TL;DR—The life of the prodigal son of Fox’s Mills reminds us of the inherent complexity of people living on Difficult Run in the 19th century.
The Real War
Writing ten years after Appomattox, Walt Whitman warned us.
The poet laureate of the antebellum/post-war divide rightly contended that “the real war would never get in the books.” Whitman worked across a traumatic threshold in American history that closed with a narrative crystallization which served to scab over the horror and confusion of the lived war.
As a poet, Whitman was rightly concerned about the consequences of a memorialization that privileged big and simple ideas of the war. This tendency to simplify, Whitman contended, had the unintended effect of obscuring a tapestry woven from small and complex psychic landscapes. This miniature phenomenological topographies were already melting away from the war generation against the warmth and tumult of mass media, industrialization, and the reductionism of the Gilded Age.
“Such was the war,” penned Whitman. “Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutia; of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual soldier of 1862-’65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say, will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be.”1
These words came from the pen of a man who self-described as a constellation of multitudes. The connection, if not obvious, is intuitive. Whitman’s sense of self and his grasp of the substance of the Civil War intersected in a notion that words were still insufficient to reproduce either accurately.
The people who fought and lived through the war were not statuesque. They were cast in bronze much later in an attempt to make sense of what had transpired. The war generation itself was not so simple and not so easily reduced.
Understanding these people requires a healthy dose of the Whitman perspective—a hunger for the multitudinous and a certain comfort with contingency. Only in the realm of possibility and ambiguity does life and its infinite could-have-beens congeal into something approaching the reality of lived experience.
No figure along Old Bad Road stretches the shadowy framework of complex biography and contradictory personage more than Amos Fox.
The real Amos Fox has never and will never get in the books. Too much has been lost.
What remains is a raft of biographical information relating snippets from the life of the eldest son of the Fox milling family. Every additional fact seems to bring the mosaic of his life further out of focus. In selective retrospective, contradiction was the guiding principle of his life.
Born rich in the comparatively poor Difficult Run valley, Amos was often cash-strapped. The idyllic milling landscape that lined his family’s pockets only drove him away into the faster life of nearby towns and cities. There, fortune forever eluded him. Brash, outspoken, hot-headed, and chivalric, Amos surrounded himself with secessionist friends and ideology in the years before Fort Sumter, yet failed to muster with his militia company and was never found in Confederate service. The war nonetheless treated him unkindly. His livelihood evaporated and his family imploded. Amidst the spartan retrenchment of Post-War Fairfax, Amos Fox sought relief in the escapism of bacchanalia. Despite a total want of military service, he took on the appearance of a tough guy and alienated the community of his birth in the process. He eventually found a place for himself in Alexandria, but was a constant presence in Fairfax County. Though his name never graced the fastidious rolls for Mosby’s Rangers, his obituary claimed otherwise.
The Shape of Amos Fox
Who was this man?
He was a twin. Likely the older of the two, because James Amos Fox bore the privileged family name of his father’s father. The original Amos Fox moved the family from New Jersey in the 1780s and purchased land along Difficult Run where he created a successful milling business.
Unlike most of the tenant farmers or low-earning property owners whose meager agricultural products patronized Fox’s Mills, we cannot be sure of the circumstances surrounding the birth of Amos and his twin brother, Frank.
The Fox family had money. With money came prestige and connections in Alexandria. It is likely these connections helped Amos and Frank’s father familiarize himself with Jane Millan, their mother. Jane was herself born into a wealthy family. The Millans owned a substantial plot of prime farming acreage near what is now the Fair Lakes development and the county dump. Jane Millan’s own familial prestige probably brought her into contact with her first husband, Harvey Summers, who was himself the scion of a wealthy land-owning family.
Neither her upbringing nor the death of her first husband in 1820 nor her marriage to Gabriel Fox found Jane flirting with poverty. To the contrary, we know from the memoir of her granddaughter, Sally Summers Clarke, that Jane Millan Summers Fox maintained a house in Alexandria until the outbreak of the Civil War. In fact, there was a great to-do at Fox’s Mills when the relatively sophisticated urban slaves Jane owned met the “country” slaves she kept along Difficult Run.2
Amos and Frank’s father owned Squirrel Hill, a prime home that has been integrated into a modern structure along today’s Lyrac Street, not far from the location of Fox’s Mills. Still, Jane Fox’s children from her first marriage were born in Alexandria. It is not known how she chose to deliver Amos and Frank.
If Amos wasn’t born in Fox’s Mills, he was certainly raised there. The Fox Family enjoyed a near monopoly on land and infrastructure for much of the mid-1800s. Many others moved in to the area, farmed its fields, and harvested timber from its hillsides, but no surname meant more than Fox. Multiple branches of the original line forked and set about in developing a couple thousand acres of productive grazing lands. Better still, Amos and Frank’s father and his three mills were well positioned to purchase raw wheat, wool, and hardwood to be sold at a premium for export at Alexandria.
Sarah Summers Clarke’s account of pre-war Fox’s Mills depicts a pastoral wonderland rich with bullfrogs and sunny afternoons set amidst the bucolic rhythms of prosperous farm life. This life captured neither Amos Fox’s imagination nor aspirations.
In 1844, when Amos and Frank were thirteen, their father, Gabriel, died. A glowing obituary depicted a man who was both an astute entrepreneur and a generous humanitarian.3 Four years later, their remarried for the third and final time. Her ultimate groom was Richard Johnson, himself a widower whose family’s sprawling Fauquier County wheat holdings propelled him into Alexandria society.4
Richard Johnson was an adroit administrator of Jane’s resources. He became guardian for the Fox children and saw to the annual leasing of their inherited slaves. Eventually, he became the operator of Fox’s Mills.
An awkward situation emerged as Amos and Frank grew into adulthood. Dickering about an inheritance materialized in a bizarre 1850 legal case, by which Jane Fox sued her children for administrative control over her deceased husband’s assets.5 There are connections between Frank, Fox’s Mills, and his new stepfather that extend well into the war years, but Amos’ connection with the Difficult Run Basin appears to have withered in the years after his father’s death.
The 1850 census records both Frank and Amos living as boarders in Fairfax Court House. Amos is listed as a barkeeper. Thus begins the first pivot of Amos Fox’s adult life. While his twin brother became a farmer, Amos was drawn to hospitality and nightlife, which are generous ways of framing a constitutional thirst for a faster lifestyle premised on alcohol.
Amos would have been no stranger to liquor. His family manufactured it at their mill, as was commonplace anywhere in the United States where grain was processed. An 1817 sale listing for Fox’s Mills lists “a new Stone Distillery, 36 feet square, supported by a never failing spring of water.”6
It would be extraordinary if young Amos had access to this facility and its products for his entire childhood but only sampled alcohol for the first time when he moved to Fairfax Court House in his late teens.
Either way, Amos found both a new home and a new role model at the Union Hotel in Fairfax Court House.
A barkeeper position at the Union—later the Willcoxon Tavern—would have afforded Amos a ringside seat for the dramatic circus that unfolded across the street at the county court house. More to the point, Amos was under the tutelage of the single greatest source of drama in Fairfax Court House—Union Hotel proprietor, James W. Jackson.7
Given the turn James Jackson’s life would take in the next decade, the choice of name for his establishment was a curious one. Jackson was a proud Southerner and a staunch secessionist. Shortly after John Brown’s Harpers Ferry Raid in 1859, Jackson began scouring the county for abolitionists, even going so far as to undertake a citizen’s arrest of two men he found circulating Hinton Helper’s book, which had incensed many Southerners with its incisive critique of slave-holding society.8
A December 1860 court order named Jackson as a captain of the night patrol and put twenty nine privates under his command. Jackson apparently declined the honor, but the statement was out there: Jackson was the sort of guy local secessionists would empower to command a roving pack of armed men designed to meted out justice to any would-be abolition-inclined terrorists thought to be lurking in the shadows of Fairfax County.9
On January 21, 1861, a special legislative election convened in Fairfax Court House to determine who would represent the district in the General Assembly. The fire-eater candidate, Alfred Moss, eventually won the race, but not before an extremely contentious scene played out on the Court House steps. Prominent members of Fairfax society wielded pistols in an attempt to intimidate would-be Unionist voters. Among those who freely dealt in violence that day was Jim Jackson. Unionist and future Federal Scout Jonathan Roberts remembered that Jackson and “his gang of bullies” were throwing their weight around outside the Fairfax County Court House.10
There is a strong possibility that Amos Fox was among this gang of bullies. Over the previous ten years, he shaped his life to intersect that of his employer and mentor, Jim Jackson. We also know that Amos was an eager recruit to the Fairfax Riflemen, the local pro-Southern militia that coalesced in 1859 to anticipate the coming war.11 The kinetic posturing of the pre-war period appealed to him.
Less obvious is a pattern of questionable financial decisions, by which Amos began to leverage inherited property and family prestige to secure luxury goods consistent with someone desperate to ingratiate themselves with a status-conscious impresario.
Liquidation was the order of the day in 1858 when Amos sold Lloyd Kidwell his inherited plot of sixty acres abutting Fox’s Lower Mill.12 A year prior, Fairfax courts ordered Amos to remand $321.62 to notorious lender JC Gunnell, from whom Amos had borrowed the funds a year earlier.13 In the same month he earned six hundred dollars from a land sale, Amos was similarly court-ordered to pay yet another local loan shark, JR Grigsby, the princely sum of $1231.14
Term papers from still another debt case from 1860 include a list of fine clothing items that Amos Fox had purchased on bad credit from William Massey.15
We will never fully know how the coins that slipped through Amos’ hand were spent. A helpful hint comes at the place where Jim Jackson, Amos Fox, and doomed hospitality establishments intersect with the main line of American history.
Sally Summers Clarke, memoirist of antebellum Fox’s Mills and niece to Amos Fox, described her Uncle as a “partner” to Jim Jackson. By early 1861 the two men were co-proprietors of the Marshall House in Alexandria, Virginia.16
In what was potentially one of the most boneheaded business decisions of all time, Jim Jackson and Amos Fox, known hotheads and secessionists, moved their hotel operation in 1861 from the relative safety of Fairfax Court House, preferring instead to open a new venture in 1861 just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. in Alexandria, Virginia. An intensely optimistic advertisement in the Alexandria Gazette from January of 1861 promised that Jackson and Company were “prepared to receive, and entertain in true Virginia style, his friends and the public generally” at the corner of King and Pitt Streets.17
In a sense, Jim Jackson was prepared to receive in true Virginia style. The already prominent four story structure was quickly affixed with a twenty foot flag pole, upon which Jackson rigged a large Confederate flag that could be seen waving from across the river in the Federal capitol.
On May 24, 1861, Union infantry crossed the river in force to respond to Virginia’s secession ratification the day prior. A dashing Colonel named Elmer Ellsworth led a small detail of Yankees into the Marshall House, where Ellsworth pulled down Jackson’s Confederate flag, and began to descend to the troops waiting below. On a second-story landing, Col. Ellsworth encountered Jim Jackson. The hotel owner unloaded a shotgun into Ellsworth’s chest, killing him instantly.
As a reward, Jackson took a musket ball to the face at point blank range from Union Private Francis Brownell who then proceeded to bayonet Jackson repeatedly, hurtling Jackson’s corpse down the stairs.
We know Amos Fox was around the Marshall House that day because one of the most vivid memories of Sally Summers Clarke’s childhood was Amos careening in his buggy down to Fox’s Mill with Jackson’s widow and daughter on board, all soaked in his dead partner’s blood.18
If Amos had leveraged his connections and inheritance to buy into the Marshall House, any hope of recouping those funds died with Jackson. The money was soon the least of Amos’ worries. His association with Jackson and his conduct over the previous years earned him a reputation as an outspoken secessionist.
Given that he was already a standing corporal in the militia company that would become the 17th Virginia, Company D, Amos Fox was a prime candidate to serve in the Confederate Armies. However, he did not.19
This decision was never justified on public record. It is somewhat curious given the honor society in which Amos was raised and his own apparent penchant for harsh speech, young Amos eschewed military service.
Maybe Amos was physically unwell. He had flipped his buggy in 1859, an accident that rendered him temporarily “insensible.”20
Or perhaps he beat his twin brother, future Mosby Lieutenant Frank Fox, to the act of guerrilla warfare by surreptitiously taking to the shadows to avenge his fallen business partner and mentor. A news account from The National Republican in June of 1861 reported the murder of Union pickets who were being killed off by “two brothers of the late James Jackson…who are said to be finely mounted and…know every cow trail in the vicinity of the Untied States lines in Fairfax and Alexandria counties.”21The paper was mistaken—Jackson’s brothers were not in Fairfax County in 1861. Was it Amos?
Salient facts demyth both possibilities. Many an ill man took the field to serve their country in 1861. An injury significant enough to preclude service would have also disqualified one from the rigors of opening a demanding business like a hotel. So too, Amos’ identity as the long-anonymous picket sniper that haunted Federal lines in 1861 is dubious. As we will see, a pattern of braggart behavior that haunted him through most of his life almost assures us that had Amos done anything valiant during the war, he would have told someone sooner rather than later.
Instead, we have to consider the possibility that Amos Fox, like many a sharp-tongued barfly, was a coward. It would be tragic if true, because few men in Fairfax County were worse treated by Federal authorities during the war than Amos.
In August of 1862 as the Army of Northern Virginia began to churn towards Fairfax County, Federal authorities rounded up known secessionists, including Amos and his two younger brothers, George and Albert.22
A little over a year later, Amos was again arrested and locked up in the Old Capitol Prison as part of a larger clean out of secessionist citizens along Difficult Run.23 Between these two bookend arrests was a third and more intriguing stint in Federal prison. The circumstances of this middle event deserve scrutiny.
When John Mosby came to town in January of 1863, he began to accumulate the services of Fairfax locals who knew their way off the beaten path in the marginal spaces where Federal cavalry dared not tread. One such local was Amos’ brother-in-law, John Barnes, who joined the Mosby command in early March of 1863.
Barnes was with the Gray Ghost when Mosby famously slipped in to Fairfax Court House on March 9, 1863 and captured Union Brigadier General Edwin Stoughton.24
In a trend that continued well after the Fairfax Raid, Mosby and his men preyed upon Federal Cavalry stretched out on the Ox Road between Fairfax Court House and Frying Pan. Even though Mosby likely entered Federal lines farther south on a line consistent with today’s Chantilly High School, the families at Fox’s Mill and their political leanings soon fell under closer scrutiny.
One week after the March 9 raid, Amos Fox, who was then “well known to many of our citizens,” again became an unconsenting guest of the Federal government as part of a larger round up of prominent secesh locals.25
When Fairfax historian emeritus Patricia Hickin fleshed out these arrests, her wording created an interesting frame. “In 1863,” wrote Hickin, “Joshua C. Gunnell as well as Amos Fox were arrested and taken to the Old Capitol Prison.”26
Many locals were arrested that year. It’s that these two would be bulked together, especially given that Amos’ twin, Frank, and their stepfather, Richard Johnson, were arrested the following day for “acting as Confederate videttes.”27
This charge is far more specific and serious than merely harboring Confederate sympathies. It’s curious that these men were considered as kinetic assets for John Mosby while their brother has been lumped in with prominent lenders and first citizens of Fairfax.
It’s interesting to note that Gunnell owned a house near the one from which General Stoughton was snatched, a property that was quite close to the former Union Hotel where Amos Fox worked as a bar keeper. It’s also intriguing to remember that Amos once loaned a substantial sum of money from Gunnell.
Further, post-war information from Unionist Johnathan Roberts provides curious context. In the days prior to Stoughton’s capture, the General gave audience to Joshua C Gunnell, who apparently warned the Union chieftain of a pending raid from John Mosby and his men who were hiding in the vicinity of Frying Pan.28
Moral ambiguity was in vogue in Fairfax. Gunnell, a vocal secessionist known as a fire-eater by his friends and neighbors, apparently saw fit to ingratiate himself with Federal authorities by attempting to inform on John Mosby.
This begs another question: how would Gunnell have known? Federal patrols were thick those days and Gunnell himself was a town figure. He didn’t have business or a farm in the western part of the county, which would have brought him in close contact with Mosby and his men. But he did know Amos Fox, whose brother-in-law was then guiding Mosby through the forests of Fairfax County and whose brother and stepfather would soon be arrested for a similar infraction.
Did Amos Fox empower Joshua Gunnell with information which could be used to betray John Mosby?
Frank Fox became an illustrious part of the Mosby command. Charles Albert Fox served honorably throughout the war. Yet, Amos has never been associated with a Mosby command that lived in legend throughout the locale in which he was raised. Was he shunned?
We don’t know. It’s very curious that his 1909 obituary in the Alexandria Gazette purports that Amos Fox served in Mosby’s Battalion during the war.29 This is the only reference connecting Amos to John Mosby. Perhaps the reporter was confused or maybe Amos made a habit of telling little white lies or it could be that Amos had a brief support role as an intelligence source in 1863. Again, we don’t know. What is certain, however, is that John Mosby was alive and living in Washington, D.C. when the obit ran. Did he see it? What would he have thought?
The near half century interval between Appomattox and Amos’ death in 1909 provide little in the way of absolute answers to the Amos Fox quandary. In the immediate wake of the war, Fairfax Court House was at its absolute lowest nadir. The grim pallor of devastation and defeat presided over a once prospering town that descended into a well-documented spree of alcoholism and violence.30
Accounts of Amos’ life provide a unique lens to this demimonde in which he was a central figure. Amos Fox spent the balance of the 1860s in Fairfax Court House. Physically stationary, he became a connoisseur of experiential and pharmacological escapism. Few worked as diligently as Amos to channel the spectacular into an absurd alternative from an otherwise bleak landscape of stripped farms, broken psyches, and vacant chairs.
As soon as September of 1865, Amos chaired the committee of arrangements and served as a marshal for a Grand Tournament at Fairfax Court House. This pageant of knightly combat was a throwback to the pre-war culture of masculinity and romanticism that predominated in the boisterous antebellum social climate. Amos and others sought to recapture the energies of 1860.31 These efforts carried over into 1867, at which point Amos was reestablished as a Fairfax Court House bar owner and man about town.32
That November, Amos found himself in a spot of trouble when an argument with well-heeled Henry B. Tyler, Jr., whose father then owned the Union Hotel, boiled over into assault. The source of the argument is unknown. Both Amos and Henry, Jr. were known factors in Fairfax Court House. Both enjoyed social prominence and neither had served in the Confederate Army despite having brothers and cousins who did so. It’s surprising to find out a man who was apparently inclined to pacifism in a time of war felt the need to resort to violence two years into the peace.
In the lone shots we know Amos fired in anger during his lifetime, the eldest Fox pressed his pistol to Henry B. Tyler, Jr.’s breast and shot twice. Justice Job Hawxhurst contended that Amos intended to kill Tyler.33 He must have been angry. Fortunately for Tyler, a button on his coat was enough to deflect the ball from Amos Fox’s pistol, saving his life and setting up an acquittal of Fox a year later in a “no harm, no foul” legal handwashing.34
The subsequent fallout from Amos Fox’s attempt to leverage unilateral violence to solve a petty dispute is an interesting barometer for Fairfax Court House’s general cultural mores in 1868. Not only was Amos not ostracized from the community, but his newest venture, the Metropolitan Hotel, was embraced as the gold standard for local hospitality. Indiscriminant shooting was good for business, apparently.
An account of Fairfax Court House published in the Alexandria Gazette in May of 1868 gushed, “We defy your city to produce a place which, for summer delights of the liquid gender, can compare with the Metropolitan Saloon of Mr. Amos Fox.” The generosity of the reporter’s hyperbole knew no bounds that day. He described the particulars of the Metropolitan Hotel with a barely restrained adoration. “For a cool, pleasant, commodious retreat, it vies with the best of its kind.” And besides, the proprietor’s “accommodating spirit” (italics their’s) was “unsurpassed.”35
As a seasoned writer of bar reviews for a weekly newspaper in Los Angeles, I am familiar with this use of language. Glow of this sort emanates forth from an afternoon in which a shrewd bar owner comps an excitable reporter a few too many in anticipation of a glowing review. Juked or not, Amos’ business dealings in Fairfax were underpinned with a deeper substance. By 1868, he had arranged for his saloon to be the stopping point for a stage coach line connecting Alexandria with Winchester.36
To borrow from Lincoln, Amos Fox could fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but could not fool all of the people all of the time. Promotion for the 1868 Knights Tournament revealed substantial disparities in the way Amos advertised himself and the reality of his place in Northern Virginia society.
Where Amos previously served as a key figure in the organization and execution of the annual Knight’s Tournament, the 1868 event found Amos relegated to Floor Manager. The event announcement that ran in the Alexandria Gazette mentioned Amos’ name last in a field of thirty-six other contributors.
Reasoning behind Amos’ fall from grace isn’t difficult to uncover. Col. John S. Mosby was slated to deliver the coronation address. It’s not puzzling that Amos would be shuffled to the lowest available position, especially if Col. Mosby developed a wartime distaste for the bon vivant from Fox’s Mills. Interestingly, one of the top billed participants was John Barnes, Amos’ brother-in-law and a former Mosby Ranger in good standing.37
In the years following this slight, Amos’ stature translated into print as an individual lacking renown and compensating accordingly by turning himself into a spectacle.
Where his friends at the Alexandria Gazette printed a darling account of Amos single-handedly subduing a horse thief in April of 1868, later profiles were not so heroically framed.38 Amos Fox became a source for agricultural curiosities. In 1869 and 1870, his Irish potatoes and “fine tomatoes” earned praise. Nothing could quite top his May 1869 discovery of a freak chicken.
Per the Gazette:
“Mr. Amos Fox, of Fairfax Court, has sent to this office, nicely preserved in alcohol, a chicken with four well developed legs, which lived ninety-six hours after it was hatched. Fairfax Court House has long been remarkable for the unique specimens of humanity it has turned loose upon the world, but this freak, together with the existence of another phenomenon there—a bull which gives milk—are brand new evidences that the spirit of revolution now abroad has invaded the natural history of that place.”39
During this period, Amos continued operating the Metropolitan Hotel and began dabbling in horse race promotion at the Piney Branch Race Course in Fairfax.40
Between 1873 and 1874, something unknown occurred. Amos Fox quit Fairfax Court House for Falls Church. Maybe a lease ran out or he outstayed his welcome. Or perhaps he sensed opportunity in a Falls Church community that was closer to Alexandria, on the railroad and without a single saloon. If he was motivated by the latter, it was a decision making process akin to investing in the Marshall House at the outbreak of the Civil War.
Falls Church had no saloons, because the residents of Falls Church were rapid supporters of the temperance movement. When they caught wind of Amos’ intent, they circulated a letter asking him to desist from opening a bar in their town, which Amos, of course, ignored. Soon after, a liquor delivery intended for Amos was left unattended on the train platform where local residents bored the casks and spilled the booze.41
When the culprit was discovered and compelled to compensate Amos Fox for his losses, a subscription paper was circulated and residents chipped in to help pay for what they viewed as a righteous deed.42
Amos got the hint and moved on. He reappears in 1876 as a real estate agent and proprietor of still another bar, this one in Herndon. Amos had apparently followed the railroad west where he discovered the same problem as before. Local temperance advocates set their sights on the corrupting influences of Amos Fox’s establishment. Less docile than before, Amos went so far as to lock teetotaling protestors in his bar for nine hours until they could be collected by their husbands.43
As was the pattern with Amos’ life, the happenings of his public persona were swept by deeper turbulence. The death of his nine day old daughter, Dollie, in 1875 hints at an important undercurrent in Amos Fox’s life.44 The loss of one child could have been a calamity for Amos, but more telling in historical memory is the case of his surviving daughter, Francis.
Names would have meant something to the man who was named for the grandfather that built Fox’s Mills. It is important that the younger Amos Fox named his eldest child after his deceased twin brother. Lt. Frank Fox died from a Yankee bullet during an 1864 Mosby raid into Maryland. His name lived on in the life of his twin brother’s surviving child.
This deep sentimentality calls into question Amos’ brash behavior, his boozing, his thirst for attention, and the culture of self-aggrandizement and alcoholism in which he spent the first decade after the war. Was this man a free spirit? Was his coping for the shame of having not served alongside his brother? Was he grieving for a lost twin and for the man he once wished to become but had never lived up to?
These questions and the underlying psychological processes on which they skimmed over seem to have accumulated weight over time. When we next hear from Amos Fox in 1877, he is a member of the Temperance Party serving as secretary and running for magistrate “upon the principle of the great temperance reform, upon which there seems to be great feeling.” What an event his first temperance meeting must have been.45
Amos lost that election and a subsequent go for Commissioner of Revenue in 1879. In 1880, the census taker caught up with Amos at his new home in Alexandria. He had left Fairfax County and was working as a hotel clerk. We have to wonder if he was back at the Marshall House.
This time was different. After a long and contentious post-adolescence spent in the Fairfax hospitality industry, Amos was beginning to cultivate a modest respectability. Thus begins the law and order stage of Amos Fox’s life. In 1881, he served as a special U.S. Deputy Marshall providing protection during the trial for James Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau.46 Amos served as a jury foreman for the trial of two Fairfax men charged with assaulting and robbing a farmer on the railroad tracks.47 Three years later, Amos Fox, a man once charged with attempted murder and assault, was appointed jailer for Alexandria.48
By the time of his death ten years later, Amos morphed into a salt-of-the-earth, pillar-of-society type. Exactly the type of man an unsuspecting obituary writer could have confused for a former Mosby Ranger.
What to Make
Nine years after Amos’ demise, an interesting story flowed forth from the pen of Harry Shannon. Better known as “The Rambler,” Shannon wrote a column for the Sunday Star in which he rambled (literally) across Northern Virginia and mined stories of a bygone past that was steadily disappearing (even then!). On one particular occasion, The Rambler rambled into a stretch of Lower Difficult Run just below Hunter’s Mill and Wolf Trap known then as Forestville.
Shannon got to gabbing with a local blacksmith that he identified as a son of Fielder Trammell. This smithy had married Amanda Grimes, which could only make him Louis T. Trammell. Born in 1840, Louis Trammell was brother to John Trammell of the 8th Virginia, cousin to Mosby Rangers William, LB, and James P Trammell, a cousin to Mosby Ranger George West Gunnell and a nephew by marriage to John Underwood.49 Having spent the entirety of his life living in the Difficult Run Basin, he would have enjoyed a good lay of the social landscape.
Interestingly, Trammell went back and forth with the Rambler about people who had come and gone back when. Among them was Jim Jackson, Amos Fox’s old business partner. This spun the dialogue into familiar territory and provoked one of the more intriguing quotes in The Rambler catalog:
“The conversation turning on ancient taverns and old preachers, the Rambler touched a spring in the old blacksmith’s mind and he let himself out with great earnestness. He said that the cause of the upset of so many of the old families was whisky! whisky! whisky! ‘The sons of the rich men wouldn’t work, but they would drink,’ and he gave the Rambler a long list of the sons of men of property who dissipated their wealth and died poor because of whisky. This blacksmith, seventy-three years old and who had been shoeing horses in Fairfax County nearly all those years, is one of the most determined prohibitionists in that county, and, of course, that means also one of the most determined prohibitionists in the United States.”50
It would be remarkable if Amos Fox weren’t on the top of the list and nigh-on miraculous if he wasn’t mentioned at all.
Amos Fox was neither the first nor the last to propel himself out of the countryside and into a town atop a rocket of grain alcohol. We have to wonder what Amos was shooting towards, or perhaps the better question is what he was running from.
Writing about a time frame when Amos Fox was already approaching dignity, historian Michael Lesy speculates on a larger and longer impetus towards urbanization in late 19th century American life:
“The people who left the land came to the cities not to get jobs but to be free from them, not to get work but to be entertained, not to be masters but to be charges. They followed yellow brick roads to emerald cities presided over by imaginary wizards who would permit them to live in happy adolescence for the rest of their lives. By leaving the land, they disavowed a certain kind of adulthood whose mature rewards they understood to be confusion and bereavement. By going to the emerald cities, they chose a certain kind of adolescence forever free from frailty, responsibility, and death. It is this adolescent city culture, created out of the desperate needs and fantasies of people fleeing from the traps and tragedies of late nineteenth-century country life, that still inspires us seventy years later.”51
If Amos Fox’s existence spells out to us in confusing ways, it is because the arc and substance of his life eschewed the linear cohesiveness we have grafted on to the antebellum world of his birth. Amos was brought up in a world steeped in honor, tradition, rigid hierarchies, and a stoic sort of romanticism. He watched this world burn and his first and most formative instinct was to step out of the way while his brother did not. From this fracture, Amos likely struggled to piece himself together in a coherent way. It would be extraordinary if he ever took measure of himself and saw it as a cohesive whole and not a collection of pragmatic solutions and spiritual band aids.
This is not a judgement. These are reasonable assessments of a man whose chaotic, often confusing, somewhat liberal penchant for remaking and reidentifying himself plays not as an Old South cautionary tale, but as an early modern or even post-modern stab at answering the all important Gaugin questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”
A spiteful Mosby declared after the war that “society is a thin coat of varnish.” Amos Fox might have agreed, which would explain why he coated himself time and time again with fresh layers of different colored shellac, trying steadfastly always to conceal his true self beneath so much veneer.
Beneath so many masks of personal modulation, Amos had one final face with which to surprise anyone who attempted to decipher his life. The man who escaped Fox’s Mills to live a town life returned to die. Amos Fox left this world at the hamlet of Pender—a post-war name given to the homes surrounding a post office not far from what was once his father’s mill.52