A Place Called Appomattox

3. The Crisis

3 THE CRISIS By the autumn of 1856, the plank road had connected Clover Hill with the James River, by way of Oakville. The roadbed lay twenty feet wide, with eight feet of that covered in thick boards on timber runners. That would have been a much more valuable asset a decade previously, when the James River canal offered the easiest and cheapest bulk transportation to Richmond, but the canal was already deteriorating: three years before , a serious rupture had forced passengers to shuttle around the Bent Creek segment in wagons, one of which had overturned and catapulted the occupants down the embankment, with injuries all around. The state completed a toll bridge over Bent Creek in 1853, so farmers on the Appomattox side could reach the canal more easily, but this eleventh-hour amenity saw little traffic. The hooting of the railroad whistles a mere three miles from Appomattox Court House signaled the impending obsolescence of the Oakville Road and the canal. Some shrewd villagers already seemed to understand that the fate of the county seat had also been sealed, and they began casting about for more promising pastures. Robert Boaz, the former militia captain who had managed the Clover Hill Tavern for Samuel McDearmon, followed McDearmon to his little Nebraska. Early in October of 1856 he secured the postmastership there, which McDearmon had exchanged for a job in Richmond; within a month Boaz heard that the rail agent’s position at the depot would also be vacant soon, and he solicited Congressman Bocock’s influence for that appointment , as well.1 Even the court clerk threatened to abandon his bailiwick. Henry Bocock was approaching forty now, but his wife was in her mid-twenties and they had five children between the ages of one and eight. Their two older boys Map 3. Appomattox Court House, 1855 were ready for school and might have benefited from the educational opportunities of a more vibrant community. Bocock had held the clerkship at Appomattox Court House for eleven years now, but when the Farmer’s Bank of Lynchburg offered him an executive opportunity he decided to take it. He broke the news to the county justices on court day, November 6, and within hours everyone had heard about it. The following day the courthouse filled with citizens who wished Bocock to stay; as people of their century so often did, they elected a chairman and secretary, adopted a resolution of regret at the prospect of losing their ‘‘most excellent Clerk,’’ and elected a committee to convey their hope for his reconsideration. Bocock would have had to know of this gathering, so the committee was probably unnecessary unless the county officers also wished to communicate a confidential raise in pay, but everyone observed the formalities and Bocock changed his mind, at least for the present.2 As the new year of 1857 began, it looked as though Attorney General Willis Bocock might be planning to leave the county. Hours after renewing his oath of office in Richmond he boarded a train for Marengo County, in distant Alabama, where on January10 he ended just under half a century of bachelorhood. In the manner of Virginia gentlemen since long before George Washington, the eldest Bocock brother saw to both his roman50 { t h e c r i s i s } tic and his economic interests at the same instant by marrying a wealthy widow. The attorney general then returned to Richmond, probably without the former Mrs. Mourning Smith Gracie; he stayed only long enough to resign his post and wrap up his paperwork, after which he rejoined his bride in southwestern Alabama. He would be back, periodically: like many of Alabama’s ruling class, the new Mrs. Bocock was a native of South Carolina , and she may have enjoyed visiting among the eastern gentry; that, or Bocock’s own stubborn attachment to his homeland, drew him back to Appomattox County from time to time, but in the three decades that remained to him he would eventually come to think of himself as an Alabamian . Bocock’s younger brother, John, a Presbyterian minister, followed him out of Virginia about the same time. Reverend Bocock, who had been pastor of a Lynchburg congregation, accepted a similar post in the District of Columbia.3 Henry Flood also moved, but not far away. For over a decade he had...