Introduction
ON APRIL 12, 1865, Captain George Washington “Wash” Nelson Jr., a Confederate prisoner of war, had just heard that Middleway, West Virginia, where his cousin and fiancée, Mary Nelson “Mollie” Scollay, lived, had been the scene of a battle the previous August. Wash was perplexed. The two had been in touch during the months since the battle, but Mollie had said nothing of it. “Where were you, Mollie, when bullets were flying through your house and the porch blown up?” he asked in a letter. “You are quite a veteran.” Of course he was right to worry. He read the news in prison; he heard stories about women on the home front, their hardships, their anxiety. Mollie (who, in fact, was fine) called this new normal “Confederate living.” In a way, military occupation imprisoned her, as the Yankees imprisoned her fiancé. News of the Battle of Summit Point also moved Wash to reflect on their shared past, the many letters exchanged between the two lovers, and the constantly blighted hopes for reunion. “If we could be disinterested spectators of our own lives,” he pondered, “the ups & downs and unexpected turns would be very amusing.”1 Fortunately, many letters that he and Mollie exchanged between 1863 and 1866 have survived, and while they are not exactly “amusing,” they invite readers to be the disinterested spectators Wash and Mollie naturally could not be themselves.
The archival record of Wash and Mollie’s love story begins in 1863—in the middle of the bloodiest war in American history. It was a year bounded in the winter by the Emancipation Proclamation and in the fall by the dedication of a sprawling national cemetery at Gettysburg to “a new birth of freedom” and the protection of a government “of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.”2 Union troops captured Wash on October 26, 1863, in New Market, Virginia, a small village in the lower Shenandoah Valley, near Mollie’s home. Over the next two weeks, Union officials moved Wash through Virginia and West Virginia into Ohio, where he spent the winter and early spring of 1864 surrounded by the wooden walls of Johnson’s Island Military Prison and the watery barrier of Lake Erie. After being transferred to Point Lookout Prison in Maryland, he began showing symptoms of dysentery and was moved to the prison’s hospital ward. Not long after recovering, he went to Fort Delaware, then to prisons in Union-controlled areas of South Carolina and Georgia. In the spring of 1865 he was sent back to Fort Delaware, where he remained until his release in June. In all, Wash was imprisoned for twenty months, spent time in six Union prisons, and traveled several thousand miles by road, rail, and water. During these tumultuous months, he and Mollie exchanged news about friends and family, discussed their reading lives, commented on the war, and expressed their love for one another. Their letters, as well as Wash’s memoir, illuminate a war-torn world of intimacy, despair, loss, and reunion in the Civil War South.
Although what follows is their story, it was also the story of countless others, North and South, who lived through the Civil War. In particular, the experience of being a prisoner or knowing a prisoner was widespread. Perhaps as many as 420,000 Union and Confederate soldiers spent at least part of the war in captivity.3 That number accounted for nearly one in seven soldiers, meaning that the suffering associated with prison experiences affected millions of people through the web of nineteenth-century social relations. In other words, it would have been difficult to find families, friends, neighbors, comrades, or lovers who did not, in one way or another, have a connection to Civil War prisons. The perspectives of Wash and Mollie therefore offer not only a new approach to this ubiquitous wartime reality but also a needed addition to our understanding of the tensions that defined the Civil War era more broadly.
Families with Deep Southern Roots
Wash and Mollie descended from early Virginia’s most prominent “first families,” including the Randolph, Page, Harris, and, of course, Nelson families.4 Born on May 27, 1840, in Hanover County, Virginia, Wash was the youngest child of Rev. George W. Nelson (1805–40) and Jane Crease Nelson (1816–78). Wash’s father was an Episcopal priest and the grandson of General Thomas Nelson (1738–89), a signer of the Declaration of Independence.5 He died just after Wash was born. Five years later, Wash’s mother married Philip Nelson, her late husband’s cousin and a planter owning twenty-six slaves in 1860.6 They lived in the western district of Hanover County, located along the western edge of the state’s Tidewater region and just north of Richmond, the capital and most populated city. Although Richmond was not the largest southern city in 1860, it offered valuable manufacturing, political, and cultural resources that made it appealing as the nascent capital of the fledgling Confederacy.7
The region surrounding Richmond was also a major locus of plantation agriculture and slaveholding. According to the 1860 census, Hanover County had a population of 17,222 people, including 7,739 free persons and 9,483 enslaved persons. The county’s demographics resembled those along the black belt in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama more closely than other counties of Virginia and Maryland. Slaveholders composed 51 percent of Hanover’s free population; most of them owned between one and ten slaves. Young Wash reaped the cultural and political benefits sown by slaves in an economy that afforded white planters and their families economic and social status. He attended a private academy—probably the Hanover Academy—and matriculated at the University of Virginia in 1858, where he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Compared with other sons of slaveholding families, Wash’s ambitions were modest: he wanted to enter the ministry and get married.8 After receiving a divinity degree from Virginia in 1860, he taught school for one year in Caroline County, Virginia.9 As a grown man, he was an inch short of six feet tall with blue eyes, brown hair, and a florid complexion.10
Mollie was born on October 15, 1844 in Middleway, Virginia. She was the youngest of three children of Samuel Scollay (1781–1857), a doctor, and his second wife, Sally Page Nelson (1801–89).11 A wealthy and prominent member of the community, Scollay owned land throughout Jefferson County. Located at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, the county was bordered by Maryland to the northeast. The geography of Jefferson County made it socially and culturally different from Hanover County, particularly in terms of slavery. In 1860, Jefferson County’s total population was 14,535, including 10,575 free persons (which likely included free black persons), and 3,960 enslaved persons.12 Over the course of Mary’s childhood and youth, Middleway grew significantly, with residents numbering around 350 in 1840 and 446 in 1850, but slaveholding was less common there than in Hanover County.13 In 1860, Mollie lived in Middleway, with her mother, older sister Harriot, and aunt, Frances B. Nelson. Sometimes Mollie referred to her home as Middleway, while other times she called it “Old Clip” or “Wizard’s Clip,” which derived from local folklore.14
A view of Middleway, Virginia, during the Civil War.
James E. Taylor, With Sheridan up the Shenandoah Valley in 1864.
The Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.
Wash and Mollie belonged to the last generation of Virginians who came of age before the Civil War. The higher education that Wash received at the University of Virginia—a classical liberal arts education in ancient languages and literature, rhetoric, logic, oratory, science, and religion—emphasized republican leadership and celebrated individual ambition as a quintessentially manly trait. Christian religion grounded and tempered that ambition, compelling young men to seek “moral perfection” as Christian gentlemen.15 Young women’s education was equally practical, but it did not emphasize extending a young woman’s ambition for success in the way that men’s education did. Nevertheless, as female youth like Mollie read and wrote their way from girlhood to womanhood, they cultivated personal ambition, questioned social expectations, and tried to delay marriage as long as possible.16 Thus, for both young southern men and women like Wash and Mollie, higher education was more than an education in gentility—it was a means of self-improvement and an opportunity to rise in social status.
Virginia’s slave population based on the 1860 U.S. Census.
Map created by Henry S. Graham, 1861. Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3881e.cw1047000
If the Civil War offered an opportunity for young men like Wash Nelson to follow the ambitions for fame and leadership that they cultivated at school, it was “a personal crisis” for young women like Mollie. According to the historian Anya Jabour, “The Civil War exacerbated southern girls’ discomfort with the status quo by producing tension between customary gender identity (as a southern lady) and a new political identity (as a Confederate rebel).”17 Yet, the war also presented many new opportunities for young women like Mollie to break through traditional gender expectations and lead their war-torn worlds.18 In terms of age, the Civil War presented the ultimate, most challenging test for both young men and women on their journeys to adulthood.
It is unclear when Wash and Mollie began courting or became engaged to marry. The letters featured in this collection suggest two possibilities. On the one hand, they may have begun courting before secession and war; if that were the case, the documentary evidence has been lost or destroyed. On the other hand, it is far more likely that the engagement between Wash and Mollie occurred during the war itself, perhaps in the late spring or early summer of 1863, just before the letters in this volume begin. Perhaps Wash visited Mollie as Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia moved north in the late spring or early summer of 1863. As a result of this visit, the two may have begun corresponding. The first letter that Mollie sends Wash, for example, indicates that Wash had previously visited her without an official furlough. Was this an intimate meeting? Perhaps. Writing to Wash on April 5, 1864, Mollie reported the engagement of their mutual cousin Fannie and her fiancé, alluding to a room that Wash and Mollie once shared in Middleway. She wrote, “They occupied our little room. Those old walls if they could talk could tell some grand old tales.”19 Finally, a letter from April 1865 reveals that Mollie did not know Wash’s birthday. If the two had courted for months or years prior to the war, Mollie certainly must have known this detail.20
Secession, War, and Capture
Although available letters do not explain Wash’s motives for enlisting or clarify his political thought, the voluminous scholarship on why men fought for the Confederacy suggests that the decision to fight was neither automatic nor easy.21 Peter S. Carmichael has argued that young Virginians of this generation, especially those like Wash, who attended the University of Virginia in the late 1850s, were ambivalent about war. “They loved the Union and abhorred secession,” he argues, “but they could not give their allegiance to a national government that did not guarantee Southern rights and political equality.”22 Alongside North Carolinians, Tennesseans, and Arkansians, many Virginians left the Union with reluctance.23
In terms of the number of slaves within its borders, the Commonwealth of Virginia was by far the largest and most influential slave state in the Union, and the politics of slavery, particularly the rise of radical abolitionism after Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, increased concern that northern fanaticism would erode the state’s sovereignty. After briefly considering gradual emancipation and deportation to Africa, the Virginia legislature began reducing the rights of free blacks, tightening “black codes,” and digging into the growing defense of slavery.24 Then, in 1859, the abolitionist John Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Jefferson County, Virginia, not far from Mollie Scollay’s hometown of Middleway. Given that most Jefferson County residents did not own slaves, Virginia governor Henry A. Wise doubted their fealty to state and region. John Brown’s raid proved the power of radical abolitionism and set the stage for Lincoln’s election in 1860, which pushed Virginia closer to secession.25 Just days after Lincoln won the presidency, South Carolina organized a secession convention, and the next month, it seceded; other Deep South states followed, leaving Virginians to decide whether to follow the lower South or remain in the Union.
Virginia and three other states in the upper South were more reluctant to join the Confederacy. They ultimately decided to secede after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, and U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for volunteers to put down the rebellion. On April 17, 1861, Virginia seceded from the Union, having, according to the Richmond Dispatch, “repealed ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America.” On April 25, 1861, the state adopted the Constitution of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America. Illustrating the excitement for secession and war, the Dispatch’s lead article on April 27, 1861, was a poem by an Alabama author, lauding Virginia’s departure from the Union and urging further consolidation of the Confederacy:
Oh, have you heard the joyful news?
Virginia does Old Abe refuse,
Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah.
Virginia joins the Cotton states,
Hurrah, hurrah,
The glorious cry each heart elates,
We’ll die for Old Virginia.26
War became for many a visceral reaction to perceived northern usurpation and an opportunity to demonstrate the leadership many young men studied and admired in their youth. Over the course of the Civil War, some two hundred thousand white males fought in General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.27 Approximately fourteen hundred Hanover County men served in the conflict, including those who joined local companies expecting to guard their home counties, as well as conscripts later in the war.28
On May 21, 1861, Captain William Nelson organized a battery, and Wash enrolled for service that day at Beaver Dam Depot on the Virginia Central Railroad. The following day Wash was mustered into service in Richmond, just five days before his twenty-first birthday. By February 1862, he had moved up through the ranks from first sergeant to second lieutenant and then captain. On April 30, 1862, he assumed command of, and reorganized, the Hanover Artillery. He was not very popular among the men. “Captain G. W. Nelson and his officers . . . have proved themselves totally incompetent to command a battery,” wrote Private Henry Robinson Berkeley in July 1862. Blaming Wash for the battery’s disorder, Berkeley wrote, “Wash is as brave a man as I ever saw and fears nothing, but bravery alone will not keep up a battery. It requires a hardworking, industrious man of good executive ability; one who never tires, and is always on the lookout for his men and horses. All of these are wanting in him [Wash] and his first and second lieutenants.”29 As part of a major reorganization within Lee’s army following the Battle of Antietam, the company disbanded on October 4, 1862, and most of its men transferred into other companies.30
While the artillery was divided between Captain Thomas J. Kirkpatrick’s Amherst Battery and Captain Pichegru Woolfolk’s Hanover County Battery, Wash was assigned as an artillery officer to General William Nelson Pendleton’s staff. According to one of his compatriots, Wash had met with General Pendleton as soon as he heard about the impending dissolution of his battery. Apparently, he “came back from Gen. Pendleton’s headquarters very well satisfied, having been promised a very soft place on the General’s staff.”31 He commanded a thirty-pound Parrott gun at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862 and was then assigned the role of inspector of batteries for the First Corps and General Reserve.32 During this time, Mollie worried about Wash’s whereabouts, particularly after receiving news of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863). “We had not been able to hear anything definite from our army until the receipt of your letter,” she wrote on July 7. Indeed, what Wash experienced in the year between the disbanding of his artillery battery and his capture and arrest is uncertain. Whatever letters the two exchanged after Gettysburg, if they wrote any at all, are either lost or in private hands. The letters in this volume nevertheless place Wash in New Market, Virginia, on October 27, 1863, when he was captured.33
Described by a Union artist as “a medley of dilapidated houses with an inn, a couple of churches, and a town hall,” New Market was not far from Mollie’s home in Middleway, where he had met with Mollie a week earlier, perhaps while on furlough following the Battle of Gettysburg.34 After visiting Mollie, Wash moved on to New Market and stayed at a “companion’s home.” While dining, he and his compatriot caught a glimpse of “a blue coat at the window.” Unable to escape, they were captured, led out of town, and placed under guard the next day. In fact, Wash carried his first letter written as a prisoner almost to Mollie’s doorstep. Mollie, however, was away in the country and did not receive the letter containing news of Wash’s capture until she returned. Meanwhile, Wash was transported to Ohio and processed at Camp Chase, a prison established in May 1861 as a Union training camp, located four miles west of Columbus, Ohio.35 Two weeks later, Wash departed for Johnson’s Island, a prison for Confederate officers located on a three-hundred-acre island off the shore of Lake Erie, a little more than two miles from Sandusky, Ohio, approximately 130 miles from Columbus.36
A postwar carded record made from a wartime descriptive list that details Wash Nelson’s appearance upon capture. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
Civil War Prisons and Prisoners
Wash’s capture in the fall of 1863 occurred at a crossroads in Civil War prison policy. When war came in 1861, neither the Union nor the Confederate government had planned on capturing enemy soldiers, let alone holding large numbers of them in prisons. There simply was no official protocol, other than precedents set in earlier wars. During the Revolutionary War, captives of a belligerent army were held in prisons rather than being tried for treason. A more complex exchange system developed during the War of 1812. These prisoners could be traded between both sides as a form of currency. A captain like Wash Nelson, for example, would have been traded for sixteen privates. This sort of trade allowed both sides to avoid both the human and monetary tolls of holding prisoners. Importantly, this exchange system depended on the bond of an oath from paroled prisoners, who promised not take up arms again until the exchange system evened out the debits and credits.
This exchange system, a flexible and evolving model, became the default policy during the Civil War. In July 1862, Major General John A. Dix (Union) and Major General Daniel Harvey Hill (Confederate) agreed to a simple policy of prisoner exchange. Once on parole, captured prisoners would be returned to exchange points, on which both sides had previously agreed, within ten days of capture. The policy was humanitarian insofar as it kept prison populations at bay. By May 1863, a combined 32,000 Union and Confederate prisoners had been paroled, and most were officially exchanged. During the first two years of war, a patchwork of individual prisons and ad hoc strategies for operating them fell into place. In the final two years of the war, problems emerged that led to a slow cessation of prisoner exchange.
The first problem involved differing prison conditions. Generally, exchanged Union prisoners came home sicker and weaker than when they had entered confinement, or than Confederate soldiers returning from Union prisons. Union officials began to wonder whether the exchange system benefited the Confederate army more than the Union. The second problem had to do with race and slavery. When Wash and Mollie first began corresponding in early summer, 1863, African American soldiers serving in the Union Army began to see combat and fall into Confederate hands. Confederate officials had previously threatened to turn over black men captured in Union uniforms to state governments so that they could be dealt with under state codes that discouraged slave revolts. Were African Americans, in other words, prisoners of war or insurrectionists? Some Confederates, refusing to acknowledge African Americans’ status as soldiers, resorted to executions and thereby threatened the stability of prisoner exchanges altogether. Finally, the third problem was a backlog of Union and Confederate prisoners as both sides sought to create prisons and wage war simultaneously.37 As a consequence, the prisoner exchange agreement collapsed. Thus, instead of being released within ten days, Wash spent twenty months as a prisoner, beginning with a brief stay at Camp Chase in Ohio and then at Johnson’s Island.
Johnson’s Island was completed in 1862 and was the only prison built by the Union exclusively for Confederate prisoners, particularly officers. The prison was large, taking up approximately fifteen acres of the three-hundred-acre island. While Wash was imprisoned at Johnson’s Island, there were thirteen prison barracks called “blocks” and a sutler’s stand where prisoners could buy supplies, such as food, writing materials, and clothing.38
A Confederate prisoner’s colored drawing of Johnson’s Island, Ohio.
Joseph Mason Kern Papers, #2526-z, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Prison life was bleak and humiliating. The guards were strict and sometimes abusive. At some Union prisons, black guards watched over Confederates, who vowed never to respect a black man’s authority. At places like Johnson’s Island, prisoners were also spectacles for gawking spectators, both male and female. On March 27, 1864, Wash described a baptism of twelve prisoners in the icy waters of Lake Erie, which some local women had come to observe. “It made me feel very solemn, as I watched the poor fellows march out into the Lake, loose ice floating on it, singing their hymns, and the guard drawn up on the shore,” he wrote. “The ladies of the Island also graced the occasion with their presence.” At Johnson’s Island, as well as other prisons, civilians were eager to see prisoners. Entrepreneurs near northern prisons catered to these interests by building observation decks or chartering boats for such voyeurism as Wash described to Mollie.39
Material conditions within prisons were poor, if not deadly. There was never enough food, blankets, and clothes, and there were many sources of sickness. Prisoners with family connections in the North received boxes of food and clothing, but this was an infrequent luxury that fostered a two-class system within the prison walls. Those without connections lived on government rations, which varied in quality and quantity. It was not uncommon for prisoners to subsist on spoiled meat, maggot-infested bread, and dirty water. In some instances, hunger produced desperation, and prisoners ate whatever they could stomach. Wash did not experience this degree of suffering until he was moved to Morris Island, South Carolina, and Fort Pulaski, Georgia. In one of the most memorable parts of his memoir, Wash wrote, “Fortunately for some of us—there were a great many cats about the prison and as may be imagined we were glad enough to eat cat. I have been partner in the killing and eating of three, and besides these, friends have frequently given me a share of their cat.”40 Diseases such as scurvy and dysentery resulted from malnutrition in many northern prisons. There were also other forms of hunger and deprivation that gnawed away at prisoners’ spirits. Hungering for freedom, for instance, prisoners frequently attempted escape. At Johnson’s Island, Wash unsuccessfully attempted to escape twice.
Although few prisoners permanently escaped, religion ameliorated emotional suffering in a number of ways. First, prisoners often held services over which captive clergy presided. Varying in size, these religious services assembled worshipers of many different Christian denominations. Wash wrote about these services in his letters home and made special note when a service was held according to the rituals of the Episcopal Church. Second, prisoners gathered in Bible study and Sunday school classes.41 Third, prison baptisms, such as those Wash described to Mollie, also enhanced prisoners’ religious lives.42 Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, prisoners who were more pious, like Wash, maintained private devotional lives through prayer and reading the Bible. Wash’s letters contain references to the Book of Common Prayer and biblical quotations, as he shared news of his survival and prayers for Mollie’s well-being. Of course religious devotion was not for everyone, and sometimes social and spiritual activities clashed. Months before Wash’s arrival at Johnson’s Island, another devout prisoner complained, “Sunday here does not differ from other days. There is no holy quiet—no holy calm. The same card playing, the same novel reading, the same profanity goes on as other days.”43
In addition to religion, prisoners maintained as robust a social life as possible. This prison community was even more meaningful when kin and friends found themselves imprisoned together. For example, Wash reported conversations he had with cousins and friends from home. They also attempted to normalize the prison experience. They played card games and told stories; they drank together and smoked pipes, when they were fortunate to receive gifts of liquor (smuggled) and tobacco from home.
Intellectual life also enhanced the friendships forged behind prison walls. Wash wrote, “Our object is to pass time pleasantly and at the same time not to let the mind become a dead letter.” Prisoners accomplished this in several ways. They maintained old friendships or forged new ones with fellow captives whose autographs and mailing addresses they gathered into personal journals in order to communicate after the war, if not just to keep the memory of prison life alive. They organized literary clubs, debating societies, and even thespian troupes such as the “Rebel Thespians” at Johnson’s Island.44 In an effort to while away the solitary hours that characterized much of their confinement, they read whatever books and newspapers they could obtain. Johnson’s Island Prison, in fact, maintained a borrowing library. Some prisoners also requested books from relatives; others wrote directly to publishers to obtain particular texts for their own amusement.45 These were the broad contours of prison life that influenced Wash and Mollie’s relationship for nearly two years.
A Wartime Courtship
Despite writing to and from prisons in Union-occupied territory, Wash and Mollie were able to forge an intimate bond. Indeed, their courtship rituals resembled those of young couples who, both before and during the war, shared their affections largely through letters.46 Wash and Mollie did not shy away from writing about their intimate lives and often employed the lofty prose that characterized the Victorian era’s epistolary traditions.47 On March 27, 1864, for example, Wash wrote, “I don’t look upon love as simply a ‘sweet enchantment’ that implies it may be broken, but rather as a soul-filling joy, resting upon & nurtured by the blessed peace of perfect confidence.” He frequently declared his love and affection, even as he told Mollie that he spent hours composing poetry using the letters of her name. Just as antebellum youth exchanged locks of hair and tintype photographs, Wash and Mollie also relied on small mementos for consolation. Wash, for example, made a ring for Mollie in prison, which she cherished as a token of his love. Likewise, Wash carried with him certain keepsakes, including a photograph of Mollie. Of course war and imprisonment also uniquely constrained their courtship, particularly in the couple’s ability to communicate frequently, freely, and accurately.
Mail was the best means to convey information, but it was not always dependable.48 Although communication innovations of the late antebellum period—particularly steam printing, railroads, and the telegraph—should have made communication easy in the Confederacy, they did not. It cost twice as much to mail a letter in the Confederacy as it did in the United States, and even though the Post Office Department grew during the war, there were never enough workers to staff it. In addition, the Confederacy’s limited industrial base made paper and stamps expensive; thus writing, while common, was nevertheless a privilege. Many southerners used paper scraps for writing letters.49 Even when supplies were available, circulation of mail posed another difficulty. Southern mail routes were centralized around urban hubs, but local postmasters were unable to work around these routes when circumstances changed, particularly when the Union occupied territories in the South and the newly formed Union state of West Virginia. In some instances, getting civilian mail across enemy lines required blockade running. It was easier to send mail to soldiers than it was to relatives and friends across enemy lines or within regions. For this reason, the Confederate army operated its own postal services in lieu of the national post office.50 According to one history of Jefferson County, a Confederate post office in Shepherdstown did not last more than a year.51 Folks on the home front could circumvent postal services altogether by sending mail, as Mollie did, by personal couriers.52
The question of privacy was one of the most significant concerns. Mollie’s family members usually read correspondence from Wash together in order to learn of news. Wash’s imprisonment added another layer of complexity. Union and Confederate prisons employed censors to read all incoming and outgoing mail, and they limited prisoners and their correspondents to one-page letters.53 Correspondents nevertheless found ways to work around censors. On March 13, 1865, for example, Wash requested “big paper” and stamps. The former would allow Wash to write more and stick to the one-page limit; the latter were always scarce. Similarly, on April 4, 1865 Mollie wrote, “Write on the blank half sheet that I sent: it is larger than the generality of paper, and you can put more on a page.” In addition to manipulating paper size, it was not uncommon for parties to write in coded language. In March 1864, when she wished to report news of the anticipated spring campaign in Virginia, Mollie wrote, “Our boys at school are well, and doing well, plenty to eat and wear. They expect to have a vacation about the first of April, when we hope to see them.” Mollie and Wash did not have any children away at school. Instead, she explained that the soldiers from her hometown were doing just fine and either expected a furlough or hoped to be on the move north to recapture northern Virginia in a repeat of spring campaigns in 1862 and 1863.
The idea of censorship upset Mollie, who viewed the act as yet another example of Yankee invasion—deep into her personal life. Throughout the 1850s, white women in Virginia had been taking a more active role in political life by reshaping political questions as extensions of their domestic authority. Yet women guarded their authority over domestic, private matters, which the war first expanded and then eroded.54 On May 23, 1864, Mollie received a returned letter she had sent to Wash. The letter was marked, “Long letters not delivered. Examiner.” Furious at the thought of other eyes reading her letter, she scribbled, “You hateful dog! What business had you writing on my letter.” What was, at one level, wartime protocol, appeared on another level to Mollie an invasion of her household and solidified her hatred of the enemy.
In addition to unreliable postal services, lack of privacy, and censorship, prisoners and their loved ones struggled to communicate accurately, given a preponderance of rumor in both printed and oral sources. According to the historian Jason Phillips, “Whether true or false, news traveled far and fast because thousands corresponded with loved ones, Confederate authorities lacked censors and modern propaganda agencies, and a highly partisan media whirled at top speed.”55 Women like Mollie faced a glut—not a scarcity—of information. However, individual pieces of news or “grape” that came verbally through the “grapevine telegraph” raised suspicions. Unsubstantiated stories from deserters or misinformation from occupying troops flooded social information networks. When Mollie heard accurate news—for example, that the Army of the Potomac had captured Richmond on April 4, 1865—she took it with a grain of salt. Believing either the news was wrong or the setback temporary, Mollie mistook the actual fall of Richmond as rumor rather than reality.
Mollie’s location in Jefferson County complicated her experience of “Confederate living.” Home to Harpers Ferry Arsenal, Jefferson County was a strategic corridor for both the Union and Confederate armies. Its close proximity to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, a crucial supply line, was also significant. By the time of Wash’s capture, the county had seen several minor skirmishes, including some associated with Stone-wall Jackson’s Valley Campaign in the spring of 1862, which brought fighting close to Charles Town. Several times during the war, the Union captured and recaptured nearby Harpers Ferry, and battles occurred in Winchester and Middleway.56 Moreover, on June 20, 1863, West Virginia was admitted to the Union, and Jefferson County residents divided along Unionist and Confederate lines. Living within the boundaries of this precarious middle ground, Mollie found herself both of and within Virginia and the Confederacy, and of and within West Virginia and the Union.57
By January 1864, the Civil War had changed dramatically, bringing greater complications and uncertainties to both Wash and Mollie. It was, quite simply, a discouraging year. Wash again tried escaping from John-son’s Island and, again, failed. Fighting escalated with the brutal and vicious Overland Campaign of 1864, and electoral politics brought the issues of emancipation and African American enlistment to the minds of many soldiers, civilians, and prisoners.58 Wartime destruction had also become increasingly visible in popular culture by 1864. Photographs and drawings of wounded and dead soldiers—as well as sick and frail prisoners—circulated widely in Union and Confederate newspapers and magazines.59 According to the historian Benjamin Cloyd, a “steady publication of articles, pictures, cartoons, prisoner testimony, and even government reports” of conditions in Union prisons circulated within the Confederacy.60 The degraded conditions in both Union and Confederate prisons resulted from the cessation of prisoner exchanges in 1863. When it became clear that the Confederacy refused to treat black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war, prisoner exchanges slowed nearly to a halt.61 With far more prisoners entering prisons than leaving through exchange, prisons became sites of deadly famine and pestilence, provoking public outcry. Wash and Mollie were likely aware of the wider public debate about prisoner treatment but underestimated its effect on the prospect of a speedy exchange.
A map of Virginia in 1861, showing Jefferson County, Hanover County, important rail lines, and Point Lookout, Maryland. J. W. Randolph, New Map of Virginia, compiled from the latest Maps. 1861. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.ndlpcoop/glva01.lva00089.
This bird’s-eye view drawing of Point Lookout, Maryland, depicts Hammond General Hospital and the prison for Confederate soldiers. Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pga.02593.
For Wash, the year of 1864 was also one of considerable travel. In April 1864, he was sent from Johnson’s Island to Point Lookout, Maryland. First opened in July 1863 on the peninsula jutting out into the meeting of the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay, Point Lookout eventually held more than twenty thousand prisoners.62 A week after moving to Point Lookout, Wash came down with chronic dysentery and was admitted to the Hammond USA General Hospital, adjacent to the prison. He recovered, and two months later, in June, Wash was transferred to Fort Delaware, a river fortification on Pea Patch Island in the middle of the Delaware River separating Delaware and New Jersey. Active for much of the war, after 1863 the site became heavily used as a prison for Confederates. Here, Wash spent his time practicing gymnastics (which worried Mollie greatly), reading, and talking with other prisoners, from whom he heard rumors of yet another prison transfer. In late summer, he and his fellow officers were taken to Morris Island, South Carolina, and placed near a Union artillery battery and in range of the Confederate guns defending Charleston in retaliation for similar treatment of Union officers by Confederates inside the besieged city.63 In these ways, the stage was set for both Mollie and Wash to turn inward to contemplate who they were as a couple and as individuals.
The empty stockade on Morris Island, site of Wash’s imprisonment in 1864, near Battery Wagner, where the African American 54th Massachusetts fought the previous year. Morris Island, South Carolina, stockade, 1865, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/itemcwp2003005334/PP/.
Gender in Crisis
As Mollie remained at home in Middleway, war, separation, and Yankee occupation jolted her experiences of and attitudes about womanhood. In terms of work, southern women’s responsibilities increased in the absence of able-bodied males and slaves.64 Mollie complained of having to perform “slave work” such as cooking and cleaning. In addition to maintaining their homes and farms, Mollie and her female friends and cousins also tended their communities’ needs by teaching school and Sunday school. These and other tasks were unique to wartime. Women in Mollie’s social world also prepared graves and memorials for fallen soldiers and played an important role in tacitly assuring prisoners’ emotional stability by writing letters to many prisoners, even if they did not personally know them. On March 21, 1865, Mollie wrote to Wash at Fort Delaware, “I have been corresponding all winter with a soldier at Fort Del . . . you can make his acquaintance if you choose, and let me know what you think of him. As he is a stranger to me, I am unable to give any opinion.” Later that year she admitted to not being able to take on additional letter writing projects for want of time and energy.
Importantly, class standing enhanced Mollie’s experiences of war. The consistently declining Virginia economy propelled hundreds of women into bread lines in Richmond, but not Mollie. In fact, she attended picnics and family gatherings, where she enjoyed feasts that she hesitated even mentioning to Wash. This was typical of her social class. According to the historian Anne Sarah Rubin, there was a “dichotomy between suffering and socializing” in Richmond, where many elite women, “unwilling to live a life without intellectual and social stimulation,” attended balls, parties, and picnics. In doing so, they broke the monotony of war.65
Not surprisingly, race further complicated Mollie’s experiences as a woman on the southern home front. After the Union army began to enlist African Americans, Mollie feared that armed blacks would incite large-scale massacres. On April 5, 1864, Mollie told Wash that a black regiment had been near Winchester, Virginia, and was headed north to Charles Town. “I trust they will not get here,” she wrote. “I have the greatest horror of them.” She was particularly appalled that Union officers had begun enlisting black men from Jefferson County. “It was galling to the flesh I assure you, but this is only one of the numerous indignations, to which we are every day subjected; however we bear it all cheerfully as it is for the good of our Confederacy.”66
As historians have argued, war also influenced how men like Wash Nelson thought about themselves as men. This had less to do with issues of work and responsibility and more to do with honor and character. The simplest way to view honor is as a concept somewhat synonymous with reputation. If a man’s reputation was besmirched in the eyes of his equals, his peers, then he would seek to vindicate the injustice, with violence if necessary.67 In terms of Confederates, one historian has argued that honor was “the lingua franca of southern sectionalism.” Southerners believed that northern antislavery politics threatened their group sense of honor and they vindicated their honor with secession.68
Several developments in the fall of 1864 and the winter of 1865 brought about Wash’s concerns with manhood, including his sense of honor. Most fundamentally, during these years, letters to and from Mollie slowed nearly to a halt, and Wash turned inward to examine his own life. In the spring of 1865, Wash Nelson turned twenty-five years old. Although he was at the prime of his manhood, he felt like a caged tiger and believed he looked like an “old looking young man.” Visible changes in his body and appearance alarmed him. He feared that any gentility he possessed before the war had disappeared; he feared returning from war a lesser man than when he entered.
Wash’s anxiety about his haggard looks and poor clothing reflects an important cultural continuity in the Civil War era, as elite whites believed public presentation was paramount in conveying honor and reputation.69 The Civil War had postponed his professional goals and his love life, and he worried this would ultimately harm his relationship with Mollie and prevent their marriage. Moreover, as rumors circulated in prison about Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Wash faced the ultimate embarrassment of swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States. For many southern men, admitting defeat and swearing the oath of allegiance were the ultimate expressions of dishonor and constituted emasculation.
In addition to the dishonor of defeat, Wash questioned whether Mollie would still love him if he swore fealty to the Union. While Mollie had a strong voice throughout their relationship, her assertiveness may have become more important in the final months of the war. In April 1865, Mollie wrote that she hoped Wash handled the news of Richmond’s capture “as philosophically as I did.”70 Shortly thereafter, Wash felt compelled to justify to Mollie his taking the oath of allegiance. Wash explained that he and fellow officers held a meeting and came to the conclusion that because the Confederate government no longer existed “our obligations to it were at an end, and our honor could no way be compromised by any course we might pursue with regard to it.” However, he still worried how this would sound to Mollie’s ears, “that by a false step now I might lose you forever. . . . If you love me write immediately.”71 Although Mollie reassured Wash that she approved of his decision, Wash had the cultural predisposition to believe that her love was conditional upon his honor.
Race, too, played an important role in Wash’s conception of manhood. Sometimes the first armed black men whom Confederate prisoners saw were their guards at prisons such as Point Lookout or Morris Island.72 For them, being guarded by black soldiers became an important indignity. At Point Lookout Prison, the Confederate artist John Jacob Omenhausser drew a scene in which a black soldier standing on a walkway alongside the prison fence looks down upon a suppliant white prisoner. The caption, written in racialized dialect, states “Sentinel: Git away from dat dar fence white man, or I’ll make old Abe’s gun smoke at you. I can hardly hold de ball back now. De bottom rails on top now.”73 While perhaps apocryphal, that last sentence came to exemplify conservative southerners’ fears of black agency for years to come.
Fears of the alliance between African Americans, the Union army, and the U.S. government simmered in Wash’s memoir.74 At Morris Island and Fort Pulaski, Wash Nelson described African American guards as “uncouth and barbarous,” as well as trigger happy. Still, he also described them as preferable to the white men who associated with them as their officers. Drawing from racialized medical theories, Wash wrote in his memoir, “If physiognomy be any index of character, then certainly those officers were villainous.” This racialist thought, which came to define the postwar South, crystallized for Wash in prison.
On June 13, 1865—just two months after Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse—Wash took the oath of allegiance and was released from Fort Delaware. In the following months he readjusted to civilian life and made preparations with Mollie for their upcoming nuptials. Between June and October, the couple was both excited and anxious. With black slaves now free persons, occupying Union soldiers, and Reconstruction looming large, Wash looked to marriage to reassert whatever claims to authority and patriarchy he might have had before the war. These tensions are palpable in some of the last letters in this collection. In a postwar letter, Wash referenced Mollie’s intention to act “ ‘as willful as possible.’” He replied he would wait until marriage before getting out his Bible and showing her where it says, “wife obey your husband.”75 It was a joke, a veiled threat, or somewhere in the middle. At times Mollie encouraged this sort of dialogue, telling Wash, “I would not marry a man unless he were my superior. I should not respect him and how could I love one whom I did not respect.”76 Other lines hinted at Wash’s own fragility. Mollie had stated earlier her intention not to talk about the wedding until he arrived at her home. Wash did not push the issue, but he suggested that it must be too delightful a subject for her to write about. “Only let me love you,” he wrote, “and love me a little in return, and I will be as pliant as clay.”77
“De bottom rails on top now.” Dialogue between a black guard and a prisoner, revealing the racial tension between prisoners and black guards. John Jacob Omenhausser, Civil War sketchbook, Point Lookout, Md., 1864–1865, Maryland Manuscript #5213, Maryland Manuscripts Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland at College Park Libraries.
Wash and Mollie married on October 17, 1865, in Virginia. Not long thereafter, Wash was ordained an Episcopal priest, like his father before him. Between 1880 and his death in 1903, Wash served as rector of St. James Episcopal Church in Warrenton, a town located in Fauquier County, Virginia.78 He resigned on account of “long-continued illness” in May 1903 and died the next month. He is buried at the Warrenton Cemetery.79 Over the course of their thirty-four-year marriage, Wash and Mollie had nine children, eight of whom survived them.80
Wash’s Memoir and the Lost Cause
In 1866, Wash drafted a memoir, which appears at the end of this volume. Wash never explained why he wrote a memoir. In many ways, though, writing a memoir might have satisfied Wash’s emotional need for closure and catharsis, or at the very least to consolidate the memory of the most painful experiences of his life. After all, prisoners of war faced more than just shot and shell, and they worried that stories of battlefield glory would overshadow their experiences of physical and mental suffering. They also passed through experiences that proved to be more difficult to reconcile. In the immediate postwar years, northerners and southerners began to write extensively about their personal experiences, which in turn generated sectional debates about each side’s culpability for wartime atrocities. The writings of prisoners were some of the most controversial.81
Settling the prisoner treatment question had much to do with preserving southern honor—an issue with which Wash struggled during nearly two years of imprisonment and even more so when he returned home, with the bitter taste of pledging allegiance to the Union still on his tongue, and with the prospect of facing former slaves as free men and women. In September 1865, for example, he mentioned in a letter a confrontation with a “negro boy.” His summary of the encounter reveals his sense of racial superiority characteristic of the postwar era: “I had a good deal of trouble [with the “negro boy”]. It was the worse for him though, as I had to knock him down, and I hit a pretty hard lick.” Wash also indicated that the boy’s parents seemed ready to intervene but he “advised them not, as I should certainly kill them if they did, and they took my advice.”82 Such a violent outburst, coming from someone planning to become a minister, demonstrates how Wash’s worldview connected masculine honor with racial superiority. Furthermore, this casual flirtation with violence within Wash’s letter offers an early illustration of the racial violence that characterized militant white resistance during Reconstruction. Postwar narratives were forged in this context of dishonor, bitterness, resentment, and white supremacy, especially those about the experiences of Union and Confederate prisoners.
Rev. George Washington Nelson Jr. (1840–1903) photographed in clerical collar ca. 1895. Nelson Family Collection, Catalog No. 1980.00114.080, Clarke County Historical Association Archives, Berryville, Va.
Prison narratives became ubiquitous in postwar American print culture, with new works appearing well into the early twentieth century. First-hand accounts of Union and Confederate prisons came into print as books, as well as articles, reminiscences, and poetry, in magazines, such as the Southern Historical Society Papers (SHSP) and the more popular and longer-lived Confederate Veteran.83 In March 1876, the SHSP published its third issue, which was devoted entirely to the treatment of Confederate prisoners during the Civil War. The editor wrote, “There is, perhaps no subject connected with the late war which more imperatively demands discussion at our hands than the Prison Question.” He reminded his readers that the northern media had agitated this discussion during the war years, reporting “Rebel barbarities” against Union soldiers imprisoned in Confederate prisons. It was time, he argued, to correct the record.84 Popular magazines played an important role in coming to terms with defeat by preserving war records and memoirs, as well as disseminating uniquely “southern” histories of the war. Magazine editors contributed historical sketches of battles and veritable hagiographies of the Confederacy’s most laureled leaders.
Wash’s memoir reflects an early influence in Lost Cause literature. Confederate officers took the lead in replying to northern critics of southern prisons. These memoirs focused on the survival of southern officers under the harsh rule of Union prison keepers. Wash also held an influential role as a member of the so-called Immortal Six Hundred. This group gained the sobriquet when the officers were moved from northern prisons to Morris Island, South Carolina, placed within range of Confederate artillery, and reportedly given rations comparable to Union soldiers at Andersonville. Most of them were slaveholders or came from slaveholding families, and they had opportunities to improve their minds through education and professional training in the years before the Civil War. The social standing of officers meant that they were more likely to keep journals or write letters during their service. They were also much more likely to write for publication after the war had ended. Wash hints at this in the 1866 manuscript: “It is my intention to give full credit for every kindness, for stretched to the utmost, they are but two or three bright spots in a dark record of suffering and oppression.” After ten months, his indignation was still very fresh.
Wash’s identity as an Episcopalian is also significant in the broader story of the Lost Cause. According to the historian Charles Reagan Wilson, the Lost Cause operated as a type of “civil religion” that appealed to Protestant southerners, in particular. Wilson argues, “While Methodists and Baptists openly endorsed and participated in the religious atmosphere of the Lost Cause rituals, the Episcopalians played an especially prominent role in the Southern civil religion, particularly in its rituals.” Wilson notes that “The army’s leadership was laced with Episcopalians, including Lee, Leonidas Polk, and Ellis Capers.” This also applied to lower-ranking officers, such as Wash Nelson, whose prison letters hinted at the importance of the denomination’s particular liturgies, played an important role in this process.85
While the documents contained in this volume do not demonstrate Wash’s role as a clergyman in any Lost Cause commemorative ceremonies, his memoir foreshadows the Lost Cause school of Civil War historiography. It also contrasts sharply with his correspondence with Mollie. The letters document intimate experiences created and shared by men and women, while the memoir is largely a man’s testimony to prison life. The striking distinction between the letters and the memoir is that while the former is a romance between a man and a woman, the latter is a drama between a man and his male captors. When Wash’s sister, Jennie, copied the memoir in 1866 she recorded, quite disappointed, that he chose not to mention the prison letters. “Some of the most touching incidents of his prison life were in connection with his letters,” she wrote, “to which—naturally he does not choose to refer.” Perhaps, after having lost a war, it would have been further emasculating for Wash to admit that his source of strength throughout the conflict had been from his fiancée.
In these ways, the documents that follow contribute to, and invite consideration of, a broader historiographical concern with postwar psychology and the construction of the “Lost Cause.” Some historical works have called attention to the unique role of Civil War prisons and prisoners in the broader cultural process of retrenchment and reunion, but the full impact of this relationship has not received due attention. In one of only a few caveats in his groundbreaking work of synthesis, Race and Reunion (2002), David Blight points out that the physical and emotional wounds of captivity never healed in the Civil War generation. Furthermore, Caroline Janney and William Blair suggest that debates about treatment of prisoners kept wounds open among this generation. Janney indicates that by the 1870s, former Confederates went on the offensive, arguing that Confederate prisoners had suffered worse than Union prisoners.86 In his foreword to a reprinting of William Hesseltine’s early overview of Civil War prisons, Blair urges historians to examine the intricacies of how wartime trauma in prison, public debate over treatment, and Civil War memory related in the postwar South. Still, the only scholarly work to examine this larger historical problem about reunion and memory is Benjamin Cloyd’s study, Haunted by Atrocity. His work on the afterlife of Civil War prisons highlights the persistent uncertainty about the meaning of captivity and atrocity in the 150 years after the Civil War, and opens the field to more nuanced work on the social, cultural, and even gendered significance of these institutions.87
Considered together, the memoir and wartime letters provide a window into prison life that students and scholars rarely see together. The letters were semiprivate, while the memoir was intended—like so many other Confederate reminiscences—to offer public testimony to perceived injustice and trauma. This volume, therefore, offers exciting opportunities for analysis and future research. In particular, it poses three related questions about history: What role does memory play in culture? How can historians reconstruct and interpret the past given conflicting sources based on memories? How did memory influence the recording, writing, and rewriting of the Confederate past? By juxtaposing the letters and memoir in a single volume, this book shows the generation and regeneration of wartime memory and history at work.
1. Wash to Mollie, April 12, 1865, box 2, folder 38, Nelson Family Papers Ms1989-021, Special Collections, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. (hereinafter NFP).
2. Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and the final proclamation on January 1, 1863. He delivered his famous address at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. See James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1988), 557, 859.
3. Scholarly approximations of the number of men imprisoned during the war vary. William Best Hesseltine reported 420,000 prisoners in his seminal Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). More recently, Benjamin G. Cloyd has taken a more conservative approach, arguing that 410,000 soldiers were imprisoned during the Civil War, among whom approximately 56,000 died: 30,000 from the United States, and 26,000 from the Confederacy. See Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 1. See also Charles W. Sanders Jr., While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 1. Although more Union soldiers died in Confederate camps than the other way around, the historical record is clear that prisons on both sides were grim.
4. Family genealogies have been invaluable. We have principally relied on T. K. Cartmell, Shenandoah Valley Pioneers and Their Descendants: A History of Frederick County, Virginia from Its Formation in 1738 to 1908 (Winchester, Va.: Eddy Press Corp., 1909); William Ronald Cocke, Hanover County Chancery Wills and Notes: A Compendium of Genealogical, Biographical and Historical Material as Contained in Cases of the Chancery Suits of Hanover County, Virginia (Columbia, Va.: William Ronald Cocke III, 1940); William Samuel Harris, The Harris Family: Thomas Harris, in Ipswich, Mass. in 1636. And Some of His Descendants, through Seven Generations, to 1883 (Nashua, N.H.: Barker & Bean, 1883); Katarina Wonders, “Prisoner of War: George Washington Nelson,” unpublished essay, on the Long Branch Plantation website, http://www.visitlongbranch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/P.O.W.-George-W.-Nelson1.pdf; Richard Channing Moore Page, Genealogy of the Page Family in Virginia. Also a Condensed Account of the Nelson, Walker, Pendelton and Randolph Families (New York: Press of the Publishers’ Printing Co., 1893).
5. Harris, Harris Family, 80. Rev. George Washington Nelson was the priest in charge at Cople Parish in Westmoreland County, Va., between 1834 and 1840. Meade, Old Churches and Families of Virginia (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1861)2:147.
6. Philip Nelson was the son of Francis Nelson and Lucy Page. He was born at Mount Hair, Hanover County, Va., c. 1811. He and Jane Nelson had three children: Francis, Caroline, and William. Page, Genealogy of the Page Family, 177. 1850 and 1860 Federal Slave Schedule, Hanover County, Va.
7. Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), 307. On Richmond’s economic, political, and cultural importance, see Gregg Kimball, American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History A History of Antebellum Richmond (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 5, 15–36; Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7–8.
8. Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, And Reunion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 74.
9. “George Washington Nelson,” on Long Branch Plantation website, http://www.visitlongbranch.org/history/people/gnelson/. There were two academies in Caroline County in 1860: Caroline Academy and Rappahannock Academy. A. J. Morrison, The Beginnings of Public Education in Virginia, 1776–1860: Study of Secondary Schools in Relation to the State Literary Fund (Richmond: Davis Pottom, Superintendent of Public Printing, 1917).
10. Compiled Confederate Service Records, National Archives and Records Administration.
11. Scollay was first married to Harriot Lowndes (1794–1835), of Georgetown, D.C. They had five children: Charles Lowndes (1823–57); Anne Lloyd (1825–68); Samuel Storrow (1827–31); Eleanor Grover (1829–55); and Elizabeth (1831–?). Only two children from his second marriage lived to adulthood. The firstborn, Francis Nelson Scollay, died in early childhood. When Scollay died in 1857, he had $100,000 to his name. Harris, Harris Family, 76.
12. 1860 U.S. Census, Jefferson County, Va., population schedule. Prepared by Social Explorer, http://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/Census1860/R11389763?ReportId=R11389763 (accessed April 12, 2017).
13. Millard Kessler Bushong, A History of Jefferson County, West Virginia (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, Inc., 2002), 97.
14. Cartmell, Shenandoah Valley Pioneers, 241–42.
15. Carmichael, The Last Generation, 72. On this generation and their educational experiences, also see Stephen William Berry, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Anya Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Timothy J. Williams, Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
16. Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 5. Young southern women shared much in common with northern counterparts when it came to education and intellectual formation. See Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand & Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
17. Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 6.
18. Ibid., 240. On Confederate women in public life, see Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
19. Mollie to Wash, April 5, 1864, box 2, folder 16, NFP.
20. Mollie to Wash, April 9, 1865, box 2, folder 37, NFP.
21. The most important works on this subject are Berry, All That Makes a Man; Carmichael, The Last Generation.
22. Carmichael, The Last Generation, 119.
23. On young North Carolinians, see Williams, Intellectual Manhood, chap. 7.
24. Louis P. Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 48–62.
25. William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia, Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 217.
26. “Hurrah for Old Virginia,” Daily Dispatch (Richmond, Va.), April 27, 1861.
27. Joseph Glatthaar, “Army of Northern Virginia,” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 2016, accessed April 14, 2017, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Army_of_Northern_Virginia#start_entry 14.
28. This number is based on the names listed on the Confederate war memorial in Hanover County, Va. Bob Krick, National Park Service, e-mail message to Timothy J. Williams, March 3, 2016. The most detailed study of the Army of Northern Virginia is Joseph Glatthaar, Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). On the Hanover Light Artillery, see Robert H. Moore II, Miscellaneous Disbanded Virginia Light Artillery (Lynchburg, Va.: H. E. Howard, Inc., 1997), 117–24.
29. William H. Runge, ed., Four Years in the Confederate Artillery: The Diary of Private Henry Robinson Berkeley (Chapel Hill: Published for the Virginia Historical Society by the University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 23.
30. Ibid., xvi–xviii.
31. Ibid., 31.
32. Ibid., 31n4.
33. Wash’s name first appears on a “Descriptive Roll of Prisoners of War at Camp Chase, Ohio,” Service Records. The carded records refer to “Capt. Nelson’s Company Virginia Light Artillery. (Hanover Artillery).”
34. James E. Taylor, With Sheridan up the Shenandoah Valley in 1864: Leaves from a Special Artist’s Sketchbook and Diary (Cleveland, Ohio: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1989), 444.
35. Roger Pickenpaugh, Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 15.
36. Ibid., 4. See also Roger Pickenpaugh, Johnson’s Island: A Prison for Confederate Officers (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2016).
37. Paul J. Springer and Glenn Robins, Transforming Civil War Prisons: Lincoln, Lieber, and the Politics of Captivity (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015).
38. A sutler was a merchant who followed armies during war and sold provisions to soldiers. The checks Wash mentions here were not official currency but the unofficial means by which sutlers and soldiers carried out transactions. David R Bush, ed., I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island: Life in a Civil War Prison (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011), 7–8.
39. Michael P. Gray, “Captivating Captives: An Excursion to Johnson’s Island Civil War Prison,” in The Midwestern Homefront during the Civil War, ed. Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 16–32; Pickenpaugh, Captives in Gray, 100.
40. Nelson, “Memoir.”
41. See, for example, “War Diary of Lieut. William Epps,” 1864, box 69, folder 43, Military Collection, Civil War Collection, Miscellaneous Records, Reminiscences, etc., State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh (hereinafter SANC).
42. “List of Confederate Prisoner of War Baptisms (1864–1865), Compiled from St. James Records,” in Military Collections, SANC.
43. Robert Bingham, August 9, 1863, Diary, in the Robert Bingham Papers, #3731-z, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereinafter SHC). On prison sounds, including noise and religion, see Evan A. Kutzler, “Captive Audiences: Sound, Silence, and Listening in Civil War Prisons,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 2 (December 2014): 239–63.
44. Pickenpaugh, Captives in Gray, 105; John G. Barrett, ed., Yankee Rebel: The Civil War Journal of Edmund DeWitt Patterson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 138; Charles W. Turner, ed. The Prisoner of War Letters of Lieutenant Thomas Dix Houston (1863–65) (Verona, Va.: McClure Printing Company, 1980), 15,17.
45. Letter from Little, Brown & Co., Publishers and Booksellers, 110 Washington Street, Boston, May 6, 1865, box 1, folder 13, Polk, Brown, and Ewell Family Papers #605, SHC.
46. Victoria E. Ott, Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 109, 111–12. Ott relied on several excerpted letters from Wash and Mollie that were published in the popular magazine, Civil War Times Illustrated 80 (September/October 1995): 28, 73–81; these same excerpts were later re-published, see Chris Fordney, ed., “Letters from the Heart,” in The Women’s War in the South: Recollections and Reflections of the American Civil War, ed. Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg (Nashville, Tenn.: Cumberland House, 1999), 253–64. On young men, women, and courtship during the Civil War era more broadly, see Berry, All That Makes a Man; Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters; Williams, Intellectual Manhood, chap. 6.
47. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
48. Communication during the Civil War, particularly in the Confederacy, is surprisingly understudied. The most comprehensive work on wartime communication can be found in Jason Phillips, “The Grape Vine Telegraph: Rumors and Confederate Persistence,” Journal of Southern History 72, no.4 (2006); Phillips, Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). The history of wartime postal services of the Union and the Confederacy is also thin. On the Confederacy, see John Nathan Anderson, “Money or Nothing: Confederate Postal System Collapse during the Civil War,” American Journalism 30, no. 1 (2013); Yael A. Sternhell, “Communicating War: The Culture of Information in Richmond during the American Civil War,” Past and Present 202, no. 1 (2009). On the political uses of mail in particular, see Stephen William Berry, “When Mail Was Armor: Envelopes of the Great Rebellion, 1861–1865,” Southern Cultures 4, no. 3 (1998); Steven R. Boyd, Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).
49. Anderson, “Money or Nothing,” 78, 75.
50. Ibid., 68, 81, 79.
51. Bushong, A History of Jefferson County, 153.
52. See Mollie to Wash, envelope, March 13, 1865, box 2, folder 31, NFP. She directed this letter in care of “L. P. W. Balch.”
53. Pickenpaugh, Captives in Gray, 98–100.
54. Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women & Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
55. Phillips, “The Grape Vine Telegraph,” 755.
56. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 457–58, 648, 777.
57. Bushong, A History of Jefferson County, 194–95. The question of West Virginia’s state-hood—and Jefferson County’s inclusion in the new state—was not legally settled until after the war, but the county ultimately became a part of West Virginia.
58. Many scholars point to 1864 as the turning point not only in the Civil War but also in the American experience of war. See Joseph T. Glatthaar, “Battlefield Tactics,” and Reid Mitchell, “Not the General but the Soldier: The Study of Civil War Soldiers,” in Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand, ed. James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 60–80, 81–95. Cultural and environmental historians have also made these claims. See Lisa M. Brady, War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), esp. chaps. 3 and 4; Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War, UnCivil Wars (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
59. This first occurred in 1862, with Gardner’s photos of Antietam, and most famously in 1863 with Brady’s photos of Gettysburg. See Nelson, Ruin Nation, 167.
60. Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity, 31. In the Union, the most popular images were Thomas Nast’s drawings, which appeared in wartime runs of Harper’s Weekly.
61. Ibid., 8.
62. Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pa: Stackpole Books, 1997), 151–52.
63. Wartime laws established by Francis Lieber’s General Order’s No. 100 called for the use of careful retaliation as a way to bind belligerents to a set of principles and curtail human losses. This group of officers selected for retaliation contributed to postwar debates about treatment of prisoners and became lionized in Lost Cause histories of the conflict. In 1905, for example, J. Ogden Murray published The Immortal Six Hundred: A Story of Cruelty to Confederate Prisoners of War, dedicating the work to his fellow Confederate officers confined “under fire of our own guns” on Morris Island, S.C., and at Fort Pulaski “on rations of rotten corn meal and pickle.” According to Murray, the book was not only to describe a tale of heroic suffering but also to provide a history “of the wanton cruelty inflicted upon helpless prisoners of war, without the least shadow of excuse.” John Ogden Murray, The Immortal Six Hundred: A Story of Cruelty to Confederate Prisoners of War (Winchester, Va.: Eddy Press Corp., 1905), 9. For an earlier example, see Fritz Fuzzlebug, Prison Life during the Rebellion; Being a Brief Narrative of the Miseries and Sufferings of Six Hundred Confederate Prisoners Sent from Fort Delaware to Morris’ Island to be Punished (Singer’s Glen, Va.: J. Funk’s Sons, printers, 1869).
64. Faust, Mothers of Invention, 74–79; LeeAnn Whites, “The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
65. Anne S. Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868, Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 67–68.
66. Mollie to Wash, April 5, 1864, box 2, folder 16, NFP.
67. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1890s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette, eds., The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), xix–xx.
68. Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9.
69. Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
70. Mollie to Wash, April 9, 1865, box 2, folder 37, NFP.
71. Wash to Mollie, May 3, 1865, box 2, folder 42, NFP.
72. Early slave laws prohibited male slaves from possessing firearms. Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 266.
73. John Jacob Omenhausser, Civil War sketchbook, Point Lookout, Md., 1864–1865, Maryland Manuscript #5213, Maryland Manuscripts Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland at College Park Libraries.
74. On this alliance, see Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom during the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 12–25.
75. Wash to Mollie, September 4, 1865, box 3, folder 10, NFP.
76. Mollie to Wash, September 25, 1865, box 3, folder 9, NFP.
77. Wash to Mollie, September 4, 1865, box 3, folder 10, NFP.
78. A. N. Brockway, ed., Catalogue of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity (New York: Council Publishing Company, 1900), 179.
79. Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Va., May 30, 1903, 3, and June 1, 1903, 2.
80. Harris, Harris Family, 80. Their fourth child, Jane Crease Nelson died in infancy (December 15, 1873–December 19, 1873).
81. The postwar readjustment of Confederate veterans to society has recently garnered much scholarly attention. Some exemplary works include Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergency of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); M. Keith Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014); Nelson, Ruin Nation.
82. Wash to Mollie, September 4, 1865, box 3, folder 9, NFP.
83. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 247–48. In fact, perhaps because of this outpouring of material, publishers adapted the term “deadline,” which once referred to a feature of prison camps, into their own professional jargon. Scholars interested in the Lost Cause and historical memory of the Civil War have mostly focused on postwar sources such as the Southern Historical Society Papers and the more popular and longer-lived Confederate Veteran. Ray M. Atchison, “ ‘The Land We Love’: A Southern Post-Bellum Magazine of Agriculture, Literature, and Military History,” North Carolina Historical Review 37, no. 4 (1960); Steven E. Sodergren, “ ‘The Great Weight of Responsibility’: The Struggle over History and Memory in Confederate Veteran Magazine,” Southern Cultures 19, no. 3 (2013); Richard D. Starnes, “Forever Faithful: The Southern Historical Society and Confederate Historical Memory,” Southern Cultures 2, no. 2 (1996).
84. “The Treatment of Prisoners During the War between the States,” Southern Historical Society Papers, 1, no. 3 (March 1876): 113.
85. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 35–36. On Leonidas Polk, in particular, see Glenn Robins, The Bishop of the Old South: The Ministry and Civil War Legacy of Leonidas Polk (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2006), 198–99, 202–15.
86. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 152–53; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Pres, 2013), 151–52.
87. William Blair, foreword to Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, xvii–xx; Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).