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The Army of the Potomac’s (AOP’s) primary mission was the defense of Washington, D.C. Click on map to enlarge. Lee’s army (in red) occupied the Rappahannock’s right bank. Often inaccurately depicted as a “Winter Encampment,” the AOP’s winter of 1863 was a strategic pause in which the army occupied a 200-square-mile, gourd-shaped defensive perimeter. Fully-manned…

This is the camp of 150th Pennsylvania Infantry at Belle Plain in March of 1863. Click on picture to enlarge and see details.  This reflects life in the camps and exposure to the radically changing elements. Note the choking smoke in the regimental streets from crude, improvised chimneys. The troops are in formation in the…

Captain Shaw’s father traveled by steamboat to Aquia Landing.  From there he went by train to Brooke Station.  Once he found his son, he presented him with Massachusetts’ Governor John Andrew’s offered command of the first black regiment of Massachusetts.  Shaw thought about it and even wrote to his parents and fiancé.  He finally accepted…

While Captain Robert Gould Shaw was in Stafford, his personal destiny was being planned in Washington and Boston, as Secretary Edwin Stanton, Massachusetts Governor John Andrew and activist Frederick Douglass sought to organize the first black volunteer regiment in the North, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. Governor Andrew gave Shaw’s father an offer for his son…

On January 24th, 1863, Captain Robert Gould Shaw, 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, arrived by steamboat at Aquia Landing . Wounded at Antietam, he returned to the XII Army Corps via Brooke Station and found his dispirited regiment encamped near Stafford Court House. Shaw wrote, “The corps had a very hard march down…it was raining hard here,…

Confederate “Come Retribution” Gold From Stafford? The Confederacy spent $500,000 in gold for “Secret Service” and “Necessities and Exigencies” between 1861 and 1863. It spent $1,500,000 in gold in 1864 and the first four months of 1865. That gold could have been mined covertly in Stafford during periods when Confederate troops occupied and when Federal…

By the outbreak of the Civil War, most of Stafford’s mines were owned by Northern capitalists who went home at the beginning of hostilities. The mines were located in a remote area and most of the employees were locals well familiar with the lay of the land and the locations of the gold deposits. Historians…

Stafford’s most productive mine was Eagle, also known at various times as the Rappahannock Gold Mine, which operated from before 1833 to around 1897. By 1847, it was operated by the Virginia Gold Belt Company of Philadelphia who changed the name from Rappahannock to Eagle Gold Mine. By 1850, it was owned by Bettle Paul…

From 1800 to the present there have been approximately 245 gold mines in Virginia. The New Yorker newspaper (June 2, 1838) reported that, in 1831, the “weekly product of the [Virginia] mines was then about $100,000 in value, or $5,000,000 annually. But a small part of the gold is sent to the U. S. mint;…

In 1782 a 0.85-ounce gold nugget was discovered on the north side of the Rappahannock River near Little Falls plantation in Stafford County. Thomas Jefferson wrote of this in his Notes on Virginia, “I know a single instance of gold found in this state. It was interspersed in small specks in a lump of ore,…

Historian Eric Foner, in his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), wrote: “Revising interpretations of the past is intrinsic to the study of history. But no part of the American experience has, in the last twenty-five years, seen a broadly accepted point of view so completely overturned as Reconstruction – the violent, dramatic, and still…

Led by historian William Dunning (Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1907), this interpretation can be summarized as: “When the Civil War ended, the white South genuinely accepted the reality of military defeat, stood ready to do justice to the emancipated slaves, and desired above all a quick reintegration into the fabric of national life. Before his…