How the Civil War Stalked Wilmer McLean

The Civil War seemed to stalk unfortunate Wilmer McLean, who could say that the conflict began in his front yard and ended in his front parlour.

CHRISTOPHER KLEIN

Forty-six-year-old Wilmer McLean was too old to serve the Confederacy when the Civil War broke out in 1861, but in short order, the conflict arrived at his doorstep. After marrying wealthy widow Virginia Mason eight years earlier, the former operator of the Kerr & McLean wholesale and retail grocery moved into his wife’s small plantation near Manassas Junction, Virginia. Fourteen slaves tended the fields of Yorkshire, named for the home county of English native Richard Blackburn who had established the plantation in the early 1700s.

Through McLean’s farm meandered a small stream called Bull Run that would witness the first major engagement between Union and Confederate forces in July 1861. As Union forces approached on a 30-mile march west from Washington, D.C., Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard took over McLean’s Manassas farmhouse as his headquarters.

A day after McLean fled with his family, the Civil War hit home—literally. On July 18, 1861, during the Battle of Blackburn’s Ford, a Union shell tore into the fireplace of McLean’s detached kitchen and ruined the dinner being prepared for Beauregard and his staff. Three days later came the Civil War’s first major encounter, the First Battle of Bull Run. Wounded Confederate soldiers and captured Union fighters both shared the floor of McLean’s barn, which had been converted to a makeshift military hospital and jail.

The battle and Confederate occupation ravaged Yorkshire. McLean returned alone to his damaged plantation and worked as an unpaid Confederate quartermaster through February 1862 before reuniting with his wife and five children in the spring. When the Union and Confederacy clashed once again in Manassas at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August 1862, McLean sought quieter—and less belligerent—pastures.

In the fall of 1863 McLean moved his family 120 miles southwest to the quiet hamlet of Appomattox Court House on the other side of Virginia. He purchased a substantial house, originally built as a tavern in 1848, along the Lynchburg-Richmond State Road and regularly travelled on the nearby Southside Railroad to tend to his business supplying sugar to the Confederate army.

In spite of his hopes for solitude, the Civil War incredibly arrived at his front door again on April 9, 1865, when Confederate Colonel Charles Marshall rode into Appomattox Court House and asked the first man he spotted—McLean—to assist him in finding a suitable home that could host a meeting between the Union and Confederate commanders. After Marshall rejected the dilapidated, unfurnished brick house initially shown to him, McLean reluctantly offered up his own comfortable, well-furnished home.

That afternoon, history was made in McLean’s front parlour as Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his forces to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, marking the beginning of the end of the Civil War. McLean’s homes had become a pair of bookends to the four-year war.

As Lee departed on his horse Traveller to break the news to his troops, Union officers launched their final raid of the war by ransacking McLean’s parlour for souvenirs of the historic meeting. “Something close to pandemonium set in,” wrote Civil War historian Shelby Foote. As McLean protested, the Union entourage walked out with the tables and chairs used by Lee and Grant, a stone inkstand, brass candlesticks and even the favourite rag doll of his 7-year-old daughter, Lula. They tore apart McLean’s cane-bottomed chairs and cut upholstery strips from his sofas as mementoes. As compensation, the soldiers shoved money into the hands of the unwilling seller and threw it onto the floor when he refused to accept it.

 

John Wilkes Booth

Despite his success as an actor on the national stage, John Wilkes Booth will forever be known as the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. Booth, a native of Maryland, was a fierce Confederate sympathizer during the Civil War. Before the fateful night at Ford’s Theatre, he had conspired to kidnap Lincoln and hide him until all Confederate prisoners were released. On April 14, 1865, Booth entered the theatre’s balcony, shot Lincoln at close range and immediately fled the scene. After a 12-day manhunt, Booth was tracked down and killed by Union soldiers.

The celebrated actor Junius Brutus Booth immigrated to the United States from England in the early 1820s and settled his family in Harford County, Maryland, where the ninth of his 10 children, John Wilkes, was born on May 10, 1838. In 1846, it was revealed that Junius Booth had neglected to divorce his first wife before eloping with his second, Mary Ann, 25 years before. The scandal made an impression on young John Wilkes, who was fiercely proud of his illustrious family name.

Did you know? Booth had performed for President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in November 1863.

After his father’s death in 1852, Booth left his studies at the prestigious military school St. Timothy’s Hall. In 1855, he followed his older brothers, Junius Jr. and Edwin, into the acting profession, making his debut in Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Charles Street Theatre in Baltimore. Booth worked for a year at a Philadelphia theatre before moving to the Marshall Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, where he became known for his dark good looks, his intensely physical, almost acrobatic, performances and his popularity with women.

In October 1859, Booth–who, like many Marylanders, supported slavery–was shocked and galvanized by the abolitionist John Brown’s bloody raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Booth briefly enlisted in the Richmond militia and witnessed Brown’s hanging in December. That summer, he signed on as the leading man in a touring theatre company. Booth was about to take on the part of Hamlet in October 1860 when he accidentally shot himself in the thigh with a co-star’s pistol. Abraham Lincoln was elected president one month later, and Booth watched the South move toward secession while recuperating in Philadelphia.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln declared martial law in Maryland as part of an effort to keep the state from seceding. Angry and frustrated, Booth nonetheless promised his mother he would never enlist in the Confederate Army. He continued his acting career, drawing crowds and impressing critics from St. Louis to Boston. In November 1863, he performed in The Marble Heart at Washington’s Ford’s Theatre. In the audience were President and Mrs. Lincoln. It was the only time Lincoln would see Booth perform.

In late May 1864, Booth invested in an oil company in western Pennsylvania. After seeing no immediate profit, he backed out of the operation, losing most of his savings. By that time, he had already begun working on his conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln. He performed less and less frequently, and by late 1864 had gone into debt. Booth attended Lincoln’s second inaugural in early March with his secret fiancée Lucy Hale, the daughter of an abolitionist New Hampshire senator. In what would be his last performance, Booth appeared in front of a full house at Ford’s in The Apostate on March 28, 1865.

Less than a week later, Confederate forces evacuated Richmond, and within two weeks, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his troops. As Washington exploded in celebration, Booth attended another Lincoln speech on April 11, reacting strongly to Lincoln’s suggestion that he would pursue voting rights for blacks. Booth angrily told his co-conspirator, Davy Herold: “Now, by God, I’ll put him through.” Three days later, at Ford’s Theatre, John Wilkes Booth made good on his word.