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Amos Fox’s World
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.

No known photos of Amos Fox survive. We have to rely on this image of his twin brother, Lt. Frank Fox of Mosby’s Rangers to satisfy our curiosity.

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.

Named today after the Waples family that bought Gabriel Fox’s mill after the war, this meadow in Oakton, Virginia, would have figured prominently in Amos Fox’s childhood. Remnants of the mill race remain in the woods to the right.

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

Gabriel Fox’s obituary from page 3, column 2 of the September 4, 1844 Alexandria Gazette.

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

Jim Jackson’s business card courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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

Jim Jackson, who some doting genealogists on Family Search have enshrined as a “Southern Martyr.” Closer to the truth would be an epitaphic borrow from Tombstone screenwriter, Kevin Jarre: “he was just too high strung.”

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

A glimpse into Amos Fox’s spending habits to be found in Fairfax Term Papers 1860-439. Courtesy of the Honorable Christopher J. Falcon, Clerk of Court.

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

Wartime image of the Marshall House complete with its famous flagpole. LoC.

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.

Jim Jackson’s murder of Col. Elmer Ellsworth at the Marshall House became a popular motif for Union political propaganda, gracing countless envelopes from men serving in Yankee armies. LoC.

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.

Jack Barnes after the war.

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?

Amos’ obituary as published on page 3, column 2 of the October 25, 1909 Alexandria Gazette. LoC.

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:
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“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
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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 Fox on the Temperance Ticket, a difficult thing to believe without seeing it yourself. From page 2, column 1 of the May 19, 1877 Alexandria Gazette.

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.

The smithy himself, Louis Tom Trammell.

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:
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“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
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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:
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“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
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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.
October 20, 2024
Creek Hypothesis

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

Difficult Run looking mighty roadlike just downstream from the site of Fox’s Lower Mill, August 2023.

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.

My much-dogeared copy of Robert F. O’Neill’s incredibly helpful Chasing JEB Stuart and John Mosby.

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.

Difficult Run at Gabrielson Gardens Park in Oakton, Virginia, looking eminently walkable three days after the last rain.

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.

Harman in good company on my bookshelf.

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.

On the former John Fox property, where I speculate John Mosby and his men crossed frequently, Difficult Run measures 30 feet bank-to-bank. There is broad floodplain on either side, gently sloping banks that offer concealment without being too great obstacles, generous bands of dry sediment in the creek bed itself, and shallow pools. All make for a hydrological feature that could be mistaken for a path.

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

October 4, 2024
Klan Geographies
TL;DR–Overlapping geography and ideology (and potentially personnel) bridge the gap between John Mosby’s wartime operations and the post-war KKK in Fairfax County, Virginia

A KKK funeral in Fairfax circa 1927. Image courtesy of Chris Barbuschak at the Virginia Room at the City of Fairfax Public Library.

Any discussion of the Ku Klux Klan, or the fault lines of race, class, and modernity that aided its formation, should be undertaken carefully. Emotional charge brings inaccuracy. This favors the creation of paper cut outs when a nuanced topographical map would be of more help, as is the case when navigating a landmark as treacherous as the KKK.

By mapping what little details we have about the lengthy history of the klan in Fairfax County, we can construct a geographic timeline that depicts a highway of thought and deed running from the antebellum era through today. John Mosby and his men appear at important intersections on this path.

As a successful marauder in Confederate service, John Mosby assembled fighting men with southern loyalties, independent dispositions, a propensity for violence, and pro-slavery beliefs into a martial force that used familiar farms and known paths to wage war against the Yankee invaders.

When the war ended, Federal armies dispersed and were replaced by a Freedmen’s Bureau that pursued the interests of former slaves at a perceived cost to war-ravaged locals. Crucially, these efforts on the part of the Federal government were transposed on lines and sites almost identical to the disposition of Federal forces during the war.

These place-rooted conflicts set the stage for patterns of social thinking premised on intimidation, violence, and the elevation of certain categories of people over others.

It is useful to understand the ways in which this southern status quo was rationalized and defended in post-war Fairfax County, if only to better comprehend a long history of conflict premised on ethnicity, religion, social position, and the all important choice between an embrace of the past and a hope for the future.

Close scrutiny of the 1927 Klan funeral reveals hood insignia designating the membership as members of Klavern #2, one of two overarching Klan organizations that VCU has identified as operating in Fairfax County during the 1920s. Image courtesy of Chris Barbuschak at the Virginia Room at the City of Fairfax Public Library.

Three Klans

There is no single Ku Klux Klan, no uniform fabric woven from the spun threads of systemic racism and calculated violence that stretches back and blankets Fairfax history from the end of the Civil War onwards.

Instead, it’s useful to think of the KKK as a mask, a symbolic face that has been worn by multiple groups at different times to signal adherence to an undercurrent of white supremacy knit with an entitlement to physical force that runs rampant throughout American history.

Sociologist Richard T. Schaefer structures the cyclical embrace of klan regalia, terminology, and direct action around three periods.¹ These triple phases conform well to historical evidence about the klan in Fairfax County.

The third and most recent instantiation of the Ku Klux Klan began in the post-WWII era and accelerated through the 1950s and 60s as a response to court decisions and legislation that challenged racial hegemony in the United States. Desegregation under the auspices of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, resulting “mass resistance,” and the Civil Rights and Votings Rights Act heralded a response from many who found meaning and comfort in the familiar hierarchies of a social order premised on ethnic category.

Not strictly a southern phenomenon, this incarnation of the klan has stretched across the United States over the course of many decades. This third klan sprouted forth from a culture of surreptitiousness and subtle behind the scenes power jockeying to embrace a certain brazenness. From the high profile publicity-seeking of former grand wizard David Duke to recent events that have found the klan merging with other white-identity groups, this version of the KKK has sought quiet institutional power marbled with publicity-hungry provocation.

Little is known of this klan in Fairfax County except in the odd moments where privately-held sentiment has breached the public sphere. A spurt of anonymous klan literature that appeared around the Sully District in 2021 is an excellent example.

This latter-day klan was a far cry from the “Second Klan,” which held great sway over American sub-urban life in the 1920s. Mainstream-adjacent, this KKK was the genesis point of much that we associate with klan culture. Its formal ranks, costuming, rituals, and messaging refined in this period as a deliberate means to achieve political and ideological legitimacy.

In Fairfax County, the Second Klan was an accepted part of local society that operated with great comfort in broad daylight. Hooded klan members paraded together and staged public funerals for deceased members. They operated a KKK-sponsored newspaper, the Fairfax County Independent, from their official headquarters in the former Fairfax Elementary School.²

Though controversial on a national level, the Second Klan’s appeals to traditional values, isolationism, anti-catholicism, and both de facto and de juris racism rang true for many in a Fairfax that was still predominantly white and rural. The Jazz Age had begun. Industrial society had produced untold changes in transportation and communication. Cultural forms were becoming less hidebound and more free-wheeling, with increasingly progressive mores about sex, dress, and conduct revolutionizing personal identity.

In a retrospectively-inclined Fairfax, these changes were greeted with some amount of scorn. Wherever the agrarian lifestyles still predominated, the klan was no great secret. It was an open and legitimate organization that grafted together similarly concerned individuals, many of whom operated in the agricultural sphere.

Throughout the 1920s, this klan had its own day at the craft and livestock-oriented Fairfax Fair. A 1926 report about a Dranesville farmers picnic in September of 1926 noted “the County Chamber of Commerce and the 4-H Clubs frolicked on the third day while the visible & invisible empire [of the KKK] held sway on the last day.”³

At center the KKK are represented at a Herndon Community Day. Image courtesy of Chris Barbuschak at the Virginia Room at the City of Fairfax Public Library.

Public and popular though it may have been, the Second Klan was still a subject of controversy. It existed in a paradoxical space where tacit approval and public disavowals kept it both out of the mainstream, but alive and well.

In 1974, eminent Fairfax historians Patrick Reed and Nan Netherton conducted an interview with Joseph Beard, the former Agricultural Extension Agent for Fairfax County who operated out of Frying Pan—a popular site for John Mosby during the Civil War that became a hub for Fairfax farm life from Appomattox through the modern period.

When questioned about the Klan during the 1920’s, Beard’s responses are at once hesitant and familiar. His words betray a calculation, by which he attempts to renounce the Klan’s darker aspects without indicting (or identifying) friends who operated within the organization.
```
NARR: Do you know anything about the Ku Klux Klan in the County or its activities?

BEARD: Well, the Ku Klux Klan: I knew of it, I knew there was such a thing. Of course, I never was a member, but I did attend one or two political rallies in 1927 on what is now the parking lot of the George Mason Annex here, which was formerly the old Fairfax City High School. There must have been fifteen-hundred Ku Klux people there that night in support of some issue one way or the other, one of the political organizations.

NARR: Would you say then there was much racial animosity in the County? Was this the direction of the Klan’s activities at that time?

BEARD: I never saw or heard locally anything that had to do specifically with special racial problems. Of course, you know what they stood for: they were prejudiced in racial situations. It seems to me that the rallies that I attended…they didn’t even have on hoods or anything. They had on uniforms, white uniforms, but their faces were not covered. I knew who some of them were, because I saw some friends there, and it was more of a political rally at the time as far as I understood.⁴
```
In a draft of a separate monograph detailing the history of Frying Pan Park during this same period, a grease pen note counsels the author to write out the Ku Klux Klan.⁵

Despite after-the-fact attempts to sterilize its history, Fairfax County’s 1920’s-era klan and its mission to gain legitimate footing in local politics left a tantalizing trail of sources. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the original KKK in Fairfax County, whose silence and shadowy conduct has flummoxed all historians that have sought to understand the place of race-oriented violence and Confederate memory in the post-Civil War period.

Look Away, Frying Pan

Patrick Reed and Nan Netherton, the same twentieth century historians that sought to tease out an anecdote of the Second Klan from James Beard, were similarly frustrated in their attempts to flesh out the original klan’s role in Fairfax during the 1860s.

In the County’s official history, a simple reference to this first invisible empire offers simply that the KKK had formed in Fairfax by late 1867 or early 1868.⁶ We are left, as is often the case, to read between the lines.

Properly contextualized, the KKK’s earliest formation in Fairfax County was a nexus at the point where heightened freedom, enfranchisement, and government support focused on recently freed African-American slaves at a perceived cost to former Confederates and the white patrician order they unsuccessfully fought to preserve.

At war’s end, there were 2,941 free African-Americans living in Fairfax County.⁷ Almost immediately following the cessation of fighting, the Freedman’s Bureau arrived in Fairfax. There, amidst the desolation that had destroyed the fortunes of so many native white citizens of Fairfax, recovery efforts focused on the elevation of former slaves. Upon passage of the 15th Amendment in February of 1869, this population was empowered to vote on an equal basis with their former masters.

This was an earth-shattering psychic wound for many Fairfax residents who had gleefully supported a bloody war that was premised on forestalling the very subversion of traditional white society they were now witnessing.

Patricia Hickin described the fallout:
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“The difficulty most Fairfax natives faced in accepting black suffrage can scarcely be overestimated, especially after it became clear that the blacks were thoroughly radical in their politics and had not the slightest intention of voting as their former masters wished. Probably nothing that happened in the course of the war was more traumatic to the whites after the war than sharing the ballot with former slaves whom they could not, at least in this respect, dominate.”⁸
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Two facts feel obvious: not everyone who felt or expressed these sentiments in post-Civil War Fairfax County was a member of the KKK, but everyone who was a member of the KKK in Fairfax County at this time surely felt this same way.

An item that appeared in 1868 in the local paper of record—the Alexandria Gazette—shines light on the way righteous indignation factored in to the formation of the KKK as a load-bearing pillar. “The Ku Klux Klan unites in a secret order,” says the story, “to defend itself against oppression and wrong.”⁹

The language used to bulwark the first klan’s supposed moral high ground echoes calls to enlist in Confederate service eight years prior. These appeals resonated. Self-defense against oppression conjured familiar images of honor warfare conducted to prevent defilement at the hands of a Yankee horde. Though the Union Army was long gone, its successor, the Freedmen’s Bureau, was an appropriate stand in for northern interference and its hallmark encouragement of African-American “usupers.”

The Freedmen’s Bureau did itself few favors when it arrived in Fairfax in the summer of 1865 and promptly took possession of every structure the Union Army had built in Fairfax County during the war.¹⁰

Wartime Federal infrastructure was inextricably linked with efforts to neutralize John Mosby. As was the case, the disposition of these structures invariably concentrated along Federal picket lines that were established after Mosby’s emergence in early 1863. Fairfax Court House, Flint Hill, and Vienna—three communities that sat just above Difficult Run and were premier targets of Mosby’s Rangers during the war—became focal points in the constellation of Freedmen’s Bureau holdings after the war. Additionally, a “colored school” at Frying Pan sat at a junction where a road accessing the Little River Turnpike and the Ox Road joined Horsepen Run. Both Federal cavalry and Mosby Rangers occupied this intersection frequently during the war.

Gracious acceptance was not the mode in which these installations were received. Rather than the resigned acquiescence of a defeated people, locals embraced an offensive posture that utilized tactics which had been perfected in the area during the recent war.

In 1866, areas once rich in Confederate sympathy across the southern and border states began to experience a rash of clandestine violence. Gone were the days of direct confrontation against Federal troops. Instead, anonymous night riders began targeting institutions that benefited African-Americans. Locally available papers ran an abundance of coverage documenting the rash of arson affecting colored schools throughout the nation. On March 16, 1866, the Evening Star published an account of a colored school burning in Centerville, Maryland.¹¹ In June, DC’s National Republican published accounts of mass arson that leveled numerous African-American institutions in Memphis, Tennessee.¹² Six weeks before the colored school at Frying Pan was torched, the Evening Star offered a snippet about the newly completed colored school in Stephenson, Alabama burning to the ground before it could even open.¹³

With repetition comes normalization, which creates the opportunity for mimicry. Fairfax was no exception.

The year prior to the formal foundation of the KKK in Fairfax County found early night riders executing a guerrilla campaign against the Freedmen’s Bureau. Targeted arson destroyed a school and church at Lewinsville and torched the Vienna quarters of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s agent, Captain Ross.¹⁴ So too, the colored school near Frying Pan fell to arson in December of 1866.¹⁵

Given that Vienna was a known redoubt of Quakers and Unionists during the war, the fact that a piece of Federal property supporting the education and empowerment of freed slaves was burned in that area suggests that someone travelled there to do the deed. At that point, there was no shortage of former Mosby men living not far from Vienna in the folds of Difficult Run or on the eastern limit of the Culpeper Basin. This same body of men demonstrated previous inclinations for this kind of work and harbored a unique body of knowledge regarding less travelled avenues in and out of Vienna.

More intriguing is the case of the colored school at Frying Pan. In 1866, the site at Frying Pan was auspiciously located a stone’s throw away from the home of Richard Turley, a Mosby Ranger.

Fellow Rangers Curg Hutchison, Phillip DC Lee, Albert Wrenn, and George Turberville lived within a couple miles, but the mere presence of Richard Turley near a colored school that burned to the ground is enough to raise eyebrows.

Prior to the war, Richard and his father CW owned one of the largest plantations in Fairfax. In 1860, they owned twenty slaves.¹⁶ These twenty humans were emancipated by war’s end and became the likely constituents of the colored school that burned.

The Turleys were in tumult in the years after the war. Loss of labor and diminished agricultural returns appear to have sent Richard and his father, CW, into a behavioral tailspin that found the father/son tandem engaging in risky and violent behavior.

Both Turleys earned “assault with intent to kill” charges after an incident on a nearby roadway on October 12, 1867. Richard Turley fired a pistol three times at William Trammell, himself a former Mosby Ranger. Charles Turley, Richard’s father, then grabbed William Trammell and instructed his son to “shoot him, damn him, kill him.”

CW Turley was found guilty of having unlawfully “shot, beat, wound and ill treat” William Trammell. This came hot on the heels of an unsuccessful defense against a debt charge brought by Amos Fox to satisfy an obligation of $40 upon which Charles Turley had reneged in June of 1867. It was a long fall from grace for a man who posted a $100 reward for the return of an escaped slave in march of 1855.¹⁷

The details of Turley’s 1855 advertisement for the return of his escaped slave add possible nuance to the depths of his post-war ego death and enrich a possible motivation for his involvement in the arson of the colored school in 1866.

Printed in the March 28, 1855 Alexandria Gazette. LoC.

Offering as much as $100 for the immediate remedy of a slave escape demonstrates a certain paternalism and a willingness to leverage whatever means possible to secure order in Turley’s household. So too, the description of the escaped person, “Arch,” is intriguing. “He is nearly six feet high,” the posting reads, “a very bright mulatto, straight flax colored hair, black eyes, and a down look when spoken to—had on when he left a suit of white fulled cloth box cloth and a lead colored wool hat.”

This description and the desperation with which his return was sought match a slave of value. It also describes a slave of mixed extraction who potentially sprang forth from the very loins of the Turley family itself. Fine clothing, flax colored hair, and an almost proud characterization of apparent intellect betray genetic proximity, possibly even an offspring relationship with CW Turley. Is it conceivable that the colored school at Pleasant Valley represented the severance of CW Turley from not just valuable property, but a piece of his own family?

We will never know if the Turleys were either Klan affiliated or the culprits to the school burning that occurred adjacent to their home. It hardly matters, because this kinship unit was but one of many that belonged to a Frying Pan community which was steeped in a rugged brand of protectionism and paternalism.

Most, if not all, of the prominent pre-war land owners thereabouts were members of the Baptist Church at Frying Pan. This church was renowned for integrating slaves into the congregation on a socially-subservient, but equal-before-god basis. The limits of faith were tested in 1859 when this seemingly progressive church was one of the first to organize a slave patrol, which combed through the fields around Pleasant Valley and Frying Pan at night, ensuring that violence against whites was not afoot.¹⁸

This organization was a cultural precedent to the night riding of the Ku Klux Klan. Before the KKK was even a glimmer in local consciousness and years before John Mosby ever set foot in the area, the local planter elite sponsored and participated in an institution designed to operate after sunset as a means to mete out justice against imagined enemies.

Interestingly, the slave patrols in Virginia grew in prominence after watershed moments like the John Brown Raid in 1859, the Nat Turner revolt in 1831 and the Gabriel uprising in 1800. However, the slave patrol as an institution dated to 1726.¹⁹ The pre-war night patrol empowered some of the most secessionist inclined and hot-headed members of Fairfax society to conduct armed operations in geographies that coincided with both guerrilla activity during the war and post-war racially-oriented violence. Not coincidentally, an 1860 court order designed CW Turley as captain over nine privates in a Frying Pan neighborhood night patrol that played as a rehearsal for later night riders.²⁰

By which CW Turley becomes an original night rider in pre-war Fairfax County. From the December 1, 1860 Alexandria Gazette.

In this same Frying Pan neighborhood which hosted some of the most lucrative, large, and closely held agricultural lands in Fairfax County, a strong desire to control any possible vector of challenge to the planter elite would have been a target before and after the Civil War. This was also foundational mentality for the establishment of the KKK.

Modes of defensive thinking rooting in class, property ownership, and insular cohesion against perceived invasion dominated at Frying Pan. The church and its well-spring of independent-oriented social thinking stemmed forth from the mind of Jeremiah Moore, a local Primitive Baptist preacher whose early arrest for challenging religious establishment in Virginia caused him to see the shadow of the heel of big government around every corner. In his teachings and correspondence, Moore couched independence in the language of a material prosperity set in the terms of human slavery.

In a letter he sent to Thomas Jefferson on July 12, 1800, Moore wrote “of course to be born poor in Virginia is to be born a Slave.”²¹ Stalwart defense against either literal or economic subjugation became something of a cultural birthright in the Frying Pan community he shepherded.

Decades after Moore’s death and years after the Civil War, former Mosby Ranger and neighbor to the torched colored school, Phillip DC Lee, was asked to opine on a proposal to move the Frying Pan Church to conform to road improvements. In talking about the church, he spoke of his home and the attitudes with which it was regarded. Lee’s response parroted rhetoric that echoed Jeremiah Moore, harmonized with neo-confederate thinking, and amplified a mode of self-determination reminiscent of familiar klan ideology.
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“The church is a sacred place to them, I believe. I have no evidence but what they met there and enjoyed themselves undisturbed until this question of boundary arose. From what I know they love the place and would not give it up for any consideration. Nothing could induce them to give it up as a place of worship. They are endeared to that place as you or I are endeared to home. It is unnatural or unreasonable that they should protect it—loving it as I have described I believe they do?”²²
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There is a continuity of community between these events. One that stretches into the pre-war slave patrols and the knights tournaments that found future Mosby Rangers riding and competing with one another to gain and retain status in communal and spatial relationships premised on love. Lee begs to know what is unreasonable about people protecting a thing that they have loved dearly. Though he is not discussing the Klan in this context, he is expressing a long-held local sentiment that challenges attempts to access and alter familiar landmarks and mores to suit modern standards.

This “love” is indistinguishable from camaraderie, which would have certainly been apparent between locals who fought together on these same lands during the war. The physical community that draped itself in a morally ambiguous “love” is the very same agricultural redoubt which James Beard described two decades later as being saturated with KKK membership.

In general, mapping sites where formal Klan activity or shadowy racial violence occurred between 1865 and 1930 nets an interesting configuration. Known concentrations in Fairfax City and Herndon coincide with familiar wartime landmarks. Arson at Frying Pan and Vienna reads geographically like wartime reports of a Mosby raid. 1920s era Klan days at the Fairfax Fair and contemporaneous rallies at the same site (once Paul V High School) put white hoods in areas where Mosby was known to sulk and prey upon Union cavalry. So too, a mass initiation of 103 KKK members in a formal cross burning ceremony at Five Oaks (across from today’s Oakton High School) in 1923 pins Klan activity at yet another location on the fringe of Difficult Run.

In many ways, the battle lines and social fractures that developed during Mosby’s tenure in Fairfax County during the war endured in a long-tailing conflict over the very same issues and land that brought the first conflict. John Mosby was no advocate of racial violence, but it’s impossible to separate the patterning he left on the land.

By channeling practiced views about place, social order, and mutual defense into an organized network of partisans who battled federal forces with impunity and great success, John Mosby unwittingly facilitated the earliest evolutions of racially-oriented violence which became the KKK.

This connection goes deeper than abstract principles and happenstance place arrangements.

A Dead Rebellion Not Soon Forgotten

In the scope of the larger, ongoing Civil War, the subtle capitulation by Federal authorities during the Reconstruction Period remains one of the least understood and most consequential battles.

Adopted in 1869 and implemented in 1870, Virginia’s new post-war constitution enshrined the right to vote for all male citizens above the age of twenty-one. In short order, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments abolished slavery, established citizenship, and provided suffrage for adult males who had once been held in bondage. In Fairfax, that was the long and short of the good news for freed slaves.

1870 also marked the point when funding for Freedmen’s Schools dried up and the doors closed. Largely the product of private benevolence, these schools depended on money sent from the Friends Association of Philadelphia for the Aid and Elevation of the Freedmen. Enthusiastic fundraising and generous donations to educational efforts south of the Mason/Dixon line withered in proportion to one another as the first half decade after Appomattox closed.

Two years later, Congress pulled the plug on the Freedmen’s Bureau in general. Any formal support for the education, economic advancement, and voting rights of the newly freed slaves lost its institutional backbone overnight.²³

Simultaneously, former Confederates who had operated in the shadows in the years after the war began to emerge into formal positions of power that were in keeping with their pre-war standing.

In 1870, James M. Love, brother of Mosby Ranger Tom Love and himself a veteran of the Black Horse Cavalry that raided so often in Fairfax County during the war, was elected Commonwealth Attorney. Thus began an illustrious career that culminated with a lengthy career on the bench as a prominent judge in the County legal system.²⁴

One year after the Freedmen’s Bureau dissolved, former Mosby Ranger Richard Farr Broadwater was elected sheriff of the county.²⁵ The old guard of former slaveowners and enthusiastic secessionists regained control of the local legal apparatus with the added benefit of four years worth of combat experience and personal relationships cemented therein.

If there were night rides and intimidation campaigns during this time, we do not know about it. Either it didn’t happen or it went wisely unreported. We do know that the interlocking martial traditions of horsemanship and mock combat were still cherished and practiced in Fairfax, as evidenced by the continuance of pre-war Knights Tournaments.

Before the war, men who figured prominently into the Mosby command like Jack Barnes, Frank Fox, Charles Albert Fox, and Albert Wrenn promenaded through Fairfax Court House before competing against one another in feats of hand-to-hand combat and mounted maneuvering. Flamboyant names like “Knight of the Valley” and “Ingomar” gave the event a feel reminiscent of a Sir Walter Scott neo-romanticist field day. Virginal maidens and a customary feast completed the trappings of pageantry.²⁶

Despite a notion that the Civil War effectively murdered romantic leanings in the American South, the Knights Tournaments continued after the war with an important twist. Reminiscences of fallen comrades and land consecrated by battle added an impetus for grafting the chivalric competition on to the substance of the lost Confederate cause.

Though coded in the trappings of the Middle Ages, the Knights Tournament that occurred on July 22, 1868 on the site of the Battle of First Manassas was perhaps the first Civil War re-enactment. Historic dress, semi-scripted combat, and doting crowds all presage the formal re-enacting movement that would emerge a century later. More importantly, the event mythologized the Confederate cause and framed the rebel dead as heroic knights who died in honorable battle.

James F. Clarke, esq., of Luray, Virginia, delivered an opening invocation that unmistakably laid claim to both Confederate moral and spiritual superiority while paving the way for an athletic tradition of active resistance rooted in formal memorialization.

The Alexandria Gazette described Clarke’s speech: “He spoke to the Knights of the days in which, under the Southern Cross, they had upon that very field, joined in a contest where every thought was but of victory or death; and of the result of their trials and dangers; then of that flag under which they now lived, and of the noble men who had supported it, and the various celebrated battle fields over which it had waved; and, lastly, he charged them as men of Southern chivalry to do their upmost in the coming contest to display the respect which they had for those ladies who were sacrificing time and money to erect a suitable monument for their former brothers in arms.”²⁷

Indeed, the entire contest and its air of Lost Cause aggrandizement were held under the auspices of erecting a memorial for two thousand Confederate dead still buried on the field.

This pattern repeats itself in Fairfax, where the substance of what the klan symbolized—a retrospective longing for a utopian past torn asunder by the usurpations of the Yankee and his agent, the slave, at the cost of noble Southern men who laid their lives down so that their country may live—expressed itself in the formation of a recalcitrant Southern identity that demanded recognition with monuments to its vaunted Confederate dead.

The power of rebel memory was such that a late 19th-century drive to fund and install a monument to Confederate dead in the Fairfax Cemetery became a bi-partisan effort. The Confederate Monument Association of Fairfax County featured donations from a who’s who of locals power brokers including former Confederate and then Commonwealth Attorney James Love, judges HW Thomas and DM Chichester, and a generous offering of twenty dollars from General Jubal Early.

Interestingly, another source of revenue sprang forth from the sale of relics harvested from the Chantilly battlefield, giving the monument the unique distinction of being funded by the looting of hallowed ground. More intriguing still are the names of prominent local Yankees who were targeted by rebel forces during the war, but contributed to the monument nonetheless.

Dairy baron JB Bowman and much maligned Civil War-era loyalist Job Hawxhurst both donated to the fund. No champions of the Confederate cause themselves, there is reason to believe that both men contributed in deference to the abundance of Confederate sentiment remaining in Fairfax. It’s not unreasonable to believe that the prevalence and power of unreformed Confederates in western Fairfax County was sufficient for men of extreme influence and wealth to sue for peace in the form of a generous donation to a memorial fund.²⁸

This movement towards memorialization and the potent groundswell of support it garnered bookend the violence against Freedmen’s facilities two decades prior. Confederate memory became the symbolic foundation for a return to racial hierarchies and social stability. This paradigm was thoroughly established in Fairfax by 1900.

As the South attempted to stabilize itself in the decades after the war, violence against African-Americans and Confederate memorialization were two sides to the same coin. Order was bestowed by the twin normalization of domineering attacks on racial others and the elevation of Confederate dead to the status of mythic heroes.

An item from the earlier school burning era that appeared in the Evening Star collated news stories from across the country in an intriguing and apparently normal sequence. A graph detailed arson against colored schools in Memphis bled immediately into a rosy item about a community effort to spruce up the graves of fallen Confederates in Richmond.

A study in contrasts from the June 1, 1866 Evening Star is perhaps more ordinary than we would like to admit.

The reader was guided through an apparently harmonious transition that segued between mob violence and the “extensive preparations” leading up to the suspension of business in Richmond that enabled “the entire white population to repair” to Hollywood Cemetery to witness the floral decoration of Confederate graves.²⁹

By 1902, support for the education and empowerment of African-Americans had long since dwindled while unbridled enthusiasm for Confederate mythology accelerated. Between these two complimentary phenomenon, a lethal space emerged.

It is perhaps a testament to the efficacy of a local legal apparatus that was itself steeped in the force dichotomies of pre-war racial hierarchies that lynchings did not occur in Fairfax. Local print media primed the citizenship for the application of Lynch law.

An 1883 “special dispatch” printed for the Fairfax readership by the D.C.-based Evening Critic reported the story of “a negro boy, of 18 years, named Jim Ball” of Fairfax who purportedly dragged the 11-year-old daughter of a local blacksmith into the woods and attempted to rape her. Jim Ball was detained by local workmen who prevented the girls’d father from killing the youth “on the spot.” The title of the news item was “HE DESERVED LYNCHING.”³⁰

From the June 20, 1883 Washington, D.C. Evening Critic.

Sensational and dubious stories were known fodder for the local press whose readership apparently savored the thought of violent remedies to perceived racial problems. An 1877 story in the Alexandria Gazette detailed a fanciful story that never appeared in ink again. It was so unbelievable that the editors themselves saw fit to temper the narrative with a shrugging admission that it might not be true.
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“NEWS FROM HOME—A Washington paper says:—‘A white fifteen year old girl married a negro in Fairfax, Va., No clergyman or magistrate could be found who would perform the ceremony, and so the couple simply swore on the Bible, in the presence of witnesses, that they would be faithful as husband and wife. The girls’ father, on hearing of the marriage, killed the negro.’ If the above is true, it is not known in this city or the parts of Fairfax adjacent thereto.”³¹
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The editors seem to have known that the story was false and saw fit to print it anyway, likely because it was an outrageous item that was not terribly dissonant from the beliefs and values of its readership.

These mores formed a climate around a heritage of night riding that extended back from before the war to embrace a subsequent movement towards Confederate memorialization. Charles Craven unwittingly detonated this cultural minefield when he initiated a crime spree in Herndon, Virginia.

The Equal Justice Initiative records no lynchings in Fairfax County from 1877 to 1950, but they document three in adjacent Loudoun County.³² However, a refined map published on Plain Talk History credits one of Loudoun’s three to Fairfax County, which was the geographic source of the men who lynched Craven in July of 1902.³³

At around 2 p.m. on July 31, 1902, a mob of one hundred and fifty men from Fairfax and Loudoun Counties overpowered the guard at the Leesburg jail. An ironworker from Frederick, Maryland named Harry Nipple used a sledgehammer to batter through the iron bars separating Charles Craven from the mob.³⁴ A gang of women encouraged the men as they removed him from the jail. Though the mob intended to remand Craven back within the legal limits of Fairfax County before dispatching him to the great beyond, the impetus to kill made for impatience. Craven was strung up within a mile of the jail along the Leesburg Pike.

The lynching was the culmination of a multi-day chase, during which a crowd of enraged white locals hunted Craven over hill and dale. Previously convicted for arson, Craven’s death occurred as a direct result of his accused involvement in the murder of Herndon farmer, William H. Wilson.

The issue of race was an unavoidable component of Craven’s demise. Newspapers reported that he had fled to his mother’s house after slaying Wilson, where he was heard to say he would kill “every white —— .”³⁵ Indeed, he had killed a white man. Further complicating the moral equation was the salient fact that Charles Craven made the mistake of murdering a former Mosby Ranger.³⁶

Confederate affiliation quickly became a prominent, if confusing, undercurrent in the Craven lynching. Not only was Craven’s victim a Mosby Ranger, but Scott Bradley, the man who was charged with literally pulling the rope that ended Craven’s life, apparently executed Craven while prominently wearing a badge from a Mosby Ranger Reunion.³⁷

The badge was a curious choice given that Bradley was not himself a Mosby Ranger. Instead, the accessory was likely symbolic, serving a semantic role in identifying the assailant as a man who counted himself a member of the post-Confederate world. Scott Bradley was not alone, apparently. He was acquitted a few short weeks later when dozens of witnesses who had previously boasted of seeing Bradley do the deed suddenly recanted. The Craven case became a vast whodunit as state’s witnesses recalled seeing many men wearing Confederate badges while the lynching occurred.³⁸ Who could be sure the culprit was Bradley?

The fact that a lynch mob would festoon itself in Confederate iconography in Northern Virginia is less interesting than the fact that a bona fide Confederate guerrilla, Elijah White, was on hand for the event and actively admonished the crowd to spare Craven’s life. White’s credentials as a Mosby colleague and the commander of his own successful independent partisan company were apparently insufficiently impressive.³⁹ The mob was not buying what Elijah White was selling.

If White felt marginalized in that moment, he was not alone. John Mosby’s inordinately pragmatic approach to reasonable post-war politics had by then earned him the ire of his fellow Virginians. The mob that lynched Charles Craven was emblematic of a larger shift. It embraced Confederate symbolism and conveyed Neo-Confederate common law in an alignment with mythic Confederate identity that scorned the moderating influence of actual Confederates.

When a judge opened proceedings against a select few who were known to have participated in the lynching two weeks after the fact, he commented, “Saddest of all is to consider the character of the men who did this deed. The mob was composed only, I am told, in a small degree of the base and degraded among us. It consisted largely of men from whom we had the right to expect better things; men of standing and education in the community; men whom we should expect to find upholding and maintaining, ready to fight for, even to die for, the laws and rights and government so dear to their ancestors, and these men were the leaders in heedless violence, in rank lawlessness.”⁴⁰

What Judge Tebbs apparently had not considered is that the upstanding men of western Fairfax County and eastern Loudoun County were compelled by their culture, their education, and their standing in the community to fight and die for informal laws and rights that had diverged from formal legal considerations.

In twenty years time, the KKK held rallies not far from where William Wilson died. Rallies where membership did not feel beholden to hide behind robe and hood. It was a secret in plain sight, a secret that assembled ideas and practices that were popular in this district because they represented the status quo. This status quo existed before the war and helped stabilize Fairfax County after the shocks of the war.

They did not need masks nor the formal governance of an organized klan. Violence, typically race-oriented, was by then an established facet of a successful underground conspiracy to reinstitute the pre-war status quo.

It could be argued that the formal KKK with its symbolism and pageantry was less potent in late 19th-century Fairfax County than its informal corollary: white, patrician, racially-configured, unreconstructed Confederate identity. In the same way we can compare the real estate holdings of pro-secession men in Mosby service to determine avenues with which the gray ghost operated during the war, these same corridors seem to have hosted an unusual amount of KKK activity and informal, racially-motivated violence.

Sources

1. Schaefer, Richard T. “The Ku Klux Klan: Continuity and Change.” Phylon (1960-) 32, no. 2 (1971): 143-57 https://doi.org/10.2307/273999.

2. Rhodes, Whitney. Fairfax. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2013. Pg. 52.

3. Elizabeth Brown Pryor Manuscript Papers on Frying Pan Farm. MSS 08-167. Fairfax Library Virginia Room Manuscript Collection. Part V: Community, pg. 15.

4. Elizabeth Brown Pryor Manuscript Papers on Frying Pan Farm. MSS 08-167. Fairfax Library Virginia Room Manuscript Collection. Interview with Joseph Beard: former Agricultural Extension Agent, Fairfax County, Virginia. November 1974. Interviewers—Patrick Reed & Nan Netherton. Transcribed by D’Anne Evans. Item 6.

5. Elizabeth Brown Pryor Manuscript Papers on Frying Pan Farm. MSS 08-167. Fairfax Library Virginia Room Manuscript Collection. Part V: Community, pg. 15.

6. Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. Pg. 384.

7. ibid p. 381.

8. ibid p. 385.

9. “The Loyal Leagues and the KKK” Published April 11, 1868. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov>

10. Johnson II, William Page. “The Freedman’s Bureau and School at Fairfax Court House.” The Fare Facts Gazette 13, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 1-27. Https://historicfairfax.org/wp-content/upoads/2012/05/HFCI1304-2016.pdf.

11. “Reported Outrages On Colored People.” Evening Star, March 16, 1866. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_leonberger_ver03/data/sn83045462/00280654255/1866031601/0590.pdf

12. “From Memphis.” National Republican, June 1, 1866. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_hawaiian_ver01/data/sn86053571/00237288968/1866060101/0535.pdf

13. “Telegrams.” Evening Star, October 25, 1866. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_leonberger_ver03/data/sn83045462/00280654279/1866102501/0452.pdf

14. Johnson II, William Page. “The Freedman’s Bureau and School at Fairfax Court House.” The Fare Facts Gazette 13, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 1-27. Https://historicfairfax.org/wp-content/upoads/2012/05/HFCI1304-2016.pdf.

15. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> December 19, 1866. Image 2.

16. Tax Records, 1817-1942. Historic Records Center. Fairfax County Courthouse.

17. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> March 28, 1855, Image 2.

18. Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. Pg. 315.

19. Wish, Harvey. “American Slave Insurrections Before 1861.” The Journal of Negor History 22, no. 3 (1937): 299-320. https://doi.org/10.2307/2714510

20. “Virginia News.” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. December 1, 1860. p. 2, c. 4.

21. Moore, Jeremiah. “To Thomas Jefferson From Jeremiah Moore, 12 July 1800.” Founders Online. https://founders.archives.org/documents/Jefferson/01-32-02-0036

22. Elizabeth Brown Pryor Manuscript Papers on Frying Pan Farm. MSS 08-167. Fairfax Library Virginia Room Manuscript Collection. Part V: Community, pg. 15.

23. Johnson II, William Page. “The Freedman’s Bureau and School at Fairfax Court House.” The Fare Facts Gazette 13, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 1-27. Https://historicfairfax.org/wp-content/upoads/2012/05/HFCI1304-2016.pdf.

24. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> November 14, 1870, Image 2.

25. ibid November 8, 1873, image 2.

26. ibid September 28, 1860. Image 2.

27. ibid July 23, 1868, Image 2.

28. “Confederate Monument Association of Fairfax County.” Fairfax Herald, Vol. 7, Number 9, 27 July 1888. Virginia Chronicle: Library of Virginia.

29. “Telegrams.” Evening Star, June 1, 1866. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_leonberger_ver03/data/sn83045462/00280654267/1866060101/0136.pdf

30. “He Deserved Lynching.” The Evening Critic. June 20, 1883, Page 1, Image 1.

31. Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> December 21, 1877, Image 3.

32. “Racial Terror Lynchings.” Equal Justice Initiative. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore

33. “Map of White Supremacy’s mob violence.” Plain Talk History. https://plaintalkhistory.com/monroeandflorencework/explore/map2/#6.94/38.78/-78.766

34. “Placed Under Arrest.” Evening Star, August 4, 1902. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_japanesechin_ver01/data/sn83045462/00280655648/1902080401/0133.pdf

35. ibid July 31, 1902. Page 2. Image 2.

36. Keen, Hugh C. And Horace Mewborn. 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry Mosby’s Command. Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, Inc, 1993. P 384.

37. “Inquest on Craven.” Evening Star. August 2, 1902. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_japanesechin_ver01/data/sn83045462/00280655648/1902080201/0107.pdf

38. “Scott Bradley Acquitted.” Evening Star, September 16, 1902. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_saluki_ver01/data/sn83045462/00280655636/1902091601/0012.pdf

39. “Jury to Take Action Today in the Craven Lynching.” Washington Times, August 1, 1902. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ndnp/dlc/batch_dlc_barack_ver01/data/sn87062245/100493160/1902080101/0086.pdf

40. “God Save Virginia, Prays Judge Tebbs.” The Washington Times. August 12, 1902. Page 2, Image 2. Chronicling America. Library of Congress.
September 30, 2024