“Paying the bounties”

-- Walt Whitman, Specimen days, 1882

Virginia defeated

 

John Robin McDaniel, Boling Clark, and Richard Morgan, To the citizens of Lynchburg and Campbell Co. ... [Lynchburg, Va., 1865]

John Robin McDaniel, Boling Clark, and Richard Morgan, To the citizens of Lynchburg and Campbell Co., Lynchburg, February 28th, 1865. [Lynchburg, Va., 1865]
Elizabeth Cocke Coles Fund (Broadside 1865 .M15)


John Robin McDaniel, Dear Sir: I am authorized by the Commissary General to solicit supplies for General Lee’s Army, in the field, by donation, loan or sale … [Lynchburg, Va., 1865]
Elizabeth Cocke Coles Fund (Broadside 1865 .M16) not pictured

On February 20, 1865, the newly appointed Commissary-General of the Confederacy, Brigadier General Isaac M. St. John, sent a circular letter to all officers of the Subsistence Department stating a general need for supplies and suggesting “patriotic appeals to a people who have never yet failed when properly approached.” These two documents, addressed directly to the citizens of Lynchburg and Campbell County, detail specific needs as well as specific prices to be paid for food supplies for General Lee’s Army.

Photograph of the University of Virginia Rotunda and Lawn, ca. 1868.

Photograph of the University of Virginia Rotunda and Lawn, ca. 1868.
Gift of Camilla Louise Wills (MSS 8116)

This image is believed to be the earliest surviving photograph of the University of Virginia. It was taken about three years after the end of the Civil War and likely represents what the Rotunda and Lawn would have looked like during the war.

Looking north, the view includes in the foreground the stone wall and “cattle guard” turnstile at the Lawn’s south end.

John B. Minor, Diary, 1843-1873.
John B. Minor Papers (MSS 3114)

Minor, professor of law at the University of Virginia, recorded the Union Army’s entrance into Charlottesville. Late at night on Friday, March 3, 1865, news came that the Confederate picket lines had been driven in and that Federal troops would arrive imminently. Minor, professor Socrates Maupin, Charlottesville mayor Christopher L. Fowler, and other local officials went to meet the advancing forces:

Our town friends had already arrived, and had displayed a flag of truce, and in a short time the enemy’s scouts were visible at the old toll gate [near present-day Alderman Library], approaching with extreme caution. Videttes [mounted sentinels] were stationed on each commanding eminence, near the road, and it was not until they reached the brook below the ice-pond that they advanced with confidence. The flag then became visible and 10 or 15 men approached at a gallop with their pistols in rest, the residue of the column dragging its slow length through the mud. We announced to these men, who were accompanied by a dirty-looking lieutenant, that no defense of Charlottesville was contemplated, that the town was evacuated, and that we requested protection for the University, and for the town … Immediately afterwards Gen [George A.] Custer passed in triumph, with 3 of our battle flags displayed, when two members of his staff rode out of the line to repeat the assurance of protection to the University. The town gentlemen now hastened to Charlottesville.

Cornelia Jane Matthews Jordan, Corinth and other poems of the war. Lynchburg, Va.: Johnson & Schaffter, 1865.
(E647 .J82)

Lynchburg resident Jordan wrote this poem in response to an 1863 visit to Corinth, Miss., where her husband was serving in the Confederate Army. Not long after it was published in 1865, copies were seized by order of Union General Aldred Howe Terry. Its fervent pro-Confederate message was, in Terry’s opinion, so “objectionable and incendiary” that he ordered the volumes burned outside the courthouse in Lynchburg. Notably, the volume’s pages are decorated with black borders, indicating mourning.