Chapter 1
A New Dominion - Virginia under the Readjuster Party
A New Dominion - Virginia under the Readjuster Party
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
“Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.” -Thomas Jefferson
April 2nd, 1865 – Richmond, Virginia
The burning of Columbia, South Carolina; A fate Richmond could have shared
Lt. General Richard Ewell was a tired, sickly, and embittered man. He had lost his leg, his field command position, his composure, and his hope of defending Richmond from the advancing Union forces. He was in a makeshift tent on the edge of the city, holding the missive addressed to him from President Jefferson Davis who had only hours earlier fled with the rest of the Confederate cabinet. The letter ordered him to burn the city’s infrastructure and supplies as they retreated, so that they could not be used to further the Yankee war effort.
“Now he stoops to such hopeless measures when defeat is all but assured.” Ewell muttered, remembering that his suggestion to free and arm the slaves in order to defend against the North was rebuked by President Davis. The stump of his wooden leg throbbed with a phantom pain as he hobbled out of the barracks and into the streets of Richmond. All around him the starving and desperate residents of the Confederacy’s former capital scrounged and looted whatever they could, knowing they would be unable to leave the city in time. A sense of anxious resignation hung in the air, as if no one knew quite what would happen when the Yankee invaders inevitably descended upon the city. Small rivers of booze trickled through the gutters, as the Confederates had been ordered to dispose of all the alcohol left in the city. Vagrants and orphans of the war armed with pots and dented tin cups scooped up the amber liquid, some to drink away their sorrows, others to try and trade it for whatever food or other supplies were left in the derelict city. A young but scraggly officer approached Ewell and gave a fatigued yet dutiful salute.
“Lt. General sir, the men have packed up everything we can carry on foot or by horse. What’re your orders?” The young man said. He glanced at the letter, being vaguely aware of its contents through the hushed whispers of the other soldiers. Ewell held the letter in his hands, chewing on his lip. Suddenly, as if seized by some spirit of vengeance, he crumpled the paper into a ball and threw the thing into the gutter to soak in the thrown away liquor.
“If the President wants to burn Richmond he can come back and do it his own damn self. We’re retreating. Tell any civilians left in the city they can either evacuate or try their luck with the Union army. This city belongs to the Yankees now.” Amid the distant sound of cannon-fire, the Confederate army quietly abandoned the former capital.
Richmond’s Power Elite: How The Jefferson Club Re-made Virginia (excerpt)
The prestigious and enigmatic Jefferson Club began as an informal social circle among the wealthy industrialists and businessmen of Richmond during Reconstruction, with the aim of using the city’s largely untouched commercial base to help rebuild the state of Virginia after the devastation of the Civil War. Some of its earliest members include Joseph R. Anderson, Lewis Ginter, James Read Branch, Albert Royal Brooks, Alexander Cameron, and Thomas Harding Ellis. The name “Jefferson Club” only began to be used in the late 1890s, as the group had begun to meet in Ginter’s Jefferson Hotel. Historians reckon that this was only possible due to the fact that Richmond had been spared much of the destruction and arson that many other southern cities had seen upon the retreat of Confederate forces, despite orders commanding the Richmond garrison to burn supplies and infrastructure before fleeing. An apocryphal tale credits this miraculous turn of fate to Confederate Lt. General Richard Ewell, who, according to legend, tossed the direct order from President Davis into the gutter and ordered his men to leave the city intact. Regardless of this tale’s authenticity, historians are in agreement that this event contributed to Virginia’s rapid economic recovery during Reconstruction. The Jefferson Club would also become an important point of contact for many members of the Readjuster Party, a coalition of populist Democrats and moderate Republicans (of which many of the members of the Jefferson Club were members or patrons) which would go on to have far-reaching political influence across both the south and the nation at large. It is no wonder, then, that the club would go on to host several US Presidents such as Ulysses S. Grant, James A. Garfield, James G. Blaine, and William Jennings Bryan, in addition to many prominent northern investors drawn in by the economic prosperity of the state, including names such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, William Henry Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan.
The origins of the Jefferson Club likely lie with Lewis Ginter, who, upon returning to Richmond after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865, quickly resumed his profitable tobacco, sugar, and cotton trading businesses. Ginter, like many others, had expected much of the city to be in ruins upon his return, and purportedly planned on moving back to his home state of New York to pursue a career in banking. While Ginter never permanently moved to New York, (not counting his manors and properties in the state) he would nevertheless become involved in banking in 1867. This experience would soon come in handy, when in the spring of 1869, during an event attended by President Ulysses S. Grant, the Richmond financier expressed support for the President’s gold policy in reducing the national debt. When Grant voiced his concerns and suggested that he might end the sale of gold to avoid driving down the price, Ginter dissented, explaining that he believed such a change in policy could trigger a buying frenzy and hinder the recovery of the economy. While Grant was not immediately convinced by Ginter’s argument, it sowed enough doubt in the President’s mind to abstain from changing his gold policy. Later it would be uncovered that the idea to change the gold policy had been fed to Grant by two New York investors named Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, who attempted to corner the gold market by buying large quantities of gold. Instead of triggering a buying frenzy, the two instead only managed to accrue substantial amounts of debt which would eventually lead both to financial ruin and bankruptcy.
June 3rd, 1868 - Russian America (Alaska)
the Western Union Telegraph Expedition in British Columbia
It had been a long and dark winter, with brutal snowstorms and barely enough daylight to go around. The men of the Western Union Telegraph Expedition were tired and homesick, but above all they were intensely determined. The expedition was tasked with a nigh impossible mission: to set up a telegraph line from San Francisco, through British Columbia and Russia’s American colony, across the Bering Strait, and finally through Siberia to Moscow. The project had been conceived due to the perceived difficulty of laying cable all across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe; to cross from America to Asia, one only had to lay cable across the short and relatively shallow Bering Strait. As the expedition would soon find out however, this would be easier said than done. The American Naturalist Robert Kennicott had led most of the expeditions to plot a course for the telegraph line through the far north of the American continent, braving rugged mountains, dense forests, and barren tundra - even narrowly avoiding death from a heart attack - and eventually leading the expedition to lay cables all the way from Washington to the Aleutian Islands. This and the somewhat expected complications of the icy, subarctic climate brought the project into jeopardy several times, and a few years prior it had almost been cancelled when the Atlantic Telegraph Company did in fact lay a telegraph cable all across the Atlantic; however, the line soon failed, and after an abortive attempt to recover and repair the cable the company delayed laying another line for at least a year. All of this is to say that while Kennicott huddled in a snow-blanketed cabin, hovering above the telegraph operator, he was intensely nervous. He had received word a few days earlier that the ship laying cable across the Bering strait had arrived in port, however the reports of their success were vague and unclear. He had no real idea whether the line would work or not. Yet, in hope of hopes, Kennicott sent a message. The telegraph operator tapped the key, spelling each letter of the message out one-by-one. Kennicott knew any potential receiver would likely speak Russian, but his knowledge of the language was fairly sub-par. He opted for a simple phrase, one he was not likely to get wrong (he wouldn’t want the first trans-pacific telegraph message to be lost in translation!). Letter by letter, the telegraph operator spelled out:
“Как у вас пого́да?”
And Kennicott waited. The howling winds of the arctic north rattled the walls of the wooden structure. Suddenly, there was a noise! The arctic expeditionaries could scarcely believe their ears, as the sound of long and short buzzing filled the cabin. The telegraph operator carefully but feverishly translated the letters, which he was surprised to find were in English. The message was short; only 5 symbols long. The silence that fell upon the room afterwards felt like an eternity.
“Well, what’d he say?” Kennicott uttered, breaking the deafening silence. The telegraph operator looked up at him and smiled.
“Cold!”
January 19th, 1870 - Alexandria, Virginia
Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States of America, former commanding general of the Union Army, and hero of the American Civil War, did not much enjoy the lavish celebrations he was often compelled to attend by the station of his current office. Despite the accusations of his opponents he was not one to engage in drunken revelry, abhorred profanity, and did not have much of a taste for music. He was a modest, reserved, and prudish, somewhat indicative of his humble, Methodist upbringing in rural Ohio. Grant’s distinctly quiet and sober personality, then, makes his chance encounter and eventual friendship with one William Mahone such a strange happenstance.
A portrait of William Mahone after the war
Mahone was, in many respects, quite the opposite of Grant. Growing up, he was a rowdy Irish-American youth whose father owned a tavern in southeast Virginia, and had become substantially wealthy from the profits of his booming railway business, the Atlantic, Mississippi, and Ohio Railroad. Mahone had served in the Civil War and even been in attendance during Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse - on the side of Lee. Now, Grant held no particular animosity towards Confederate officers. He held General Lee in high esteem, and acted honorably in victory towards his defeated foe. What he did abhor, was many of the ex-Confederates attempts to undo the progress that had been achieved at the cost of countless lives. All across the former Confederacy, former Confederate officers and politicians conspired to resist and roll back the legislation Grant had been tirelessly pushing through to Reconstruct the south; primarily those pertaining to the rights and free labor of the newly freed slaves. However, as Grant would come to know, Mahone was not like those men. In contrast to many of his other compatriots, Mahone did not resist the tides of abolition and emancipation; despite having owned 7 slaves prior to the war, once the war had ended Mahone became dedicated to the fair treatment, education, and overall betterment of freed negro slaves, something Grant could sympathize with greatly.
It is perhaps this strange mix of contradictions and commonalities which drew Grant and Mahone together, and eventually the two struck up a conversation. Their discussion was brief yet courteous, the two quickly finding common ground by sharing war stories and conversing about the state of Reconstruction, particularly the importance of securing voting rights for emancipated blacks and poor whites - something Mahone was especially passionate about. By the end of the night both men went their separate ways, not thinking too much of the encounter. However, unbeknownst to them, this was to be the beginning of a relationship which would shape the political landscape of Virginia - perhaps even the entire nation - for decades to come.
