War Comes to Chatham Manor: The Battle of Fredericksburg, 1862

They say that war makes for strange bedfellows, and the Battle of Fredericksburg was no exception. In 1862, three notable Americans – Clara Barton, “Angel of the Battlefield” and founder of the American Red Cross; Dr. Mary Walker, first female battlefield doctor and the only female Medal of Honor winner; and Walt Whitman, American poet – traveled to the Union field hospital established at Chatham Manor, a Virginia plantation house near Fredericksburg, Virginia.¹ They came unbidden, providing battlefield aid and comfort to the fallen during the first Battle of Fredericksburg (December 11-15, 1862). Unknown to each other before the war, there is no record of any meetings between these “strange bedfellows” at Chatham Manor; they likely passed each other, unseen, in the fog of war. But their collective medical and humanitarian contributions, at Fredericksburg and throughout the Civil War, helped fill a critical need in what Whitman described as “… an unaccountable and almost total deficiency of everything for the wounded…”² Dr. Dyer, the surgeon-in-chief at Chatham Manor during the battle, also spoke of this “meagerness of the [medical] supplies at our command” caused by a “lack of administrative ability or willful neglect.”³

Prior to the Civil War, Chatham Manor had been a Virginia plantation renowned for the grandeur of its 18th-century Georgian architecture, the perfection of its ornamental gardens, and the opulence of its furnishings. Built about 1730 by William Fitzhugh and owned by some of Virginia’s most elite families, Chatham Manor hosted prominent visitors such as George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Abraham Lincoln. It was at Chatham that “… John Dandridge, the father of Martha Washington, breathed his last … that Martha Custis first met Washington…. [and] Mary Custis met her idol, Robert E. Lee.”⁴ But in 1861, the Confederate owners of Chatham Manor, Mr. and Mrs. James Lacy, were forced to evacuate; and in 1862, General Irvin McDowell, recognizing its strategic location overlooking the Rappahannock River bridges, brought 30,000 Union troops to Chatham Manor and established his headquarters and field hospital.

A Union soldier described the devasting toll this took on the property, observing that “The grounds surrounding it [Chatham Manor], which had been tended with so much care, were now covered with the tents of staff officers and orderlies; the fences were gone, the shrubbery destroyed, and the whole plain, now covered with troops, was…a barren, uninviting waste.”⁵

On December 11, 1862, as thousands of Union troops positioned for the impending battle, Dr. Dyer was at Chatham Manor preparing for expected casualties. Over the next few days, as advancing Union troops were met with a withering attack by 78,000 entrenched Confederate soldiers, Dyer and his surgeons attended to hundreds of wounded soldiers, who quickly filled the operating tables from morning until late at night. An exhausted Dyer described the chaos, writing that “I have the Manor full, men lie on the floors as close as they can be stowed, a little straw here and there: the best we can do for them.” By December 18th, as the firing ceased and flags of truce began to fly, Dyer began transporting the wounded to Washington D.C. “Both armies are back in their old camps,” he wrote “and we have lost at least 10,000 men.”⁶

When Clara Barton arrived at Chatham Manor on the eve of battle, she described in a letter to her cousin the “strange, sad scene” that surrounded her: “The camp-fires blaze with unwonted brightness, the sentry’s tread is still but quick, the scores of little shelter tents are still as death…[but] Already the roll of the moving artillery is sounding to my ears. The battle draws near…”⁷ Throughout the fighting, Clara Barton likely spent little time inside Chatham Manor. Beloved by the Union soldiers as “a ministering angel to our sick,” Barton much preferred to work independently and closer to the troops. Even though snow covered the ground, she wished for a tent, floor, and stove so she could stay by her wagons rather than stay in a “rebel house.”⁸

Shortly after the fighting began, Barton received a message from one of the field surgeons to come immediately to the city, and “… within twenty minutes, was rocking across the swaying bridge, the water hissing with shot on either side.”⁹ Despite the thick fog and continuous shelling in the city, Barton moved quickly through the streets from one makeshift hospital to another, assisting the doctors and caring for the wounded. Over the course of the Civil War, Barton’s service on sixteen battlefields was marked by bravery, tenacity, and unflinching compassion for her “soldier boys.” After the War, she would go on to establish the American Red Cross, extending her humanitarian legacy by bringing international attention and relief to disaster victims.

With the onset of the Civil War, Dr. Mary Walker, only the second American woman to receive a medical degree, applied to serve as an Army surgeon. Although denied a paid position, she voluntarily acted as an assistant surgeon at the Patent Office Hospital in Washington D.C. Hearing of the impending battle in Fredericksburg, she traveled immediately to Chatham Manor and offered medical assistance. Dr. Walker likely provided triage support close to where the Union pontoons were bringing wounded soldiers back across the river. Although this was Dr. Walker’s first exposure to battle-inflicted injuries, she remained dedicated to battlefield medicine, and in 1863 was officially hired as a contract Army surgeon. An advocate for women’s rights, Walker engendered substantial controversy throughout her life over her insistence on wearing pants. One soldier remarked on her unusual appearance stating that “Miss Mary Walker created a sensation…she calls herself Dr. Mary Walker and wears a Bloomer and rode her fiery steed with grace and dignity.”¹⁰

Arrested in 1864 by the Confederate Army on charges of spying, she spent four months as a prisoner of war in Richmond’s notorious Castle Thunder prison. In a letter from prison to her mother, she wrote: “I hope you are not grieving about me…I am living in a three-story brick ‘castle’ with plenty to eat and a clean bed to sleep in.”¹¹ The reality however, was quite different. Living in a rat-infested room and fed a diet of moldy bread and rice, she weighed only 60 pounds when she left the castle. She continued to serve as an Army doctor throughout the rest of the Civil War, and in recognition of her valor, she became the first – and only – woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Walt Whitman received word on December 16, 1862 that his younger brother George Whitman, an officer in the 51st New York Regiment, had been wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Walt Whitman immediately left his home in Brooklyn and traveled to Fredericksburg, relieved to find his brother in good health despite a bullet wound to the cheek. Whitman quickly made friends with the soldiers of the 51st and engaged in camp life; over the next two weeks, he would eat with them, listen to their battle stories, and learn about their backgrounds. At some point, he went into Chatham Manor, and was greatly moved by the true cost of war:

It [Chatham Manor] is used as a hospital since the battle, and seems to have received only the worst cases. Outdoors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the Manor, I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. — about a load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each covered with its brown woolen blanket. In the dooryard, toward the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel staves or broken board, stuck in the dirt.¹²

The forty-six-year-old Whitman was at a low point in his life, distressed over the Civil War and struggling with his writing. But as he walked through Chatham Manor, seeing the needs of these wounded men, he was imbued with a sense of duty and wondered how he might be able to help. He wrote, “I do not see that I can do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them.” Wanting to do more, he took up residence in Washington D.C. to be near the military hospitals and spent the rest of the war in ministry of the wounded. Over the next three years, he estimated he made over 600 hospital visits in support of 80,000 to 100,000 soldiers, conducting bedside visits, providing small gifts, reading to the sick, as well as running errands and writing letters home for them.¹³ Notably, he listened to them talk, recognizing a new poetry in their stories of the love and grief, as well as the pain and suffering, of war. “I find it [the hospital visits] curiously fascinating,” he wrote, “Nor do I find it ended by my doing good to the sick and dying soldiers. They do me good in return, more than I do them.”¹⁴ Their stories, along with his personal experiences, inspired his 1865 poetic account of the Civil War entitled Drum Taps.

Throughout the antebellum period, Chatham Manor was a place where “The grounds descended to the river in terraces, and the Manor and its surroundings could not well be surpassed for beauty, elegance and comfort.”¹⁵ Situated on 800 acres, in 1861 the Lacy property and dwellings were valued at close to 40,000 dollars.¹⁶ In 1865, Mrs. Lacy returned to a devastated home, where “all the paneling had been stripped from the walls, every door and window was gone, literally only the bare brick walls were left standing. The trees had been cut down, the yard and garden were a wilderness of weeds and briers and there were nineteen Federal graves on the lawn.”¹⁷ Although the Lacys made efforts to repair Chatham, they were forced to sell the property in 1872 for $24,000, well below what they originally paid.¹⁸

Luckily for us, the history of Chatham Manor did not end with the Civil War. A restored Chatham Manor and gardens are now part of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, ensuring that this history remains present for future generations.