Slave Auction, Virginia
Lefevre James Cranstone, 1860–63

Richmond, Virginia, was second only to New Orleans as a slave-trading center. In the three decades before the Civil War, more than 300,000 slaves left Virginia through sale. Based on his travels in the state between September 1859 and June 1860, English artist Lefevre James Cranstone completed his impression of a slave auction in 1862. Cranstone’s rendering of the auction house interior highlights the commercial base upon which the institution rested. Virginia novelist George Tucker wrote that "One not accustomed to this spectacle, is extremely shocked to see beings, of the same species with himself, set up for sale to the highest bidder, like horses or cattle." The overwhelming need for black labor lessened the frequency of auctions during the war, but they did not cease.

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1991.70

Pike
1859

In 1857, abolitionist John Brown contracted with Charles Blair, a Connecticut blacksmith, to make 1,000 pikes. These became part of a stockpile of weapons Brown planned to use to support his raid against the federal arsenal and armory at Harpers Ferry. Although Brown’s mission ended in failure and the Commonwealth of Virginia executed him for treason, the event sent shock waves through the nation. Brown became a martyr for the antislavery cause in the North, but to southerners he personified the hostile intentions of northerners toward slavery. Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin sent a pike to each governor of a slaveholding state as a symbol of "the fanatical hatred borne by the dominant northern party to the institutions & people of the Southern States."

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1997.167.1

Sword and scabbard belonging to Union general George H. Thomas
Ames Manufacturing Company, 1848

In 1848, residents of rural Southampton County had presented Lt. George H. Thomas with an engraved silver sword for gallantry in the Seminole and Mexican wars. He wore it only once—at his 1852 wedding to Frances Kellogg of Troy, New York. Some blamed her for his later pro-Union stance. Because of his army travels, he left the sword in the care of his sisters in Virginia. In April 1861, Thomas chose to remain in the U.S. Army. His sisters disowned him. His letters were returned unopened, and his appeals for the return of the sword were ignored. Judith Thomas wrote that he "had been false to his state, his family, and to his friends." The sisters were never reconciled to their brother, who died in 1870.

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1900.1.A–C

Siah Carter
Detail from Sailors on deck of USS Monitor, July 9, 1862

Two months after the first battle of ironclads at Hampton Roads, the USS Monitor lay at anchor on the James River. Although told that "the Yankees would carry them [escaped slaves] out to sea, tie a piece or iron about their necks and throw them overboard," Siah Carter, a twenty-two-year-old enslaved African American from Shirley Plantation, rowed a small boat out to the ship. Taken aboard the Monitor for a three-year term, he became first assistant to the ship’s cook and served in the Union navy until May 1865. After his discharge, Siah married Eliza Tarrow, a former slave at Shirley.

Credit: Library of Congress

Pocket watch belonging to Thomas Jonathan Jackson
Mid-nineteenth century

As spring 1862 arrived, former V.M.I. professor Thomas J. Jackson received orders to drive federal forces from the agriculturally rich Shenandoah Valley. Armed with detailed and accurate maps, Jackson skillfully maneuvered his 17,000 men against larger but dispersed federal forces. He defeated portions of three Union armies and tied up nearly 60,000 Union troops that otherwise might have moved against Richmond when Gen. George B. McClellan attacked it from the east. An anxious Jackson likely stared at this watch while observing his troops. Careful not to exhaust them during forced marches, he ordered his men to rest ten minutes every hour.

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1938.1

Maj. Gen. James E. B. Stuart’s Whitney Navy revolver
c. 1857–62

James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart was arguably the most famous cavalryman of the Civil War. A Virginia-born graduate of West Point, Lieutenant Stuart of the 1st U.S. Cavalry carried orders for Col. Robert E. Lee to proceed to Harpers Ferry to crush John Brown’s raid in October 1859. Stuart, volunteering as aide-de-camp, went along and read the ultimatum to Brown before the assault in which Stuart distinguished himself. Promoted to captain on April 22, 1861, Stuart resigned on May 14, 1861. Jeb Stuart led the cavalry in all of the Army of Northern Virginia’s battles from June 1862 until May 1864. At the battle of Chancellorsville he took over command of Stonewall Jackson’s Corps after that officer had been mortally wounded. Returning to the cavalry, Stuart commanded Confederate horsemen in the largest cavalry engagement fought on the American continent at Brandy Station on June 9, 1863. During Grant’s drive on Richmond in the spring of 1864, Stuart’s force clashed with Gen. Philip Sheridan’s cavalry at Yellow Tavern on the outskirts of Richmond on May 11. During the fight Stuart was mortally wounded after discharging the last barrel of this revolver.

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1983.32

General Order No. 9
1865

General Order No. 9 was Gen. Robert E. Lee’s dignified farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia. Clerks wrote out multiple copies, many of which Lee signed individually.

The text reads as follows:

Head Quarters Army of No Va
10 April 1865
General Order
No 9

After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.
I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles who have remained steadfast to the last that I have consented to this result from no distrust of them.
But feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that would compensate for the loss that would have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their Countrymen.
By the terms of the Agreement officers and men can return to their homes and remain there until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you his blessing and protection.
With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration for myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell.

R. E. Lee
Genl

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, Mss12: 1865 Apr 10:5

Unidentified African American woman
c. Mid-nineteenth century

It is unclear whether this well-dressed, unidentified woman is free or enslaved. What is clear is that her status as an African American woman was significantly altered by the outcome of the American Civil War. Two years of fighting had transformed Union war aims, and by 1863, the North no longer fought only to save the Union but also to end slavery.

Generations of Americans hailed Abraham Lincoln as "The Great Emancipator." In recent decades, however, some historians have minimized Lincoln’s role and argued that the enslaved people freed themselves. Slaves did take the initiative to escape, but in Virginia it was the presence of Union lines that made successful escape more likely. After January 1, 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and its promise of just treatment inspired a dramatic increase in the number of escape attempts.

Although some enslaved African Americans escaped to Union lines, the hundreds of thousands of slaves and free blacks who remained provided essential labor for Virginia farms while 89 percent of eligible white men served in Confederate armies. At least partly out of fear that they might lose their freedom if they failed to contribute to the war effort, free blacks often worked beside the slaves, for minimal wages.

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1997.110.4

Pvt. Henry Van Leuvenigh Bird
c. 1861–65

Henry Bird, a twenty-one-year-old store clerk, enlisted in the Petersburg Grays (Company C of the 12th Virginia Infantry) two days after Virginia’s secession. In July 1862 he caught a mild strain of typhoid fever that kept him out of the war for seventeen months. Returning to his unit in 1864, he fought through the Overland Campaign and into the trenches at Petersburg. At the October 1864 battle of Burgess’ Mill, Bird was captured and confined at Point Lookout, Maryland. Following Appomattox, while he waited to be released, Bird received a letter from his father:

"The state is quieting down and people are going to work, and the war will soon be a thing of the past. I [have] been to see Genl Lee and he told me that all the soldiers who desired to return to their native places . . . should take the oath of allegiance to the U. States and become god citizens."

Bird returned to Petersburg in June 1865. Apologizing to his fiancée, Margaret Randolph, he took the oath of allegiance—the prerequisite to receiving a marriage license. Facing an uncertain future, Bird penned a note to Margaret, "My darling, we are all strangers in the land now." Bird lived in Petersburg until his death in 1903.

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1994.108.6

Libby Prison window frame
c. 1845–52

Located at the southeast corner of Cary and Twentieth streets in Richmond, Virginia, Luther Libby’s three-story warehouse was converted into a prison for Union officers in March 1862. As many as 1,000 men were crowded into the building, which, after each heavy rain, suffered from flooding that sent scores of rats scampering among the prisoners—giving rise to the nickname "Rat Hell."

On January 17, 1863, the Richmond Dispatch reported that 1,600 prisoners captured on New Year’s Eve at the battle of Stones River in Tennessee had just arrived in Richmond. The prisoners were distributed throughout the city and 700 were held at Libby.

The last Union soldiers imprisoned at Libby arrived on April 1, 1865. The next day, Richmond was evacuated. A week later the warehouse was home to more than 800 Confederate soldiers captured during the final week of the war in Virginia. During his visit to Richmond on April 4, Abraham Lincoln paused to look at one of the Confederacy’s most notorious prisons. A group of African Americans suggested that they would pull the building down, to which Lincoln replied that it be left as a monument.

Retired from its use as a prison, the warehouse briefly served as a fertilizer factory until it was purchased in 1889, disassembled, and shipped to Chicago, where it was reassembled and opened as the Libby Prison War Museum in 1889. Ten years later, the building was demolished—this time permanently—and pieces were sold as souvenirs.

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1990.113

Secession pen and holder
c. 1861

Seven slaveholding states seceded following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. On April 4, 1861, a convention of representatives from across the commonwealth gathered in Richmond and voted eighty-eight to forty-five against seceding from the United States. The desire to preserve the Union changed in Virginia after the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12 and Lincoln’s April 15th call on all loyal states—Virginia included—for militia to suppress the rebellion. On April 17, the delegates reconvened, this time voting eighty-eight to fifty-five in favor of secession. The Ordinance of Secession was ratified by the voting citizens of Virginia on May 23, 1861. Although not all slaveholding states of the Upper South seceded, Virginia refused to participate in an invasion of the Deep South. Valentine W. Southall of Albemarle County signed the Virginia Ordinance of Secession with the gold nib of this pen. To celebrate his Confederate nationalism, he later replaced the original handle with wood taken from the carriage of the cannon that fired the first shot at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1960.74.A–B

The Battle Between the Monitor and the Merrimack
Xanthus Smith, c. 1880

On March 8, 1862, the world’s first ironclad ship, CSS Virginia, destroyed two wooden-hulled U.S. warships at Hampton Roads. A Virginia-born sailor on the USS Cumberland observed that "None of our shots did appear to have an effect on her." This battle revolutionized naval warfare by proving that wooden vessels were obsolete against ironclads. The next day the Union’s first ironclad—the USS Monitor—arrived and fought the Virginia to a draw, ensuring the safety of the Union blockade fleet. A Union sailor from Staunton remarked that "John Bull [Great Britain] will have to build a new navy." Within weeks, Great Britain—the world’s leading naval power—canceled construction of wooden ships.

Credit: Virginia Historical Society, 1998.53