Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War

5. Center of Echoes: Castle Murray, Fauquier County, Virginia

five Center of Echoes Castle Murray, Fauquier County, Virginia within a few miles of bristoe station is Castle Murray, a Medieval Revival home designed and built for Dr. James Murray in 1857–58. Gouverneur Kemble Warren used Murray’s home as his headquarters on the night of October 13–14, 1863. At 2:00 a.m. on the fourteenth a messenger rode up to the castle with Warren’s orders from General George Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac. Warren and his staª reviewed the orders, deciding to move his men toward Confederate positions at dawn—starting the events that would culminate in the Battle of Bristoe Station late that afternoon. Timothy O’Sullivan’s photograph shows what Castle Murray looked like the following month, with Union army tents pitched before it (fig. 54). Castle Murray was a likely place for Macbeth to make contact. James Murray ’s residence is maybe a better place than most to exemplify the strange situational possibilities of a work of art touching down at a particular spot, chancing to spark a momentary realization for a person who happens to be there. “The beauty of poetry is appreciated only by those who happen to read it in the right time, place, and under the right circumstances,” the Confederate infantryman Henry Kyd Douglas, who during the war read hundreds of books, wrote in 1863.1 This power of happenstance—the chance encounter where an utterance echoes oª a place, if only for a moment— even may be what Castle Murray was built for. Upon the Murray home’s 1 6 1 sturdy walls, the play would find a receptive place to resound. Castle Murray was built to block—and yet somehow also to receive—messages from the outside. In each case the peculiar power of the building, to deny and to accept communications, had to do with slavery. Edmund Lind, the home’s architect, introduces us to the idea. Coming to America from his native England in late 1855, he settled in Baltimore and was surprised to find the virulence of the proslavery feeling there. “Niggers do not seem to be much thought of in Baltimore—the Yankee looks upon them much the same as he would his horse or dog—and treats them about as well—in many cases ten times worse,” Lind wrote in his diary on January 4, 1856. “I thought when I came here that niggers enjoyed pretty good privileges—I begin to think diªerently—everywhere in Baltimore amongst all classes & grades, he is consid’d the animal made for the white man’s use— & well the white man avails himself of the privilege. A long discussion with Granger & Barker [Lind’s associates] in the evening did not tend much to c e n t e r o f e c h o e s 1 6 2 Fig. 54. Timothy O’Sullivan, Castle Murray, 1863. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. the removal of this impression altho’ both profess to be at enmity with slavery itself—Along a Baltimore Street a cold girl [colored? cold and colored?] could not pass without being snowball’d.”2 Lind’s personal view of slavery is unclear. He seems to deplore the treatment of blacks in Baltimore. His use of the word niggers may be a sardonic echo of the local parlance. Back in New York in November 1855, a few days after his arrival from England, he attended Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, sitting among thousands of parishioners to hear the famous abolitionist hold forth on human accountability in a sermon based on Romans 14:12: “Every one of us will have to give an account of himself before God.” Later in November, still in New York, Lind visited the “Colored Home” and the “Colored Orphan Asylum, most pleasing of all— Saw & heard the young darkies go thro’ their exercises in School.”3 Yet only the second commission Lind undertook was a country estate for a man who almost certainly owned slaves. Working in the o‹ce of Baltimore architect William Turnbull Murdoch, Lind was commissioned by Murray, a resident of Baltimore, to build a house on a large Fauquier County farm Murray had just purchased. The house Lind designed was expensive, a baronial dwelling costing $6,500.4 It looks small in an architectural rendering that may be by Lind (fig. 55), but Castle Murray, or Melrose...