Virginia at War, 1862

The Trials of Military Occupation

55 TheTrialsof MilitaryOccupation Thomas P. Lowry The process of going to war involves three beliefs. The first is that some external enemy is intolerable in his philosophies, policies, and actions. Whether the perceived enemy is a Bolshevik, a capitalist, an unbeliever, or an abolitionist, the process is the same. The second belief is that this enemy can be easily overcome, because he is evil, or undeserving, or of weak moral fiber, the corollary being that the person proposing war possesses some special quality, whether it be élan, or Bushido, or manifest destiny, or having been chosen by God. The third essential belief on the road to war is that victory will be relatively painless. In the imagined triumph of arms, the enemy—who of course is cowardly—will flee before the gleaming swords of the righteous, who will return home covered in medals and glory, with perhaps a slight wound as a badge of manhood. Swooning womenfolk and admiring noncombatants will indeed hail the conquering hero. Perhaps no one embodied the concept of painless triumph more than South Carolinian Armisted L. Burt, who offered to personally drink all the blood spilled as a result of secession.1 Not only was Burt 5 million pints wrong, but he also failed to predict the occupation of his beloved South by a Yankee army, with all the consequences inherent when women and children confront armed men, men whose opposing political values (and empty stomachs) imbue them with a sense of entitlement. In 1862 northern Virginia, pieces of the southeastern coast, and intermittently, places in the lower Shenandoah Valley took rank among the first portions of the Confederacy to suffer Union military occupation. Their inhabitants 56 The Trials of Military Occupation were to learn firsthand what lay in store for more and more of the Southern people as the war rolled on. An army marches on its stomach, Napoleon remarked, and an army marching on hardtack, with its total absence of protein, fat, vitamins, and flavor, quickly seeks to supplement the government ration. In 1862 Virginians were to learn that hunger, the most immediate of soldier needs, was also to be the most easily remedied in an occupied country, and that civilian ownership and rights meant little or nothing to a Yankee with an empty belly. Nine soldiers of the Eighty-seventh New York slaked their hunger at a farm near Fort Monroe. William Van Voohes, William Ferdon, Augustus Van Grosbeck, David McConnell, William McCarty, and four other men returned to their camp with stolen hams, turkeys, ducks, chickens, and milk. One New York plunderer, perhaps of a more Sybaritic bent, returned bearing an armload of peacock feathers. At their court-martial, the keystone of their defense was that “a Negro told us the owner was a Rebel.” Each soldier was fined $10, none of which went to the victimized farmer.2 Fort Monroe had space for only 1,400 soldiers. In May 1861, the garrison was increased to 6,000 men. The overflow went to the newly established Camp Hamilton, just north of the fort. There, two Union men made recorded mischief. Lewis Hickox, Eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry, was raising hell at the store of Vorhies and Bell. He was drunk and obnoxious enough to be expelled. The next day, he reappeared, drunk and obnoxious, and armed, and shot at (but missed) a civilian, Henry Clark. Hickox pleaded for clemency , claiming to be “very feeble and very old [almost fifty] and a wounded veteran of the Mexican war.” His feebleness seemed somewhat selective.3 William Cunningham, Sixteenth Massachusetts, was less flamboyant. He stole a farmer’s fence near Camp Hamilton and used it to cook his dinner, for which he was fined $10.4 Mutton was on the menu at Catlett’s Station.5 F. L. Melott, Twelfth Pennsylvania Reserves, was fined three months pay for killing a sheep.6 John Pircall, Thirty-fifth New York, was a deserter who made his way to Catlett’s Station, where he destroyed his uniform, donned civilian clothes, spent the night in a whorehouse, and stole three horses. He and his friends seemed to have become instantly unpopular, evidenced by what he told the court: “I was with Frank Pierce and a man named Curly, who was shot and killed by the citizens who arrested us.”7 Near Camp Warren, three men of the Second U.S. Infantry had also Thomas P. Lowry 57 killed...