the Union, which was “the fountain…from which all of us
drink” and “the sacred and priceless jewel.” Hough advocated for the South’s
5

Charles Poland, Jr., From Frontier to Suburbia: Loudoun County, Virginia (Westminster, Maryland:
Heritage Books, 2005), 174; William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the
Second Party System, 1824-1861 (The University Press of Virginia, 1996), 284-285; Taylor M.
Chamberlin and John M Souders, Between Reb and Yank: A Civil War History of Northern Loudoun
County, Virginia (Jefferson and London: McFarland &Company, Inc, Publishers, 2011), 20; The
Democratic Mirror, June 8, 1859.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
economic independence from the North, supported the Fugitive Slave Act, and
opposed federal influence over the question of whether the western territories should
be slave or free. However, he contended that the U.S. would benefit if the fire-eaters
left the country. John Brown’s October 1859 insurrection, occurring merely one mile
from the northwest Loudoun border, convinced those in the northern Loudoun towns
of Hillsboro and Lovettsville to increase the size and arms of their militia forces and to
use them to patrol the Potomac border to protect the county from further abolitionist
invaders. In mid-November, local magistrate Charles F. Anderson ordered the creation
of a vigilance committee to prevent any future slave conspiracy. Headed by militia
captain Lewen Jones and consisting of fourteen farmers, the committee possessed the
authority “to visit any night within…north Loudoun County for 2 months all negro
quarters and other places suspected of having therein unlawful assemblies or such
slaves as may strole from one plantation to another without permission.” Despite these
developments and tensions, Loudoun’s moderate citizens held on to their identities as
unionist Whigs. While the abolitionism of Loudoun’s Quakers reflected that of
northerners, the county’s Friends, in contrast to northern Quakers who venerated
Brown as a martyr, considered Brown’s act to be a counterproductive instigator of
southern resistance. 6
A national crisis finally arrived with the 1860 presidential election. Like the
rest of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, Loudoun voted for the Constitutional
Union Party candidate John Bell, who won 2,037 votes in the county. 778 chose
southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge; northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas
picked up 120 votes from the county; and eleven Loudouners cast their ballots for
Abraham Lincoln. Loudoun’s Republican electorate resided in Purcellville and what
would be the county’s two wartime unionist strongholds, Waterford and Lovettsville.
6

Aaron Astor, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and
Missouri (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012); Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia,
168; The Loudoun Chronicle, August 31, 1849, December 21, 1849; The Democratic Mirror, October
26, 1859, November 9, 1859, January 11, 1860; Court Minute Book, v. 16, Loudoun County Court
Records; A. Glenn Crothers, Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern
Virginia, 1730-1865 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 242.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
While majorities in both Loudoun and Virginia voted for Bell, the county departed
from most of the state in that its support for the Constitutional Union ticket was
overwhelming; Bell narrowly captured Virginia as a whole, receiving 74,481 votes to
Breckinridge’s 74,325. 7
Despite Lincoln’s election, Loudoun County did not ride the Deep South’s
secession wave. On December 10, 1860, county residents held a meeting at the
Leesburg courthouse to respond to the possibility of disunion. A committee of nine,
chaired by John Janney, a prominent Whig politician who was one vote shy of being
William H. Harrison’s vice president in 1840, drafted a set of resolutions. Their
preamble claimed that Lincoln’s election threatened neither the Union nor the U.S.
Constitution due to the absence of any legislation that would warrant secession. The
resolutions called for the repeal of the North’s personal liberty laws and for Virginia to
reject secession unless the border states and the other southern states determined to
leave the Union as well. Meeting members approved the measures by a vote of 92 to
65. The one measure they rejected opposed the federal government using force to
prevent states from seceding, indirectly endorsing federal coercion to crush the
rebellion. 8
As the states of the Deep South began to secede and establish the Confederate
States of America in December 1860 and January 1861, the Virginia state legislature
called for the Old Dominion to hold a secession convention on January 14, with each
county sending delegates. The convention met in Richmond on February 13 and spent
two months debating Virginia’s most prudent course of action. Loudoun County’s
delegates were John A. Carter and John Janney, both unconditional unionist
politicians. Loudouners rejected secessionist candidate John R. Carter of Philomont.
The body elected Janney to serve as its president. After his election, Janney stated his
desire that the Union established by the founders be maintained and that the star
representing the Old Dominion always remain on the U.S. flag. Early in the
7
8

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 176.
The Democratic Mirror, December 12, 1860.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
convention, the delegates sought sectional reconciliation. On April 4, 1861, a majority
of the delegates, including Janney and Carter, defeated a motion for Virginia’s
secession, by a vote of 88 to 45. Reflecting the rest of the Upper South, the firing on
Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to crush the rebellion convinced
the delegates to pass an ordinance of secession in a secret session by a vote of 88 to 55
on April 17, 1861. Loudoun County’s two delegates were among those who voted
against the measure. The convention then sent the ordinance to the people as a
referendum on the ballot of the May 23, 1861, state election. On that date, Virginians
ratified the ordinance, bringing their state out of the Union and into the Confederacy. 9
Loudouners remained active back home during the convention’s meeting.
Shortly before the Fort Sumter attack, Loudoun’s secessionist minority conducted a
campaign promoting disunion. One group, including Hillsboro farmer James M.
Kilgore, held a meeting in Leesburg, the county seat, where secession sentiment
predominated. Attendees wrote a resolution encouraging the passage of the secession
ordinance. Loudoun’s pro-Confederate citizens celebrated the firing on Fort Sumter
and witnessed their numbers increase following the incident. As Briscoe Goodhart, a
soldier in the Union’s Loudoun Rangers, an independent cavalry unit recruited from
Loudoun’s unionist population, recalled, news of the attack “was followed by the
booming of cannon and the waving of Confederate banners, yelling and parading of
streets.” 10
The conditional unionist majority, opposed to both secessionism and federal
use of coercion against the seceded states, found Lincoln’s egregious use of force
against other southerners grounds for joining the secessionist wave. During the late
antebellum sectional tensions and most of secession crisis, Loudouners supported both
the Union’s preservation and the South’s right to defend itself against northern attacks
on slavery. However, with Lincoln’s decision to use military forces to crush the

9

The Democratic Mirror, January 30, 1861, February 13, 1861; Virginia Secession Convention,
February 13, 1861, April 4, 1861, April 17, 1861. http://collections.richmond.edu/secession/
10
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 11.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
rebellion, they needed to choose between preserving the national Union and joining
the Confederate South. As Loudoun County historian Charles P. Poland, Jr., noted
regarding the decision among most Loudouners to join the Confederacy, fighting
“against fellow Southerners was even more repugnant than the demise of the
Union.” 11
Meanwhile, the unconditional unionists of Loudoun looked on in horror at the
prospect of civil war and disunion. Waterford Quaker Rebecca Williams reacted to the
convention’s passage of the ordinance by thinking about “the deplorable condition of
our beloved country” and declaring that the prospect of war and “its horrors—
disruption of the Union” was “too terrible to think of.” Goodhart mentions an incident
in which secessionists seized unionist property before the state ratified the secession
ordinance in April 1861. The “galling yoke of secession was made…oppressive to the
Union citizens of Loudoun” when the Loudoun Cavalry, a militia unit, seized horses
and wagons from the county’s German and Quaker communities. 12
When the convention sent the ordinance to the people of Virginia for
ratification, Confederate soldiers and secessionist civilians intimidated those who
intended to vote against disunion. They warned unionists to abstain from voting. Many
complied; others risked personal harm by voting anyway. When one Leesburg man
voted “the Union ticket against secession” he “was treated to a bath in a mud hole.”
Other secessionists threw their unionist neighbors into the Potomac River. A number
of unionists including Benjamin V. Saunders of Leesburg folded under the coercion
and voted for the ordinance. As he stated after the war, “I was afraid that if I did not
vote I would be forced to leave my home and family.” Williams asked in response to
these conditions: “How long will such tyranny and anarchy prevail?” Both Williams
and Goodhart stated in their accounts that a large “number of citizens” escaped this

11

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 179.
Rebecca Williams Diary, April 25, 1861; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia
Rangers, 21-22.

12

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
persecution by fleeing the state, seeking refuge in Maryland. These conditions
intensified during the war. 13
Loudoun County overwhelmingly voted for secession, by a tally of 1,626 to
726, with only three of the fifteen precincts—the German and Quaker settlements of
Waterford, Lovettsville, and Waters—siding with the United States. In Leesburg, four
hundred voted for secession, while twenty-two rejected it. Merely three citizens in
Snickersville chose the Union, compared to one hundred fourteen who voted for the
ordinance. Four towns—Middleburg, Powells Shop, Union, and Whaleys—
unanimously approved the ordinance. The unconditional unionists in Waterford
outnumbered secessionists by a margin of two hundred twenty to thirty-one at the
polls. In Lovettsville, three hundred twenty-five rejected secession, while forty-six
approved of it. Thus, the secession crisis in Loudoun mirrored that of the rest of
Virginia and the Upper South: a secessionist minority emerged after Lincoln’s
election, and once Lincoln called for troops following the firing on Fort Sumter, a
majority of conditional unionists decided to secede. However, since voter intimidation
influenced at least a small portion of the election results, it will never be known how
many in each town truly supported and opposed Virginia’s secession. The towns that
rejected secession would become unionist strongholds during the war. 14
In Loudoun County, the civilians and soldiers who supported the Confederate
republic and those who maintained an allegiance to the United States each possessed
political and ideological loyalties. Briscoe Goodhart’s history/memoir of the Loudoun
Rangers discusses the convictions of Loudoun’s unionists, including their theory of
what the Union represented. They viewed the Union as a compact greater than the sum
of its parts; it was not a loose confederation of states. Each state constituted a
component of this compact, one which held supreme governing power over the states.
13

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 12-13; Benjamin V. Saunders (no.
21,591), Claims Disallowed by the Commissioner of Claims (Southern Claims Commission), NARA,
www.fold3.com; Rebecca Williams Diary, May 20, 1861.
14
The Democratic Mirror, May 29, 1861; Harrison Williams, Legends of Loudoun: An account of the
history and homes of a border county of Virginia’s Northern Neck (Richmond: Garrett and Massie,
1938), 199.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
States and individual citizens had no choice but “to render unfaltering allegiance to
that power.” The unionists of Loudoun saw the relationship between the federal
government and states as that of a parent and child. If a state sought to secede, it was
“the duty of the parent government to proceed with due solemnity and take the
rebellious State across the right knee and administer a spanking that would bring the
adventurous and misguided member back to full recognition of the authority of the
parent government.” Thus, the pro-Union population of Loudoun saw the Union war
effort as the parent government disciplining seceded states. Loyalists viewed the
Union as “the best government that ever existed” and the Confederates’ war against
that government as a “cruel and unjustifiable” attempt to “slay the goose that laid the
golden egg.” John W. Forsythe, another veteran of the Loudoun Rangers, attributed
his unionism to constitutional principles. As he declared in his memoir, “when the
question of secession became the leading subject of agitation and the ordinance of
secession was passed, I found myself adhering to the Constitution and Government of
the United States.” 15
Loudoun County’s Quakers subscribed to a religious form of unionism.
According to prominent Quaker Samuel M. Janney, the Friends of northern Loudoun
County were “true and loyal to the Federal Union” and “among the most prominent
adherents of the Federal government.” They believed that this government was “the
best and most liberal now existing in the world, and is probably as good as the people
of this country are capable of supporting.” They pointed to the lack of an established
state church in the United States that could oppress their religious society, as had been
the case for the original Quakers of Europe. During the war, Janney longed for God to
“unite once more in the peaceful maintenance of our excellent civil government.”
Historian A. Glenn Crothers has identified in his work on northern Virginian Quakers
from 1730 to 1865 that unionism “presented a moral dilemma” for the Friends:
15

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 8, 11, 14, 199; John W. Forsythe,
Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, ed. Melvin L. Steadman, Jr. (Annandale: Turnpike
Turnpike Press, 1967), 1; John W. Forsythe Service Record, NARA, www.fold3.com. A shoemaker
before the war, Forsythe enlisted in the Rangers on June 20, 1862, and would serve as a sergeant in
Company B.

24

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
“supporting the Union war effort compromised their” pacifism, “a central component
of their faith.” This pacifism required neutrality in military conflicts. As Crothers
argues, to solve this predicament, Friends, motivated by Confederate persecution and
the Union war effort’s emancipationist turn, developed a new form of Quakerism that
permitted them to choose and support a side in the Civil War. However, a minority of
Loudoun’s Friends “allowed their sympathies with the Southern people to lead them
astray” and sided with the Confederacy. 16
Frank Myers, the captain of the Thirty-fifth Battalion Virginia Cavalry’s
Company A, sheds light on the ideological views of secessionist Loudouners and their
theory of what the Confederacy stood for in his history/memoir of his unit. Like other
former Confederates in the postwar period, Myers asserts that the Confederate war
effort defended “States Rights and the old Constitution.” Myers interpreted the North
as anti-republican, evil, and resembling the old monarchical, aristocratic order of
Europe. He referred to the Lincoln administration as the “Lincoln dynasty,” the Union
army as “the army of Abraham I,” a group of “devils,” and the “blue-coated gentry,”
and the United States as a country jointly governed by Lincoln and Satan. A
component of Loudoun secessionism held the county’s unionists to be traitors to their
state for being loyal to “Yankee land,” a country whose government threatened
Virginia’s border. These Tories lacked an understanding of the true relationship
between the national government and the states. Under the U.S. Constitution, the
federal government upheld the rights of sovereign states. The unionists failed to
understand justice and the intentions of the framers by incorrectly holding that the
document gave the federal government supremacy over the states. States could freely
leave the Union’s compact. Thus, the Confederate Loudouners believed that the eleven
states comprising the Confederacy possessed the right to separate themselves from that
compact. However, as will be later seen, mixed in with this constitutional language is
a defense of the institution of slavery. In essence, the ideology formulated by

16

Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 116, 189, 194-195, 208; Crothers, Quakers Living in the
Lion’s Mouth, 238-239, 265-271.

25

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
secessionist Loudouners recognized that states possessed the right to withdraw from
the Union when it threatened slavery. 17
One variable of loyalty in Loudoun County was ethnicity. The unionists of the
county stand out in that they tended to be Quakers, Germans, and Scots-Irish; the
secessionists were of English descent. Forsythe attributes his U.S. patriotism to his
Scottish ethnicity. The ethnic make-up of Loudoun and its role in shaping Civil war
loyalties were a function of eighteenth century migration patterns. Between 1725 and
1750, English colonists settled in the eastern and southern portions of the county,
while Quakers, Germans, and Scots-Irish from Pennsylvania moved to northern and
western Loudoun County. 18
Another issue that determined the allegiances of Loudouners during the Civil
War was slavery. Northern Loudouners tended to be small, nonslaveholding farmers
whose eighteenth century ancestors never brought slaves. However, a group of small
slaveholders nevertheless resided in this area, making up four percent of its 2,294 free
citizens. The three hundred fifty-six slaves in unionist Loudoun constituted thirteen
percent of the area’s total population (2,650). Ninety-one slaveowners lived in the
towns with populations that rejected the secession ordinance by a majority and that
cheered and aided Union forces during the war. Of this group, sixty-five (seventy-two
percent) owned between one and four slaves. Fourteen (fifteen percent) owned
between five and nine slaves, and eleven (twelve percent) owned between ten and
nineteen slaves. Only one slaveholder—William Wertes of Lovettsville—in the
unionist-dominated area of Loudoun County owned more than twenty slaves.
Waterford and Lovettsville residents overwhelmingly owned small farms, with eightyone percent of the towns’ one hundred fifty-six farm owners possessing less than two
hundred improved acres. In 1860, Loudoun County had 212,600 acres of improved

17

Franklin M. Myers Service Record, NARA, www.fold3.com; Myers, The Comanches, 5, 19, 21, 219,
226, 278, 336, 356, 393.
18
Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 1; Goodhart, History of the Independent
Loudoun Virginia Rangers 3-4; Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 6-7, 131; Crothers, Quakers Living
in the Lion’s Mouth, 8-37.

26

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
land and 75,451 acres of unimproved land. Loudouners grew wheat, rye, corn, and
oats. On the eve of the Civil War, they produced 396,297 bushels of wheat, 27,858
bushels of rye, 891,470 bushels of corn, and 186,642 bushels of oats. The county did
not produce any rice, tobacco, or cotton. 19
According to Goodhart, the soldiers of the Loudoun Rangers, recruited from
Loudoun’s nonslaveholding farmers, held that slavery degraded American labor. Also,
though the loyalties of white Loudouners mixed ideology and local concerns
(constitutional principles and the bitter feelings towards military occupation), for
African American Loudouners, both types of allegiance were one and the same. Their
experience living at the bottom of a racial hierarchy and toiling on farms and
plantations as slaves directly produced the emancipationist ideology to which they
subscribed. Mirroring African Americans throughout the Civil War South, Loudoun
blacks supported the Union cause because its success would bring about their
emancipation. As James Fields, a free African American, asserted after the war, due to
“what…Lincoln had done for the colored folks,”—pursuing an emancipationist
agenda during the war—“black folks could not be anything but for the Union.” They
thus opposed the Confederate republic, founded and governed by a slaveholding
aristocracy. As a result, the conflict witnessed Loudoun’s black population aid the
Federal war effort, undermine the Confederate war effort, and seek the protection and
freedom that Union forces offered. 20
Northern Loudouners’ antislavery views did not exclusively result from
economics or race; it was also a function of religion. The Quakers who heavily
populated the area subscribed to a religious type of abolitionist sentiment, opposing
slavery on moral grounds. Subscribing to a faith holding that all individuals possessed
an inward light and that divinity existed within each person, Quakers believed “that

19

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun
County, Virginia, NARA; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Agriculture of the United States; Compiled from
the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864.
20
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 199; James Fields (no. 11342),
Southern Claims Disallowed.

27

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
slavery is wholly inconsistent with the beneficial precepts of the Christian religion.”
As a result, the Society of Friends prohibited “members from holding in bondage our
fellow-men.” Though happy with both the abolition of slavery in the northern states
and the existence of an antislavery movement there, Loudoun’s Quakers decried the
slow progress of the abolitionist movement. Influencing this view was the Friends’
doctrine championing the meek, the poor, and the needy, categories they held slaves to
comprise. Though Loudoun’s Friends thought the U.S. government to be the world’s
best, they maintained that it is “not conducted on Christian principles” and “assists to
hold in bondage millions of our fellow-creatures, who are kept in ignorance and
degradation.” Through their opposition to their section’s peculiar institution, the
Friends of Loudoun County can be placed among the abolitionists of the North. Thus,
despite the sectional conflict of the late 1840s and 1850s, a component of the southern
population acted as if they were transplanted northerners, supplementing the North’s
free labor, antislavery argument. 21
The antislavery views and antebellum activities of Samuel M. Janney illustrate
the northern Virginian Quaker stances on slavery. He described himself as an
outspoken supporter of “immediate and unconditional emancipation.” He loathed
slavery, an institution that degraded blacks and instilled arrogance, illegal behavior,
idleness, and dissipation into whites. Janney considered the war’s destruction of the
slaveholding states to be “a just retribution” for their “oppression of our fellow
creatures.” A resident of the town of Lincoln who frequently attended Friend meetings
in the lower North and northern Virginia, Janney played an active role in antislavery
efforts during the antebellum period and considered it his duty to undermine the evil
of slavery. During the 1820s, Janney and other Quakers established a benevolent
society that publicized the evils of the institution of slavery, unsuccessfully petitioned
Congress to abolish slavery and the domestic slave trade in the District of Columbia,
and aimed to rescue blacks from slave traders in Alexandria, with mixed success. In

21

Crothers, Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth, xi, 4; Samuel Janney, “The Freedom of the Press
Vindicated,” June 11, 1850; Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 116.

28

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
1844, Janney wrote an epistle to the Ohio Yearly Meeting at Mount Pleasant in which
he praised Friends who promoted abolition and the welfare of African Americans. He
called for Friends to support the northern free black population and stated his belief
that God would soon liberate the enslaved. Janney wrote a series of essays in southern
papers “showing the disastrous effects of slaveholding in my native State, and the
superiority of free labor in promoting public prosperity and individual happiness.” The
writings aimed to highlight the institution’s “baleful influence on morals and on the
material interests of the community.” As a citizen of a slave state, he thought he could
convert fellow southerners to his cause more effectively than a northerner. 22
Central, southern, and eastern Loudouners, whose English ancestors brought
slaves with them, tended to support the institution. In contrast to the small farm
ownership and low slaveholding rates in unionist Loudoun, secessionist Loudoun had
an economy based on slavery, a larger slave population, a higher slave ownership rate,
and larger farm sizes. Although only a slightly higher percentage of central and
southern Loudoun’s 13,422 free residents owned slaves than those of northern
Loudoun (4.7 percent), slaveholders in the pro-Confederate area tended to own a
larger number of human beings. While slaves made up 13 percent of unionist
Loudoun, twenty-eight percent (5,145 members) of Confederate Loudoun’s total
population of 18,567 was enslaved. While almost three-quarters of slaveholders in the
unionist areas owned fewer than five slaves, fifty-five percent of the six hundred
thirty-one slaveholders in the towns that helped pass the secession ordinance and aided
the Confederate army owned between one and four slaves. Over a quarter (twenty-six
percent) owned between five and nine slaves. The percentage of those owning
between fifteen and twenty-four slaves in the secessionist towns (six percent) is
double that of the unionist towns (three percent). Although no one in pro-Union
Loudoun owned more than twenty-two slaves, fourteen (two percent of) slaveholders
22

Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 11, 28-33, 86, 91, 208; Samuel Janney, “An Epistle to the
Members of the Society of Friends in the State of Ohio,” 1844. The only essay Janney cites is one
entitled “The Yankees in Fairfax County, Virginia,” which discusses agriculture, education, and
political economy in Loudoun’s neighboring county in order to demonstrate the superiority of free labor
over slave labor.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
in pro-Confederate Loudoun owned more than twenty-five, including the county’s
largest slaveowner: Elizabeth O. Carter, owner of one hundred twenty-eight human
beings and resident of the secessionist stronghold of Aldie. Also, while only one-fifth
of farm owners in unionist villages held over two hundred improved acres, one third of
the 1,052 secessionist town farm owners did so. 23
Though secessionist Loudoun possessed a greater share of the county’s wealth
than unionist Loudoun in terms of slave property and farm size, personal estate and
real estate values reveal a level of parity in the two sections. The percentage of the
2,641 personal property holders with an estate worth less than one hundred dollars in
the secessionist towns exceeded that of the four hundred eighty-four property holders
in the pro-Union towns (17.6 percent to 5.4 percent, respectfully). The unionist area
was home to a larger proportion of citizens owning estates worth between one hundred
and five hundred dollars (forty-three percent to 32.2 percent) and $1,000 to $4,999
(28.5 percent to 23.4 percent). Pro-Confederate town residents owning estates between
$5,000 and $9,999 (8.4 percent) and over $10,000 (7.4 percent) outnumbered those of
the unionist villages; six percent occupied the former category and 4.6 percent fell
under the latter. The percentages of real estate holders whose property values range
from zero to ninety-nine, one hundred to four hundred ninety-nine, five hundred to
999, 1,000 to 4,999, and 5,000 to 9,999 in both sections almost mirror each other.
While 21.3 percent of the two hundred sixty-eight real estate holders in pro-Union
Loudoun owned more than $10,000 worth of property, 23.9 percent of the 1,366 real
estate holders in secessionist Loudoun did so. 24
As sectional tensions over slavery heated up following the Mexican Cession,
proslavery Loudouners defended their way of life. In August 1849, Methodist minister
William A. Smith delivered a lecture defending slavery at the Leesburg courthouse.

23

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun
County, Virginia, NARA; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Agriculture of the United States; Compiled from
the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1864.
24
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA.

30

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
The large cheering audience heard him declare “that slavery is right in itself and
sanctioned by the Bible.” The county’s future secessionists were thus steeped in
antebellum proslavery literature. During the war, the pro-Confederate population
denounced the U.S. army’s emancipationist war aim. Frank Myers referred to the
Union’s invasion of the Confederacy as “the abolition crusade upon the South.” 25
The years 1849 and 1850 witnessed a conflict between the county’s proslavery
population and antislavery Quakers. Just as slaveholders denounced northern
antislavery literature in the antebellum period, Loudoun’s proslavery population
sought to crack down on Samuel Janney’s antislavery activities. When the Quaker
leader refuted Smith’s argument in a Leesburg newspaper article, the Loudoun County
Grand Jury tried to prosecute Janney for trying “to incite persons of color to make
insurrection or rebellion” and denying the right to own property in slaves. During his
June 1850 trial, Janney succeeded in avoiding conviction, but he expressed his
abolitionist views. In his defense, Janney informed the slaveholder-dominated court he
did not think that slaveholders lacked a property right in their slaves. Rather, he
recognized the right; this right was what he found most objectionable about the South.
According to Janney, slavery “degrades men by regarding them as property” and “as
chattels personal.” His defense led to his acquittal. The existence of proslavery and
antislavery movements within a southern county reflected the national debate over
slavery in the antebellum period. 26
The dividing line between unionist and secessionist Loudoun was not
completely geographical; nonslaveholding unionists resided in the secessionist
stronghold of Leesburg. As Leesburg resident Forsythe revealed, “I was born in
Virginia, and educated under the influences of slavery,” but “without imbibing the
prejudices of the Southern people.” He added that preserving the Union represented a
much greater importance for the South than maintaining its institution of slavery and

25

Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 97; Myers, The Comanches, 359.
Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 97-98; Janney, “The Freedom of the Press Vindicated,” June
11, 1850; The Washingtonian, August 10, 1849.
26

31

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
that the peculiar institution violated the U.S. Constitution. He referred to the
slaveholding aristocracy as “the nobility,” and described Loudouners who fought in
the Confederate army as those who “sacrificed their lives upon the altar of slavery.” 27
Loudoun County can be seen as a miniature model of a Confederate state; just
as each of the eleven states comprising the Confederacy had a unionist minority,
Loudoun also had a small unionist stronghold. Northern and western Loudoun, with its
pro-Union citizenry and low slaveownership rate, thus resembled places such as North
Carolina, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, and northern
Alabama. Similarly, Loudoun’s unionist section, consisting of free laborers and
participants in an abolitionist movement, can be seen more as a northern area than a
southern area. Reflecting on Virginia’s entrance into the Confederacy and West
Virginia’s reentrance into the Union, Goodhart admired “the Union people of West
Virginia, who would not submit to such tyranny.” Meanwhile, the pro-Confederate,
proslavery section of the county mirrors the majority of southerners and the
slaveholding aristocracy in eleven states who founded the southern Confederacy. 28
Soon after the Old Dominion’s secession, the state began to recruit soldiers for
the Confederate army and prepare for military conflict, as the rest of the Confederacy
did in the late spring and summer of 1861. Men from the secessionist towns enlisted in
the Confederate army in droves. The neighborhood surrounding Welbourne, an estate
owned by the Dulany family in southern Loudoun County several miles north of the
Fauquier County-Loudoun County border, witnessed all of its young men enlist and
prepare for “a fair fight with Lincoln’s men.” The Dulanys, a family of wealthy
planters who owned forty-seven slaves, were among the conditional unionists who
switched to the Confederate camp after the events of April. One of the family’s
members—Richard H. Dulany—received a commission to raise a command that
aimed to protect Virginia and his home from Yankee invasion. Due to the Dulanys’
status as secessionist planters living in the heart of pro-Confederate Loudoun and the
27
28

Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 1-2.
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 14.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
slaveholding region of the county, they were a part of the slaveholding aristocracy that
founded the Confederacy. 29
Loudoun’s experience during this period of mobilization was unique due to its
border with Maryland, a Union slave state. As a result, like the border states, the
county faced a situation in which they would be among the first areas to be invaded by
the Union army. Between 1861 and early 1862, the Union army stationed itself in and
around Washington, D. C., at Harper’s Ferry, and along the Maryland side of the
Potomac River. The Federals also established a blockade of the Potomac. Under the
blockade, no mail could pass to or from Virginia and Maryland, which blocked
communication between unionists who remained in Loudoun and those who fled to
Maryland. Civilians needed a pass to cross the international border, except unionist
refugees and those transporting agricultural supplies to Union lines. 30
With the onset of war, civil government in Loudoun County collapsed. In its
place was martial law administered by military forces that regulated civilian behavior
and loyalties. When one side’s army garrisoned Loudoun’s towns and built
encampments throughout the county and the opposing army had a minor presence in
or was absent from Loudoun, the former in effect governed the county. Without an
enemy to challenge its presence, the occupier ruled Loudoun. Such a situation
characterized the Confederate occupation of 1861 and early 1862. However, when
both armies had a strong presence in Loudoun and the county’s towns frequently

29

Richard H. Dulany to Mary Whiting, May 31, 1861, in Margaret Ann Vogstberger, The Dulanys of
Welbourne: A Family in Mosby’s Confederacy (Berryville: Rockbridge Publishing Company, 1995), 12; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun
County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 13, reel no. 338; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population
Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm
no. 565, reel no. 037. Household head John P. Dulany, a “gentleman” according to the census, owned
seven slaves, $9,000 in real estate, and a personal estate worth $86,200. His son Richard owned forty
slaves, $157,000 in real estate, and a $150,650 personal estate. Though the family owned a large
number of slaves, their wartime writings fail to mention how their slaves responded to the war and the
arrival of the Union army. Thus, it is unclear whether they resembled the other Loudoun slaves or the
slaves throughout the South who deserted their masters and fled to Union lines.
30
Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 200; John E. Divine, Bronwen C. Souders, and John M.
Souders, To Talk is Treason: Quakers of Waterford, Virginia on Life, Love, Death and War in the
Southern Confederacy (Waterford: Waterford Foundation, 1996), 76.

33

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
changed hands between the two sides, as was the case from early 1862 until war’s end,
Loudoun could be considered a “no man’s land.” Under this mutual occupation,
soldiers attempted to place the county under the authority of their respective
government. However, the presence of the enemy, with whom they often clashed,
prevented either from securing a firm grasp over the county. 31
The close proximity to the enemy convinced Confederate commanders to send
soldiers to Loudoun, initiating the Confederate occupation of the county’s towns and
farms. The troops guarded the Potomac River and burned the bridges connecting
Virginia with Maryland at Shepherdstown, Harper’s Ferry, Berlin, and Point of Rocks.
They constructed defensive fortifications on the road from Edward’s Ferry to
Leesburg and the approaches from the Chain Bridge and the Alexandria turnpike to
Leesburg. To build the fortifications, the Confederates impressed Loudoun’s whites,
free blacks, and slaves, threatening imprisonment if they refused. 32
The Confederates of 1861 and early 1862 coerced citizens into performing
other types of labor and raided their farms. They forced Joshua Everhart of
Lovettsville to leave his home in order to haul corn for one or two days on five
occasions. They often threatened to imprison him in Richmond if he refused their
orders. The troops jailed him in Leesburg for seven days and repeatedly demanded
that he take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, to which he refused. Later in the
war, Everhart endured harassment from guerrilla leader John Mobberly. Mobberly’s
men once arrested Everhart, took him to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and tied him to a
tree, where they planned to leave him for one or two days to suffer from hunger and
exposure. Michael Long of Lovettsville freed him several hours later. As punishment
31

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 214-215.
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 19; Chas. P. Stone to S. Williams,
September 10, 1861, O. R., Volume 5, 591; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the
Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 581, reel
no. 053, microfilm no. 642, reel no 114, microfilm no. 517, reel no. 197; Benjamin T. Franklin (no.
11786), Southern Claims Commission Case Files, NARA, www.fold3.com; Samuel N. Grubb (no.
2667), Southern Claims; Silas Corbin (no. 12460), Southern Claims; William Crim (no. 21567),
Southern Claims; Joseph L. Edwards (no. 11041), Southern Claims; James Fields (no. 11342), Southern
Claims Disallowed; Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 78.
32

34

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
for escaping and voting against the secession ordinance, Mobberly returned to his
home and struck him on the head with a stick, producing “an ugly scar.” In January
1862, Lovettsville free black Joseph Rivers’ employer ordered him to haul corn for the
Confederate army in Leesburg. In July 1861, the Confederates detained Adam Cooper,
a farmer residing one mile south of Lovettsville, for five days and forced him to haul a
portion of the army’s corn to Manassas. The Rebels threatened to hang Hough after he
retrieved cattle they had seized from his farm. 33
The black and white unionists coerced into laboring for the Confederacy
resisted by refusing to go to Leesburg or by deserting. George S. Wenner of
Lovettsville exiled himself in Maryland for two months to prevent the Confederates
from sending him to work on the Leesburg breastworks and from conscripting him.
Two African American teamsters who deserted from the Confederate army in
Waterford on September 7, 1861, and fled to Union lines in Maryland two days later,
one of whose names was Franklin Young, a free black laborer, informed Federal
commanders of these conditions. A New York Times report estimated that so many
Loudoun contrabands were flooding into Frederick, Maryland, in December that the
county lost at least one third of its slave population. Among these slaves was Noble
Robertson of Waterford. On January 12, 1862, he left his master William Giddings,
crossed the Potomac, and entered Union lines in Maryland. Two weeks later, a Federal
captain granted Giddings permission to free his wife and three children, owned by
Hoysville farmer Sydnah Williams. One night, he re-crossed the river and guided his
family to and over the Potomac at Point of Rocks by the next morning. Thus,
Loudoun’s civilians, in the early months of the war, lived within a rapidly militarizing
borderland, in the midst of one army awaiting an invasion by the nearby other army. 34

33

Joshua Everhart (no. 11653), Southern Claims; Joseph Rivers (no. 37320), Southern Claims
Disallowed; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States,
1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 442, reel no. 122.
34
George S. Wenner (no. 51495), Southern Claims; James Fields (no. 11342), Southern Claims
Disallowed; Chas. P. Stone to S. Williams, September 10, 1861, O. R., Volume 5, 591; New York
Times, January 3, 1861; Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 83. It is unclear why
Robinson and his wife had different owners.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Unionists’ sentiments and refusal to enlist and help defend the border also
provoked Confederate authorities and secessionist citizens into conducting a policy of
persecution. The occupying soldiers placed those “citizens who adhered to the Union
cause…under a strict surveillance.” Confederate troops visited the home of Alfred Fox
one night, threatening to imprison him in Richmond for his support for the Union.
William P. Hillery of Lovettsville paid for his unionist loyalty when General Nathan
G. Evans’ Confederate troops threatened to arrest him and raided his shop. Loudoun’s
Confederate occupiers considered Silas Corbin to be a dangerous threat to their
authority and government because he wished “the Union to remain as it was” and for
“the downfall of the Confederacy.” As a result, in the fall of 1861, Rebel troops
arrested Corbin and jailed him in Leesburg for two weeks. 35
Rebecca Williams recorded several incidents of Confederate persecution in the
late summer of 1861. On August 12, a party of Confederates occupying Lovettsville
rode down to Waterford and captured merchant John B. Dutton. They took him to
Leesburg, where they held him in custody. His wife Emma and their eldest daughter
Elizabeth, both of whom were in great anxiety, later acquired permission to briefly
visit him. The Confederates sent Dutton to Manassas Junction in mid-August, before
returning him to his family at the end of the month. Williams expressed anger at the
Rebels for tearing families apart in this way. Three thousand Rebels later marched to
Lovettsville. “After committing many depredations on Union men,” they took two or
three prisoners. The party set up a camp around Waterford’s Quaker meeting house
and demanded food from homes, before hastily leaving two days later. Through this
persecution, Loudoun reflects the early war conditions elsewhere in the Civil War
South. 36

35

Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 83; Alfred Fox (no. 11786), Southern Claims;
William P. Hillery (no. 11784), Southern Claims; Silas Corbin (no. 12460), Southern Claims.
36
Rebecca Williams Diary, August 12, 1861, August 18, 1861. For accounts of the Confederate
persecution of unionists in New Orleans and northern Alabama during the early months of the war, see
Michael D. Pierson, Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans (Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Margaret M. Storey, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s
Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004).

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Like other areas of the Confederacy, Loudoun witnessed local level
conscription one year prior to the passage of the national draft. In July 1861,
authorities informed Loudouners to prepare “to be drafted into the militia for an
immediate march to Manassas Junction, to fill up the ranks of Gen. Beauregard’s
forces,” then preparing for an engagement with General Irwin McDowell’s Union
army. Among those conscripted were Joseph L. Edwards, a farmer who resided near
Harper’s Ferry, into a militia unit. He deserted after serving for fifteen days. 37
John Forsythe was another example of a Loudouner who endured persecution
and ostracism for his pro-Union sentiments and refusal to join the Confederate army
after the outbreak of hostilities. As a unionist resident of secessionist-dominated
Leesburg, he occupied a hazardous position. However, he nevertheless “remained
loyal to the government of the United States.” During the initial wave of enlistment,
Forsythe refused to join and vocally opposed the war. It was painful for him to witness
his friends and acquaintances don the gray uniform and join the companies being
formed. He in good conscience could not “fight in defense of a cause so repugnant to
my principles.” A Confederate soldier once warned him that he better join the
Yankees’ side if he would not join an army that had moved up to Loudoun to fight for
him. When he took an oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and pinned a small
U.S. flag to his coat upon the entry of the Twenty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry into
Leesburg, a group of secessionists assaulted him. Realizing that he could not remain as
a civilian at home in peace, he decided to join the Loudoun Rangers in early 1862. 38
Many unionists responded to the “reign of terror” of the summer of 1861 by
fleeing to the safety and shelter of Maryland as draft-dodgers and exiles. The
Baltimore American recorded that on July 13, twelve Union men in Waterford left
their homes, evaded Confederate pickets for nine miles, and crossed the ford at Point

37

The Confederate army also coerced an anti-Confederate segment of the New Orleans population into
enlisting in its ranks; Baltimore American, July 15, 1861. Beauregard and McDowell clashed in the
First Battle of Manassas/Bull Run on July 21, 1861; Joseph L. Edwards (no. 11041), Southern Claims.
38
Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 1-3. Forsythe does not mention the specific
dates of his experiences.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
of Rocks. There, they entered the lines of the First New Hampshire, who provided
them with protection and sent them to Washington, D.C. The following night, a large
number of unionists made escape attempts through the Point of Rocks ford. While
forty succeeded, “Confederate pickets on the other side were seen to stop and drive
back several squads of men who were coming in the direction of the ford.” Four other
Waterford Quakers—Amasa Hough, Jr., Samuel Janney’s son Phineas, John Dutton’s
son James, and Franklin M. Steer, sweetheart of John Dutton’s daughter Mollie—
relocated to Maryland to avoid Confederate conscription. Williams noted that, due to
so many men “gone over the river,” the Quaker meetings in Waterford were
noticeably devoid of husbands and populated with their wives. To avoid his county’s
Rebel occupiers, Silas Corbin fled to Maryland through the Berlin and Point of Rocks
crossings several times between April 1861 and April 1865 with his father James. As
he recalled, “I would stay away a month and sometimes six weeks at a time. I had to
stay as long as the rebels occupied Loudoun.” John D. Fry relocated to Maryland in
August 1861 “to escape from rebel abuse and violence.” Confederate soldiers had
pillaged his home and struck him over the head with their revolvers. Thus, unionists
were forced to leave their property, occupations, families, and sweethearts for their
loyalty. Choosing to support the Union while the majority of the county and state tried
to establish the Confederacy invited persecution. Confederate oppression in unionists’
local communities mixed with this pro-Union ideology to inspire resentment towards
the new republic and a desire to escape its troops. 39
In addition to the white unionists, another group that crossed the Potomac
border to freedom was Loudoun County’s slave population. While slaves in the Deep
South resided far away from the North and could not easily reach freedom until the
Union army arrived nearby, Upper South slaves had a shorter path to free territory.
39

Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 3; Baltimore American, July 15, 1861; Janney,
Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 189, 199; Baltimore American, July 15, 1861; Mollie Dutton to Franklin
Steer, July 26, 1861; Mollie Dutton to Franklin Steer, September 1861; Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M.
Janney, 199; Amasa Hough, Jr. (no. 21579), Southern Claims; Rebecca Williams Diary, August 27,
1861, September 1, 1861; Silas Corbin (no. 12460), Southern Claims; John D. Fry (no. 15982),
Southern Claims.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Even so, no slave population had a better opportunity to escape bondage than those on
the border in which Loudoun was located. In early 1862, slaves belonging to Leesburg
miller John P. Smart fled to Maryland. One dark, cold Sunday night during the first
week of February 1862, Elijah White’s cavalrymen learned that a party of runaways
planned to arrive at the mouth of Catoctin Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River,
where several Union soldiers waited in a boat with which to transport them to the
Maryland shore. A secessionist Baptist preacher piloted the troops to the creek, where
they hid in different positions and waited for the slaves’ arrival. When the
Confederates ordered them to halt, “they commenced to run, and in great excitement
the preacher sprang forward” and fired his shotgun at the runaways. The Federals in
the boat then fired a volley, after which the Confederates departed. The slaves escaped
both capture from White’s men and wounds from the preacher. Over the course of the
war, many Loudouners held in bondage crossed the border to Maryland. 40
If unionists ferried back across the Potomac and returned to their homes, they
risked capture and imprisonment. In December 1861, William Smith, Armstead
Magaha, Emanuel Ruse, and Isaac C. Slater attempted to return to the county after
visiting their families in Maryland. When they reached the ferry across the river from
Berlin, Confederate authorities arrested them on the charge of spying. They served
their sentence in Richmond’s Libby Prison, where they suffered from malnourishment.
Slater “was reduced almost beyond recognition, and was years after his release
regaining his health and strength.” After attending the Quakers’ Yearly Meeting in
Baltimore in the spring of 1861, Samuel Janney accepted a Virginian’s offer to ferry
him across the Potomac into Loudoun. While Janney ate dinner at a unionist citizen’s
40

Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 87; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of
the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 07, reel
no. 321. Myers, The Comanches, 21-22. Smart owned twenty-two slaves. How many of them went over
the border is unspecified. Among the works that discuss the slaves throughout the South who fled the
plantations for northern freedom or service in the Union army are Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our
Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2003); Astor, Rebels on the Border; William Freehling, The South vs. The
South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001); Richard M. Reid, Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina’s Black Soldiers in
the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
house, Confederate soldiers arrested him and sent him to General Evans’ headquarters
in Leesburg, where he remained in detention for four days. Despite the potentially
lethal consequences for possessing and acting on pro-Union sentiments, Loudouners’
ability to escape to a nearby U.S. state was an opportunity not afforded by unionists
elsewhere in the Confederacy who lived hundreds of miles from a border or northern
state and/or Union lines. 41
The Eighth Virginia Volunteers, recruited mainly from Loudoun County, but
also from the surrounding Fairfax, Fauquier, and Prince William Counties, subjected
Waterford to an extensive occupation in the late summer, fall, and winter of 1861. A
mixture of hostility and co-existence characterized this occupation. The Confederates
initially “seemed to entertain a strong prejudice and animosity against the Friends,
having been informed that they were Union men and abolitionists.” However, as the
two sides became better acquainted, the Confederates’ antagonism towards the
Quakers lessened; they eventually dealt with the town’s storekeepers “more fairly than
any they had met with on their march from the South.” Janney mentioned that he and
the county’s other Quakers charitably delivered bread and vegetables to ill
Confederate soldiers in a Leesburg hospital. The soldiers agreed to possess half of the
Quakers’ meeting house for use as barracks; the Quakers could still meet in their own
half. The Eighth’s troops also courted the town’s women. 42
The Confederate occupation, as well as general wartime conditions, impacted
Loudoun economically. On December 31, the Mutual Fire Insurance Company of
Loudoun County suspended operations. In addition, the town’s mill shut down, postal
services ceased, and merchants’ stocks plunged. Moreover, “the people of Loudoun
County” became “destitute of coffee, sugar, and salt” as a result of the supply seizures
41

Smith lived on a farm in Hoysville; Magaha worked as a blacksmith in Lovettsville; Slater was a
nineteen year old merchant clerk from Lovettsville; and Ruse cannot be identified. See U.S. Bureau of
the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County,
Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 431, reel no. 111, microfilm no. 440, reel no. 120, microfilm no. 501,
reel no. 181. Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 21; Janney, Memoirs of
Samuel M. Janney, 191-193.
42
Williams, Legends of Loudoun, 201; Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 192-194; Baltimore
Yearly Meeting Minutes, fall 1862; Rebecca Williams Diary, August 27, 1861, September 10, 1861.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
by Confederate troops. Thus, Loudoun’s unionists paid financially for having the
misfortune of living in the northern tip of the Confederacy. Meanwhile, life in
southern Loudoun continued normally during the war’s first year, temporarily sparing
the Dulanys from the conflict’s depredations. 43
Loudoun’s civilians lived under new Confederate occupiers in early 1862. At
the beginning of the year, General D. H. Hill’s brigade took possession of Leesburg
and Waterford. The Madison cavalry and Elijah V. White’s company of secessionist
Loudouners comprised the Waterford garrison, replacing the Eighth Virginia. These
two companies scouted the Potomac border to prevent unionists from fleeing to
Maryland and to watch Union forces on the other side of the river. The companies also
used the Waterford Friends Meeting House as a barracks. Like the Eighth Virginia’s
soldiers, these Confederates respected the building’s religious services, stowing away
their baggage to make room on meeting days and participating in meetings. 44
However, the persecution of the county’s pro-Union citizens persisted. Mollie
Dutton’s March 1862 letter to Franklin Steer reveals the emotional trauma Loudoun’s
unionists experienced under enemy occupation, the support they provided for each
other, and the contempt they held against the Confederacy. She discusses how the
Confederates captured John Dutton a second time. Elizabeth Dutton travelled to
Leesburg on both March 6 and 7 “to endeavor by every means in her power to effect
his release.” General Nathan G. Evans, whose Confederate force moved from
Waterford to Leesburg early that month, deferred hearings for John, to the Dutton
family’s frustration and despair. To pass the time, Mollie read to her mother and both
her cousins Charles Hollingsworth and Rebecca Williams cheered up the Dutton
family. Reflecting on the treatment of the past year, Mollie denounced the Confederate
soldiers present in Loudoun. She proclaimed: “They come they say to protect and do
nothing but destroy. Oh! deliver me from this Southern Confederacy!” Mollie

43

Divine, To Talk is Treason, 31; Chas. P. Stone to S. Williams, September 10, 1861, O. R., Volume 5,
591; Vogtsberger, The Dulanys of Welbourne, 17-20.
44
Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 194; Mollie Dutton to Franklin Steer, March 1862.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
described how their Rebel overlords considered all unionist behavior to be threatening.
When they talked, they committed treason; when they performed any action, they
engaged in rebellion. The “vilest set—mean, contemptible men” surveyed their
movements. She would rather die at Confederate hands than “sympathize in their
cause.” Loudoun’s unionists thus developed hatred for their Rebel occupiers for
threatening the safety of their community, arresting their family members, and
destroying their economy. Though they already opposed the Confederacy on
ideological grounds, its acute threats to the well-being of their neighbors and
themselves gave them another reason to hope for Union victory. Despite these ordeals,
the unionists’ future mistreatment by their own army did not produce similar feelings.
As will be seen, Loudoun’s unionists continued to hold an allegiance to the United
States despite their subsistence being threatened by that republic’s military as well. 45
As the unionist population of the border county suffered under Confederate
occupation in 1861 and early 1862, it longed for the arrival of liberators across the
Potomac. As Mollie Dutton exclaimed in July 1861, “oh! if we could only see an
‘American’ it would do sore eyes good.” Rebecca Williams expressed disgust with the
Union’s idle behavior in the early months of the war. In the winter and spring of 1862,
however, unionists’ hopes became reality when Union forces challenged Confederate
control of Loudoun, one aided by the loyalist citizenry. In February, the Yankees
finally arrived. Colonel John W. Geary and his Twenty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry
repeatedly conducted raids from their base at Point of Rocks to Loudoun. On February
24, Geary’s force captured Lovettsville. From there, the Federals launched daily
foraging expeditions against secessionists’ houses and farms. However, Geary’s men
occasionally plundered unionists’ farms. During this period, General George
McClellan sent the Army of the Potomac to the peninsula between the York and James
Rivers in a campaign to capture Richmond. In response, Hill’s brigade withdrew from
Waterford and Leesburg and departed southward to aid the forces under General
Joseph E. Johnston defending the Confederate capital. To prevent the oncoming Union
45

Mollie Dutton to Franklin Steer, March 1862.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
troops from liberating them, the Confederates took the white citizens, free blacks, and
slaves they had employed on the Leesburg fortifications with them in their southward
march. 46
Pro-Union Loudouners expressed relief and gratitude when these liberators
entered their section of the county. Upon Geary’s arrival in Lovettsville, his Federals
“were greeted with enthusiastic demonstrations of joy and manifestations of Union
feeling.” When his force entered Waterford, the unionist inhabitants were ecstatic. As
one member of the First Michigan Cavalry described, “The people were all up when
we came in and cheered us and waved their handerchiefs.” As Waterford’s residents
watched and cheered the blue columns marching through the town that night, Mollie
Dutton shouted from her porch “Hurrah for the Union.” One soldier replied, “Hurrah
for the girl who hurrahs for the Union.” The Michigan soldier told the recipient of his
letter that “You just aught to have seen how glad (they were) to see us Yankees.” Soon
after the Federals’ arrival, citizens offered them food and lodging. 47
Throughout the war, whenever the Union army invaded the South, members of
the slave population fled to Federal lines to acquire their freedom. Loudoun’s slaves
did likewise upon the arrival of Geary’s men. As Amanda H. Donohoe, a member of a
secessionist Mount Gilead family, decried: “When the Northern army came, there was
a stampede among the Negroes. Nearly all have gone and…We have none.” She
introduces five runaways in her letter: Henry, who ran off with their colt; John, a slave
she had sold at a previous date for assaulting his overseer; and an unnamed man
belonging to Amanda’s aunt who stole her horse on which he escaped with his wife.
While the Union troops received aid and welcome from the unionists, they punished
secessionists for their disloyalty. Janney notes that during the short occupation the

46

Mollie Dutton to Franklin Steer, July 26, 1861; Rebecca Williams Diary, September 10, 1861;
Divine, To Talk is Treason, 39; Alfred Fox (no. 11786), Southern Claims; Amasa Hough, Jr. (no.
11784), Southern Claims; Mary C. Alder (no. 44691), Southern Claims; Samuel Wright (no. 48804),
Southern Claims; Joseph Rivers (no. 37320), Southern Claims Disallowed; Mary M. Dixon (no. 12351),
Southern Claims Disallowed; Virginia Virts (no. 41880), Southern Claims Disallowed; Janney,
Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 194-195; Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 97.
47
Report of John W. Geary, May 14, 1862, O. R., Volume 5, 512; Divine, To Talk is Treason, 39.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Federals seized property from civilians known to support the Confederacy. After
occupying Waterford for three hours, Geary’s regiments withdrew to pursue Hill’s
brigade. Thus, unionists’ pro-U.S. ideology combined with the local concerns
regarding Rebel harassment, Union protection, and, for African Americans, freedom
from bondage. 48
Following the soldiers’ departure, the village’s majority unionist population,
believing that they would have the U.S. government’s protection from then on,
became emboldened. Refugees returned from their exile. Draft dodgers such as Frank
Steer concluded that they could safely return to Waterford. The unionists enforced
ideological loyalty to the Union when they raised a large U.S. flag on Main Street and
required all residents to salute the flag when passing it. “Southern sympathizers” chose
to avoid performing this “hateful gesture” by going “from one section of the town to
other by way of a long detour over the hill to the north.” The penalty for refusing to
salute the flag is not stated in the record, nor is there any mention of a secessionist
receiving punishment. However, the raising of the stars and stripes and the
secessionists’ resistance to unionist control by avoiding contact with the flag illustrates
the Union-Confederate struggle for control of Waterford at the civilian level, albeit
devoid of violence, and further illustrates the acute political, ideological nature of
Loudouners’ loyalty. 49
Without Confederate troops, Waterford’s secessionists, on the other hand,
lowered their profile and “became less defiant, less confident, and more courteous”
towards the unionists. Yet, Janney reveals that relations between civilians on the
opposing sides of the conflict tended to be mild and even cooperative in the absence of
an army persecuting supporters of the other army. Each side learned that mutual acts
of kindness and mercy benefited them during a war in which both sides experienced
alternate successes and defeats. Quaker unionists aided secessionists whose property

48

Amanda H. Donohoe to her sisters, April 2, 1862; Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 194-195.
Rebecca Williams Diary, May 22, 1862; John D. Fry (no. 15982), Southern Claims; Samuel Wright
(no. 48804), Southern Claims; Divine, To Talk is Treason, 39.
49

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
was seized by the Union occupiers. Though the Confederate army persecuted the
Quakers for their pacifism, their secessionist civilian neighbors followed the Friends’
example, rarely harassing them and exhibiting a nonaggressive nature. These moderate
relations contrast with the violent local conflicts between guerrilla bands in the
Appalachians and Jones County, Mississippi. However, Janney’s observations must be
considered along with the hostility that nevertheless existed between the supporters of
the two warring republics in the county. For example, when the Federals arrived in the
county, secessionists such as William Wilkes threatened to physically harm Hamilton
farmer David Carr, who took an oath of allegiance to the U.S. from Geary. 50
When Union forces reached central and southern Loudoun County in the
spring and summer of 1862, the area’s secessionists endured an enemy occupation for
the first time. John P. Dulany, Richard’s father, witnessed the pillaging by Federals
who visited Welbourne during scouting operations while encamped in Upperville, four
miles to the west of the Dulany home in northern Fauquier County. At midnight one
evening, a group of thirty or forty soldiers searched the residence for Richard. On
April 16, another party seized three of the Dulany’s horses. A week later, a Union
force guarded the house, prohibited anyone from leaving, and captured two other
horses from the property’s stables. On April 28, 1862, the same group of Union
soldiers came to guard Welbourne and arrest John Dulany and the family tutor Mr.
Wiedmayer. They then broke into the house and seized the family’s bacon, tea, coffee,
sugar, wine, and whiskey. The soldiers also searched the upstairs rooms, tossing
women’s clothing, despite the objections of Dulany cousin Mittie Herbert. The Federal
captain’s “language and gestures were most insolent and threatening” to Herbert. He
threatened to arrest and imprison her and to burn the house before leaving. Herbert
informed another Dulany cousin Julia Whiting of the incidents: “We and your own
family thrown into Yankee lines to be pillaged and insulted—every one around here
50

Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 194-195; David Carr (no. 1389), Southern Claims
Disallowed. For works on violent civilian conflicts elsewhere in the South, see Paludan, Victims: A
True Story of the Civil War; Sarris, A Separate Civil War; Bynum, The Free State of Jones; Bynum,
The Long Shadow of the Civil War; William R. Trotter, Bushwhackers: The Civil War in North
Carolina, The Mountains (Winston Salem: John F. Blair, 1988).

45

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
has been tormented with their visits.” Shortly thereafter, Geary left Loudoun to
combat General Stonewall Jackson as he conducted his Shenandoah Valley Campaign.
In June, when the Eleventh New York Cavalry rode to Leesburg to free slaves being
held in the county jail, the town’s women and children expressed their displeasure at
living under a Yankee occupation. In this “hot-bed of secession,” women crossed “the
streets to avoid meeting officers” and a group of children sung “Dixie” in front of the
Federal quarters. 51
Despite the conclusions of Waterford’s unionists, the Federal presence in
Loudoun did not protect the county’s loyalists from Confederate forces for long,
which they learned in the late spring and summer of 1862. From this point until the
last several months of the war, Loudouners lived in an area over which neither side
would have total control. Neither the Union nor Confederate militaries could
temporarily occupy towns and persecute disloyal citizens without the other side doing
so as well. Because both armies held and traded territory in Loudoun, neither
government’s military could govern the county without challenge from the other side.
While they would never again be under a complete Confederate occupation as they
were in 1861, Geary’s raids and the return of Rebel forces began a period during
which both the Union and Confederate armies crossed through the county’s towns and
farmland at different times for the remainder of the war. The unionists and
secessionists could never know how long their respective army would occupy their
town and protect them, nor could they know how long they would have to tolerate the
other army and its depredations. As a county within a Confederate state that shared a
border with a border state and a county populated with both unionists and secessionists
and a combined Union-Confederate occupation, Loudoun constituted a borderland.
Confederate forces first entered Aldie and Waterford. In May 1862,
Confederate cavalrymen seized Aldie shoemaker William Alexander’s horses, wagon,
hay, and meat. During their foraging operation, they condemned him and threatened to
51

Statement of John P. Dulany, undated, in Vogstberger, The Dulanys of Welbourne, 25-29; Mittie
Herbert to Julia Whiting, June 7, 1862, in Ibid., 34-35; New York Times, June 16, 1862.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
destroy his property. Due to the Confederate occupation of his area of residence,
Alexander lacked a means to escape. In August 1862, the Loudoun Rangers occupied
Waterford. Pro-Confederate civilians in Waterford informed Elijah White’s company
of the Loudoun Rangers’ encampment in the town and led the troops to the camp. In
response, White attacked the Rangers at the Waterford Baptist church on August 27.
After a bloody three-hour engagement, the Confederate Loudouners forced the Federal
Loudouners to surrender, before immediately giving them parole. 52
During and after the engagement, Waterford’s civilians performed services for
the soldiers of both sides. The Confederates used the house of Lydia A. Virts, located
across the street from the church, as a cover from which they fired on the Rangers.
Virts delivered three flags of truce to them, the last of which proved successful. While
no member of Waterford’s unionists participated in the fight, the village hastily nursed
the wounded Rangers. As soon as White’s company departed, physician Thomas Bond
and other villagers proceeded to the church to gather the wounded. P. S. Chalmers, a
tailor, treated Private Henry Dixon until his death. The Duttons’ cared for Private
Edward Jacobs, who would later be discharged for his injuries. Lieutenant L. W. Slater
received treatment from three Waterford residences. Thus, Waterford residents
demonstrated their unionist sympathies by caring for wounded U.S. soldiers. 53
The unionists and secessionists in and around Loudoun continued to live in the
midst of both armies in the fall of 1862. In early September, General Robert E. Lee
and his Army of Northern Virginia crossed through Loudoun County on their way to
Maryland, where they would fight General George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac
in the Battle of Antietam. The citizens of Leesburg gathered along their streets and
cheered Lee’s Confederates as they crossed through the county seat on their way to
Maryland. When four hundred cavalrymen reached Waterford one afternoon, they
“placed the town under martial law, and…posted pickets on the Hillsborough and
52

William Alexander (no. 51396), Southern Claims; Myers, The Comanches, 97-99.
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 33, 35-36; John E. Divine, The
Virginia Regimental Histories Series: 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry (Lynchburg: H. E. Howard, Inc,
1985), 9.
53

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Lovettsville road.” The Confederates’ arrival provoked a new exodus of white and
black unionists to Maryland. In response to this development, Colonel Dixon S. Miles
advised Colonel Henry B. Banning, stationed at Berlin, to protect the unionists and
give them an oath of allegiance. Also, Miles ordered Colonel William P. Maulsby to
send five hundred of the African American refugees to Harper’s Ferry to work on
fortifications. In late October, a group of runaway slaves and Quakers provided the
Sixth New York Cavalry, stationed at Purcellville, with intelligence regarding the
conditions and locations of Lee’s Confederates. 54
Waterford’s renewed isolation from the Union army proved to be temporary;
the Federals arrived shortly thereafter. During the Antietam Campaign, Loudoun slave
Fielding Green piloted General George McClellan’s army from Snickersville to
Warrenton. Like Geary, McClellan’s forces foraged from unionists and secessionists
on the way to and the way back from Maryland. In late October, a month after
Antietam, the Army of the Potomac’s Ninth Corps and the Loudoun Rangers marched
to Lovettsville and Waterford, before departing southward to join the rest of
McClellan’s army several days later. With the Yankees gone, the Rebels felt free to
terrorize, pillage, and kidnap unionists. In October, the Thirty-fifth Virginia robbed
and destroyed the store of a pro-Union merchant named Jacob Stoneburner at
Lovettsville. At one point that fall, Confederate soldiers arrested Quaker Job
Throckmorton while he travelled to a monthly meeting in Hopewell, Virginia. They
forced Throckmorton to endure “fatiguing marches and great privations, which
resulted in his death.” On November 9, 1862, a force from White’s Cavalry galloped
to Aldie, where they “took a Union lady prisoner.” In December, White searched for
the Rangers in Waterford. When the cavalrymen found that Means’ men were absent,
it left soon after. The presence of White’s men frightened “the intensely tory citizens

54

Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 130, 143; D. S. Miles to Colonel Banning,
September 6, 1862, O. R., Volume 51, Part 1, 795; D. S. Miles to William P. Maulsby, September 6,
1862, O. R., Volume 51, Part 1, 794-795.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
of Waterford half out their wits.” The military forces of both republics then went to
their winter quarters, bringing peace to Waterford for much of 1863. 55
The Dulanys provided assistance to General J.E.B. Stuart’s Confederate
cavalrymen in November 1862. Stuart had crossed into Loudoun County in October to
screen Lee’s army during its march from Winchester to Culpepper. General Alfred
Pleasanton’s Union cavalry then entered the county to engage him, prompting Stuart
to meet the Federals near Union, several miles away from the Dulany home. During
these operations, Confederate pickets stationed themselves at the Dulany family’s
slave chapel and acquired wagons. After they departed, Julia Whiting and Mr.
Weidmayer guided a soldier on a road leading to Upperville. When they returned to
Welbourne, the Dulanys’ slaves were frantically fastening windows and locking doors
in preparation for a potential Union pillaging operation, due to a cavalry engagement
raging nearby. When troops arrived, the family braced for what they expected, but, to
their relief, they noticed that the soldiers belonged to Stuart’s command and had been
invited there by Richard Dulany for dinner that evening. The family wholeheartedly
welcomed their guests. Later that week, the Dulanys had other guests over: Captain
William D. Farley, one of Stuart’s aides; Major John Pelham, one of Stuart’s
artillerymen; and acquaintance John Landstreet, a Leesburg clergyman. Throughout
the next day, the Dulanys provided Confederates and General Stuart with food while
they fought the Yankees in the town of Union and the area surrounding Welbourne.
The fighting moved so close to the estate that the family witnessed a fire exchange,
during which a shell landed near Julia Whiting and bullets struck their roof. Though
relative peace returned to Welbourne by December and the Dulanys had been in the
presence of friendly forces, the family felt anxiety over the possibility of another
Union operation. Thus, it was both their proslavery, secessionist ideology and the

55

Fielding Green (no. 17560), Southern Claims; Nathan Kimball to J. H. Taylor, October 3, 1862, O.
R., Volume 19, Part 2, 14; Baltimore Yearly Meeting Minutes, fall 1862, quoted in Janney, Memoirs of
Samuel M. Janney, 202; F. Sigel to S. P. Heintzelman, November 9, 1862, O. R., Volume 19, Part 2,
563; Myers, The Comanches, 145.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Union army’s threat to their homes that fostered the Dulanys’ support for the
Confederate army and southern independence. 56
In early 1863, despite a short supply of goods, the town mill’s closer, and the
absence of men off fighting or in exile, normalcy appeared to have returned to
Waterford. Lee’s army by-passed Waterford on its march to Pennsylvania during the
Gettysburg Campaign. Yet, the rest of the year would witness the Union and
Confederate armies constantly seizing unionists’ animals and crops and occasionally
abusing them throughout the county. The Fourteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry took John
Heater’s hay and corn in June 1863, despite his status as a unionist Leesburg farmer
who ferried Union soldiers across the Potomac River. Later that year, Confederate
soldiers took clothing and a horse from Heater, calling him a “damn Yankee” in
response to his objections. On July 17, 1863, soldiers in General John Sedgwick’s
Corps camped in and around John F. Smith’s Purcellville farm and took his corn. In
August or September 1863, three or four Confederate soldiers arrested Marshall W.
Carpenter of Unison for taking the oath of allegiance to the U.S. in Maryland. While
they sent him to a Richmond prison, he escaped. As Carpenter detailed after the war,
“after my escape I made my way back through the mountains and was several weeks
in the mountains and hills before I dare venture home for fear of being taken again.”
After returning home two weeks later, he continued to worry about Confederate
soldiers pursuing him. 57
1863 witnessed James M. Downey endure harassment from both armies. In the
winter, the Loudoun Rangers took “a considerable quantity” of the rails constituting
his fences. Downey received this treatment despite willingly feeding, nursing, and
quartering Union soldiers who arrived at his house. In October, Mobberly and seven of
his guerrillas punished Downey for being elected to the pro-Union Virginia legislature
56

Vogtsberger, The Dulanys of Welbourne, 47; Julia Whiting to Mary D. Whiting, November 21, 1862,
in Ibid., 49-50; Julia Whiting to Mary D. Whiting, November 21, 1862, in Ibid., 53-54; Fanny Dulany
Diary, Early November 1862, in Ibid., 55; Julia B. Whiting to Richard H. Dulany, December 7, 1862, in
Ibid., 58.
57
John Heater (no. 12466), Southern Claims; Marshall W. Carpenter (no. 10435), Southern Claims
Disallowed.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
in Alexandria. They arrested him and threatened to either send him to one of
Richmond’s prisons or to shoot him if he did not pay them one hundred dollars. His
wife secured his release by paying Mobberly the money. The Confederate irregular
then ordered Downey to report to Colonel Elijah White’s camp the next day. Downey
instead decided to flee to Maryland, becoming a refugee for the remainder of the war
and returning home when Union soldiers occupied the part of Loudoun in which his
home was located. He thus felt safer in the presence of Union troops. Downey
revealed his ideological devotion to the Union by aiding U.S. troops and serving in a
unionist legislature; the localism informing his allegiance highlighted itself when he
sought the refuge of Union soldiers after undergoing Confederate persecution in his
neighborhood. 58
Another victim of his own side was John Dutton, who in the fall of 1862 at last
left Confederate captivity. He nevertheless continued to live apart from his family.
Beginning in late 1862, he resided in Point of Rocks, Maryland, where he operated a
store in order to support his family (the war closed his Waterford business). Here, he
learned that “Harry our family horse had been captured from the rebels by some of
Means’ men.” When the Ranger captain refused to return the horse, John Dutton
submitted a complaint about him to Colonel Donn Piatt in Baltimore in early August
1863. He begins the letter by detailing his misfortunate of being a unionist living in
the Confederacy. Dutton informs Piatt that “in consequence of my well-known Union
sentiments, I have suffered much from the rebels, both in person and property.” As a
result, he lost his business and both he and his son had to abandon their family. During
the war, he was a loyal U.S. citizen who had “done aught against the best interest of
the United States Government.” Dutton therefore felt insecure as long as Means stayed
with his Rangers at Point of Rocks. John Dutton, a proud supporter of the federal
government and bitter victim of Confederate abuse, expressed a unionism motivated
by political views and local concerns. 59

58
59

James M. Downey (no. 12461), Southern Claims.
John Dutton to Anna Dutton, April 28, 1863; John Dutton to Donn Piatt, August 3, 1863.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
The Union’s depredations against unionist Loudouners did not shake their
loyalty to the United States. They continued to welcome the arrival of Federals with
open arms. When General Meade’s Army of the Potomac crossed into Loudoun after
the Battle of Gettysburg in mid-July 1863, the Loudoun Rangers and the First, Second,
and Third Divisions passed through and briefly camped at Waterford. As Briscoe
Goodhart stated, “our command was a great favorite with the intensely loyal citizens
of the Quaker village.” The mostly-female population cheered the Federal soldiers
“with many a hurrah for the Union” and waved handkerchiefs and the stars and stripes
during this Union occupation. In a recognition of the strong pro-U.S. sentiment in
Waterford, “it seemed strange to find so patriotic a place in the Confederate
dominions” for the northern soldiers of the Twenty-fourth Michigan. A corporal of the
Thirty-ninth Massachusetts Infantry wrote to his family that when his unit entered
Waterford, “several houses had its Union flag hung out and the women stood at the
doors with water to give to the soldiers.” Thus, unionist Loudoun was a place in which
northerners and southern unionists could develop an affinity for each other. From
these accounts, one could easily mistake Waterford and Lovettsville as northern, not
southern, villages being liberated from Confederate invaders. 60
Another aspect of the interaction between the Union soldiers who entered
Waterford in July 1863 and the women of the village involved social gatherings and
courtship. The men of the Twenty-fourth Michigan and the Loudoun Rangers attended
balls with loyalist women on numerous occasions during the war. Two of John
Dutton’s daughters captured the hearts of Federal soldiers: Elizabeth (Lizzie) and
Emma Dutton. During the occupation, Lizzie met Lieutenant David Holmes of the
Seventh Indiana. They wrote to each other after his unit left the town, until Holmes
perished on June 18, 1864, in an assault during the Petersburg Campaign. Lizzie then
developed a correspondence with Joseph Dunlop, the soldier who informed her of
Holmes’ death. After the war, Lizzie and Joseph married. Emma courted John Norton
60

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 101-102; Orson B. Curtis, History
of the 24th Michigan of the Iron Brigade (Detroit: Winn and Hammond, 1891), 196; George E. Fowle to
home, July 19, 1863.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
of one of the Second Division regiments. In a letter written shortly after the Federals’
departure in late July, Norton not only expresses his affections for Emma, but also
discusses the loyalties of Loudoun County. He complains about the strong “Secesh”
sentiment in Warrenton, to which his unit marched. He informs Emma that her
“beautiful village” has been the only during his two-year service in Virginia “that has
earned such a cordial sympathy with our cause.” 61
For most of 1863, the Dulanys found new opportunities to express their
Confederate loyalty and to resist Union pillaging. They formed friendly contacts with
and provided shelter to John S. Mosby’s Forty-third Battalion Virginia Cavalry, a
Confederate partisan unit that terrorized Union troops and supply lines in northern
Virginia from 1863 to 1865. Following engagements with Union cavalry in early May,
the partisan commander rode to Welbourne and reported his casualties to the Dulanys.
John Dulany then accompanied Mosby to Upperville. John hoped for General Robert
E. Lee to win the Battle of Chancellorsville. As he prayed in a letter to his son
Richard, “May our merciful Father give us victory” in the “severe fight.” 62
Also during this period, the Yankees swarmed around Welbourne searching for
horses and chasing Mosby’s Rangers. The Dulanys saw the Federals capture a large
number of men and horses at a blacksmith shop owned by George Hooper on the
nearest road. The continued presence of Union forces caused John to hope that “Gen.
Lee will take pity on us and deliver us at least for a few weeks from the tender mercies
of the Yankees.” To protect their horses from Union seizure, the Dulanys hid them in
an undisclosed mountainous area. In June 1863, the members of the Army of the
Potomac, during General Lee’s march to Pennsylvania, encamped on the Welbourne
farm and seized almost the entirety of their meat supply and raided the house for
supplies. On October 12, one Union soldier took the Dulanys’ bread. When he moved

61

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 119-121; Wilbur F. Hinman, Camp
& Field: Sketches of Army Life (Cleveland, 1892), 422-423; John Norton to Emma Dutton, July 27,
1863.
62
Julia Whiting to Richard H. Dulany, May 4, 1863, in Vogtsberger, The Dulanys of Welbourne, 94;
John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, May 6, 1863, in Ibid., 95.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
towards their ham, Emily, the cook, interfered. He drew his pistol and threatened to
shoot her if she continued to resist. Emily reacted by pointing a knife at the soldier.
The intervention of an officer diffused the situation. On November 23 and 24,
Lieutenant William T. Turner and a Mr. Hall of Mosby’s command visited
Welbourne. On December 2, Turner returned to Welbourne. He stayed at the residence
as a guest for two weeks, leaving after hearing reports of Union forces approaching.
The end of 1863 brought the Dulanys despair; four Union troops captured their cousin
Richard Carter, a resident of Crednal, on the road leading to Welbourne. While fleeing
the Federals, his horse fell. They sent him to Camp Chase, where he remained until
August 3, 1864. Thus, the Dulanys lived in the midst of forces from both sides of the
conflict. If friendly troops arrived one occasion, the family could expect hostile
soldiers to be visiting shortly thereafter. 63
Waterford’s residents had enjoyed peace for the better part of a year, and the
pro-Union majority once again expressed its unionist sentiments by cheering for its
heroes. Yet, by August 1863, the Confederate army returned, making the unionist
villagers vulnerable to renewed persecution. Meanwhile, the Union army conducted its
own mistreatment of disloyal citizens in the dominantly secessionist sections of
Loudoun County that month.
One episode involved both sides taking disloyal Loudouners hostage. The
Union army arrested and held at Fort Delaware secessionists Henry Ball and Campbell
Belt for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. According to Ball
and Belt, the U.S. government was one “to whom they owed none, and which was
incapable of protecting them in it if they did.” Ball had served as a commissary for the
Confederates at the beginning of the war; Belt enlisted in the Confederate army at the

63

John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, May 6, 1863, in Ibid., 95; Fanny Dulany to Richard H. Dulany,
May 14, 1863, in Ibid., 97; John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, May 16, 1863, in Ibid., 98-99; Mary
C. Dulany Diary, October 12, 1863, in Ibid., 112; Mary C. Dulany Diary, December 17, 1863, in
Ibid.,119.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
outbreak of hostilities, but only served for a twelve month term. Both were living at
home at the time of their arrest and imprisonment. 64
Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon ordered Elijah White and his
battalion to play the role of retaliator. White’s party arrested Quakers William
Williams and Robert Hollingsworth, sent them to Richmond’s Libby Prison, and
declared they would be incarcerated there until U.S. authorities released Ball and Belt.
White’s soldiers attempted to arrest Asa Bond as well, but Asa’s daughters Laura
Bond and Rachel A. Means, wife of Loudoun Ranger Captain Samuel C. Means,
struck the Confederates with broomsticks, rolling pins, and clubs. Means then “ran to
her residence…got her revolver, and fired two shots, when the terrified rebels fled in
confusion” and abandoned the arrest effort. 65
Williams and Hollingsworth suffered imprisonment for supporting the Union
while living in the Confederacy and struggled to regain their freedom. One night in
late August 1863, Williams heard a knock at his front door. When he answered, “a
pistol was pointing in my face and I was told that I was a prisoner and must go with
them.” His wife Mary asked the soldiers why they had arrested him, to which they
replied that he was a hostage. The Confederates then mounted him on one of their
horses. After the Confederates arrested Hollingsworth, they sent the hostages to the
Thirty-fifth’s camp near Upperville. Unionists and secessionists from Waterford,
including Mary Williams, went to this location to express their opposition to the
policy of taking citizens hostage. White agreed to parole Williams and Hollingsworth
for thirty days. In the meantime, the visiting unionists spent those days negotiating an
exchange with the U.S. government. White required the two men to return to his camp
64

Myers, The Comanches, 220; Memoir of William Williams. According to the census, Ball was a
farmer living in Bloomfield, southwestern Loudoun County. The census does not list Belt.
65
Myers, The Comanches, 220; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 130;
Baltimore Yearly Meeting, fall 1862, in Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 205, 207; Memoir of
William Williams. Williams was a farmer, merchant, minister at Fairfax Meeting, president of the
Mutual Fire Insurance Company, and member of the Waterford town council. Hollingsworth was a
teacher. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States,
1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 457, reel no. 137, microfilm no. 449, reel no.
129; Divine, To Talk is Treason, 57.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
after their parole ended. Mary then took her husband and Hollingsworth home. Asa
Janney and Williams’ brother-in-law James Walker visited Washington to attempt to
arrange an exchange of the hostages, but Secretary of War Edwin Stanton expressed a
lack of interest. On the day prior to the parole’s expiration, James Walker, William
Williams, Mary Williams, and Robert Hollingsworth travelled to White’s camp. To
ensure that Williams and Hollingsworth received the same punishment as Ball and
Belt—imprisonment—White ordered the two unionists to Richmond’s Castle
Thunder. White sent Corporal Harrison Moreland, a laborer from Waterford before the
war, and a group of guards to direct them to their destination. William’s cousin
Rebecca reacted with melancholy when Mary and James brought this news. 66
The guards and the prisoners marched across the Blue Ridge Mountains, Front
Royal, the Luray Valley, the Swift Run Gap, Stannardsville, and to Orange County’s
court house. Along the way, they received food and shelter from various homes. Upon
their entrance of Castle Thunder, over one hundred prisoners consisting of unionists
from Virginia and East Tennessee and deserters shouted “fresh fish.” At the prison,
Williams and Hollingsworth were fed soup, a half loaf of bread, and a small piece of
boiled beef. Their time involved discussing their lives with the other prisoners, playing
checkers, and cleaning the rooms of excrement and lice. They used the influence of
John B. Crenshaw, whose brother in law married one of William’s cousins, to acquire
parole, under which they would stay at his house with his family in Richmond. 67
Crenshaw’s family welcomed Williams and Hollingsworth. His wife Judith,
born in Philadelphia, supported the Union. During their stay, they “had been visited by
several of our Loudoun rebel friends then in Richmond, Wm. B. Lynch, Charles Ball,
Thomas M. Edwards and others.” These secessionists, though considered enemies
throughout the conflict, helped complete their release from Confederate captivity.

66

Memoir of William Williams; Rebecca Williams Diary, September 7, 1863; U.S. Bureau of the
Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County,
Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 456, reel no. 136. Though identified in Williams’ memoir, Moreland
cannot be found in the Thirty-fifth Battalion’s service records.
67
Memoir of William Williams. “Fresh fish” was term Civil War prisoners used to refer to new arrivals.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Edwards convinced his friend Charles Lee, who was acquainted with Confederate
Secretary of War James A. Seddon, to support their release as well. Edwards and Lee
visited Seddon and presented the argument that if authorities sought hostages in
retaliation for Federals’ taking of hostages, the Confederacy should get them from the
North, not the South. Seddon responded favorably, granting the two Loudoun
unionists their unconditional release. This assistance further reveals the moderate,
nonviolent nature of the unionist-secessionist relations in Loudoun County. While
secessionists indeed harassed and intimidated unionists, especially during the 1860
election and the secession crisis, the source of much of the oppression in the divided
county was the military forces, not civilians. 68
However, Williams and Hollingsworth could not begin the trek back to
Waterford for another two weeks on account of the latter being ill. The final period of
Williams’ and Hollingsworth’s stay in Richmond illustrated the often friendly
relations between Loudoun’s unionists and secessionists. Williams reveals that they
both “felt free to express” their pro-Union and abolitionist views to both Crenshaw’s
family and Thomas Edwards. When members of the family condemned the Union’s
recruitment of black troops, Williams responded that such a policy was a just course of
action. His reasoning was that since slaves believed that the war would inevitably free
them, the Confederacy would undergo a bloody, destructive slave revolt resembling
the Haitian Revolution if the U.S. government had not been guiding the slaves’ role in
the war by enlisting them. Also, the Confederacy, by mustering all of its able-bodied
white men into its army, was risking the well-being of its women and children because
the absence of white men left them at the mercy of slaves. At a subsequent occasion,
Williams told Edwards that he “regarded the present effort as a Rebellion against legal
authorities” and that he could not in good conscience recognize the Confederacy by
taking an oath of allegiance to that republic. Despite the knowledge of the newly-freed
hostages’ unionist views, the secessionist Thomas Edwards convinced an official to
provide the two men with passes needed to safely travel back to Waterford. As
68

Ibid.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Williams recollected, “how many Union men would have done the same thing for an
avowed Rebel wanting a pass from the U.S. Government (?)” Williams and
Hollingsworth thereafter journeyed back to Waterford. Since no one had learned of
their release from Confederate prison, everyone responded to their arrival with great
surprise and jubilation. 69
James W. Walker subsequently informed General Hitchcock and Secretary of
War Stanton of the release of Williams and Hollingsworth, adding that the Union
should reciprocate by releasing Ball and Belt. Samuel Janney and Mary and James
Williams met several times with President Abraham Lincoln to solicit the release of
the two secessionists. These efforts eventually convinced the federal government to
free them. William Williams learned a lesson from his odyssey of arrest,
imprisonment, and release: the Union had abandoned him, yet witnessed “the people
whose sons and husbands were in the Army fighting for a principle I opposed” commit
acts of kindness for him. As this story illustrates, though Loudoun’s unionists wanted
the United States to crush the rebellion and the county’s secessionists desired for the
Confederacy to attain its independence, both opposed their governments’ policy of
kidnapping enemy civilians and holding them as hostages. Despite their government
being at war with the other, they refused to allow such harm to be done to their
unarmed adversaries. 70
In 1864, Loudouners paid the largest prices for their allegiances and endured
the greatest amount of destruction to their property. The plundering and persecution
seen in the first three years of the war intensified. Though the county had avoided
large armies since the Gettysburg Campaign, small irregular parties roamed
throughout the county in early 1864. To feed themselves and their horses, the
irregulars foraged Loudoun farms. Also, the Union maintained the Potomac River
blockade. Thus, Loudoun County’s civilians continued to live in a war zone and see
soldiers from both armies trade relative control over the county’s towns. While they
69
70

Ibid.
Ibid.; Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 207; Rebecca Williams Diary, October 4, 1863.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
were more likely to be persecuted by the army of the side they opposed, everyone was
vulnerable to foraging from both militaries. Moreover, full-scale destruction of the
county’s resources occurred at the end of the year. As in previous years, Loudouners,
despite their treatment, aided soldiers in the service of their chosen side and expressed
their patriotism.
In 1864, the Quaker families of Waterford continued to endure Confederate
persecution and persisted in their non-violent pro-Union expressions. Rebecca
Williams repeated the gloom of her earlier diary entrees on New Year’s Day, 1864,
characterizing Waterford as “loaded with sorrow and suffering.” In late April, “some
rebel horse thieves took James M. Walker away with them.” Five days later, Walker
returned to his relieved family. Each time the unionists publicized their allegiance,
Confederate forces attempted to suppress them. In the late spring of 1864, three young
sisters knitted a U.S. flag and waved it from the upper window of their house as
soldiers crossing by. Union soldiers cheered, but Confederate troops treated their
action as a treasonous offense. Several times the Confederates searched the girls’
house in vain to destroy the flag. The girls successfully hid the flag by placing it under
a false board in their attic floor. 71
Lizzie Dutton, Lida Dutton, and Sarah Steer demonstrated their patriotism in
May 1864 by launching a pro-Union monthly newspaper: The Waterford News. On
each issue’s front page, the women inscribed the words “Union Forever” and devoted
prayers or poems to President Lincoln and the soldiers fighting for the glorious Union.
A poem from the first issue denounced the traitorous Confederacy and its president. It
described the Civil War as a time when “treason” reared “its serpent head” and when
“our banner, once the pride And boast of every true Virginian” was “Now trampled
under feet that bear The impress of Old Jeff’s dominion.” Another section of the
paper, addressed by residents of a remote area of Dixieland, called for the Army of the
Potomac’s ultimate victory. The third issue prayed for General Ulysses S. Grant “To
crush this rebellion And put Treason to flight” and to conquer the enemy who had
71

Rebecca Williams Diary, January 1, 1864, April 24, 1864; Divine, To Talk is Treason, 78.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
raised his sword against the liberty and the government for which heroes had shed
their blood. Secessionists searched for the paper in the women’s homes, prompting the
Duttons and Steer to hide it. Thus, six Waterford women risked provoking further
Confederate mistreatment in order to publically express their allegiance to the
Union. 72
As they did earlier in the war, African American Loudouners spent 1864 aiding
the Union cause by providing of intelligence. Free blacks William Smith of Wheatland
and William Whine, who resided in Lovettsville, reported information about
Confederate movements to their white employer and Wheatland farmer William H.
Adams, who in turn passed that information to Union forces. This intelligence
gathering “was able to save Union troops from capture several times.” Joseph Rivers,
another free African American, informed the Federals about the operations of John
Mobberly’s band, which invited a deadly retaliation if the guerrilla leader learned of
this action. Thus, by performing local service, free and enslaved black Loudouners
helped topple a slaveholders’ republic under which members of their race lived in
bondage. 73
Northern Loudoun’s unionists suffered from pillaging by Rebel irregulars in
the first half of 1864. Mosby, upon forming his Partisan Ranger battalion in 1863,
mounted the command with horses seized from the unionist population. The career of
the Forty-third Virginia consisted of terrorizing not only the Union army, but also the
pro-Union civilians of “Mosby’s Confederacy,” which comprised Loudoun, Fairfax,
Prince William, and Fauquier Counties. On June 17, 1864, Mosby engaged in
“plundering, stealing, and burning the house, barns, and hay” of Waterford resident
Sydney Williams. The summer of 1864 also saw Confederate forces seizing grain and
other supplies from the German and Quaker settlements. An August 1864 report noted
that four hundred unspecified Confederate soldiers persisted in robbing “the Union

72

The Waterford News, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 28, 1864; The Waterford News, Vol. 1, No. 3, July 2, 1864;
Divine, To Talk is Treason, 78.
73
Samuel George (no. 1052), Southern Claims.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
men of Loudoun.” The report’s author demanded that the loyal population of the
county be relieved from these depredations with a cavalry force. 74
The joint-occupation of Loudoun County often meant that citizens would have
to care for wounded soldiers when the two sides fought engagements. On May 17,
1864, a force comprising Mosby’s Rangers and members of Mobberly’s band
ambushed three Loudoun Rangers. Two died, while one—Sergeant Charles Stewart—
survived with five wounds. A group of Waterford’s women arrived to the scene after
the Confederates withdrew, including Rachel W. Steer, the owner of a farm south of
the village. Accompanying them was physician Thomas Bond. With the nursing from
the “kind Union lady” Steer and Dr. Bond, Stewart recovered from his wounds
incurred from “the inhuman rebels.” 75
From July 4 to July 16, 1864, during a heightened period of operations by
Mosby’s Rangers, Waterford’s residents “were entirely surrounded by rebels, and
entirely cut off from all communication.” Mobberly’s irregulars were being
increasingly noted for depredations against the unionist German population in late
1864. Towards the end of the year, both Mosby’s Rangers and Mobberly’s band
foraged and seized supplies in the German settlements. For refusing to participate in
the rebellion and supporting the side of the northern invaders, unionists saw the
county’s Confederate forces designate their farms as the preferred foraging targets. 76
Meanwhile, the Dulanys spent 1864 providing additional shelter to
Confederate irregulars, enabling them to blend in with the local population and
thereby evade Union forces in between operations. During the first week of January,
Lieutenant Turner and Mr. Smith played chess with Mary Dulany before leaving for a

74

Max Weber to T. A. Meysenburg, June 17, 1864, O. R., Volume 37, Part 1, 646; R. C. Bamford to
Max Weber, June 17, 1864, O. R., Volume 37, Part 1, 646; Goodhart, History of the Independent
Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 128; James M. Downey to C. C. Augur, August 12, 1864, O. R., Volume
43, Part 1, 776-777.
75
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 127; The Waterford News, Vol. 1,
No. 1, May 28, 1864.
76
The Waterford News, August 20, 1864; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia
Rangers, 173.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
raid against the Third Pennsylvania Cavalry near Warrenton. When Turner returned to
Welbourne on a snowy January 8, he gave the women and girls a sleigh ride. During
the first week of February, the Dulanys dined with Elijah White, Mosby surgeon
Lawrence Alexander, and Baron Robert von Massow, a Prussian who rode with the
Forty-third Battalion. On February 9, the family hosted a large group of Mosby’s men.
Later that spring, many Rangers attended religious services in the area. In early June
1864, the Dulanys nursed ill Rangers Massow and Ludwell Knapp. 77
During the summer and fall of 1864, the Dulanys suffered from poor wartime
conditions and worried about future Federal foraging. Oats, corn, and meat were in
small quantities due to a drought and Confederate authorities supplying the counties
south of Loudoun with food. Also, the inflated Confederate currency prevented John
Dulany from purchasing a horse. John feared such circumstances could worsen,
pointing to the possibility that the Yankees might invade the county and seize or
destroy everything Loudouners needed for subsistence. After learning of General
David Hunter’s Shenandoah Valley raid, which attacked civilian property as part of
the Union army’s developing “hard war” policy, whereby the Union tried to
demoralize southerners through the widespread, routine destruction of their resources
and property, Fanny Dulany condemned the Union commander and the U.S. army in
her diary. She declared that she “would despise that horrid old wretch Hunter to come
here” and that the Bible’s command to love one’s enemies did not apply to the “horrid,
savage, mean, dirty, unprincipled, cruel,” and devilish Yankee enemy. However, the
Dulanys also faced Rebel mistreatment. Before Fanny, Mary, and Mr. Weidmayer
visited Oatlands, on the road south of Leesburg, they searched for a mule and horse
captured by unidentified Confederate soldiers. 78

77

Vogtsberger, The Dulanys of Welbourne, 121; Mary Dulany Diary, January 4, 1864, January 6, 1864,
in Ibid., 121-122; Mary Dulany Diary, February 3, 1864, February 4, 1864, in Ibid.,130; Fanny Dulany
to Richard Dulany, February 5, 1864, in Ibid., 130; Mary Dulany Diary, June 3, 1864, June 4, 1864,
June 6, 1864, in Ibid., 158-159.
78
John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, July 12, 1864, in Ibid., 177-178; Fanny Dulany Diary, June 16,
1864, in Ibid., 164; Fanny Dulany to Richard Dulany, July 1864, in Ibid., 181; Grimsley, The Hard
Hand of War, 3-4.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Union and Confederate pillagers continued to visit the family into the fall of
1864. Learning of the arrival of Union forces at Middleburg, east of Welbourne,
provoked anxiety and fostered a sense of weariness. In November 1864, John felt a
high level of nervousness from the knowledge that the Yankees could be anywhere in
the area. These concerns convinced him to refuse to let Mary travel to Barbee’s
Crossroads twenty miles away in Fauquier County, where Richard was recovering
from a wound. Such passion and worrying represent another example of the localism
that combined with the Dulanys’ ideological loyalties. The Dulanys despised the
Yankees, not only because they had supported Confederate independence since 1861,
but also due to the threat the Union posed to their home life. 79
Waterford residents again witnessed the two opposing armies trade possession
of their town numerous times in the summer of 1864, provoking an emotional reaction
from the residents each time. Whenever Union soldiers arrived, the response was joy;
whenever the Confederates appeared, depression reigned. In August, Lieutenant John
W. Hutchinson of the Thirteenth New York Cavalry rode into Waterford. There, he
asked Emma Dutton for directions. He wore a coat over his blue uniform to protect
himself from a possible attack from the Confederates infesting the county. As a result,
Dutton and Hutchinson were unsure of each other’s allegiances. When he inquired
about her loyalty, she replied, “If you’re a rebel I hate you; but if you’re a Northerner I
love you.” He then opened his coat to show her his Federal uniform. The two
developed an acquaintance; when the lieutenant returned to Waterford after the war,
they married. 80
By 1864, great demand existed for various products in the absence of open
stores. As a newspaper ad reported, “the Union Ladies of Waterford” wanted pound,
sponge loaf, and ginger cakes, as well as molasses. In June, to the citizens’ relief, the
Union partially lifted the blockade, permitting loyalists to purchase goods in Maryland
if they obtained a pass. When Brigadier General Max Weber attained a position in the
79
80

John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, October 1864, in Ibid., 228.
Divine, To Talk is Treason, 84.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
U.S. War Department, he “modified the order so that once a week each loyal person,
well vouched for, and bringing to our lines supplies, could purchase $10 worth of
necessaries, swearing that they were for family use.” Northern Virginia’s unionists
utilized this change in Union policy to acquire high-demand supplies in Maryland.
Thanks to the loosening of the blockade, Loudoun County’s unionists became
consumers again. 81
In the fall of 1864, John Dutton remained a unionist exile in Maryland. There,
he closely followed the North’s political situation and hoped for President Lincoln’s
reelection. He also expressed his unionist sentiments in letters to his family at this
time. As he stated in an October letter to his youngest daughter Anna, Lincoln’s
victory in November “will show to the people of the South that we intend to put down
the rebellion; to be one country.” He added that this result would represent a rejection
of the sectional division and that “The whole Union and nothing but the Union is the
determination of the people.” John did not support Lincoln in the 1860 election,
thinking him unqualified for the office. But with his determined and successful
handling of the war, the president won over John. He concluded his letter declaring his
love for “all good Union people” and hope that “they will all hold out faithful to the
end.” 82
Union forces had seized the livestock and crops of Loudoun County’s unionists
and secessionists since their arrival in the county in March 1862. Yet, at the end of
November 1864, the Union army committed the largest act of destruction of the war in
Loudoun. This occurred in the context of Union General Philip Sheridan’s campaign
against General Jubal Early’s Confederate forces in the summer and fall of 1864 in the
Shenandoah Valley. During the campaign, Mosby’s Rangers constantly harassed
Sheridan’s supply lines and garrisons. Frustrated and with the aim to drive Mosby out
of northern Virginia, the Union high command decided to destroy a major food and

81

The Waterford News, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 28, 1864; Max Weber to J. A. Hardie, June 5, 1864, O. R.,
Vol. 37, Part 1, 595.
82
John Dutton to Anna Dutton, October 25, 1864.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
manpower source of the Forty-third Virginia’s: Loudoun County. What resulted was
an example of what historian Clay Mountcastle referred to as “punitive war,” an act of
retaliation by the Union army against the southern civilian population for Confederate
irregular attacks in the area in which these civilians lived. 83
In August, Grant asked Sheridan if he could “spare a division of cavalry, send
them through Loudoun County, to destroy and carry off the crops, animals, negroes,”
and all able-bodied men of military age. Grant exempted from arrest Loudoun’s
Quaker population, “who are all favorably disposed to the Union.” Grant’s instructions
included the capture of men because Mosby’s Rangers “are conscripting everybody
there capable of bearing arms.” Busy fighting Early, Sheridan waited until the late fall
to follow Grant’s instructions. He then decided to proceed with the punitive operation
in Loudoun “and let them know there is a God in Israel.” Sheridan sought to punish
secessionist Loudouners such as the Dulanys for aiding Mosby’s Rangers with
supplies, food, and shelter. He wanted to demonstrate to the “villainous” population in
the vicinity of Harper’s Ferry that the Forty-third’s attacks on his supply lines and
garrisoned troops would cost them “all that they have spent their lives accumulating.”
Sheridan ordered General Wesley Merritt to take two brigades from his First Cavalry
Division into the area bordered by the Potomac River, Bull Run Range, White Plains,
Shenandoah River, and Manassas Gap Railroad. There, Sheridan ordered Merritt to
“consume and destroy all forage and subsistence, burn all barns and mills and their
contents, and drive off all stock in the region.” However, in an illustration of the hard,
and not total, war that characterized the Civil War, Sheridan advised Merritt to bear in
mind “that no dwellings are to be burned and that no personal violence be offered to
the citizens.” 84

83

Clay Mountcastle, Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2009).
84
U. S. Grant to P. H. Sheridan, August 16, 1864, O. R., Vol. 43, Part 1, 811; U. S. Grant to P. H.
Sheridan, August 21, 1864, O. R., Vol. 43, Part 1, 869-870; C. C. Augur to P. H. Sheridan, August 25,
1864, O. R., Vol. 43, Part 1, 909; P. H. Sheridan to H. W. Halleck, November 26, 1864, O. R., Vol. 43,
Part 2, 671-672; Jas. W. Forsyth to Wesley Merritt, November 27, 1864, O. R., Vol. 43, Part 2, 679.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Between November 27 and December 2, 1864, Merritt’s Union force
conducted a burning raid in Loudoun County. Leaving behind a path of destruction, it
rode along the Catoctin Creek and crossed through Middleburg, Salem, Millville,
Philomont, Circleville, Hamilton, Waterford, Lovettsville, Hillsboro, Purcellville, and
Snickersville. The Yankees foraged and rounded up or slaughtered horses, hogs, cattle,
cows, and sheep. They burned buildings such as mills, factories, and stables. Hay,
wheat, corn, and straw went up in flames. The Federals insulted women and pillaged
homes and the county’s poor house. Once they completed the raid, the Union forces
withdrew to the Shenandoah Valley. 85
Despite Grant’s order to spare the Quakers, the Union army destroyed the
property of “neighborhoods inhabited chiefly by citizens who have been steadfast in
their loyalty to the National Government.” When the Federals burned the barns of the
countryside, residents could see the flames illuminating the night. Samuel Janney
estimated that the total loss of unionist property and livestock during the raid
amounted to $256,000. The troops destroyed $80,000-worth of property held by the
Quakers meeting at Goose Creek and $23,000 owned by members of the Fairfax
Monthly Meeting at Waterford. Merritt burned the flouring and saw mill of Janney’s
brother Asa, “one of the most thoroughly loyal citizens we have,” according to
Samuel. Yet, as Mark Neely points out, this raid, like Union civilian policy in general,

85

James J. Williamson, Mosby’s Rangers: A Record of the Operations of the Forty-Third Battalion of
Virginia Cavalry from its Organization to the Surrender, from the Diary of a Private, Supplemented
and Verified with Official Reports of Federal Officers and Also of Mosby: with Personal
Reminiscences, Sketches of Skirmishes, Battles and Bivouacs, Dashing Raids and Daring Adventures,
Scenes and Incidents in the History of Mosby’s Command …Muster Rolls, Occupation, and Present
Whereabouts of Surviving Members (Alexandria: Time-Life Books, 1895), 320-321. According to
Private James J. Williamson of Mosby’s Rangers, his command partially alleviated the destruction by
driving some livestock to already burned areas and by hovering around and occasionally firing on the
raiders. Numerous Southern Claims Commission claimants lost food and animals during the burning
raid. See Amasa Hough, Jr. (no. 21579), Southern Claims; George Cooper (no. 10998), Southern
Claims; Silas Corbin (no. 12460), Southern Claims; William Crim (no. 21567), Southern Claims; David
Carr (no. 1389), Southern Claims Disallowed; Ezekiel Potts (no. 21601), Southern Claims Disallowed;
George Baker (no. 51400), Southern Claims Disallowed; Sarah Cooper (no. 1214), Southern Claims
Disallowed; Uriah Beans (no. 41700), Southern Claims Disallowed; Virginia Virts (no. 41880),
Southern Claims Disallowed.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
was constrained: personal accounts often exaggerated the extent of the devastation,
and Union army spared the civilians’ subsistence. 86
The Quakers of Waterford had mixed responses to the raid. Most were
shocked that, despite supporting the federal government and refusing to join the
rebellion for three years, the Union army they welcomed, loved, and cheered for had
destroyed much of their possessions. Janney’s account of the unionist property
damage had a bitter tone, emphasizing the “great hardship” and “suffering” of the
most loyal people of the county. However, while many secessionists throughout the
Confederacy became alienated from their cause when their national government began
depriving them of the means of subsistence, the unionists of Loudoun County
underwent no such change of loyalty at any point after the raid. Rather, they remained
steadfast unionists who looked forward to the crumbling of the Confederacy. At least
two even supported the burning of Loudoun. During the raid, Major J. B. Wheeler of
the Sixth New York saw Emma Dutton and another Waterford woman sitting on gate
posts in front of the Dutton house. According to Wheeler, they waved U.S. flags and
called as flames baptized their hay, “Burn away, burn away, if it will keep Mosby
from coming here.” Some unionists, therefore, supported whatever policy was
necessary to drive out the Confederates infesting their homes. 87
Quakers’ reaction against the U.S. government was not revenge, but applying
for compensation. Samuel Janney wrote a petition to this end, which many unionists
signed. He and his cousin Charles went to Washington, D.C., where they made the
unionists’ case before Secretary Stanton and Congress. The House of Representatives
passed a joint resolution to pay $60,000 to loyal Loudouners for seized livestock, but
failed to pass the Senate. Neither house voted on a bill to pay for the destroyed
property. Congressmen decided in this way due to the war’s high cost and the flood of

86

Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 230; Neely, The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction, 109139. Samuel’s barn was spared because it lay next to his dwelling, but the soldiers drove away his
horses and cattle.
87
Ibid.; Divine, To Talk is Treason, 92. The anti-Confederate dissidents grew alienated with the
Confederate cause due to battlefield defeats and the Confederate government’s conscription policy.

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similar applications from other loyal southerners. After the war, Janney and other
Friends convinced Congress to pay $61,821.13 to Loudoun County’s wartime
unionists for the livestock Merritt drove off. However, they never received
compensation for their destroyed property, with the exception of individual claims
made to the Southern Claims Commission in the 1870s and contributions from New
York and Philadelphia Friends. 88
The severity of the burning raid and the maintenance of pro-U.S. sentiments
among Loudoun’s unionists following the raid demonstrate that ideological loyalties
in Loudoun County were strong enough to withstand mistreatment from one’s favored
government. For those who felt the Federal army had betrayed them, political
allegiance to the Union trumped the local concern of personal property destruction, an
act which, when committed by the Rebels, had intensified their dislike for the
Confederacy. Those recognizing the burning raid’s potential benefits expressed a
political allegiance to the Union when they waved its flag and demonstrated a unionist
sentiment rooted in localism when they interpreted the Union army’s act as a service
to their community.
The Dulanys managed to avoid the burning raiders, but nevertheless endured
Union depredations before and after the raid. A couple months prior, the Dulanys
witnessed the Federals burn all of their fences. In early November, while the family
felt relieved at the possibility that it would avoid the Yankees for a time, a Federal
brigade led by General Powell stripped Welbourne of fifty-one or fifty-two cattle,
three horses, and an unidentified number of sheep. After the Yankees left, Mary,
Fanny, and three others walked to the Union forces and convinced the officers to
return three cows. In December, as the Union army attained a firm grasp over the
entire county and searched for Mosby, the Dulanys experienced the war’s most
complete Union occupation of Loudoun County, one in which they were in the
vicinity of more Yankees than at any previous time. As a result, the family lacked a
means to deliver mail and was cut off from Confederate aid. In late December, Union
88

Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 231-232.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
soldiers burned down the Dulanys’ barn, as well as a barn in Millsville, located in
between Welbourne and Middleburg. As John Dulany revealed on January 1, 1865,
“We have been surrounded by Yankees for nearly a month, so that it was dangerous to
leave the house.” Even when the Union army departed the area around Welbourne for
a week of raiding and went into winter quarters, the Dulanys felt to be at the Yankees’
mercy, given the continued absence of Confederate forces to challenge the Union
occupation. John compared Union soldiers to hungry wolves who tirelessly hunted for
Mosby’s Rangers during both the night and day. Thus, Welbourne’s secessionist
family saw late 1864 and early 1865 as a time in which the Union army became an
even greater danger to their home. 89
A Union cavalry brigade under General Thomas Devin, which participated in
the burning raid, spent the winter of 1864/1865 occupying Lovettsville and
Wheatland. Due to the raid’s wholesale destruction, the troops required supplies
brought in from Maryland in order to subsist. This winter saw little Confederate
activity in Loudoun, which resulted in a return of relative peace for unionists and
which can be attributed to the low quantity of forage. A joyful January 1865 letter
from Mollie Dutton to her mother-in-law indicates that happier times had arrived in
the absence of Waterford’s Rebel oppressors. She mentions that her brother James
returned home, reuniting the family after a three year separation. Also, the town’s
Friends were “enjoying good health and pretty good spirits” and “the Secesh are the
despondent ones now.” Mollie also reveals that “our soldiers are in (town) every day.”
However, as with every occupation of the war, some members of Lovettsville’s
civilian population underwent a series of foraging and plundering. Since late 1864 and
early 1865 witnessed a Federal occupation of Loudoun and an absence of any

89

John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, September 1864, in Vogtsberger, The Dulanys of Welbourne,
204; John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, November 2, 1864, in Ibid., 230; Mary Dulany to Richard
H. Dulany, November 11, 1864, in Ibid., 233-235; Nina Whiting to Alice Whiting, November 1864, in
Ibid., 238; John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, December 28, 1864, in Ibid., 247; John P. Dulany to
Richard H. Dulany, January 1, 1865, in Ibid., 248. John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, January 12,
1865, in Ibid., 262.

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Confederate activity in the county, the United States briefly acquired total control over
Loudoun County. 90
The final months of the war brought despair back to Loudoun’s Quakers.
During the first week of March 1865, Mosby and ninety of his Rangers occupied the
county. As a result, the Friends experienced a “terrible troublous day” in which their
“mental horizon has been pitch black.” The troops sought to enforce conscription and
thereby provide manpower to the weakening Confederate army. Fortunately for the
Quakers, Mosby’s men exempted most of them. Seven of the Rangers coerced Samuel
Janney into hosting them for an evening and permitting them to sleep at his house. The
Rangers also spent their occupation foraging. They seized ten percent of the county’s
remaining corn, bacon, and wheat and captured wagons with which they transported
the food. At one point during this period, “the Rebels took nearly everything” John
Everhart “had, even my own, my wife’s and my daughter’s clothes.” Thus, though the
Union army conducted an unchallenged occupation of post-burning raid Loudoun
County in the winter of 1864/1865, Rebel forces arriving in the spring reminded the
Yankees and unionists that the Confederacy could still conduct operations in the
border county. 91
In April 1865, the mood of Loudoun’s unionists shifted to a mixture of joy and
gloom when news arrived of Lee’s surrender to Grant and the assassination of
President Lincoln. The Union population celebrated “the prospect of deliverance from
rebel oppression and anticipated restoration of the National authority” and mourned
the loss of their “beloved and venerated President.” Janney recalled that he felt great
“affection and reverence” for Lincoln and that, due to his acquaintance with the fallen
leader, he felt that he had lost a friend. According to Rebecca Williams, “No event of
the war has shaken the heart of the people to such extent as Lincoln’s death.” Rebecca

90

Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 230; Mollie Dutton to Phebe Steer, January 29, 1865; Adam
Cooper (no. 445), Southern Claims; Elizabeth Everhart (no. 41741), Southern Claims; Mary J. Smith
(no. 41849), Southern Claims Disallowed.
91
Mollie Dutton to Phebe Steer, March 8, 1865; Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 232; John
Everhart (no. 11652), Southern Claims.

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compared the slain president to Moses, describing him as a man who “had led the
country through much difficulty and many trials and was permitted even a glimpse of
that promised land, but not to reach it.” Though most of Loudoun’s unionists voted for
Bell in 1860, this response to the assassination reveals that the county’s pro-Union
population resembled the North in its support of and love for the Republican president
by the end of the war. 92
Though mourning the loss of their country’s leader, Loudoun’s unionists
continued to rejoice at their republic’s victory over the one they opposed and suffered
under for four years. When a group of Quakers, while present at a shoe shop on Main
Street, learned of Lee’s surrender, they were uncontrollably jubilant. Williams
mentions that the town hoisted a U.S. flag during a patriotic celebration of the Union’s
restoration. On May 3, Lovettsville raised the stars and stripes for the first time since
the start of the conflict. Also, with the slaveholding republic dead, the county’s
African Americans had secured their emancipation. Meanwhile, “active participants in
or sympathizers with the treasons of Jeff Davis and Co.” became “gloomy and
downcast.” Samuel Janney mentioned that a large number of Loudoun’s secessionists
opposed John Wilkes Booth’s action because they recognized Lincoln’s “benevolent
disposition and remarkable lenity towards his enemies” and feared potentially harsh
measures from President Andrew Johnson. Yet, as will be seen in the epilogue, these
worries would prove unfounded. Four years of martial law and military occupation
had come to an end. 93
In the final months of the war, Loudoun’s secessionists began to notice the
hopelessness of the Confederate cause and the eventual fall of their republic. Richard
Dulany hopelessly wished that independence would constitute a portion of the peace
terms. John recognized that the South would need to surrender its slaves. He wrote to
his son that he “did not believe without a great change in our favour that this war can

92

Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 235; Rebecca Williams Diary, April 23, 1865.
Rebecca Williams Diary, April 30, 1865; Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 235; Chamberlin
and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 339.

93

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
be carried on much longer, and if the South should be conquered it will make a great
change in our circumstances.” John responded to the fall of Charleston, South
Carolina, in mid-February 1865 with disbelief. Nina Whiting interpreted the
Confederate government’s consideration in late 1864 to recruit slaves to fight for its
independence as a sign that defeat was imminent. She thus recognized that by
undermining the institution the Confederacy was established to uphold and protect, the
young republic would fail to defeat the Union. By the late spring of 1865, the
Dulanys’ country ceased to exist and they would have to endure being members of a
vanquished population. 94
While many of Loudoun County’s civilians endured the hardships of the Civil
War in their homes or in exile and witnessed scores of Union and Confederate soldiers
trade occupations of their neighborhoods, others joined locally-raised irregular
military units. Those Loudouners who only expressed their loyalties by feeding and
nursing soldiers, waving flags, and voting in the secession ordinance election faced
arrest, imprisonment, and harassment. However, the other group of Loudoun citizens
who joined unconventional commands expressed their loyalties in the most violent and
costly form possible when they risked severe injury and death fighting skirmishes. In
between foraging and harassing unarmed supporters of the enemy, Loudoun’s
irregulars enlisted in a Federal partisan battalion, a Confederate partisan battalion, or a
Confederate guerrilla band and fought a local conflict. In doing so, they sought to
protect their loyal neighbors from enemy forces and defend both their county and
republic. What resulted was a local civil war between the unionists and secessionists
of Loudoun County.

94

Richard H. Dulany to Mary Whiting, January 29, 1865, in Vogtsberger, The Dulanys of Welbourne,
264; John P. Dulany to Richard H. Dulany, February 24, 1865, in Ibid., 274; Nina Whiting to Alice
Whiting, November 1864, in Ibid., 239.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013

CHAPTER III
MORE LIKE A SLAUGHTER PEN: THE IRREGULAR WAR IN
LOUDOUN COUNTY
On April 5, 1865, Loudoun County Confederate John Mobberly approached
the barn, in which Sergeant Charles Stewart, Joseph Waters, and Mahlon H. Best of
the unionist Loudoun Rangers concealed themselves. As the three Federal soldiers
prepared to rise and shoot, Stewart might have reflected on the events of the past year
that led to this ambush, since what he was about to do was a personal act of revenge.
On May 17, 1864, outside of Waterford, Loudoun County, Virginia, a group of John
S. Mosby’s Rangers and John Mobberly’s irregulars attacked the Loudoun Rangers’
pickets, one of whom was Stewart. As he and three others chased a decoy soldier,
Rebels ambushed them, killing two and causing one to flee. Stewart surrendered, but
the ambushers fired at him anyway, knocking him off his horse and wounding him in
four different places. Mobberly rode his horse over Stewart’s body. He then shot the
Ranger in the face “and left him for dead.” 1
Afterward, a local Quaker woman named Rachel Steer and Dr. Thomas Bond
nursed him and helped him recover, saving his life. Bond declared that “his only
ambition in life was to live long enough to make another hell” for Mobberly, and
Stewart sought revenge for this vicious personal encounter. In one attempt in the Blue
Ridge Mountains, Stewart and a party of his soldiers fired at Mobberly, but each bullet
missed. In early April, 1865, Mobberly planned to meet with a unionist named Luther
M. Potterfield at Potterfield’s barn in the Blue Ridge Mountains and near the town of
Lovettsville. Upon the Union army at Harper’s Ferry learning of this and organizing a
party of five men to kill or capture Mobberly, Stewart seized the opportunity and
requested to join the squad. After entering the barnyard, Mobberly saw the Rangers

1

John W. Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, ed. Melvin L. Steadman, Jr.
(Annandale: Turnpike Press, 1967), 9; Briscoe Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia
Rangers. U.S. Vol. Cav. (Scouts) 1862-65 (Washington, D.C.: Press of McGill & Wallace, 1896), 127.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
and yelled “Oh, Lord I am gone!” They fired their revolvers; Stewart’s “bullet pierced
his brain, and he fell from his horse a corpse.” 2
This ambush represents a single episode of a local conflict in Loudoun County,
Virginia, during the American Civil War. In and around Loudoun, irregular units
representing the Union and the Confederacy frequently engaged each other and regular
army units of the opposing side. They operated behind enemy lines, served in units
much smaller than conventional commands, and made quick, stealthy attacks. This
chapter will examine the careers and experiences of three commands: the Independent
Loudoun Rangers (sometimes referred to as the “Loyal Virginia Cavalry”), Elijah V.
White’s Thirty-fifth Battalion Virginia Cavalry (also known as “White’s Cavalry” or
“White’s Battalion”), and John W. Mobberly’s band of Loudoun County guerrillas.
General Thomas L. Rosser, commander of the Laurel Brigade, which the Thirty-fifth
joined in late 1862, nicknamed the command “the Comanches” for decisively routing
a Union force at Parker’s Store on November 29, 1863, during which they rode wildly
and made “ear-piercing yells.” 3 The nickname stuck to White’s Cavalry for the
remainder of the war, and it will often be used to refer to the unit in this chapter.
Though the service of Henry A. Cole’s Maryland partisans and John S. Mosby’s
Forty-third Battalion Virginia Cavalry (Mosby’s Rangers) in Loudoun will also be

2

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 127, 197-198; Forsythe, Guerrilla
Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 8-11; Col. M. S. Thompson, “Prince of Dare-Devils,” Confederate
Veteran 28 (August 1920): 288-89.
http://archive.org/stream/confederateveter28conf#page/288/mode/2up/search/mobberly Different
sources provide different reasons for Mobberly and Potterfield meeting. Forsythe says in his memoir
that Mobberly and Potterfield agreed to an arrangement where the former would kidnap slaves and the
latter would then enlist the slaves into the Union army in exchange for a bounty that the two would
divide up. April 5 was to be a day where they would confer further on the matter. For other
explanations, see Taylor M. Chamberlin and John M Souders, Between Reb and Yank: A Civil War
History of Northern Loudoun County, Virginia (Jefferson and London: McFarland &Company, Inc,
Publishers, 2011), 330. One story the authors tell is that Mobberly and Potterfield planned to meet
regarding a horse trade, while another says that Potterfield made arrangements to discuss with
Mobberly a desire to join his band of irregulars.
3
Frank M. Myers, The Comanches: A History of White’s Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, Laurel Brig.,
Hampton Div., A.N.V., C.S.A. (Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co., Publishers, 1871), 238; John E. Divine,
The Virginia Regimental Histories Series: 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry (Lynchburg: H. E. Howard,
Inc, 1985), 42.

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studied, only those activities that involve Cole’s men and Mosby’s unit collaborating
or clashing with at least one of the other three units will be given attention.
Since this chapter examines a local irregular war, it will build on the growing
body of scholarship over the last three decades on irregular warfare, inner civil wars,
and military occupation in Civil War America. This chapter addresses the question of
why Loudoun County is important in the study of small, irregular conflicts and the
phenomenon of irregular warfare in general. All three of the units that are the focus of
this study have received insufficient and limited attention from historians, who have
only mentioned them briefly in larger works on Civil War irregular warfare. This
study of Loudoun County’s civil war will join scholars Phillip S. Paludan, Jonathan D.
Sarris, Victoria E. Bynum, and Barton A. Myers in examining irregular conflicts and
civil wars in local communities scattered throughout the Confederacy. The chapter
will also add to the work of Kenneth Noe on counter-irregular warfare by discussing
military units whose purpose was to target irregular combatants infesting a particular
geographic area. The unconventional warfare in Loudoun fits in with the scholarship
on the classification of military occupation; the situation in the county resembles what
historian Stephen V. Ash termed “no man’s land,” areas of the Civil War South over
which neither the Union nor the Confederate armies had complete control. The
irregulars constantly clashed with each other without eliminating the other from the
county and thereby securing Loudoun for their respective republic. Moreover, since
Loudoun, a county within a Confederate state, shared a border with two Union border
states, states in which Loudoun’s irregulars served and that produced soldiers that
fought alongside the Loudoun units, this study joins works covering other borderland
areas. Thus, a study of Loudoun County’s war allows the scholarship to come closer to
completing the picture of both the phenomena of irregular warfare and of Civil War
borderlands. 4
4

Robert Mackey, The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861-1865 (Duncan:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 101. Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role
of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 479481; Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee

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Focusing on the Loudoun Rangers and the commands of White and Mobberly
will best showcase Loudoun County’s inner war. The commands shared parallel
histories: each had an overwhelming majority of soldiers from Loudoun County in its
ranks, each of their commanding officers lived in the county when hostilities broke

Press, 1981); Jonathan Dean Sarris, A Separate Civil War (Charlottesville and London: University of
Virginia Press, 2006); Victoria Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010); Victoria Bynum, The Free State of Jones (Chapel Hill and London:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Barton A. Myers, Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty,
and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2009); Kenneth W. Noe, “Exterminating Savages: The Union Army and Mountain
Guerrillas in Southern West Virginia, 1861-1862,” in Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson ed. The
Civil War in Appalachia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 104-131; Stephen V. Ash,
When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Robert Mackey, in his study of irregular warfare in
the Upper South, particularly the guerrilla war in Arkansas, the partisan war in Virginia, and the regular
cavalry raiding in Tennessee and Kentucky, while providing due attention to Mosby’s Rangers, only
briefly mentions the Loudoun Rangers and John Mobberly’s band and ignores White’s battalion and
Cole’s Maryland Cavalry, making his work very limited. To be sure, Daniel E. Sutherland’s general
work on irregular warfare briefly mentions how these irregular units that fought in Loudoun engaged
each other and were composed of soldiers who preferred to operate independently from the regular
army. He also discusses the creation of Mobberly’s band and Mosby’s Rangers, but he lacks details
regarding the specific dates and places of their engagements and he does not devote any attention to
how the other irregular units formed. Thus, a more comprehensive account of these specific units
detailing their entire history in the war is needed. In his classic work, Victims, Paludan analyzes the
Shelton Laurel Massacre in western North Carolina in 1863, the execution of thirteen young and old
unionist prisoners by Confederate soldiers in January 1863. This occurred in a context in which the
Confederacy enforced conscription, alienating secessionists, inspiring desertion, and leading to a war
with unionist guerrillas. In A Separate Civil War, Jonathan Dean Sarris examines the inner civil war in
Fannin and Lumpkin as being characterized by lower class-based unionist dissent and anti-Confederate
guerrillas who opposed conscription. They fought against Confederate soldiers, militia units, and local
secessionists. In The Long Shadow of the Civil War, Victoria Bynum compares and contrasts three
guerrilla wars in the Quaker Belt of piedmont North Carolina, Jones County, Mississippi, and Hardin
County in eastern Texas. Bynum studies Jones County and the Knight Company exclusively in The
Free State of Jones. She details how the Confederacy began violently cracking down on disillusioned
deserters in the unionist county, provoking them into forming the Knight Company and waging a
guerrilla war against raiding Confederate soldiers and conscription officers from 1863 to 1865. Barton
Myers uses the execution of Confederate Daniel Bright by Union soldiers in North Carolina’s Great
Dismal Swamp region as an allegory of the irregular war raging in the area, which involved black
counter-guerrilla soldiers, a community divided between a Confederate majority and unionist minority,
and retaliatory killings. In his study, Noe examines the development of the Union army’s counterguerrilla warfare against Confederate bushwhackers in West Virginia in 1861 and 1862 from a limited
to a more destruction war involving scouting and destruction of property from notorious units like the
Thirty-sixth Ohio. The types of occupations Ash identifies are towns garrisoned by Union troops and
the Confederate frontier which the Yankees occasionally entered but remained under Confederate
authority. For border state studies, see Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: the Civil War in
Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Aaron Astor,
Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
out, and they each underwent a challenge to their status as an independent unit that
illustrates their identities as unconventional soldiers. To be sure, Confederate
Loudouners joined Mosby’s Rangers, Loudoun County comprised a portion of
Mosby’s Confederacy, and Loudoun was the location of a large portion of the
operations of Cole’s Cavalry. However, Mosby was from central Virginia, Loudouners
constituted a minority in Mosby’s ranks, and Cole’s Cavalry was recruited from
Maryland. In essence, the county was not as central to these two units’ careers as it
was to those of the three commands of focus, in terms of why they fought and what
they represented. By using the stories of these three commands, this chapter will
capture what irregular warfare was for home-grown units in Loudoun County and how
unconventional soldiers from the county viewed this type of warfare and what their
motivations for fighting in this way were. 5
Centering on three units that are almost completely neglected in the
scholarship provides new insights into the dynamics of Civil War irregular warfare
that present a more revealing study than one concentrating on Mosby’s Rangers, one
of the most studied irregular units in the Civil War field. 6 Loudoun County did not
5

Previous scholars have argued that Civil War soldiers fought for ideology, patriotism, nationalism,
honor, manhood, their comrades, and/or their homes. For the literature on soldier motivations, see
Stephen Berry, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor,
and Manhood in the Union Army (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010); Chandra
Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage
Books, 2007); James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1988); Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); James I. Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Gray
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988); Aaron Sheean-Dean, Why Confederates Fought:
Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Bell
I. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1952); Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the
Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943).
6
Among the numerous works on Mosby’s Rangers are: Virgil C. Jones, Ranger Mosby (Chapel Hill,
1944); Kevin H. Siepel, Rebel: The Life and Times of John Singleton Mosby (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1983); Jeffry D. Wert, Mosby’s Rangers: The True Adventures of the Most Famous Command of
the Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1990); Hugh C. Keen and Horace
Mewborn, 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry: Mosby’s Command (Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, 1993);
James A. Ramage, Gray Ghost: The Life of Col. John Singleton Mosby (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1999).

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
merely constitute a portion of Mosby’s Confederacy; it was also the primary area of
operations for three other irregular units that harassed and terrorized enemy forces and
helped turn northern Virginia into a warzone from 1862 until the end of the war.
Moreover, since White’s Battalion did not form under the Partisan Ranger Act, but
resembled those Confederate units that did in terms of recruitment, organization,
tactics, and strategy, focusing on such a command will reveal another dimension of
Confederate partisan warfare. The only operations of Cole’s Cavalry and Mosby’s
Rangers that will be mentioned are those that involve them either fighting against or
alongside the three units mentioned above.
This chapter will emphasize the local element of Civil War loyalty in Loudoun
County and how soldiers expressed it. Loudouners, whether they be the unionists who
enlisted in the Loudoun Rangers or the secessionists who served in White’s
Comanches or Mobberly’s band, fought as irregular warriors for their respective
republic through defending their local area. The ideological and local allegiances
soldiers shared with civilians and civilians’ expressions of these allegiances have
already been covered in the previous chapter, but this chapter details the most violent
expression of these loyalties: military combat. Loudoun irregulars fought in their
county, in adjacent counties, and along the border with Maryland and West Virginia.
Due to sentimental ties to their home region, these places were the only ones in which
they wanted to fight; they opposed attempts by superior officers to coerce them into
fighting in locations further away. As soldiers of independent units, they sought to
maintain the authority to fight wherever they pleased and to only follow discretionary
orders from the nearest general. Attempts to infringe on this independence brought
resistance ranging from complaining in its mildest form, mutiny at its most extreme.
Despite these realities, Loudoun County irregulars willingly served alongside regular
soldiers from the different regions of their respective nation—the county’s southern
unionists fought alongside northern Federals and the secessionists of the northern tip
of the Confederacy fought alongside Confederates from the Lower South and
elsewhere in Virginia.
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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Loudoun County’s experience in the Civil War reveals that its irregular
warfare had three different, distinct types. Most of the scholars mentioned above use
the term “guerrilla” (sometimes “bushwhacker” as a synonym) as a blanket term for
all types of unconventional warfare or will use the terms “guerrilla,” “partisan,” or
“irregular” interchangeably. Civil War soldiers used the same terminology in their
memoirs and official reports. The types of unconventional warfare in Loudoun County
constitute a version of Robert Mackey’s distinction between “guerrillas,” “partisans,”
and “regular cavalry raiders.” The first term refers to disorganized, armed groups of
civilians or soldiers lacking any connection to or control by the regular army of the
side for which they fought. The second term encompasses organized, mostly
independent irregular companies or battalions not connected to a regiment or brigade
and subject to special orders from their government and regular army. Partisans were,
like regular troops, formally mustered into their units, wore uniforms, received
military pay, and officially represented a government. Yet, they fought with guerrilla
tactics. The third type of irregular was composed of conventional cavalry soldiers
from a regiment or brigade who occasionally left their units for raids in which they
enacted irregular tactics. 7
Loudoun lacked the civilian guerrilla bands and deserter bands seen in the
Appalachians and in other parts of the Confederacy and Union border states. However,
the county did witness the formation of a guerrilla band formed by partisans who, with
authorization from their commander, broke off of their battalion to fight their own
irregular war. The other two units discussed in this study were either the partisan or
regular cavalry raider type and sometimes switched from one to the other. Being home
to a local civil war involving such types of units, Loudoun represents a unique area in
the Civil War South; here was a place where if a civilian sought take up arms in
7

Sutherland, The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War, vi-ix; Myers, Executing
Daniel Bright, 45, 50-51; Mackey, The Uncivil War, 5-11.Sutherland differentiates between
“guerrillas,” “partisans,” and “bushwhackers,” but combines all three on the grounds of strategy and
tactics with the first term. Myers uses the terms “guerrilla” and “irregular” to refer to guerrilla-partisan
hybrids: Confederate companies that organized to form the Sixty-Sixth North Carolina Partisan
Rangers, permitted under the 1862 Partisan Ranger Act, but ultimately never became a larger irregular
unit and instead conducted independent military operations against occupying Union forces.

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defense of the country he supported, he joined an official unit. These elements make a
study of unconventional warfare in Loudoun County essential. The irregular war in
and around Loudoun will be put into the context of similar wars throughout the Civil
War South and border states.
The origins of the Loudoun County’s irregular war can be seen in the county’s
response to John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid and attempted slave insurrection in the
fall of 1859, which occurred one mile from Loudoun’s northwest border. Local
militiamen and armed civilians marched to the ferry, and new militia companies such
as Leesburg’s Loudoun Guards, the Loudoun Artillery, and the Hillsborough Border
Guards quickly came into existence, joining previously existing militia units like the
Loudoun Cavalry to scout and guard the border area for potential further abolitionist
invaders. Thus, while Loudoun County reflects the rest of Virginia and the South in its
exacerbated fears of northern abolitionism following this raid, it was all the more
urgent for the county due to its border with the North and the short distance from
Harper’s Ferry to the northwest county line. Future Loudoun secessionists prepared
for war a year before Lincoln’s election. When war broke out, Confederates in
Loudoun would have to worry, not only about northern abolitionist invaders, but also
those already amongst them. 8
The irregular war in and around Loudoun County began with the formation of
a single Confederate partisan unit: Elijah V. White’s independent cavalry company, a
unit which formed the nucleus of what would become the Thirty-fifth Battalion. A
Marylander who fought abolitionists in “Bleeding Kansas” and who acquired a farm in
Loudoun County in 1857, White on the eve of the war joined the Loudoun Cavalry,
with which he “took part in the scenes of excitement” during John Brown’s raid.
When hostilities broke out, White joined the Seventh Virginia Cavalry, scouted for the

8

Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 3-8.

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Eighth Virginia Infantry and General Nathan G. Evans in Loudoun, and participated in
the Battle of Ball’s Bluff outside of Leesburg in October 1861. 9
For distinguished service in the battle, Evans’ officers recommended that
White be rewarded an army commission. White acquired authorization from Secretary
of War Judah P. Benjamin to form an independent company that would conduct
“ranging service” along the Union-Confederate border, report to the nearest
Confederate general, and have the duty of protecting Loudoun’s secessionists against
the Union army, which had troops present in the county for most of the war. Captain
White initiated recruiting in Leesburg. By December 1861, he acquired a sufficient
number of men from the secessionist population of Loudoun to begin service.
Afterward, the partisan cavalrymen reported to General A. P. Hill, who, because he
was the nearest high-ranking commander and was among the Confederates occupying
Loudoun in preparation for a Union invasion, assumed command over them until
whenever he left the area. The soldiers comprising the new company held their
independence and duty of border service in Loudoun dearly; they sought to maintain
it, with mixed success, over the course of the war. 10
The Loudouners who enlisted in Elijah White’s cavalry unit tended to own
little or no property and mostly consisted of farmers and laborers. The vast majority of
those who enlisted in White’s partisan company, which would eventually become
Company A of the Thirty-fifth Virginia, owned no property or property worth below
one hundred dollars, while a small elite owned estates worth thousands or tens of

9

Myers, The Comanches, 8; O. R., Volume 5, 360-367. On the morning of October 21, 1861, a Federal
force that landed on the west bank of the Potomac River the previous night was marching towards
Leesburg when they met and clashed with Mississippi volunteers in a wooded area one mile from the
town. The Union soldiers received reinforcements, and the Eighth Virginia joined the Confederate
force, which succeeded through effective firing and a charge in driving the Federals back to the
Potomac.
10
O. R., Volume 5, 362, 366; Myers, The Comanches, 16, 18, 363. According to Hunton’s report of the
battle, White, with “intimate knowledge of the country and daring courage rendered great service.”
Lieutenant-Colonel John McGuirk described White’s involvement as “gallant action” deserving of
“commendation.” This service involved guiding a party of forty Confederates in an attack on the Union
line that resulted in the capture of three hundred and twenty-five Federals. Hill ordered the partisans to
establish a courier line between Leesburg and Winchester.

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thousands of dollars. Of the one hundred seventy Comanches identifiable in the
census, one hundred thirty-seven owned a personal estate worth under one hundred
dollars. Fifteen soldiers owned between one hundred and four hundred ninety-nine
dollars-worth of property. Five held property amounting to between five hundred and
nine hundred ninety-nine, and six owned personal estates worth between one thousand
and 2,499. Of the seven who possessed personal estates exceeding 2,500 dollars, two
owned property under 10,000 and two others held property over 10,000 dollars. In
terms of real estate property, White’s Cavalry had an even greater concentration of
wealth. One hundred fifty-eight held real estate below one hundred dollars. Five
owned real estate spanning the values one hundred to 2,499 dollars, while five others
held property worth between 2,500 and 9,999 dollars. Three Comanches owned real
estate property greater than 10,000 dollars. The average amount of real estate property
a Comanche held was four hundred one dollars, and the average value of his personal
property was three hundred seventy-eight dollars. 11
In the sample, fifty-one soldiers were farmers before they enlisted and thirtysix troops worked as laborers in 1860. The command included eight carpenters, five
blacksmiths, and five clerks. There were also three shoemakers, three millers, and
three merchants serving in White’s command. The company had a single saddler,
plasterer, tailor, watchmaker, drover, druggist, bricklayer, wheelwright, and printer.
Forty-three had no occupations. The average age of the Comanches at the time of
enlistment was 24.2. 12
The Comanches lacked large slaveholders in their ranks; nine owned between
one and four slaves, while two owned between five and nine slaves. Collectively,
eleven Confederate irregulars owned a total of thirty people. The command defended
the peculiar institution and recognized the threat the Union army posed to slavery.
Frank Myers referred to the Union’s invasion of the Confederacy as “the abolition

11

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA.
12
Ibid; Thirty-fifth Battalion Service Records, NARA, www.fold3.com.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
crusade upon the South.” Early in the command’s service, as Loudoun’s slaves fled
across the Potomac River to freedom in Maryland, White’s Cavalry briefly acted as a
slave patrol. One dark, cold Sunday night during the first week of February 1862,
Elijah White’s cavalrymen learned that a party of runaways planned to arrive at the
mouth of Catoctin Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River, where several Union
soldiers waited in a boat with which to transport them to the Maryland shore. A
secessionist Baptist preacher piloted the troops to the creek, where they hid in
different positions and waited for the slaves’ arrival. When the Confederates ordered
them to halt, “they commenced to run, and in great excitement the preacher sprang
forward” and fired his shotgun at the runaways. The Federals in the boat then fired a
volley, after which the Confederates departed. The slaves escaped both capture from
White’s men and wounds from the preacher. 13
Scouting operations, small engagements with Union forces, and occasionally
following the orders of superior Confederate officers in northern Virginia and along
the Potomac River, characterized the Comanches’ history in the early part of the war.
White’s company’s first operations consisted of scouting and guarding the Potomac
River with the assistance of Captain Graves’ Madison Cavalry, which at the time
picketed the river from the Maryland towns of Point of Rocks and Berlin, while each
unit encamped in Waterford. Lieutenant Frank M. Myers notes that, with the
command reaching seven hundred troops, it was “about this time an officer was sent
by Gen. Hill to muster the company regularly into the service of the Confederate
States.” 14
When the Comanches began searching for Union forces with which to engage
in late February 1862, Colonel John W. Geary’s Twenty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry,
based at Point of Rocks, Maryland, on the other side of the river from Loudoun, kept
an eye on their movements. While scouting with thirty-five members of his company
13

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun
County, Virginia, NARA; Janney, Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, 97; Myers, The Comanches, 21-22,
359.
14
Myers, The Comanches, 19.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
in Loudoun Heights, White discovered and decided to capture blockhouses guarded by
Geary’s regiment. He sent Neersville farmer Thomas S. Grubb, John Tribbey, R.
Ferro, Waterford miller Charles Cooper, and Frank Myers to stealthily approach the
blockhouses and quickly charge upon and fire at the Federals, with the remainder of
White’s party acting as support. However, when a shot from the rear, the source of
which is unclear, alarmed them, the five withdrew to the rest of the command, and the
company returned to Waterford. 15
During this period, General George McClellan sent the Army of the Potomac
to the peninsula between the York and James Rivers in a campaign to capture
Richmond. In response, General A. P. Hill’s brigade withdrew from Waterford and
Leesburg and departed southward to aid the forces under General Joseph E. Johnston
defending the Confederate capital. To prepare for the southward shift in the front line
between the Union and Confederate armies on the Potomac resulting from the start of
the Peninsular Campaign, White’s command moved back to Leesburg. According to
Myers, “Hill ordered White to remain and act as he thought best, but to watch the
enemy, keep him advised of all movements along the border.” 16
The spring of 1862 witnessed the expansion of Loudoun’s irregular war
through the entrance of conventional regiments that temporarily detached from their
brigades and divisions and fought with the irregular tactics of quick, surprise, hit-andrun attacks and independent raids behind enemy lines. Geary, with his Pennsylvanians
and the First Michigan Cavalry, hunted for Confederate forces in Loudoun that
threatened to attack the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Geary sent his Federal raiders
on a march to Leesburg, where he took possession of the town’s buildings. Cut off
from supplies, White’s men could not effectively resist the Union raiders, and
therefore they withdrew to a position outside the town. However, four companies from
Colonel Munford’s Second Virginia Cavalry, assigned to operate along the border in
15

Myers, The Comanches, 28-29, 36; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers ,
26; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 486, reel no. 166, microfilm no. 425, reel no. 105.
16
Myers, The Comanches, 31-33.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
March 1862, came to White’s aid. Munford temporarily put the Comanches under his
command, and his force kept the Federal raiders “in constant fear and trembling.” The
Confederates followed Geary’s advance and attacked his pickets nightly. Munford and
White clashed with Geary in April when he moved to Rectortown, Fauquier County,
where the Confederates forced Geary to fall back to Salem. Here, they assaulted his
rear and dispersed his force. Despite this success against a Union rival with a
Confederate ally, serving under Munford angered Comanches who thought that doing
so undermined their independence as partisans. 17
The Comanches often lost a greater amount of independence when they fought
alongside the main Confederate army. In late April, White received orders to serve
under General Richard S. Ewell’s Division in the Shenandoah Valley. According to
Myers, while encamped here, “some of the boys,” in protest, “determined to visit their
homes, and accordingly four of them deserted and made their way back to Loudoun
and Fairfax.” 18 The rest of White’s Cavalry, on the other hand, complied with their
orders, which included delivering dispatches, fighting regular cavalry engagements,
and being provost guards and couriers in May and June.
In June 1862, the company began to undergo changes in its structure and
experienced a reinforcement of its identity as a partisan cavalry unit. They learned that
an independent Confederate Maryland company commanded by Captain George W.
Chiswell, known as “Chiswell’s Maryland Exiles,” with members recruited primarily
from Frederick and Montgomery Counties, was preparing to join White’s company
and form a new, larger unit. At the same time, news arrived of the passage of the
Partisan Ranger Act by the Confederate Congress, a piece of legislation that
authorized the formation of partisan units engaged in independent border warfare
against the Union army. The Richmond government now approved and aided the
creation of units identical to the sort of White’s command. Regarding the act, Myers
17

Myers, The Comanches, 34-36; Report of John W. Geary, May 14, 1862, O. R., Volume 5, 512-515.
In this fight, the Confederates killed two Union raiders and captured all of the Twenty-eighth’s
baggage.
18
Myers, The Comanches, 40.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
described how “this idea struck the minds of White’s men very forcibly as containing
the very principle upon which their company had been formed, and the one they most
desired to have applied to their own particular case.” He adds that White’s soldiers
hoped that, with the arrival of Chiswell’s men, they could potentially become partisan
rangers under the act, cease serving under the direct orders of generals, and resume
“the more congenial and pleasant” duty “of once more scouting on the frontier.” The
current phase of regular service for White’s command concluded in August 1862. The
Comanches could now finally have their homecoming. 19
Following several months of service by White’s Cavalry, the Union army
formed its own partisan company: the Loudoun Rangers, composed of unionists from
the county. The Union army had been fighting White’s company with the regular
cavalry raiding form of irregular warfare in early 1862, but the unconventional war
became a civil war when each side of the divided county created a rival partisan unit.
The Appalachian and Jones County, Mississippi, civil wars resulted from unionist
civilians and Confederate army deserters, each of whom lacked any direct connection
to the Union army, violently resisting the Confederacy’s national conscription policy.
Loudoun’s civil war stands out by showcasing an official U.S. company of
southerners. Every Confederate state collectively contributed 104,000 white soldiers to
the Union army, and the two hundred forty-five men who joined the Loudoun Rangers
ensured that Virginia played its part, even after the secession of West Virginia from
the Old Dominion and the formation of numerous Union forces from the new state. 20
Moreover, just as both republics fought for control of the entire South, they also
sponsored a partisan war in which they fought for supremacy over a small area of

19

Myers, The Comanches, 71-72; Confederate Congress, Partisan Ranger Act, April 21, 1862; J.
Thomas Scharf, History of Western Maryland: Volume 1, 339; Divine, 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry,
11. Though White and Chiswell operated their companies together, they together lacked the sufficient
number of soldiers to become a battalion.
20
Loudoun County Rangers Service Records, NARA, www.fold3.com; For works on Union soldiers
from the Confederacy and border states, see William W. Freehling, The South vs. The South: How AntiConfederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Richard N. Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy (Northeastern University
Press, 1992).

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northern Virginia. Since neither the Union nor Confederacy possessed complete
control of Loudoun, they each turned to irregular warfare against each other.
A Waterford flour mill owner, mercantile business owner in Point of Rocks,
Maryland, and station agent for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Samuel C. Means
endured the intimidation, confiscation, and coercion inflicted on unionists by
Confederates in Loudoun during the early months of the war. In response, Means fled
in exile to Point of Rocks in July 1861. Here, Means served as a guide for Colonel
Geary when his regiment crossed the Potomac to Harper’s Ferry and captured
Lovettsville and Waterford. Viewing him as a traitorous renegade responsible for
these raids, the Richmond government put a $5,000 bounty on Means’ head in
December 1861. Means transformed from an exiled southern unionist to a Union
partisan in January 1862, when Secretary of War Edwin Stanton called him to
Washington, D.C., and offered him a commission to raise a company. In May, Colonel
Dixon Miles mustered the Loudoun Rangers into service at Harper’s Ferry and
Captain Means established the command’s headquarters in Waterford, where he
initiated recruitment. 21
Like White’s Confederate Cavalry, Means’ Loyal Cavalry engaged in border
service along the Potomac River, cherished and struggled to preserve its status as an
independent unit, occasionally took orders from a superior officer, and fought with
quick ambushes behind enemy lines. The soldiers in the Loudoun Rangers considered
their company to be one of counter-irregular scouts who fought the Confederate forces
occupying Loudoun and protected the county’s unionist population from Confederate
mistreatment. As Sergeant John W. Forsythe declared, “they were…mustered into the
army and equipped and mounted for service against bands of guerrillas who infested
that part of the state, and who were engaged in committing depredations upon loyal
citizens.” Just as the Union army directed Blazer’s Independent Scouts to combat
Mosby’s Rangers in northern Virginia and sent the Thirty-sixth Ohio to scout for and
fight Confederate guerrillas in southern West Virginia, it also recruited the Loudoun
21

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 23-24, 26-27.

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Rangers to engage the Comanches and all other Rebel forces that could be found
trespassing in Loudoun County. The Rangers also spent the war plundering and
foraging from civilians. As Frank Myers revealed, whenever the Loudoun Rangers
conducted a raid, “hen-roosts, milk-houses and ladies’ wardrobes were invaded in the
most approved style of genuine Yankee warfare.” 22
The religious and ethnic composition of the Loudoun Rangers reflects that of
the county’s unionist population. Just as the county’s unionists tended to be Quaker,
German, and Scots-Irish, members of each of these three groups enlisted in the
locally-raised Federal unit. The Quakers’ devotion to the Union motivated them to
violate the tenet of their religion which espoused pacifism by joining a U.S. military
unit. Collectively making up seventy-nine percent of the ninety-nine Loudoun Rangers
who can be identified in the census, eighteen Friends, forty-three Germans, and
seventeen Scots-Irish citizens enlisted in the command. 23
The command’s socioeconomic profile reveals that its troops possessed less
wealth than those of White’s Cavalry. Though the overwhelming majority of both
Loudoun commands owned no property or were small property holders, the Rangers
only had one extremely wealthy serviceman, compared to several of the Comanches.
Seventy-seven Rangers owned less than one hundred dollars of personal property,
22

Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 4; Myers, The Comanches, 360.
A. Glenn Crothers, Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia,
1730-1865 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), xi, 4; Goodhart, History of the Independent
Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 8-9. The Waterford Friends within the Rangers included Captain Means,
Edwin R. Grover, Charles F. Anderson, James A. Cox, Edward T. White, Flemon B. Anderson, David
E. B. Hough, Thadeous W. Franklin, Henry C. and Isaac S. Hough, Edward Bond, Samuel, William,
Joseph F., George W., and Robert W. Hough, and Fenton P. and Charles F. Rinker. The Germans of
Lovettsville and Taylortown who enlisted were Luther W. Slater, James H. Beatty, John P. Hickman,
George V. Kern, Samuel, Joseph, and Peter C. Fry, Jacob Cordell, Samuel E. and George C. Tritapoe,
Jacob E. Boryer, Charles and George W. Baker, Samuel J. and William J. Cooper, George P., John M.,
and Presley A. Davis, Thomas, Charles, and Henry Dixon, Armistead Everhart, Briscoe Goodhart,
Philip H. Heater, Mahlon H. Best, Edward Jacobs, Joseph T. Ritchie, John Ambrose, Charles F.
Moreland, Albert C. Mock, John Lenhart, George Swope, Charles Stout, Charles L. Spring, Charles H.
Snoots, William Shoemaker, John W., Charles W., and Richard Virts, Frank Mormon, James
Stoneburner, Jonathan Myers, and Jacob Long. Daniel M. and William S. Keyes, James H. Corbin,
Milton S. and James W. Gregg, Joseph T. Divine, John S. Densmore, Michael McMullen, J. C.
McCutcheon, D. J., George H., and Robert S. Harper, John W. Forsythe, Peter Miles, Charles McDade,
George Welch, James W. and Sylvester Shakelford, and Joseph T. Cantwell comprised the Scots-Irish
Rangers.
23

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
while sixteen possessed between one hundred and five hundred dollars. Two in the
sample owned personal estates worth between five hundred and one thousand dollars,
and three held property worth between one thousand and 2,500 dollars. Only one
Ranger owned a personal estate worth more than 5,000 dollars—Captain Samuel
Means. Ninety Rangers held real estate valued at below one hundred dollars. Four
owned between one hundred and one thousand dollars-worth of real estate, and the
same number possessed real estate worth between one thousand and 2,500. Means was
also the wealthiest Ranger in terms of real estate ownership, possessing an estate
amounting to 20,000 dollars. The average amount of real estate property a Ranger held
was two hundred ninety-eight dollars, and the average value of his personal property
was one hundred eighty-one dollars.
Like the Comanches, the Rangers overwhelmingly tended to be farmers or
laborers on the eve of the war. Forty-one worked as laborers, and thirty-three were
farmers. Seven had taken up carpentry. Two were in each of the occupational
categories of miller, machinist, or manufacturer. The sample of Rangers also included
one shoemaker, farm manager, merchant, cooper, superintendent of furnace, saddler,
blacksmith, and tailor. Four had no occupation in 1860. When he enlisted, the
Loudoun Ranger was 25.9 years of age on average, making him slightly older than
White’s cavalryman. Although a tiny group of small slaveholders lived in the unionistdominated sections of the county, none enlisted in the Loudoun Rangers. According to
Briscoe Goodhart, the soldiers of Means’ command were antislavery, holding that the
institution degraded American labor. 24
The first operations of the Loudoun Rangers consisted of disrupting a
Confederate supply line extending from Baltimore to Leesburg. By mid-summer 1862,
the command had acquired fifty soldiers and relocated its camp to first the German
Reformed church in Lovettsville, followed by the Baptist church in Waterford. Here,
24

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of
the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA; Loudoun County Rangers Service Records,
NARA, www.fold3.com; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 199

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
the company became “engaged in active scouting and succeeded in mounting all
recruits on captured horses.” 25
During the Civil War, the Loudoun Rangers frequently fought alongside a
Federal partisan battalion from Maryland who often crossed the river to engage
Confederate forces in Loudoun County and to defend Maryland’s border from
Confederate invasion: Henry Cole’s First Potomac Home Brigade, also known as
Cole’s Maryland Cavalry, a command recruited mainly from the unionist population
of Frederick, Maryland. 26 The cooperation between a Virginian unit and a Marylander
unit on both the Union and Confederate sides, along the border of a Confederate state
and Union border state, further demonstrates the acute borderland element of
Loudoun’s irregular war.
One such collaborative raid occurred in August 1862. In the aftermath of the
Peninsula Campaign, the Confederate army moved up into northern Virginia for
recruiting. As Richard Simpson’s Eighth Virginia Infantry marched to Mount Gilead
for this purpose, a party of thirty from Means’ Loyal Virginia Cavalry and a
detachment of Cole’s Marylanders disrupted the Confederates. An advance guard of
several Rangers led by Lieutenant Daniel M. Keyes galloped to Simpson’s home, a
rendezvous point. Simpson fled upon their arrival and ignored demands to surrender;
multiple shots fired by his Ranger pursuers killed him. Cole’s Cavalry had been
spending the summer of 1862 scouting in Loudoun, during which it exchanged “an
occasional shot with straggling bands of…White’s Confederate Cavalry” at
Leesburg. 27
The two Loudoun County-based partisan companies fought their first
engagement of the local civil war on August 27, 1862. When White left Ewell’s
Division and marched to Loudoun that month, it was for the purpose of a raid aiming
to “whip” and chastise “a band of renegades and Yankees…under Sam. Means.”
25

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 29-30.
C. Arthur Newcomer, Cole’s Cavalry; or, Three Years in the Saddle in the Shenandoah Valley
(Baltimore: Cushing and Company, 1895), 9-11, 19.
27
Ibid., 25, 30-31, 33.
26

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Secessionist civilians in Waterford informed Elijah White’s company of the Loudoun
Rangers’ encampment in the town. Shortly before 3 a.m., White, with twenty
Comanches, twenty soldiers under Captain Randolph from the Fourth Virginia
Cavalry, six of “Stonewall” Jackson’s scouts, and six civilian pilots from the county,
galloped to Waterford. A slave arrived at the Rangers’ camp and informed the
commanding officer that this Confederate force was riding in the direction of the
camp, but he gave no weight to the information. Several hours later, Randolph’s
troops evaded the Ranger pickets, surrounded the camp, and caught the attention of the
Rangers, of whom twenty-three were present. In response, Lieutenant Luther W. Slater
(Means was at his home) formed a battle line. Hidden behind buildings and vegetation,
the Confederates were hardly visible to the Rangers. When Slater demanded that they
identify themselves, they fired their carbines, wounding a proportion of the line,
including Slater in the temple, shoulder, arm, breast, and hand. The Rangers answered
with carbine fire of their own, before they fell back to the inside of the Baptist church.
Slater continued to command the Rangers despite laying on the church floor, bleeding
from his wounds. When he began to undergo significant blood loss, he transferred
command to drillmaster Charles A. Webster. The Comanches then arrived to the
scene, dismounted, and fired through the church’s walls and windows. Goodhart
recalls how “the Rangers returned the fire as vigorously as circumstances would
permit,” despite many laying “around in the church pews weltering in their blood,
making the place look more like a slaughter pen than a house of worship.” Amidst this
gruesome ordeal, the Rangers could hear their wounded crying for water. 28
The Confederates used the house of secessionist Lydia A. Virts, located across
the street from the church, as a cover from which they fired on the Rangers. Virts
delivered two flags of truce to them, both of which the Rangers refused. The depletion
of his force’s ammunition convinced Webster to accept the third offer, the conditions
of which were immediate parole and the officers retaining their side arms. Those

28

Myers, The Comanches, 95, 97, 99; Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 11, 25;
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 33-34.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Rangers who bled in the church included Philomont farmer James A. Cox, James W.
Gregg, and Thadeus W. Franklin of Waterford. Goresville cousins Charles and Henry
Dixson, the former a farmer, the latter a laborer, perished. In the service of the
Confederacy, John Dove received a wound, Peter J. Kabrick, a Waterford carpenter,
was mortally wounded, and Brook Hays died. Kabrick later died of his wounds on
September 6. 29
An aspect of the engagement sheds light on the social and familial divisions
within Loudoun County. Both Goodhart and Myers reveal in their memoirs that a
number of those who fired on and killed each other during the fight had been friends
and schoolmates prior to the outbreak of hostilities. When siblings William Snoots and
Charles Snoots, the former a Comanche, the latter a Ranger, met after the parole,
William expressed a desire to kill Charles, but White’s officers rebuked him.
Following the fight, the Loudoun Rangers, now at a strength of only thirty-five
soldiers, went to guard the fords of the Potomac River, while White’s command
rejoined General Ewell. One of Slater’s wounds—a gunshot wound that crippled his
right arm—forced him to resign from the command as first lieutenant. 30
The citizens of Waterford hastily nursed the wounded Rangers. As soon as
White’s company departed, physician Thomas Bond and other villagers proceeded to
the church to gather the wounded. P. S. Chalmers, a tailor, treated Private Henry
Dixon until his death. The Duttons’ cared for Private Edward Jacobs, who would later

29

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 33; D. S. Miles to Halleck, August
27, 1862, O. R., Volume 12, Part 3, 705; James A. Cox Service Record, James W. Gregg Service
Record, Thadeus W. Franklin Service Record, Charles Dixson Service Record, Henry Dixson Service
Record, NARA, www.fold3.com; Myers, The Comanches, 101, 395, 397; U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia,
NARA, microfilm no. 463, reel no. 143, microfilm no. 623, reel no. 095, microfilm no. 422, reel no.
102, microfilm no. 413, reel no. 093, microfilm no. 412, reel no. 092. White captured thirty of the
Rangers’ horses and dozens of their weapons. Casualties included two killed and seven wounded for the
Federals and six killed and nine wounded for the Confederates.
30
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 38-39; Myers, The Comanches,
102; Luther W. Slater to William H. Chesenough, February 16, 1863, Luther W. Slater Service Record,
9, NARA, www.fold3.com. Both Myers and Goodhart insist that had his officers not stepped in,
William would have killed his brother.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
be discharged for his injuries. Lieutenant L. W. Slater received treatment from three
Waterford residences. 31
The Loudoun Rangers and White’s company each conducted regular and
irregular operations for their respective sides in Loudoun County and Maryland during
the Antietam Campaign of September 1862, during which they fought alongside and
engaged regular cavalry raiders. On September 2, joined by one hundred and twentyfive soldiers from Cole’s Cavalry, the Rangers launched an expedition to Leesburg.
After the Union force established pickets on the roads leading to the town, J.E.B.
Stuart ordered one hundred and twenty-three soldiers from Colonel Munford’s Second
Virginia to capture the party of marauders under Means, which according to Stuart,
“had so long infested that country.” In this counter-irregular operation, Munford
attacked Means’ pickets, prompting the Federals to respond with several volleys from
their revolvers. Thinking that the secessionist population would likely aid Munford in
some way, Means and Cole relocated to a road outside of town and formed a battle
line. They pushed back a portion of Munford’s cavalry, but the remainder of his force
charged their rear and surrounded them. The Federals managed to escape the
entrapment, but after a heavy fight, the Second Virginia drove them to Waterford,
where Munford ended his pursuit. The engagement further weakened the Loudoun
Rangers, reducing their number of available soldiers to twenty. Means’ Loyal Cavalry
and Cole’s Cavalry relocated to Harper’s Ferry, garrisoned by the Union army’s
Eighth Corps. Here, the Rangers served as scouters, guides, picketers, flank guards,
and dispatchers for the Army of the Potomac during the remainder of the Antietam
campaign. 32

31

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 35-36; John E. Divine, The Virginia
Regimental Histories Series: 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry (Lynchburg: H. E. Howard, Inc, 1985), 9.
Slater first went to carpenter William Densmore’s residence for one week, after which farm manager
George Alders cared for him for three weeks. Ten of Alders’ neighbors then attached a pole on each
side of his rocking chair, “in which position they carried him to his father’s residence, near
Taylortown.” After two weeks, Slater was removed to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he finished his
recovery.
32
O. R., Volume 11, Part 2, 745; J.E.B. Stuart to R.H. Chilton, February 13, 1864, O. R., Volume 11,
Part 2, 745; Report of Thomad T. Munford, O. R., Volume 11, Part 2, 749; Report of Dixon Miles, O.

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On September 12, Captain Chiswell’s Confederate Marylanders arrived and
united with the Confederate Loudouners. The two companies watched the movements
of McClellan’s army and defeated a Union infantry force on White’s farm in
Goresville. The command afterward returned to Leesburg, occupied by a company of
the Sixth Virginia Cavalry and forty Mississippi infantrymen. Leesburg also fell along
the path of four hundred Union cavalrymen led by General Kilpatrick on a raid in
search for Confederate forces in Loudoun. The various Rebel units took positions on
the Leesburg turnpike and in the town and fired on the approaching Yankee raiders.
Kilpatrick eventually withdrew, but friendly fire wounded White in one of his
shoulder blades when he attempted a charge; Myers subsequently took temporary
command of the Comanches. 33
In mid-October, four newly recruited companies of northern Virginians, whose
respective commanders were John Grabill, James Trayhern, George Ferneyhough, and
R.B. Grubb, reported to Myers to form a battalion with the original Loudoun company
and Chiswell’s company, although the actual organization did not occur until the end
of the month. Myers initially commanded the force, but Trayhern replaced him on
October 19. His tenure as commander consisted of leading an unsuccessful scouting
expedition of one hundred and thirty soldiers in two squadrons to hunt down any
Union forces that can be found in Loudoun, during which the Sixth New York Cavalry
routed the Comanches. When the Comanches returned to camp, hostility towards
Trayhern for leading them into such a disastrous fight forced him to resign from the
unit, after which Myers resumed command. Colonel Bradley T. Johnson of General
J.E.B. Stuart’s staff formally mustered these companies into the Thirty-fifth Battalion
Virginia Cavalry on October 28, 1862. The soldiers unanimously elected Elijah White

R., Volume 11, Part 2, 805; John E. Wool to Stanton, September 3, 1862, O. R., Volume 19, Part 2, 174;
Henry B. Banning to John E. Wool, September 4, 1862, O. R., Volume 19, Part 2, 179; Goodhart,
History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 41-44, 55-58. Union casualties were eleven
killed, twenty wounded, and forty-seven captured; Confederate casualties were two killed and four
wounded.
33
Myers, The Comanches, 110-111; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth
Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 396, reel no. 076.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
as their major. White, who had recovered from his wound, now commanded a larger
partisan unit composed of each element of the Virginia-Maryland borderland. 34
White’s Battalion raided one of the wagon trains of the Army of the Potomac,
which had crossed through Snickersville in early November along the way to
Fredericksburg during Ambrose Burnside’s offensive against Lee’s army. According
to Myers, “White’s boys very quietly took possession of them, and now the battalion
divided into several detachments and ranged the country nearly all night.” The only
casualty of this operation was Leesburg resident John Stephenson, who was wounded.
On November 9, a party of four soldiers from Company A—Henry Simpson,
Mortimer W. Palmer, David J. Lee, and Robert A. Ritacor—engaged a fifty-member
Union cavalry force in a skirmish in Philomont and attacked a wagon train guarded by
the Ninety-first Pennsylvania Infantry outside of the town. Before the war, both
Palmer and Lee lived in Arcola in eastern Loudoun, where the former worked as a
clerk and the latter a laborer. White’s Battalion concluded its series of raids on
Burnside’s rear by surrounding and capturing a camp of sixty Union infantry. The
Thirty-fifth Virginia spent the remainder of November 1862 raiding Loudoun County
and preparing for another fight with Means’ Rangers. On November 9, 1862, a force
from White’s Cavalry galloped to Aldie, where they “took a Union lady prisoner.” In
the meantime, General William E. Jones moved his Laurel Brigade and White’s
Battalion to a camp in Frederick County, Virginia. 35

34

Divine, 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry, 13; Myers, The Comanches, 115-120; John W. Geary to H.
C. Rodgers, October 22, 1862, O. R., Volume 19, Part 2, 99. The Sixth captured twenty-three, wounded
one, and killed one, and seized thirty horses. The Comanches inflicted fourteen Union casualties during
the engagement. The original Loudoun company became Company A, with Frank Myers as captain;
Chiswell’s Maryland Exiles became Company B; Company C consisted of the troops under R.B.
Grubb; Trayhern’s band was converted to Company D; Grabill’s men became Company E; and the
soldiers commanded by Ferneyhough were designated to be organized as Company F several months
later.
35
Myers, The Comanches, 127-129, 397. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth
Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 758, reel no. 200,
microfilm no. 537, reel no. 009, microfilm no. 529, reel no. 001; Elijah V. White to T. T. Munford,
November 14, 1862, O. R., Volume 19, Part 2, 147; F. Sigel to S. P. Heintzelman, November 9, 1862,
O. R., Volume 19, Part 2, 563. Myers reveals that the total gains of these successful expeditions in
November 1862 were one thousand prisoners and two hundred wagons. Originally named the Ashby

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Both Means’ and White’s partisans conducted raids in Loudoun County in
December 1862, at the end of which they met a second time at Waterford. White
obtained permission from General Jones to lead a scout into the county. White
searched for the Rangers in the Quaker village. When the Comanches found that
Means’ men were absent, it left soon after. The presence of White’s men frightened
“the intensely tory citizens of Waterford half out their wits.” The next day, after
beginning with attacks on a Union corps and assaulting a Federal wagon train, “the
Major then turned his attention to Means’ gang” and galloped a second time to
Waterford, where he fought his Loudouner rivals; both partisan commands arrived in
Waterford at the same time. In Goodhart’s account, the Rangers had launched a raid to
Waterford, and upon arriving they unexpectedly encountered White. “As our number
was so small, we fell back toward Lovettsville.” Both units departed after a brief
engagement. The two Rangers wounded in this fight were Michael Mullen, an Irishborn laborer from Mount Gilead, and Lieutenant William S. Keyes, who suffered a
shot in the arm. The member of the Thirty-fifth Virginia that the Rangers captured was
Ned Moreland, who subsequently took an oath of allegiance to the Union and served
as the Federal Loudouners’ cook for the remainder of the war. 36
The Loudoun Rangers moved their camp to Point of Rocks. The Comanches
galloped across the Potomac River to Union-occupied Poolesville, Maryland; the
defenders, consisting of several Union cavalry parties, “made a sharp fight, but were
soon compelled to give up to the victorious raiders.” Upon returning to Virginia,
White launched an additional scout in Loudoun County, which proved eventless and

Cavalry, after commander Turner Ashby until his death in June 1862 during “Stonewall” Jackson’s
Valley Campaign, the Laurel Brigade consisted of Chew’s Battery and the Sixth, Seventh, and Eleventh
Virginia Cavalry Regiments. The command spent the war serving in the Army of Northern Virginia’s
campaigns. White’s Cavalry would join the brigade later in the year.
36
Myers, The Comanches, 142-145; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers,
79; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 741, reel no. 183. The Comanches wounded two
Rangers, and Means’ men captured one.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
concluded the time allotted for his irregular activity while apart from General Jones’
brigade. The command returned to Jones’ camp on Christmas. 37
Early 1863 witnessed the Loudoun Rangers continuing to serve alongside
regular Union soldiers and engage White’s Cavalry. In late January 1863, they joined
a force of Union raiders—Major Martin J. Byrne’s Thirteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry—
through Loudoun. The first town they reached was Goresville, where unionist farmer
George Umbaugh “quenched the thirst of” each Federal “with good, fresh apple
brandy.” During the raid, the Rangers and the Pennsylvanians took unionist citizen
Amasa Hough, Jr.’s, corn and hay. Upon entering Leesburg, the Union force noticed
two Comanches fleeing from a local hotel and captured them in a nearby stable. The
Confederates were Charles Cooper, a secessionist Waterford miller, and John Taylor.
The Union irregulars concluded their raid by riding through Waterford, Hillsboro,
Harper’s Ferry, and Point of Rocks. At the end of February, the Rangers hunted for
White’s command two additional times, one to Leesburg and the other to Snicker’s
Gap, in order to stop them from enforcing Confederate conscription and stealing
horses. However, the Rangers failed to locate the Comanches both times. In March
and April, the loyalist Virginians conducted raids in which they, alongside
conventional Federals, clashed with regular Confederates. 38
White’s Cavalry ended 1862 with a challenge to its status as a partisan unit,
one that gave birth to a new type of irregular unit and that highlighted the local
motivations of Loudouners serving in unconventional units during the Civil War.
While the Comanches had been under the orders of Confederate generals and had
fought alongside regular cavalry brigades, it had never become officially absorbed into
the large Confederate army structure. However, this changed when the Thirty-fifth

37

Myers, The Comanches, 146-147; General Orders, Gen. R. E. Lee, February 28, 1863, O. R., Volume
25, Part 2, 649. White captured seventy-seven prisoners and several horses, weapons, and wagons.
38
Amasa Hough, Jr. (no. 21579), Southern Claims Commission Case Files, NARA, www.fold3.com;
Charles W. H. Cooper Service Record, NARA, www.fold3.com; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population
Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm
no. 425, reel no. 105; Samuel C. Means to B. F. Kelley, February 27, 1863, O. R., Volume 25, Part 2,
109; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 79-80, 83-84.

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Virginia returned to General Jones’ camp on Christmas. According to the recollections
of Myers, when Jones ordered Major White to command the Valley District, “here the
battalion learned for the first time that its independence was gone and it was a portion
of Gen. Jones’ brigade permanently, and that” he added, “the men were regular
troops.” 39
In response, the Loudouners and Marylanders of Company A and Company B,
respectfully, mutinied. The former declared that, as the original company, they were
an independent unit that served on the Union-Confederate border. They joined under
the knowledge that, while they would report to the nearest commanding general, they
would never be attached to any regiment or brigade without their consent. Also, as
Myers described, the Loudouners’ homes “were in the enemy’s lines, and in the
mountains, and as wild as they were they would have remained untamed for the
remainder of the war.” Those in Company B proclaimed that, as citizens of a state still
residing in the Union, they lacked any sort of allegiance to the Confederacy. Rather,
they were foreigners who were loyal to the South and who had the right to serve this
region independently, the reason for them uniting with White’s original company in
the first place. Company C, consisting of soldiers from Fairfax County, sympathized
with these two companies, but they only intended to join the mutiny if they succeeded.
The Thirty-fifth Virginia’s mutiny in December 1862, which resulted from local ties,
contrasts with the class-motivated mutinies in other areas of Civil War America. 40
White ultimately convinced the mutineers to accept the changes and
accompany the other companies in becoming a regular cavalry unit, but not before
detaching a group of incorrigible soldiers who refused to comply and permitting them
39

Myers, The Comanches, 148.
Ibid., 148-150; Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 159. None of the other companies
participated or expressed a desire to. For the scholarship on Civil War mutinies, see Webb B. Garrison,
Mutiny in the Civil War (White Mane Publishing Company, 2000); Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and
the Roughs; Michael D. Pierson, Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Both Garrison and Foote examine the
rebellion of lower class enlisted soldiers against their upper class officers. Pierson analyzes the mutiny
of lower class immigrant soldiers at a Confederate fort on April 27 and 28, 1862. He reveals that the
Fort Jackson mutiny was a political act meant to benefit the United States and hurt the Confederate
States, an act that represented one episode of a large unionist movement based in nearby New Orleans.

40

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
to form a new guerrilla band under John Mobberly, who worked as a laborer in
Harper’s Ferry before the war. White granted them their aspiration to operate in
Loudoun County and to protect the secessionist population from unionists and Union
soldiers, the duty of White’s Cavalry during its partisan phase. In essence, John
Mobberly’s new band possessed a level of independence greater than White’s
command ever attained because, though it occasionally fought alongside and reported
to other Confederates, it did so on its own discretion; Mobberly represented the
highest level of authority over his band. Since this band was self-constituted and
served the Confederacy without any pay or army regulation, when it broke off of the
battalion, it became a group of guerrillas. 41
Though the operations of the Thirty-fifth and Forty-third Battalions greatly
frustrated the Union army throughout the war, the Federals in northern Virginia
despised John Mobberly’s band. Only Mosby’s Rangers produced more worry among
and condemnation by the Union army in this area. Forsythe described these irregulars
as “the most cowardly and desperate of all guerrillas.” Goodhart referred to
Mobberly’s band as “a notorious guerrilla,” a member of White’s command who “had
assumed more the character of a bandit,” and the “most desperate” of the Confederate
irregulars operating in Loudoun. In one report, General J. D. Stevenson defined the
irregular leader as a “desperate villain.” 42
Regardless of this language, Mobberly’s band fought using tactics identical to
those of partisans and regular cavalry raiders—scouting, raiding, ambushing, stealth,
destruction of the enemy’s supply lines, etc. Its area of operations mainly consisted of
the area between the Blue Ridge Mountains and Catoctin Mountains. Mobberly’s
preferred location was the rocky, wooded Short Hill, where he hid in both the natural
terrain and the houses of secessionist families. From here, his irregulars charged down
41

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 477, reel no. 157; Sutherland, A Savage Conflict,
480.
42
Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 8; Goodhart, History of the Independent
Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 141, 194, 196; J. D. Stevenson to E. M. Stanton, March 28, 1865, O. R.,
Volume 46, Part 3, 240-241.

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the mountain’s slopes, fired on Federals, and quickly withdrew to the thick trees.
However, it was smaller than the size of a company and proved to be the most brutal
of Loudoun’s irregulars; it rarely took prisoners, often committed brutal acts against
the prisoners it did take, and targeted both soldiers and civilians. For example,
Forsythe reveals that Mobberly sometimes took captured soldiers to the hills of
Loudoun County, put them on their backs, placed large boulders on their limbs, and
left them there to die of malnourishment and exposure. One time later in the war,
Mobberly harassed Lovettsville unionist John Everhart. The Loudoun guerrillas
arrested Everhart, took him to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and tied him to a tree, where
they planned to leave him for one or two days to suffer from hunger and exposure.
Michael Long of Lovettsville freed him several hours later. As punishment for
escaping and voting against the secession ordinance, Mobberly returned to his home
and struck him on the head with a stick, producing “an ugly scar.” Arthur Newcomer,
member of Cole’s Cavalry, wrote after the war that the most common fate of those
captured by Mobberly’s band was to be instantly shot. 43
Very little sources are available regarding the roster of Mobberly’s band. Since
this was a gang of soldiers detached and independent from the Confederate army, no
muster rolls were issued. Official reports reveal that the unit had, at its largest size,
twenty-five members. Out of this group, only four, other than John Mobberly, can be
identified by name in the Official Records and the Thirty-fifth Virginia’s service
records: French Bill, James H. Riley, S. Mocks, and Thomas E. Tippet. Riley and
Tippet were members of Company A, so they can be determined to have been one of
the mutineers. Before the war, Riley lived in Neersville and Tippet resided in Gillford
Station. However, no soldier with the last name “Mocks” and a first name starting
with the letter “S” can be found in the census or service records. Bill was a
defector/deserter from the Union army. It is therefore likely that new soldiers such as
43

Richard E. Crouch, Rough-riding Scout: the Story of John W. Mobberly, Loudoun’s own Civil War
Guerrilla Hero (Arlington, Virginia: Elden Editions, 1994), 2; Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in
Libby Prison, 8; Joshua Everhart (no. 11653), Southern Claims; Newcomer, Cole’s Cavalry, 93.
Forsythe adds that, at the end of the war, the Union army found skeletons pinned to the ground in this
manner.

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Bill and Mocks joined the band after White’s mutineers broke off from the Thirtyfifth. 44
Though the remaining men of White’s command served willingly with the
Thirty-fifth Battalion for the remainder of the Civil War, they nevertheless longed for
a return to partisan service in which they propelled surprise attacks on an unsuspecting
enemy. They despised their new service, which compelled them to charge against a
prepared enemy and endure the tedium of drilling and camp life during the spring of
1863. However, as they would soon learn, the Comanches would occasionally detach
themselves from their brigade, ride to Loudoun, fight in the manner of partisans, and
therefore become the regular cavalry raider type of irregulars. While the local civil
wars in Jones County, Mississippi, and various Appalachian communities saw the
formation of armed bands consisting of deserters, draft-dodgers, and civilians, by
1863, Loudoun had a Federal partisan unit, a Confederate regular cavalry raider
battalion attached to a brigade, and a band of Confederate guerrillas who had broken
off from the raider battalion.
In February 1863, President Jefferson Davis promoted White to the rank of
lieutenant colonel and an election chose Myers to replace him as the battalion’s major.
Before beginning its career as regular cavalry, White’s Battalion fought one last series
of engagements as a partisan unit. On February 14, 1863, it attacked Union pickets on
the road leading to Hillsboro, wounding one severely and capturing one. In response,
Brigadier General Benjamin F. Kelley sent a “strong cavalry scout” to Leesburg to
drive the Comanches away. The following month, the Thirty-fifth fired on Union
pickets at Harper’s Ferry. The Union forces again responded with counter-irregular
warfare: Colonel James N. Schoonmaker led a party that rode to Leesburg and
“captured 5 bushwhackers, of White’s band.” In late April and early May, the

44

John D. Stevenson to Morgan, April 1, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 3, 444-445; James H. Riley
Service Record, G. Mock Service Record, James H. Mock Service Record, William H. Tribette Service
Record, NARA, www.fold3.com; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census
of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 475, reel no. 155,
microfilm no. 327, reel no. 007.

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command joined the Laurel Brigade on an expedition into West Virginia, through
which General Jones sought to damage the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and fight the
Federal forces in the new Union state. Among the West Virginians the Comanches
engaged were the “Swamp Dragons,” unionist home guards created for local defense
against Confederates. On May 25, White’s Battalion officially became a component of
General Jones’ Laurel Brigade. 45
Both the Loudoun Rangers and White’s Cavalry played regular and irregular
roles for their respective armies during the Gettysburg Campaign of summer 1863,
accompanying them through Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. At one point
during the campaign, Rangers James H. Beatty, Joseph T. Ritchie, and Milton S.
Gregg skirmished with several Comanches in Waterford. “Charging into town, they
completely routed those five rebels.” Also during their brief stay in Waterford, the
Rangers received a joyous welcome from the unionist population. As Briscoe
Goodhart stated, “our command was a great favorite with the intensely loyal citizens
of the Quaker village.” The mostly-female population cheered the Federals “with
many a hurrah for the Union” and waved handkerchiefs and the U.S. flag. On one
midnight occasion, a party of White’s Cavalry crept up and seized several horses at the
Rangers’ new camp on Heater’s Island in the Potomac, while they were asleep.
Means’ cook noticed the seizures and alerted the soldiers, a body of whom then
mounted the few remaining horses, crossed the river into Virginia, and clashed with
the Comanches. The Rangers charged and scattered them “in every direction in the
darkness…and severely wounding one man, shooting him through the body.” 46

45

William N. McDonald, A History of the Laurel Brigade (Baltimore: Mrs. Kate S. McDonald, 1907),
116-130; Myers, The Comanches, 151; Brig. Gen. Goudy to James A. Seddon, January 23, 1863, E. V.
White Service Record, 57, NARA, www.fold3.com; Benjamin F. Kelley, February 16, 1863, O. R.,
Volume 25, Part 1, 19; B. S. Roberts to W. H. Chesebrough, March 18, 1863, O. R., Volume 25, Part 1,
45; Organization of Cavalry Division, Army of Northern Virginia, Maj. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart, C. S.
Army, commanding, May 25, 1863, O. R., Volume 25, Part 2, 825. The brigade also included the Sixth,
Seventh, Eleventh, and Twelfth Virginia Cavalry.
46
Myers, The Comanches, 181-186; E. V. White to W. E. Jones, June 10, 1863, O. R., Volume 27, Part
2, 768-770; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 89-90, 101-102; Forsythe,
Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 14.

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The Loudoun Rangers thereafter relocated to Point of Rocks. Here, Means’
men captured a horse belonging to Waterford unionist John Dutton, who moved to
Point of Rocks to support his family after his store closed. When Means refused to
return the horse, Dutton submitted a complaint about him to Colonel Donn Piatt in
Baltimore in early August 1863. When General John R. Kenly ordered Means to
return it, the captain insisted to Dutton that the order was discretionary and decided to
keep the animal. After Kenly issued a second order, Means finally returned Dutton’s
horse. Dutton stated in a latter that since he moved to Point of Rocks, Means had
“made frequent threats against my person and property” and “has urged some of his
men to insult and abuse me.” John Dutton also cites incidents in which both Means
and Private Charles F. Anderson threatened to destroy his store. 47
The Rangers’ presence at Point of Rocks prompted White to obtain permission
from Ewell to “make a raid” there, “in the hope of striking again his old enemy,
Means.” His force crossed the Potomac at Grubb’s Ford, near the Catoctin Creek, and
landed three miles from Point of Rocks. Before assaulting Means, White damaged a
Union wagon train, railroad track, and telegraph wire he encountered. White’s plans
against the loyalists at Point of Rocks involved Company B, with seventy soldiers,
striking from the north and Companies A, C, D, E, and F attacking from the south.
Both squads were to form a junction and then attack the Rangers. However, before it
reached Means’ camp, Company B ran into two hundred members of the Second
Maryland Cavalry, who had been ordered to defend Point of Rocks from any possible
Confederate attack. After the unionist Marylanders suddenly formed a battle line, the
secessionist Marylanders charged and broke it, despite receiving heavy carbine fire.
As this skirmish progressed, the remainder of White’s companies reached the camp
and routed the Rangers. When the Confederates attacked, many of the Federals were
either cooking dinner or sleeping. 48
47

John Dutton to Anna Dutton, April 28, 1863.
Dan. Tyler to Hooker, June 18, 1863, O. R., Volume 27, Part 2, 23; E. V. White to J. E. B. Stuart,
June 18, 1863, O. R., Volume 27, Part 2, 770; J. W. Garrett to E. M. Stanton, June 18, 1863, O. R.,
Volume 27, Part 3, 200-201; George D. Summers to R. Bruce, July 12, 1863, O. R., Volume 27, Part 2,

48

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Among the Rangers’ casualties was Private John W. Virts, a Waterford farmer
who the Comanches shot in the breast and sent to Belle Isle Prison in Richmond. In
1861, Virts had joined the Loudoun Artillery, a Confederate militia unit, and fought
under that command in the First Battle of Bull Run, during which he was also
wounded. After going home to recover, he fled to Maryland, where he took an oath of
allegiance to the United States. He returned home after the Union army entered
Loudoun and enlisted in the Loudoun Rangers on July 3, 1862. While it is unclear why
Virts switched sides, the Confederate persecution, coercion, and intimidation of
Loudoun County’s unionists in the early months of the war suggests that he joined the
Loudoun Artillery involuntarily and for self-protection. While in the custody of the
Confederate government, his captors charged him with deserting the Loudoun
Artillery two years prior and decided to execute him. However, before the
Confederates could carry out the sentence, an unidentified Ohio soldier who had been
captured several days earlier gave Virts his uniform. Under this disguise, John Virts
told Confederate authorities that his name was Jim Davis and a member of an Ohio
regiment. The masquerade enabled Virts to be exchanged. 49
Elijah White’s battalion, for a period during the Gettysburg Campaign, once
again became an unconventional unit, though this time one of regular cavalry raiders.
It used the same tactics as when it was a partisan command, but they remained a
component, albeit one temporarily detached, of a conventional brigade. During the
actual Battle of Gettysburg in early July 1863, the Loudoun Rangers and Thirty-fifth

203-204; Myers, The Comanches, 188, 190; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia
Rangers, 90; E. V. White to W. E. Jones, June 20, 1863, O. R., Volume 27, Part 2, 770-771. The
Maryland Exiles inflicted four casualties (one killed and three wounded) on the Second Maryland.
Ranger casualties were four killed, twenty-seven wounded, and twenty captured, as well as the loss of
horses.
49
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 90-91; John W. Virts Service
Record, NARA, www.fold3.com; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census
of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 464, reel no. 144.

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Battalion served their respective armies by scouting, assaulting enemy wagon trains,
and carrying dispatches. 50
When General Lee’s forces crossed the Potomac River following the defeat in
Pennsylvania, White acquired permission from General Stuart to send the Thirty-fifth
Battalion on a raid into Loudoun, thus turning the Comanches into a regular cavalry
raiding outfit once again. After crossing the Shenandoah River from Jefferson County,
West Virginia, the Comanches learned that Meade’s Army of the Potomac was
marching nearby. In response, White prepared his men for an attack and watched the
blue line of Yankees cross through their position. White then sent Captain Myers with
a party of six to attack Meade’s pickets south of Paris on the turnpike in order to “stir
up those fellows.” A force of Union cavalry suddenly appeared; Myers’ party fired a
volley in response, which pushed them back. After learning that two companies from
the Sixth Michigan Cavalry had moved from Harper’s Ferry to Waterford, White
gathered one hundred and twenty of his soldiers and prepared for a surprise attack on
their camp. As the Comanches approached, White tripped over a hay pile. In the
process of falling, he accidently discharged his weapon, causing his men to think the
assault had started and to charge the camp from two hundred yards away. As a result
of firing earlier than they planned, the Michigan cavalry had enough time to flee.
Before doing so, however, the Federals fired “one volley at the Confederates, killing a
very gallant young soldier of Co. C,—John C. Grubb.” 51
In early August 1863, Union raiders hunted for White’s raiders. During the
first week of the month, Colonel William D. Mann of the Seventh Michigan Cavalry,
stationed at Warrenton Junction, learned that White was encamped at Landmark with
four hundred of his soldiers for the purpose of destroying U.S. government stores. In
response, Mann “at once saddled up and started to attack him” with detachments from
his regiment as well as the Fifth Michigan Cavalry. This hasty decision to engage
50

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 99-100; Frank Myers, The
Comanches, 192-206.
51
Myers, The Comanches, 208, 211. The Thirty-fifth nevertheless managed to inflict four Union
casualties.

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White occurred in the context of Union commanders growing frustrated with northern
Virginia being infested with White’s and Mosby’s irregulars, who constantly
threatened and attacked Union troops and supply lines. Mann’s raiders conducted a
long and exhausting pursuit of White through Leesburg, the Catoctin Mountain, and
Dranesville, each of which White would occupy before exiting upon Mann’s arrival.
The Federals finally met their target at Frying Pan, firing a volley that scattered
them. 52
Between August 15 and 19, White again became the target of Union counterirregular warfare. Colonel Charles R. Lowell led two hundred troops from his Second
Massachusetts Cavalry on a raid through Loudoun and Fairfax Counties that had the
goal of locating and ambushing the Thirty-fifth Virginia, who were scouting the area.
Lowell acquired intelligence of White riding in Aldie, Goose Creek, Lewinsville,
Leesburg, Waterford, Hughesville, Mount Gilead, and Middleburg; whenever the
Second Massachusetts arrived in each place, White had just departed in order to avoid
a fight. Lowell captured ten stragglers from the battalion, but, becoming exhausted
from a long pursuit in which he “could not get a fight out of White,” he ended the raid.
Though Lowell failed to initiate an engagement with the Comanches, the importance
of this hunt is that it illustrates the threat the Federals perceived him to be as the
commander of an irregular battalion constantly attacking Union supply trains and
ambushing unsuspecting Union troops in and around Loudoun, a threat they were
determined to eliminate. 53
At the end of August, the Thirty-fifth Virginia continued waging the raiding
type of warfare while detached from Jones’ brigade, turning its attention to Union
forces in Fairfax and Maryland. On the 27th, the Comanches learned of the presence of
the Eleventh New York Cavalry at Edward’s Ferry, Maryland. White and one hundred
of his Comanches crossed the Potomac, avoided detection from the Federals’ patrols,
52

William D. Mann to Jacob S. Greene, August 8, 1863, O. R., Volume 27, Part 2, 992-994; Henry H.
Lockwood to H. W. Halleck, August 1, 1863, O. R., Volume 27, Part 3, 826; Henry H. Lockwood to
Couch, August 1, 1863, O. R., Volume 27, Part 3, 826-827.
53
C. R. Lowell to J. H. Taylor, August 20, 1863, O. R., Volume 29, Part 1, 74-75.

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concealed themselves next to the camp, and prepared to strike the regiment. The
attackers encountered a patrol man; when they tried to capture him, he aimed his
weapon, forcing them to shoot him. The shots alarmed the camp, prompting White to
hastily organize a battle line and order “a charge, in which they received a volley from
the enemy that badly wounded one man, and several slightly.” Despite heavy
fortifications, the Comanches pushed into the camp and defeated the Federals.
Afterward, they enforced Confederate conscription, while evading Union forces
hunting after the command. Though the Thirty-fifth Virginia experienced turbulence
in its conversion into a regular battalion, it managed to at times return to Loudoun,
resume its raids and ambushes against Union forces, and pretend to be partisans
again. 54
After the Gettysburg Campaign, the Loudoun Rangers returned to independent
partisan duty and expanded. Goodhart mentions that in the aftermath of the campaign,
Captain Means briefly conscripted citizens of Loudoun County into his command or
any other Union force they chose. This venture that resulted in several of “Loudoun’s
loyal sons” joining the Rangers, which included Thomas J. Loy, Samuel Wenner, and
Hoysville farmer Samuel Compher. Afterward, the Loyal Virginia Cavalry initiated
efforts to expand the command to a battalion. In late July, the unit opened up
recruiting offices in Harper’s Ferry, Sandy Hook, and Lovettsville, at which they
enlisted soldiers for Company B and Company C: Lovettsville farmer George H.
Hickman, Thomas Dewire, Phil Prichard, Hiram Casaught, Silas W. Goodhart (brother
of Briscoe), Hoysville laborer Peter W. Fry, George W. Loy, and Samuel White. Two
members of Cole’s Cavalry assisted the Rangers in their expansion, recruiting for
Company D in Frederick, where they enlisted thirty men. In November 1863, since the
new companies had an insufficient number of soldiers for three companies, Means
consolidated and mustered them into a new Company B, of which James W. Grubb
54

Myers, The Comanches, 218; E. V. White to J. E. B. Stuart, August 29, 1863, O. R., Volume 29, Part
1, 92-93. White’s men killed two, wounded two, and captured sixteen prisoners and a number of horses.
E. V. White to J. E. B. Stuart, September 2, 1863, O. R., Volume 29, Part 1, 93. The conscription is
detailed in Thos. C. Devin to A. J. Cohen, September 2, 1863, O. R., Volume 29, Part 1, 94-95; James
B. Swain to J. P. Sherburne, September 1, 1863, O. R., Volume 29, Part 1, 95-96.

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became captain and which numbered sixty men. For the remainder of the Civil War,
the Loudoun Rangers consisted of the original Company A and Company B. However,
the command never became a battalion, as the Comanches did. 55
In mid-September, Cole’s Cavalry joined Means’ Rangers on a search in
Loudoun for Company B of White’s Cavalry, which was in the initial stages of a raid
of its own whereby it was to seize Union cars loaded with horses on the Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad in Maryland. Crown led the Confederates to a wooded area at the base
of the Catoctin Mountain, where they encamped. That night, the U.S. force marched to
the top of the mountain, divided itself into two squads and galloped down the
mountain. Lieutenant Charles Atwell’s squad, consisting of Sergeant Jim Beatty,
Henry Hough of Lovettsville, Waterford farmer Sam Tritapoe, John Densmore of
Waterford, and Waterford laborer Sergeant Flemon Anderson met fifty of White’s
Marylanders as they slept. As the Federals yelled and fired, the Confederates scattered
without shoes, caps, and/or shirts on. The Rangers surprised the camp, but, as Cole
reported, Comanches who were “concealed in the thicket…immediately opened fire
upon my advance guard.” The Federals then charged and dispersed the Confederates.
In Forsythe’s account of the engagement, he reveals that, as a result of this victory,
“we felt satisfied, as we had got even with them,” pointing to their defeat at the hands
of the Comanches in August 1862 in Waterford. 56
The Loudoun Rangers moved to Harper’s Ferry on September 20, 1863. Ten
days later, Brigadier General H. W. Lockwood ordered Lieutenant Gover to lead thirty
men from Company A and six from Company B on a scout to “Between the Hills,” the
55

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 101, 117-118; U.S. Bureau of the
Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County,
Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 428, reel no. 108, microfilm no. 506, reel no. 186, microfilm no. 408,
reel no. 088, microfilm no. 409, reel no. 089.
56
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 104-106; Forsythe, Guerrilla
Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 13; Myers, The Comanches, 222; Henry A. Cole to William M.
Boone, September 17, 1863, O. R., Volume 29, Part 1, 109-110; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population
Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm
no. 494, reel no. 174, microfilm no. 425, reel no. 105, microfilm no. 423, reel no. 103, microfilm no.,
424, reel no. 104.The Federals captured Lieutenants Crown and Dorsey, sixteen privates, and thirty
horses and wounded one in this surprise attack.

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location between the Blue Ridge Mountains and Catoctin Mountain, going as far as
Neersville. Among the Rangers were Sergeants Robert Graham, James W. Gregg, and
John P. Hickman, as well as Privates Charles H. Snoots of Hoysville, John S.
Densmore of Waterford, Joseph T. Ritchie of Goresville, and Briscoe Goodhart. Along
their path, they met a slave who gave them cider. On a road leading back to Harper’s
Ferry, the Rangers encountered a force of fifty from Companies A, B, C, and D of
White’s Battalion and a company from the First Virginia Cavalry, commanded by
Captain William F. Dowdell and scouted for by John Mobberly. A farmer from
Harper’s Ferry, Lieutenant Benjamin F. Conrad helped lead the Confederates. White
sent this force to search for Union scouting parties. The Rangers fired on the
Confederates’ pickets, who galloped to a nearby barnyard, halted, and fired back.
“Suddenly a column of” the Rebel cavalry “came out of the woods east of the barn in
perfect line and opened fire on” the Rangers. Dowdell’s raiders smashed into and
broke through Gover’s force, driving it back to Harper’s Ferry. A member of the
Rangers’ advance guard, Private Reuben Stipes, “was unavoidably taken prisoner
while endeavoring to rejoin his command” as the Union partisans retreated to their
camp. 57
The Loudoun Rangers rode back to Point of Rocks to set up winter quarters.
During this winter, the Rangers occasionally returned their county for foraging and
social activities. They took “a considerable quantity” of the rails constituting unionist
James M. Downey’s fences. One day, James Gregg, John Hickman, Flemon Anderson,
Daniel Harper, George Hickman, and Henry Hough received invitations to attend a
ball with unionist women in one of Loudoun’s towns. As Goodhart stated, “The
Rangers had a weakness for such amusements” and “were sure of lady friends.” While
the soldiers and women danced that night, a heavy snow fell outside. To ease their
57

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 423, reel no. 103, microfilm mo. 428, reel no. 108,
microfilm no. 477, reel no. 157; Myers, The Comanches, 227; Goodhart, History of the Independent
Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 107-108; E. V. White to J. E. B. Stuart, October 2, 1863, O. R., Volume 29,
Part 1, 203-204. Reuben Stipes Widow’s Pension, application no. 98670, NARA, www.fold3.com. The
Rangers suffered three wounded and had five captured. Confederate casualties consisted of three
wounded.

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friends’ trips back home through the snow, each of the troops rode them to their
residences on horseback in a single file line. 58
Meanwhile, in September 1863, a party under White rode into Fairfax County,
where it searched for a Union force that had recently clashed with Mosby’s Rangers.
The Confederate cavalrymen included John Dove, a farmer from Whaley’s Station, a
town near the Loudoun-Fairfax border. Along this route, they received heavy fire from
four parties of concealed Union troops. After various evading movements, the squad
fled from the ambush. The next raid, also in Fairfax, occurred on October 1, during
which the lieutenant colonel and fifty Comanches from Companies A and B rode to
the Sixteenth New York Cavalry’s camp. Lacking adequate intelligence of the Federal
force from which to plan an attack, White “resolved to find out for himself the
enemy’s situation, and putting on a Yankee uniform, he…started…for the camp.”
After White finished scouting, his command entered the camp unnoticed and fired on
the tents. 59
In mid-October, Lowell’s Second Massachusetts Cavalry watched the Thirtyfifth Virginia’s movements and resumed its counter-irregular warfare against the
raiders. Encamped near Gum Springs, the Union colonel learned of small Comanche
parties scattered between Goose Creek and the Little River Pike. A sixty-man
detachment sent from the regiment met and skirmished with members of the battalion.
Lowell then ordered this squad to “take care of any scattered parties of White’s who
come” the way of Gum Springs. 60
This particular session of the Comanches’ borderland raiding in the summer
and early fall of 1863 eventually came to end when General Stuart ordered them to
58

James M. Downey (no. 12461), Southern Claims; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun
Virginia Rangers, 119-120.
59
Myers, The Comanches, 231; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census
of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 356, reel no. 036; C. H.
Potter to J. H. Potter, October 3, 1863, O. R., Volume 29, Part 1, 201-203; E. V. White to J. E. B.
Stuart, October 2, 1863, O. R., Volume 29, Part 1, 203-204. The Comanches killed four, captured thirty,
and seized sixty-four horses.
60
Charles R. Lowell, Jr., to J. H. Taylor, October 13, 1863, O. R., Volume 29, Part 1, 480-481. Lowell
killed one member of White’s Battalion and captured three of its horses.

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report to General Thomas L. Rosser, now in command of the Laurel Brigade and
encamped in Rappahannock County. During this period until December, the brigade
conducted a series of engagements with the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry in the area
encompassing the Bull Run River, Buckland, Stephensburg, Todd’s Tavern, the Plank
Road, Parker’s Store, and Sangster’s Station. White’s Cavalry thus returned to its
conventional duty of drilling, regulated scouting and fighting, and grand reviews.
Myers discusses how, in an indication of the discomfort the command experienced in
its regular service and due to insufficient supplies in their winter quarters, a large
number of the soldiers in Companies A and C developed such agitation that on
December 14, they deserted in order to acquire cold weather clothing. Myers then
galloped to Loudoun and Fairfax, where he brought the deserters back to the
command. 61
In October, John Mobberly and seven of his guerrillas punished James M.
Downey for being elected to the pro-Union Virginia legislature in Alexandria. They
arrested him and threatened to either send him to one of Richmond’s prisons or to
shoot him if he did not pay them one hundred dollars. His wife secured his release by
paying Mobberly the money. 62
Most of the Thirty-fifth fought as a regular cavalry battalion for the majority of
1864. Meanwhile, a detachment of the Thirty-fifth, along with one of Mosby’s
Rangers, remained in Loudoun and occupied Leesburg. On January 15, Cole’s
battalion launched a scout from its camps in Waterford and Hillsboro to the county
seat, where it defeated these Confederates in a skirmish. In February 1864, at the
brigade’s camp at Weyer’s Cave, Colonel White court-martialed the deserters of
Companies A and C, disciplining them for their acute local-based loyalty to the
Confederacy. They received double picket duty for one month as punishment. 63

61

Myers, The Comanches, 232-233, 239-240; McDonald, A History of the Laurel Brigade, 201-213.
James M. Downey (no. 12461), Southern Claims.
63
Myers, The Comanches, 250; Henry A. Cole to Sullivan, January 16, 1864, O. R., Volume 33, 385386. Cole captured two Comanches, two Rangers, and four horses.
62

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In the late spring and summer, while the detachment of the Comanches who
occupied Leesburg with Mosby’s Rangers remained in Loudoun, the Thirty-fifth left
the Shenandoah Valley and Loudoun County with the Laurel Brigade and fought
alongside General Robert E. Lee’s army against General Ulysses S. Grant’s army in
the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns. Participating in this conventional warfare in
1864 depleted the Thirty-fifth’s numerical strength to such an extent that Company D
dissolved, its remaining soldiers moving to the other companies. Among those
Loudouners who died in action that late spring and summer were Waterford farmer
Henry R. Moore, Lovettsville farmer Samuel W. Crumbaker, Thomas E. Tippett of
Gilford Station, and William H. Edwards of Leesburg. Crumbaker died of a pistol shot
through his skull, while Tippett perished after a bullet entered his right arm. 64
According to Frank Myers, serving in these campaigns caused them to begin to
accept their status and identity as regular soldiers, realizing that they must fight for the
Confederate cause wherever they are ordered to do so in order to win the war. Though
they continued to dream of “roaming along the Potomac and Shenandoah” again one
day, they did not want to return to the Loudoun border area until they defeated the
Yankee invaders down in central and eastern Virginia. Since they now realized that
the importance of winning the war exceeded that of fighting near their homes, the
secessionist Loudouners’ ideological commitment to Confederate independence now
trumped the aspect of their loyalty based on local ties. Whereas localism dominated as
their main combat motivation for two years, by the summer of 1864, political
allegiance to their republic, though the original inspiration for enlisting in the
Confederate army in early 1862, emerged as the primary reason for them fighting the
Yankees. 65

64

Myers, The Comanches, 287, 395; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth
Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 466, reel no. 146,
microfilm no. 508, reel no. 188, microfilm no. 048, reel no. 051, microfilm no. 367, reel no. 047; Henry
R. Moore Service Record, Samuel W. Crumbaker Service Record, Thomas E. Tippett Service Record,
William H. Edwards Service Record, NARA, www.fold3.com.
65
Myers, The Comanches, 255-312. Myers mentions that, during a moment of the Overland Campaign,
the entire Laurel Brigade cheered “Hurrah for the Comanches!”

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
February 1864 witnessed the first engagement between the two northern
Virginian Ranger units. During a raid through Loudoun, Means acquired knowledge
that Mosby’s soldiers occupied a citizen’s house near Wheatland. He then sent an
advance guard comprising Flemon Anderson, Lovettsville farmer George Hickman,
Waterford resident David Hough, John Forsythe of Leesburg, and William Bull of
Company A, as well as Company B members, to this location. Bull and Anderson
entered the house, and when seven of the Confederate Rangers inside shot at them,
“these two men opened fire on the rebels, driving them out in the garden.” Thus, a new
rivalry in Loudoun’s irregular war began. 66
In March and April 1864, a challenge to the Loudoun Rangers’ status as
partisan cavalry occurred, which almost resembled that of the Comanches. Though the
two mutinies had different results, their causes mirror each other. At the end of March,
the Department of West Virginia ordered Captain Means to send his command, then
stationed at Point of Rocks, to Charleston, West Virginia to be consolidated with the
Third West Virginia Cavalry Regiment, which would transform the Loudoun Rangers
into regular cavalrymen. Means and his men protested, refusing to comply with the
order. They argued that it violated the independent service Stanton authorized for the
command when they first formed as a unit. As Means stated, “My command was
raised in Loudoun…by special order of the War Department as an independent
organization, mustered into service by myself with prescribed geographical limits.”
Therefore, the unit, he continued, “has no connection whatever with the 3rd (West) Va.
Cav., or any other cavalry in the service.” The persistent refusal of Means to comply
convinced Lincoln and Stanton to dismiss him from U.S. military service for
disobedience of orders. However, Stanton also revoked the order, allowing the

66

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 506, reel no. 186, microfilm no. 381, reel no. 061;
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 121. Casualties for Mosby were one
killed, two wounded, and four captured.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Loudoun Rangers to remain a partisan unit for the remainder of the war. Daniel M.
Keyes replaced Means as captain. 67
Whereas the Thirty-fifth’s commander complied with the order to attach his
unit to a Confederate brigade and successfully coerced mutineers into doing so as
well, the Rangers’ captain led the resistance to his command becoming a component
of a conventional regiment within the Union army’s hierarchical command structure.
While the Comanches ultimately joined the regular Confederate army and
occasionally detached from it to serve as regular raiders, the Loudoun Rangers, though
often assisting the Second or Third Brigade of the Army of the Potomac’s Eighth
Corps, managed to officially remain a partisan unit for the entire war.
More importantly, this mutiny, combined with the previous one, further
demonstrated the local element of unionist and secessionist Loudouners’ motivations
to fight unconventionally in the Civil War. Whether they supported the attempt to
establish a southern republic or continued to maintain an allegiance to the United
States, all Loudouners who enlisted in irregular units either refused or agreed with
misgivings to be part of a large command structure in which they possessed less
freedom to fight where they pleased, suffered under the tedium of regular camp life,
and served away from the vicinity of their homes. Regardless of the side on which
they served, Loudouners fighting in irregular units conceived to scout, ambush, and
raid along the border and in their county sought to put their lives on the line for their
government only on the condition that they do so in the near their homes and with
limited regulations, an arrangement that permitted them to defend their homes and
neighbors from enemy occupiers.

67

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 123; Chamberlin and John M
Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 236; Special Orders by E. D. Townsend, April 13, 1864, Samuel C.
Means Service Record, 22, NARA, www.fold3.com; William W. Averell to Max Weber, April 13,
1864, O. R., Volume 33, 860; F. Sigel to Max Weber, April 19, 1864, O. R., Volume 33, 912; H. M.
Burleigh to Provost Marshal, April 24, 1864, O. R., Volume 33, 965; Max Weber to Averell, April 13,
1864, O. R. Volume 33, 859-860; Max Weber to T. Melvin, April 25, 1864, O. R., Volume 33, 974; T.
Melvin to Crook, April 26, 1864, O. R., Volume 33, 989; Samuel F. Woods to Bamford, April 25, 1864,
O. R., Volume 33, 974.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
In the late spring and summer of 1864, Captain Keyes’ Rangers fought a series
of engagements with Mosby’s Rangers. In mid-May 1864, Keyes led a party of thirty
on a raid from Point of Rocks to Leesburg. Meanwhile, Captain A. E. Richards and
thirty-five of Mosby’s men launched a foraging expedition from Bloomfield. After
learning of the Federals’ operation, Richards decided to abandon the purpose of the
raid and instead engage Keyes’ men. Keyes attacked Richards when they met. As
Goodhart explains, “Keyes and Grubb led the charge, and after a brisk encounter the
enemy was routed” and retreated towards Leesburg. During the engagement, the
Confederates shot Sergeant James H. Beatty’s horse “Milroy” in the leg, forcing
Beatty, a Lovettsville farmer, to ride the first healthy horse he encountered in order to
keep up with the Federals’ advance. The Loyal Cavalry next rode through Waterford
and Hillsboro; at both places they collided with the Forty-third again. After spotting
the loyalist Virginians in Waterford from outside the town and learning from a civilian
that they quartered themselves in the Baptist church, some members of Richards’ party
attacked Keyes’ pickets. The Confederates drew the main force out and then shot at
them. Six of Keyes’ soldiers chased this group to a location where the rest of
Richard’s party concealed itself. It then rose up and fired into the pursuers, wounding
two. Mosby’s Rangers quickly rode into Waterford, where they charged and broke
through the Federal formation. The Confederate Rangers chased the Union Rangers
into the Catoctin Hills several miles away before they fled back to Point of Rocks. 68

68

W. A. Duncan to J. P. Slough, May 17, 1864, O. R., Volume 37, Part 1, 475; Goodhart, History of the
Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 126; Daniel M. Keyes to Burleigh, May 15, 1864, O. R.,
Volume 37, Part 1, 464; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the
United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 498, reel no. 178; James J.
Williamson, Mosby’s Rangers: A Record of the Operations of the Forty-Third Battalion of Virginia
Cavalry from its Organization to the Surrender, from the Diary of a Private, Supplemented and Verified
with Official Reports of Federal Officers and Also of Mosby: with Personal Reminiscences, Sketches of
Skirmishes, Battles and Bivouacs, Dashing Raids and Daring Adventures, Scenes and Incidents in the
History of Mosby’s Command …Muster Rolls, Occupation, and Present Whereabouts of Surviving
Members (Alexandria: Time-Life Books, 1895), 168; John Scott. Partisan Life with Col. John S. Mosby
(Harper and Brothers, 1867), 214. Keyes’ force captured three of Mosby’s men in the first fight, but
suffered eight casualties. At Hillsboro, the Loudoun Rangers captured four of Mosby’s Rangers. At the
Waterford fight, Keyes had two killed, four wounded, and five or seven captured, as well as fifteen
horses seized from him. Richards did not have any casualties.

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On the morning of May 17, while members of Keyes’ Rangers were eating
breakfast at Sergeant David Hugh’s home in Waterford, one hundred and fifty
Confederates from both Mosby’s command and Mobberly’s band attacked their
pickets. Picketers Michael Ryan, James Monegan, and Charles Stewart chased a decoy
into a trap in which a concealed group of Mobberly’s men revealed themselves, killed
Ryan and Monegan, and mortally wounded Stewart after he surrendered. Keyes hastily
gathered the rest of his force and formed a battle line on a hill outside the village,
where he received a Confederate assault. The loyalist Virginians then began a
sequence in which they fired at the Confederates before falling back multiple times;
after doing so for three miles Mosby and Mobberly departed. 69
The rival Ranger units met on additional occasions in the summer of 1864.
Keyes launched a raid with a party of thirty to Loudoun on June 10. When the raid
took the Federals to Morrisonville, Keyes clashed with a group of Mosby’s men, who
were in the process of seizing grain. Several days later, during another scout in the
county, a Loudoun Ranger squad learned that a party of the Forty-third Virginia
planned to steal corn from a Waterford farm. It hid near the farm and waited to
ambush the foragers. Goodhart recalled that “when near the barn our squad attacked
them, killing one (B. F. Barton) and capturing two others.” These operations in June
occurred in the context of heightened activity in Loudoun County by Mosby’s Rangers
and counter-irregular warfare by the Union army in response. Union reports from the
month highlight the need to clear the county of the irregulars, who, in squads ranging
between thirty and forty soldiers, raided and scouted throughout the county. 70

69

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 127. Goodhart claims that several
of his unit’s horses were shot, five men became prisoners, and that two further soldiers suffered wounds
during the second phase of the engagement.
70
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 130; Daniel M. Keyes to H. M.
Burleigh, June 10, 1864, O. R., Volume 37, Part 1, 622; Daniel M. Keyes to H. M. Burleigh, June 21,
1864, O. R., Volume 37, Part 1, 658; Max Weber to T. A. Meysenburg, June 17, 1864, O. R., Volume
37, Part 1, 646. Keyes reported that he took four prisoners and that one hundred fifty other members of
Mosby’s command were present in Upperville and scattered in small parties throughout Loudoun
County.

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In July 1864, White’s Battalion rode to a camp on the Nottoway River ten
miles from the brigade, ceasing its service at Petersburg. In an expression of the
Comanches’ identity as border warriors, Myers reflected that “the resting days of this
month were very gladly accepted by these border men, who had never in their lives
known any other than the pure mountain air and water under the shadow of the Blue
Ridge.” During the encampment, White realized that he had “a chance to operate in
his partisan style,” and organized a party of ninety soldiers, which marched to Sussex
County and attacked a scouting party of sixty black Union cavalrymen. After the
battalion learned of Jubal Early’s Maryland invasion, Company B temporarily
deserted and rode to its members’ home state to take part. They did not receive any
penalty from White, who sympathized with their action. The Comanches could not
resist taking a break from regular service and operating as irregulars. On July 21,
Colonel Richard H. Dulaney ordered the Thirty-fifth to report to the Laurel Brigade on
July 27 at Freeman’s Ford and to picket. 71
Also in July 1864, the Loyal Virginia Cavalry served alongside regular
Marylanders against Mosby. During Early’s invasion of Maryland in early July, the
Forty-third Battalion operated along the Union line of communications between D. C.
and Harper’s Ferry. Two hundred and fifty of Mosby’s Rangers, with artillery, raided
Point of Rocks, where two hundred and twenty-five troops from the Loudoun Rangers
and two companies from the First Maryland Infantry encamped. After Mosby’s
artillery, supported by Company C, started firing shells, Companies A, B, and D
galloped toward the village while under heavy Union fire from a rifle pit. The
Confederates struck the Federals, forcing them to retreat. Goodhart describes how, “as
we had no artillery, our forces fell back beyond the range of their guns” and fled to the
Union garrison at Frederick, Maryland. During the fight, a bullet struck Captain Keyes
in the foot. In addition to this engagement, the Loudoun Rangers spent the end of June

71

Myers, The Comanches, 313-315.

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and the beginning of July patrolling and picketing the Potomac River from Berlin to
Point of Rocks. 72
On August 12, the Thirty-fifth Virginia joined the Laurel Brigade in marching
back to the Petersburg Campaign, to the disappointment of the Comanches, who again
desired to return home. After one month of fighting there, Rosser sent White’s
Battalion and the rest of the brigade to the Valley. Meanwhile, the portion of the
battalion that had stayed in northern Virginia waged collaborative operations with
Mosby’s Rangers. In the early fall, the Confederates had been “infesting the country
around Berryville, and between Bunker Hill and Winchester, cutting off small parties
and threatening” Union trains. When the Laurel Brigade entered the Valley in early
October, they arrived during General Philip Sheridan’s burning raid and engaged
Sheridan in retaliation for his “baptism of fire.” The Valley was not close enough to
home for the Loudouners of Company A. After mentioning that he received
information about Union pickets occupying the roads in Loudoun County, Private
John Stephenson told his brother that “I do not know when I can get back (to
Loudoun) but I shall try to get there” by Christmas. Loudoun always occupied
Company A’s soldiers’ minds. 73
In August 1864, the rivalry between the Loudoun Rangers and the three
Confederate irregular units resumed. A party of Keyes’ partisans launched a raid from
their Point of Rocks camp to Leesburg, where it encountered a group of White’s
raiders. When the Rangers charged, the Comanches bolted southward. On August 19,
a party led by Lieutenant Atwell hunted for John Mobberly, who, along with twenty of
his guerrillas, had been seizing the horses of both unionists and secessionists at
Waterford. At this point in the war, Mobberly’s band had increased its activity in

72

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 132-133; Forsythe, Guerrilla
Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 19; Williamson, Mosby’s Rangers, 184-185; Scott, Partisan Life with
Col. John S. Mosby, 241. Daniel M. Keyes to S. F. Adams, July 2, 1864, O. R., Volume 37, Part 2, 12.
The Federals only had one wounded and one killed horse and Mosby suffered no casualties.
73
Myers, The Comanches, 320-333; Stevenson to Halleck, October 2, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2,
262; John Stephenson to Brother, October 22, 1864, John Stephenson Service Record, 8, NARA,
www.fold3.com.

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Loudoun County and along the Potomac River. A Union major reported that the
irregulars frequently patrolled the river in civilian clothes and that “when they find our
men separated from their commands they bushwhack them.” Mobberly became such a
hazard to the Union forces in northern Virginia that it made its first attempt at
arresting him in September. 74
After an unidentified African American man informed the Loudoun Rangers
that Mobberly’s band rode to a farm owned by Charles James, Atwell devised an
attempt to capture him at this farm in which the Rangers split into two squads, one
entering from the Taylorstown road, the other from the south. As the first squad
approached, Mobberly mounted his soldiers and prepared to engage. However, a
premature carbine discharge by a member of the second squad a half mile away
revealed to the former Comanche that he was about to be trapped, convincing him to
escape to Catoctin Mountain. The loyalist cavalrymen pursued the guerrillas, but they
dismounted and ran into thick woods next to the mountain, which the Rangers’ horses
lacked the ability to enter. The single casualty of this affair was Sergeant John N.
Johnson. While riding, his horse fell, “painfully injuring him.” On August 21,
Brigadier General John D. Stevenson, commander of Harper’s Ferry, ordered Atwell
to lead a thirty-eight soldier scout to Aldie. While crossing through Leesburg, they met
and quickly defeated a party consisting of soldiers from White’s Battalion and the
First Virginia Cavalry. 75
For the Union army in northern Virginia, the summer and fall of 1864 brought
threats from both the regular and irregular wings of the Confederate army. Following
their series of unconventional engagements, the Loudoun Rangers received orders to
74

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 141; E. B. Tyler to L. Wallace,
August 4, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 1, 693; J. H. Wilson to Chapman, September 12, 1864, O. R.,
Volume 43, Part 2, 74. The Rangers captured two Comanches and several horses.The report ordering
the arrest mistakenly classifies Mobberly’s band as a component of “Mosby’s gang.”
75
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 142-143; R. E. Cook to H. M.
Burleigh, August 22, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 1, 636; N. P. Chipman to E. M. Stanton, August 22,
1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 1, 881; N. P. Chipman to Edwin W. Stanton, August 20, 1864, O. R.,
Volume 43, Part 1, 858-859. In the chase, Atwell’s Rangers wounded Mobberly in the arm and captured
four of his irregulars and all except three of his horses. Atwell took three prisoners, each of whom were
mortally wounded and one of whom—Edwin Drish—died of his wounds.

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return to Harper’s Ferry and do special service for the First Brigade of General Philip
Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah while it fought against General Jubal Early’s
corps during the Valley Campaign of 1864. Despite this threat from the conventional
Confederate army, the Union army remained worried about Mosby, White, and
Mobberly. It ordered Keyes to send his entire command on a scout to Loudoun County
to “clear the country as much as possible of guerrillas.” In addition, the Union army’s
First and Third Cavalry Divisions fought several counter-irregular engagements with
Mosby and Mobberly in late August and early September. 76
On October 14, 1864, the Loudoun Rangers learned that Captain Samuel
Chapman’s company from the Forty-third Battalion had just crossed the Potomac
River at White’s Ford, destroyed canal boats possessing supplies for the Union army,
and begun to ride towards Adamstown, Maryland, a town on the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad, with the objective of seizing supplies from Union stores and intercept a train.
Captain B. Spence, commander of Union forces at Monocacy, ordered Loudoun
Ranger Grubb to lead an attack on Chapman’s men and drive them to the Potomac.
Grubb gathered eighty-one men, swiftly rode to Adamstown, and attacked Chapman
as he began his return to Virginia, driving him to a point three miles from the
Potomac. The Federals charged and poured several volleys into the Confederates, who
fled to a strip of woods near the river. However, the Rebel partisans regrouped, and
once they were in striking distance, launched a shattering counterattack on Grubb,
forcing his force to scatter and retreat. In the engagement, George H. Waters was
killed, while Waterford carpenter Robert W. Hough and Neersville laborer Joseph
Bagent received severe wounds. Chapman’s Rangers captured John W. Forsythe and
Daniel Burnett. 77

76

Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 144-169; S. F. Adams to Daniel M.
Keyes, September 23, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 160; Philip H. Sheridan to Augur, September 10,
1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 64. No report detailing the results of Keyes’ scout has been located. In
these fights, the Federals killed nineteen and captured six of Mosby’s Rangers and killed five soldiers,
captured forty horses, and seventy-five revolvers from Mobberly’s band.
77
Williamson, Mosby’s Rangers, 264-265; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia
Rangers, 170-171; Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby Prison, 17; Scott, Partisan Life with

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The two Ranger units clashed again in late November 1864. The unionist
partisans received a report that a detachment of Mosby’s men were near Leesburg.
This party, numbering thirty-eight and commanded by Captain Richard P. Montjoy,
had been ordered by Mosby to ride through Loudoun County in search of the Virginia
Yankees. In response, Lieutenants Robert Graham and Augustus C. Rhodes led thirtyfour soldiers divided into two squads to the town. With no sign of Mosby’s Rangers,
the Loudoun Rangers left Leesburg and began their return to Point of Rocks. Their
column, which had become thinly spread out over the course of the raid, ran into
Montjoy’s force at Goresville. This initiated a chaotic period of firing and
maneuvering by each side. When a group of Mosby’s men pressed against Mahlon H.
Best of Hoysville, Milton S. Gregg, and Lovettsville farmer James H. Beatty, Best
turned in his saddle, pointed his revolver over his shoulder, and shot Mountjoy, the
ball entering the captain’s brain. However, the Confederates routed the Federals,
scattering them “like chaff before the wind.” Among the wounded and captured
Loudoun Rangers were Hoysville laborer Peter C. Fry and John W. Lenhart, who
broke his collar bone. 78
Mobberly became an increasing annoyance for the Union army in 1864,
prompting it to conduct counter-irregular operations against him. In January, Major
Henry Cole occasionally sent parties on night raids in Loudoun aiming to capture
Mobberly and his band. Mobberly’s irregulars were being increasingly noted for
Col. John S. Mosby, 341; George H. Waters Service Record, Robert W. Hough Service Record, Joseph
Bagent Service Record, John W. Forsyth Service Record, NARA, www.fold3.com; U.S. Bureau of the
Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County,
Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 456, reel no. 136, microfilm no. 475, reel no. 155. Grubb’s force
suffered one killed, two wounded, and four captured; Chapman had two missing.
78
John W. Munson, Reminiscences of a Mosby Guerrilla (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company,
1906), 141-142; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 172-173;
Williamson, Mosby’s Rangers, 311; Scott, Partisan Life with Col. John S. Mosby, 374-375; U.S.
Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun
County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 411, reel no. 091, microfilm no. 498, reel no. 178 microfilm
no. 409, reel no. 089; Daniel M. Keyes to S. F. Adams, November 29, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 1,
670; Daniel M. Keyes to Stevenson, November 28, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 689-690; Henry
Burtnete to J. D. Stevenson, November 28, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 689; Peter C. Fry Service
Record, John Lenhart Service Record, NARA, www.fold.com. Casualties for this fight were seven
captured, including the two lieutenants, and four wounded for the Loudoun Rangers, three killed and
one wounded for Mosby’s Rangers.

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depredations against the unionist German population in late 1864. Towards the end of
the year, both Mosby’s Rangers and Mobberly’s band foraged and seized supplies in
the German settlements. On November 11, while eleven soldiers from the Second
Massachusetts Cavalry rode towards Harper’s Ferry, Mobberly and twenty-five of his
guerrillas attacked at a location between Charlestown and Halltown. Also that year,
Mobberly and his second-in-command French Bill had “brutally murdered” a surgeon
from the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry after he surrendered. To put an end to these
activities, General Stephenson in late November selected the Loudoun Rangers for a
mission to capture Bill. Waterford farmer Samuel E. Tritapoe, Joseph T. Ritchie,
Goresville laborer Joseph Fry, and Wilson Lathan tracked him down near Lovettsville,
with the aid of horse tracks on the snow-covered ground. Bill fired his revolver at the
Rangers, but Tritapoe and Ritchie knocked the weapon out of his hand, captured him,
and brought him into the custody of U.S. officials, who hung him for his crimes.
Mobberly’s small band frequently attacked Union forces in Loudoun during the winter
of 1864/1865. It launched nightly assaults on the pickets of the Sixth New York
Cavalry’s winter quarters camps at Lovettsville in December 1864. These attacks by
the “rough-riding scout” hit each camp and each picket line in every one of his raids,
keeping the Yankees on guard each night. 79
In November and December 1864, the main force of the Thirty-fifth Virginia
returned to its alternate duty as a conventional raiding unit. Lieutenant Colonel White
led the battalion on an independent raid to the Alleghany Mountains of West Virginia
in order to fight the Swamp Dragons a second time. Joining them were Captain
McNeill’s Rangers, John Mobberly’s band, and two regular companies, making the
whole force three hundred-strong. The West Virginians often fired at the Confederate
79

Newcomer, Cole’s Cavalry, 93; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers,
173-174; C. Crowninshield to A. E. Dana, November 11, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 604; John D.
Stephenson to Sheridan, December 1, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 721-727; D. Henry Bartnete to
Stephenson, December 1, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 721; John D. Stephenson to Sheridan,
December 2, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 727; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of
the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 425,
reel no. 105, microfilm no. 418, reel no. 098; Myers, The Comanches, 359. Mobberly killed one and
captured five of the Federals.

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column from concealed, distant positions; however, the raiders occasionally succeeded
in winning skirmishes. “McNeill’s and White’s guerrillas” also attacked a regular
Union army post at Green Spring Run during the raid. By December 21, the
Confederates returned to the Valley. 80
After engaging Mosby and Mobberly for two months, Captain Keyes’ Rangers
spent December 1864 fighting their original irregular rival, the Comanches. On the
first day of that month, Lieutenant Gover and forty Rangers crossed the Potomac
River to Harper’s Ferry and rode to “Between the Hills.” Upon arriving in this area,
the troops met Lieutenant Samuel E. Grubb’s Company C at Hillsboro. “Gover
ordered a charge, driving them through the village.” After returning to camp, Keyes’
men resumed its counter-irregular operations when General Stevenson, worried about
a potential Mosby raid into Maryland, ordered them on a scout to Loudoun on
December 6 in order to acquire intelligence about the partisan chief. 81
On December 24, James W. Grubb of Hillsboro led a party of twenty
dismounted Loudoun Rangers into their county. While the bulk of the squad marched
to Waterford, Sergeants Flemon B. Anderson, George H. Hickman, and John P.
Hickman, a Potomac Furnace farmer, visited the home of Anderson’s mother in
Taylorstown. A combined Thirty-fifth Battalion-Forty-third Battalion force of sixteen
surrounded and entered the house with drawn revolvers. Anderson attempted to escape
through the back door. The Confederates fired ten shots at him, three finding their
mark. Despite his wounds, Anderson shot back with his revolver, killing one and
wounding three Confederates. “As he gained the outside of the door he was shot
through the head,” dying several minutes later after his mother Mary Anderson caught
80

Myers, The Comanches, 346; B. F. Kelley to Seward, November 1, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 1,
649; William H. Seward to Stevenson, November 1, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 522. The
Confederates wounded one, killed one, and captured the rest of the Federals at this post. Though the
reports in the O. R. date this raid at the beginning of November, Myers’ memoir states that this West
Virginia raid occurred in mid-December.
81
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 179; John D. Stevenson to Spence,
December 7, 1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 754; Spence to Stephenson, December 7, 1864, O. R.,
Volume 43, Part 2, 755; Daniel M. Keyes to J. D. Stephenson, December 8, 1864, O. R., Volume 43,
Part 2, 764. The Rangers captured four and killed one Comanche.

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him in her arms. John and George Hickman proved less resisting towards the
Comanches and Mosby’s Rangers, who took them prisoner. Meanwhile, after waiting
in vain for several hours for a detachment of White’s Battalion to arrive in town, those
Loudoun Rangers in Waterford returned to camp without a fight. This particular
engagement illustrates how close these irregular soldiers were to home. Since their
home county constituted their area of operations and their battlefield, whenever they
took a break from scouting and raiding to visit their family’s residence, they were
vulnerable to an enemy attack at any time. 82
At the end of 1864, the Comanches underwent another crisis. With the Valley
desolated after Sheridan’s raid in the fall, heavy snow that winter, and limited supplies
coming in, eliminating almost all sources of foraging for the soldiers and their horses,
White sought to disband the battalion. Early rejected the request, but Company F
refused to accept his answer, deserting the command on December 27. When White
learned of the company’s action he contemplated resigning from the command, “but
the Loudoun boys gathered around their Chief like children around a father” and
convinced him to stay. On January 1, 1865, White acquired permission for a Loudoun
raid and sent Myers to lead it. The captain ordered Companies A, B, and C to ride to
Loudoun and Company E to go to its members’ homes in Page and Shenandoah
Counties. “When they entered their paradise, for such Loudoun county seemed to
them,” the Comanches witnessed the effects of General Wesley Merritt’s burning
raid. 83
Loudoun County’s local irregular war continued into the final months of the
national conflict. Companies A, B, and C of the Comanches spent the rest of the
winter dispersed throughout Loudoun County and Fairfax County, “nominally under
the command of Captain Myers…who held weekly meetings of his squadron at
82

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 408, reel no. 088; Goodhart, History of the
Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 179-180; Daniel M. Keyes to S. F. Adams, December 25,
1864, O. R., Volume 43, Part 2, 827. Myers does not mention the two December fights with the
Loudoun Rangers, nor does he discuss any collaboration with Mosby at this time.
83
Myers, The Comanches, 353-356.

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various points, but apart from the meetings the men were under no restrictions or
control except” keeping an eye out for and evading Union scouting parties in the
county. 84
Captain Frank Myers stayed at his farm one mile west of Waterford, which
shifted from snow-covered to rain-drenched that season. Here, he reflected on
conditions in the county and on the service of northern Virginia’s Confederate
irregulars in a diary. He noticed an active social life: “The people of Loudoun have
had more parties, balls, and joyous gatherings this winter than has been known since I
can remember.” Without mentioning any specific events that influenced his views,
Myers revealed a disdain he had for Mosby’s Rangers. When Private Townshend
Vandevanter of Hamilton visited him on February 19 to request an exchange to the
Forty-third Virginia, he “tho’t Town had more of the man in him than to want to leave
an active working command for one that does nothing but play.” Myers asserted that
the operations of the Thirty-fifth Virginia consist of “hard duties compared to
Mosby’s” and that “I wouldn’t give much for the patriotism of any man who is
physically able to be a soldier who would join Mosby now.” He even attempted to
prevent the Forty-third from conscripting Comanche Privates Cornelius Shawen and
Henry C. Bennett and wished that the Loudoun Rangers “would whip them (Mosby’s
Rangers) out.” Myers mentions that, due to the lack of an encounter with the Loudoun
Rangers during the entire winter, he was not “afraid of Keys much.” Due to three
years of war-related hardships, Myers dreaded the fighting that was to come once
spring started. Various neighbors, comrades, and kin visited his home that winter:
Eveline Myers, Thomas and Thurza F. Johnston, William Shawn, Charlotte Hope,
Gabriel Braden, Sergeant George Everheart of Hamilton, Sergeant and Philomont
laborer Charles Gallaway, Private and Lovettsville laborer George Miller, and Private
John Tribby, a Neersville carpenter before the war. 85
84

Frank M. Myers Diary, February 19, 23, 26, 1865; Ibid., 357.
Frank M. Myers Diary, February 17, 19-21, 28, March 2, 4, 9, 15, 1865; Townshend H. Vandeventer
Service Record, NARA, www.fold3.com; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the
Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 723, reel
85

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In January, White rejoined his command and planned to attack the Sixth New
York Cavalry’s camp of two hundred and fifty soldiers at Lovettsville. Each of the
three Confederate irregular units based in Loudoun County collaborated in this
operation. On the night of January 17, 1865, White gathered eighty Comanches,
several of Mosby’s Rangers, and a Mobberly-led advance guard. The guard fired on
the Union pickets, and the entire force afterward charged into the camp. Many of the
Yankees occupied tents into which Confederate bullets poured. However, the majority
of the New Yorkers exited their huts, rallied, and launched a counter-attack, flanking
the raiders and driving them out of the camp. 86
This fight was the final one for the Comanches in Loudoun County during the
war. The battalion subsequently prepared to return to the regular Confederate army
and leave the freedom of irregular warfare for the last time. On March 21, 1865,
White, after several attempts, gathered sixty members of his scattered command,
including Myers, now only composed of Companies A, B, and C, and returned to the
Laurel Brigade. They then fought the remainder of the Petersburg and Appomattox
Campaigns. White ordered Boyd Barret of Hillsboro and Samuel White to stay in
Loudoun in order to collect those Comanches who remained the county. 87
Myers reveals that, by 1865, unconventional warfare, once their “delight and
pride,” had become futile in the Comanches’ minds. Three years of combat produced a
great amount of fatigue and reduced their morale. It convinced them that their small,
isolated raids and skirmishes were not aiding the effort to defeat the invading Yankee

no. 165, microfilm no. 720, reel no. 162, microfilm no. 669, reel no. 141, microfilm no. 476, reel no.
156, microfilm no. 513, reel no. 193.
86
Frank M. Myers Diary, February 17, 1865; Myers, The Comanches, 362; Thomas C. Devin to
Hayden, January 30, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 1, 452. In Devin’s report, White had three men
killed, eleven wounded, and eleven horses wounded; the Sixth’s casualties were two killed, five
wounded, and eight horses captured. According to Myers’ memoir, the Comanches captured one
hundred and fifty Federals and their only casualty is a single wounded soldier; in his diary, the force
killed and wounded approximately thirty Federals and captured eleven soldiers and one hundred horses.
87
Frank M. Myers Diary, March 21- April 10, 1865; Myers, The Comanches, 366-392; U.S. Bureau of
the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Loudoun County,
Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 644, reel no. 116. During these final conventional operations, White
became a full colonel and Myers received a promotion to the rank of major.

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hordes in the way large, decisive, conventional engagements fought by the Army of
Northern Virginia could. They “all felt that to attain the liberty for which so much
blood had already been spilled, there must be great…battles fought.” Here, one can
see that the loyalty of those in White’s Cavalry had evolved from an allegiance to the
Confederacy expressed only through independent border warfare in their home area, to
devotion to the Confederacy demonstrated through conventional military service
wherever it was needed to win the war. Though both ideology and localism comprised
the dynamics of the loyalty of secessionist and unionist Loudouners for the entire war,
since 1864, ideological commitment to Confederate independence was a more acute
aspect of the Comanches’ loyalty than local ties. Such a development occurred in
neither the Loudoun Rangers nor Mobberly’s band. 88
Keyes’ Rangers continued to camp at Point of Rocks for most of the winter of
1864/1865. In early February 1865, four members—Sergeant James H. Beatty and
Privates Henry Hough, Joe Ritchie, and George Davis—attained permission to cross
the river and scout dismounted in Loudoun. Once there, they discovered four of
Mosby’s Rangers enter a house, which included Major William Hibbs and Lieutenant
J. W. James. Beatty organized an ambush with his three men. “When the rebels came
out to get their horses, Sergt. Beatty’s crew rushed out of the shed and opened fire on
the enemy, capturing all four before they had time to draw their revolvers.” 89
On March 20, 1865, the Loudoun Rangers joined an expedition from Harper’s
Ferry to Upperville, accompanied by five companies of Colonel Reno’s Twelfth
Pennsylvania Cavalry and eight companies from the First United States Infantry, with
Reno in overall command. This raid included numerous engagements, involved
constant harassment by Confederates, and witnessed Union pickets receive nightly
attacks. As the force crossed through Hillsboro, it skirmished with a party of Mosby’s
Rangers. The next day, the Federals encountered a force at Purcellville consisting of
White’s and Mosby’s men which fired several shots from distant, concealed locations
88
89

Myers, The Comanches, 364-365.
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 182.

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and tracked their flanks and rear from a half mile away. Goodhart recalled that
“whenever a hill or ravine would protect them they would crawl near enough to the
road to bushwack (sic) us, and we kept out a skirmish line on each side and rear, and
an advance guard to prevent a surprise.” Near Harmony, the irregulars attacked the
Union skirmish line and ambushed the main force. However, volleys from the Federal
infantry dispersed the Confederates. On March 22 and 23, 1865, the irregulars
persisted in its following of and sporadic attacks on the Union column while it crossed
Purcellville, Bloomfield, and Upperville. Reno’s column returned to Harper’s Ferry on
March 24. 90
Meanwhile, in the late winter and spring of 1865, John Mobberly and his band
had so “badly scourged” Loudoun County and “had become so desperate and such a
terror” to its civilians that General Stephenson, commander of Union forces in
Harper’s Ferry, placed a bounty on his head. Stephenson sent a dismounted party of
twelve of the Loudoun Rangers to the county to conduct a mission in which they
would capture or kill Mobberly and his band on a road in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
They hid themselves in a thicket and waited for his arrival. When they saw him, the
Rangers revealed themselves and demanded his surrender; Mobberly responded by
fleeing. According to Goodhart, “every one of our boys fired at him” with their
carbines “at close range, but did not strike him.” Their lack of horses prevented a
pursuit. 91
The Loudoun Rangers’ rivalry with Mobberly’s band and Mosby’s Rangers
concluded in early April 1865, just prior to Lee’s surrender to Grant. On April 5, the
Rangers made a second attempt to capture or kill Mobberly. Stephenson ordered a
90

Scott, Partisan Life with Col. John S. Mosby, 457; Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun
Virginia Rangers, 191-193; John D. Stevenson to Emory, March 8, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 2,
898; Report of Winfield S. Hancock, February 18, 1867, O. R., Volume 46, Part 1, 524-527; C. H.
Morgan to C. C. Augur, March 22, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 3, 84. The Federals suffered nine
killed, twenty wounded, and five captured; Confederate casualties were five killed and an unspecified
number of wounded and captured.
91
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 194-195; Newcomer, Cole’s
Cavalry, 93; Brig. J. D. Stephenson to E. M. Stanton, March 28, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 3, 240241.

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squad, consisting of Charles Stewart, a laborer from Harpers Ferry named Private
Joseph Waters, Mahlon H. Best, and three Loudoun civilians who volunteered as
pilots, “to wipe out the notorious guerrilla.” Stewart led the party to the Blue Ridge
Mountains, learned from local citizens that Mobberly was to be at a farm near Short
Hill, and proceeded to the farm’s barn, where they concealed themselves. When
Mobberly, accompanied by a band member named Riley, galloped into the barnyard,
the three Rangers all rose and fired their revolvers, killing Mobberly and mortally
wounding Riley. They returned to Harper’s Ferry with his body. On April 6, 1865,
fifty of Mosby’s Rangers from Captain George Baylor’s Company H crossed into the
Valley. Upon learning of their rivals’ camp near Halltown, Baylor’s men executed a
surprise assault in which they “cleaned them out” and captured a large proportion of
the command, the remainder retreating to nearby bushes. This was the last engagement
for the Loudoun Rangers of the war. 92
After General Lee’s army surrendered at Appomattox, the Comanches rode
back to Loudoun County, where they disbanded, returned to their homes, and received
paroles. Upon hearing the news of the Army of Northern Virginia’s surrender, Frank
Myers was devastated, commenting that “I am sure I was never in so much trouble in
all my life.” During the journey home, Myers was “sick, worn out, and” felt “almost
like I could wish I was dead.” He reflected on his military service of the last three
years and several days: “I know I had rather been killed in my first battle, if I was fit
92

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860,
Loudoun County, Virginia, NARA, microfilm no. 480, reel no. 160; Goodhart, History of the
Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 197-198; Forsythe, Guerrilla Warfare and Life in Libby
Prison, 10-11; Newcomer, Cole’s Cavalry, 93; Williamson, Mosby’s Rangers, 364; Scott, Partisan Life
with Col. John S. Mosby, 463-464; J. D. Stephenson to E. M. Stanton, March 28, 1865, O. R., Volume
46, Part 3, 240-241; John D. Stevenson to Morgan, April 1, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 3, 444-445; J.
D. Stephenson to E. M. Stanton, April 5, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 3, 590; Report of Winfield S.
Hancock, February 18, 1867, O. R., Volume 46, Part 1, 524-527; D. R. Clendenin to C. I. Wickersham,
April 11, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 1, 1308-1309; John D. Stevenson to Morgan, April 6, 1865, O.
R., Volume 46, Part 3, 617. These three civilian pilots agreed to help the Union army capture Mobberly
if the U.S. government armed them, gave them provisions that would enable them to live away from
home, and rewarded them in return. Neither Goodhart nor Forsythe mention their unit’s final
engagement. Baylor captured between twenty-five and forty-five of the loyalist Virginians, almost all of
their horses, and a portion of their weapons and camp equipment. Casualties were one wounded for
Baylor and five or six killed or wounded for the Loudoun Rangers.

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to die, than pass thro the experience of the last three days.” However, he could not
“face that we are subjected,” asserting that “If the people will do their duty, the Army
will whip the Yankees yet.” When he returned to his residence, Myers dreaded
surrendering and acquiring a parole. He initially experienced difficulty deciding
whether he should or not, but he ultimately recognized that this action was a necessity.
After being paroled on April 25, Myers stated that he was “so sorry I surrendered” and
felt that “I have acted cowardly” for doing so. Meanwhile, the Union army succeeded
in eliminating what remained of Mobberly’s band. By April 1865, casualties incurred
over the course of its existence had reduced his band to four members. Upon the death
of their leader, the remaining three surrendered to the Union army and acquired
paroles on April 19, 1865, to the relief and satisfaction of the Federals in the northern
Virginia-Maryland border area. Once the remaining elements of the Confederate army
surrendered, the Loudoun Rangers concluded its service on May 31, mustering out at
Bolivar, West Virginia. The irregular war in Loudoun County had ended. 93

93

Frank M. Myers Diary, April 9-25, May 12, 1865; Myers, The Comanches, 392; John D. Stevenson to
Morgan, April 1, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 3, 444-445; John D. Stevenson to Mitchell, April 19,
1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 3, 840; W. G. Mitchell to Stevenson, April 19, 1865, O. R., Volume 46,
Part 3, 841; Winfield S. Hancock to John A. Rawlins, April 20, 1865, O. R., Volume 46, Part 3, 868;
Goodhart, History of the Independent Loudoun Virginia Rangers, 199; Peter Dorherety Service Record,
21, NARA, www.fold3.com.

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CHAPTER IV
EPILOGUE: RECONSTRUCTION LOUDOUN COUNTY
Both the unionists and secessionists of Loudoun County welcomed the end of a
devastating war that had toppled their civil government, destroyed the county’s
resources, and brought economic downturn, martial law, and military occupation. Yet,
with the death of the Confederacy, the triumph of the Union and the federal
government, and the emancipation of African Americans, the ex-secessionists of
Loudoun, as well as the rest of the former Confederates, were a defeated people. Over
the next decade, they witnessed Radical Republicans in nearby Washington, D.C., and
in their home county try to conduct a revolution in the southern racial order and try to
remove their political rights.
Though bitter that their republic had failed to achieve independence and that
slavery had died, those Loudouners who sided with the Confederacy became hopeful
that the federal government’s Reconstruction policy would restore white supremacy.
Ex-secessionists subscribed to a new postwar unionism. However, when the Radical
Republicans seized power in the federal government, which brought the possibility of
racial equality, ex-secessionist Loudouners grew to despise and helped topple
Reconstruction. Though the minority of wartime unionists who had helped win the
war for the Union promoted the cause of the freedpeople, most Loudouners in the late
1860s and 1870s became members of the conservative South’s Redemption order. Yet,
just like the interaction between unionists and secessionists during the war, the
relationship between Loudoun’s white and black Republicans and its ex-Confederate
conservatives was relatively mild and devoid of violence, despite obvious tensions.
Moreover, the Reconstruction experience of Loudoun and Virginia never included the
existence of a Radical Republican state government seen in the rest of the former
Confederacy. Meanwhile, veterans of the Loudoun Rangers and their families
experienced misfortune in the postbellum period. Those who served in the Thirty-fifth

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Virginia Cavalry’s Company A endured the bitterness of defeat, accepted Union rule,
and were elected to political office in Reconstruction Loudoun. 1
Despite the destruction of northwest Loudoun in the burning raid and loss of
slave labor in southern and eastern Loudoun, the county’s economy began to recover
in the postbellum period. The Civil War had depleted the county’s livestock to such an
extent that the population of horses, oxen, and hogs in 1860 had still not recovered in
1870. However, wheat production in 1870 exceeded 1860’s 396,297 bushels, reaching
a yield of 537,026 bushels. As early as mid-June 1865, The Mirror, which resumed
publication at that time after ceasing operation during the war, dropped the word
“Democratic” from its title in order to draw a readership from both old Whigs and
Democrats and to become a Conservative Party paper, reported that “growing crops
are looking remarkably well and promise a good yield” and that Loudoun’s
“agricultural resources are immense.” The livestock and crop shortages immediately
after the war increased farm prices. The Quakers’ Southern Claims Commission
compensation, financial aid from northern Friends, and lack of slaves enabled them to
recover quicker than the rest of Loudoun. Businesses reopened throughout the county
in the spring and summer of 1865. Charles P. McCabe, a prosperous slave trader in the
1850s, turned to manufacturing and selling clothes and footwear after the war. Yet,
those who held bank notes in Confederate currency were unable to redeem them.
Leesburg doctors, who could not conduct their practice during the war, including
Alexander R. Mott, George E. Plaster, and J. F. Zacharias, returned to Loudoun’s
county seat, where they opened drug stores and collected unpaid fees. Also in the
spring and summer of 1865, Leesburg lawyers such as William B. Downey, John M.
Orr, Charles B. Tebbs, and George A. Thatcher handled claims against the federal
government for the Union army’s property destruction. By December 1865, mail
service resumed in Loudoun. 2
1

Charles Poland, Jr., From Frontier to Suburbia: Loudoun County, Virginia (Westminster, Maryland:
Heritage Books, 2005), 221-223.
2
Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 223, 227-228, 231-236. The Mirror, September 15, 1858, June 14,
August 9, 1865, April 17, 1872. On the eve of the war, Loudoun had 7,503 horses, one hundred five

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Due to punishment for their wartime sentiments, a number of Loudoun Ranger
veterans and their families did not share in Loudoun County’s economic recovery. In
1869, Isaac Hughes, Jr., moved to Maryland to work for his family’s wool factory. His
brother Thomas then sought the patronage of ex-secessionist farmers, who refused “on
account of my partner, who…was one of Mean’s gang.” The Confederate army’s
plunder and confiscation of Samuel Means’ mill in Waterford caused the Rangers’
first captain to become bankrupt and debt-ridden after the war. These circumstances
forced him and his wife to move to Washington, D.C., where Rachel operated a
boarding house and Samuel died of cancer in 1884. That same year, Daniel Keyes
succumbed to poor health resulting from the strain of combat. As local historians
Taylor Chamberlin and John Souders describe, the Union partisan command’s second
captain was “a delayed casualty of the war.” 3
While other areas of Virginia and the rest of the postbellum South witnessed
paramilitary groups such as the Ku Klux Klan intimidate, torture, and murder
freedpeople and white Republicans, Reconstruction Loudoun County witnessed
relatively peaceful relations between black and white citizens. According to Loudoun
County historian Charles Poland, Jr., due to the county’s large number of nonslaveholders before the war and the absence of African Americans in Loudoun’s local
government after the war, neither the KKK nor any other paramilitary group formed a
Loudoun branch. Another likely reason for the lack of paramilitary violence in
postbellum Loudoun is the relatively non-violent character of and dedication to law
and order in the county’s politics during the Civil War and Reconstruction era. While
Loudouners indeed killed each other in their local irregular war between 1862 and
1865, only those who had enlisted in the Union or Confederate government’s official
military committed the violence. Meanwhile, civilians who never enlisted abstained
from the violence seen in other southern communities; instead, they, at times, provided
mules, 571 oxen, and 23,153 hogs; five years after the war, Loudoun had 5,572 horses, eighty-two
mules, 620 oxen, and 14,594 hogs.
3
Taylor M. Chamberlin and John M Souders, Between Reb and Yank: A Civil War History of Northern
Loudoun County, Virginia (Jefferson and London: McFarland &Company, Inc, Publishers, 2011), 354;
The Washingtonian, June 4, 1869; Loudoun Mirror, September 25, 1919.

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aid to and exhibited kindness towards supporters of the enemy army, despite hostile
sentiments. Loudouners continued these peaceful relations following the war’s
conclusion. Once the Confederate army ceased to exist, all political violence in
Loudoun ended. Loudoun’s conservative citizens considered violence against white
Republicans and freedpeople outside of a government-sanctioned military unit to be
undesirable. As a result, not one veteran of Elijah White’s Thirty-fifth Virginia took
up arms against any component of the postbellum order after their unit disbanded. The
absence of a Loudoun County KKK reflects the minor presence of the group in the
Old Dominion as a whole. Allen W. Trelease’s work on the Reconstruction Klan
discusses how, in the spring of 1868, the conservative Richmond Examiner and
Enquirer promoted the KKK as an organization that would resist the carpetbaggers,
the Radicals, and the “Africanization of Virginia.” However, following several violent
incidents in 1868, the KKK ceased to exist in Virginia after December. Trelease
attributes the short life of the Virginia KKK to the lack of a Radical Republican
regime and to the Conservative take-over of the state in 1869. Without the emergence
of a Radical order, there was less of a need for white supremacist paramilitary activity
in Loudoun and elsewhere in Virginia than in the rest of the former Confederacy. 4
Nevertheless, Loudoun’s whites continued to subscribe to the notion of African
American inferiority and oppose racial equality. During the rest of the 1860s,
newspaper articles asserted that blacks were promiscuous criminals who lacked the
ability to properly participate in the political process. Whites continued to regulate
black behavior, forming a “special colored police” force in 1875. Moreover, the vast
majority of people arrested for crimes in Reconstruction Loudoun were African
American. In 1875, black Loudouners comprised twenty-six of the thirty-two inmates
in the county jail. In August 1875, the “colored police” arrested a black man for
4

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 238-239; Harrison Williams, Legends of Loudoun: An account of
the history and homes of a border county of Virginia’s Northern Neck (Richmond: Garrett and Massie,
1938), 225; Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern
Reconstruction (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 65-68. For another work on how white southern
conservatives used violence to overthrow Reconstruction, redeem the South, and maintain white
supremacy, see George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of
Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

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selling whiskey during a religious revival, for which Justice E. B. Powell fined him
and sent him to jail for ten days. Powell subsequently ordered another African
American to be whipped for stealing boots and dismissed a case involving one black
man pointing a pistol at another African American. In 1866, a white man named
Landon T. Lovett received a one year sentence for stealing a horse and killing a black
man, while, in 1871, the county court sentenced African American William Carter
twelve years for only horse theft. Former slaveholders doubted that former slaves
could become competent free laborers. One newspaper contributor and ex-slaveowner
who referred to himself as “Agricola” declared in the fall of 1865 that “The negro will
never constitute much of a bugbear in this county” and will fall “back at the gradual
approach of the white man.” 5
African American Loudouners, aided to a limited extent by the Freedmen’s
Bureau and the county’s Quakers, sought to improve their community after
emancipation. Most became tenant farmers after the war. Like freedpeople throughout
the postbellum South, some continued working on the same land on which they had
toiled as slaves. To care for indigent and ill freedpeople, African Americans in
Leesburg gathered in February 1866 to establish the Colored Man’s Aid Society.
Freedmen’s Bureau agents oversaw freedmen’s labor contracts and the establishment
of schools for black children. Waterford Quakers Sarah Steer and Annie Matthews
taught African American students starting in the fall of 1865. Wheelwright Reuben
Schooley sold a quarter acre piece of land on which Waterford constructed a
schoolhouse for the village’s black population. 6
Loudoun County, along with the rest of Virginia and the former Confederacy,
underwent three political developments after the Civil War: Presidential
Reconstruction, Congressional Reconstruction, and Redemption. While exConfederates considered sectional reconciliation to be easy under the first stage, the
5

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 239-244; The Mirror, July 12, August 22, September 21, October
12, 1865, November 28, 1866, February 10, April 6, August 24, 1876, December 13, 1871, August 19,
1875.
6
Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 244-245; Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 348.

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agenda that Radical Republicans imposed on them produced frustration and
disillusionment and pushed their political activities in a conservative direction. When
the South’s redeemers overthrew Reconstruction, ex-Confederates embraced their
political position in the Union. Yet, the bitterness of losing the war persisted
throughout this period. However, Loudouners and Virginians experienced
Reconstruction differently compared to other southerners; Radicals never seized
power in the Old Dominion’s state government. Instead, a moderate Republican
governor and a Conservative Party-run legislature controlled Virginia politics. 7
Loudoun County’s unionists had participated in Virginia’s wartime
Reconstruction when they supported the restored unionist state government based in
Alexandria and governed by Francis H. Pierpoint. They sent three delegates to the
body’s constitutional convention in 1864: James M. Downey, John J. Henshaw, and
Edwin R. Gover, each of whom resided in Waterford. Just as Loudoun unionist John
Janney became president of Virginia’s secession convention, Downey was elected
speaker of the unionist legislature’s House of Delegates. The convention wrote a
constitution that disenfranchised and barred from office those Confederates who held
state and national office during the rebellion. At the war’s conclusion, on May 9,
1865, President Andrew Johnson recognized the Pierpont government as Virginia’s
legitimate state government. 8
Despite a level of tension and hostility leftover from the war, Loudoun County
peacefully adjusted to the ultimate end of Confederate rule and the return of the
United States government’s authority. The wartime unionists supported the
Republican Party; the former secessionists voted for the Conservative Party in local
and state elections and the Democratic Party in national elections. The antebellum and
wartime experiences of each created their political allegiances. As abolitionists and
7

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 256. For a political history of Virginia’s Reconstruction
experience, see Jack P. Maddex, Jr., “Virginia: The Persistence of Centrist Hegemony,” in
Reconstruction and Redemption in the South, ed. Otto H. Olsen (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana
State University Press, 1980), 113-150.
8
Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 258; James M. Downey (no. 12461), Southern Claims;
Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 338.

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promoters of African American welfare before and during the conflict, Loudoun’s
unionists became supporters of the black civil rights agenda of the GOP’s Radical
wing. Loudoun’s wartime unionists became scalawags, white southerners who
supported Congressional Reconstruction. The ex-Confederates of Loudoun and the
rest of Virginia would establish a new political party in opposition to the Radical turn
in Reconstruction policy. While they accepted the death of slavery and all hope for
southern independence, the ex-Confederates maintained their belief in black inequality
and their opposition to the federal government undermining a state’s white
supremacist regime. The conservatives also feared that the Radicals would
disenfranchise former Confederates. 9
Former captain of Company A, Thirty-fifth Battalion Virginia Cavalry Frank
Myers was an ex-Confederate who never accepted his country’s defeat. In the late
spring and summer of 1865, Myers adjusted to his civilian life of corn farming,
fishing, squirrel hunting, attending church, and spending time with friends, family, and
old comrades. During this period, he continued to reflect on his military service and
struggled to come to terms with defeat. He “was very much in the notion of breaking
my parole,” but the presence of his sweetheart Fannie convinced him otherwise.
Exacerbating his torment about surrendering to the Yankees was Colonel Elijah White
declaring that “all who voluntarily take the parole are traitors. So I am a traitor now.
Well! it’s hard to bear indeed.” However, spending time with Fannie and his friend
Armistead M. Vandevanter, who owned a farm on the road between Waterford and
Wheatland, helped him experience happiness for the first time in the postwar period.
When Myers learned of his former commander getting a parole later in the month, he
asked, mockingly, “Wonder who is the coward & traitor now?” On May 23, he
acknowledged the four year anniversary of Virginia’s secession. He fondly
remembered fighting Union forces whenever the anniversary of a particular
engagement arrived. He wished that he could be “doing it again” instead of “living

9

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 270; James A. Baggett, The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in
the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), xi.

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like I am now.” His status as a conquered subject in the “subdued” South caused
Myers to compare himself to a “slave,” which made him “feel ever so bad too.” As a
result of this condition, Myers was “almost ready for another war.” Yet, without
providing an explanation, he contemplated joining the U.S. army in mid-May, for
which he asked God to forgive him. 10
The unionists acquired their greatest amount of political control immediately
following the Union victory. At the end of April 1865, three hundred of Loudoun
County’s leading unionists met in Waterford’s Quaker meeting house for the purpose
of restoring civil law in the wake of the Confederacy’s collapse. Samuel B. T.
Caldwell of Wheatland chaired the meeting, while two Quakers—Waterford
schoolteacher Robert Hollingsworth and Hamilton farmer Henry C. Brown—served as
secretaries. Attendees passed motions recognizing the death of the Confederacy and
recommending the restoration of state and local government, kind treatment of the
secessionists, nullification of the secession ordinance, emancipation of the slaves, and
the nomination of political candidates who had supported the Union. Among those
who delivered speeches promoting such goals were James Downey, William Mercer,
Dr. Thomas Bond, Samuel Janney, Thomas Taylor, and William Williams. The
meeting planned for the county to hold a May 15 convention at Hamilton, at which
unionists chose a slew of candidates for a May 27 election. When the unionists
postponed the election, Frank Myers, expressing an opposition to the new local
unionist regime, hoped that it would be “indefinitely.” They then decided to hold the
election on June 1. Due to the disfranchisement of most ex-secessionists and an oath
of allegiance requirement, the 930 Loudouners who turned out to vote tended to be
unionists. Though only a third of the electorate, they cast an overwhelming majority of
the ballots. As a result, wartime loyalists won every county office: Samuel C. Luckett
for sheriff, William Downey of Taylorstown, former Loudoun Ranger private James
Grubb for circuit court clerk, Charles P. Janney for county court clerk, former Ranger
lieutenant Luther Slater for magistrate, Luther Potterfield and Jacob Wine for
10

Frank Myers Diary, May 2-3, 9, 12, 14, 1865, June 13, 30, 1865.

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constable, and Asa Bond as overseer of the poor. The unionist minority now held
political control of Loudoun County. 11
In the summer of 1865, Virginia and Loudoun County witnessed both a
reconciliatory Reconstruction policy that threatened the unionists’ newly-created
regime and one that foreshadowed the Radical Reconstruction policy of the next two
years, which threatened ex-secessionist property and political rights. Governor
Pierpont found that Virginia’s constitutional restrictions on ex-Confederates would
result in ninety-five percent of the state population being unable to vote and hold
office. He decided to solve this problem by authorizing the legislature to relax the
constraints. Virginia’s ex-Confederates happily welcomed the governor’s
“exceptionally liberal and conciliatory” action. In mid-June, the radical unionists in
the legislature responded by proposing an amendment to the constitution that would
restrict suffrage to white and black unionists. The Mirror considered the radicals to be
merely “discontented people.” Unionists Samuel Janney and Yardley Taylor
encouraged Pierpont to enact African American suffrage in order to prevent those who
had plunged Virginia into the rebellion from recapturing the state. Pierpont ignored
Janney and Taylor and instead focused on ex-secessionist voting rights. Enraging
unionists, a special legislative session initiated a process by which those white men
who took President Andrew Johnson’s amnesty oath could vote and scheduled a
referendum on the constitution in which voters could decide to remove the document’s
ex-Confederate suffrage restrictions during October’s congressional and state
elections. Ex-Confederates rejoiced; unionists fumed. 12
Despite Virginia’s turn towards a Reconstruction on ex-secessionist terms, a
federal body threatened to radicalize land ownership in Loudoun. On August 31, 1865,
ex-secessionists learned that the Freedmen’s Bureau planned to confiscate 15,000
11

Rebecca Williams Diary, April 30, 1865; Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 339, 354;
James Walker to Elisha Walker, May 8, 1865; Alexandria Gazette, May 10, 18, 1865; Frank Myers
Diary, May 27, 1865; The Mirror, June 14, 1865. After serving out his term, Slater worked for the War
Department.
12
Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 345-346; Alexandria Gazette, June 13, 1865;
Yardley Taylor to Pierpont, June 17, 1865; Samuel Janney to Pierpont, June 23, 1865.

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acres of land owned by those who had supported the Confederacy and then redistribute
it to freedpeople, provoking great anger. As the editor of the Mirror—Benjamin
Sheetz—commented, “Broken in fortune, crushed in spirit, a magnanimous conqueror
might at least afford to spare her (the South) the bitter humiliation of being trampled in
the dust…for the benefit of ‘loyal refugees’ and ‘freedom.’” However, in late
September, the Bureau returned the land to its relieved white owners, who never
relocated. Moreover, Loudoun’s freedpeople never received redistributed land. As part
of President Andrew Johnson’s conciliatory approach towards the rest of the South
during the early years of Reconstruction, he ordered the cessation of land confiscation
in Virginia. 13
Federal soldiers occupied a portion of Loudoun County that summer. In June,
troops arrived in the county with the objective of removing buttons off of Confederate
veterans’ uniforms. Frank Myers revealed that he managed to avoid the Yankees and
keep his buttons. To offset Johnson’s lenient policy towards the former Confederacy,
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sent fifty members of the Ninety-sixth New York
Infantry to Leesburg to serve as provost guards. The force’s captain ordered citizens
who had branded their horses or mules with the letters “CS” or “US” to report to his
office. He required paroled Confederate soldiers to register at his office and ordered
his soldiers to create a census of the town’s African American population. In response
to the continued Union occupation and to try to prevent the U.S. government from
enacting more severe measures, The Mirror and The Washingtonian—Leesburg’s two
papers—encouraged the county’s former secessionists to take whatever oaths of
allegiance were needed to easily adjust to the Union’s restoration. The New Yorkers
relocated to Warrenton in early October, to the relief of Keetz and eastern Loudouners,
who were happy to again live in “a civil community, alone amenable to civil
jurisdiction. Long may it last.” 14
13

The Mirror, August 31, September 14, 28, November 2, 1865.
Frank Myers Diary, June 9, 11, 1865; Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 347, 349;
The Mirror, August 9, 31, September 7, October 5, 12, 1865; The Washingtonian, August 18,
September 1, 1865.

14

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Due to the unionist seizure of power, a desire for peaceful reconciliation with
the North after defeat and four years of war, and President Andrew Johnson’s
Reconstruction policy, which neither punished the South nor undermined white
supremacy, Loudoun’s ex-Confederates renewed their allegiance to the Union. On
May 31, 1865, the citizens of the former secessionist stronghold of Leesburg raised the
stars and stripes. During a meeting held at the Leesburg courthouse on September 11,
1865, with the purpose of determining how to respond to the confiscation, a veteran of
the Thirty-fifth Virginia Cavalry, James M. Kilgour, expressed his new unionist
conviction. He stated that since the war settled the issues regarding slavery and
secession, Virginians needed to demonstrate “their loyalty…to the Government of the
United States.” The meeting’s attendees adopted resolutions proclaiming their
allegiance to the United States and endorsing the Johnson administration because his
“efforts to reconstruct the States of the late Confederacy upon conservative principles
in accordance with the Constitution of the United States.” The Mirror opposed both
Radical Reconstruction and the southern condemnation of those northerners,
derogatively called “carpetbaggers,” who moved to Loudoun County or elsewhere in
the South after the war. In 1871, the paper considered those who used the term
“carpetbagger” to be “oily tongued demagogues, who never discovered the great
beauty of Virginia.” Regarding the failure to achieve Confederate independence,
Benjamin Sheetz declared in June 1865 that southerners, “as good and lawabiding
people,” should “conform at once to the new order of things.” Sheetz praised President
Johnson, holding him to be just, wise, firm, and patriotic. The paper also begged that
ex-Confederates take Johnson’s oath of amnesty, which would quickly ensure peaceful
reconciliation with the North, foster law and order, and prevent the Radicals from
imposing racial equality. As in the antebellum years, postbellum Loudoun County
politics exhibited a moderate, unionist tone. 15

15

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 256-264; The Mirror, June 14, September 7, 14, 1865, October
25, 1871.

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Despite each side possessing different visions of Reconstruction, the
relationship between Loudoun County’s wartime unionists and ex-secessionists cooled
and was no longer characterized by violence in the postbellum period. However,
occasional instances of nonviolent hostility occurred. In mid-July, John Dutton, who
had been forced into exile in Maryland for his unionism, referred to Frank Myers as
“one of the worst rebels in Va & must be forced to take the oath or leave the U.S.”
Myers recorded in his diary his desire to kill Dutton. However, no physical altercation
took place. 16
In the lead up to the October elections, wartime unionists warned exConfederates that their desire to preserve white supremacy would lead to a harsher
Reconstruction policy. Dr. Thomas Bond, who had nursed Ranger Charles Stewart
back to health during the war, declared that “Nothing but discreet and patriotic
conduct can now save the people of Virginia from subjugation” and that “if it be not
faithfully rendered, territorial ostracism from the Union, military government,
confiscation, and negro suffrage will inevidently follow.” Confederate army hostage
William Williams advised former secessionists that, without black suffrage, Congress
would refuse Virginia’s readmission to the Union: “until by an extension of the right
of suffrage to our colored population, Congress shall be satisfied that it will be safe to
admit us again.” 17
When Loudouners held their first U.S. congressional election since 1860 on
October 12, 1865, the ex-secessionists hoped that Reconstruction would conclude as a
result. Frank Myers believed “it to be the duty of every southern man who has or can
have the privilege to vote for the candidates who if elected will defend the rights of the
southern people best.” He encouraged every ex-Confederate to vote, but his indecision
over taking the oath of allegiance and vote prevented him from participating in the
election. In the same entry, Myers revealed his wish that a new civil war between

16

Frank Myers Diary, July 17, 1865.
Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 349; The Mirror, September 21, October 19, 1865;
The Washingtonian, October 6, 1865.

17

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northern Radicals and southern conservatives would break out, which, he thought,
would settle the debates between the two sides over what the nature of Reconstruction
should be. His bitterness towards the war’s result emerged ten days later when he was
tempted to capture and murder a U.S. army officer he passed by. 18
Due to four years of war and unionists’ sense of betrayal towards the state
government and prediction that the ex-Confederates would inevitably rise to power,
turnout was low: 1,200, compared to over 2,000 in the 1860 and 1861 elections. The
enfranchisement of oath-takers enabled conservative candidates to sweep. The
wartime loyalists of Waterford and Lovettsville gave unionist candidates most of their
votes. In the House of Delegates elections, William H. Gray of Leesburg and Robert
M. Bentley of Aldie defeated Dr. Bond and Lovettsville’s Jonas Schooley. In the race
for the Seventh Congressional District in which Loudoun was located, 754 voters
chose conservative Robert Y. Conard over former Alexandria legislator Louis
McKenzie, who received four hundred twenty-three ballots. Also during the election,
834 Loudouners voted for the referendum eliminating the provision of the state
constitution disenfranchising ex-Confederate government officials. Among those
former secessionists who could vote because of Johnson’s amnesty pardons in the
summer and fall of 1865 were George W. Ball, Thomas W. Edwards, and Sanderson
Thrift. Thus, Loudoun’s ex-secessionist conservatives had overthrown the radical
unionist order established immediately after Union victory and Virginia’s legislature
had now become conservative-dominated. 19
The unionists felt that Governor Pierpont and the federal government had sold
them out to their old enemies and that the conservative return to power threatened
their safety. Dr. John Henshaw of Lovettsville testified about the effects of the exConfederate victories to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction in February 1866. He
revealed that former secessionists in Loudoun County were as “hostile…as they ever

18

Frank Myers Diary, October 12, 22, 1865.
Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 264; Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 350-351;
The Mirror, October 19, 1865.

19

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were” towards the U.S. government and wartime unionists. He claimed that exConfederates received fairer trials than loyalists and lamented that none of the Rebels
would ever be charged with treason against the U.S. government. Henshaw revealed
the existence of (false) rumors that John S. Mosby’s Rangers were waiting to help
resurrect the Confederacy. According to Henshaw, the Methodists sent a Maryland
unionist minister to Loudoun. When he arrived, ex-secessionists assaulted him and
ordered him to return to Maryland. He added that the federal government had not been
sufficiently assisting the Freedmen’s Bureau and the freedpeople. Henshaw also
testified that ex-Confederate neighbors had been ostracizing him since the war
ended. 20
By December, Virginia and every former Confederate state except Texas met
President Johnson’s requirements for readmission to the Union: taking an oath of
allegiance to the U.S., abolishing slavery, ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment,
nullifying secession, and repudiating all debts incurred from supporting the
Confederate war effort. However, Congress refused to seat congressmen from the exConfederate states and rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction. During the rest of
the decade, the Radical Republicans controlling Congress pursued an agenda that
included promoting African American civil rights and dividing the South into five
military districts, which Federal troops governed through martial law. 21
With the Radicals now dominating the federal government and its
Reconstruction policy, Loudoun County’s ex-Confederates began to lose hope for an
immediate reconciliation that would preserve white supremacy and end federal
intervention in southern society and politics. While still loyal to the United States,
Loudoun’s conservatives felt threatened by the Radicals. Though some expected
Johnson to “restrain the radical wave…threatening to submerge the whole country,”
20

Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 351; John Henshaw testimony, February 1, 1866,
United States Congress, Report of Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 2:36-39.
21
Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 264-265; John H. Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 54-84; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction,
1865-1877 (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1966), 83-154; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished
Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 226-280.

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others such as Sheetz recognized that Johnson may have capitulated in the face of “the
dictation of Congress.” The conservatives could claim a victory when the Radicals
failed to override President Johnson’s veto of a bill to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau
in February. However, this would constitute Johnson’s last victory; in March,
Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which recognized African American
citizenship. The Mirror lamented that southerners, after losing their bid for
independence and surrendering to the North, met each requirement for rejoining the
Union and had, in the process, been “maliciously taunted with being sworn
abolitionists.” But, the article continued, “never let it be said that by legislative
enactment we declared ourselves no better than” an African American. According to
conservatives, the Civil Rights Act placed “power in the hands of the negro at the
expense of the white man” and constituted “despotism” and “mongrel imbecility.” 22
Tensions existed in Radical Reconstruction Loudoun between federal authority
and conservative citizens. In February 1866, Thomas E. Allen, the provost marshal of
Leesburg, warned that any former Confederate soldier who wore an insignia of his
rank would be arrested. When Congress designated Virginia the First Military District
in March 1866, U.S. troops garrisoned the county’s towns for the remainder of the
1860s. The presence of these soldiers angered whites who assumed that they arrived in
response to “‘frequently reported’ falsehoods of bad treatment to the darkies.” Next to
one of the soldiers’ barracks in Leesburg was the home of John W. Head. One day, he
purchased a large amount of fish. As he unloaded the fish, several drunk troops stole a
few. When Head objected to their action, the soldiers beat and kicked him, breaking
his nose and drawing blood. Shortly thereafter, a butcher named John T. Grimes
admonished Head’s attackers, provoking a hostile exchange of words that culminated
in Grimes threatening to stab the troops with a knife and cleaver and the soldiers
pointing their weapons at Grimes. The arrival of an officer diffused the situation. 23

22
23

The Mirror, January 24, March 14, 21, April 4, 1866.
Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 260-261; The Mirror, February 7, March 14, July 18, 1866.

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Loudoun County’s conservatives denounced the other components of the
Radical agenda and felt despair from the ever-increasing power of the Radicals. When
Congress submitted the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted African Americans the
constitutional right of citizenship, to the states for ratification in the summer of 1866,
Sheetz doubted that “this bastard amendment, the offspring of the brain of such
political harlots as (Charles) Sumner, (Thaddeus) Stevens & Co., will ever receive”
the support of enough states to make it law. Sheetz also began to fear that if the
Radicals emerged from the 1866 midterm elections victorious that permanent disunion
and the reduction of the southern states to “conquered provinces” that would be denied
entry into the Union would result. When the Radicals increased their majorities in both
houses of Congress and impeached President Johnson, Loudoun’s conservatives
moved away from reconciliation towards passive resistance to Reconstruction. In
response to Congress passing the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, Sheetz advised the
county’s citizens “not to voluntarily assist in carrying through the flames of faction,
this condemnation of all that we have…held sacred.” However, Sheetz later began to
think that passive resistance would disenfranchise some ex-Confederates and thereby
allow the white Radicals and blacks to seize control of Virginia. 24
The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 designated Loudoun County and the rest of
Virginia the First Military District, divided the rest of the former Confederacy into
four other military districts, and resulted in black Virginians acquiring the right to
vote. Each district was commanded by northern generals who possessed the authority
to register voters and to construct the machinery through which to elect constitutional
convention delegates. The Radicals ruled that the military districts would govern
Loudoun County and the South with martial law until they enfranchised blacks and
barred ex-Confederate officials from office, after which they could apply for
readmission to the Union. The new black electorate enabled the passage of a proposal
for a new constitution and the election of a Republican majority at the constitutional
24

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 269; The Mirror, June 20, October 10, 1866, June 12, 1867.
Abolitionists before and during the war, Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens were among the leaders
of the Republican Party’s Radical faction in the 1860s.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
convention. Meeting in December 1867, the convention wrote the Underwood
Constitution, which disenfranchised and barred from office ex-Confederate officials.
The national GOP decided to hold Virginia’s gubernatorial election and constitution
referendum in July 1869. 25
Though the Radical Republicans controlled Congress, Loudoun’s exConfederates continued to increase the number of their seats in government and to
overthrow scalawag political power. Concurrently, Virginia’s conservatives regrouped
and reversed the Radical tide. Between in the late 1860s and 1870s, Loudoun’s
conservatives helped redeem the Old Dominion from congressional radicalism.
Loudoun began the process of Redemption when conservatives met at a county
convention in April 1866. The body nominated Elijah V. White as a candidate for
sheriff; White decisively defeated Samuel G. Luckett in an election by a vote of 1,504
to 972, with much of the second total coming from Waterford and Lovettsville. The
Mirror attributed the victory of the former Thirty-fifth Virginia Cavalry Battalion
commander to his “honest conservatism and manly adherence” to Johnson’s
Reconstruction policy. October 1867 witnessed most Loudouners reject the proposal
for a new constitution and two ex-secessionists—Norborne Berkeley and George E.
Plaster—defeat two wartime unionists—William Williams and John G. Viall—in the
election for the county’s convention representatives. In the election, Frank Myers
swallowed the bitter pill of taking the oath of allegiance to the U.S. government and
registering to vote “before the grand high priest of the devil in Loudoun—John B.
Dutton,” who he felt like choking. Though he accepted that voting for conservatives
was now “the only way to fight the devils,” he considered participating in the United
States political process and becoming a loyal Union man to have transformed him into
“a liar, fool, villain and nigger.” Thus, for Myers, the restored Union represented
Radical Republicanism. 26
25

Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 351-352.
Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 271-272; The Mirror, April 11, May 30, 1866; Chamberlin and
Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 251-253; Frank Myers Diary, June 5-6, 26, 1867. Myers ceased
writing his diary in 1867, so it is unclear how he felt when the South completed its Redemption.

26

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
In late 1867, eight hundred old Whigs and Democrats gathered in Richmond to
establish the Conservative Party of Virginia in opposition to Radical Reconstruction.
In early 1868, ex-Confederates established the party’s Loudoun chapter, whose
executives included Charles B. Ball, Cornelius W. Paxson, Armistead M.
Vandeventer, Armistead Filler, and William Wenner. In 1869, moderate Republicans
and members of the Conservative Party united in a coalition that elected moderate
Republican Gilbert C. Walker for governor and a Conservative majority in the state
legislature. They also ratified the Underwood Constitution and removed the
document’s clauses disfranchising ex-Confederates. With ratification, the federal
government granted Virginia readmission into the Union on January 26, 1870, and the
Conservative Party solidified its political power and state organization in the 1870s. 27
In the 1870s, ex-secessionist Loudouners appointed Benjamin Sheetz to the
office of superintendent of the Conservative Party’s Loudoun organization. Beginning
in the summer of 1871, Loudouners formed Conservative clubs and conducted
meetings to nominate and elect Conservative candidates in local and state elections.
Loudoun conservatives formed clubs supporting Democratic Party-endorsed Liberal
Republican presidential candidate Horace Greeley in 1872 and Democratic
presidential candidate Samuel Tilden in 1876. Loudoun’s Republicans, nevertheless,
possessed a level of political power despite the Redemption of their county. In the
1872 presidential election, President Ulysses S. Grant narrowly won Loudoun County
by a margin of 1,549 to 1,516. However, some conservatives chose Grant over
Greeley and 1,471 Loudouners abstained from voting in protest against Greeley also
being a Republican. Thus, without the restrictions on ex-Confederates of the original
restored state constitution and with the movement towards southern Redemption,

27

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 271-272; The Washingtonian, February 21, 1868, June 18, 1869;
Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 251-253; William Gillette, Retreat from
Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 81-85;
Maddex, “Virginia,” in Reconstruction and Redemption in the South, ed. Olsen, 129-146.

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Loudoun’s unionists, as well as other scalawags throughout the South, were relegated
to obscurity, irrelevancy, and permanent powerlessness. 28
The Radicals of Loudoun County and Virginia attempted to resist the
Conservative onslaught. During the 1869 gubernatorial campaign, they backed
incumbent Henry H. Wells, who had replaced Pierpont. The Quakers fueled the
campaign by launching a new newspaper called the Loudoun Republican. However,
Walker won fifty-eight percent of the Loudoun vote, while 971 African Americans
and 700 whites, mainly from Waterford and Lovettsville, voted for Wells. After the
election, conservatives could only attract eleven men to participate in a victory parade
in Waterford. Loudoun’s Republicans conducted a campaign during the county
elections of fall 1870. However, the minority status of old unionists dating back to the
war once again failed to prevent a Conservative victory. Former Comanche lieutenant
William F. Barrett won the sheriff race after Elijah White decided not to run for
reelection. J. Mortimer Kilgour defeated incumbent Commonwealth Attorney William
Downey. The only Republican victors were Lewis McKenzie in his congressional race
and an unidentified Republican running as an independent who captured the county
treasurer office. Conservatives offset any damage that the Republican stronghold of
Waterford could do to their political successes when they placed the village within the
same township as Conservative-dominated Hillsboro, Purcellville, and Wood Grove.
Thus, Loudoun County’s scalawags entered the 1870s politically isolated, a position
they occupied for the rest of the postbellum period. 29
The 1876 presidential election represented the culmination of the Conservative
Party’s rise in Loudoun County and a moment when Democrats across the South
sought to overthrow the “corrupt centralism” and “carpet-bag tyrannies” that had
oppressed the South for a decade after the end of the Civil War. Such a result,

28

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 271-272; The Mirror, July 26, August 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 1871,
August 26, September 2, 16, November 13, 1875, September 13, 1877; Chamberlin and Souders,
Between Reb and Yank, 251-253; Baggett, The Scalawags, xii, 259.
29
Chamberlin and Souders, Between Reb and Yank, 353; Loudoun Republican, July 23, 1869,
November 11, 1870. White subsequently became president of a Leesburg bank and a Baptist minister.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
southern conservatives believed, would require a Democratic victory. From early
September until the election, Sheetz, The Mirror, and a pro-Samuel Tilden club in
Leesburg conducted a campaign promoting Tilden’s candidacy. The club held
meetings in which figures such as ex-Confederate Colonel Richard H. Lee and Captain
George R. Head derided the Republican Party. The former characterized the GOP as
corrupt, while the latter encouraged black Loudouners to cease “arraying themselves
as a class against what nine-tenths of their white fellow-citizens believe to be for the
best interest of all the people” by voting Republican. Head’s speech responded to
Loudoun’s African Americans, who promoted the Republican ticket of Rutherford B.
Hayes. In Leesburg, members of a black GOP club condemned the Democratic Party
as “detrimental to the welfare of the colored man” and praised the Republican Party
for helping them acquire their “freedom and rights.” 30
The level of Conservative political activity greatly exceeded that of the
Republican campaign. In the three weeks leading up to the election, speakers
endorsing the Conservative and Democratic candidates visited the towns of Aldie,
Snickersville, Union, Hughsville, Hillsboro, Farmwell, and Woodgrove every
Saturday. On October 26, Leesburg’s Tilden club sponsored a rally for the Democratic
nominee on the county courthouse square, during which over one thousand citizens
listened to nine unidentified ex-Confederate officers deliver speeches. Participants
conducted a parade populated with U.S. flags, torches, and cannon shots. The Mirror
described how a cannon “belched forth its thunderous peals” in anticipation of the
southern Democrats metaphorically sending the GOP to its “grave.” In the election,
Tilden won a large majority of Loudouners; he received 2,643 votes, while Hayes
picked up 1,705 votes. The electorate in Waterford and Lovettsville, unionist
strongholds during the war that had rejected the 1861 secession ordinance, cast most
of Hayes’ Loudoun ballots. In response to Tilden’s popular vote victory and large
majority of Loudoun voters, The Mirror proclaimed the South’s liberation from

30

Poland, From Frontier to Suburbia, 277; The Mirror, September 4, October 12, 26, November 2,
1876.

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Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013
Radical Reconstruction: “USHER IN THE NEWBORN DAY, THE YEAR OF
JUBILEE HAS COME, Tilden Our Next President, ‘Let us have Peace.’” Sheetz
declared that Tilden’s election broke “the backbone of the Republican party, whose
real strength was in the passions and prejudices of the North.” He added that the
Democratic victory “is but the triumph of home rule and the equality of the States”
and an indication that “the South…is a component of the Union, not a vassal of the
North.” However, when Sheetz learned in early 1877 that an electoral commission
granted Hayes the electoral votes in South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon—
states whose results were disputed—and thereby victory in the election, he protested
this “wholesale robbery” and egregious “fraud.” However, Reconstruction finally
ended when Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South in exchange for
winning the presidency. 31
During and after the Civil War, a majority of Loudouners aided the other
southern states in trying to defeat northern and federal interference in their political
and social order. While Loudouners and other southerners had failed in a bid for
independence, they acquired home rule a decade later. After formulating a new
postbellum loyalty to the Union based on conservatism, the ex-Confederates of
Loudoun County, Virginia, and the South achieved southern Redemption. Though
Loudoun’s unionists could celebrate the restoration of the Union and abolition of
slavery in 1865, by 1876, their hopes for the improvement of African Americans’
condition in the restored Union and for white and black Radical political power had
been dashed.

31

The Mirror, October 26, November 2, 9, 16, 1876, February 22, March 8, April 26, 1877.

151

Texas Tech University, Scott Thompson, August 2013

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