Occupy Lexington

We modern Americans have no experience with our home towns being invaded and occupied by an enemy army. That hasn’t happened in the United States in 150 years now, not since we did it to ourselves during the Civil war.

In the early days of our nation, that wasn’t the case. We love the Brits now, so much so that in the twentieth century, we twice sent hundreds of thousands of our young men to fight and die in their defense. But twice, a hundred years before WWI and earlier, red-coated British armies ravaged the United States, even burning our new national capitol building and president’s official dwelling.

By 1916, we had moved past the memory of those invasions, and locked arms with the English against a new common enemy, the Germans. And we did so again in 1942.

During WWII, the great Sunday morning surprise attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor was an air attack by ship-based airplanes. No Japanese infantry or tanks landed in Hawaii. WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all been “over there.”

Even the terrorist attack on 9-11-2001 was not an invasion. No occupying army broke down doors of civilian homes and searched every room for weapons.

But for three days in mid-June of 1864, that’s exactly what happened when blue-coated American soldiers occupied Lexington, Virginia during the Civil War.

Lexington was not a rail center like Atlanta, or home to foundries where cannons were forged like Richmond. Yet, the quiet town of just a few thousand residents became a target for a Division of Union soldiers for two reasons.

First, Lexington is at the foot of the Shenandoah Valley, a rich agricultural region that was a critical breadbasket for the Confederacy.

Second, Lexington was, and still is, home to the Virginia Military Institute, a small military academy where Stonewall Jackson taught (Quite poorly, it is reported). 

In May, 1864, just the month before the Union occupation of Lexington, the 200 teenage cadets of VMI were called out to temporarily join the Confederate army at the battle of New Market. 

Ten cadets died in the battle, and the northern press jumped on it. The army was castigated for waging war on children, even though the average age of the VMI cadets was eighteen. The Union commanders, when they learned that a Confederate general had ordered the battalion of "underage boys" into battle, were angry as well. The Union generals wanted some payback.

In a nutshell, when the Yankees got close to Lexington, the cadets at VMI were marched further south into the hills to safety. The Union commander, General Hunter, ordered the buildings at the military school burned down, along with the home of the past governor of Virginia which was adjacent to the campus. The photo below is the burned out cadet barracks building at VMI.

The retreating cadets could not carry all of the school’s inventory of military wares with them. So, in the day before the Yankees arrived, extra uniforms and weapons, that were now legitimate Confederate war materials, were distributed among the patriotic citizens of Lexington to hide. 

Just days after the Union forces left Lexington, a young lady named Rose Pendleton, the daughter of a Confederate general and sister of a colonel, wrote a long letter about the occupation. Her lengthy, remarkably detailed, letter describes how her family coped with the invading soldiers, and how she and her sisters aided the southern cause by hiding uniforms and even muskets rescued from the VMI storerooms.

Muskets were hidden in basements and laid on hidden corners of roof tops. Cadet uniforms were donned by women and worn under their dresses.

Some young women put on their skirt hoops and tied cadets’ extra shoes to the hidden framework of their hoops, all covered by their skirts and petticoats.

Sometimes these subterfuges worked, sometimes they didn’t. Miss Pendleton wrote that one of her mother’s servants (slaves) must have informed a Union officer where to look for hidden muskets, because the soldiers returned for a successful second search of her home and found the muskets stashed in the basement.

The Union soldiers did literally search every house in Lexington looking for food. Barrels of flour, hams, and other stores were confiscated.

The local newspaper building was ransacked. The printing press was dragged into the street and smashed. The collection of typeset letters were scattered in the street, but the building was not burned.

Lexington was the final destination of a thirty mile long canal that ran from Lynchburg, the closest railroad station. The canal locks in Lexington were destroyed, making the canal unusable for some time.

There is no record, even in the veiled language of the day, of any physical assaults on the women of Lexington, thankfully. The days of conquering armies raping and pillaging were past, and the days of total war, burning every home, never appeared in that part of Virginia. Restraint was exercised by the Union command in Lexington, much different than the practices of Sherman’s army that was soon to burn a wide swath across Georgia.

The only Confederate soldier killed was a man named Matthew White, a cavalryman from Lexington, who was home for some unknown reason. White took it upon himself to kill the farm laborer, a man named John Thorn, who had guided the first Union cavalrymen into Lexington. White bushwacked Thorn, then made the mistake of telling two men he thought were also southern soldiers on furloughs, but who turned out to be Union spies who had come to scout Lexington before the army arrived. They reported White’s admission to the Union commander. White was found, arrested, and taken into the woods by Union soldiers and executed.

The soldiers in blue came, took all the food they could find, destroyed anything related to the southern war effort, and left.

I’m writing this post about the “civilized sacking of Lexington” by the Union army because those three days are the setting for some pivotal plot developments in Defiant Honor.

Notice the wide front porch  in this post-Civil War photo of the Pendleton home in Lexington. Just a few days ago I wrote a scene in which my character Faith and one of the Pendleton ladies, both expecting babies, sit in rockers and engage in conversation a few days before the occupation of Lexington by the Yankees.

It was writer’s serendipity to find a photo of the very porch on which I’d just placed two characters in my novel, one fictitious and one a real person I’ve written into the plot.

Finally, more somberly, I ask you to pause for a moment and cast yourself into the helplessness of your town being invaded and occupied by hostile soldiers. We modern Americans are incredibly fortunate to have missed that drama. It happened all over Europe and much of Asia during the two world wars of the last century. It is happening now, this very day, in the Mideast, creating a nightmare life for hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians.