Civil War Weather in Virginia

Introduction

“I beseech you,” Douglas Southall Freeman said a few days before his death in an address to some avid battle¤eld tourers, “give us what we do not now have but long have needed, namely, a meteorological register of the War Between the States.” The powerful impact of weather upon military operations suggested to Freeman the obvious importance of learning the details. “There are a great many days when we know nothing about the weather; we have no report of the temperature; we do not know whether the dust was rising or the mud was covering the men. . . . These are factors of the utmost importance and could be employed to inestimable advantage.”1 More than half a century later, Freeman’s plea remains unanswered. This book ¤nally does what he suggested so long ago, although only for the Virginia theater of the war. The chances are high that the Virginia theater loomed, as always, at the forefront of Freeman’s mind anyway, just as it does with me. The diligence of an 1860s Presbyterian preacher in his sixties made this weather compilation possible. Most of the fundamental weather details of temperature and precipitation herein come from a ledger kept by the Reverend C. B. Mackee, who faithfully made readings in Georgetown, D. C., at 7 a.m., 2 p.m., and 9 p.m. each day. Mackee began the daily routine at Lewinsville in Fairfax County, Virginia, in June 1858. When he moved across the river into Georgetown sixteen months later, he carried the ledger with him and kept on recording his observations.2 In June 1860 the census found “C. B. MacKee [sic],” age sixty-¤ve, living in Georgetown’s Third Ward. Mackee3 gave his occupation as “O.S.P. MinisIntroduction ter.” Instructions for the 1860 census recorders admonished them to abbreviate religious denominations. Fortunately, one of only three examples supplied to illustrate that system was “O.S.P.,” to mean Old School Presbyterian. The Reverend Mackee gave his place of birth as Pennsylvania, and the value of his total personal estate as one hundred dollars, a very scant estate indeed, even in that era. Mrs. Hanna Mackee, age forty, had been born in Iceland. The ¤ve children, three of them girls, ranged downward from a child age eleven, born in Maryland, to an infant age one, born in Virginia.4 Mackee’s ledgers survive today thanks to a concerted effort by the Weather Bureau, mostly in the 1950s, to secure surviving copies of early records for inclusion in a national meteorological archive. The front matter on the micro-¤lmed roll that includes Georgetown offers this introductory explanation: “Weather Diaries and Journals loaned by the National Archives to the Weather Bureau for micro¤lming. Most of the sources were collected by the Smithsonian Institution or the Army Signal Service prior to the establishment of the Weather Bureau in 1891.”5 All but two of the ¤fty-seven tables in this book, which provide basic weather data for the months from October 1860 through June 1865, report exclusively the temperature and precipitation details collected by Rev. Mackee in Washington. A broken thermometer knocked the Georgetown observer out of business for three weeks in February 1861; a Richmond station ¤lls that gap, as is explained in some detail at the appropriate point below. The complete absence of Georgetown’s weather-ledger sheet for August 1863 creates the only other anomaly, ¤lled in that instance by reports from just across the river at Alexandria, Virginia. The details of that necessary adjustment appear in the August 1863 entry. The importance of providing a uniform set of data made it easy to dodge the temptation to compile the tables for various months from various weather stations. None of those other stations operated for more than one-fourth of this period, most for a shorter span than that, while Georgetown’s reports survive for 96 percent of the 1,732-day period from October 1, 1860, to June 30, 1865—a total of more than ¤ve thousand individual readings. Interesting material from Richmond, Cumberland, Lexington, and elsewhere shows up in this book on the monthly pages that face the tables. Even in instances when an individual Georgetown ledger entry is missing or illegible, and another station can ¤ll the gap, that information is supplied in the facing prose page, not inserted directly into the ledger (cf. April 20–21, 1864). Excepting only February 1861 and August 1863, temperature or comments in the tables herein always...