Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
While time-honored celebrations of Armistead and Pickett focus narrowly on moments at Gettysburg, primary sources declare the untold story of the best of men in the worst of times and refutes Lost Cause myths surrounding Armistead and Pickett. Written by retired scientist J.K. Brandau, for the first time, Lions of the Dan widens the aperture to introduce real heroes and amazing deeds that have been suppressed until now. Brandau presents the experiences of real soldiers in their own words and highlights the much-ignored history of Southside Virginia, presenting the Civil War start to finish from a unique, regional perspective. Readers find their pedestrian notions of the founding of the South’s peculiar institution challenged as they read an objective account of Virginia’s secession and celebrate the courage and devotion of soldiers on both sides.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781642793086 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2019 |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Southside Virginia: An Antebellum Primer
Highborn adventurers seeking wealth established the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. Early Virginia colonists suffered grievous hardships, losses, and imminent failure. Salvation through John Rolfe's tobacco is legendary. Rolfe married Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan. Their stories are essential Virginia history.
Tobacco, an eighteen-month crop, required prodigious labor. Planters first employed indentured servants. From 1618 onward, the colony filled demand through its headright system. Many were commoners lured by empty promises. Most were desperate lowborn, debtors, petty thieves, or street urchins, the off scourings of English society.
The first Africans arrived in 1619. An English ship had taken these prize from a Portuguese vessel and exchanged twenty for provisions at Old Point Comfort. Since English law prohibited holding Christians in permanent bondage, this entitled evangelized Africans to indentured status. Therefore, the first Africans may have entered the colony as indentures.
Captured Turks, African Muslims, and others classed heathen entered the colony as non-statutory, permanent slaves. Some obtained indentured status upon conversion to Christianity. Generally, the colony favored indentured labor, for permanent bondage, purchased at premium, was less profitable due to the colony's high mortality rate.
Technically, indenture contracts expired, while permanent bondage did not. In practice, treatment proved the same either way. By 1620, the sale of contracts between planters had already reduced indentures to chattel.
The odds of indentures surviving servitude to realize freedom dues were slim. Those who survived hardening in Virginia and subsequent toils often had terms extended by courts through a master's fabricated complaint. Some fled to take their chances in the wild. A minority fulfilled their servitude to work allotted parcels alone or in partnership with other freedmen. These, in turn, acquired indentures and expanded their tobacco holdings.
In 1624, King James revoked private charter and made Virginia a royal colony. It was the first colony in what was to become the British Empire. The king died the next year, and son Charles inherited the throne. The Stuart kings, though Protestant, resisted Protestant reforms and alienated Puritan subjects. Many sought refuge in Virginia.
By 1640, a considerable Puritan population established themselves in the colony, particularly south of the James River. Virginia (and the entire South) may have developed differently and in parallel with New England had it not been for Sir William Berkeley (pronounced Barclay).
Sir William was a courtier, playwright, and favorite of King Charles I. Puritan reforms enacted by Parliament stopped Berkeley's income, thus arose an intense, personal contempt for that sect. Berkeley finagled royal appointment as governor of Virginia and proprietor of North Carolina. He arrived in Jamestown in 1642 just as civil war erupted between the king and Parliament. Local outbreak of the Third Anglo-Powhatan War in 1644 eclipsed the bloody struggle at home. Berkeley successfully defended the colony and restored peace. By that time, Parliamentary forces controlled England.
Sir William remained fiercely loyal to the king and maintained control of the colony after the Regicide in 1649. In the name of the crown, as well as personal vendetta, Berkeley persecuted Virginia's Puritans. This drove many to Maryland. At the same time, many Royalists, casually referred to as Cavaliers, left England for refuge in Virginia.
In 1651, Parliament dispatched three warships to demand Berkeley's surrender. Only then did Sir William relinquish control to Virginia's Puritan faction and peacefully withdrew to his plantation, Green Spring.
Virginia colonists continued to prosper under Puritan governors Richard Bennett, Edward Digges, and Samuel Mathews. In 1653, Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Berkeley bided his time until Cromwell died in 1658. Sir William then wrestled control from the frail Governor Mathews. When Mathews died in January 1660, Berkeley resumed governorship. Later that year, England restored the throne. King Charles II recognized Berkeley's loyalty and declared Virginia a dominion: thus, its epithet, Old Dominion.
Sir William's plantation exile provided him opportunity to experiment with alternate cash crops. Despite possibilities, nothing challenged tobacco's profitability.
To the chagrin of common colonists, Sir William confiscated public lands for distribution as proprietorships and grants to Royalist chums and noble spawn. English tradition willed titles, lands, wealth, and virtually everything to eldest sons while siblings received token inheritances, if anything at all. Virginia offered Cavalier offspring disinherited by birth order unique opportunities for wealth.
By 1660, servant longevity had increased sufficiently to make permanent slavery competitive with indentured labor. Berkeley, his political cronies, and Royalist transplants provided themselves means to work their holdings most cost effectively by formally legalizing permanent slavery in 1661. Additional laws governing hereditary slavery and racial slavery followed. Provisions for Christian conversion affecting slave status vanished. African slavery in Virginia mirrored the classic Roman pattern rather than biblical guidelines.
At this same time, King Charles II formed the Royal African Company to monopolize the colony's African slave trade. The king then assured demand by cutting off the supply of indentures.
The most notable beneficiary of Berkeley's new, evolving social order was Robert "King" Carter, born in 1663. Carter would die in 1732 the richest man in the colony, leaving over three hundred thousand acres in lands, many plantations, a thousand slaves, a fortune in liquid currency, and a Cavalier dynasty. Intermarriages of his and other wealthy Royalist planter clans, like the Randolphs, were the unofficial, untitled, but nevertheless very real aristocratic class celebrated as the First Families of Virginia (FFV).
Berkeley rigorously enforced tenants of the Church of England and persecuted dissenters. In 1672, George Fox visited the Puritans of Nansemond County. Virtually all became Quakers. Berkeley stepped up harassments with ruinous fines, confiscations of property, and expulsions from the colony. Persecution drove nonconformists west into the frontiers of Southside Virginia and North Carolina.
Berkeley's dominion ignored, slighted, and oppressed all but the wealthy planter class. Rebellion erupted in 1676 led by Nathaniel Bacon, Berkeley's nephew by marriage. The roughly 50:50 Anglo:African racial composition of rebelling freemen reflected the relative color blindness of contemporary commoners. Berkeley fled to the Eastern Shore. Bacon and his rebels burned Jamestown.
Soon thereafter, Bacon succumbed to disease, and the revolt collapsed. Berkeley returned and summarily hanged conspirators. The number and personages executed appalled Charles II, who recalled his superannuated representative to England to give account. Sir William returned to London but died before having audience with the king.
Berkeley governed Virginia for twenty-seven years, the longest and most influential tenure of any Virginia governor. He is best noted for having established Virginia's bicameral legislature. However, it was also Sir William who purged the colony of its Puritan element, fostered Virginia's Cavalier class, and codified permanent, hereditary racial slavery.
Puritan versus Cavalier mindsets had polarized England into bloody civil war. The respective American derivatives North and South would eventually do the same.
* * *
The First Families of Virginia were the wealth and power in the Commonwealth. They populated leadership and learning. FFV gentry were stewards of Virginia culture and history. FFVs mothered Founding Fathers and presidents.
Proud FFV progeny perpetuated time-honored delusions of a fanciful Cavalier past referred to simply as Old Virginia. One wrote, "What is certain is, that life in Virginia, at the time, was an ideal life, simple wholesome and happy." In reality, few, if any, lived such a life. What is certain is that only an FFV possessed such potential.
Virginia's yeomanry (descendants of commoners, indentures, Puritans, dissenters, Scotch-Irish, Germans, etc.) embraced Cavalier legacy by default, if at all. For them, life was brutal, all-consuming at best. For them, precious little memory conveyed beyond a generation.
By 1860, the average Virginian looked back as far as the Revolutionary War. It was as if the Declaration of Independence marked the beginning of time. The colonization of Jamestown was ancient lore. The epithet Old Dominion was well known but its origin vague. Fables about Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, Bible stories, and oral traditions from the Revolution constituted most pedestrian history.
In effect, "old times there" were forgotten!
* * *
Virginians in the Albemarle Basin were particularly forgetful of old times. Southside Virginia is geographically more North Carolina than Virginia. By 1860, few gave thought to why ancestors settled in such isolation. It was home.
Blue Ridge mountain rivulets form the headwaters of the Dan River. The lazy stream crosses the Virginia–North Carolina border six times before joining the Roanoke River, which then crosses the border again to eventually empty into the Albemarle Sound. The collective watershed geographically isolated Southside Virginia from the colony's Chesapeake Bay economy. The region therefore became refuge for Quakers (converted Puritans), Baptists, Methodists, dissenters in general, runaways, and outcasts of every description fleeing effective reach of the English crown and Anglican authorities.
In 1714, Governor Alexander Spotswood built Fort Christanna in Virginia's Southside near present day Lawrenceville to establish regular trade with Indians. Spotswood encouraged settlement in the region by Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch as buffer between native tribes and proper English civilization. The formation of Brunswick County followed in 1720. Its boundary then stretched to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Serious English settlement of the area began after the official survey of the Virginia–North Carolina border by William Byrd II in 1728. Population growth required subsequent divisions into additional counties: Lunenburg in 1746, Halifax in 1752, and Pittsylvania in 1767.
Pittsylvania County, the largest county in Virginia, was named in honor of English prime minister William Pitt, First Earl of Chatham. The popular Pitt had recently secured repeal of the much-hated Stamp Act. The new county seat assumed the name Chatham.
Two score years prior, Byrd described what became Pittsylvania County as a veritable "Garden of Eden." Settlers discovered the truth was that the climate, soil, and topography was good for growing the tobacco weed and little else. Regional geography stunted growth, for the law required all tobacco to be inspected before sale. The sole cash crop of the colony required expensive, torturous transport overland to a government inspection site with Chesapeake Bay access: Lynchburg, Petersburg, or Norfolk. The situation discouraged establishment of towns in Southside Virginia.
Consequently, subsistence farmers on this frontier depended heavily on necessities from either nearby plantations or from a unique system of Scottish stores. Scottish financiers backed warehouses in Richmond and Norfolk. These supplied their trading posts throughout Virginia's Southside, which, in turn, served as middlemen for tobacco exchange. The proprietor of the Scottish store in Chatham was Scotsman Samuel Callands. Independence from Great Britain made Callands an independent store owner.
When Patrick Henry County split off from Pittsylvania in 1777, the county seat moved to the more central village of Competition. By 1788, Callands's store occupied the original brick courthouse/gaol vacated by county government. Callands's store and post office thrived as center for local community. By 1852, the original Chatham, the first county seat, had become known simply as Callands. Locals then referred to Competition, the new county seat, as Chatham.
* * *
In 1793, the General Assembly established a tobacco inspection warehouse on the Dan River at Wynne's Falls, the site of a ford and trading post. That same year, upon approval of formal town layout, the legislature changed its name to Danville. Work also began that year on the Dismal Swamp Canal to connect the Albemarle Sound to Hampton Roads. Eight years later, the new waterway opened river trade throughout Southside Virginia. Another event in 1793, no less important to the area, was the birth of Benjamin William Sheridan Cabell.
B. W. S. Cabell was born of FFV stock at Repton on the James River. Cabell studied law at Hampden-Sydney. In 1811, he moved briefly to Kentucky with his father but returned to Virginia with his aunt Elizabeth. At the outbreak of the War of 1812, Benjamin Cabell secured a commission as ensign in the 3rd Regiment Virginia Militia. He eventually served on the staffs of generals Joel Leftwich and John Pegram. After the war, Cabell ascended to colonelcy in the Virginia Militia. He married Sallie Epps Doswell in 1816. The couple moved to Danville, a mere fledgling town.
The Cabells lived in a modest abode at the foot of Main Street. Pocahontas Rebecca Cabell, the first of ten children, was born there June 29, 1819. Her name reflected Cabell's direct descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas.
Colonel Cabell was energetic and visionary. In 1820, he and another Mason established the Roman Eagle Lodge. The first meeting inducted other Danville principals, including Dr. George Craighead and James Lanier. The brotherhood consolidated town leadership. Soon thereafter, Benjamin Cabell named his first son John Roy after friend John B. Roy, the first Worshipful Master of the lodge and head of local tobacco trade.
Cabell's leadership and clout promoted development of the Dan River. Cabell was responsible for the first mill race, bateaux navigation to Danville by 1825, construction of the boat basin, the stone canal around the falls, and the first cotton mill in 1828. When Danville's first newspaper went defunct, Cabell cofounded and edited its successful successor.
Cabell's second daughter, Virginia, was followed by son Powhatan Bolling, which name again emphasized noble colonial lineage.
William Lewis Cabell was born New Year's Day 1827. Cabell named this son after his gristmill partner and future uncle by marriage.
Cabell acquired land suitable for a plantation overlooking the Dan River on the north bank opposite Danville. There he built Bridgewater.
Following a stillbirth came son Algernon Sydney named for that distinguished Puritan. Next son George Craighead was named after another friend, the prominent town doctor. The last three Cabell children were Sarah Epps, Joseph Robert, and Benjamin Edward.
Colonel Cabell served multiple terms as delegate in the Virginia General Assembly (1823–1827 and 1829–1830).
* * *
The Great Eclipse crossed the South in 1831. In Southampton County, an evangelized slave named Nat Turner embraced it as a sign from above. His deadly slave insurrection rocked Southside Virginia. Shockwaves jolted every slave state. Reactionaries in Virginia pushed to abolish slavery. Not only did their legislative efforts fail, but the Virginia General Assembly passed counter-legislation that banned manumission and made abolitionist activity a felony. Abolitionist groups tolerated until then fled north. Paranoia spread. Legislatures throughout the South passed ever increasingly stricter laws restricting slave assembly, worship, transit, and education with severe penalties and ruthless enforcements. Southern racial slavery reached its ultimate, most repressive, and cruelest form. The perfidiously twisted biblical justifications for the South's "peculiar institution" defied Scriptural contexts. Christian denominations split North and South.
* * *
Danville approached five hundred inhabitants. It was the only recognizable town in all Southside Virginia. Legislation authorized election of a town council. This first body included familiar names Colonel Benjamin Cabell, Dr. George Craighead, and James Lanier, Danville's first mayor. Cabell also served in the Virginia State Senate (1830–1833).
Despite his holdings in the Roanoke Navigation Company, Cabell began advocating railroad construction in 1835. Twelve years later, the Richmond & Danville Railroad received charter.
Cabell was appointed major general of the Virginia Militia in 1843. In 1850, he served as a pallbearer for John C. Calhoun's Richmond procession. In 1856, Cabell officiated alongside Mayor William T. Sutherlin to welcome the first train into Danville. That same year, the nation elected his cousin John Cabell Breckinridge vice president of the United States.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Lions of the Dan"
by .
Copyright © 2020 J.K. Brandau.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Chapter One Southside Virginia: An Antebellum Primer,
Chapter Two The Second American Revolution,
Chapter Three Elusive Glory,
Chapter Four Advance to the Rear,
Chapter Five Seven Pines: Day One,
Chapter Six The 57th Virginia, Armistead, and His Brigade,
Chapter Seven Malvern Hill,
Chapter Eight The Second Manassas and Maryland Campaigns,
Chapter Nine Pickett's Division and Fredericksburg,
Chapter Ten The Siege of Suffolk,
Chapter Eleven Gettysburg,
Chapter Twelve The Aftermath of Gettysburg,
Chapter Thirteen Pickett Descends on New Bern,
Chapter Fourteen Chester Station, Drewry's Bluff, and the Howlett Line,
Chapter Fifteen Their Fight to the Finish,
A Parting Thought: Furled, but Not Forgotten,
Endnotes,
Bibliography,
Index,
About the Author,