Civil War Weather in Virginia

Chapter 5. 1864

January 1864 Richmond opened the new year with “a bright windy day, and not cold.” The temperature plummeted late on January 1, and the night became “bitter.” On January 2 the morning dawned “bright and clear, and moderating.” After a “dark and threatening” 4th, the 5th proved to be a “bright, pleasant day.” When “a light snow” fell on Richmond on the 7th it was, amazingly, “the ¤rst time the earth has been white this winter.” More snow overnight to the morning of the 8th cleared off into a “bitter cold” day.1 Lee’s troops near the Rapidan River suffered under two snows during the week ending January 9, “each one two or three inches deep,” driven by “cold north winds.”2 In his tent in Culpeper County, a Pennsylvanian wrote in his diary on January 18: “Commenced raining about 6 A.M. and continued all day very heavy rain at noon.”3 A Mississippi colonel called this winter, far north of his customary latitudes , “long, weary and vigorous.”4 The Alexandria weather station reported these temperatures at 2 p.m. on days when the Georgetown recorder missed readings or left them illegible: Chapter 5 1864 20 degrees on the 2nd, 40 on the 16th, and 40 on the 30th. Through January the weather in Alexandria featured many clouds but not much precipitation— twenty-one cloudy days but only one rainy day (the 18th), and snow on the 4th, 5th, and 7th.5 116 / Chapter 5. 1864 February 1864 “Hazy, misty weather” covered Richmond on February 1, but the next day became “beautiful and spring-like.” Both the 3rd and the 4th were clear and cold. A snowstorm on the 15th melted completely during a “bright windy” 16th. February 17 in Richmond remained “very cold—freezing all day,” but the 18th outdid it with “the coldest morning of the winter. There was ice in the wash-basins in our bed chambers, the ¤rst we have seen there.” The only February 29 that the Confederate nation experienced brought moderate rain to Richmond.6 In describing this season, a diarist encamped near Charlottesville said, without specifying individual dates, that “a great deal of snow fell this winter, and altogether it was the severest in our experience.”7 Near Paris, “a squall of snow” struck on the morning of February 16, ushering in “a severe cold day.” Three days later a girl wrote in her diary there of “the coldest weather I have ever felt,” and described visiting soldiers “frolicking over the ice pond,” some of them having “disgrace[d] themselves with King Alcohol.”8 A weather station in Alexandria, just across the Potomac River from Georgetown, recorded 2 p.m. readings of 50 degrees on the 8th and 30 degrees on the 10th. The Alexandria ledger showed twelve fair and seventeen cloudy days, with only one measurable snow.9 Chapter 5. 1864 / 117 118 / Chapter 5. 1864 March 1864 As the infamous Dahlgren raid approached Richmond on March 1, “dark and raining” weather impeded its progress and aided the capital’s defenders. The next morning revealed “a slight snow on the ground” from overnight, but “bright and cool” weather came in during the ensuing day and “bright and frosty” skies on the 3rd. March 4 also began “bright and frosty,” but turned “warm and cloudy in the afternoon.” The capital’s weather followed that pattern through March 7—“bright and frosty” mornings, later “warm and pleasant .” Typically unpredictable March weather developed at the end of the month: windy and warm on the 27th; “April-like” on the 28th; “a furious gale, eastern, and rain” on the 29th; rain all night on the 30th with “the wind blowing a gale from the east”; and “cloudy and cold” on the 31st.10 A Virginia heavy artillerist sent in hurried pursuit of Dahlgren on “a very rainy night and . . . not very warm” found that his shoddy government-issue shoes disintegrated in the messy weather, leaving him virtually barefoot: “The slush and mud . . . soon caused them to come to pieces. The soles were gone, the uppers ®apping about my ankles, but my feet in the mud.”11 New Yorkers reconnoitering near Madison Court House at the beginning of March, as a cover for Custer’s raid toward Charlottesville, reported that steady rains had left that region “in many places covered with water.”12 When a Tennessee soldier reached Orange Court House on March...