Originally aired on August 30, 1996 - In part 105 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson discusses the vital role that Lynchburg, Virginia played during the war.
#105 – Lynchburg
Drive east and west through Virginia on US 460, or north and south through the state along US 29, and you will encounter Lynchburg. This vibrant urban center, like so many towns in the South, contains few visible signs of the Civil War that overwhelmed it, but some are there – along with a host of known facts.
In 1860, business and transportation had made Lynchburg a beehive of activity in Virginia’s central piedmont. Tobacco was the principle industry among the 6,800 residents, but the town also boasted four iron foundries and eleven grist mills. Railroads stretched east to Norfolk, west to Knoxville, and north to Alexandria. The James River and Kanawha Canal flowed through the downtown and bore more commerce than the railroads combined.
When civil war came in 1861, the call to arms went forth and Lynchburg responded in full. Some 1,500 of its young men entered the military. Four of ten companies in the 11th Virginia Infantry consisted of Lynchburg men. A mounted company from the area was part of the 2nd Virginia Cavalry. The Campbell County region also contributed a half-dozen artillery batteries to the Confederate cause.
As its sons did battle on distant fields, Lynchburg became a depot for commissary and quartermaster stores for the Confederate armies. The town was a rendezvous point and training station for recruits seeking to become soldier. Lynchburg steadily became the second largest hospital center in the Confederacy. At one time, 10,000 sick and wounded soldiers were in the town’s thirty hospitals. Over 2,700 of those men died in Lynchburg.
Union authorities became aware of the valuable link Lynchburg was between the eastern and western military theaters. In mid-June, 1864, near 18,000 Federals under General David Hunter moved on the town from the west. Local reserves, militia, and the VMI corps of cadets were an inadequate defense. General R. E. Lee thereupon dispatched 8,000 veteran soldiers under no-nonsense General Jubal Early to defend Lynchburg.
Action occurred all day on June 17 at the city’s outskirts. Hunter became increasingly convinced of the propriety of seeking a quieter locale as quickly as possible. He pulled back under cover of darkness. A rearguard fight near Salem was part of the Union withdrawal.
Ten months later, it was to Lynchburg that Lee’s retreating army was moving when Union forces blocked the way twenty miles to the east at Appomattox Court House. The official surrender of Lynchburg on April 12, 1865, was an anticlimax.
War took heavy toll physically and mentally on Lynchburg. Its businesses and transportational facilities were in shambles. The town itself bore countless scars of overuse and neglect. Defeat and destruction were one and the same. A disproportionate number of Lynchburg soldiers lay dead. In that group was the town’s leading soldier, General Samuel Garland, killed in action at the battle of South Mountain.
Like so many other devastated communities, Lynchburg rose from the ashes in the post-1865 period. One of its best-known residents after the war was the unreconstructed “Old Jube” Early, who orchestrated “Lost Cause” opinion from his law office until his death in 1894.
Some reminders of the war still exist. In the Confederate Cemetery are the graves of 2,200 soldiers from fourteen states. The stone obelisk dedicated to their memory is the city’s oldest monument. Local historians can point out the perimeters of the battlefield and the locations of prominent wartime buildings.
Lynchburg has another and unique Civil War memento. Off the beaten path at the back of Riverside Park is a fragment of the hull of the packet boat Marshall. In 1863 this flagship of the Virginia canal fleet transported the body of General “Stonewall” Jackson from Lynchburg to its final destination in Lexington.
Like another metropolis along the James River, the “Hill City” can boast of an imposing history.