Research
Current Project
My research is centered on northern Virginia, specifically the county of Fauquier. The county was unique for several reasons, among them its great antebellum wealth, and because it was home to the partisan fighter John Mosby and his Rangers, one of the only meaningfully effective and successful Confederate guerrilla units of the war. I am interested in the world in which these guerrillas operated, specifically in the effects of near-constant occupation at the grassroots level. Its proximity to both capitals meant that Union and Confederate armies occupied Fauquier throughout the war and the county seat alone changed hands 67 times.
Writing from northern Virginia in September 1862, a northern newspaperman defended the actions of the Union army in the state while describing the “foul institution” of slavery. “The damage done in Virginia,” he argued, “resulted in part from the necessary operations of war where two large armies were contending and traversing the country in all directions.”[1] Necessary or not, Virginia found itself a battleground during the Civil War and its residents, especially those in Fauquier County, found themselves on the front lines. While both armies expected the residents to feed and provide for them, little thought was given to how the people themselves would survive, including the 48 percent of the population that was enslaved.[2] Left to fend for themselves, Fauquier’s residents became “front-line civilians,” and at the vanguard of this local war were elite white women.
Other residents, such as non-slaveholding whites, free Blacks, children and the elderly as well as the enslaved, had their own needs and desires to which slaveholding white women were forced to respond. Together these groups survived a military occupation that lasted three years, during which time their county also became the chosen home of the Confederacy’s most successful partisan unit, the 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry, led by John S. Mosby. Because of Fauquier’s location on the border between both armies, and because of the guerrilla war, my work argues that the residents did not have a traditional home front experience. Instead, it was part of a larger domestic war fought by those in occupied regions. Civil War scholars and buffs alike are familiar with the stories of Mosby’s men as well as the battles and escapades of the famous (and infamous) generals who fought and died in Virginia. Many also understand the role the home front played in sustaining the Confederate army and the ways in which enslaved people used the chaos of war to seize their freedom. My research, however, removes the separation between home front and battlefield. Returning to the war in Virginia is necessary to grasp the ways in which race, gender, politics, and the military altered the traditional 19th century domestic sphere, intertwining war and private life in a way that challenged conventional gender roles and military affairs.
Next Project
I am also interested in domestic life in Virginia, post-Civil War. My second book project examines the amnesty applications filed by citizens across the state in the years following the war, specifically those filing under the 13th exception of President Andrew Johnson’s Amnesty Proclamation. This exception required all those worth over $20,000 in 1860 to specially apply for a pardon. The proclamation gave the president the opportunity to embarrass the aristocracy and force them to grovel before the government they had betrayed. As members of the Confederate elite, wealthy planters came to symbolize two things in Union victory: the need to purify democratic society of aristocratic corruption, and a patriotic desire to humiliate tyrants.
These pardon applications reflect a new perspective of post-war citizenship, and they reveal fascinating facets of ex-Confederate character. Pardon applications allow for individual stories which, in turn, tell us a lot about how Southerners, especially wealthy Southerners, thought about their relationship to the federal government. An examination of the amnesty applications filed in Virginia reveal people caught between loyalties and were men who wanted to repossess all the political rights afforded to citizens of the United States. Citizenship was a means by which men exercised control over their lives outside the home, and indirectly, how they maintained power and authority inside the home. In a world of new state government formation and state constitution re-writes, former Confederates were eager to once again take control. But they could only do so once they had been pardoned.
[1]“The Savageness of Slavery,” North American and United States Gazette [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] Sept. 19, 1862: n.p. 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, accessed Dec. 18, 2017.
[2] With 933 slaveholders and 2,111 families reported on the 1860 census, much of the county had ties to slavery, whether or not people personally owned slaves. See: 1860 U.S. census, population schedule, Fauquier County, Virginia, University of Virginia, Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, accessed June 20, 2015 http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/collections.