ruins of hampton

Before the last echoes of 2011 tremble and die out let me just say it was an amazing year, history-wise. Especially because of a war we solemnly observed while we modern folk watched another war come to a halt.

There were other highlights of the year for me, softer ones: a series of columns about a Portsmouth musician and would-be Hollywood starlet whose letters were found abandoned in an attic; another series about the four sisters who left intact a mansion that has become home to the Portsmouth Historical Society. And a simple tale about a man named Fentress who ran a general store and post office in old Norfolk County a century ago.

But always, always you come back to the 150th anniversary of that dreadful tragedy, the Civil War, and the fateful steps that were taken. For folks here in Hampton Roads the first drumbeats could be heard as early as January 1861 when the state legislature decided to call for a secession convention.

This region was dead set against it, and yet in Norfolk a local paper, the Southern Argus, was railing about northern aggression and applauding South Carolina for quitting the Union. A “Minute Man” organization had sprung up, claiming “the inalienable right to resist unconstitutional aggressions by the Federal Government.”

Elizabeth Curtis Wallace of Deep Creek, for one, was sick with worry.
“I am oppressed often with fearful forebodings, and indefinable apprehension that some dire calamity is about to overtake us as a family,” she wrote in her diary in late February.

The convention in Richmond had just begun, with all of the states in the upper South watching. For months it appeared Virginia would vote against parting with the Union, and in fact in early April the first vote went down to defeat two-to-one, with both Norfolk delegates joining the opposition.

But then on April 12, the Confederate batteries opened fire on Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The nation was at war, but, still, if President Lincoln hadn’t ordered the southern states to help raise an army to put down the rebellion it might have been a different story. The Richmond convention reconvened and this time voted overwhelmingly to secede.

That was the thunderclap that shook loose the foundations of the Old Dominion. As I wrote in May, delegates from the counties beyond the Appalachians – they were all part of the sprawling state – marched out of the convention hall, vowing to form a new government that was loyal to the Union.

“We are determined to live under a State Government in the United States of America and under the Constitution of the United States,” one of the loyalists said. “It will require stout hearts to execute this purpose; it will require men of courage.”

At first, a reorganized government was formed, claiming to be the only legitimate one, and President Lincoln recognized it. So at that point there were two Virginias, one a part of the Confederacy, another part of the United States. This lasted only briefly. The leaders of the “New Virginia” hammered out details for more than a year and then, in 1863, West-by-God-Virginia was created.

In August the unthinkable happened. Confederate soldiers faned out through historic Hampton and set fire to virtually every building in sight, leaving, in the view of one observer, ”a forest of bleak sided chimneys and walls of brick houses tottering and cooling in the wind, scorched and seared trees and heaps of smoldering ruins. . . .”

The Pilot quoted extensively from letters and diaries written by both northern and southern soldiers, many full of bravado at first.

But after hundreds of miles of marching, after wet, miserable winter days and incessant fighting, the stark reality – and brutality – of war comes through in diary entries of George Ferebee, a Princess Anne County farmer.
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“The ground is thickly strewn with bleeding, dead-and-dying,” he wrote after heavy fighting in July 1864. It was just days after his 30the birthday.

Lastly, I wrote about a collector who had come across photographs of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jeff Davis, taken after the war. Both looked gaunt and careworn as they neared the end of their days, the fire in their expressions long since gone out.

These are oldies – but not-really-goodies – from last year’s time machine. Bring it on, 2012.

Photo. Hampton after it was burned to a crisp in August 1861. Library of Congress.