Category: Uncategorized

TL;DR–fear of poverty and hatred of categorical others were powerful root motivators behind the scenes of 19th century sectional conflict.

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The summer heat in Fairfax County is oppressive. The glare of the sun pins a person down and the weight of the air holds them there. This goes on for days on end. Weeks sometimes. Forests and fields thrum with teeming masses of unseen cicadas and katydids. Fairfax retreats indoors.  

Then one morning things change. Whisps of white in the atmosphere congeal. The air feels fragile. Fluffy white cotton ball clouds grow gray and distended. A playful breeze becomes a feral wind as the skies darken.

Meteorological minutiae fails in favor of folk lore. Poplars and the oaks give final warning. When the bottoms of the leaves flip up to reveal millions of white bellies, the approaching storm is no longer approaching. It is there already, sucking air into its thundering lungs.

In no more than thirty seconds big drops of summer rain drive through the heat and send a bouquet of diffused tar and earth into the heavy air when they sizzle against the scorching asphalt of neighborhood streets.

It is easy to feel invaded when the storms arrive. They seemingly come from elsewhere to attack peaceful domesticity with chaotic atmospheric power. This is an illusion.

The grand squalls that launch off the Blue Ridge and barrel across Loudoun, Fauquier, and Prince William Counties to rattle the windows and howl through the trees of Fairfax owe their potency to close conditions.

Large storms are little more than conglomerations of locally-sourced heat and moisture. On those summer days, every little plant, mud puddle, and dry pond sweats its yield upwards. Transpiration and evaporation at microscale combine and contribute the essential preconditions for storms.

Your neighborhood dew drop becomes gaseous molecules that climb 40,000 feet above the Commonwealth of Virginia where they harden into ice and collide with one another. Every collision creates a charge. The clouds become electric and organize into something lethal. Pockets of current send charged fingers out and down, looking for their reciprocal part. The lightning that strikes the ground arrives in its point of contact because there is a receptive element at that very place. Sometimes the ground itself reaches upwards into the air with its own electrical charge.

This relationship is essential. It takes two to tango, so to speak. Huge, brawny clouds owe their strength, their capacity for violence, to powerful relationships with ultra-small-scale pockets of life.

Grand Abstractions Reign

Lincoln recognized the war it for what it was: the defining storm of our nation’s existence. It roiled on the horizon for a generation until conditions were right and then unleashed its terrible fury on the American landscape and the people that inhabited it.

We know just about everything there is to know about the flashes of white-hot current that reached down from the storm and savaged small sections of America in so many irreparable instants. You need look no further than the battle flags to recall these strikes: Gettysburg, Manassas, Stones River, the Wilderness, Chickamauga. The list goes on.

If you have the right ears, you can still make the thunder peels echoing through the land. Or maybe that’s the bark of another storm?

What we do not know and get further away from knowing every day is how individual obscure corners of the American nation fed the storm, nourished it, surrendered to it, and sent its own energies upwards to summon its vengeance down.

There exists a raft of explanations tied together with justifications that typically appear in the form of ideas. These thoughts were supposedly potent enough to drive otherwise rational men to die and, more importantly for a nation then steeped in the lessons of the ten commandments, kill.

Duty, honor, states’ rights, spirit, justice, freedom, liberty, and equity between men  are lovely ideas that are powerful enough to build mighty hosts. Any one of these concepts is sufficient to explain the Spirit of ’61 and the fisticuffs on the Plains of Manassas. Here is your moisture and your heat. The stuff of storms on the horizon.

These abstractions lack a requisite immediacy. Aspirational ideas about identity and philosophy push men to combat, but they are rarely enough to hold them there. Take any private on either side and transport them out of the maw of the Muleshoe or the West Woods or the Slaughter Pen or the Deep Cut or the Widow Tapp’s Farm and ask them why they were there at that moment doing what they were doing. It would be remarkable if their answer was couched in the language of intellectualized rationalizations and not core emotionality.

No flag and no idea suffice to motivate. These events were savage. The sheer aggression and cruelty of this war was raw and personal. You and ninety-nine of your boyhood friends stand half a football field away from another tight knit social group and bore fist-sized exits wounds through one another until someone relents or everyone falls.

What electrical impulse drew up from the land and into the bodies of its sons to enable the storm to strike down so many for so long?

The answers are dim. In part because the scale of the horror of our Civil War shrouded its survivors in a glory that prevented honesty. A magnificent fabric of men could not be saddled with the hard and ugly truth that they entered the war from a position of anything other than absolute moral rigor.

New evidence emerges. The puzzle reconfigures. In Difficult Run in Fairfax County, Virginia, on the eve of the Civil War, men lived in fear. They were afraid of poverty. There was a true terror that the future would be less bountiful than what they imagined their ancestral past had been. Worse, these people connected poverty to a deeper fear of enslavement.

This fear was rooted in the presence of an “other,” the Yankee farmers who settled in that section over the previous twenty years and lived amongst these third and fourth generation Virginians. People who sounded or looked or behaved or prayed or feasted or farmed in ways strange to the traditional Virginia sensibility were instruments of this pervasive fear. By their very existence, their unrelenting nature, their moral clarity, and their prosperity, these Yankees provided another crucial spark: hate.

When these insecurities merged and the prevailing wisdom posited that the men they hated where preparing to subjugate them into the world of poverty they most feared, the church-going, tax-paying, Whig-voting men of Difficult Run felt they had no choice but to secede.

The rest is history.

They Came to Take from the Land

Humans came to Difficult Run to extract resources from the earth. This is the first and most important premise. This pattern predates the arrival of English colonists by thousands of years.[1] Spruce and hemlock forests disappeared in the wake of the last ice age to make way for oak, chestnut, and hickory trees that sustained native Algonquins with gathered calories.[2] Seams of abundant white quartz along old ridge roads made for valuable trade goods along the Potomac—a river named in native tongue for its propensity to host market exchanges. The many deer that still haunt the woods here represented valuable sustenance. Eventually, the quarter mile wide floodplains that shouldered off Difficult Run, Little Difficult Run, Angelico Branch and Piney Branch would have made excellent laboratories for first forays into designed agriculture.[3]

A variety of motivations brought prehistoric humans here: subsistence, trade, and tribute for kings. The governing principle ruling all subsequent social bonds and common values sprouted from one central truth—people survived by building economies from ecologies.

The English, too, came to take from the land. Their efforts were both more brazen and more myopic than those of their native predecessors. What indigenous people stewarded for millennia out of necessity, the English devoured within a generation.

A “frontier mentality” prevailed beneath the overarching framework of a trans-Atlantic trade that hungered for cash crops.[4]

For first arrivals, the only settlement model that made any sense was chiefly economic. Produce as much of the crop that brought the most money at market at whatever cost to the land. There was, they thought, going to be more land, forever. Endless unclaimed forests awaited the armed English transplant. Everything that became Fairfax County sprouted from this original conceit. The lowland rolling roads, the Alexandria wharves, the many churches and their generous glebes, the court houses, and the ordinaries that welcomed their many litigants on court day—this social infrastructure was an outcropping from a microeconomy premised on coaxing as much tobacco leaf as possible from the soil.

The looming disaster is obvious after the fact. Each planting season leached unreplenishable nitrates from the soil. Farms set in sandy bottom lands and stripped of trees lost inches of soil every winter. Avery Odelle Craven estimated that the height of tobacco planting in Northern Virginia found the Potomac River carrying away as much as four hundred pounds of soil from every acre in its drainage basin each year.[5]

These numbers spell disaster writ large. For planters of the age, cost mattered less than profit. Returns on tobacco created a very real sense of opportunity.

In an important sense, the first plantations that leached the soils of Virginia’s tidewater were less about hardscrabble homesteading and more about ferocious desperation. Strip these ecological-economic circuits of their mythos and you’ll see venues where England’s second sons and slum-born servants had a rare chance to escape the terms of their birth.

The first century of Virginia can be read thus as a massive jailbreak from the stagnation and stricture of the Elizabethan Age.

Heartier escapees cut loose from the Potomac after a few seasons once virgin soil began to wilt against the demands of its ongoing prima nocta beneath the English plow. Others stayed and followed a patchwork of lesser land in search of yields that would never match that first season.[6]

The revolution came. America became America. Soon, conflict moved to the European continent. Rolling roads cut into the earth to facilitate tobacco exports found second life as conduits for Fairfax-grown wheat—a crop that thrived on well-used land.[7]

Another boom came and times were high again. Then peace came to Europe. Plows beat from swords of the Napoleonic Wars tilled wheat in French and Spanish and German fields again. When grain prices in Virginia stabilized, the good times were gone for good.

What ensued was a season of harsh realism. Boundless opportunity and easy money in agriculture disappeared. In its place, the grand art of capitalism flourished. The gentleman farmer was a losing proposition. Instead, the millers, shipping agents, railroad and turnpike boosters, bondsmen—antebellum finance men, one and all—took over.

Wealth and its attendant status were no longer grown in Fairfax County, but acquired by implementing creative ways of processing, transporting and selling another’s crop cheaper, better, and faster.

Meanwhile, Fairfax’s farms fell into disrepair and the grain interests in Alexandria sent their tendrils farther afield to find new suppliers in Fauquier, Loudoun, and the Shenandoah beyond.

The death knell of first Fairfax came in 1837 when a national banking crisis produced a liquidity shortage. Scarce money spelled ruin for short-on-luck farmers who borrowed in spring to float their operation until harvest.

Many more left. From 1810 to 1840, the population of Fairfax County fell by thirty two percent.[8] Land prices plummeted in deference to the ruined condition of the soil. The writing was on the wall for Virginians: leave or be left behind.

The Yankees Arrive

Meanwhile, all was not well in Upstate New York. If Virginians felt the crush of diminished returns and darkening prospects, young farmers of the Empire State felt equally vulnerable for very different reasons.

Farmers of the Hudson Valley planted for longevity. Shorter growing seasons and soil unsuitable for tobacco encouraged early forays into crop rotation and cover methods that nurtured soils. Early sustainability efforts provided a sense of stability to established farmers while simultaneously kneecapping young men who aspired to farms of their own.

In the mid-19^th century, an acre of land in Dutchess or Ulster County, New York was worth between forty and seventy dollars.[9] Few could afford to enter this real estate market as it was. Families that rented farms were subject to further shock when previously lenient landlords refused to absorb the full shock of the 1837 financial crisis. In 1839, rent hikes and cash calls for outstanding debts stoked a frenzy along the Hudson. The Anti-Rent Wars, as they came to be known, featured disgruntled farmers who obscured their identity in “Indian” costumes while they marauded through the landscape tarring and feathering landlords and their agents.[10]

The outcome was not different from the agricultural crisis in Fairfax: many who couldn’t eke out a winning hand chose to leave. In the spring of 1840, fifty-six such families from Dutchess County, New York arrived en masse in Fairfax County.[11]

What could go wrong? Land was cheap. Ruined parcels sold for between five and fifteen dollars an acre. Proximity to the Federal City ensured a ready market for crops. Competition was low and the growing season down south was long.

A chorus of local southern voices greeted the northern interlopers with open arms and round applause. “The Yankees are doing wonders,” wrote one commentator.[12] Agricultural reform was a quickly growing pet project of numerous Virginians who wisely tied their state’s future prosperity to near term efforts to reclaim the soil.

With the arrival of over one thousand Yankees in the ensuing ten years, Fairfax was primed for large-scale agricultural reform. The New Yorkers brought new crops, rotation strategies, deep plows, and dairy farming to Fairfax County. Their skills and knowledge represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore the convective relationship between ecology and economy.

Perhaps there is an alternate universe where the Virginia farmer saw the error of his ways and accepted the gracious wisdom of his Yankee neighbors. Together, they forged a prosperous and stable Fairfax County that served as a shining example of regional collaboration that averted civil war and laid the foundations for a present-day American utopia.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way our world works. Equal resources and unequal ability extrapolated over the span of two decades will result in a massive inequality of returns.

In Fairfax County between 1840 and 1860, one group stagnated and another grew ascendant. Inhospitable farming conditions and anemic markets fostered an evolutionary crucible. It was a red queen paradigm. Every family in Fairfax County had to run just to stay in place. The race was one premised on advanced agricultural precepts. Yankee-born farmers had been running this particular race since childhood. Their Virginia-born neighbors and competitors never really learned how to run.

If the disparity wasn’t obvious in the moment, its tell-tale traces have stained the historical record. The effect of diminishing prospects and lowered status on the Virginia psychology screams out in the ongoing cycles of seasonal debt and court records for spurts of drunkenness and sometimes murderous violence.[13] Both of which were almost exclusively southern pastimes. The predominantly-Quaker New York Yankees are scantly represented in debt suits or court cases pertaining to violence and drink. It would seem they were busy improving their property and buying up local infrastructure.[14]

One of the biggest remaining questions about Fairfax County in the lead up to the Civil War is whether local civility or bipartisan national media frayed first. What is certain is that the 1850s found Fairfax County hosting a budding culture war.

Yankee success behind the plow inspired a raft of nationally-distributed literature enlisting the New Yorkers of Fairfax County as the vanguard of the free labor movement. More than a critique of slavery and slaves, the dialogue indicted slave owners and beneficiaries as participants in an exploitative system that encroached on the rights of their African slaves while infantilizing their owners.

In a series of high-profile reports from Virginia, partisan authors excoriated the ignorance and indolence of white southerners whose want to of initiative and knowledge created a situation that only the Yankee could fix. “There is no place in the United States where God has done so much and man so little,” wrote one such chronicler.[15] Virginia-born Quaker Samuel Janney dug the knife in deeper in the pages of the Richmond Whig where his lengthy jeremiad “The Yankees in Fairfax County, Virginia by a Virginian” first appeared.

Janney described Virginia as such, “Her fields exhausted and lying waste—many of her towns and villages exhibiting the appearance of premature decay; her population retreating; her school system wretchedly defective; and a large proportion of her white inhabitants in a condition of ignorance and degradation.” All of which Janney laid at the feet of young Virginians who would rather spend their time “lounging about taverns, going to races or cock-fighting, or other places of amusement.”[16]

This discourse surely strained the bounds of civility and Christian behavior. Once eroded, the benefit of the doubt was replaced with a presumption of slight that seeded an atmosphere of contention and bitterness. A patchwork of neighbors divided itself into two groups: us and them.

One anecdote demonstrates the easy pettiness with which the smallest social infraction could taint a relationship and entrench stereotypes. In the 20^th century, Sally Summers Clarke wrote a memoir describing her childhood at Fox’s Mills where her father was superintendent. She recalls the very moment her father soured on Yankees.

“I particularly remember one New York family by the name of Hammond. They bought land near us. Father heard that they needed some tools to fix their house with. After breakfast one morning he went over to the Hammond’s with the tools. They were just sitting down to breakfast when father came. Instead of inviting father to sit down and eat with them they simply sat down and ate in silence. Father was deeply offended. He took his hat and left as soon as possible. The Hammonds meant no offense in not inviting father to their breakfast table. It was just the way they had been raised. But father felt that the Hammonds were guilty of the greatest breach of Virginia hospitality. No one in Virginia high or low, rich or poor, but what was invited to eat when in a neighbor’s home at meal time.”[17]

In the butterfly theory of social conflict, a bruised ego is enough to start a war. While we’re searching for the tangible on Difficult Run, it’s tough to argue that enough insults printed in agricultural journals or fauxpas committed over breakfast could ever boil over to anything more than ill will. These many words, however potent, did not make a civil war, but the calumny and mistrust they encouraged removed all elasticity from the ordinarily pliable socius of Fairfax County.

Long after the war, John Mosby himself wrote that “our civilization is a thin coat of varnish.”[18] Accumulated insults cracked this veneer revealing unbridgeable fault lines that crackled with the primal energy of Fairfax County’s deepest fears.

Slipping Into Slavery

Slavery really did a number on these people’s heads. A whole circuitry of anxieties emanated outwards from the peculiar institution.

Virginia history is laced with instances of panic in which all levels of white society mustered a cohesive kinetic response to uprisings of indigenous or African-descended people against the dominant socio-economic framework. Events like Bacon’s Rebellion and Nat Turner’s Uprising carved through the surface matter of Ol’ Virginny and revealed forever the flickering jack o’ lantern glow of paranoia that broods wherever systemic inequity produces reciprocal violence. This first fear is pronounced and well known. The second fear is more prominent and less-spoken still.

A society that enshrines the condition of slavery similarly encodes the universal concept of slavery. All citizens of slave states possessing an iota of self-awareness could summon—consciously or not—a scenario in which they too were enslaved.

Southern intellectuals fell over themselves trying to legitimize the strict boundaries of slavery as a righteous and race-based category. Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens achieved the most crystalline version of this foundational theory in his “Cornerstone Speech” of March 1861.

“With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law,” Stephens wrote. “Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”[19]

In a speech delivered before the U.S. Senate and reprinted for all Fairfax readers in the Alexandria Gazette in 1858, South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond braided the all-important notion of the African-descended slaves’ natural subservience within the framework of a South that took care of its own. Hammond appealed to the teaming masses of white labor beneath the Mason-Dixon when he accused the North of essentially enslaving its white laborers under the guise of free-labor. The rhetorical device was clear: without racially-determined slavery, the lower whites would be the lowest rung in the social hierarchy. Everyone who witnessed the slavery arrangement from within the South could have understood those terms.[20]

The mask of stalwart solidarity between whites slipped further and further from the face of Southern society in influential readings reserved for the studies of learned, wealthy, and prominent men of the slave system who could afford both education and leisure time in which to read. In 1856, Prince William County’s beloved son, George Fitzhugh, printed his pro-slavery missive Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters. Diving into Aristotelean logic for the reenforcing benefit of his parlored readership, Fitzhugh championed the socialism of subjugation and rebuked the anarchy of raw liberty in favor of this simple calculation: “it is the duty of society to enslave the weak.”[21]

One hundred years later, LBJ book-ended this thought tunnel with an observation about the southern electorate, in which the hard-scrabble whites asserted their identity by locating themselves above African-Americans in the social hierarchy. “If you can convince the lowest man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” said LBJ.

At Frying Pan in western Fairfax County, these threads wove together in an eerie paradox that unfolded over the decades preceding the Civil War. In 1840, that Baptist church had nearly thirty African-American members.[22] After John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frying Pan was one of the first areas to organize a night patrol against marauding slaves.[23]

What a confusing construction: the enslaved apparently possessed souls that deserved full salvation beneath the equal eye of a divine savior who knew no caveats of race, but the fellowship that carried this covenant calcified against the fear of these same slaves hacking their masters to death in the still of night. What was advertised as a divinely-ordained hierarchy of humanity was seemingly afflicted with core terrors that questioned the entire proposition.

The cartwheeling contradictions manifest in the actions of the Frying Pan Meeting House express best the desperation with which white thought in Difficult Run negotiated its critical vulnerabilities.

This Baptist sphere nurtured many a Mosby man in the decades before the war. Turleys, Hutchisons, Wrenns, Lees, and Foxs all attended church there. What those meetings instilled in their congregants was a distillation of ideas formulated by the area’s preeminent theologian, Jeremiah Moore.

His Baptist faith reflected a typically American contrarianism. Moore began preaching at a time when Virginia had a state church and all clergy were required to be licensed, a process that ensured orthodoxy. Jeremiah Moore was more interested in a republican faith with fewer boundaries between man and the divine. His religious practice was both inherently spiritual and political. Moore suffered for these beliefs. He was arrested numerous times for preaching without a license.

After the Revolution, Jeremiah Moore established his church at “Difficult” where he espoused a rugged, homespun spirituality that was at odds with the forever-looming menace of state power. In an 1800 letter to Thomas Jefferson, Moore articulated an important pillar of his worldview where class, power, and state authority collided.

“And of course,” Moore wrote Jefferson, “to be born poor in Virginia is to be born a Slave.”[24]

The Difficult Run basin that Moore and his students shepherded was saturated by fear of a dual menace: the powerful hegemonic interests of authoritative elites and the omnipresent threat of slave revolt. These twin pillars of threat created a pocket of thought where men had to safeguard their fortunes and their homes from ever-imminent danger.

The very scenario they had been preconditioned to fear emerged over three successive autumns just two years before the war.

In September and October of 1857, a banking crisis in New York quickly spread its contagion down the eastern seaboard. What began as a halt in specie withdrawals became a general run of bank failures from Portland, Maine to Richmond, Virginia. Credit that was so vital to farming interests in Fairfax County evaporated. The run came at an inopportune interval for local farmers. The bubble popped during the annual wheat harvest when sale of crops was expected to inject valuable liquidity into the local microeconomy. What wheat sales occurred in Alexandria in the Fall of 1857 were based on flagging prices that had dropped as much as 36% since July.[25]

For the umpteenth time, enslaving poverty was knocking on the door. Recovery was slow coming. Fairfax County’s economy was still in a place of raw vulnerability in October of 1859 when news filtered in that an abolitionist briefly seized the Federal arsenal at Harpers’ Ferry some forty miles west. Fairfax was dangerously close to a potent attempt at inciting a general uprising of slaves. New old fears joined the press of imminent poverty.

On October 22, 1859, the Alexandria Gazette reprinted a nightmarish scenario first published in a New York paper: “We have no doubt that it was Brown’s deliberate intention to use the arms which he had brought from Kansas for his treasonable purpose: that he calculated upon seizing the United States arsenal, and thus supply the slaves of Virginia and Maryland with weapons and ammunition, in the hope that they would flock to his standard in thousands.” More importantly, the “bloodshed and anarchy” that John Brown designed to unleash on Virginia had been literally and metaphorically supported by numerous Yankee benefactors.[26]

Here, finally, was a situation that touched both terminals on the vast underground battery of fear and anxiety that Fairfax’s slave society fed for a century prior. This was proof positive that the Yankee neighbors harbored menace in their hearts and that subjugation of the southern people by physical or deliberate force was just a prelude to enslavement. The charge that came off this dawning conceptual picture was strong.

Night patrols formed. Militias mustered. The anti-Yankee hostility was palpable. At least one northerner felt inspired to take out a full advertisement in the Fairfax News where he declared his unwavering loyalty to the southern cause and its peculiar institution.[27]

Shortly after Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, a man named Gartrel who had the temerity to admit he voted for Old Abe was blackened completely in printer’s ink at Fairfax Court House and sent on his way.^[28]

The lead up to the vote for secession in 1861 was laden with overt threats of violence by Southerners. Thomas Moore, a grandson of preacher Jeremiah Moore, famously confronted local Yankees with an ultimatum: cancel their subscriptions to the New York Tribune or get out!

WHY?

The war was a horror in Fairfax County. No one, Yankee or Rebel, won. Both armies ate the ecology in equal measure and denuded the economic prospects of Fairfax County for a generation to come. Poverty and alcoholism ran rampant after Appomattox. Once proud Yankee farms lay in ruins and much of the flower of Fairfax’s southern society lay a-mouldering in the grave. Brave charges under proud banners took more from these people than any slave revolt ever had. Too many of the survivors wore pinned up sleeves where a plow hand or sturdy leg should have been.

Today, we’re one hundred and sixty years into a prolonged dickering match about the merits of the impulses that fostered this destruction. Streaked in bad faith, misinformation, and a wicked sunk cost fallacy that often prevents critical thinking, attempting to answer the question “was it worth it?” feels like a foolish exercise. We’re left instead to ask, simply: why?

There is a tendency to lapse into the pretensions of the “preventable war” theory, by which we are supposed to believe that a single generation of irrational Americans surrendered the onus of compromise in favor of violence. One glance at our own time provides an interesting corollary: conflict is a group effort, nurtured by many generations and contextualized in deep patterns of thought and deed that mark every level of the American scene with its striations. In these spaces, accusations are common and accountability is scarce.

Some Southerners in the pre-war space accused abolitionists of “longing for the apocalyptic moment.”[29] If true, the immanentizing effort to foster a lifting of the veil was also a Southern impulse.

Ecological fragility, economic volatility, social fractures, threats of violence—these shared pathways were not so much manufactured in the 1840s and 1850s as they were unconsciously reflected. Two hundred years of unsustainable agriculture, irresponsible banking, boosterism, and countervailing pride created a pocket of contradictions woven in combative language that encouraged conflict.

The collision of peoples that occurred in Fairfax County in the years before the war was but one critical charging spark in a pre-existing storm developed from the anxieties of many previous generations. Sensing a coming front, Virginians—Yankee-born or southern-bred—agitated towards sectional crisis through a mode of self-interest that precluded calming collaboration.

Compromise, change, forgiveness, and communication premised on equity were not strong suits of either group. However gifted these people were as farmers or sportsmen, retrospect finds them wanting entirely for the very skills that make for lasting prosperity. Fear of poverty and hatred of others braided together as both groups did whatever necessary to fashion structures of power and implements of control that assured they and theirs would do well and would not have to deviate too far from the assumptions and prejudices of their own in-group. Sound familiar?

In 1851, a broad cross-section of Fairfax County (embracing a plurality of both northern and southern identity) threw its weight behind the Whig Party. Everyone could agree that tariffs and infrastructure—two policies that protected and improved the interior sphere against outside influences–were the path forward for Fairfax.

Exposed to the cunning rhetoric of grand narratives posited by distant journalists whose lone interaction with Fairfax County itself came in a series of unidirectional broadcasts delivered via ink splatter, simmering fear and hatred at the neighborhood level oozed a solvent of self-righteousness that ate through any and all bonds of affection.

By 1861, the broadcloth of Fairfax society had ripped and contracted. Many of the same men who had found fellowship as Whig delegates in 1851 were so thoroughly convinced of the fragility of their future and the imminent erasure of their past that they cast votes to cleave apart the country they had worked so hard to cobble together.

The story of the road to secession in Fairfax County is a hyper specific drama about the collapse of local systems against the weight of the ecological, economic, social, and psychological demands of its people. It is also, unfortunately, a universal human story retold in broad stroke duplicate wherever neighboring people see, act, and earn differently than their neighbors.

Our species has a tragic quirk that finds us ducking time and time again into the easy and temporary solace of adversarial arrangements when we should be investing in the rough, but ultimately rewarding pursuit of coexistence. This is truly the old bad road at the heart of the human journey.

If we’re lucky enough to realize in the moment what horrors our local hatreds are feeding, we are often too late to convince our neighbors of such.

Old Fairfax learned this lesson the hard way. Only when the storm and its terrible swift sword of lightning and wind leveled the pre-war world did the accumulated charge of so much spite and ill-will dissipate. Temporarily, at least.

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[1] Craig, John, Grace Karis, Susan Leigh, Bonnie Owen and Darlene Williamson, editors. Vale History: From Money’s Corner Through Difficult,” 1991-1995. Fox Mill Communities Preservation Association History Committee. Joy S. Starr Collection on Vale History. Collection 06-18. Virginia Room. Fairfax County Library. Page 5-6—now verboten, the 1990s found local historians disclosing archaeological sites and their specific locations into public record. The earliest known site in “Vale” dates back as early as 6000BC.

[2] Pettitt, Alisa. “Virginia Indian History at Riverbend Park.” Fairfax County Government. Accessed 12/24/24. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/sites/parks/files/assets/documents/naturalcultural/archaeology/archaeology-first-virginians-riverbend-park.pdf

[3] Smith, Bruce D. “The Cultural Context of Plant Domestication in Eastern North America.” Current Anthropology 52, no. S4 (2011): S471-84. https://doi.org/10.1086/659645

[4] Craven, Avery Odelle. Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. P. 19-20 “Frontier communities are, by their very nature, notorious exhausters of their soils. The wants and standards of living of such communitites have been developed in older economic regions and they make demands upon the newer sections that cannot be met from normal returns.”

[5] Craven, Avery Odelle. Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860. P. 28.

[6] Ibid 32. Craven sites two seasons of maximum planting potential and a total of four very good seasons before the soil was permanently depleted beyond tobacco production.

[7] Crowl, Heather K. “A History of Roads in Fairfax County, Virginia: 1608-1840. Masters Thesis, (American University, 2002). P. 46.

[8] Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. P. 134.

[9] Ibid p. 256.

[10] Huston, Reeve. “The Parties and ‘The People’: The New York Anti-Rent Wars and the Contours of Jacksonian Politics.” Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 2 (2000): 241–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/3124703.

[11] Abbott, Richard H. “Yankee Farmers in Northern Virginia, 1840-1860.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76, no. 1 (1968): 56-63. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4247368 p. 2

[12] Ibid 4.

[13] Charles Adams’ routine appearances before the county court and the stabbing death of Moses Williams at Hunter’s Mill in 1857 all come to mind. Beach, Georgina. “A Game of Cards At Hunter’s Mill.” HSFC Yearbook 24 (1993-1994): 106-130. https://archives.org/details/yearbook-volume-24-1993-1994/ This quote from a 1918 interview of a blacksmith on Difficult Run rings particularly true: “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 dissipaded their wealth and died poor because of whisky.” “The Rambler Writes of Old Families Living Near Forestville, VA.” Sunday Star. June 2, 1918. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_gonzo_ver01/data/sn83045462/00280658388/1918060201/0488.pdf

[14] Evans, D’anne A. The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758—1990. Oakton: The Optimist Club of Oakton, 1991. Pg. 26-27. The Hawxhurst Brothers’ purchase of Col. Broadwater’s old mill on Difficult Run in the early-1850s was one of the most quietly provocative events of the decade in western Fairfax County.

[15] Abbott, Richard H. “Yankee Farmers in Northern Virginia, 1840-1860.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76, no. 1 (1968): 56-63. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4247368 p. 5

[16] Janney, Samuel. “The Yankees in Fairfax County, Virginia by a Virginian.” Baltimore: Snodgrass & Wehrly, 1845. https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/may864316

[17] Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. Then We Came to California: A Biography of Sarah Summers Clarke. Merced: Merced Express, 1938. Https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015041065445. Pg. 6.

[18] Seipel, Kevin H. Rebel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. P. 254.

[19] Stephens, Alexander. “Cornerstone Speech.” American Battlefield Trust. Accessed 4/12/25. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech

[20] “Speech of Senator Hammond, of S.C.” Alexandria Gazette. March 15, 1858. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85025007/1858-03-15/ed-1/?sp=2&q=mudsill&r=0.147%2C0.031%2C0.524%2C0.323%2C0&st=pdf

[21] Fitzhugh, George. Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters. Published in God’s cuttiest Amazon.com provisioned public domain reprint. Citation in question can be found in Chapter XIX: “Protection, and Charity, to the Weak,” if you can find a copy created by humans for humans.

[22] Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. P. 288.

[23] Ibid p. 315.

[24] Moore, Jeremiah. “To Thomas Jefferson From Jeremiah Moore, 12 July 1800.” National Archives. Accessed 1/15/24. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-32-02-0036

[25] “Decline in Flour.” Alexandria Gazette. October 6, 1857. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85025007/1857-10-06/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf&r=0.172%2C1.204%2C0.485%2C0.255%2C0

[26] “Mad Brown’s Insurrection.” Alexandria Gazette. October 22, 1859. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85025007/1859-10-22/ed-1/?sp=2&q=john+brown&st=pdf&r=0.431,0.312,0.31,0.31,0

[27] Riker, Alfred. “To the Public.” Alexandria Gazette. December 29, 1959. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025007/1859-12-29/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=1855&index=6&date2=1861&searchType=advanced&language=&sequence=0&words=Fairfax+News&proxdistance=5&state=District+of+Columbia&rows=20&ortext=&proxtext=&phrasetext=fairfax+news&andtext=&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=5

^[28] “Excitement at Fairfax Court House.” Alexandria Gazette. November 9, 1860. Page. 3, Column 2.

[29] Blight, David W. American Oracle. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. P. 70.

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

Sources

1. Whitman, Walt. “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books.” American Literature. Accessed September 1, 2024. https://americanliterature.com/author/walt-whitman/essay/the-real-war-will-never-get-in-the-books 

2. Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. Then We Came to California: A Biography of Sarah Summers Clarke. Merced: Merced Express, 1938. Https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015041065445. p. 1-3.

3. “Died.” Alexandria Gazette. September 4, 1844. Image 3.

4. “Fairfax County Items.” Alexandria Gazette. March 5, 1888.

5. Virginia Chancery Index. Fairfax Co., 1850-006, Cff30-Ff, Jane Fox vs. Infants of Gabriel Fox. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/full_case_detail.asp?CFN=059-1850-006#img

6. “Public Sale.” Alexandria Gazette & Daily Advertiser. Volume 18: Number 5092, 8 December 1817.

7. Johnson, William Page, II. “The Freedman’s Bureau and School at Fairfax Court House.” The Fare Facs Gazette Vol 13, Issue 4. (2016): 1-27.

8. “Arrest.” Alexandria Gazette. December 22, 1859. 

9. “Virginia News.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. December 1, 1860. 

10. Catlin, Martha Claire. The Quaker Scout: Testimony of a Civil War Non-Combatant of the Woodlawn Antislavery Colony. Columbia: Quaker Heron Press, 2022. p. 155.

11. Johnson II, William Page.  Brothers and Cousins: Confederate Soldiers & Sailors of Fairfax County, VA. Athens: Iberian Publishing, 1995. p. 59.

12. “Land Sales in Fairfax County.” Alexandria Gazette. Volume 59. Number 276. November 19, 1858.

13. TP June 1857 Gunnell, JC vs. Amos Fox 1857-210. Term Papers (Judgments), 1818-1952. Historic Records Center. Fairfax County Courthouse.

14. ibid TP December 1858 Grigsby, John R vs Amos Fox 1858-703.

15. ibid TP November 1860 Massey, William D vs J Amos Fox 1860-439. 

16. Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. Then We Came to California: A Biography of Sarah Summers Clarke. Merced: Merced Express, 1938. Https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015041065445. p. 8.

17. “Marshall House.” Alexandria Gazette. February 2, 1861.

18. ibid.

19. Johnson II, William Page.  Brothers and Cousins: Confederate Soldiers & Sailors of Fairfax County, VA. Athens: Iberian Publishing, 1995. p. 59.

20. “Accidents.” Alexandria Gazette. August 26, 1859. 

21. “The Murderers of the United States Pickets.” The National Republican. June 6, 1861.

22. The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Civil War. Ohio State University eHistory. <https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/war-rebellion-official-records-civil-war> Serial 117, Page 0382, “Prisoners of War and State, Etc.”

23. “Committed to the Old Capitol.” Evening Star. September 15, 1863, p.2, c. 4.

24. Keen, Hugh C. And Horace Mewborn. 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry Mosby’s Command. Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, Inc, 1993. p. 294.

25. “Prisoners.” Alexandria Gazette. March 17, 1863. p. 1, c. 1.

26. Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. p. 355.

27. “War News.” Alexandria Gazette. March 18, 1863. p. 1, c. 3. 

28. Catlin, Martha Claire. The Quaker Scout: Testimony of a Civil War Non-Combatant of the Woodlawn Antislavery Colony. Columbia: Quaker Heron Press, 2022. p. 263

29. “Death of Mr. Fox.” Alexandria Gazette. October 25, 1909. p. 3, c. 2. 

30. Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. p. 373-374.

31. “Local News.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. August 31, 1865. p. 3, c 1. 

32. “Grand Tournament and Ball.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. September 2, 1867. p. 3, col. 4.

33. TP August 1868 Commonwealth of VA vs. Amos Fox 1868-212. Term Papers (Judgments), 1818-1952. Historic Records Center. Fairfax County Courthouse.

34. “Attempt to Shoot.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. November 6, 1867. P. 3, c 1. 

35. “Letter From Fairfax County.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. May 30, 1868. p. 2, c. 4.

36. “Alexandria and Winchester Mail Stage Line.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. August 6, 1868. p. 2, c. 6.

37. “A Grand Tournament & Pic-Nic at Carlin’s Springs.” Ibid 

38. “Arrest of a Horse Thief.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. April 2, 1868. p. 3, c 1. 

39. “Lusus Nature.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. May 15, 1869. P. 3, c 2.

40. “Alexandria in the Field.” Evening Star. July 16, 1873. P. 1, c 2.

41. “Letters From the People. Excitement at Falls Church Over the Prospective Establishment of a Drinking Saloon There.” The National Republican. June 1, 1874. p. 4, c 5.

42. “Local Brevities.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. June 2, 1874. P. 3, c. 4.

43. “Crusaders.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. February 14, 1876. P. 3, c. 2.

44. “Died.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. July 3, 1875. P. 2, c. 6.

45. “Temperance Ticket.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. May 19, 1877. p. 2, c. 1.

46. “The Trial of Guiteau.” Evening Star. November 14, 1881. p. 1, c. 2.

47. “Affairs in Alexandria.” Evening Star. February 24, 1896. p. 3, c. 5.

48. “County Items.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. August 31, 1899. P. 3, c. 1.

49. Johnson II, William Page.  Brothers and Cousins: Confederate Soldiers & Sailors of Fairfax County, VA. Athens: Iberian Publishing, 1995. p. 160.

50. “The Rambler Writes of Old Families Living Near Forestville, Va.” The Sunday Star. June 2, 1918. P. 42. 

51. Lesy, Michael. The Wisconsin Death Trip. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973.

52. “Death of Mr. Fox.” Alexandria Gazette. October 25, 1909. p. 3, c. 2. 

TL;DR–By virtue of their loose formations and personal histories, Mosby’s Rangers potentially used creeks like roads.

There’s a great factoid from a lecture Steve Knott gave at the US Army War College in 2013. As he puts it, the second largest city in the Confederacy after New Orleans was wherever the United States Army of the Potomac was at any given time.¹

This Civil War, the war as it was lived and experience in real time, was a teeming, rambunctious, lively, and crowded affair. Today, not so much.

Those of us who still visit or even live in the War Between the States one hundred and sixty years later know this hard truth: the Civil War can be a lonely place. 

Most of the work I do involves interrogating the dead to represent a haunted landscape of long-forgotten memories. This is mostly a solitary pursuit, a one-way dialogue. With that in mind, it’s a great and rare pleasure to gab with anyone who is similarly captivated by the Civil War.

Recently, I was lucky to get in touch with Robert F. O’Neill, whose detailed monographs Chasing JEB Stuart and John Mosby: The Union Cavalry in Northern Virginia from Second Manassas to Gettysburg and Small but Important Riots: The Cavalry Battles of Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville have been essential sources for piecing together my work. 

Besides being a valuable opportunity to compare notes on Fairfax Court House circa 1863, talking with Bob was a powerful incentive to distill and refocus a now sprawling body of local research into a single important idea.

For John Mosby and his men, creeks could be roads. 

MOSBY on DIFFICULT RUN

Surviving Federal dispatches and a raft of Mosby lore that paints Yankees as categorically inept make more sense in this new context. The Federals tasked with running down John Mosby in Fairfax County, Virginia, were beholden to formal maps and the known roads they depicted. Local Confederates—many of whom were vital components of Mosby’s command—had mental maps of low profile routes directly between milling centers. As critical hubs of hyperlocal economies, these mills were connected in some way or another to every farm in the area. More importantly, what roads that did exist in 1863 had often been purpose-built to access these mills. 

Such landmarks and their attendant infrastructure loomed large in the identity of Difficult Run boys that scouted and fought for John Mosby. In an area rife with mills, these all-important places have been conceptually neglected in studies of the Civil War. 

They exerted a gravitational pull on the surrounding landscape and altered the ecological conditions in unpredictable ways. At Fox’s Mill, the upper gristing facility was known to harness every drop of Difficult Run when in operation. A quick close of the dam resulted in a bone dry creek bed and prodigious flooding of the marshy land above. A mile north at the lower Fox Mill, a dam of stone construction was reliably used to create a large and deep swimming hole as late as the 1930s. 

Many century (or even millennia) old patterns of resource extraction along Difficult Run carved paths through the basin that oriented themselves along or across the creek. In a Civil War-era Northern Virginia renowned for poor road quality and steep turnpike tolls, these creek-centric bridle paths would have vital pieces of unmapped infrastructure.

Beyond the scope of the manmade, there were clear advantages to be found along creeks, especially in the Difficult Run basin. As Robert O’Neill writes in Chasing JEB Stuart and John Mosby, and as I can attest from a childhood spent on Difficult and Little Difficult Runs, these deep-sunk waterways were known to generate long-lasting inversion layer fogs that jacketed the already bank-cloaked creek beds in a thick haze.²

These factors are the foundation of my creek hypothesis. Raw place potentials and the opportunities for maneuver and concealment that they afforded can be overlaid with data about the economic interests and loyalties of local property owners, their support for and participation in Confederate service, and the values that shaped life in the basin to create a map of interconnected runs that were the functional equivalent of alternative roads for those with access and knowledge. 

BIGGER THAN JOHN

This hyperlocal theory is part of a much larger reassessment. A body of work is emerging to broadly highlight how important creeks were to the Civil War. 

In All Roads Led to Gettysburg—a book I heartily recommend to anyone interested in Civil War fighting tactics—historian Troy D. Harman inverts traditional narratives about the war’s most celebrated battle to foreground natural resources, landform, and powerful spatial arrangements as determinants in the outcome of Gettysburg.

Harman’s extensive interpretation of the battlefield reconfigures the fight’s history away from an accidental run-in towards a deliberate maneuver by both armies to secure and position= forces around valuable water sources. Like a negative topographic image, he flips the familiar story of struggles for crests of famous ridges to a keen focus on the valleys between these heights. 

When addressing the way Cemetery and Seminary Ridges loom—literally and figuratively—over the historiography of Gettysburg, Harman writes, “Beyond the fight itself, these ridge lines are best understood as cover for water used to sponge artillery rounds approximately 25,000 times, to nourish 60,000 horses and mules pulling wagon trains in the rear, for hydrating 175,000 military personnel in front and rear, and for treating approximately 27,000 wounded.”³

This an exceptional insight. One that removes much of the mysticism surrounding the Civil War and replaces it with a wise, administrative psychology in keeping with the tenor of the West Point education that prepared so many officers in both armies.

Even as I celebrate this utterly reasonable position that creeks were objects of great interest and value to men who made conscious and rational decisions about orienting around them, I need to leave room for the very same irrationality that Harman demyths. 

I contend that the true power of creeks in the Civil War was equally unconscious and instinctive. 

Mind body circuits connecting fragile psyches with flagging physiologies exerted tremendous influence over conflicts like the Civil War where closed order linear tactics defined the dominant mode of fighting. Unit cohesion, fighting spirit, maneuverability, and resilience in the 1860s was inordinately dependent on the behavior of individuals who formed the unit’s literal connective tissue. 

Fear, vulnerability, exhaustion, and confusion can ignite destructive behavioral feedback loops that undermine a unit’s ability to fight. This fear, vulnerability, exhaustion, and confusion can be mitigated or multiplied as a function of position and landform.

Like any other animal, humans arrayed in an organized herd that is enduring effective threats from a more concealed or better positioned opponent can experience deep-set emotional responses that override strategic evaluations in favor of brute kinetics. 

Creeks and creek beds are critical factors in this equation. 

It’s interesting that I cannot think of a single instance where Civil War units that were developed into battle lines traveled parallel to the course of a creek. 

Invariably, companies, regiments, brigades, divisions, and corps shift to advance on a creek perpendicular to its flow so that the entire length of the unit (and hence its ability to concentrate firepower) fronts to the creek bed. 

I’m open to being wrong, but it seems to be a rule that the presence of a creek bed either dictates initial deployment or bends units in its vicinity into its hydrology features in predictable ways.

There are some obvious facets of reasoning that could affect this phenomenon. 

First, creeks make for excellent defensive lines. Readymade breastworks could be occupied by skirmishers and concentrated riflemen in a protective schema that served as a force multiplier against attackers. 

Even if a creek wasn’t occupied, its very presence was an obstacle to unit cohesion. Irregular paths and non-standard depths merged with poor footing and loose soils to create a disastrous potential for dissolving massed formations. In linear tactics that depended on sheets of volley fire, fording or even negotiating a creek as a battle line equated to crucial moments of lost firepower mired in disorganization. 

Still more dangerous was the danger a creek presented when its course forced a partial crossing or even split a battle line—one part on this side and the other part across the run. If one wing of a regiment proceeded at regular speed, while the other became embroiled with the dog leg of a creek, that regiment could effectively large proportions of its firepower in a lengthy and complicated attempt to realign troops that were suddenly in or across a body of water. Once split, it would be easy to get bogged down, bent or ambushed without support. 

On a deeper and even less conscious level, the very fact that creeks represent the lowest point of a slope would have been a powerful incentive to face them head on. Basic Civil War tactics were based on a system of guides by which NCOs and officers struggled to maintain straight lines focused on single geographic objectives. Often, as was the case with wheel maneuvers, men of authority had little say. It was up to individual soldiers to maintain lines of sight with one end of their regiment while pushing their arms against the opposite side to maintain unit cohesion. 

This type of unit is inherently sensitive to landform. Men who want to fight and obey orders will still succumb to the downward pull of a path of least resistance. At a quick time pace of 110 steps per minute, even a handful of unintentional missteps can compound into a divergence that pulls a fighting unit apart. 

Excellent soldiers with elite NCOs and efficient officers could still be susceptible to these erroneous footfalls when under fire or exhausted from a long march. As one side of a regiment slipped towards a creek at the foot of the hill, it would be easy for the rest of the unit to simply align on the errant element. Thus, a formation of any size could find itself unwittingly oriented parallel to a creek and receiving concentrated rifle fire on one or more flanks.

The disparity between instinct and intent is difficult to evaluate. What was a command initiative and what was unconscious? How much did these patterned interactions with creeks owe to good military sense and how much was the natural consequence of unwieldy linear formations sloughing deeper into paths of least resistance? 

Kenneth Noe hints at a similar phenomenon in his book on Civil War weather, The Howling Storm. He discusses a small reformation of the Federal line at the Battle of Logan’s Cross Roads in language that anticipates my quandary. 

“As the Confederates extended their flanks, however, the Union defenders withdrew up the road through a ravine,” he writes. “They halted at a stout split-rail fence that ran along an intersecting country road. This fence line soon became the vortex of battle, drawing an increasing number of troops.”⁴

Though not a statement on creeks, Noe’s reflection is couched in terms of geographic fixations, battlefield gyres, and gravitational guides that pulled and drew troops against plan and best interest into unfortunate positions. 

My mind can’t help but wander to James Longstreet’s assault on July 2 at Gettysburg, in which her divisions were supposed to attack en echelon northwards up the Emmitsburg Road, but wound up deploying to assault eastwards instead. Terrain and enemy dispositions obliterated orders and created conditions that led to individual initiative from the divisional level down. This found Confederate forces aligned on Plum Run and Houck’s Ridge—land features of tremendously magnetic importance to men accustomed to Civil War combat. 

Tantalizing Implications

The creek hypothesis is particularly engaging not just because it identifies patterned use of creeks, but because it implicates broadly held psychological phenomena and the way these mentalities engage and shape instincts. Specific topographies encourage particular maneuvers that exist beyond the pale of the conscious. In many ways, our everyday conduct is unknowingly shaped by the places we inhabit. Geography inspires mental processes and triggers the body into familiar behaviors. In this way, orientation to landform could be an asset or a tremendous liability.

As a commander of atomized troops that never fought in an ordered line of battle, John Mosby did not have the same problems with creeks that vexed his colleagues in mainline Confederate formations. This cleavage from tradition into a dissolved fighting paradigm is a critical evolution in military technology and an important clue to the viability of creeks in Mosby’s successes. 

A group of loosely assembled men on horseback would not suffer the potentially catastrophic consequences that required others to orient themselves to creeks in predictable ways. Mosby’s Rangers were free to improvise, innovate and channel their base instincts for protection and maneuverability into a symbiotic, not adversarial, relationship with creek formations.

Difficult Run emerges as an important laboratory of this greater creek hypothesis. At one level, standard linear tactics employed by Federal forces failed to effectively counter or even identify a Rebel force that mimicked the creek bodies in which it hid by dissolving prescribed linear form and achieving a loose, watery formation.

In this way, John Mosby flowed across the hillsides and passed up and down creek beds that themselves tied into pre-existing paths unknown to any map. This pragmatic place-negotiation has never really been addressed in the field of Mosbyana, but happens to explain the phantasmagoric effect with which John Mosby was able to maneuver and thrive when the roads of Fairfax County were choked with Yankee cavalry. 

On a deeper and more philosophically satisfying level, a rigorous consideration of creek topographies and their role in the Civil War brings a complex and previously neglected alternate geography to the foreground. There are unseen axes and invisible intersections where people, their needs, and their social worlds laced into both built infrastructure and patterns of weathering that carved convenient footfalls into the earth.

These relationships are so pervasive as to become utterly unconscious. People of the Civil War era and modern humans share the common experience of being drawn ever downwards into comfortable dispositions with specific places. In these invisible relationships, a wellspring of possibilities rich in contingency trails off the shoulders of a robust geographic determinism.

Understanding the way cultured vision, landform weathering, and the overlay of geography intersect emerges as a holy grail in a field of study far broader than just the Civil War. 

Sources

1. “Battle of Gettysburg: Why J.E.B. Stuart Ends Up in Carlisle.” Steve Knott. U.S. Army War College. 2013. https://youtube.com/watch?v=lrXxz4iniRs

2. O’Neill, Robert F. Chasing Jeb Stuart and John Mosby. Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc, 2012. p. 108.

3. Harman, Troy D. All Roads Led to Gettysburg. Lanham: Stackpole Books, 2022. P 7-8.

4. Noe, Kenneth W. The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. p. 102