[Inspired by my
annual Virginia pilgrimage with the boys, this year’s series will focus on
AmericanStudying interesting places in the Commonwealth. Leading up to a
special weekend post on my presentation at the Historical Writers
of America conference in Williamsburg!]
Two other important
contexts for a site closely tied to the Civil War’s opening salvos.
While of course
the first shots of the Civil War were fired on Charleston’s Fort Sumter, the war’s
first land conflict is generally
considered to be the June 1, 1861 skirmish between Union scouts and local
militiamen known as the Battle
of Fairfax Court House. You can’t throw a Virginia peanut anywhere in the
state without encountering Civil War history of one type or another, though, and
while each such moment was certainly significant to both its individual participants
and the war’s evolving trajectory, it can also begin to feel as if each
community is competing to make the case for why this particular battle was more meaningful or worth memorializing. (A
phenomenon not unique to either Virginia or Civil War history—just ask residents
of Lexington
and Concord precisely where the Revolutionary War began!) And from a
military history standpoint, the second
Battle of Fairfax Court House (fought just over two years after the first,
on June 27, 1863) was far more significant, as it impacted Confederate troop
movements and availability not long before the war’s decisive conflict at
Gettysburg.
In any case,
Fairfax Court House connects to additional and even more unique and interesting
American histories than those Civil War moments. The first Fairfax county
courthouse was constructed at a site known as Spring Fields in 1742, and a second,
more sizeable structure built 10 years later in the town of Alexandria. These
county courthouses featured and reflected a new, interestingly aristocratic and
ad hoc form of justice and governance in the colony, as “gentleman
justices” (including both George Washington and George Mason) appointed by the
Governor met on “court day” not only to decide on criminal and civil cases
and punishments, but also to set and levy taxes, authorize new construction and
development, and generally run much of the colony’s financial and civic affairs.
Elites occupied central roles in the governments of every 18th
century colony to be sure, but nonetheless this overt reliance on the wisdom of
individual landed gentleman differentiated Virginia from the “town
meeting” narrative of New England communal governance. It’s thus perhaps not
coincidental that while New England’s Revolutionary activities began with secret societies and
nighttime tea parties, Virginia’s began with gentlemen serving
the colony in the House of Burgesses and yet openly declaring
their commitment to liberty and independence.
The gentleman
justices were not the only, nor the most numerous, Virginians present
at the courthouse on court day, however. As the opening of that interesting
hyperlined article (on Virginia courthouse architecture) notes, court day was a
deeply communal and festive occasion, one that brought out a wide cross-section
of 18th
century Virginia’s population. Yet at the same time, Old Courthouse Road
(address of the historic Fairfax County
Courthouse site that remains in operation to this day) intersects with Gallows
Road, still in use as a state road but of course named for a far different and
darker social purpose (or perhaps not, as this
Washington Post article argues—but
as noted there, a gallows was built in Alexandria in the same year as the
courthouse construction there, so the larger point certainly stands). Since at
least Bacon’s
Rebellion of 1676, the relationship between Virginia’s elites and its
broader population had been a fraught one, and the move toward revolution
across the 18th century cannot be separated from that uneasy and
evolving dynamic. In both celebratory and darker ways, the history of the Fairfax
Court House thus interconnects with that interplay between the colony’s “gentlemen”
and its men (and women) more broadly.
Last VA places
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Interesting places (in any state) you’d highlight?
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