Charlottesville was founded in 1762 and named in honor of Queen Charlotte, consort of Great Britain’s. In 1819 established the University of Virginia about a mile west of town. On the eve of the Civil War, Charlottesville’s population was only about 3,000, but it had surpassed Scottsville as the largest town in Albemarle County and home of several factories, banks, and hotels, as well as six newspapers. Still, it was “uninteresting,” according to a visiting doctor, “nothing more than a small village built mostly of frame houses.” After the in voted to secede on April 17, 1861, most white Charlottesville residents enthusiastically supported the Confederacy, and the town’s light industry mobilized for the war effort.
The Charlottesville Manufacturing Company operated cotton and woolen mills that produced Confederate uniforms. Owned by John A. Marchant from 1852 until 1864, when his son, Henry Clay Marchant, bought it, the factory was burned by occupying Union forces in 1865. (Henry Marchant reopened the facility in 1867 as the Charlottesville Woolen Mills, and it became Albemarle County’s largest industry.)
The factory also produced uniforms designed especially for the Albemarle Light Horse Cavalry, including jackets for $2.75 and pants for $1.50. Marcellus McKennie opened McKennie and Company on July 1, 1861, and the firm manufactured four to five swords per week. (By comparison, T. D. Driscoll, in Howardsville, was able to make twenty-eight swords per week.)
Finally, G. W. Wells and Brothers provided artificial limbs, including one for John Bell Hood. The Confederate general lost his right leg in September 1863 at the Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia, and while recuperating in Richmond, he received an artificial limb from Charlottesville despite the fact that one had been sent for him from France. “The Charlottesville leg is a far better looking one than the French one,” the diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut observed in February 1865.
Charlottesville General Hospital
Complaints About Medical Care in Charlottesville
Charlottesville General Hospital employed approximately three hundred Charlottesville residents and grew to a capacity of 500 beds staffed by between fifteen and fifty doctors. Dr. J. L. Cabell, professor of anatomy and surgery at the University of Virginia, managed the facility and oversaw, among others, McKennie the sword maker and Dr. Orianna Moon, the hospital’s superintendent of nurses. An Albemarle County native, Moon as a young woman was described as being antislavery, anti-, and pro-woman’s rights. (Her sister was the Southern Baptist missionary Charlotte “Lottie” Moon.) An 1857 graduate of the Female Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she was one of only thirty-eight that year who held medical degrees in the United States. Moon worked in Charlottesville only for a few months before relocating to Richmond in November 1861, having married her hospital colleague, Dr. John Summerfield Andrews.
The hospital, meanwhile, continued to care for soldiers wounded in battle and sick from disease. Forty percent of patients were treated for gunshot wounds, making amputation one of the most frequently performed medical procedures; diarrhea, typhoid, measles, dysentery, and pneumonia were far more common ailments. As the war went on, there were severe shortages of medical supplies, forcing the staff to resort to indigenous plants, such as dandelions, dogwood, juniper, and persimmons, with known or suspected medicinal properties. Most of the 1,100 patients who died at the hospital during the war were buried in unmarked graves in a field adjacent to the University Cemetery. In addition, Confederate general Carnot Posey, a Mississippian who attended law school at the University of Virginia and died after being wounded at the Battle of Bristoe Station (1863), is buried in the cemetery. After his 1862 death at Harrisonburg in the, was buried in Charlottesville; his remains were reinterred in following the war.
Charlottesville residents organized the Charlottesville Artillery, a provost guard, and the 47th and the 88th Virginia militia regiments. (Marcellus McKennie, in addition to being a surgeon and sword manufacturer, was colonel of the 88th Virginia.) In April 1861, four infantry companies—two each of town and university men—organized into the Charlottesville and University Battalion. The following month, the 19th Virginia Infantry Regiment was formed mostly from Charlottesville and Albemarle County recruits, with University of Virginia and West Point graduateas its colonel. Composed of ten companies, the regiment included two from Charlottesville: Company A of the Monticello Guard and Company B of the Albemarle Rifles. The eleven-man regimental band, formerly the Charlottesville Silver Cornet Band, was considered by some to be the finest in the Army of Northern Virginia, but it disbanded in 1862.
The 19th Virginia fought at the First Battle of Manassas (1861) and the(1862), where it captured a Union battery and 200 prisoners. During the (1862), the regiment captured another Union battery, but during the , which included the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, the regiment suffered a casualty rate of more than 47 percent. It was worse the following summer. During Pickett’s Charge, on the third day of the (1863), the regiment lost 60 percent of its men killed or wounded, as well as its flag. (The Massachusetts soldier credited with capturing the colors was later awarded the Medal of Honor.) Of the approximately 1,600 men who served in the 19th Virginia’s ranks over the course of the war, only 30 were left to surrender at the on April 6, 1865, just three days before to Union general-in-chief .
African Americans accounted for the majority of Albemarle County’s population between 1820 and 1890. According to the United States Census of 1860, the county was home to 606 free blacks and 13,916 enslaved African Americans, compared to 12,103 whites. The Civil War provided both a crisis for Charlottesville’s African Americans, who became the subject of the white population’s hostility and fear, and an opportunity.
Charlottesville’s most prominent citizens were slaveholders—from Dr. Cabell, who owned three slaves, to Uriah P. Levy, the owner of, who owned twenty-one. As such, they were invested in maintaining the antebellum social order and establishing harsh measures in instances where that order was disrupted. For instance, blacks were prohibited from smoking in public, with the punishment for noncompliance being ten lashes for slaves and a ten-dollar fine for free blacks. Curfews were set and enforced, prohibiting any slave from leaving his or her master’s property past nine o’clock at night without written permission.
Authorities also cracked down on any mixing of the races. An African American man named Jackson who was living on University of Virginia property was removed in 1863 on the grounds that he was married to a white woman. Basil L. Gildersleeve, a professor of Greek and Hebrew at the university, spoke out against so-called miscegenation. He wrote that it was only by preventing a mixture of the races “that we owe the supremacy of the white man on the continent, and that we look down so proudly on the mixed population of Mexico and the twenty-two cross-breeds of Lima.”
The Confederate government, meanwhile,African Americans’ labor for the war effort. Free blacks between the ages of fifteen and fifty were required to report to the courthouse, where they were examined by a doctor from the Charlottesville General Hospital who determined how and where they should work. If they did not report, they were taken by gunpoint. Against the protestations of their owners, slaves were taken, too. Between 1862 and 1864, about 940 slaves were impressed. In 1863, four slaves murdered a Confederate officer attempting to take them. In some cases, slave owners moved their African Americans rather than lend them to the Confederacy.
African Americans also took advantage of the shifting social conditions during the Civil War to establish their own Baptist congregation. About half of Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s blacks, both free and enslaved, had a connection to the biracial First Baptist Church and its pastor, A. B. Brown. On April 20, 1863, these “African Baptists,” as they referred to themselves, established their own congregation within the church, the Charlottesville African Church. “They expressed their initial desire to separate from the white church so mildly and with such courtesy that, for a time, whites did not understand precisely what was happening,” the historian Charles F. Irons has written. African Americans were using the church to establish for themselves some level of autonomy.
Whites interpreted the black congregants’ agreement to retain a white pastor, John T. Randolph, as an indication that they recognized their continued subservience to church authorities. But by June the blacks had rejected Randolph, prompting the church to reiterate that any new black congregation must “not place the colored brethren beyond the care and control of the church.” Sometime between 1864 and 1867, the African Baptists fully separated from the First Baptist Church and moved into the basement of the Delevan building, at one time a University of Virginia temperance hotel and during the war used by Charlottesville General Hospital. Their new pastor was William Gibbons, a former slave. In 1867, a portion of the congregation formed Mount Zion, while, in 1884, the Delevan Church completed a new building and renamed itself the First Colored Baptist Church.
Custer’s Raid and War’s End
Charlottesville largely escaped the ravages of Civil War, but in 1864 the city became a target of a small Union military operation associated with the. When Union general Hugh Judson Kilpatrick proposed a cavalry raid on Richmond in order to release its 15,000 Union prisoners of war, he also suggested two diversionary raids to distract Confederate defenders. Union colonel Ulric Dahlgren, a one-legged veteran of Gettysburg, would strike at Richmond from the south while another expedition, this one commanded by Union general George A. Custer, would raid Albemarle County to divert Confederate forces away from Kilpatrick and Dahlgren. At Madison County, Custer was given command of 1,500 men drawn from various units, and he promptly set out to destroy the Lynchburg Railroad Bridge over the Rivanna River and military supplies at Charlottesville, forty miles away.
On February 29, 1864, Custer crossed the Rivanna near the Earlysville–Charlottesville road and launched a surprise attack against four batteries of the Stuart Horse Artillery Battalion, about 200 men in winter quarters and under the temporary command of Captain Marcellus Moorman. After Custer captured their camp and destroyed their equipment, the artillerymen briefly retreated to a nearby hill. When one of their caissons accidentally exploded, they made a half-hearted counterattack and Custer withdrew, mistakenly thinking that Confederate reinforcements had arrived.
Although the skirmish lasted less than an hour, and it was but a secondary piece of the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid, residents designated it the “battle” of Rio Hill. The “Great Albemarle Raid” as a whole led to little appreciable results; Custer destroyed the Confederate camp but failed to divert many troops from the Richmond defenses or to reach Charlottesville. Perhaps in an attempt to salvage some good news from what turned out to be the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren fiasco, Union general, commander of the ,
declared the Charlottesville expedition a success. And in Charlottesville thankful local women presented a $500 silk flag to the Stuart Horse Artillery that read: “From The Ladies of Charlottesville To Stuart’s Horse Artillery, Our Brave Defenders.”
Following Confederate general‘s defeat at the Third Battle of Waynesboro on March 2, 1865, and fearing pillaging by advancing Union troops, town and university officials surrendered to Union generals Philip H. Sheridan and George Custer on March 3, 1865. Union forces initially occupied Charlottesville for three days. Following Lee’s surrender a month later, the town came under the jurisdiction of the , and the new occupation force consisted of a regiment of Pennsylvania cavalry. A local newspaper sullenly conceded: “The Virginia of the past we shall not know again any more than we can revive the Middle Ages.”