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14 A Sense of Duty With the war over, Chapman, twenty-five years old, and Josie, not yet nineteen, faced the difficult task of rebuilding their lives. The country they had fought for no longer existed. The South was impoverished; its economic system in shambles; its social and political order destroyed. Virginia was under military occupation, its citizens subject to harassment and arrest. Indeed, authorities arrested Sam Chapman in the summer of 1865 for journeying to Washington, D.C., without a signed parole. In these uncertain times, Chapman and Josie, along with her mother Esther Jeffries and grandmother Esther Foote, reclaimed the Edge Hill estate.1 A letter from Josie to Chapman’s sister Kate in Luray provides a glimpse into the Edge Hill household in the spring of 1867. Son William Allen “Willie” (born 1865) was a mischievous little boy, enjoying candy from his father and pleased when his uncle John Jeffries brought apples. Josie was caring for daughter Esther Foote “Hettie,” one month old and sick. Esther Jeffries and Chapman worked in the fields sowing seed, worried about the late spring. Chapman was “looking very well, fatter than I ever saw him,” Josie proudly proclaimed. Yet it was also a frightful time of poverty, privation, and turmoil during Reconstruction. Josie’s faith helped steer her through the troubled times. “How well it is that God mercifully conceals from us the future, nor gives us to taste in anticipation the bitterness of death,” she wrote her sister-in-law. “Did we know that dark storms would overtake us on the sea of life, might we not shrink back from the path we must necessarily pursue?”2 Two more Chapman children were born at Edge Hill—Elizabeth Forrer “Libbie” (1869) and James Jeffries (1873). Sam Chapman lived nearby in Rectortown and taught in the school system. Chapman farmed the land. In 1870 the farm comprised 534 acres, of which 234 acres were forest, and was worth almost 11,000. Chapman’s personal estate was valued at slightly over 2,000. Chapman raised 107 sheep that produced 370 pounds of wool that year. Other livestock included 8 horses, 5 milk cows, 2 working oxen, 6 cattle, and 6 swine. That year, the farm produced 800 bushels of corn, 300 bushels of oats, 250 bushels of wheat, 75 bushels of potatoes, 3 tons of hay, 200 pounds of butter, and some fruit. Three farm laborers assisted Chapman in the fields, and a servant  a sense of duty  helped Josie run the household. However, after eight years of togetherness, the year 1873 brought events that forever changed the Chapman family. Chapman sought an alternative to farming and turned to Mosby for help.3 Following the war, Mosby practiced law at Warrenton. He initially resided at Road Island, the Jeffries’s estate down the road from Edge Hill near Bethel. However, military authorities harassed and even arrested Mosby, and it was not until Grant, at the behest of Mosby’s wife, wrote his own personal order exempting Mosby from military arrest and allowing him to travel unhindered that Mosby was made a free man. Mosby eventually befriended Grant and supported his reelection in 1872. For Rutherford Hayes’s election in 1876, Mosby openly declared that he was a Republican. His support of the Republican Party was pragmatic, to help gain favorable influence for Virginia in the government, but it was an act of defiance that dismayed Virginians. He was shunned, his law practice failed, and Mosby moved to Washington, D.C., in 1876. Two years later, Hayes appointed him consul at Hong Kong, a position he retained until 1885.4 In June 1873, with Mosby’s influence in the Grant administration, Chapman and his brother Sam received appointments as railway post office clerks at an annual salary of 1,200. They served on the Washington, D.C.–Lynchburg, Virginia, route. One year later, Chapman and Josie exchanged the 534-acre Edge Hill farm, valued at 8,000, for property in Alexandria bounded on the east by Patrick Street and extending west to Henry Street and between King and Prince Streets. The Chapman family maintained residence in Alexandria for the next seventeen years. Four more children were born—John Henry (1875), Katharine Neal “Katie” (1877), Samuel Forrer (1879), and Mary Eustace (1881). Esther Jeffries, her mother Esther Foote, and a servant completed the Chapman household. Sam Chapman, too, sold his property near Rectortown and...

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