“A Matter of Increasing Perplexity”: Public Perception, Treatment, and Military Influence of Refugees in the Shenandoah Valley During the American Civil War

Noah Frazier Crawford

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts In History

Paul Quigley (Chair) Melanie Kiechle Brett Shadle

May 7, 2021 Blacksburg, Virginia

Keywords: Refugee, Fugitive, Deserter, Unionist, Virginia, Civil War Era “A Matter of Increasing Perplexity”: Public Perception, Treatment, and Military Influence of Refugees in the Shenandoah Valley During the American Civil War

Noah Frazier Crawford

Abstract: This thesis examines the ways in which definitions and perceptions of refugees in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia evolved over the course of the American Civil War. It investigates perspectives from individuals in both the United States and Confederate States to illustrate how misconceptions about refugees—who they were, what they wanted, and how they could benefit each side—dominated how displaced people were discussed. I argue that despite significant attention to refugees in newspapers, military reports, and among the public, both sides failed to adequately assist refugees who were displaced as a result of the war. Utilizing a broadly chronological approach allows greater insight into how the situation in the Shenandoah Valley escalated over time with the addition of various refugee demographic groups, including white Unionists, Black self-emancipated people, deserters, and pro-Confederate civilians. This thesis discusses how each of these groups challenged Americans’ culturally-constructed definition of the word “refugee.” It also demonstrates how military commanders made use of refugees as sources of military intelligence who directly influenced the events of several military campaigns. This thesis argues that misconceptions about refugees hindered an effective and meaningful response to the Valley’s refugee crisis among government officials, military officers, and the general populaces of the North and the South.

“A Matter of Increasing Perplexity”: Public Perception, Treatment, and Military Influence of Refugees in the Shenandoah Valley During the American Civil War

Noah Frazier Crawford

General Audience Abstract The devastation wrought by the American Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia sparked a refugee crisis that grew in size over the course of the war. From the earliest days of the conflict in 1861, Americans correctly predicted that the war would displace many people. However, mistaken ideas about who qualified as a refugee and what to do with or for refugees prevented an effective response that could have alleviated the suffering of many of these people. This thesis examines how Americans struggled to understand refugees as matters of gender, race, and loyalty appeared to complicate the subject. It offers insight into not only how Americans perceived refugees, but also explores refugee experiences in order to illuminate voices that were overlooked both in the 1860s and in the decades since the war.

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Acknowledgements

Many individuals deserve my thanks for their parts in the formulation of this thesis. The members of my thesis committee provided invaluable assistance. Dr. Melanie Kiechle offered a perspective that not only resulted in greater clarity throughout the project, but encouraged the inclusion of incisive analysis that was absent in initial drafts. Dr. Brett Shadle assisted greatly in helping to crystallize my earliest undeveloped ideas about the topic and consistently provided insight into how to maintain an emphasis on the refugees themselves. Dr. Paul Quigley, my committee chair, deserves praise not only for his contributions to place the events described herein within the broader context of the Civil War, but for his observations, suggestions, and patience with my many half-formulated ideas from the very beginning of the project through the present.

I am also grateful to the many members of the Virginia Tech History faculty and my peers in the graduate program for their mentorship and encouragement. Ben Olex, Dylan Settle, and Alfonso Zavala in particular provided not only academic insight, but also offered more relaxed topics of conversation related to American history that provided a welcome respite from work. Other friends, including John C. Settle, Joey Frazier, and Nate Eaton also deserve appreciation for the same reason.

My grandmother, Christine Crawford, deserves especial mention; her recollections of life as a refugee planted the seeds of this project in my mind many years ago, and I am grateful beyond expression for her many kindnesses and inspiring this thesis. Additionally, Dr. Kitty

Crosby’s encouragement and support throughout my academic endeavors was tremendously appreciated. My family—my mother, Lindsey; father, Gregg; and brother, Daniel—have been supportive of my academic endeavors (and infatuation with American history) from the very v beginning and I cannot thank them enough for not only tolerating, but encouraging me at every step. I appreciate their patience when I bothered them with a story, sent them something to read, or talked their ears off on car rides. Finally, I wish to thank Andi Crosby for her tireless support, encouragement, and love throughout the past five years. She has shown me what it means to live life and to work with a passion, and I could not have asked for a better person with whom to traverse the trials of graduate school.

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Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………...……...……ii General Audience Abstract…………………………………………………………………….iii Acknowledgements…………………………………………..……………………….………....iv Introduction “What Shall Be Done With Them?”: Perceptions of American Civil War Refugees, Then and Now…………………………………………………………………………………..1 American Perceptions of Refugees at War’s Beginning………………………………..…4 Refugees in the War: Assumptions, Misconceptions, and Influence on the Conflict……..6

The History of the Shenandoah Valley Before the American Civil War…………………9

Historiography…………….……………………………………………………………..13 Chapter I “Neither Pity nor Protection”: White Unionists and Black Refugees in the Shenandoah Valley, 1861-1862……………………………………………………………………….24 Initial Refugee Flights and Encounters with Military Forces, May - December, 1861…………………………………………………………..26

Refugees and Military Intelligence, January - June, 1862……………………………………………………………..33

Refugee Experiences as an Indicator of an Evolving War, July – December, 1862…………………………………………….…………….41

Chapter II “An Immense Tide of Emigration”: The Developing Crisis in the Valley, January 1863 – April 1864………………………………………………………………….……………49 “A Great Exodus:” The Emancipation Proclamation in the Shenandoah Valley, January – June 1863……………………………………………………………...51 “Thankful It Is No Worse”: Refugee Activity Shifts Southward, April 1863 – January 1864……………………………………………..………..55

“Pathways Along the Mountain Sides”: The Rise of Deserters as a Refugee Demographic August 1863 – April 1864………………………………………………………..63

Chapter III “We Are Starving, I and My Children”: Refugees, Hard War, and the Conflict’s Uncertain End, April 1864 – October 1865…………………………………………………….....74 vii

Sigel’s Campaign: April – May, 1864………………………………………………………………..75 Prayer Meetings and Ice Cream Socials: Northern Public Mobilizations for Refugees, Summer 1864…………………………………………………………………….80 Hunter’s Campaign: June 1864………………………………………………………………………...83 Sheridan Takes Charge: August – December, 1864………………………………………………………..88 “Feed Upon the Enemy”: January – October 1865………………………………………………………….96 Conclusion: The Shortcomings of Civil War Refugee Policy………………………………104

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...108

Introduction

“What Shall Be Done With Them?”:

Perceptions of American Civil War Refugees, Then and Now

On the first day of June 1861, the New York Times ran an opinion piece in its morning issue that generated considerable controversy among that periodical’s vast audience. As war drums echoed across the United States, “The Problem of the Negro Fugitives” presented Times readers with a subject that, while familiar, was hardly foremost in their minds as the United

States prepared to put down the rebellion of the Southern states. In a remarkably prophetic piece, an anonymous contributor to the Times predicted that the plight of many thousands of noncombatants would come to be prioritized as a byproduct of the war and would demand the same level of attention as supplying the troops or procuring victory on the battlefield.

“The really embarrassing question growing out of the war, and which in its novelty, and in the difficulties surrounding it, transcends all others, is just beginning to show itself,” the article began. Before honing in on its purpose, the article discussed how certain rules of war had long since been regulated with such stipulations as prohibiting violence against civilians and demanding humane treatment of prisoners.

But what shall we do with the slaves that may fall into our hands by the fortunes of the war, who to the South are chattels—to the North human beings?... We may yet find useful employment for ten or twenty thousand, but what shall we do with fifty or a hundred thousand? They must be presently fed and clothed, and though clearly contraband in reference to the rebels, we cannot treat them as other articles contraband of war, put them up to auction, and sell them to the highest bidder… Whatever may be the final event, we may have a hundred thousand slaves on our hands before the questions raised are solved. Till they are, they must be treated as beings entitled to our sympathy, not as chattels, or property… What shall be done with them? That we shall soon have a vast number to provide for, there cannot be a doubt. Many will be able to care for themselves, but probably only a small proportion of the whole number. The faculty to do this must be

1

2

acquired.1

The article went on to pose important practical questions regarding Black fugitives: Should they be relocated to unorganized western territories? Should they be allowed to remain in their state of refuge? Should they be forced to return whence they fled?

Times readers rushed to share their opinions. In a response to the editor the very next morning, reader W.C. Gould acknowledged “the disposition of the fugitive slaves as a matter of growing perplexity.” He happily presented a resolution adopted by fellow Republicans some weeks earlier urging, first, for a repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law and, second, for the United

States government to “Prevent suffering and pauperism among the fugitives, by aiding them to seaports, where the ships of the Haytian Government and other colonists will take them to free homes without charge.”2 Another reader, Jacob Wrey Mould, opined that the government must

“draft or organize them into this supplementary or assistant army; set them to constructing roads, to assist on earthworks, utilize them into transporters of provisions, or hospital attendants,” citing a precedent by the British government conscripting fugitives for such work during the Crimean

War several years earlier.3

Although jarring in their proposed solutions, such letters to the editor serve to illustrate the diversity of opinions among white nineteenth century Americans regarding not only what should be done with Black fugitives but also how to deal with any fugitives of conflict. This very phraseology reveals much about their mindset; namely, that something had to be done to fugitives as well as for them. Americans applied this paternalistic thinking not only to discussions about Black refugees, but to people of all races, genders, and loyalties who were

1 “The Problem of the Negro Fugitives,” New York Times, June 1, 1861. 2 W.C. Gould, “The Slave Refugees,” New York Times, June 2, 1861. 3 Jacob Wrey Mould, “What Shall Be Done With Them?,” New York Times, June 2, 1861. 3 forced from their homes, including white pro-Union Southerners, pro-Confederate Southerners, and army deserters. This indiscriminate paternalism, however, could disproportionally impact

Black refugees, who already dealt with racial prejudice. Black Refugees, then, received the brunt both of racism as Black people in addition to the paternalism impressed on refugees. Thus, while designation as a refugee could formulate compassion for white refugees, it rarely offered the same advantage to Black refugees.

In 1861, individuals on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line were familiar with concepts about a nation’s obligation to take in “refugees.” Many Americans believed that religious and societal obligations compelled them to feed, clothe, and shelter citizens who had been driven from their homes. However, most Americans badly misunderstood refugees’ reasons for leaving home, their intentions upon locating a place of refuge, and their basic humanity. As the subject moved from the pages of newspapers literally onto their doorsteps, so too did attitudes of the public evolve as refugees’ plight evolved before their eyes. In response, leaders in both the

Union and the Confederacy created and altered policies, entwining the complexities of the refugees’ situation with the chaotic world of politics. This became especially pertinent for Black refugees, who were forced to navigate a political world that frequently enforced their enslavement in the midst of a military conflict being fought to end slavery. Military affairs, already impacted by refugees through the political realm, became doubly influenced as refugees began to pass into military lines, presenting soldiers from the most amateurish private to the

Commander in Chief himself with people whose motivations and human needs necessitated consideration. In 1860s America, people understood that refugees could influenced the course of the war. Modern scholars agree; Yael A. Sternhell, a scholar of human movement in history, has said that “movement, in all its shapes and forms, is a critical component in the wartime 4 experiences of men and women, combatants and noncombatants, individuals and nations.”4

In the first eighteen months of the war, the Shenandoah Valley frequently drew the attention of Northerners and Southerners for the dramatic and critical military campaigns waged between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies. There, the refugee crisis—for by 1862, it was certainly a crisis in the eyes of refugees themselves, the public, and policymakers—came to epitomize the increasingly dire situation unfolding from the Kansas frontier to Fortress Monroe on the Chesapeake Bay. Moreover, just as the military campaigns of the Valley greatly influenced the conduct of the war, the influence of refugees on these campaigns serves as a critical piece in understanding the course of the war at large. With white Unionists and Black refugees fleeing northward and Confederate sympathizers and army deserters moving southward, the Shenandoah Valley represents an environment of movement even greater than might be surmised by studying the major military operations alone.

So as both sides mustered their forces for the conflict—as the 7th New York Infantry marched dramatically down Broadway to exuberant cheers, Baltimore’s streets ran with blood from the clashes between pro-Confederate civilians and Federal infantrymen, and commanders set their sights on the strategic railroad hub of Manassas Junction along Bull Run—a situation concerning the wellbeing of noncombatants evolved alongside the military escalation. For four years, Union and Confederate armies jockeyed for command of the Shenandoah Valley, and refugees’ influences were not only present during such moments but were active and even crucial participants of the Civil War.

American Perceptions of Refugees at War’s Beginning

4 Yael A. Stenhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 3. 5

By 1861, the average nineteenth century American not only understood the word

“refugee” but had come to associate the word with a host of connotations and implications.

Etymologically, the word was commonplace in the English language for at least two centuries prior to the American Civil War and appeared in Noah Webster’s very first edition of his dictionary in 1828. The noun “refugee” is defined therein as “1. One who flies to a shelter or place of safety. 2. One who, in times of persecution or political commotion, flees to a foreign country for safety; as the French refugees, who left France after the revocation of the edict of

Nantz, and settled in Flanders and America; the refugees from Hispaniola, in 1792; and the

American refugees, who left their country at the revolution.”5 Far from pedantic, examining the dictionary definition of the word reveals two important considerations. First, it indicates that the term held a formalized definition well before the Civil War (indeed, before the average soldier of the conflict was even born). Second, it conveys that nineteenth century Americans were able to conceptualize refugees in a context they understood based on examples from their nation’s own history—in this case, refugees from the American Revolutionary War, many of whom were

Loyalists who fled from the colonies during or immediately following the war.6

Religion also informed Americans’ understanding of refugees and, more importantly, their obligation as Christians in caring for them. The word “refugee” never appears verbatim in the King James Version of the Bible, which was by far the most prevalent version utilized by the clergy and everyday people in the United States from the nation’s founding until well after the

Civil War. However, the word’s absence in the King James Version stems from the timing of its introduction into the English language; it was used to describe exiled French Huguenots around

5 American Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Noah Webster, 1st ed. s.v. “Refugee,” accessed November 20, 2020, http://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/refugee. 6 For more information on refugees of the American Revolutionary War, see Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York City, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). 6

1685, nearly seven decades after the publication of the King James Bible. Instead, the word

“fugitive” previously served to represent people who fled or were ejected from their land, and this term appears in the King James Version a half-dozen times, including in well-known verses that were familiar to virtually all churchgoing Americans regardless of denomination.

Describing Hebrews (with whom nineteenth century American Christians incessantly conflated themselves), II Kings 25:11 spoke of “fugitives that fell away to the king of Babylon” when Israel fell to that empire. Isaiah 15:5 instructed Americans that fugitives’ circumstances were to be lamented—“My heart shall cry out for Moab; his fugitives flee unto Zoar…” Finally,

Ezekiel 17:21 warned of fugitives as especially susceptible to violence and conflict—“And all his fugitives with all his bands shall fall by the sword, and they that remain shall be scattered toward all winds…” These three characteristics of fugitives as familiarized to American

Christians through the King James Bible dominated the country’s perception in the decades before the Civil War. Biblical allusions to refugees increased with the onset of war. Clergymen encouraged compassion but recognized that hard times impeded charitability; during the winter of 1862, a Winchester, Virginia, preacher reminded his congregants that even Jesus Christ “came unto his own, and his own received him not.”7

Refugees in the War: Assumptions, Misconceptions, and Influence on the Conflict

Americans, then, prepared for war in 1861 with three understandings about the conflict as it related to refugees. First, they correctly predicted that individuals would be driven from their homes as a result of the conflict. Second, they believed themselves beholden to a duty of charity for these displaced people. Finally, Americans imagined refugees along lines of gender and

7 Cornelia Peake McDonald, A Diary With Reminiscences of the War in A Woman’s Civil War, ed. Minrose C. Gwin (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 62. 7 age—they expected most refugees to be either women, children, or old and infirm men. These assumptions were grounded in cultural factors such as Christianity and also a degree of simplistic thinking. Just as Americans optimistically predicted a 90-day war, they also mistakenly anticipated a straightforward struggle bereft of conflicting loyalties and individuals who did not fall neatly into the title of “friend” or “enemy.” Helping to charitably provide for small families of noncombatants who held the same convictions as they did was not a difficult task to imagine for Americans; how to treat such families who were sympathetic to the enemy was more complicated. Of course, there was also what the Times contributor called “The really embarrassing question” about the war—how was the United States to prepare for almost four million enslaved individuals who could make use of the conflict to flee their enslavement?

Conversely, how could the Confederate States prevent such an exodus? Finally, an almost entirely unexpected group of refugees confronted Americans by the war’s midpoint—deserters who resisted all attempts at coercion and regulation.

Refugees were visible to the American public from the very earliest days of the conflict.

Just as quickly, military officers sought to make use of refugees for information about enemy dispositions. From the very first movements of Union forces into Southern territory until the last surrender of Confederate troops in the summer of 1865, refugees supplied officers with copious amounts of information, much of which influenced the military campaigns that dictated the result of the conflict. That reason alone positions refugees as a fascinating group who exerted significant influence on the course of the war. But perhaps even more important than how refugees influenced the movement of armies was the constant presence and the power— conscious or otherwise—that their designation held. As said above, Americans not only felt compelled to accommodate refugees, but believed it to be a religious duty. As the number of 8 refugees swelled, the Union and the Confederacy buckled under an obligation that they greatly underestimated in size and complexity.

Accounts of refugees filled newspaper pages alongside descriptions of great battles; fundraisers for refugees could be found in advertisement sections alongside promotions for books and kitchen utensils; meetings to coordinate refugee relief were announced in events listings alongside opera performances. Everywhere Americans turned in 1861 through 1865, they saw the war; everywhere they saw war, they were confronted with the reality of refugees.

Despite recognition by soldiers, newspapers, and the public in the 1860s as an important byproduct and factor in the course of the war, relatively few historians in the past century and a half have illuminated the ways in which these people influenced the conflict. Oftentimes, refugees did influence the war through providing military intelligence. But regardless of whether they provided intelligence that the military considered during its observations, refugees filled cities, encampments, roads, and the countryside on which the war was fought, forcing leaders, soldiers, and civilians to acknowledge their existence. Historian Amy Murrell Taylor observes as much in her study of refugee camps for enslaved people, writing that “The very act of enduring—of simply living—inside the war’s slave refugee camps was an elemental part of the story of slavery’s destruction in the United States.”8 This thesis expands on Taylor’s position by translating her reasoning to refugees of all races and loyalties while focusing specifically on a critical geographic region—the Shenandoah Valley.

In so doing, this thesis makes three arguments. First, it illuminates the experiences of refugees that have largely been neglected in both academic and popular discussions of the war.

Doing so reinforces the agency of these individuals within the historical narrative by situating

8 Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 248. 9 them as central figures in the war rather than placing them in the margins. Second, the thesis argues that refugees had a significant effect on the war, both by conveying military intelligence and by becoming a major civil-military point of contention. Not only did information provided by refugees influence the strategic decisions of military officers, but the burgeoning refugee population itself meant that military leaders could not simply turn a blind eye to the plight of thousands. Finally, the thesis argues that refugees’ collective “enduring—of simply living” prompted a refugee crisis on a scale previously unprecedented in American history, one that challenged Americans’ perceptions not only about refugees, but the capability of their society to meet crises of such magnitude. Indeed, the various and constantly-evolving ways that

Americans defined refugees paralleled the complex and often contradictory ways that Americans understood gender, loyalty, and race.

Collectively, this thesis argues that Americans’ perceptions of refugees did not dramatically shift as a result of the conflict. Indeed, despite steady concern and significant attention to the plight of refugees, Americans seemed largely incapable of confronting the subject meaningfully. After four years of war, Americans still understood refugees largely by their prewar perceptions. To Americans in 1861, refugees were white women, children, or elderly individuals who were pitiable and loyal to their (the perceivers’) cause. Four years later, remarkably little had changed; additional groups (such as deserters) had complicated this perception, but Americans still viewed refugees much as they had before. The story of refugees in the Shenandoah Valley, then, challenges narratives of the Civil War as a revolutionarily progressive development in American history by illuminating a stagnation in an important byproduct of the war along lines of race, gender, and loyalty.

The History of the Shenandoah Valley Before the American Civil War 10

Before the American Civil War, the Shenandoah Valley served as a topographic highway between warring nations. For centuries, steady travel and trade up and down the Valley between neighboring Native American tribes gave rise to a north-south roadway that Europeans dubbed the Indian Road. In times of conflict between Native American nations, raiding war parties replaced commerce along the highway. By the eighteenth century, the Shenandoah had long been a region wracked by conflict between nations to its north and south.

After the United States achieved its independence, the Valley’s agricultural industry flourished; during the Civil War, almost one-fifth of all wheat harvested in the South came from the Shenandoah Valley.9 By the mid-nineteenth century, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that followed the Valley’s northern boundary alongside the Potomac River connected the Midwest to

Washington, D.C., and the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, it provided an east-west avenue of trade and movement through the Valley to accompany the north-south movement of the Valley Pike which followed the grade of the road that Native Americans and white settlers had used for centuries. The Valley Pike’s surface was macadamized—covered with a surface of crushed limestone to provide a paved surface impervious to the precipitation and mud endemic to historic roadways.10 Infrastructural improvements continued throughout the mid-nineteenth century in the form of three railroads that carried goods from the Valley to other regions of the country.

Thus, by 1861, the Shenandoah Valley held older means of moving goods and people—dirt roads and canals—as well as newer means—a major paved highway and railroads.

The Valley’s military value rivaled its economic prosperity. In 1799, the United States government established an armory and arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. In the decades before the war, the arsenal produced tens of thousands of small arms and hundreds of cannons. John

9 Peter Cozzens, Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 22. 10 Cozzens, Shenandoah 1862, 23. 11

Brown, who recognized Harper’s Ferry for the strategic military position that it was, seized the arsenal as the primary act during his doomed 1859 insurrection. Brown’s plan to distribute weapons from the arsenal to enslaved people across the South floundered when militia and

United States Marines surrounded his small band in the town; he was captured and executed, but the actions in the northern Shenandoah Valley established him as a martyr in the North, and earned him the sobriquet “the Meteor of the Civil War.”11

As primarily a military site, Harper’s Ferry paled in size to other urban centers in the

Shenandoah Valley. Bounded on the north by the Potomac River, the Alleghenies to the west and the Blue Ridge to the east bound the Valley on its south-southwesterly course for 185 miles.

10 miles up the Valley from the Potomac in Jefferson County (“up the Valley” meaning

“southward,” to reflect the flow of the south-north course of the Shenandoah River that dominates the region), the Valley Pike crossed through the town of Martinsburg. Because of its northward location, Martinsburg became a major operation center for Union armies during the war and, correspondingly, a hub for pro-Union refugee activity. A dozen miles to the southeast—and 6 miles west of Harper’s Ferry—lay Charles Town, another Union stronghold.

All three towns also lay along the line of the vital Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad.

Although Union forces frequently occupied Jefferson County (indeed, the county joined other western counties in seceding from Confederate Virginia in 1863 to become the panhandle of West Virginia), most of the rest of the Valley to the south represented territory more firmly pro-Confederate. 20 miles southward from Martinsburg, the Valley Pike ran through the picturesque community of Winchester, a hotbed of pro-Confederate sentiment. As a community squarely along the geopolitical border between North and South, the town famously changed

11 Kent Ljungquist, “’Meteor of the War’: Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman Respond to John Brown,” American Literature 61 (1989), 674, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2927002. 12 hands some seventy times during the war; tens of thousands of refugees passed through or sought shelter in Winchester during the conflict. 17 miles south of Winchester, the Manassas Gap

Railroad travels westward from Strasburg and Front Royal towards the rail networks around

Washington. The Valley Pike continues its southward course from Strasburg for 47 miles before reaching Harrisonburg. 23 miles beyond that centermost town in the Valley lay Staunton; the crucial crossroads town included the north-south Valley Pike, the primary east-west highway from Virginia into the Appalachian Mountains, and the Virginia Central Railroad that carried provisions and people from the southern Valley towards the population centers in the Piedmont and Tidewater. 33 miles further south on the Pike sat Lexington and the symbolic military heart of Virginia military might, Virginia Military Institute. 20 miles beyond, the Alleghenies and

Blue Ridge narrow to a chokepoint at the small town of Buchanan, where the Shenandoah Valley effectively ends and the New River Valley begins.

When Virginia seceded from the United States in April of 1861, both sides recognized control of the Shenandoah Valley as a priority. Its bountiful harvests could supply the massive armies that operated across the country; numerous and multifaceted highways of dirt roads, paved roads, canals, and railroads allowed for movement of men and materiel; towns and communities offered shelter and points of concentration for scattered military forces.

Topographically, the Valley was a two-edged sword for each side. On the one hand, control of the Valley allowed armies to move into the enemy’s heartland, screened from enemy eyes by the mountain ranges on either side. Conversely, loss of control of the Valley offered those same advantages for the enemy. Thus, leaders needed to control the Valley whether they were pursuing an offensive or a defensive strategy. For four years, the Union and Confederacy battled for the region’s resources, lines of transportation, and strategic significance. Indeed, perhaps no 13 region saw as much devastation during the war as the 85 miles between Martinsburg and

Staunton. The Shenandoah Valley hosted dozens of major battles and innumerable skirmishes, famous commanders and notorious miscreants. The Valley is also rightly remembered for destruction off of the traditionally-identified “battlefield.” The “hard war” policies of Union generals such as David Hunter and Phillip Sheridan became the stuff of legends or, alternatively, infamy. Civilians suffered mightily during the campaigns that blurred the distinction between home front and battlefront as well as soldier and noncombatant.

Historiography

One oft-heard expression—especially among adherents to Lost Cause ideology—is that

“winners write the history.” In understanding the history of the Civil War in the Shenandoah

Valley, it might more accurately be said that the privileged wrote the history. Almost all of the most formative books written about the war for half a century after its conclusion came from the pens of the elite—many political figures, but especially military leaders. The officers who wrote these early histories usually skirted the issues of the war and focused entirely on the battles and tactics, recording events in the style that future generations of scholars dubbed “old” or

“traditional” military history. Not only was it almost exclusively focused on military events, but the traditional military history of the Civil War minimized the contributions of the home front, noncombatants, and enslaved people to the war’s outcome, opting instead for a strategic and “big picture” understanding of the conflict that emphasized prominent military and political leaders.

Since most of the early writers of the war’s history were officers and officers tended to be better educated than the enlisted men, almost all of the early histories discussed troop movements, strategizing, and other topics that sterilized the horrors of the battlefield by viewing 14 it from an intellectual and physical distance.12 Consequently, the human cost of the war was obscured; damage to people’s bodies, homes, and livelihoods was discussed almost as an afterthought. Sometimes, these early writings never discussed the war’s horrible realities at all.

Gruesome wounds and agonizing deaths appeared as numbers on a list of casualties the writers supplied; razed homes and the tribulations of their former occupants rarely garnered mention except to incite their readers’ fury against their foes who wrought such destruction. The early writers romanticized the war into a great drama in stark contrast to the terrifying, confused horror that most soldiers and civilians experienced.13

In the mid-twentieth century, two important developments pertinent to the history of refugees in the Civil War occur. First, the rising popularity of social history, which historian

Sarah Maza characterizes as a shift towards the “masses rather than the elites.”14 Increased interest in experiences of common people and soldiers rather than political elites or military officers forced a shift in military history towards narratives about the “face of battle”—history

12 Many other well-known works illustrate the extent of control that high-ranking military officers and political leaders held over the early “official” history of the war. Confederate General Jubal A. Early—himself a major player in the Shenandoah Valley during the war—was among the most prominent. The archetype of the “Lost Cause” ideology that justified secession and the Confederate cause, he contributed hundreds of articles to periodicals in which he enamored readers with recollections of military strategy and fierce battles. John B. Gordon’s 1903 Reminiscences of the Civil War embodies the writing focuses and style that dominated Civil War scholarship through the early twentieth century. Other examples include Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America by Confederate general James Longstreet, and Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History written entirely without the aid of Lee himself, but by a member of his staff, Armistead L. Long. Northern writers were by no means an exception, as exemplified by the popularity of The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant and The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac by General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. 13 That is not to say that no one except generals wrote about the war; on the contrary, many American recorded their reflections either daily in diaries or years later in reminiscences. In 1882, Samuel R. Watkins, a Tennessee private who served the full duration of the war, published his wartime reminiscences. Watkins keenly understood that most of the war’s history was being written by wealthy, highly-educated officers; he sarcastically accentuated his lowly status by phonetically spelling out his military company designation for his book, which he called Co. Aytch: or a Side Show of the Big Show. That the subtitle called his intimate encounters with death and terror a “side show” in comparison to the “big show” offered by his commanders only further illustrates his cheekiness and adept understanding of the limitations of the war’s historiography. 14 Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 15. Maza’s designation of groups of people as “masses” is tongue-in-cheek and meant to reflect the erroneous generalizing that often occurs when speaking of this historiographic occurrence. 15 that emphasized the experiences of the common soldiers, especially their emotions, observations, and horror at the realities of war. Although it took several decades to fully develop, this “new” military history gained prominence in the second half of the century.15 This development foreshadowed an increase in discussion about how civilians interacted with the military during the war. After all, it was common soldiers who had captured enslaved Black people who sought refuge in Union lines or forced Confederate sympathizers from their homes; their officers certainly provided the policy, but their writings rarely mentioned such unsavory business.

Common soldiers, however, tended to be more blunt in their recollections of such subjects as well as holding a more personal knowledge of how those events occurred.

The second major development follows a similar line as the former. The rise of social history meant that innumerable previously-neglected accounts from civilians now elicited significant attention by historians. To be sure, the war’s relationship with civilians in discussions of humanitarianism has always been a mainstay in Civil War scholarship; indeed, the first scholarly “histories” of the war were written before the war itself ended. In 1863, a number of books about the history of wartime relief organizations had already been written and scholarly work on the ways in which human welfare was prioritized in the midst of warfare remained a popular subject for historians and general audiences.16 The historiography of humanitarianism and the American Civil War abounds with work on Clara Barton, soldiers’ relief societies,

15 Bell Irvin Willey’s twin studies on the individual soldiers of both sides—1943’s The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy and 1952’s The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union—reflect early efforts among Civil War historians to better understand what the war was really like for most of its participants. Watkin’s Co. Aytch, understandably, also received a surge in interest and republications at this time. John D. Billings’ Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life (1887) is often understood as the Union counterpart to Watkin’s Co. Aytch, as it offers an intimate look at the mundane aspects of living in army encampments and exhausting marches that few traditional military histories examine in detail. Hardtack and Coffee also saw significant popularity and republication at this time. 16 Two such early books were K.P. Wormeley, The United States Sanitary Commission: A Sketch of Its Purposes and its Work (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1863) and Wormeley, Katherine Presley, The Other Side of the War with the Army of the Potomac: Letters from the Headquarters of the United States Sanitary Commission During the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia in 1862 (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Company, 1889). 16 medical developments that saved countless lives, and the like. The historiography, however, is noticeably one-dimensional—it focuses primarily on humanitarianism away from the battlefront: hospitals, the home front, and relief efforts. That refugees are hardly incorporated into scholarship on humanitarianism in the Civil War is not surprising; as discussed in Chapter II, humanitarian attention and endeavors were often confined to the home front, far away from where such aid was badly needed by refugees nearer to the battlefront. The secondary source literature, therefore, reflects the wartime focuses of the public’s humanitarian endeavors primarily for soldiers and not on refugees.

In 1964, Mary Elizabeth Massey introduced the subject of refugees fully into Civil War scholarship by publishing Refugee Life in the Confederacy, the first major work solely dedicated to describing refugee experiences during the war. By Massey’s own admission, her book was limited in scope, focusing narrowly on white Southerners, especially wealthy, literate women.

Accordingly, her book rarely illustrates any interaction between the military events of the war and the experiences of refugees. Furthermore, Massey’s discussion of the reasons for refugee flight are limited; she broadly identifies fear as the primary factor, but virtually all other motivations are overlooked.17 Scholars more recently take issue with Massey’s terminology and analysis of refugees generally; indeed, her claim that refugees left their homes “unprepared, unguided, and undisciplined” contrasts sharply with the evidence presented in this thesis, which demonstrates that refugees often did have explicitly-identified pathways, destinations, and organization. Still, Massey’s book demonstrated Civil War refugees were beginning to be discussed apart from casual mentions in military histories. Even more importantly, Massey makes an attempt to define who constituted a Civil War refugee for the purpose of scholars

17 Mary Elizabeth Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 12. 17 within a context of the Civil War; noting the varying motivations, genders, races, and loyalties of these displaced people, Massey observed that “the only thing they had in common was displacement.”18

Occurring simultaneously to the development of social history and its relationship to the study of wars was the conception of refugee studies as its own discipline. In the aftermath of

World War II, in which tens of millions of people were displaced, governments began to recognize the necessity of crafting policies not only concerning, but exclusively dedicated to refugees. Liisa H. Malkki—an historical anthropologist—explains that “‘the refugee’ as a specific social category and legal problem of global dimensions did not exist in its full modern form before this period.”19 Since the grounding for the discipline was so closely linked to a conflict fought primarily in Europe, Asia, and Africa, refugee studies initially focused on those geographic areas. Scholarship on the history of refugees in the United States was thus stunted and largely disconnected from the development of historiography and theories about refugees in the rest of the world.20 A great surge in scholarship and interest in the American Civil War in the

1960s and 1970s, then, did not benefit from the inclusion of ongoing refugee studies scholarship.

As a discipline that fully emerged in the United States academy during the early 1980s, academic discussion of refugees initially found footing in matters of foreign policy, sociology, and anthropology, among others, but it naturally expanded to the discipline of history as well.21

As the United States engaged in wars such as those in Korea and Vietnam that provoked significant displacement of people, historians began to observe similarities between ongoing

18 Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 31. 19 Liisa H. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995), 497-498, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2155947. 20 Jérôme Elie, “Histories of Refugees and Forced Migration Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 24-25. 21 Philip Marfleet, “Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2007), 136. 18 situations and situations within their own periods of study. In recent decades, the subject of refugees only increases in pertinence as displacements continue to increase in frequency and size. Whereas post-World War II Europe proved an initially popular environment of focus for historians, historians in recent decades increasingly integrate refugee studies as a component in their work on their respective areas and time periods. Consequently, refugee studies has increasingly appeared in disparate contexts across space and time, from Cold War-era southeast

Asia to 1990s central Africa. Paul A. Kramer describes the historiography of refugee studies as a way to combat the “dispossessing violence that sets migrants to flight” by recording refugees’

“memory and history.”22 However, although Civil War scholarship followed the American academic developments of the late-twentieth century—from emphases on social history, to cultural history, to gender history—few scholars except Massey worked on matters relating to refugees in the Civil War.

To be sure, significant additions continued that would greatly influence and contribute to the eventual development of Civil War refugee studies. In the early days of Civil War social history, historians focused on the home front of pro-Union Northerners or pro-Confederate

Southerners. In the 1990s, Barbara J. Fields and other historians elevated experiences of enslaved people to the forefront of scholarship. By the early 2000s, Civil War historiography was marked by a continued interest in social history and “everyday people,” but with an evolving understanding of who constituted an “everyday person.” Historians began to discuss people who did not fall neatly into pro-Confederate or pro-Union camps. Since the rise of social history fifty years earlier, historians had been moving away from generalities about loyalty and dedication; at this point, the historiographic focuses honed in on increasingly-complex groups, such as pro-

22 Paul Kramer, “Unsettled Subjects: Inventing the Refugee in North American History,” Journal of American Ethnic History 39, no. 3 (2020), 5. 19

Union Southerners, anti-Union Northerners, and people who lived in borderlands and contested territory whose loyalty fluctuated with the approach or removal of armies.

Another such group was deserters, whom Mark A. Weitz studied extensively in a number of books, including his 2005 study More Damning Than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate

Army. First, discussing deserters reflects the aforementioned shift away from “the higher-ups” towards more common experiences; officers rarely deserted (not necessarily because of any higher degree of commitment to their respective cause, but because it was far more difficult for an officer to slip away on the march or in camp). Second, bringing light to the many thousands of individuals who did not “serve honorably” challenged the perennial, romanticized view of the conflict in which soldiers never faltered in serving their causes. Understandably, this struck especially hard against the Lost Cause sentiment of Confederate soldiers’ unwavering courage and gallantry.

Weitz’s and other late twentieth century scholarship on desertion also pushed back on previous historians’ interpretations of the subject from earlier in the century. The stigmatization of desertion present in the Civil War era still permeated in 1928 when Ella Lonn published

Desertion During the American Civil War. The officers’ reports in the Official Records that comprised the majority of Lonn’s source base almost invariably scorned desertion. Lonn’s analysis demonstrates how such sentiments remained strong in early scholarly works on Civil

War desertion; she repeatedly refers to desertion as “the evil” and “the disease.”23 Lonn acknowledges this stigma when she writes that “to-day the term deserter is one of reproach and disgrace on the lips of every one.”24 In contrast to Lonn’s and other early scholars’ work on

23 Ella Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War, (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1928), v, 127. 24 Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War, 226. 20 desertion, Weitz’s books illuminate the “gray” area of war.25 Not every soldier faithfully wore a blue or gray uniform for the whole war; many shed their labeling coats and served their own personal interests and looked after their own needs. Weitz pushes back against generalizations that observed the war as a simple binary; in Weitz’s mind, the realities of warfare are for more nuanced and complicated than geopolitical boundaries or simple national loyalties.

Weitz also discusses an area overlooked by Massey in her social history—motivations.

Weitz boldly claims that “the Confederate cause was irrelevant; [Confederate soldiers] had priorities of their own.”26 Furthermore, Weitz contends that these irregular soldiers not only complicate our understanding of the war, but were believed during the war itself to be a potential source of victory or defeat. Weitz points out that President Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of

Amnesty and Reconstruction of December, 1863, represents a major step by the United States government in treating deserters as individuals who can tilt the scale of war in their favor.27

Although Weitz does not expressly identify deserters as “refugees,” the ways in which his discussion of the topic changed the ways in which the line between combatant and noncombatant becomes blurred and the significance of such personal and larger narratives represents a noteworthy step towards understanding people who were displaced by the war.28

Refugee studies truly became a major topic of discussion in Civil War literature in the

2010s. David Silkenat’s 2016 work Driven From Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee

Crisis represents one of the best books on the subject. First, Silkenat opens the door of refugee studies far wider than any other historian by understanding the term “refugee” broadly (a

25 Francis Butler Simkins and James Patton Welch are two more early scholars from this period who address refugees in their chapter “The Refugee” in their work The Women of the Confederacy (Richmond, VA: Garrett and Massie, 1936). 26 Mark A. Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 37-39. 27 Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter, 44. 28 For a more thorough discussion of understanding deserters as refugees, see Chapter II. 21 tendency adopted in this thesis). Silkenat argues that refugees studies of the Civil War is not limited by sources or want of material, but by previous historians’ extremely narrow definition and perception of refugees along lines of gender and age. As discussed in Chapter I, Americans have often understood refugees as noncombatant women and, if not women, helpless children or feeble old people. Silkenat criticizes such short-sightedness; it is damaging to lump refugees together under such generalizations, as “their differences were far more significant than their similarities.”29 Silkenat specifically identifies five distinct groups of refugees in North Carolina: emancipated blacks, enslaved people, pro-Confederate whites, pro-Union whites, and female students at educational institutions.30 Silkenat strongly argues that “Refugeeing formed a critical part of the wartime friction and abrasion that wore away at slavery and the institutions that supported it.”31 Silkenat’s Driven From Home embodies how broadly modern historians define refugees, a definition maintained in this thesis—individuals who were compelled to leave their homes as a result of wartime conflict, are not actively serving in the armed forces, and cannot reasonably return to their homes for fear of retribution.

Two final works exemplify the depth and state of Civil War refugee scholarship currently. In 2011, Chandra Manning’s Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil

War looked at the experiences of enslaved Black people during the war and the ways in which those people influenced the outcome of the war. Whereas Massey and Silkenat studied refugees as social history and Weitz through the lens of military history, Manning skillfully blended sources and approaches from each subfield to masterfully synthesize the advantages of each approach to craft a prize-winning book. In 2018, Amy Murrell Taylor followed Manning’s

29 David Silkenat, Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 5. 30 Silkenat, Driven from Home, 6. 31 Silkenat, Driven from Home, 4. 22 approach in Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps that specifically honed in on how Black refugees under Union jurisdiction contributed to the war effort in ways far beyond the usual descriptions of working on fortifications or other noncombatant roles. Taylor’s book also garnered considerable acclaim and exemplifies the ways in which the topic of refugees continues to rise in interest in Civil War scholarship.

This thesis seeks to follow the groundwork laid out by these historians, particularly the blended approach of Manning and Taylor. It makes use of a variety of primary sources in order to adequately address the three aforementioned goals. In order to illustrate the experiences of refugees, a number of diaries and reminiscences from refugees themselves are utilized. This ensures refugees’ perspectives are incorporated not only for relaying of facts, but that their emotions be made apparent as well. To demonstrate the contributions of refugees to the war efforts of their respective sides, the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion are heavily cited. This compendium includes reports, correspondence, and all manner of military documents from low-ranking officers to the commanders-in-chief. Additionally, a number of letters from high-ranking individuals are utilized, including President Lincoln’s. Together, these sources make clear the ways in which refugees influenced the conduct of the militaries throughout the war. To assist in the third goal, newspapers are included. Not only do these report on refugee activities, they perform the more important task of informing modern readers how historic people learned about refugees. The sheer volume of newspaper reports and attention to detail included is itself noteworthy, as is the ways in which references to refugees fill all aspects of the paper, from front page editorials to advertisements for novels about fictional refugees.

In contrast to the wealth of sources from newspapers, army officers, and other observers, far fewer extant sources from Black refugees are easily located. As a result, non-refugees’ 23 words and reflections on Black refugees’ experiences warrant thorough scholarly scrutiny.

Rather than an impediment to discerning refugees’ influence on the war, such statements reveal a great deal about how non-refugees’ misconceptions about Black refugees influenced the ways the conflict was perceived, supported, and fought.

The thesis is divided into three chapters, each of which covers approximately a year and a half of the Civil War. Chapter I provides the context for how Americans understood refugees prior to the Civil War. Their assumptions (many of them badly misinformed) yielded considerable misunderstandings that impeded meaningful assistance for refugees. It also discusses the largest groups of refugees in the Shenandoah Valley during the first eighteen months of the war—white Unionists. Although Northerners affirmed their status as refugees due to their whiteness and loyalty, white Unionist men were simultaneously expected to contribute to the war effort through enlistment in the army and supplying officers with information on

Confederate military dispositions. Chapter II looks at the middle of the war, building on the scholarship of Black refugees and their experiences in the war who, despite their reliability as military informants and commitment to the Union cause, rarely garnered mention as “refugees” and were, therefore, denied the attention paid to white refugees. It also introduces the argument of deserters as an overlooked group of refugees. Chapter III looks at the conclusion of the war and how the refugee crisis only increased in the war’s final months—evidence of leaders and populaces who refused to provide significant assistance to people who did not align with their definition of refugees due to their race or loyalty to the opposing side. In a brief conclusion, the thesis offers a summary and a few key points of insight into how this historical subject carries significant lessons for the modern age.

Chapter I

“Neither Pity nor Protection”:

White Unionists and Black Refugees in the Shenandoah Valley, 1861-1862

On May 24, 1861, Union Major General Benjamin F. Butler issued his famous proclamation regarding enslaved individuals who entered Federal lines near Union-held Fortress

Monroe at the mouth of the James River in Virginia’s Hampton Roads. The story is a familiar one. Three enslaved men—Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend—fled enslavement when they learned that their slaveholders intended to sell them further south away from their families. The three men sought refuge in Fort Monroe; a Confederate emissary demanded their return.32 Rather than surrender the refugees, Butler turned Southerners’ logic regarding enslaved people as slaveholders’ property against the slaveholders themselves. Butler argued that the enslaved people’s status as “property” permitted the Union officials to claim enslaved people as “contraband of war,” thereby exempting them from returning the enslaved people to their owners under the Fugitive Slave Law. In recent years, the progressiveness of

Butler’s intentions has been drawn into question by a number of historians. Still, Butler’s proclamation transformed the conduct of the Civil War and indicates an increasing acknowledgment of the Union’s purpose in the conflict as inextricably tied to the destruction of slavery, although President Abraham Lincoln did not formalize this as a war aim until signing the Emancipation Proclamation over a year and a half later. Moreover, it serves as the most well-known example of refugee policy defining the conflict in traditional scholarship of the war.

While Americans recognized the proclamation as a critical moment, it served as but one early

32 Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York City, NY: Vintage, 2016), 32. 24

25 defining point in a long succession of events involving refugees, and it was recognized as such contemporaneously.

White Unionists’ flight defined the refugee movement during the year 1861 in the

Shenandoah Valley. The persecution these individuals faced at the hands of Confederate sympathizers for their loyalty to the United States filled newspapers in the North, inciting the

Northern public to animosity towards Confederates and conviction in the righteousness of their cause. White Unionists also influenced the decisions of Union military officers in the Valley.

Eager for information on Confederate military dispositions, Union officers questioned these refugees from “Rebeldom” for any information that could be used to make more informed strategic decisions. On a number of occasions—including during “Stonewall” Jackson’s Valley

Campaign—these reports contributed to the paralysis that gripped Union commanders and allowed Jackson’s army to conduct one of history’s most renowned military campaigns.

But if white Unionists comprised a majority of refugees in the Valley during the war’s first year, Black refugees outnumbered white Unionist refugees in 1862. These refugees performed the same actions as white Unionists—they supplied Union officers with valuable military information and newspapers printed stories portraying Black refugees as pitiable victims of Confederate brutality. By the end of 1862, the association between the Union military and freedom was too clear for many enslaved individuals in the Valley to doubt. The Preliminary

Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862 accelerated Black refugee movement in the

Valley. Despite numbering in the tens of thousands, the refugees’ situation and the severity of their collective experiences did not necessarily represent a crisis. The failure of both sides to adequately address these refugees, however, boded poorly for the refugees of 1863 and beyond when the number of refugees would only continue to rise. 26

Initial Refugee Flights and Encounters with Military Forces, May - December, 1861

Within days of Virginia’s vote of secession, loyal supporters of the United States from the Old Dominion began arriving in the North. The New York Times informed its readers on

May 24, 1861, that the steamship Keystone State had arrived in the city carrying some seventy white “Refugees from Norfolk” who had taken temporary shelter in Fort Monroe two days before the three Black men who made their way into that same Federal installation were declared

“contrabands.” The paper listed each family by name; only one adult male is mentioned, the balance consisting entirely of women (both married and single) and children.33

That the Times specifically listed each refugee by name reveals, first, that readers were expected to acknowledge their humanity in their plight and, second, that the arrival of Southern refugees in the city was considered a matter of some importance and was viewed with a degree of curiosity. Also of note are the categorizations in the report: gender, age, and marital status are all noted; critically, the refugees’ race is not. In the spring of 1861, the race of anyone designated a “refugee” was presumed to be white. Black refugees would be distinguished as

“runaways” or, henceforward, as “contrabands.” The language from the events of that exact week are revealing—the seventy white people fleeing from pro-Confederate forces on the

Keystone State from Fort Monroe were dubbed “refugees”; the three Black people who fled pro-

Confederate forces to Fort Monroe were designated “runaways” and then “contrabands.” From the earliest days of the war, newspaper-readers learned about refugees and the conflict through the narrow framework established in the prewar years. Indeed, newspapers were a primary means by which Americans’ perceptions of refugees were maintained, regardless of how accurate the papers’ descriptions actually were.

33 “Arrival of the Keystone State: Refugees From Norfolk Arrived And On Their Way.,” New York Times, May 24, 1861. 27

Why did these refugees flee the South so early in the war? After all, this was the season of the “90-day war” when damage to bodies and properties was naively expected to be minimal.

The Times covered refugees as extensively as any newspaper during the war, and it addressed this topic as soon as it arose in the weeks following the bombardment of Fort Sumter. “It would seem scarcely possible that in this age and country,” bemoaned the Times in June, “that a system of oppression and wrong, such as now prevails in the Southern States, could exist.” The article claimed that thousands of families had already been driven out of their homes in the South into

Northern states, “without even the remotest form of a trial, their property destroyed and themselves impoverished by the terrorism not only winked at, but sustained and applauded by the public authorities.” Around Washington, D.C., there were hundreds of displaced people, and the journalist utilized gendered language to further invest the readers in the report.

Some of these are women, whose property has been plundered, leaving them penniless, whose sons have been seized and imprisoned, or forced to join the rebel army, to save their own lives. Some are wives, whose husbands have been suspected of opposition to the treason of secession, and been arrested, and themselves, with their children, compelled to escape for safety from the State. Some are daughters, banished, hunted out of the “Old Dominion,” on account of the real or imaginary attachments of their fathers to the flag of their country, and some are sisters, whose brothers have offended against the majesty of secession. Such is the warfare waged even in Virginia, the most enlightened and liberal of the revolting States—a warfare that spares neither sex nor condition. The helplessness of age, the weakness of woman, the feebleness of chi[l]dhood, can claim no exemption, secure neither pity nor protection from its remorseless cruelty, and yet the men engaged in it claim to be Christians, living under the full blaze of Christian civilization, recognizing the ordinary obligations of Christian duty, and, above all, pretend to be fighting for liberty!

Deliberately loaded with terminology and rhetoric aimed to inflame readers, the article insists that such atrocities are expressly the policy of the Confederate government and such depredations exceed even the mindless inhumanity of the “Reign of Terror” during the French 28

Revolution.34 Just six weeks into the war and well before the bloodletting began in earnest later that summer, the press sought to capitalize on readers’ perceptions of gender, familial structures, and “Christian duty” in regards to refugees. Furthermore, they sought to do so in a way that affirmed their side’s moral superiority by depicting the transgressions as their enemy’s formal government policy.35

Who were these refugees around Washington? They surely hailed from all over Virginia, but many were from the Shenandoah Valley, the topographic highway of the mid-Atlantic region from the heart of the Union territory in central Pennsylvania to the Southern interior.36 Military historians of the Valley’s many combat operations rarely discuss the wealth of Union sympathizers in the region. A plurality of the settlers, especially in rural areas, were German-

Americans, who had long-since rejected slavery as being incompatible with Protestant doctrine in sharp opposition to Southern pro-slavery theological apologists.37 Some Virginians openly opposed secession; after all, the Old Dominion had chosen its electors for the Constitutional

Union Party in the 1860 Election, a party of compromise that tread a narrow line between affirming states’ rights and advocating for union at any cost. Indeed, on April 4, 1861, the state legislature voted against secession before reversing itself in a subsequent vote after the fall of

Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops to put down the rebellion. Thus, despite reluctance to secede during the winter of 1861, the majority of white Virginians wholeheartedly embraced the

34 “The Refugees from the South,” New York Times, June 11, 1861. 35 Mark Grimsley observes that Northerners early in the war maintained “a deep sense of moral justice: a belief that whatever the claims of military necessity the innocent and helpless deserved some pity, and that even the guilty should suffer in rough proportion to the extent of their sins.” Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (New York City, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2. 36 For more information on the geographic parameters and topographical composition of the Shenandoah Valley, see Warren R. Hofstra, The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 37 John W. Chambers and David Osher, Southern Heroes: The Conscript Quakers (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1972), 8. 29

Confederacy upon the invasion of Virginia by Federal troops in May.38 Many white Virginians in the Valley likewise threw their support behind the Confederacy, but many antislavery and anti-secession residents, dubbed “Unionists,” refused to bend to the popular will.39 Localized partisan conflict was inevitable.

Confederate sympathizers targeted white Unionists as soon as Virginia seceded.

Sometimes secessionists resorted to intimidation, as when several Mennonite Unionists in

Rockingham County were escorted back to the polls to change their votes by a group of

Confederate sympathizers after voting against secession during the state’s referendum in May.40

During the same referendum, H.C. Strunk boldly cast the only vote against secession in Bath

County, Virginia. Seized by two Southerners, he was “flung down a rocky bank, and brutally maltreated.” His scalp deeply gashed, Strunk was nearly executed on the spot but was instead granted three hours to leave the county. Strunk and his wife returned to his native Pennsylvania, leaving behind a 175-acre farm and assets valued at over $3,000; in his report to the Philadelphia

Evening Bulletin, he noted that he intended to return to his farm “when the rebellion is crushed out.”41 Strunk’s account reveals the danger Unionists faced if they did not flee the Valley, as well as those white Unionists’ mistaken opinion that they would simply return to their homes when the conflict ended.

38 For more on the evolution of Virginia’s populace from pro-Union to pro-Confederate sympathies between January and April of 1861, see Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 39 During the war, usage of the term “Unionist” almost universally referred to white Southerners who maintained their loyalty to the United States. Enslaved individuals who sought protection from the United States military were almost invariably designated “runaways” or other titles that distinguished them on the basis of race. For the purpose of this thesis and to provide consistency and clarity with the historic sources, the term Unionist will refer to white Southerners who sought refuge in Union lines while Black individuals who fled to Union lines will be identified as Black refugees (also per historic sources; see Chapter I). For more on reasons that Southerners remained loyal to the Union before and during the war, see Carl N. Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (New York City, NY: Harper & Row, 1974). For a nuanced perspective that challenges a broader historiographic trend to understand Appalachia as heavily pro-Union, see The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1997). 40 Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 346. 41 “How A Union Man Was Treated In Virginia,” New York Times, August 21, 1861. 30

In early November, Mr. R.P. Swaney stumbled into Union lines in Gilmer County,

Virginia, after departing from Highland County several weeks earlier. Formerly an employee of the auditor’s office in Richmond, Swaney recognized that pretending “to be a good Secessionist” had become increasingly impractical in the wake of continued Union and Confederate activity in western Virginia. Swaney’s report echoed Strunk’s optimism about returning home in the near future; he confidently asserted that “those who fled from this section are sure that in time they will be able to return with a conquering army.” Swaney reported the presence of “plenty of good

Union men” in western Virginia, and in this he was correct.42 However, his misguided understanding of a potential return to home matches a pattern that continued among refugees the entire war; they believed that their status in a place of refuge was only temporary until they could return to their original home. Furthermore, the opinions of Strunk and Swaney regarding the temporary and presumed brief nature of their expulsion closely matches the opinion of soldiers on both sides who assumed through mid-1861 that the fighting would conclude in several months.

While physical violence to their person was a reasonable concern among white Unionists, many who fled from the Valley feared impressment more than outright assault. A majority of the white male Unionist flights from the Valley in the first half of the war occurred due to fearing conscription into the Confederate army. On the morning of August 14, four white Unionists passed into the Federal lines near Harper’s Ferry; they had fled Martinsburg, Virginia, after

Confederate partisans imprisoned white Southerners who refused to join the Confederate army.43

In 1861, Confederate forces did not hold jurisdiction to impress anyone, and the events in

Martinsburg in August were an exception to this reality. However, in 1862, the Confederate

42 “A Refugee From Richmond,” New York Times, November 25, 1861. 43 “From Gen. Bank’s Command,” New York Times, August 14, 1861. 31

Congress passed a conscription act that authorized the impressment of able-bodied men. The fears of Unionists in 1861 turned out to be entirely justified.

Tales of Unionists fleeing persecution in the Valley drew the attention and pity of the

Northern public. But even at this early stage in the conflict, refugees’ struggles already garnered considerable political weight. Indeed, as mentioned above, many Americans exhibited an understanding that refugees should be granted all Christian charity necessary to their immediate health. Once such conditions were met, however, Northerners expected refugees to prove their dedication to the Union again by supporting the war effort. For able-bodied white men, this meant service in the armed forces. On June 21, the Chicago Tribune reported that a “Loyal

Virginia Regiment… composed of Union refugees” was then being raised in Williamsport,

Maryland, and Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Revenge for “cruel treatment of their persons, robbery, outrage, and destruction of property” were mentioned as motivation for the Unionist recruits.44

So many Unionists from the Valley answered the call that a second regiment had to be formed immediately after formation of the first to accommodate all the new recruits.45 By war’s end, some 30,000 white Southerners from Virginia served in Union army regiments.46 Thus, in the first months of the war, Northerners did consider white Unionist males refugees, but that did not exempt them from military service; on the contrary, these white Unionists were expected to enlist and fight in the war which had displaced them.

Regardless of race and gender, Union officers believed that every single refugee who came into Union lines could serve an important purpose—an immediate and informed source of

44 “Loyal Virginia Regiment,” Chicago Tribune, June 21, 1861. Speeches given to garner support among Unionists to take a stand for the United States played a major role in formulating awareness for these individuals; the speeches were often reprinted as pamphlets and widely distributed. For more, see Southern Unionist Pamphlets and the Civil War, ed. Jon L. Wakelyn (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999). 45 Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers in the Confederacy (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 13. Both of these regiments were eventually disbanded and their soldiers assigned to other units. 46 Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists, 215. 32 what decades later came to be called “military intelligence.” By far the most common mention of refugees in newspapers and military sources comes in the form of refugees as bearers of information on enemy strengths, positions, fortifications, and morale. On November 4, a refugee reported Winchester’s daunting defensive works were abandoned by Confederate forces, optimistically concluding that “one thousand good Union troops could take the place.”47 No military operation transpired for control of the town that winter, and it appears that the refugee’s claim that a regiment of troops should take the city was ignored as, indeed, it should have been—

Confederate forces actually still swarmed the area at that time.

Here it becomes important to note the reason why newspaper articles detailing refugee reports are worth considering. It is not their accuracy—or inaccuracy—that makes refugee reports in newspapers valuable. The fact that refugee reports are mentioned at all in such an interminable manner indicates how refugees and their knowledge were understood to be an important source of intelligence-gathering. More importantly, despite the inaccuracies of such reports, they were still quite commonplace toward the end of the conflict, which reveals the depth of American interest in refugees as subjects of war. This fixation continued throughout the conflict.

In truth, it is unfair to criticize the many refugees who reported inaccurate information on enemy dispositions, just as it was unfair for authorities to expect these individuals to observe and relay this information to them when their lives could depend on their flight away from enemy military forces. Finally, official sources and analysts hardly produced better results, at least until the standardization provided by the Bureau of Military Intelligence was solidified over halfway

47 “Interesting From Baltimore,” New York Times, November 4, 1861. 33 through the war.48 No one doubts Allan Pinkerton’s influence on the course of the war through his dubious quantification of Confederate forces during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign.

Likewise, the accuracy or inaccuracy of refugee reports in agenda-driven newspapers should not be accepted or dismissed on account of objective veracity, rather, the reports should be considered more broadly as indicative of how the war was being fought and whose words and perspectives were considered in military strategy and political policy.

Refugees and Military Intelligence, January - June, 1862

The Union and Confederate armies ceased major operations from November of 1861 through mid-March of 1862, content to stare at one another from across the Potomac River and train their burgeoning, but poorly-drilled forces. Much like military operations, refugee movement slowed during the winter months, although it by no means stopped entirely. On New

Year’s morning, Unionists in Berkeley County, Virginia, raised a small United States flag over a local dam; after four days, pro-Confederate forces removed the flag and searched for the offenders, including searching the home of one James Greenwood, another Unionist refugee.49

The Confederates left the Greenwood home empty-handed, but this short account reinforces a previously-revealed suggestion—that many white Unionists, even as late as the beginning of the war’s second year, did not consider their expulsion from their homes to be permanent. Indeed, Greenwood presumably fled from a home that was located further south, but rather than cross the Potomac and find refuge in Union territory, he seemed content to simply relocate northward down the Shenandoah Valley instead of moving entirely outside of

Confederate territory. The frequency of stories such as Greenwood’s belies his account being a

48 For more information on the Bureau of Military Intelligence, see Edwin C. Fishel, The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996). 49 “Gen. Banks’ Command,” New York Times, January 15, 1862. 34 simple miscalculation regarding where he could live unmolested by Confederate forces.50

Perhaps Greenwood was reluctant to enter undisputed Union territory, as doing so would obligate him to provide recompense for refuge by serving the United States, probably in a woolen blue uniform with a rifle on his shoulder. Whatever his reasoning, the situation presented a clear conundrum for Greenwood and many other refugees. As the winter snows began to melt across western Virginia, the relationship between refugee experiences and the conduct of the war became increasingly clear.

This season would eventually see “Stonewall” Jackson’s Valley Campaign totally stymie the entire Union war strategy in the Eastern Theater for upwards of four weeks. However, at year’s beginning, Jackson was floundering in the northern Valley after a disastrous winter campaign that achieved nothing besides procuring frostbite for many of his infantrymen. In mid-

January, three hundred refugee women from Jefferson County on the Virginia side of the

Potomac were reported to be living in Frederick, Maryland. However, “many of them left their children at home, and are now desirous of returning, but a strict blockade is kept by [the

Confederate forces].”51 Why these women left their children across a river in enemy territory is unclear; the purpose of the report was to enrage Northern readers about how Confederate forces refused to allow mothers to retrieve their own children during the harsh winter months.

Shortly before the beginning of the spring campaigning season in March, accuracy of refugee reports began to be questioned. “The general reports from Winchester are conflicting, and but little reliance placed upon them, coming as they do from refugees and contrabands,” read

50 Simkins and Patton reach the same conclusion in their study of Southern women during the war: “…the majority preferred to face the enemy in familiar surroundings rather than undergo the hardships of living in strange sections of the impoverished and blockaded Confederacy.” Simkins and Patton, The Women of the Confederacy, 40. Note that this contrasts with Massey’s Refugee Life in the Confederacy which makes a point that refugees often left their homes for the duration of the conflict (4). 51 “From the Upper Potomac,” Chicago Tribune, January 22, 1862. 35 the New York Times on March 3.52 Despite this criticism, the Times, the Chicago Tribune, and many other major papers continued to relay refugee reports to the public for the duration of the war.

Two weeks later, another important development occurred. Previously, the designation of “refugee” in the Shenandoah Valley had been limited entirely to white Unionists; self- emancipated Blacks almost invariably drew the label “contraband,” despite the fact that Black fugitives from the South certainly satisfied the definition and vernacular understanding of the word “refugee.” The influence of Black refugees on the conflict as part of the larger refugee crisis manifests in different ways, especially in late 1862 with the introduction of the Preliminary

Emancipation Proclamation. But March 1862 marks a point of evolution in understanding the question asked by many Northerners: “Who qualifies as a refugee?”

On March 16, a Times headline proclaimed “A Statement Of A Refugee” among a list of other topics discussed in the article. However, the article never once mentioned white Unionists or Black refugees. Instead, the “Refugee” is a Confederate soldier, “A young South Carolinian who came into our lines this morning…”53 Before being conducted to the rear as a prisoner of war, he answered the usual questions posed to refugees regarding estimates of troops strengths and dispositions.

This designation was not the result of sloppy editing, but a clear rebranding of who qualified as a refugee according to the Northern press. On March 25—the same day that Jackson suffered his worst defeat of his military career just south of Winchester at Kernstown—the

Chicago Tribune made an even more explicit reference to deserters as refugees. The article, titled “Statements of Refugees from the Rebel Army,” detailed how four native Southerners were

52 “From The Upper Potomac,” New York Times, March 3, 1862. 53 “Pohick And Its Surroundings,” New York Times, March 16, 1862. 36 conscripted into the Confederate Army and escaped to Union forces in Virginia.54 Such individuals presented Northerners with a quandary; the South Carolinian had voluntarily enlisted in the Confederate service, so he could hardly be considered a Unionist, but he and others had obviously never been enslaved and could not be designated contrabands either legally or socially.

Yet they had fulfilled other tenets of the understanding of refugees as individuals seeking protection by voluntarily entering Union lines; furthermore, they seem to have been treated the same as other refugees, having been interrogated as to enemy dispositions and then treated decently. Later in the war, Northern newspapers—and eventually military commanders and the public—frequently considered Confederate deserters to fall under the label of either “refugee” or

“fugitive,” the former designation entitling them in most circumstances to the same treatment received by white Unionists and sometimes considerably better treatment than that received by

Black refugees.

After Union forces routed Jackson’s small army at Kernstown, a fresh wave of panic engulfed the Valley as white Unionists feared increased conscription efforts, Confederate deserters increased in volume due to low morale, and enslaved people recognized that Union victory and progress southward increased their chance of escaping slavery. On April 1, Union

Brigadier General J.D. Cox, commanding the District of the Kanawha, reported this surge to his superior, Major General John C. Fremont in Wheeling, Virginia.55 He wired, “Some refugees, escaping from the militia draft in Greenbrier County, came in last evening, and confirm my report of yesterday in regards to rebel troops at Lewisburg.”56 This correspondence confirms

54 “Statements of Refugees from the Rebel Army,” Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1862. 55 The District of the Kanawha aligns broadly with the territory that would become the state of West Virginia in June 1863. From the end of the 1861 through the end of the war, most of the region was firmly under Union control, hence its organization as a military district long before its political organization as a state. 56 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 18, 38. 37 that (1) conscription was still the primary reason for Unionist flight from the Valley at the beginning of 1862, (2) Union officers still considered refugee reports, at least in confirming information they had surmised, even a year into the war, and (3) the pathway of refugees did not always flow directly northward down the Valley towards Harper’s Ferry but sometimes cut against the grain of the Allegheny Mountains into what would eventually become West

Virginia.57

That same day, Fremont received a wire from another subordinate, Robert H. Milroy, who reported from Huttonsville, Virginia:

Refugees continue to come in squads of from 5 to 25, in great destitution. Some have enlisted in Virginia regiments and some employed by me on roads. Twelve, arrived this day from Pocahontas, report that impressment is continuing, and assure me of strong Union feeling in Pocahontas, Highland, Greenbrier, Bath, Alleghany, and Rockingham Counties. They implore our protection and pray for assistance; was on point of giving them relief two weeks since, but in obedience to orders I deferred it. Three fugitive slaves from Highland, just in, state 80 wagons passed Monterey last Friday for Camp Alleghany, and heard their master, a Colonel Kincaid, say that enemy were going to move.58

This report corroborates a number of previous points. First, that soldiers who entered Union lines were designated refugees. Second, that the aforementioned pathway westward rather than following the Valley was more prevalent than expected. Third, that fugitive slaves are listed explicitly in apparent juxtaposition to “refugees,” thereby indicating a distinction that became especially important with the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation later in the war.

Throughout April 1862, the Confederate war effort in the Shenandoah Valley appeared to be crumbling on all fronts. On April 7, reports arrived (from a refugee), that “a thousand Union

57 The secession of the West Virginia counties from Confederate Virginia draws considerable scholarship. For more discussion of this topic, see Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), Kenneth M. Noe, “Exterminating Savages: The Union Army and Mountain Guerillas in Southern West Virginia” in The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays ed. Noe and Shannon H Wilson (Knoxville, MD: The University of Tennessee Press, 1997), Theodore F. Lang, Loyal West Virginia: From 1861 to 1865 (Baltimore, MD: The Deutsch Publishing Co., 1895), and Gary G. Walker, The War in Southwest Virginia, 1861-1865 (Roanoke, VA: Gurtner Graphics & Printing Co., 1985). 58 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 18, 34. 38 men in Rockingham County have taken to the mountains… with a determination to resist with arms their impressment by the rebels. This statement is believed. Gen. Jackson threatens to subdue them by force, which they are determined to resist.”59 Was there really a regulation-sized regiment of Unionists holed up in the Blue Ridge, defying Stonewall Jackson’s army? Almost certainly not, as there is no other mention of such a force anywhere else.60 The critical phrase from the report is that “This statement is believed.” Northern readers knew that Jackson had been beaten at Kernstown; Union reports from Kanawha indicated a dire situation in the southern

Valley for Confederate forces; and now a thousand loyal Union men resisted Stonewall Jackson in the very heart of the Valley. These reports—a smattering of truth and fiction—greatly influenced how the Northern public and officials viewed the situation in the Shenandoah Valley in early April.

The reports of refugees continued to pour in and the outlook seemed only to brighten for the Union. On April 8, the Associated Press reported that a Unionist paper printed by a pro-

Union refugee in Martinsburg had begun printing. 61 General Milroy had wired his superior the previous week about the Union refugees rushing in from the southern Valley, and he wrote to

Fremont again, urging a strike while the Confederacy was off-balance.62 Finally, on April 27, the Times gleefully reported that Jackson and his army had vacated the Valley. The paper claimed that residents were “of the belief that the war in Virginia is nearly at an end” and, for the first time, it actually appeared that such optimism was warranted. The reporter continued:

Jackson’s retreat from this valley has had a beneficial effect upon the volunteers and drafted men from Rockingham and the surrounding counties. Large number of them are

59 “Official News From Gen. Banks,” New York Times, April 8, 1862. 60 Despite the Times’ incorrect report on the extent of armed Union resistance in the Valley, there were many Unionists taking up arms in small bands. See Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists and Charles Anderson, Fighting by Southern Federals (New York City, NY: The Neale Publishing Company, 1912). 61 “From The Lower Potomac,” New York Times, April 8, 1862. 62 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 18, 63. 39

daily coming into our lines, and delivering themselves up. It is stated that hundreds of them are now in the Massanutten Mountains… only awaiting an opportunity to escape and claim protection from Gen. [Nathaniel] Banks.63

In every one of the aforementioned sources, refugees served a role in informing both military authorities and the public through newspapers about Confederate dispositions and disintegration.

And, of course, it was not simply the refugees’ reports that played an important part in the narrative of the war—it was their actions (or, at least, the alleged actions)—of hundreds of

Unionist refugees banding together to tear down the Confederacy from the inside. By the first day of May, refugees had not only reported and confirmed that Jackson was leaving the Valley, but they seemingly assisted in expelling his army themselves.

Discussion of affairs in the Valley trickled down to a silence among newspapers and military reports over the next week, apart from a May 8 Tribune article which quietly contradicted many previous reports. There was no great Unionist army operating in the mountains; in fact, the white Unionists whom the army did encounter seemed “afraid, and those who want to conciliate us, too ignorant to tell much about anything. Not one in twenty knows anything, even about the roads five miles from his house, the subject on which they ought to be best informed.”64 Clearly, something was afoot in the Shenandoah Valley during the first week of May.

While refugees had garnered significant attention for the first year of the war, coverage by the press all but disappeared for five weeks; indeed, coverage on every subject was superseded by the bold campaigning of “Stonewall” Jackson’s small army. In the first week of

May, Jackson reversed his duplicitous movement out of the Valley, marched rapidly across its width, and forced Milroy’s army to retreat northward after a small, but fierce, engagement on

63 “Department of the Shenandoah,” New York Times, April 27, 1862. 64 “From Gen. Banks’s Column,” Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1862. 40

May 8 at McDowell. Jackson’s army then sped northward and nearly annihilated a Federal detachment at Front Royal in lopsided fashion on May 23. Jackson culminated his drive with a crushing victory at Winchester on May 25 that routed the last Federal force from the Valley. For two weeks, those exploits drew headlines and, more importantly, the Federal high command’s full attention.65 These events—the movement of troops, the ferocious battles, and their influence on the conduct of the war by diverting Federal troops from the thrust on Richmond—have been discussed extensively since the very days when they occurred. The influence of refugees in formulating the events receives far less attention.

On May 24—the day after the fight at Front Royal and before the Federal disaster at

Winchester—Brigadier General John W. Geary wired Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton from

Rectortown. “From a refugee,” Geary warned, “I learn that a large number of troops are being sent [towards the Valley] to sustain this movement of Ewell and Jackson.”66 Just an hour and a half later, the jittery Geary wired Stanton again; he was pulling his command back ten miles based on the information related by the refugee.67 Thus, the first of many Union detachments to drastically alter its operations in the wake of Jackson’s campaign did so at least in part because of information received by a refugee.

Jackson’s Valley Campaign also marks a period of greatly-increased attention to refugees by soldiers and Washington policymakers. At this time, Union officials began to consider the extent and volume of refugee flight a kind of barometer in gauging the seriousness of a military situation. Two days after Jackson sent the Federal army reeling northward from Winchester,

Bank’s aide-de-camp, Colonel John S. Clark, reported to Stanton, “Refugees and stragglers

65 For a single-volume, comprehensive work on Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign, see Cozzens, Shenandoah 1862. 66 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 18, 224. 67 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 18, 224. 41 coming in [to Harper’s Ferry] constantly.”68 The next day, Stanton received another report detailing how the Potomac River impeded not only fleeing Union soldiers during their flight from Jackson but also crowds of refugees.69 In his report of the battle at Winchester, Banks noted that a flanking maneuver that seized his supply train was “confirmed by the return of fugitives, refugees, and wagons, which came tumbling to the rear in fearful confusion.”70

Increasingly, Union officials considered refugee flight an indicator of military failure.71

Refugee Experiences as an Indicator of an Evolving War, July – December, 1862

That the wellbeing of refugees became conflated with Union success on the battlefield was doubtless a crucial development of the Valley Campaign. For the first year and a half of the conflict, refugees served as critical suppliers of information to military authorities. By the war’s second summer, their wellbeing became equated to military triumph. However, another critical development was brewing during this time; initially an overlooked matter by white Northerners and Southerners, the progress of the conflict to officially become an emancipatory struggle became even more readily apparent in the summer of 1862. While white authorities, soldiers, and newspapermen focused so much on white refugees in the Valley during war’s first eighteen months, the influence of Black refugees became indisputable by the end of the war’s second year.72

Black refugees garnered many titles. In period sources, they were simply dubbed

68 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 18, 262. 69 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 18, 266. 70 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 18, 266. 71 Jackson’s Valley Campaign was hardly the only occasion where refugees directly influenced the outcome of a military operation. For another example during the Civil War which occurred on the Florida coast, see George E. Buker, Blockaders, Refugees, and Contrabands: Civil War on Florida’s Gulf Coast (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1993). 72 Alongside these events, Grimsley notes that the summer of 1862 marks the end of the “conciliatory” policy popular among Northerners towards Southerners and the war henceforward took a turn towards “hard war.” Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, 3. 42

“runaways”; more recently, scholars have preferred the use of “self-emancipated” to describe these people. However, Black men and women who fled their lives of enslavement endured persecutions and struggles as severe as any, and they certainly qualify as refugees under the nineteenth century American definition of the term. Far beyond meeting compatibility with a definition however, Black fugitives from the South provided many of the critical influences imposed on the conflict by other refugees: intelligence reports, indicators of a military crisis, and individuals whose trials necessitated Northerners’ sympathy and charity. In spite of these realities, white Americans rarely considered Black refugees worthy of anything more than their pity. Indeed, the war was all but over by the time a bureau for the wellbeing of these individuals was established.

In 1860, 18% of the Shenandoah Valley’s population was enslaved.73 The white residents of the Shenandoah Valley held to the view of many slaveholding individuals across the

South, considering slavery a “positive-good”—that enslaved individuals benefitted from enslavement because that status ensured them shelter, food, and salvation through conversion to

Christianity. As such, white Valley residents exhibited an almost incredible naivete about the contentment of enslaved individuals. In May of 1861, as the first refugee activity began in the

Valley, Judith W. McGuire wrote in her diary, “if we are obliged to go from home, to leave every thing in the care of the servants. They have promised to be faithful, and I believe they will be…”74 Two weeks later, on May 25, she did just that: “locked up every thing; gave the keys to the cook, enjoining upon the servants to take care of the cows… When we took leave of the servants they looked sorrowful, and we felt so. I promised them to return to-day…”75

73 Cozzens, Shenandoah 1862, 28. 74 Judith W. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War (1867; repr., New York City, NY: Arno Press, 1972), 13-14. 75 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War, 18-20. 43

By spring of 1862, few Southerners in the Valley still propagated the idea that enslaved people would reject opportunities of freedom, but they continued to believe that emancipation would only harm self-emancipated individuals. A pro-Confederate woman in Winchester, Laura

Lee, recorded in her diary on March 22, 1862, that these Black refugees “do not look forward to the hardships and difficulties of a free Negroes life. Great numbers have gone today… It is only young men and boys who they entice off.”76 Northern newspapers also noted this development.

On April 8, the New York Tribune reported that “The slaves of James M. Mason have decamped from Winchester in a body and made their way to Philadelphia.”77 But not all Black refugees sought shelter in Northern cities such as Philadelphia; indeed, many Black refugees did not seek shelter in the North at all. Rather than continue their flight northward away from military operations, Black refugees gravitated towards Federal armies and then tended to stay with those armies, at least for a time. The pro-Confederate diarist Lee, writing in Federally-occupied

Winchester on April 17, observed “Hundreds of Negroes are in town, quartered in supply houses and warehouses, until they can be sent off. They have threatened to take Mr. Sheppard’s house for the same purpose, turning the family out.”78 Southerners raged at what they considered betrayal by enslaved people who fled their place of enslavement; that these Black refugees flocked to Federal lines only further exacerbated their discontent.

Also, as with white Unionists, the Valley’s Black refugees served as intelligence- gatherers. The same Chicago Tribune article from May 8, 1862, that criticized white Unionists as reticent in supplying information commended enslaved people for their assistance.

“Contrabands are our great resource. They can always be relied on as truthful, and willingly give

76 Julia Chase and Laura Lee, Winchester Divided: The Civil War Diaries of Julia Chase and Laura Lee, ed. Michael G. Mahon (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), 26. 77 “From The Lower Potomac,” New York Times, April 8, 1862. 78 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 62. 44 any information they have, while their shrewdness and careful observation often find out matters of great importance.”79

Black refugees understood quite well that their status as free individuals hinged on the success of Union arms. During the Union withdrawal from the Valley before Jackson’s advance in May, 1862, Lee wrote in her diary of “the greatest panic among the servants, the Yankees have assured them that Jackson is murdering all the Negroes as he advances, even cutting the throats of the babies in their cradles. […] Numbers of them believe it, and are terrified beyond belief. They have spread abroad a report too, that they intend to burn the town. Crowds have gone from here today, not only runaways, but many who have always been free.”80 A middle- class Valley woman, Cornelia McDonald, corroborated this event in her diary:

On the approach of Jackson the negroes, who had, many of them left their homes and were living in the town, began a flight that only equalled in speed and madness by the Yankees themselves. A terror-stricken mob pushed out of town in the rear and in advance of the flying bluecoats and many were overtaken and turned back by our men, who had to assure them that they would not all be killed, and that their babies especially would not be thrown to the dogs to be devoured. They had been told by the Yankees that Jackson’s men would have no mercy on them but that they would be put to the most cruel death. Several miles outside of Winchester, McDonald observed a Black woman who “had only three hard crackers in the three days past, and… she had turned back because she saw women drop by the road side with their babies to die. The Federals had induced them to fly, but could not succor them in their distress.”81 McDonald and other civilians had begun making the same comparisons between the military withdraw of Federal soldiers and Black refugee flights as Federal soldiers and policymakers.82

This particular event—the flight of Black refugees alongside the Federal army after the

79 “From Gen. Banks’s Column,” Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1862. 80 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 37. 81 McDonald, A Diary With Reminiscences of the War, 64. 82 For a thorough analysis of the relationship between Union armies and Black refugees, see Elizabeth R. Varon, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War (New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019). 45 battle at Winchester—drew considerable interest from Confederate sympathizers like Lee and

McDonald and resentment from Union sympathizers like Julia Chase. “We fear that Banks thought more of getting the Negroes off than to save the poor soldiers, or save the country,”

Chase wrote bitterly on the evening of the battle. “About 6 o’clock this morn. The stampede commenced, of troops & individuals who had been boarding in town, or keeping stores. Nearly every darkie in town has left, completely crazy.”83 The Northern press also blasted Banks for his mismanagement and proclaimed that the Union retreat from the field was complicated by the corresponding flight of refugees. So scathing were these criticisms that Banks penned a letter to the Chicago Tribune for publication flatly denying that he had allowed refugees to make use of

Federal wagons for escape.84

In the summer of 1862, President Lincoln tabled his Preliminary Emancipation

Proclamation until the Union armies had achieved a victory. Enslaved people increasingly took the matter of emancipation into their own hands. On July 14, 1862, Laura Lee confided to her diary, “More servants going off. I suppose at least three-fourths of the servants in this region are gone.”85 Two weeks later, Lee noted “The Union Hotel is given up to the runaways, it has been closed as a hospital for some weeks.”86 As before, military operations brought the Valley’s continuing refugee crisis to the fore when Army of Northern Virginia passed through the Valley before its fateful invasion of Maryland in September of 1862.87 Increased Confederate military activity in the area correlates to an increased attention on refugees. On September 6, the diarist

Lee wrote “Many of the runaway servants have returned to their houses, some voluntarily, others

83 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 38. 84 “Letter from Gen. Banks,” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1862. 85 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 48. “Servants” being a common Southern euphemism for “enslaved people.” 86 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 51. 87 Massey concurs with the assessment that the year 1862 saw a considerable surge in numbers of displaced people as to amount to concern over its size. Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 5. 46 brought in by the soldiers.”88 Clearly, Black refugees’ freedom often depended on the strength of Confederate military forces in the region.

While active military campaigns certainly saw increased activity among Black refugees, stagnant military presences also compelled Black refugee flight. The Unionist Julia Chase recorded in her December 4 diary entry that “The Federals, before coming into town, demanded of the Mayor the surrender of the town. An hour and a half was given to all citizens or soldiers to leave if they wished… Quite a number of Union men left and some Negroes….”89

Slaveholders recognized this trend and sought to prevent enslaved people from fleeing slavery by bringing the enslaved people with them when they fled from an area, as Chase recorded on

December 2, when she wrote that a “Great many secessionists have left, some taking their darkies with them.”90

Gradually, Federal authorities and soldiers were beginning to acknowledge the plight of

Black refugees alongside that of white Unionist refugees. In 1861, authorities prioritized the reports of white Unionists; by the end of 1862, Black refugees received increased attention both in the press, in the military, and at the very highest levels of the Federal government. Two letters to President Lincoln typify this shift. Writing from Williamsport on June 18, 1861, Lincoln’s close friend and bodyguard, Ward H. Lamon, scrawled out a report to the president the “Exodus from Virginia” of white Unionists. Lamon’s letter reflected focuses and opinions prototypical of white authorities at war’s onset, including the common refrain that he was “sure that a regiment

[of white Unionist refugees] will be raised… get [Secretary of War Simon] Cameron to authorize

88 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 56. 89 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 70. 90 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 69. 47 me to have those Virginians mustered into service…”91

Within a year and a half, the majority of Lincoln’s correspondence on refugees discussed not far-fetched hopes of enlisting white Union refugees into military service but how to care for the burgeoning population of self-emancipated individuals. On November 24, 1862—six weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect—the chaplain of a Union cavalry regiment, W.H.N. Stewart, asked Lincoln to provide greater support for the Black refugees.

While campaigning with his regiment in Virginia, Stewart came to recognize that refugee policies had hitherto not reflected the Union’s war aims. White Unionists were not the cause of the war—the matter at stake was the enslavement of three and a half million Black men, women, and children. Stewart asked Lincoln to prioritize “the liberated, or refugee blacks.”92 The

“liberated” were not described as “contrabands” or “runaway slaves” but explicitly as refugees, just as Lamon and so many others had described white Unionists for the previous year and a half.

As such, Black self-emancipated individuals could not be understood only as sources of information but people whom the Federal government were obligated to protect just as much as white refugees.

From the war’s first shots in April of 1861 through the end of 1862, the Civil War experienced a number of changes. The conflict had exceeded almost every early war supposition as to duration and bloodiness. Furthermore, the relationship between Union victory in the war and the abolition of slavery became increasingly obvious, culminating with the issue of the

Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Refugee experiences in the Shenandoah Valley

91 Ward H. Lamon to Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln Papers: Series 1. General Correspondence. 1833-1916:, Effort to raise troops from Virginia, June 18, 1861, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/mal1034100/. 92 W.H.N. Stewart to Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln Papers: Series 1. General Correspondence. 1833 to 1916: Colonization, November 24, 1862, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/mal1974800. 48 during this time reflect this trajectory. During the war’s first six months, accounts from the press, military officials, and civilians highlighted the displacement of white Unionists in the

Valley; just as the Union was in peril, so too were the lives of thousands of Unionists in the

Valley. And like the Union itself, the status of these individuals received attention and support.

These white Unionists frequently became affiliated with the Union military, often as sources of military intelligence but also as representatives of the danger to supporters of the United States.

In such capacity, the press propagandized the trials of refugees.

However, white Unionists were hardly the only refugees in the Valley—just as the preservation of the Union was hardly the only matter at stake in the war. Present from the very beginning, Black refugees influenced the war in much the same way as other refugees, such as providing intelligence which contributed to the course of military operations. Furthermore, the experiences of Black refugees and their status as synonymous with Union military success also indicates the extent to which the fighting of the conflict was inextricably connected to their freedom. The June 1, 1861, New York Times piece that spoke of Black refugees as a matter that

“transcends all others” predicted the importance of refugees, especially Black refugees, in a remarkably insightful way. At the time, few individuals in either the North or the South were aware of the implications of refugees on the course of the conflict and the ways in which refugees would eventually be so closely correlated to the success or failure of military operations. In the war’s next two years, the subject only grew in importance as fighting dragged on, raising critical questions about how refugees—especially emancipated Black individuals— would be treated when the guns finally fell silent.

Chapter II

“An Immense Tide of Emigration”

The Developing Crisis in the Valley, January 1863 – April 1864

Despite the armies settling into winter quarters after the bloodlettings at Fredericksburg and Stones River, refugee activity did not abate either in military reports or in home front newspapers. Indeed, the winter of 1862-63 brought a dramatic change in the Union’s wartime objectives. The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on the first day of the new year.

Many enslaved Black people in the Southern states had long been refugeeing into Union lines; the Second Confiscation Act (passed in July 1862) affirmed that slaves who escaped to Union lines would not only be held as “contrabands of war,” but permanently free. Union armies now possessed the legal ability to ignore the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that previously required them to return enslaved people to slavery, regardless of their slaveholder’s sympathies.93 With the

Emancipation Proclamation’s signing, enslaved people did not have to flee into Union lines;

Union occupation of an area effectively liberated all the slaves in the region by law.

For the previous two years, President Abraham Lincoln had insisted that his administration, the Republican Party, and the North at large did not care to end slavery where it already existed, only to prevent its expansion into unorganized western territories.94 Nominated

93 A number of writers have questioned the effectiveness of the Emancipation Proclamation as an emancipatory document; the Proclamation could only free enslaved people in territories under Rebel control, even going so far as to list excluded counties and parishes that were occupied by Union forces. Other historians emphasize the role of the Proclamation as a formal acknowledgement of Union emancipatory policy. This historiographical discourse is best exemplified in Edna Green Medford, Frank J. Williams, and Harold Holzer, The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views, ed. Harold Holzer (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006) in which each author interprets the Proclamation through a lens (social, political, and iconographic, respectively), contesting its effectiveness from each perspective. For more, see James McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?” in Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, ed. James McPherson (New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997). 94 See Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861. 49

50 by his party in 1860 as a moderate, Lincoln now issued a remarkably progressive executive order—enslaved Black people were not “contraband of war,” but “thenceforward, and forever free.” While the Second Confiscation Act emancipated enslaved people held by slaveholders who were actively affiliated with the Confederate cause, the Emancipation Proclamation disregarded such specificity and ordered the emancipation of all enslaved people in territory held by the Confederacy. Lincoln’s words were clear—this effort was not a wartime measure; the word “forever” meant that the United States was committed to abolishing slavery.

With the formal acknowledgment by the United States’ chief executive that emancipation was an objective in the ongoing war, the nature of the conflict shifted. The political principle of preserving the Union now included a battle for the physical well-being of three and a half million enslaved individuals in the Confederate States.95 Whether these people would come to be seen as “refugees” by the majority of the population remained to be seen. Just as the objectives of the war crystallized in the first weeks of 1863, so too, did the expanding nature of the continued refugee crisis across the country.96 The Emancipation Proclamation certainly spurred enslaved people to take refuge within Union lines in unprecedented numbers, but an entirely new category of refugees emerged into the public eye during the same time. The conflict tested the resolve of even the most dedicated soldiers, and 1863 saw a sharp rise in the number of soldiers who slipped out of camp and sought safety from the war and its devastation.97 These deserters—

95 This battle for emancipation is the focus of considerable scholarship. Joseph P. Reidy, Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) utilizes considerable wartime and postwar sources to dispel the misconception that the Emancipation Proclamation or any other single event marked an end of slavery or the beginning of an age of emancipation. James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York City, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014) focuses on “political abolitionism” and the ways in which antislavery sentiment in the North brewed years before the war. 96 Massey notes that the increase in refugees apparent in 1862 maintained itself in 1863. Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 6. 97 See “Desertion” in Joseph Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2009). 51 unable either to return to their homes in their native state or to their camps under fear of punishment—often took shelter in the geopolitical borderlands between the North and South.

Sheltering in contested regions increased deserters’ likelihood of evading both armies; if neither side could establish firm, lasting control over a region, then neither side could create effective agendas to bring in deserters.

The addition of deserters to the broadly-defined categories of refugees presented a wealth of new questions for the two governments and the people to address: If deserters were, in fact, refugees, were they entitled to the same protections as noncombatants? What about deserters who violently resist being “brought in?” Far from clarifying the situation about refugees in the

Shenandoah Valley and beyond, the middle of the war brought new questions into the spotlight; ineffective handling of such questions exacerbated an already fragile situation. By the beginning of the 1864 campaigning season, the complicated refugee situation had swelled into a crisis.

“A Great Exodus:” The Emancipation Proclamation in the Shenandoah Valley, January – June

1863

Within days of the Emancipation Proclamation taking effect on January 1, 1863, thousands of enslaved people fled slavery to Union lines, challenging the lingering misconceptions among pro-slavery Southerners about the loyalty of their slaves. The pro-

Confederate Winchester resident Laura Lee noted “Lincoln’s proclamation” in her January 5, diary entry, but added that “thus far we have seen no effects of it.”98 The situation in the northern Valley changed sharply in the next two weeks; on January 21, Lee conceded “Numbers of servants are leaving everyday, free as well as slaves… The Yankees tell them President Davis

98 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 76. 52 has ordered them all to be killed.”99 Lee’s pro-Union neighbor Julia Chase agreed, recording that “The blacks are leaving in great numbers, and probably in the course of a few weeks there will be but very few left. We shall be at a loss to get anything done.”100 Across town, Cornelia

McDonald scornfully observed several days after Lee’s and Chase’s entries,

There is a great exodus of negroes; every day some government wagons depart laden with them and their effects; on their way to the land of Promise; where that happy country may be we know not, though some say it is Central America that they are turning their eyes to. Their great Patron and fellow citizen, Abraham Lincoln, has, however, told them in the frankest manner imaginable that the governments of those states were not very willing to receive them; and that is was also true that many of them would die before being there very long. Another small inconvenience he touched on was, that “the political condition of those states was not very well settled, and that commotions were frequent in which the rights of the weak were disregarded, and their gains often appropriated by those who at the time were most powerful.” Still the far seeing and self sacrificing Sons of Ham were to rush upon all these uncertainties for the sake of the welfare of their posterity, as in the country they must ever be the inferior of race.101 Lee’s, Davis’s, and especially McDonald’s reactions reveal three important developments in perceptions of Black refugees in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. First, diarists in the Shenandoah Valley record the presence and activities of enslaved and formerly- enslaved individuals with far greater frequency than in the war’s first two years. Not only are mentions more frequent, but writers relay their opinions on Black refugees in far more candid and polarized terms. Crucially, “refugee” was rarely a term associated with these Black refugees. Second, that the United States government had not adequately established an effective system for the arrival of refugees from the Shenandoah Valley who fled to Washington,

Pennsylvania, or just to the presumed shelter of Union-occupied locales in the northern Valley.

Pro-slavery writers, such as McDonald, used this reality to reinforce their continued paternalistic attitude towards enslaved individuals. Finally, the seeds of postwar racial oppression are evident

99 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 78. 100 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 79. 101 McDonald, A Diary With Reminiscences of the War, 119. 53 in comments such as McDonald’s Biblical allusion to the “Sons of Ham” and her even more flagrant pronouncement that Black men and women “must ever be the inferior race” in the country.”102 The postwar racial prejudices that manifested clearly in the Reconstruction South did not spring into existence when the Confederate armies stacked arms in 1865, but represent a fruition of resentment exacerbated by racist reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation. Such racist reactions were themselves the embodiment of racist antebellum philosophy that predated the war and sustained pro-slavery arguments in the mid-nineteenth century.

At first, pro-slavery Valley residents still clung to their belief that slaves would never leave their slaveholders willingly. Lee wrote on February 11 that Federal soldiers,

not content with encouraging and persuading the servants to go off, force off those who are unwilling to go. They send parties of cavalry through the country, who seize wagons and horses and fill them with the Negroes who have chosen to remain at their homes and bring them away in spite of their entreaties to the contrary.103 Within two months of the Proclamation, even Lee could no longer deny Black refugees’ deliberate flights from slavery. On March 2, Lee reported that hundreds of former slaves refugeed in Winchester before venturing northward into Pennsylvania. “Ours are still vehement in their loyalty, but there is no faith to be placed in one of them,” Lee admitted.104

Besides the Emancipation Proclamation going into effect, the first of January prompted another refugee crisis in the Valley. On that day, Union General Robert H. Milroy occupied

Winchester and imposed harsh sanctions on pro-Confederate civilians. On April 7, Milroy demanded a house owned by the Logan family for use as his headquarters; the residents declined, whereupon Milroy ordered them removed six miles out of the town and left on the side of the

102 Referring to Black individuals as the offspring of Ham relays a common antebellum pseudo-theological assertion that Black people descended directly from Ham, the disgraced son of the patriarch Noah. Ham’s descendants were cursed to be “a servant of servants.” See Genesis 9:20-25. 103 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 80. 104 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 81. 54 road.105 The episode of forced relocation repeated itself many times throughout Milroy’s occupation of the town, and Milroy’s controversial policies that resulted in hundreds of refugees left stranded in the upper Valley during the severest winter in two decades drew considerable attention to the refugee crisis in the Valley more broadly. To the average newspaper reader, it appeared that a Union general simultaneously bungled the relocation of Unionist and Black refugees and was, in fact, exacerbating the crisis by ejecting Southern families from their homes.

Even Union officers tasked with the removals found the work distasteful.106 Just one week later,

Milroy ordered Miss Mary McGill removed from the town; her crime had been to criticize

Milroy’s expulsion of the Logan family in a private letter that Federal officials intercepted. She, too, was removed by wagon five miles from town and forbidden to return.107 On June 9, Milroy threw a Dr. and Mrs. Baldwin out of town, requisitioning their home and furniture for army use.108 Such actions enraged pro-Confederate citizens such as McDonald and Lee, who vented their fury in their diary pages; Unionists like Chase either overlooked the incidents or considered them just treatment for traitors.

Milroy viewed his policies as a “two birds, one stone” approach. Removing Confederate sympathizers from the town opened vacancies for Black and Unionist refugees to stay. Milroy saw this as an even trade—Confederate civilians became refugees while pro-Union refugees obtained shelter. On one occasion, Union soldiers arrived at a lodging house with twenty-three

Black refugees; they demanded the proprietor give his best room to the refugees, who allegedly

“seemed very humble and shocked at what had occurred.” Doubtlessly fearing retribution, the

105 McDonald, A Diary With Reminiscences of the War, 136. 106 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 86. 107 McDonald, A Diary With Reminiscences of the War, 139. Laura Lee also recorded the McGill incident in Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 87. 108 McDonald, A Diary With Reminiscences of the War, 154. 55

Black refugees “begged that they might go into the kitchen” for their lodging.109 These instances illustrate how military commanders such as Milroy not only actively involved military forces in the handling of refugees, but depersonalized refugees by treating them as numbers that needed accommodating or rejecting.

“Thankful It Is No Worse”: Refugee Activity Shifts Southward, April 1863 – January 1864

For two years, civilians on both sides looked to their governments and armies to address the plight of refugees. By mid-1863, the inability (or unwillingness) of generals and politicians to treat refugees as anything except a moral obligation or political issue was all too clear. Morale was low, especially in the North, and Federal policymakers spent so much time focusing on reversing ebbing fortunes on the battlefront that they overlooked the ever-growing refugee situation. Thus at a time when creativity, compassion, and effective handling was most needed,

Union leaders fixed their eyes on Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg rather than burgeoning refugee hotspots like Winchester or Memphis, Tennessee.

Northern civilians proved slightly more attentive of refugees at this time than their leaders. In particular, Northerners noted the wealth of relief organizations that existed for soldiers, such as the United States Sanitary Commission; why could organizations not be established to alleviate refugee suffering, too? Thus in addition to the massive shifts in subject of refugees during the Civil War caused by the Emancipation Proclamation, another significant development was an increase in public engagement with refugees’ wellbeing. Initially, these efforts were still closely tied to the war effort. In the following months, a number of organizations—commissioned by the government or operated entirely by civilians—formed in the North to relieve the suffering of refugees. But even by the very end of the war, the public’s

109 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 87. 56 expenditures for Unionist refugee relief paled in comparison to their charity for soldiers’ relief.

The prospects for Black refugees were no better, despite continued media coverage and military interaction with this latter group. On April 23, the New York Times noted a “Contraband

Commission” had been “charged by the President to organize a comprehensive plan of taking care of the Africans whom this war shall free, and enlisting them as soldiers.”110 Despite such seemingly progressive developments, the federal government would not establish an agency thoroughly dedicated to Freedmens’ wellbeing until the just two months before the war’s end.

Confederates, meanwhile, similarly failed to adequately address the ever-increasing number of refugees in the Shenandoah Valley. Especially pressing was the situation around

Winchester in the lower—that is, the northern—Valley. What became of the Confederate refugees who fled (or whom Union forces expelled) from the lower Valley? By 1863, refugees filled the hotels, taverns, and cottages in the commonwealth. Many refugees sought a degree of normalcy, finding refuge in pious observation. Regardless of tangible wellbeing, spiritual health seemed a priority for many refugees. Judith W. McGuire, a refugee who sought shelter in the

Richmond area, recalled that in her congregation of fifty, well over half were also refugees.111

Just as attending church typified prewar life, so, too, did attending formal balls. “The young people among the villagers and refugees have been amusing themselves, during the past two evenings, with tableaux,” McGuire recorded during her stay near Richmond.112 Another way they sought normalcy was by lugging along seemingly-superfluous baggage, especially furniture.113 McGuire opined that bringing along furniture ensured they were “nicely fixed for

110 “Our Special Washington Dispatches,” New York Times, April 23, 1863. 111 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War, 205. 112 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War, 217. 113 Massey notes that Southerners in the mid-nineteenth century were especially “possession-conscious,” hence the tendency to overstuff wagons with furniture to almost ludicrous capacities. Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 52. 57 refugees, who must do the best they can, and be thankful it is no worse.”114 She even found reason for optimism among the hardships, claiming, “The war has taught useful lessons, and we can make ourselves comfortable and happy on much less than we ever dreamed of before.”115

McGuire also displays a remarkable self-awareness as to the privilege of her station and its positive effect on her wellbeing. She rarely bemoaned her hardships in her diary and frequently acknowledged that her wealth allowed a greater degree of comfort than might have been expected or was being experienced by other refugees. “How are the poor to live? McGuire lamented to her diary as the cold December weather commenced. “Money is laid aside for paupers by every one who can possibly do it…”116

As refugees continued to seek shelter and normalcy, developments continued to influence the constantly shifting situation. The western counties had long resisted Confederate authority from “eastern” Virginia. In June 1861, these western counties had already formed a kind of geopolitical entity separate from the Confederate government of the state, and boldly proclaimed all state offices in Virginia vacant and filled this ostensibly legitimate government with their own representatives. Red tape impeded this loyalist entity from entering the Union until June 20,

1863, when West Virginia officially declared itself a political entity entirely separate from

“eastern” Virginia and the Confederate States of America. As if to reinforce their claim as the legitimate government of Virginia, the West Virginia government moved its “state archives” to

Union occupied Alexandria in eastern Virginia.117 Militarily, this declaration changed the situation little; almost all of the counties that formed West Virginia had been occupied by Union forces since autumn of 1861. However, this event does illustrate the divisive nature of the

114 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War, 206. 115 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War, 240. 116 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War, 247. 117 Anderson, Fighting By Southern Federals, 140. 58 conflict in the middle Appalachians. Moreover, the Shenandoah Valley now represented the border between the United States and the Confederate States; indeed, the Valley’s northernmost county—Jefferson—was one of the counties that seceded from Virginia and the Confederacy to form West Virginia.

The third week in June further demonstrated the fluidity of military control in western

Virginia when Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia passed through Chester Gap near Front Royal, annihilated Milroy’s garrison at Winchester, forded the Potomac River, and crossed the Mason-

Dixon Line to invade Pennsylvania. South-central Pennsylvania, of course, was the very area to which so many Black and white Unionist refugees had fled for the previous two years.118 Yet again, these refugees fled before the advance of Confederate arms. Unionist Julia Chase scathingly condemned these refugees for not resisting the Confederate advance; she “had supposed that something would have been done there on the part of the unionists, but so far as we can learn the rebels have marched through without the least resistance.”119 Exactly what

Chase and other Federal sympathizers expected refugees to do in the face of a Confederate field army is unclear. Her sentiments, however, can be understood as a continuation of perceptions from earlier in the war regarding white male Unionists—that even if they were “refugees,” they were still expected to fight.

Again, patterns of refugee movement correspond to their respective armies’ movements.

In late June, a rumor of a Union raid on undefended Richmond prompted a panic that resulted in many Richmonders fleeing the city. Rather than scattering across the Old Dominion, these refugees trailed the Confederate army’s general path into the Valley, albeit into Staunton and the

118 See Chapter I. 119 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 96. 59 middle Valley rather than Winchester and the northern counties.120 Still, the flight and movement of Confederate refugees in conjunction with a movement of a Confederate army presents another indication of the importance of perceived perceptions and areas of control in refugee flight.

Any Richmonders who sought refuge in the Valley during that summer almost immediately found themselves reversing their course. On the first three days of July, Lee’s army suffered a catastrophic defeat in south-central Pennsylvania at Gettysburg. The Confederate army barely retreated across the Potomac intact, and its subsequent withdraw from the Valley into central Virginia was followed by a similar exodus of Confederate refugees from the northern

Valley.

These same individuals had endured the fierce combat of the first two years of the year.

Indeed, the army with which they sympathized had suffered a similar defeat after attempting the same maneuver through the same territory the previous year at Antietam. What prompted this new surge in Confederate refugee activity after the Gettysburg Campaign? The trend of civilians to follow the army with which they sympathize again manifests. But unlike after Antietam,

Confederates in Winchester and the northern Valley were not uncertain about their fate once occupied—they were informed by experience as to the hardships of living under martial law. As much as anything, Milroy’s draconian policies in the first six months of the year left Confederate civilians fearful of Union soldiers. Milroy’s expulsion of Confederates from Winchester left long-lasting effects on the region; not only did he force many Confederates to become refugees, but fear of such prosecution prompted hundreds more to become refugees in the summer of

1863. Cornelia McDonald’s recollections of that summer reinforce this theory; “Few were willing to risk another Federal occupation, for the next might be a prolonged one, as Gen. Lee

120 “A Panic in Richmond,” New York Times, June 23, 1863. 60 had been obliged to retreat,” she explained, “and if they did not go when they had the opportunity to take some of their belongings, they would in all probability be thrust out helpless.”121

McDonald wrote in her diary that “dread of the evil to come” forced her family’s flight from their Winchester home. She recounted packing her chest “with the house linen and winter clothes and the silver, rolled up a few carpets and waited.” This seemingly-pedantic inventory reveals an interesting distinction between McDonald as a Confederate refugee in the middle of the war and Unionist refugees earlier in the conflict. McDonald departed from home on July 18, a “hot, hot day… [with a] broiling sun,” yet she still packed winter clothes and carpets.122

Whereas Unionists left the Valley in 1861 with the understanding that they would soon return to their homes, McDonald appears to have no delusions about the seriousness of her relocation.

She departed aware that she likely would not return to her home until spring of 1864.

Her destination reveals yet another development of 1863 in refugee affairs in the Valley.

Since April 1861, Winchester had been the hub of refugee activity for both sides. Unionists and

Black refugees from the southern and central Valley fled there on their sojourn northward, staying if Federals occupied the town. Pro-Confederate civilians from Maryland and northern

Virginia fled southward to Winchester, staying if Confederates occupied the town. Now, both sides seemed to understand the picturesque town would remain a combat zone for the foreseeable future, regardless of how definite and total an occupying force’s power appeared. The nexus for

Southern refugees shifted southward to the bucolic town of Staunton in the central Valley, and it

121 McDonald, A Diary With Reminiscences of the War, 164. 122 McDonald, A Diary With Reminiscences of the War, 165. Carpets often served an auxiliary purpose for heat retention in the nineteenth century; indeed, Confederate soldiers at this point in the war were issued parcels of carpet and rugs in place of military blankets when wool became scarce. The presence of carpets in McDonald’s trunk provides more evidence that she did not expect to return to her home until at least the spring thaw of 1864. 61 was this locale to which the McDonalds fled.123 Like Winchester, Staunton’s highways proved a natural concentration point for refugees—the Valley Pike provided north-south travel through town while the Parkersburg Turnpike provided east-west traffic. Moreover, the Virginia Central

Railroad, which connected western Virginia to the railroad hubs of Richmond and Petersburg, also ran through Staunton. Thus refugees could travel any direction from Staunton on either good highways or railroads.124

The McDonalds (and many other families) proceeded southward on the Valley Pike by cart. After 100 miles and several days, they reached Staunton, but the McDonalds only rested a day before turning east towards Charlottesville; they had been advised that food was in abundance in nearby Amherst County. Yet again, aversion to enemy armies played a part in this decision, as Amherst “was out of the way of armies.”125 The McDonalds crossed the Blue Ridge out of the Shenandoah Valley, bore southwest upon reaching Charlottesville, and reached

Amherst. After a short visit to Richmond to retrieve Mr. McDonald (an ailing clerk in the

Confederate Commissary Department), the family elected to return to the Valley. But instead of heading northward towards their home in Winchester or even the more safe refuge of Staunton,

Mrs. McDonald took a canal boat from Lynchburg to Lexington, the southernmost of the

Valley’s large towns. No major Union army had ever ventured near Lexington, and the

McDonalds felt themselves quite safe until the summer of 1864.126

McDonald’s reminiscences go into detail about the particulars of her journey up the

Valley, her stay in hotels, and the nature of refugee life in the Valley. The most important part of

123 Massey notes that Charlottesville—across the Blue Ridge some 35 miles east of Staunton—also became a hotspot for refugee activity at this time. Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 77. 124 See Jonathan Berkey, “Swallowing the Oath: The Battle Over Citizenship in Occupied Winchester,” in The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship, ed. Paul Quigley (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2018). 125 McDonald, A Diary With Reminiscences of the War, 167. 126 See Chapter III for more information on Hunter’s Campaign. 62

McDonald’s odyssey, however, is its stark contrast with pro-Union refugees. As noted, many

Union refugees thought their removal from the Valley was only temporary. Incredibly, Union refugees appear to still adhere to this idea as late as the summer of 1863. Julia Chase recalled on

August 13 that “Several of the Union refugees embraced the opportunity of coming home, tho’ their stay was short.”127 Martinsburg—just several miles northward, but within the borders of the newly-minted state of West Virginia—had been noted by Union authorities as a haven for

Unionist refugees since the summer of 1861, and two years later the town still hosted displaced, but local refugees.

As the summer ended and the fall continued to be relatively quiet in the Valley, some

Confederate refugees grew tired of living away from home and ventured northward from their abodes in Staunton. The Union’s Bureau of Military Information (the precursor to the Central

Intelligence Agency) received word on October 20 from Martinsburg that “All the refugees who fled from the presence of the Union forces are returning down the valley with the expectation that the rebels will soon have possession of this country.”128 Union Colonel Joseph Thorburn relayed similar information to department headquarters in Parkersburg, West Virginia, claiming,

“An immense tide of emigration northward will set in as soon as winter is over.”129 What could prompt this “immense tide of emigration?” If Confederates still feared Union occupation, why would they risk leaving the southern Valley? The answer lies not in supposed safety in Union lines, but in fear of the lurking marauders then rising in power and number in the southern

Valley.

127 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 103. 128 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 49, 360. 129 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 60, 403. 63

“Pathways Along the Mountain Sides”: The Rise of Deserters as a Refugee Demographic

August 1863 – April 1864

1863 saw many important developments in the refugee crisis in the Shenandoah Valley.

Black refugees drew considerable attention among government officials, military commanders, and Valley civilians. West Virginia formally declared itself a state, and was promptly admitted to the Union, drastically altering the boundary line between the United States and the

Confederacy from the banks of the Ohio River to the Allegheny Mountains on the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley. Union depredations also spurred refugee movement. But just as these occurrences resulted in increased refugee activity in the Valley, so, too, did the general course of the war prompt a new surge in another refugee demographic. Just as refugees were impacting the ways that the public and the army understood the war, the war was also perpetuating the refugee crisis.

By late 1863, the tide of the war had turned. Confederate hopes—so high in the aftermath of smashing victories at Fredericksburg (December 1862) and Chancellorsville (May

1863)—had plummeted after a slew of crushing defeats at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and

Chattanooga. The profligate printing of paper money by the Confederate government caused staggering inflation that crippled the national and private sectors of the Confederate economy.

One woman refugee boarding just east of the Valley in Charlottesville secured her lodging for

$300 per month—over two years’ salary for a Confederate army private.130 Food prices soared, too. In Richmond, a single barrel of flour cost the same as the month’s rent in nearby

Charlottesville.131 Unable to survive such conditions, civilians in Richmond and across the

130 Simkins and Patton, The Women of the Confederacy, 104. 131 James I. Robertson, Jr., Civil War Virginia: Battleground for a Nation (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1991), 109. 64

Confederacy demanded food from Confederate authorities. When their demands went unanswered, women took to the streets in violent protest, in some cases marching by the thousands to pillage bakeries in defiance of Confederate authorities and soldiers sent to restore order.132 The strain of war placed many civilians in increasingly dire need of necessities like food, fostering dissent that continued through the end of the war.

Moreover, that winter the Confederate Congress passed an even more extensive

Conscription Act that enlisted men aged 17 through 50 into the armed forces. These three factors combined to place enormous stress on the Confederate war machine during the winter of

1863 through 1864, and desertion rates inevitably skyrocketed.133 Although offhand primary sources later indicated that Confederate desertion rates doomed the South during the war’s final winter, more recent study indicates that the winter of 1863 actually saw far higher numbers and rates of desertion.134

Although the Shenandoah Valley provided a topographic avenue of escape for Unionists and enslaved people to Union lines, it also provided a haven for soldiers who fled from the harsh privations and horrors of army life. But the apparent migratory highway of the Valley actually became something of a trap for many Confederate deserters who sought safety at their homes in the Deep South. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—the primary Confederate military force in

Virginia—fielded regiments from all Confederate states except Kentucky and Missouri. It was reasonable for deserters from Deep South states to follow the contour of the Appalachian

Mountain chain southward before turning westward towards their home state. This was

132 Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 169. 133 For more on the reasons why Confederate soldiers deserted, see Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War, Chapter 1, “Causes of Confederate Desertion.” 134 For a thorough study of Confederate desertion rates, see Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York City, NY: Free Press, 2008). 65 especially true at the beginning of 1863, as the land around this described route was all but untouched by the conflict, whereas traveling due west or southwest meant traveling directly into the combat zones of Kentucky and Tennessee.135

But this route proved increasingly less practical the further deserters traveled on it. First, the Valley Pike’s macadamized surface—an invaluable benefit to travelers—ended at Staunton.

The Valley’s wide, even floor ends sharply south of Lexington, chopped up by a series of parallel north-south ridgelines before widening again to the New River Valley, which itself continues by other names and by other rivers all the way down the Appalachians to Chattanooga.

The critical rail junction of Chattanooga—which could theoretically provide a departure point to anywhere in the South for a homebound deserter—was in Union hands. Finally, and most importantly, the entire country from Knoxville onward swarmed with armies. Deprived of the ability to even possibly jump onto a train without being detected, a Confederate soldier in Lee’s army who wished to return to his native state of Texas would have to travel over 1,000 miles by foot, the first several hundred miles through mountains, dodging Union and Confederate forces the entire way across the South. Unable or unwilling to risk such a harebrained scheme, hundreds of deserters holed up in the southern Valley in Rockbridge and Botetourt Counties.136

These individuals certainly represent a very different kind of refugee. The image of

Confederate soldiers, many of whom still carried their rifles from the army, stealing away into

135 In late 1862, Confederate General Braxton Bragg launched a counteroffensive into Kentucky. He was repulsed at the Battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862), and again at the Battles of Stones River (or Murfreesboro, December 31, 1862-January 2, 1863). Active campaigning continued throughout the rest of the year throughout central and eastern Tennessee, inhibiting movement of deserters to their homes west of the armies’ areas of operation. 136 Floyd County and Montgomery County—just beyond the Valley’s southern edge—became major concentrations for deserters as well; the people in those counties even elected a “state government” and “governor” to rule over those communities in defiance of Confederate authorities. Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War, 63, 67. Scholars John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney relay few instances of deserters from Virginia’s Valley reaching the North Carolina. in their study of desertion in Appalachia North Carolina during the war, supporting the theory of the Valley’s topography sealing deserters off from their homes further south. John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 66 the mountains does not match many modern perceptions of a refugee. Nor did it conform to many Americans’ perception of refugees in the 1860s. But the reason that nineteenth century

Americans did not frequently refer to them as refugees is because these armed bands of deserters did not match the perception of refugees as helpless women or children. For the average

American in 1863, “refugee” implied a necessity for pity, which these individuals rarely achieved. However, deserters who become stranded in the mountains do achieve the culturally- constructed definition of a “refugee” in nineteenth century America—they are individuals who are compelled to leave their homes due to the war, and they find themselves unable to return home without reasonable risk of harm. Newspapers and reports from the war most commonly— but by no means universally—cast deserters into the category of “fugitives.” In fact, soldiers who took absence without leave perfectly fit Webster’s American Dictionary definition of a fugitive, which was defined as “One who flees from his station or duty; a deserter…”137 But

Americans did not apply the same level of pity towards “fugitives” as “refugees”; indeed, other definitions for “fugitive” in the same dictionary entry include “Volatile… Unstable…

Wandering; vagabond.” These definitions of “fugitives”—and, thereby, deserters—contrast sharply with the nineteenth century colloquial definition of refugees, which generalized along predictable and consistent lines of gender, age, and loyalty.

Returning again to the criteria utilized by historians such as David Silkenat allows for more clarity as to how deserters meet the academic definition of refugees. Deserters were compelled (often forced through conscription) to leave their homes as a result of wartime conflict; after fleeing military service, they were not actively a part of the armed forces; and they could not reasonably return to their homes (or even their army camps) for fear of retribution.

137 American Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Noah Webster, 1st ed. s.v. “Fugitive,” accessed April 27, 2021, http://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/fugitive. 67

Broadly-defined, deserters in these circumstances can be understood to be technical, if not conventional, refugees. More importantly, some nineteenth century sources actually refer to deserters as refugees, if not in name then in spirit. By the end of the war, Confederate deserters are frequently identified with refugees in newspapers, private accounts, and military reports.

Confederate support in the mountains had been flagging since the earliest days of the war. For over one hundred years, scholars attributed the lack of Confederate support in western

Virginia as simply antislavery sentiment due to the non-agricultural nature of the mountain economy. In recent years, historians have proposed that deep cultural divisions exacerbated the tension between people in Appalachia and the tidewater. By the time of the Civil War, western

Virginians saw the people of eastern Virginia as elitist snobs, while the latter saw the former as backwards.138 As more Confederate deserters found refuge in the Appalachians, anti-

Confederate dissent began to boil over into savage, intimate warfare that matched the bushwacking of better-known environments such as Missouri in brutality if not in scale. Almost

38,000 men from Virginia joined the Union army or navy during the war, more than enlisted from New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, or Rhode Island.139 More prevalent, however, in the borderland of the Shenandoah Valley than conventional enlistment was guerilla warfare and vigilantism against Confederate authority.

Beginning in the summer of 1863--not coincidentally, just several weeks after the

Confederate disaster at Gettysburg--mentions of deserters in the Valley increase greatly. In early

January, Winchester residents formally presented a local Confederate officer to “have the guerillas removed from our midst, as they are committing so many depredations, stealing all the

138 See Crofts, Reluctant Confederates. 139 Anderson, Fighting By Southern Federals, 11. 68 horses they can lay hands on.”140 Contrary to suspicions, these “guerillas” were not the infamous horsemen of John Mosby’s command or any of the other partisan rangers operating in northern

Virginia, and Confederate commanders realized that their countryside was being plundered not just by Federal armies, but by their own deserting men. By mid-August, Union newspapers had caught on to the rising dissent in western Virginia. A former Washingtonian residing in

Lexington returned to the District of Columbia and

confirms the reports of great demoralization in the rebel army and says a fight occurred a few days before he left between several regiments […] and Stuart’s cavalry. The [deserters] were very much dissatisfied, and started to leave for home, when they were attacked by Stuart’s cavalry, and compelled to return to duty. He represents Lee’s army as almost in open mutiny, owing to the gloomy aspects of affairs in the Confederacy since the fall of Vicksburgh and Port Hudson, and that it is with difficulty kept together. The rebels were deserting in large numbers, and he says the North Mountains are full of deserters from Lee’s army.141

Three days later, this informant doubled-down on his report according to another Times article.

He states that he last week saw in one body more than one hundred deserters from Lee’s army […] going home through Rockbridge County and the Provost Guard was afraid to oppose them. Coming up the valley, he learned that four or five hundred men […] had left for home, with their arms, and a fight occurred […] between these deserters and Stuart’s cavalry, in which the deserters routed the cavalry, and then made off. Both the Blue Ridge and North Mountains were full of rebel deserters going home with their arms, and so many passing had worn pathways along the mountain sides. The general opinion at Lexington and Staunton, among the citizens and soldiers, was that the Confederacy was “played out.” […] The only rebel troops in the valley, except straggling bushwackers, are Imboden’s cavalry…142

The refugee’s story had changed dramatically in three days; whereas in his first telling the deserters were “compelled to return to duty,” his second telling says they “routed the cavalry, and then made off.” The latter, more dramatic tale is almost certainly less truthful. In either case, this refugee’s report summarizes the developing situation in the southern Valley aptly:

140 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 102. 141 “News From Washington,” New York Times, August 15, 1863. 142 “Statement of a Refugee,” New York Times, August 18, 1863. This refugee reported his flight as northward to “Winchester and Martinsburgh, thence by railroad to Baltimore and this [Washington] city.” 69

Confederate soldiers were deserting in droves due to conscription and low morale, using the

Valley to guide themselves home, and openly defying Confederate military forces in pitched skirmishes.143

The situation grew worse in the following months. On October 9, Chase complained

“The guerillas who infest our neighborhood are robbing the people… The Secesh must never complain about the Yankees (as they term them) stealing, for their own party are as bad if not worse.”144 Again, Chase misunderstood either the nature of these raids or the definition of the word “guerilla”; theft was a capital offense in the Confederate armies. Even among the more unregulated Confederate guerillas like Mosby’s battalion, larceny of private property was rare, especially given the tremendous success of these raiders on enemy supply depots. Whether these men truly were Confederate guerillas or were more deserters, lawlessness clearly was on the rise in the Valley.

In an especially bold incident on November 24, three men “dressed as soldiers” stole valuables and horses in the Winchester area before attacking several citizens, firing a mill, and making off. Laura Lee observed “It does seem as if we were sadly subjugated when three armed men can keep a whole community at bay. Some persons declare that the men were not Yankees, but a portion of a band of thieves who have been prowling and robbing in the mountains.”145 As in this episode, deserters frequently banded together into gangs large enough to provide some safety in numbers, but small enough to evade pursuing Home Guards or army units sent to suppress their raids. In some cases, the deserters actually maintained a sense of unit and martial

143 That this refugee and the Times distinguished Imboden’s cavalry from the “straggling bushwackers” lends further credence to the assertion that the “guerillas” Julia Chase mentioned as stealing horses in Winchester did not belong to formal Confederate military units, but were deserters capitalizing on the lack of military forces in the region. 144 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 111. “Secesh” was a common abbreviation among Union sympathizers for “secessionists.” 145 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 120. Chase also records this incident. 70 cohesion, operating as a fighting unit and adhering to their station and rank. On January 10,

1864, Chase reported “A Lieutenant of the 3rd Arkansas rebel regiment has come into Fort Smith with a squad of the men of his regiment & delivered themselves up.”146

The increasingly lawless atmosphere of the Shenandoah Valley at this time resulted in greater refugee migration in some instances and sharp stagnation in others. Civilians sought safety from deserter bands, Federals soldiers, and even Home Guard units that themselves had undertaken dubious methods to counter deserter threats. As such, many civilians fled the Valley.

Doing so often proved difficult, as leaving the relative safety of an urban community subjected the traveler to possible attack by those very forces. By February 14, 1864, Julia Chase recorded that “No one is safe in passing up and down the Valley… Oh, the horrors of war, and especially a civil war.”147 Indeed, by this point, the in-fighting in the Valley amounted to a civil war within the American Civil War, in which deserters, marauding Federal cavalry, Home Guards,

Confederate soldiers, and civilians all sought to come out on top, which often simply meant surviving. While the hemorrhaging of manpower in Lee’s army slowed by spring of 1864, an army of deserters roved the Valley. On March 22, Chase wrote “there seems no safety whatever” from the hit and run raids.148

Collectively, the fear wrought by these deserters negatively impacted the Confederate war effort. More broadly, the burgeoning populace of Confederate dissenters—Unionists, Black refugees, deserters—generated an increasingly volatile environment in which the Confederate army operated and civilians sought to survive. Historian Lorien Foote aptly summarizes how an

146 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 128. 147 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 134. 148 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 137. Lonn writes that “It may not be far-fetched to see a logical preparation for the lawless Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction in the lawless bands of the Civil War deserters. Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War, 122. For more on deserter communities and their tenuous hold on Southern life in the region, see John C. Inscoe, “’Moving Through Deserter Country’: Fugitive Accounts of the Inner Civil War in Southern Appalachia” in Noe and Wilson, The Civil War in Appalachia. 71 increasing number of dissenters operating in Southern territory fundamentally undermined

Confederate authority: “They were a different kind of invading army, one that was weak and unarmed. They never fought a conventional battle. But they heralded the collapse of the

Confederate States of America.”149

The year 1863 brought tremendous change both to the war and the refugee crisis in the

Shenandoah Valley. The most obvious change occurred on the very first day of the year, when the Emancipation Proclamation formalized emancipation as a wartime objective for the Union.

Its effects were as visible in the Valley as anywhere, with thousands of enslaved individuals chancing a refugee life for an opportunity of freedom. The other significant impact of the

Proclamation—the enlistment of some 200,000 Black soldiers into the Union’s army and navy— manifested clearly on April 3, 1864, when a detachment of United States Colored Troops marched through Winchester to the shock of Unionist residents and the disgust of Confederate sympathizers. The trajectory of the Proclamation’s influence is clearly outlined in Laura Lee’s diary. In early 1863, she still refers to enslaved individuals in paternalistic terms and only in passing. Her reaction to Black soldiers marching through Winchester fifteen months later reveals the extent of how her racial attitudes evolved; whereas she previously referred to enslaved individuals as “Negroes,” this incident prompted a harsher racial epithet and several lines in her diary that demeaned the Black Union soldiers through flagrant racial stereotypes.

Confederate sympathizers in the Valley also chafed under Union occupation, most notably under Milroy’s hand in Winchester. Milroy certainly broke the spirit of many

Confederates in the region, prompting a significant migration of refugees out of the northern

Valley. Even after his defeat in June 1863 and the lack of significant Union military presence

149 Lorien Foote, The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 20. 72 until May of the following year, Confederate civilians in the region still feared the possibility of occupation enough to flee from the northern Valley.

Coupled with West Virginia’s separation, conscription, military setbacks, and a financial crisis of staggering proportion, Confederate control over the Shenandoah Valley wavered in the final months of 1863. Thousands of deserters from Lee’s army prowled the Valley, preying on friend and foe and flaunting Confederate efforts to subdue them. Lawlessness prevailed until

Union and Confederate forces returned in the spring of 1864, driving deserters to the margins of the Valley and exacting harsh retribution on those who remained. Ella Lonn aptly summarizes the nature of the increasingly disastrous situation: “By June, 1863, it was apparent that there existed no agency adequate to cope with the evil [desertion]. The military commanders, occupied with the enemy, were not tempted… to spare any considerable forces to pursue deserters.”150

These words about deserters could reasonably be projected on all types of refugees in the

Valley—leaders acknowledged the rising level of a crisis, but focused their attention on battlefield matters. Massey observes that “President Davis was especially indifferent to their plight although he did occasionally mention them, but he gave no indication of thinking that they were problem worth of consideration by the Confederate government.”151 The “wavering and uncertain” policy towards refugees from leaders in Washington was hardly better; Lincoln’s

Cabinet was aware of a developing crisis in the Valley and across much of the South, but still expressed no intentions of addressing it.152 Far from alleviating as the war progressed with increased military, civilian, and government attention, the refugee crisis in the Shenandoah

Valley only rose to a crescendo as the war entered its fourth year. Refugees appeared more

150 Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War, 52. 151 Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 244. 152 Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War, 94. 73 numerous than ever, and in many different forms: Unionists, pro-Confederates, self-emancipated

Blacks, and now legions of deserters.153 These refugees continued to influence the war as it dragged on into its bloodiest phase.

153 Lonn writes of these groups collectively as their own “society, hybrid indeed, threatening anarchy instead of civilization.” Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War, 200.

Chapter III “We Are Starving, I and My Children”: Refugees, Hard War, and the Conflict’s Uncertain End April 1864 – October 1865

Despite the Confederate reverses at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, many people on both sides correctly believed the war was far from over as the armies prepared to tramp out of their winter quarters in early 1864. Certainly there had been many important military developments that winter, but the appointment of Union general Ulysses S. Grant to general-in-chief of Union armies in March of 1864 marks an important development in how the war in Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley was to be waged. The doughty Midwesterner traveled east to Virginia to personally direct the Union armies’ renewed offensive on Richmond, which included a three-pronged drive on the Rebel capital.

The plan called for the Army of the Potomac—nominally under the command of George

G. Meade, but accompanied by the superior Grant—to grind down Robert E. Lee’s Army of

Northern Virginia in a bruising, relentless offensive that drove south from the Union camps along the Rapidan River. Meanwhile, Benjamin F. Butler’s Army of the James would travel up the Peninsula from the Federal bastion of Fort Monroe to strike Richmond from the east.

Finally, Franz Sigel’s Army of West Virginia would march south up the Shenandoah Valley, crushing Confederate resistance in the Confederacy’s “breadbasket” to disrupt provisions and other supplies to Confederate armies and threaten Richmond from the west. Union armies in the

Western Theater under William T. Sherman would also launch coordinated offensives towards the vital railroad hub of Atlanta, Georgia. Grant’s plan relied on hitting the Confederacy at multiple strategic points to destroy the Confederacy’s ability to wage the war. If any single

Union army proved unable to strike a decisive blow, they could at least wreak havoc and draw

74

75

Confederate forces away from other objectives; as Lincoln folksily observed: “If a man can’t skin, he must hold a leg while somebody else does.”154

Despite the increase in refugees brought about by the events of 1863 and recognition that refugees were in need of shelter and protection, neither side had constructed a cohesive program for caring for refugees. As the military events rose to a crescendo in 1864, so, too, did the crisis of refugees reach new heights as three major campaigns developed in the Valley between May and October.155 As Union armies drove deeper into the Valley than ever before, enslaved people found more opportunities to flee to Union armies; the number of new Black refugees in the

Valley remained consistently high during 1864. Just as these Union armies precipitated Black refugee flight, they also initiated a drastic increase in Confederate-sympathizing refugees.

Furthermore, increasingly dire military fortunes accelerated desertion from the Confederate armies at this time. Of the three primary refugee groups in 1864, one—Black refugees— maintained their high rate of flight while the two other groups—pro-Confederate refugees and deserters—increased in numbers. Far from addressing the plight of refugees, the Union and

Confederacy had seen the crisis elevate in the previous three years to include people of different classes, loyalties, races, and priorities. The question still remained—how would the governments address this crisis? Furthermore, how would refugees—both individually or collectively—influence the war?

Sigel’s Campaign: April – May, 1864

As the Union war machine lurched to life in the spring of 1864, the relationship between military affairs and the actions of refugees was as apparent as ever. Union general Franz Sigel—

154 Henry Ketcham, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York City, NY: A.L. Burt, 1901), 354. 155 Massey notes that this acceleration in rate of refugeeing occurred throughout the South in the year 1864. Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 7. 76 tasked with driving southward up the Shenandoah Valley—issued an edict that illustrates how significant refugees had become to military planning of Union leaders. On April 12, 1864, Sigel issued general orders from his headquarters in Cumberland, Maryland, that sought to smooth his army’s movement through enemy territory. Sigel correctly assumed that the resumption of campaigning would initiate refugee flight in great numbers. Moreover, the general orders defined Union policy towards these refugees in the Valley during Sigel’s campaign. Sigel ordered that:

Commanding officers at stations within this department […] are directed to send all deserters from the enemy, guerillas, agents, and spies in the interest of the so-called Confederate States, and also refugees from sections held by the rebels, to the commanding officer at Harper’s Ferry, Va., or to the provost-marshal general of the Department, at Cumberland, Md., or to the senior officer at Clarksburg, Va., as be most convenient.156 This single sentence reveals several noteworthy considerations. First, deserters are distinguished from refugees in name, but still ordered to be treated as the same. Thus, even though deserters are not considered refugees, they are included in the same demographic category by the Union military. Second, refugees are lumped together with individuals deemed undesirable and vagabond: deserters, guerilla fighters, agents, and spies. Not only were all of these individuals enemies to the Union cause, but dishonorable fighters; at this time, it was common military policy to hang captured enemy spies without any trial or military tribunal.157

That refugees would be discussed in the same terms and subject to the same regulation reveals much about how distastefully Sigel viewed individuals who he deemed an impediment to his army’s prospective operations. Finally, Sigel’s words demonstrate a desire for regulation of refugees and others during military campaigns. The three stations Sigel identified—Parkersburg,

156 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 60, 846. 157 Indeed, many captured Confederate spies and guerillas would be summarily executed by Union forces in the subsequent campaigns in the Valley. 77

Cumberland, and Harper’s Ferry—formed a broad cordon intended to catch all displaced individuals fleeing the fighting in the Shenandoah Valley.

Critically, Sigel’s orders were not charitable efforts intended to provide for the refugees; in all cases, the groups Sigel identified would serve some kind of purpose for the Union military.

The order’s second article makes this clear.

Strict examination and prompt disposition will be made in each case. Deserters may ordinarily be discharged upon taking the oath of allegiance to the Government of the United States, and may received employment on fortifications or other public works within the department; but in cases where it is considered unsafe to allow them to remain, or be employed in the immediate vicinity of our lines, they will be sent to some point in the interior and there be discharged.158 Since Butler’s “contraband decision” in 1861, Black refugees had been employed as laborers for

Union armies. Sigel hoped to make use of Confederate deserters in the Valley in the same way.

But deserters who could not be trusted to dig trenches for the Union would be “sent to some point in the interior.” The ambiguity of direction is not insignificant. Sigel only broadly stipulated that deserters would be sent somewhere northward, presumably into Pennsylvania, outside of Sigel’s military department. Thus, Sigel’s plan for accommodating deserters entailed either using them to build earthworks for his army or pushing them outside of his jurisdiction.

Sigel also planned to use deserters to assist the Union military through military intelligence.

Descriptive lists will be forwarded weekly to the military provost-marshal-general of the department, at Cumberland, showing the regiment or other organization to which they belonged, the place of residence and enlistment, and the disposition ordered. Such information could then be forwarded to the Bureau of Military Information, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. B.M.I. agents compiled information on Confederate military units and positions to tabulate Confederate troops strengths dispositions to allow Union

158 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 60, 846. 78 commanders to make more informed strategic decisions. Refugees had been a source of military information for Union commanders for the entire war. As discussed in Chapter 1, refugees did not always relay correct information; deserters from the Confederate army were more informed on the details of their units’ movement. Sigel, then, was tweaking the long-running practice of utilizing refugees as sources of information to rely on not only Unionists fleeing Confederate arms, but also Confederate soldiers fleeing service. Curiously, Union commanders like Sigel seemed to believe the reports of enemy deserters, although they often noted in correspondence that their sources for such information came from “enemy deserters” rather than the ostensibly more sincere Union sympathizer refugees.159

Finally, Sigel’s order accounted for refugees by name, stipulating that “Refugees will be discharged after examination, and may be employed at any place within the lines, but all persons suspected of being guerillas, spies, etc. will be sent to the provost-marshal at these headquarters for further examination and trial.”160 Sigel thus implied that irregular combatants and spies could fall in with refugee columns to obtain safe passage behind Federal lines, sabotaging the

Union war effort from within. How often did irregulars disguise themselves as refugees to infiltrate Union lines? While it is difficult to imagine that it did not occur at some point during the conflict, it does not appear that such espionage occurred in the Shenandoah Valley up to this point in the war; it certainly did not occur with the frequency to warrant such paranoia from the

Union high command. Sigel’s order makes clear that although Union officers understood the magnitude of refugees, they degraded their value to instruments of military information at best or subjects of suspicion at worst.

As intended, Sigel’s order drew a wealth of information from refugees about Confederate

159 Lonn writes that “the value of the information betrayed by rebel deserters must have manifetly been great.” Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War, 105. 160 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 60, 846. 79 military movements; it did not, however, provide any more accurate information than before.

Within three weeks of his order, Sigel’s army moved southward up the Valley Pike from the northern Valley. In his dispatch informing Grant of his movement, he mentioned that

Longstreet’s Confederate Corps was operating in his front in Page County, but noted that such information was “only a report of a refugee.”161 Sigel’s regulation of refugees and their information was being put to use, but Sigel seemed wary of accepting refugees’ words outright; indeed, the report was entirely incorrect, as Longstreet’s Corps was over forty miles away in central Virginia. Despite his seeming misgivings about the reliability of this report, Sigel demonstrated an incredible cautiousness during his southward drive into the Shenandoah. Many attribute Sigel’s defeat to his decision to leave behind a significant part of his army at Strasburg to guard his rear, troops that could have turned the tide at New Market; the reports of a few refugees warning of a Confederate corps in the Valley might well have frightened the normally aggressive Sigel into fear.

Despite his defeat, Sigel continued receiving reports from refugees about Confederate forces. Sigel’s predecessor in command of the Department of West Virginia, Benjamin F. Kelly, was forwarding reports to Sigel as his battered army regrouped near Strasburg. Kelly informed

Sigel that refugees “report that Averell defeated Echols and Jackson on the 11th at Goshen… twenty-one miles southwest of Staunton. I fear this is not reliable, as Echols confronted you at

New Market on the 15th.”162 Kelly’s observation was correct, as John Echols had commanded one of the Confederate brigades that routed Sigel at New Market. The incidents during Sigel’s doomed campaign that spring reveal the ineffectiveness of the Union commander’s order as a

161 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 60, 1006. 162 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 70, 502 80 means of gathering intelligence; despite the additional screening, refugee reports were often very inaccurate, sometimes resulting in catastrophic strategic errors.

Prayer Meetings and Ice Cream Socials: Northern Public Mobilizations for Refugees, Summer

1864

While Sigel scrambled to reform his army, the Northern populace began to mobilize humanitarian aid for refugees such as those Sigel and other Union officers continued vaguely directing towards the “interior.” In New York City, citizens rallied to hold “A meeting for the relief of the suffering white population of the South” at the Cooper Institute, a high-profile venue, on June 10. The religious grounding of the North’s moralism manifests clearly in the

New York Times report of the meeting. After an opening prayer, a clergyman who had toured the

Southern battlefronts discussed “the sufferings of the Southern refugees within our lines, who have sacrificed all their possessions in their devotion to the Union.”163 The meeting announced the organization of prominent citizens and clergymen who would “take charge of the work of supplying the wants of the white population of the South.” Some fifteen reverends committed to the organization and a benediction concluded the business for the evening. The organization explicitly mentioned white refugees as the intended recipients of this aid; the repeated distinction of race was deliberate and the exclusion of Black refugees reveals racist overtones within

American society.

However, not all Northern organizations excluded Black refugees. Just four days after the meeting at the Cooper Institute, the “Strawberry, Ice Cream and Floral Festival in Aid of the

Freedmen and the Southern Loyal Refugees” commenced on Broadway Avenue. According to the Times, the three-day fundraiser should stir the hearts of “every patriotic man and woman in

163 “Union Refugee Meeting,” New York Times, June 10, 1864. 81 the City.”164 The paper did not stipulate exactly how the festival transpired—it took greater note of the cake and floral arrangements than the refugees the festival ostensibly benefitted—but this festival and others across the North illustrate the ways in which the home front interacted with the subject of refugees as a byproduct of the war.

Despite the honest efforts of the public to provide food and clothing for refugees, such gatherings were insufficient in assisting displaced people. As mentioned earlier, Americans entered the Civil War with an ideological understanding crafted by cultural factors such as religion, but history also molded perceptions. When war broke out in 1861, no major battles had occurred on American soil in almost half a century. The United States had not experienced a major invasion since the British incursions during the War of 1812; relatively few Americans could recall the devastation wrought by that conflict in 1861. The Mexican-American War from

1846 to 1848 was primarily an offensive conflict for the Americans and was fought mostly in

Mexican territory, thereby minimizing the number of American refugees during that conflict.

Thus, although Americans possessed a foggy and distant collective knowledge of refugees from their Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, very few Americans were familiar with how to care for American refugees.

Furthermore, international events just several years before the Civil War began influenced Americans’ understanding of modern warfare. The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 is most frequently discussed in conjunction with the American Civil War as a conflict that enlightened Americans about how wars were fought. From the Crimean War, American military officers learned the value of rifled firearms; doctors and nurses made great strides (or, more accurately, learned many painful lessons) in the treatment of sick and wounded soldiers; civilians

164 “Grand Festival in Aid of the Freedmen and the Southern Loyal Refugees,” New York Times, June 14, 1864. 82 learned how to form relief societies and aid the war effort from half a world away. The Northern public embraced the third point with great vigor; innumerable “Soldiers’ Relief” societies were founded to raise money, gather supplies for, and otherwise subsidize the wellbeing of Union troops.165 Indeed, some civilian initiatives garnered not only governmental attention, but also funding and authority. Most famously, the United States Sanitary Commission raised awareness and provided recommendations on soldier health in camp and in hospitals that had far-reaching effects.166 But these societies focused almost exclusively on soldiers; relief efforts for refugees paled in comparison.

This simple fact demonstrates an important development in the history of refugees in the

Civil War. On the one hand, Americans knew before the first shots rang out that the war would prompt significant refugee need; during the war, the reports of newspapers and soldiers provided the public with considerable information on and attention to the developing crisis involving refugees. On the other hand, Americans were aware that soldiers would be and were in need of supplementary materials in addition to those furnished by the government; they held massive rallies, fundraisers, and stitched untold millions of garments for the soldiers on the front lines.

But the civilian populaces of the North and the South never brought the two concepts—massive demand for refugee aid and considerable supply for such aid—together.

Americans had to choose where to focus their priorities—would they support their notions of Christian charity for refugees or their civic duty to patriotically support their country and their soldiers’ battlefield efforts? While not always in clear juxtaposition, Americans answered so resoundingly with the latter that the two options almost appear as if they believed

165 Nina Silber notes that white Northern women were more concerned with relief of soldiers than refugees, especially Black refugees. Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 137. 166 For more on the U.S.S.C., see William Quentin Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York City, NY: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956). 83 them to be mutually exclusive—the U.S. Sanitary Commission alone raised over $15 million and formed its endless army of volunteers into over 7,000 subsidiary societies.167 That the

Commission even existed at all demonstrates a degree of cooperation between civilians and their government for the purpose of assisting soldiers that never occurred for the sake of providing for refugees. Furthermore, refugees presented a complicated subject morally in the eyes of

Northerners. By late 1863, many Northerners endorsed the “hard war” policies ever after associated with David Hunter, William Sherman, and Philip Sheridan; they supported these policies when they were “orderly, surgical, and easy to justify.”168 Refugees diverse motivations, races, and loyalties complicated the morality of this binary, scientific mindset. If the first primary flaw of the response to the Civil War’s refugee crisis lay at the governments’ feet for not immediately forming agencies (as mentioned at the end of the previous chapter), the second factor in the escalating crisis lay with the prioritizations of the American public. By

1863, patriotism trumped moral conviction in the critical home front arena of wartime aid and refugees in the Shenandoah Valley and beyond continued to suffer.

Hunter’s Campaign: June 1864

After the debacle at New Market, David Hunter took command of Sigel’s battered Union army. Hunter renewed the offensive up the Valley, traveling entirely up its length and crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains to besiege the railroad and supply hub of Lynchburg. From the very beginning of his campaign in early June, Hunter’s pro-emancipation policies enflamed

Confederate civilians; Judith McGuire wrote that “The poor servants could not resist these intoxicating influences…” Even at this late date, the paternalism that typified antebellum

167 Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel, 297. Massey also contends that “Displaced civilians were never as well treated as the… soldiers.” Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 147. 168 Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, 181. 84 slaveholders’ perceptions of slavery appear in McGuire’s words: “They have gone to homeless poverty, an unfriendly climate, and hard work; many of them to die without sympathy… Poor, deluded creatures!”169

Along the way, Hunter ordered harsh reprisals on Southern sympathizers and institutions, such as when he ordered the burning of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. Cornelia

McDonald—who had fled Winchester to perceived safety in Lexington—was shocked at the depredations of Union troops. McDonald recalled that “the professors’ houses was set on fire, and the distracted families amid the flames were rushing about trying to save some of their things… Not even their books and papers could they save, and scarcely any clothes.”170 Reviled among Confederates, Hunter’s actions seemed justified among Unionists like Julia Chase who noted earlier in the campaign that Hunter had “several houses… destroyed, in consequence of guerillas firing from these houses upon the train as it passed down. We think it exactly right. If persons will harbor these outlaws, they much expect the consequences.”171

Confederate General Robert E. Lee, himself besieged by Grant’s forces in Richmond and

Petersburg, dispatched his dependable subordinate, Jubal Early, and his Second Army Corps to relieve the Lynchburg garrison—which included a number of male refugees who had fled to

Lynchburg and were impressed into service to defend their place of refuge—and drive Hunter from the Valley.172 Early pushed Hunter’s force back in a retreat that rapidly devolved into an ignominious flight of the Union army from Lynchburg northwestward across the West Virginia line. Confederates had driven many Union armies from the Valley many times before, but almost all of those withdrawals occurred in the northern Valley around Winchester, Martinsburg,

169 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, 278-279. 170 McDonald, A Woman’s Civil War, 188. 171 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 146. 172 Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 147. 85 or Harper’s Ferry. This was the first time a major exodus of refugees occurred in the southern

Valley.

Amidst all the chaos, Hunter made provisions for refugees who took flight with the

Union army. Special Orders Number 115, issued from Buchanan on June 15 as the Federals passed through the town during their withdrawal, ordered that any army wagons not utilized as ambulances for transporting wounded men would be “devoted to carrying north the families of refugees, white or colored.”173 Hunter’s order illustrates a remarkable difference from Union policy of just two years earlier; during the summer of 1862, General Banks had had to defend himself against reports that he had allowed refugees to make use of his army’s actions, the exact act which Hunter now undertook. Moreover, that Hunter intended to offer the same transportation benefits to white and Black families alike demonstrates an indication of racial equality shared by few of his compatriots. In truth, Hunter had always been something of a maverick within the Union high command. In spring of 1862, Hunter successfully advocated for the formation of Black regiments. Even more controversially, Hunter took Benjamin Butler’s logic regarding “contrabands of war” further while fighting along the Carolina coast. Hunter declared martial law and then declared all slaves in the Carolinas and Georgia to be free. The proclamation garnered massive backlash from nearly all quarters, and President Lincoln revoked the order as he had with Fremont’s 1861 proclamation, but Hunter’s reputation as a fervent abolitionist only grew in the subsequent years. Thus, while an anti-slavery order was not new for

Hunter, it was novel for a Union commander in the Shenandoah Valley.

Most Union officers and men, however, still exhibited the same scornfulness evident in earlier wartime writings. The 28th Ohio Infantry was among the regiments tasked with escorting the refugees under Hunter’s order, but its men and officers balked at the task. The regiment’s

173 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 70, 640. 86 commander informed his superiors that “This march from Staunton [westward into West

Virginia], in charge of prisoners, refugees, contrabands, sick, wounded, and a mixed mass of soldiers… was by far the heaviest task of duty ever heaped upon me and my cut up regiment.”174

If the Northern public sought to help Unionist refugees to fulfill their Christian duty, Union soldiers in the field still grumbled at the prospect.

With the Valley cleared of Union armies, Early elected to launch an offensive on

Washington, D.C. itself using the Valley’s mountains to screen his movement northward. As panic gripped the capital, United States Secretary of War Edwin Stanton continued receiving reports on Early’s dispositions, largely based off the reports of refugees. “Breckinridge,

Imboden, and Early, in command of Ewell’s corps, are reported as having passed through

Winchester north. The refugees from Martinsburg report the aggregate rebel forces at 15,000 to

30,000,” read the report to Stanton, which was correct in all its claims.175 Stanton was not the only individual receiving accurate information from refugees. On July 2, as Early’s army marched towards Washington, Sigel—stationed in Early’s path at Martinsburg with 6,000 men— received word from “a number of refugees” fleeing northward that “Early with three divisions was moving toward Strasburg… Although this report is not fully reliable, I have ordered all the stores which can be transported to be removed from here to Harper’s Ferry.”176 Sigel acknowledged the dubious reputation refugee reports held among Union officers by this point; still, he considered such reports reliable enough to warrant a major relocation of supplies based off such reports. Sure enough, Early’s advance passed by Martinsburg and continued to the outskirts of Washington itself before Early withdrew as Federal reinforcements swarmed to

174 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 70, 664. 175 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 71, 18. 176 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 70, 174-175. 87 defend the capital.

Meanwhile, other Union forces returned to the southern Valley in the absence of

Confederate forces. A lightning raid by Union cavalry through Buchanan involved a rare event—an outright attack on refugees by Union forces. Spying a wagon train, the Union commander ordered a squadron of cavalry “to capture a train of refugee wagons… The wagons were loaded with stores of provisions and forage, which was secured for my command.” The officer did not relay the fate of the refugee occupants, but the event represents the shifting war in the Shenandoah Valley. Despite gruffness and threats, Union soldiers behaved with considerable restraint during most encounters with Confederate civilians, especially refugees, with the exception of Milroy’s forces during the 1863 occupation of Winchester. Now in summer 1864,

Union soldiers were not only attacking civilians, but refugees, and not only attacking refugees, but admitting it matter-of-factly in their reports. The treatment of these refugees foreshadowed the harsh treatment of Southern civilians by Union forces in the Valley over the last year of the war.

Other incidents of note offer insight into prejudices against refugees at this time. Three years of inconsistent reports had discredited intelligence reports as sources of information in the

North. In fact, Union officers began qualifying such reports with descriptions of the refugees to indicate their reliability. Descriptions such as that of a Union colonel reporting to his superiors in Clarksburg of “An intelligent refugee, a British subject,” became increasingly common.177 As the war entered its closing stages, personal characteristics of refugees—particularly race— became increasingly prevalent in reports.

As summer drew to an end, Grant’s grand strategy in Virginia had been stymied; Sigel’s and Hunter’s drives up the Valley had been repulsed, as had Butler’s drive on Richmond;

177 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion, serial 71, 379. 88

Meade’s Army of the Potomac pinned down Lee’s army at Richmond and Petersburg, but the war in the Eastern Theater had reached a stalemate. In the fall, Grant would take drastic actions to break the stalemate, and the Valley would be the decisive theater in his plans.

Sheridan Takes Charge: August – December, 1864

In mid-August, Union armies had ground to a halt in the face of stubborn Confederate resistance around strategically-critical cities, including Petersburg and Atlanta. Grant understood the value of the Shenandoah Valley not only as the “breadbasket” supplying the Confederate armies, but a kind of military chessboard. After the bloodbaths in assaults on fortified

Confederate positions in June at Cold Harbor and Petersburg, Grant reasoned that he stood a better chance of destroying Confederate armies in open-field engagements. The Union high command established a new military jurisdiction, the Middle Military Division, a conglomerate of military departments in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia, under the unified command of Grant’s tenacious cavalry commander, Phillip Sheridan. Sheridan thus possessed operational control over all Union forces across three states for the sole purpose of driving up the Valley and smashing Early’s army at every opportunity. A major occurrence in the progression of military events, Sheridan’s appointment to the newly-created Middle Military

Division underscores an important development in the history of refugees in the conflict.

Three major shortcomings in the way that the two sides handled the refugee crisis are evident in the preceding pages. First, the governments of the warring nations failed to provide for or even to effectively organize any significant government organization to oversee the relocation and assistance of refugees. Second, the civilian populations of both sides did not collectively generate humanitarian aid efforts themselves in the same manner that they were for soldiers. The third shortcoming in the halfhearted endeavor to help refugees might well be 89 guessed based on the events in the Valley during the war—inability of the Union military to effectively handle the crisis.

As early as 1862, this problem appears on a large scale. Union General John A. Dix in southeastern Virginia found his jurisdiction tasked with caring for the 5,000 Black refugees around “Freedom’s Fortress”; he petitioned numerous Northern states to offer asylum to these refugees, but Northern politicians feared such a move “political suicide.”178 Despite increasing abolitionist sentiments in the North as the war progressed, almost all Northerners still maintained a wariness of freedmen.179 Although Black individuals certainly experienced an increased level of suspicion and prejudice, refugees of all races were almost invariably seen by soldiers as problems to be dealt with expeditiously rather than effectively. The officer in the 28th Ohio

Infantry who complained in his report of Hunter’s Valley Campaign about his task to escort refugees typified sentiments among soldiers from privates to the commanders of military departments and districts. Departments were administrative districts determined by the War

Department to provide great structure and clearer jurisdiction for army officers. Geographic boundaries were often determined by topographic features; as the Shenandoah Valley had relatively clear borders—mountains on three sides with the Potomac River on the north— defining the tasks and responsibilities of officers in the Valley should have been easy.

But bureaucratic red tape, politics, and military jockeying resulted in near-constant shifting of boundaries in the Shenandoah Valley. Over the course of the war, the Valley was variously part of twelve distinct Union military departments under some twenty different commanders. As if the cavalcade of officers was not confusing enough, the prescribed boundaries of these borders were almost constantly shifting; sometimes the Blue Ridge

178 Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, 139. 179 Silber, Daughters of the Union, 235. 90

Mountains represented a boundary, but sometimes the border shifted to be the roadbed of the

Valley Pike. Sometimes individual counties were identified to comprise a department, but still other times bodies of water like the Potomac or Shenandoah Rivers were used. Finally, the various departments all held ambiguous geographic names: “the Department of the Shenandoah,”

“the Department of West Virginia,” “the Mountain Department,” the list goes on. With the exception of Milroy and Hunter—who, as mentioned above, exacerbated the refugee crisis in many ways by ousting hundreds of Southern civilians from their homes—Union commanders came and went to quickly in the Shenandoah Valley that they hardly had time to consider the refugee crisis before they were reassigned elsewhere. If all else failed, Union officers had a tendency to simply order the refugees along outside of their lines—whether deeper into Union territory or into Confederate territory did not matter so long as they were outside of the perpetually moving borders determined by the War Department. The creation of the Middle

Military Division, then, seemed to solve at least part of this problem—it clearly placed Sheridan in command of all troops in the area.180 Grant always admired Sheridan for his ability to succeed where others had failed—that was, after all, why he had selected Sheridan to defeat Early in the first place. Perhaps Sheridan could bring some confusion out of the reigning chaos in the

Shenandoah Valley.

As Sheridan mustered his forces at Harper’s Ferry, refugees came into the Union lines.

Even at this date, these refugees believed that their displacement was not only nonpermanent, but would be brief. Refugees from Harper’s Ferry, Baltimore, and Martinsburg fled to Charles

Town, “hoping that they would be enabled to remain at least that near their homes, but last night these unfortunate gentlemen were compelled to come to the Ferry and seek safety still further

180 For an exhaustive reference book on military departments during the war, see John H. Eicher, David J. Eicher, and John Y. Simon, Civil War High Commands (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 91 on.”181 Many of the few enslaved individuals who still remained in the northern Valley also fled northward; Laura Lee curtly recorded that “Betty went off last night with the Yankees.”182

Confederate sympathizers likewise fled their homes in the northern Valley; lingering memories of Milroy’s occupation and especially the destruction wrought by Hunter’s campaign convinced many residents to pack up their belongings and flee before Union armies arrived. In mid- summer of 1864, thousands of civilians—Unionists and Confederates, Black and white— refugeed from the Winchester area. After three years of warfare in the region, the sheer number of refugees in August of 1864 amounted to a crisis.

Sheridan’s offensive began in late-August, pushed Early steadily back towards

Winchester, ultimately inflicting a crushing defeat on Early’s army on September 19th outside of that beleaguered town. The Confederates were routed, fleeing through the streets in panic; the

Union occupation that evening represented the final time that Winchester changed hands during the war. Three days later, Early’s army suffered another crushing defeat at Fisher’s Hill and withdrew all the way to Waynesboro in the southern Valley. With free reign of the Valley,

Sheridan’s forces instituted hard war policies intended to permanently break the spirit of the

Valley’s Confederate residents as well as eliminate its provender that could be used to feed

Confederate armies.183 From Harrisonburg to Strasburg, Sheridan’s army burned barns, mills, and any structure that could potentially contribute to the feeding of Confederate soldiers; for decades, Valley residents bitterly recalled “the Burning” much like residents of Georgia and the

Carolinas recalled William Sherman’s drive through their states.

The physical and psychological effect of the Burning on the pro-Confederate citizens of

181 “The Situation—A Magnificent Country,” New York Times, August 24, 1864. 182 Lee and Chase, Winchester Divided, 165. 183 For a more thorough discussion of “hard war” policies and how they foreshadowed later “total war” policies of the World Wars, see Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War. 92 the Valley was felt deeply, both in the Shenandoah and throughout the South. In the wake of

Hunter’s devastating campaign, McGuire bemoaned that

“There seems no touch of pity in the hearts of many of the Federal generals. Women and children are made homeless… poor old Virginia has been furrowed and scarred until her original likeness is gone. From the Potomac to the Roanoke… she could scarcely be recognized by her sons.”184 Like Sherman’s “March to the Sea” that began several weeks later, Sheridan’s devastation of the

Valley broke the will of many Confederate civilians to continue the fight.

Also like Sherman, Sheridan did not bother keeping his superiors in Washington closely informed of his precise movements, eliciting a deluge of uneasy messages from the War

Department inquiring about Sheridan’s whereabouts. In an uncommon occurrence, refugees actually confirmed the location of a Union army to Union authorities who had otherwise struggled to pinpoint Sheridan’s location in the Valley. “Two refugees came from Harrisonburg yesterday,” Secretary of War Stanton was assured on September 30, “Confirming Sheridan’s moving in direction of Staunton.”185 As his army moved northward towards Strasburg, leaving smoldering barns and mills in their wake, enraged Confederate forces nipped at the barnburners’ heels. Sheridan’s October 7 report to Grant reveals the former’s keen eye for perceiving refugee flight in the Valley.

From the vicinity of Harrisonburg over 400 wagon loads of refugees have been sent back to Martinsburg; most of these people were Dunkers, and had been conscripted. The people here are getting sick of the war; heretofore they have had no reason to complain, because they have been living in great abundance.” Sheridan was entirely correct—most of the fighting in the Valley had occurred in the northern quadrant in the vicinity of Winchester; until Hunter’s strike that June, no major Union army had penetrated into the Valley further than Staunton. Union sympathizers in the “upper” Valley—the

184 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, 283. 185 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 91, 221. 93 central and southern regions of the Valley—recognized that Sheridan’s army represented one of their best chances to date of taking shelter under the Union banner. Moreover, Sheridan’s report indicates that the cracks in the Confederate armor were widening into chasms; Grant’s strategy of making Confederate civilians tire of the conflict seemed to be working very well, especially with Sheridan’s successes.

That same evening, Sheridan dispatched a follow-up report upon making camp along the banks of Cedar Creek north of Strasburg in which he complained about the effectiveness of

Confederate guerilla raiders in picking off Federals who became separated from the main column of his army. Intriguingly, Sheridan described how “The refugees from Early’s army… are organizing guerrilla parties and are becoming very formidable… If I attempt to capture them by sending out parties, they escape to the mountains on fleet horses.”186 Clearly, the deserter bands that marauded the Valley in 1863 had only gained strength in the aftermath of Confederate defeats. Indeed, the Confederate Assistant Secretary of War bitterly complained that winter that

“So common is the crime, it has in popular estimation lost the stigma which justly pertains to it, and therefore the criminals are everywhere…”187 Sheridan’s reference to these deserters as simply “refugees” lends further evidence to the broadening of the definition of refugees during the war.

On October 19, Early launched a surprise attack on Sheridan’s army while the Union commander happened to be returning from a meeting in Washington. The dawn assault drove the entire Union army in confusion several miles northward until Sheridan, hearing the sound of gunfire from his lodging in Winchester, dramatically arrived on the scene. He rallied his reeling

186 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 90, 32. 187 James A. Campbell, Reminiscences and Documents Relating to the Civil War During the Year 1865, (Baltimore, MD: John Murphy & Co., 1887), 28. 94 troops and launched an afternoon counterattack that utterly smashed Early’s army, thus turning a potentially devastating defeat into a splendid Union victory. Lee recognized that Early’s army was finished as a fighting force and recalled four of Early’s five infantry divisions to Petersburg, leaving Early with a skeleton force to resist any renewed thrust down the Valley by Sheridan.

Grant, however, believed that Sheridan had done in two months what Union armies had been unable to do for three and a half years—decisively defeat Confederate forces in the Valley, destroy its supply of food, and break the spirit of its civilians. The ramifications of this final point were especially pertinent as Northerners renewed discussions about how refugees were to be treated.

Far less lauded in the newspapers, but no less important to the study of refugees in the

Shenandoah Valley, was the distribution of civilian aid for soldiers at this time. As mentioned earlier, the public rarely failed to provide relief for its soldiers, and the Union soldiers in

Sheridan’s army around Winchester was no exception. In October, 1864, the Medical Bureau and the U.S. Sanitary Commission had invested $10,000 into care for wounded Union soldiers recuperating in Winchester, despite poor management of these funds by the local administrators of those organizations.188 To be sure, Union soldiers benefitted from this aid, but it did little to succor the Unionists, Black refugees, and other refugees in Winchester and the surrounding countryside. While soldiers received the best medical care and provisions the North could supply, refugees in the same city struggled to maintain their health and (especially in the cases of

Black refugees) their freedom.

The baseless fear that Confederate agents were disguising themselves as refugees reared its head again in the weeks before the 1864 Presidential Election. Allegedly, “rebel agents in

Canada design to send into the United States, and colonize, at different points, large numbers of

188 Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel, 269. 95 refugees, deserters and enemies of the Government, with a view to vote at the approaching

Presidential election.” As such, all Southerners who entered Union states in the Department of the East between October 28 and November 3 were required to register themselves to thwart any attempts at election fraud.189 Unfortunately for the thousands of refugees in the United States, suspicion hardly abated in the weeks after the election. In a letter to the New York Times’ editor after a number of hotels caught fire allegedly as a result of pro-Confederate arsonists, one New

Yorker clamored for a congress of hotel owners to “refuse admission… to every person in any way connected, or reasonably supposed to be connected with the South.”190 For this New

Yorker, even formerly-enslaved individuals and Unionists were not to be trusted.

Distrust of refugees at this time was hardly limited to candid New York Times readers.

The Confederate Secretary of War, James Seddon, issued a notice on a number of matters regarding the conduct of the war. In a failed juggling act, Seddon acknowledged the existence of

Union sympathizers within the Confederacy—such as those in the Valley—while trying to downplay their numbers.

During the last year a few persons have gone to the United States without permission from the Confederate authorities. Some of these have no designs hostile to the Confederacy, but others leave as informers and as enemies. In some cases the act is treasonable, in others more venial. A law is necessary to punish the cases which do not amount to treason under existing laws.191 Despite the deteriorating military situation on all fronts, the Confederate Secretary of War deemed it sufficiently important to designate Unionist refugees traitors. As mentioned in

Chapter 2, the accuracy of refugees’ reports is not necessarily the most important consideration, but rather to what extent military authorities deemed them worth acting upon. Clearly, Secretary of War Seddon believed the subject one worthy of attention.

189 “Order From Gen. Dix,” New York Times, October 30, 1864. 190 “The Rebels Among Us Let Them Be Watched,” New York Times, November 28, 1864. 191 “Southern News,” New York Times, November 15, 1864. 96

Like many Confederate officials, Seddon demonstrates impressive self-delusion in considering the war far from over. The reelection of Abraham Lincoln in November all but guaranteed the war would be sustained. For many soldiers, civilians, and policymakers on both sides, the end of the war was in sight.

“Feed Upon the Enemy”: January – October 1865

With only paltry Confederate resistance present, Union authorities possessed free reign of the Valley; with virtually no havens for Confederate-sympathizing refugees, those individuals now came under Union attention as well. But rather than making use of the termination of active campaigning in the region for the first time in three and a half years, the Union high command only increased the number of refugees. Formerly, refugeeing had spiked during times of active campaigning and receded as refugees found shelter when battling armies moved out of the area.

But in a concerning break from precedent, the number of refugees did not decrease after Early’s army withdrew in late-October. Far from abating, the crisis increased during the final weeks of

1864. Nine days after the decisive Union victory at Cedar Creek, Sheridan ordered eighty

Winchester civilians expelled from the town.192 Similar events occurred throughout the region as

Union forces cracked down on Confederate sympathizers. So pronounced was the suffering, that some Confederates such as Judith McGuire vainly hoped that the plight of refugees in the Valley might inspire Confederate soldiers to fight harder to prevent other regions from suffering as the

Shenandoah. “I believe that had Georgia one tithe of the experience of the ruined, homeless

Virginians,” McGuire opined, “She would exert every fibre of her frame to destroy the enemy; she would have no delusive hope of escape.”193

Despite the inevitability of Confederate military collapse in the subsequent months, the

192 Chase and Lee, Winchester Divided, 174. 193 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, 317. 97 crisis in the Valley and elsewhere only further devolved. Refugees continued to seek any kind of assistance from the government; Sheridan’s gutting of the Valley exacerbated the food shortages and soaring inflation plaguing the South; a number of refugees from the area arrived in

Washington citing scarcity of provisions in the South as their primary cause for leaving home.194

Just days after the 1864 Election, the American Union Commission issued a plea for assistance across the North “in behalf of the suffering refugees of the South.”

[T]he population, first exhausted by military exactions, have been plundered and stripped by guerillas; at length, abandoning their famine-smitten homes, they crowd within our lines. They arrive in the utmost possible destitution, huddle together in wretched places of refuge, and sink under want, exposure and disease… The […] recent devastation of the Shenandoah Valley, have made a frightful increase of this misery and thrown fresh thousands of houseless and naked creatures upon Pennsylvania […] for relief. An ordinary famine scarcely involves such suffering. The famine-stricken have homes. It is impossible to depict this misery of the homeless… What can be done? […] We plead for the contribution from every Christian Church… We entreat every pastor to give us his influence and aid to this end… The Union Commission has the approval of the President, and the sanction of the War Department, and can command Government facilities for transportation. […] Our generosity will save the lives of our friends and abate the rancor of our enemies.195 Much can be made of the Commission’s appeal, but the last sentence indicates the reconciliatory ambitions of at least some Northern organizations, even though peace was six months away.

But hard times impacted the whole country; just two days after Christmas, the New York

Times ran an article that criticized the Federal government’s handling of the refugee crisis during the war. The article began by commending the government’s “honorable” endeavors to feed and provide for refugees (both Black and white), but the author’s true colors reveal themselves quickly enough as he lambasts the “immense system of charity… now sustained by the

Government, toward both poor whites and blacks.” The author repeated the common reasoning

194 “News From Washington,” New York Times, December 11, 1864. 195 “The Southern Refugees,” New York Times, November 23, 1864. 98 at the time that charitable giving made “paupers” of dependents.196 As evidenced so many times during the war, Northerners’ tolerance of refugees ended where refugees’ inability to labor began.

Despite appeals from pro-Union relief societies, such as the American Union

Commission, that sought reconciliation and humane treatment towards enemies, few Northerners supported charitable giving to individuals fleeing an enemy nation. Henry Halleck, the former

Union general-in-chief, was among the Northern policymakers who not only urged harsh treatment, but understood the power of controlling food over enemy civilians. Phillip

Sheridan—as tough on the enemy as any commander—exhibited misgivings about the severity of his army’s destructive acts on the Valley’s residents as the coldest weeks of the winter began in the northern Valley. Thousands of Southerners in the northern Valley were literally starving in front of his army’s eyes and even Sheridan urged compassion in a dispatch to Halleck; might he not provide some small amount of food to residents of the Valley between his army and

Staunton? Halleck’s January 27, 1865, response reveals much about how the Union high command viewed Southern refugees.

…no authority can be given for the subsistence of rebel families outside of our lines, nor even within, any longer than till they can be removed or sent to their friends and natural protectors. The disloyal people of the Shenandoah south of Winchester and outside of our lines have been, and are now, at full liberty to join friends in the rebel service or in other places in the rebel territory. The disloyal within our lines should be sent South to feed upon the enemy. Loyal refugees should be temporarily assisted and sent North where they can earn a livelihood.197 In his final comment, Halleck exemplifies the same rhetoric seen previously in the December

Times article and throughout the war—that refugees were, first, to be assisted and, second, to be employed. Halleck’s comment about refugees being sent away “to feed upon the enemy” evokes

196 “Government Charities,” New York Times, December 27, 1864. 197 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 96, 276 99 parasitic imagery that was deliberate. For Halleck, refugees were entitled to charity under

Christian doctrine with the expectation that they would find work promptly. Any refugees who did not find work, especially if they were enemies, were drains on the Union war effort that should be expelled to drain the enemy’s war effort. In either case, refugees were not people, but instruments of war. Halleck was not a disgruntled enlisted man; he was the chief of staff and general-in-chief before Grant assumed that role in 1864. That one of the highest-ranking soldiers and government bureaucrats still defined refugees along lines of loyalty in 1865 reveals how little had changed since 1861 regarding how important allegiance was to attaining status as a refugee.

Sheridan immediately got to work to fulfill Halleck’s orders. Sheridan continued to order

Confederate sympathizers removed beyond his army’s lines around Winchester, including Laura

Lee’s family in late February. Troopers escorted the family seven miles southward before returning to their own lines; they intended to find shelter in Staunton, but were taken in by an acquaintance in Newtown instead.198 Just six weeks before the end of the war, and despite an almost total cessation of hostilities in the Valley, refugees still abounded.

Not all Washington bureaucrats saw things as coldly as did Halleck and Sheridan. Since the fall of Atlanta in the summer of 1864, an eventual Union victory in the war seemed inevitable; accordingly, legislators began formulating provisions to prepare for the postwar period. In February 1865, the creation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned

Lands was announced. The Bureau’s name alone precisely identifies three of the most pressing legal concerns the national government anticipated for the end of the conflict. Indeed, the

Freedmen’s Bureau (as it came to be known) was the first United States government agency

198 Lee and Chase, Winchester Divided, 184. 100 established for humanitarian purposes.199 For four years, refugees—including large number of freedmen—had sought shelter in Northern cities, military installations, and armies. Although numbers are difficult to tabulate, the sheer increase in newspaper reports in late-1864 about refugees reveal that far from an abating crisis, the number of refugees had probably never been higher at any point in the war than it was in its final months. Although the government hoped that the war would end soon, they could not forecast with any degree of precision when or how it would end. Thus rather than seeing the “Freedmen’s Bureau” as a product of the end of the war, it is more meaningful and accurate to understand it as a reaction during the war to a crisis that was reaching unsustainable proportions; indeed, the Bureau was established as a subsidiary of the War Department.

Additionally, the bill establishing the Bureau was very broad; it sought to provide for the management of “all abandoned lands, and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel states.” The Bureau did not fully establish itself until after the war was concluded; like the Emancipation Proclamation, it could not begin operating in areas still under

Confederate control which were precisely the areas most in need of it. Until several months after the war ended, the Middle Military Division still held jurisdiction over the Shenandoah Valley, thereby lessening the importance and effectiveness of the Bureau in the Valley until after the war’s conclusion. Still, the formation of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865 indicates a significant milestone in the history of the United States’ humanitarian policy.

In March 1865, the Confederacy was in its death throes. On March 2nd, the Union

Middle Military Division forces annihilated the last of Early’s army at Waynesboro; Early’s chief topographical engineer, the vaunted cartographer Jedediah Hotchkiss, himself slept in a

“refugee camp” that he described with such casualness as to imply such camps as being

199 Manning, Troubled Refuge, 263. 101 commonplace.200 With Confederate resistance in the Shenandoah Valley all but nonexistent, the remaining diehard Confederate sympathizers folded. After traveling up the Valley, from

Winchester to Waynesboro, one Union newspaper correspondent opined that “Nine-tenths of the people of Virginia would vote themselves back into the Union to-day…”201 True or not, the devastation wrought by Sheridan had certainly broken the will of the Valley’s residents to resist

Union arms. Furthermore, although Sheridan had certainly brought some order out of the military chaos in the Valley through consolidating his forces and crushing Confederate resistance, his hard war policies greatly exacerbated the refugee crisis in the Valley. Despite his aptitude for battlefield command, Sheridan proved no different than his predecessors in his handling refugees.

The end came quickly for the Confederate military. On April 2nd, Grant’s forces overran

Lee’s defenses at Petersburg, prompting a weeklong westward retreat of Lee’s army that ended with its surrender at Appomattox Court House. Two weeks later, the second largest Confederate army under Joseph Johnston stacked its arms at Greensboro, North Carolina. With the dominos beginning to fall, Union officers finally began to think of what the postwar era would hold. An officer in the Middle Military Division suggested that Unionist refugees in the Charles Town and

Martinsburg area could finally return to the home which they had left four years earlier with the belief they would return in several weeks.202

Despite jubilation over the Confederate surrenders in April that signified the traditional end of the Civil War, many questions remained. Refugees still filled cities and the countryside, especially around the Shenandoah Valley, Memphis, Tennessee, and Cairo, Illinois. The Bureau

200 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 95, 516. 201 “Sheridan’s Raid,” New York Times, March 23, 1865. 202 United States, War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888-1922), serial 97, 804. 102 of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was still in its infancy; implementation of effective strategy remained in the future. As such, many officials on both sides took matters into their own hands. In Lexington, the quartermaster “divided among those persons who had been connected with the army the stores and provisions that were left there.”203 Even Union officials looked on the refugees of their former enemies with pity. One week after Lee’s surrender, Union officers in Richmond and other Virginia cities offered refugees railroad passes to return to their homes, a kind-hearted gesture out of touch with reality for many refugees. As McGuire bewailed, “alas! To their homes! How few of us have homes!”204 It often took considerable time for refugees to return to their homes—those that remained—or return to their livelihoods; in at least one case, the winding road home for one Southern family in Louisiana encompassed six months.205 As late as October of 1865—six months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court

House—some refugees struggled for basic necessities. McDonald remembered at that time that she “burst out crying” as she confided to a friend that “We are starving, I and my children.”206

Thus, the hope of many people for a return to some sense of normalcy within weeks of the war ending did not prove realistic.

Furthermore, normalcy was not always conducive to wellbeing, especially for recently emancipated but still disenfranchised former slaves. A surge in racist attitudes in the immediate weeks after the war’s conclusion is best exemplified in a Pittsburgh Chronicle article from April

15, the very day of Lincoln’s death. The article describes a number of Black refugees in western

Pennsylvania who allegedly insisted on returning southward to work on the plantations from which they had fled. The author disparages these men with not only racist stereotypes, but the

203 McDonald, A Woman’s Civil War, 234. 204 McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, 357. 205 Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, 274. 206 McDonald, A Woman’s Civil War, 244. 103 same tropes regarding laziness as a result of charity exhibited by so many Northerners when describing refugees. The author describes them as “Entirely ignorant, their mental capacities almost a blank, disgustingly filthy, ragged and swarming with vermin, hating work and seemingly without purpose or prospect in life, they are just about as low in the scale of humanity as any beings…” Furthermore, fleeing enslavement individually (as many Black people did during the war) often meant separation from family. The sheer size of the number of refugees and the extent of the chaos after the war often made finding family difficult. As late as April

1866, Philadelphia newspapers were still printing advertisements from a Black man who fled

Shenandoah County five years earlier and was still looking for his family.207 Clearly, the plight of refugees was far from over; indeed, a host of new challenges had arisen with the end of the war.

207 Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South, ed. Catherine Clinton (New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), 24.

Conclusion

The Shortcomings of Civil War Refugee Policy

Hindsight allows the modern reader to recognize nineteenth century Americans’ flawed perceptions of refugees. But Americans--from the organizers of the fundraising ice cream socials to Abraham Lincoln--crafted their understanding of refugees according to the world around them. Cultural factors, particularly ideals of Christian charity, determined how

Americans viewed individuals who often seemed impossibly distant from their homes in New

York or Ohio. Government officials, born into the same world and culture, were hardly more nuanced or informed on the realities confronting refugees and refugee policy. In that sense, perception of refugees strongly reflected their equally-flawed perceptions of war itself: it would be over quickly, it would be clean and clear, and a simple military solution was the most effective means of solving the “problem.” Of course, each of those assumptions proved tragically erroneous. Far from becoming more effective, the Union and Confederate leaders appeared increasingly inept at handling the crisis occurring in the Shenandoah Valley and throughout the country. The simple fact that it was only forty-seven months into a forty-eight month war that a Bureau designed to assist refugees was created reveals the extent of governmental folly.

But the reasoning that government bureaucrats impeded assistance to refugees only goes so far. Military forces in the Valley, on both sides, consistently manipulated refugees, using them as sources of intelligence. The most obvious problem apparent from the refugee crisis in the Shenandoah Valley appears that military leaders were woefully untrained for how to help refugees, even those who sympathized with their side. Perhaps the single most-damaging action

104

105 consistently undertaken by Union officers was to simply “pass the buck” when situations arose.

With the whole country divided into military districts and departments, Union commanders in particular did little to regulate or accommodate refugees; they simply ordered them out of their lines--north, south, east, or west. When the refugees passed out of their jurisdiction, Union officers reasoned, they were no longer of their concern. The suffering of refugees became extreme, their numbers swelled, and by the beginning of the war’s final year the Federal government in particular found itself under increased pressure to do something, but four years of neglect had damaged the situation so thoroughly that it took well into 1866 before the war ended for displaced people.

The identifiable problem--stated succinctly--was that Americans fundamentally underestimated the complicated nature of warfare. More specifically, Americans—from the bombardment of Fort Sumter through the Burning of the Shenandoah Valley—identified refugees by their race, their gender, and their allegiance. Despite considering white Unionist men as refugees in writing, the Northern public and press expected these men to fight in the very conflict they were fleeing. Black refugees—regardless of their gender or allegiance—were almost automatically excluded from refugee status along the basis of their race. Finally, loyalties and motivations were rarely binary in the Valley, just as they are rarely binary now; to the very end of the war, few officials on either side acknowledged as much. Deserters presented an especially perplexing case for Americans as both their gender and perceived loyalties complicated their status in American newspapers and among civilians. But the American public were not the only ones who underestimated the complexities of war and refugees; government officials, uncertain of what to do, simply deferred the matters on the ground to military commanders. These officers themselves had no better idea of how to handle such situations; 106 they either employed refugees for their war effort, drove them back into enemy lines (as Halleck suggested to Sheridan), or simply pushed them into another officer’s military department. And while the public and many soldiers often pitied refugees, their actions too frequently ended there.

What, then, can be learned from the experiences of refugees in the Shenandoah Valley during the American Civil War? First, that systemic cultural factors influence not only governmental policy, but the line between civilian government policy and military policy. For many Americans in 1861, familiarity with refugees began with Genesis and ended at

Revelations. Regardless of how they learned about refugees, in almost all cases they pictured refugees along lines of gender, age, and allegiance--extremely flawed assumptions that totally overlooked massive demographics like Black and white pro-Union men and deserters.

Ultimately, even these cultural influencers were abandoned in the name of patriotism; quite simply, Americans in the 1860s valued perceived patriotism in the form of soldier aid as a cause more worth of their attention and efforts, while they understood refugees as subjects of little more than pity. In order to help refugees, then, Americans must first recognize individuals as refugees, regardless of gender, race, or nationality.

Second, the governments on each side simply failed to establish civilian agencies with anything approaching competence; in order to adequately assist refugees, clearly-defined and purposefully-established agencies become indispensable. The construction of dozens of government-supported relief organizations such as the United States Sanitary Commission confirms that the government possessed the ability to formulate relief at this time. Unfortunately for refugees, one can only wonder what might have been achieved if the Bureau of Refugees,

Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands had been established more than two months before war’s end. 107

The governments compounded these errors by deferring to military officers who were no more competent and oftentimes even less willing to offer solutions. This third lesson--that military officers in regions that see significant refugees should be aware of the complex nature of refugee movements--is utterly indispensable in caring for displaced people. A lack of accountability permeated among Union commanders in the region due to the constant shuffling of department boundaries, commanders, and jockeying for command. That official Union policy under Halleck as late at the winter of 1864-1865 was to turn away noncombatant civilians under suspicion of disloyalty represents a darker reality than many care to admit.

Refugees in the Shenandoah Valley experienced the Civil War in ways both fascinating to the modern observer and important to the historian of the conflict. Far from a footnote, refugees influenced the ways in which armies conducted campaigns and understood their enemy through intelligence reports. In many cases, as with the deserter communities, they even definitively resisted formal military might through irregular warfare and terrorization, defying simplistic understandings. But perhaps most importantly, the shortcomings of the governments and militaries in addressing the refugee crisis reveals that the United States has struggled to properly care for displaced people in the past. To craft a more accommodating future, the lessons taught to the modern observer by Civil War refugees must be considered, analyzed, and implemented.

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