From Wheeling to Petersburg: Virginia's War to Preserve the Union

Abstract

Tens of thousands of anti-secessionist Virginians joined the Union Army between 1861 and 1865, forming an organized military effort to resist the Confederate government and preserve the Union, and yet surprisingly little attention has been paid by historians to these formations of Southerners who went to war against their own families in defense of their nation. While Virginians like Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jackson have been the subject of countless examinations, Virginia Unionists like Joseph Snider, Charles Capehart, and even Winfield Scott, have been largely ignored by the historiographers of the American Civil War. What efforts have been made to recognize these Unionists is generally found in small histories of the individual Unionist counties and even smaller histories of the individual Unionist units. Indeed, in the entire historiography of the American Civil War, the only significant effort to study this subject thus far has been the book Lincoln’s Loyalists by the historian Richard N. Current. Unfortunately, while Current’s work presents an overview of Southern Unionist military history, it does not provide a focused, comprehensive examination of the military history specific to Virginia’s Unionists. And so, it will be the undertaking of this project to examine in detail the scope and impact of Virginia’s Unionist military formations within the American Civil War. This project brings together the scattered state and unit histories, along with primary source accounts, voting records, and battlefield reports, in order to assess the size of the Virginia Unionist efforts and what role, if any, these military formations played in the destruction of the Confederacy.