Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia

Chapter 1: The War Comes, 1860–1865

9 1 The War Comes, 1860–1865 I live inhopes that I shall see you again. . . . I am inhopes that when we meet again it will be never to part again. —george Jones to Sarah Jones, his wife, January 6, 1864 PIttsylvanIa County, Virginia’s largest in area,has the rolling landscape typical of the foothills east of the Blue Ridge mountains. The county is in the southern part of Virginia’s Piedmont region,located on the North Carolina border. In 1860, as today, its largest community was Danville, a city located on the south bank of the Dan River and in the southern portion of the county. Economic growth, largely based on tobacco, had caused the city’s population to more than double from 1850 to 1860, when it numbered over thirty-five hundred people. Although linked to western and northern Virginia, and northern North Carolina to the south, by road, canal, or river, on the eve of the Civil War the most important transportation route for Danville (and for all of Pittsylvania County) was the Richmond and Danville Railroad, completed in 1856,which connected the people of the area to Richmond,the economic and political capital of the state. After Danville, the next largest concentration of people was at the county seat, called Pittsylvania Court House, although it was later named Chatham; in 1860, its population numbered about 350 people. Pittsylvania County had a number of other communities—Callands, museville, Sandy Level, Whitmell, Cascade, Kentuck, Laurel grove, and others—all largely rural farming towns of fewer than one hundred people.The county’s total population,of over thirtytwo thousand inhabitants, made it the third largest in the state in 1860.Almost entirely native born, the county’s population was about 53 percent white. The remainder of the county’s residents, almost fifteen thousand men and women, were black,the vast majority of them held in slavery and working on the region’s ubiquitous tobacco farms.1 Danville Ringgold Sutherlin Laurel Grove Mount Hermon Kentuck Whitmell Sandy River Cascade Chestnut Level Spring Garden Riceville Chalk Level Galveston Chatham (Pittsylvania Court House) Mt.Airy Straightstone Museville Sandy Level Callands Pigg Banister Dan Sandy River River River R i v e r River S a n d y Sandy Creek C r e e k Roanoke to Greensboro to Richmond Map Source: ESRI Data and Maps 2003 Map by Stephen P. Hanna, UMW Cartography Laboratory Richmond Pittsylvania County, Virginia the war comes, 1860–1865 11 Some historians have argued that by 1860 the states of the Upper South had begun, for a variety of reasons, to reduce their investment in and commitment to slavery. Although this seems to have been true for certain regions in Virginia—the overall percentage of slaves in the state’s population had fallen in the decade from 1850 to 1860, from 33 percent to 30 percent—Pittsylvania was not one of those regions. In that same decade, in Pittsylvania County, the number of slaves had increased, at the same rate as the increase in the white population.2 According to one historian, “Pittsylvania was not an area of large planters and poor whites,but an area of relative white equality.”Indeed,slaveholding was fairly well distributed among the white population of the county.Although only about 25 percent of all Southern white households in 1860 owned slaves, about 40 percent of Pittsylvania County white households owned slaves. The county had a slightly larger percentage of planter households (those owning twenty or more slaves) among slaveholding households than the state had (see table 1.1), but its percentage was lower than for households in the Deep South states. Landownership was another indicator of the county’s “relative white equality .” Augusta County, a region described—both at the time and by historians today—as a county with good opportunities for middling people in 1860, had landownership rates of only 62 percent.Comparably,in 1860 roughly 65 percent of Pittsylvania’s households owned land.3 most of the land and slaves controlled by white Pittsylvanians were used to grow tobacco. The crop had been the dominant product of the county since its inception, and a recent boom in tobacco in the 1850s had merely increased PittTABLE 1.1 planters as part of the slaveholding population (1860) Total number Percentage Total of slaveholders of slaveholders number of who own twenty who own twenty slaveholders or more slaves or...