Audio
Jackson Death Site Audio Tour, #3, Fairfield Office
Transcript
Today, the office building is the only structure from the Fairfield Plantation that still stands. The building is a one-and-a-half-story, square, frame building clad in white weatherboard siding and with little ornamentation overall. Looking at this structure today, would you know that there was once a plantation here? During the early 1900s, the Richmond, Fredericksburg, & Potomac Railroad Company, led by a Confederate veteran, preserved the office building because of its association with Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Yet, many other important events took place here at Guinea Station during the Civil War.
When the Civil War began in 1861, the Chandler family chose to directly engage in the conflict. Thomas Chandler’s three oldest sons joined the Confederate army. Thomas, who was 63 years old at the time, remained at home with his wife and remaining children. He continued to operate the plantation, and he provided supplies to the Confederate army on a number of occasions. The war also impacted the enslaved people living at Fairfield. In May 1862, U.S. soldiers moving south from Fredericksburg briefly occupied Guinea Station. Even though these soldiers only remained at Guinea Station for a few days, eight enslaved people at Fairfield used their presence as an opportunity to run away and left Caroline County with the U.S. Army. Thomas Chandler later applied to the Confederate Congress, which reimbursed him for the loss of eight enslaved workers.
During the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Guinea Station became the northernmost supply depot for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, led by General Robert E. Lee. The Confederate Quartermaster Department transported thousands of pounds of supplies from Guinea Station to troops in the field, possibly utilizing the labor of enslaved men impressed by the Confederate Army. After the battle, a portion of Lee’s army, under command of General Thomas Jackson, camped at Guinea Station. Jackson set up his tent near the main house at Fairfield. His soldiers turned to whatever means of entertainment they could find as they waited for spring weather. In February 1863, General Jackson’s soldiers had a massive snowball fight. Despite these occasional moments of fun, however, most soldiers spent the winter exposed to the elements and suffering from supply shortages. Some soldiers deserted. Others died of disease in camp.
By the spring of 1863, the U.S. Army of the Potomac and Confederate Army of Northern Virginia fought once again, this time at Chancellorsville, roughly 30 miles northwest of Guinea Station. During the second day of the battle on May 2nd, 1863, Jackson’s army corps carried out an extensive flank attack, which caught the U.S. Army of the Potomac off guard. However, his attack failed to fully overrun the center of the Federal line and reconnect Jackson’s force with the remainder of the Confederate army under command of General Robert E. Lee. When nightfall brought the Confederate attack to an end, Jackson conducted a reconnaissance of the Federal position to determine whether he should renew the attack into the night. As Jackson and his staff rode out on horseback in front of the Confederate line in darkness, soldiers in the 18th North Carolina Regiment confused Jackson’s party for U.S. cavalry and fired on them. General Jackson was wounded in the left arm and in the right hand. One of Jackson’s aide’s, Keith Boswell, was killed by the same volley, and others were wounded or captured.
The surviving members of Jackson’s staff evacuated him to a field hospital near Wilderness Tavern. There, they met with Jackson’s doctor, Hunter McGuire, who examined Jackson’s wounds and determined that his left arm needed to be amputated. McGuire put Jackson under anesthesia and removed his left arm in the early morning hours of May 3rd. The following day on May 4th, Jackson traveled by wagon twenty-four miles to Guinea Station. Confederate surgeons hoped to transport Jackson by train to a more permanent hospital in Richmond. Earlier that day, however, the U.S. cavalry severed the RF&P. As a result, Jackson could not be moved until Confederates could repair the railroad. Under General Lee’s instructions, Jackson’s staff brought him to Fairfield and put him up in the office building. Members of the Chandler family as well as Jim Lewis, an enslaved man hired out to Jackson, prepared the building for his stay and helped make him comfortable.
On May 5th and 6th, Jackson continued to rest at Fairfield and seemed to be doing well. However, his condition worsened on May 7th. By then, the railroad was back in operation, but Jackson was too ill to move. Doctor McGuire diagnosed him with pneumonia. Desperate to find a solution, McGuire called in a pneumonia specialist, Doctor David Tucker, from Richmond. Mary Anna, Jackson’s wife, also traveled to Fairfield from Richmond to be with her husband. Mary Anna brought Julia, the Jacksons’ newborn baby, and Hetty, a woman the Jackson family enslaved, with her from Richmond. At about 3:15 p.m. on May 10th, 1863, Jackson died in the office building. News of his death quickly spread throughout the country. Mary Anna chose to have Jackson’s body buried in Lexington, Virginia. While Robert E. Lee’s army achieved victory at Chancellorsville, the battle came at an immense cost. Lee’s army suffered over 13,000 casualties, including General Jackson.
While Jackson was the most well-known Confederate soldier to come to Fairfield after the Battle of Chancellorsville, he was not the only one. In the aftermath of the battle, thousands of wounded soldiers crowded around the station waiting for transportation to hospitals in Richmond. Roughly six thousand U.S. soldiers captured at Chancellorsville also camped at the station until the Confederate Army could move them to prisons in Richmond. In December of 1863, the Chandlers sold Fairfield Plantation, but continued to live there until March of 1865. More chaos followed in May of 1864, when a cavalry skirmish took place at Guinea Station after the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. During the skirmish, the U.S. cavalry destroyed the railroad station. As U.S. General Ulysses Grant passed through the area after the skirmish, he stopped at Fairfield and talked with Mary Chandler.
The Civil War, which the Chandlers had wholeheartedly supported, drastically altered their lives. When the war ended in 1865, all three of Thomas Chandler’s sons who served in the Confederate Army returned home. The community of Guinea Station slowly recovered from the damage it had suffered during four years of war. For the roughly 10,000 people who had been enslaved in Caroline County, the 13th Amendment ensured that the freedom gained during the war would be permanent. Yet, decades of violence and strife awaited them. To assist formerly enslaved people in their transition from slavery to freedom, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, more commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Federal agents working for the Freedmen’s Bureau came to Caroline County in 1865. Bureau agents did not always protect and look after the interests of Black citizens. They often oversaw the creation of unfair labor contracts that kept formerly enslaved people tied to the same white landowners who enslaved them before the war. Thomas Chandler entered into a labor contract apprenticing four young boys to him until they reached the age of 21. While slavery had been officially abolished, contracts like these established coercive labor relationships that often resembled slavery.
In the postwar era, a new problem emerged as the country struggled to reunify. How would the conflict be remembered, and who would have a role in forging that memory? War brought influential figures such as Ulysses Grant and Thomas Jackson to Fairfield Plantation, launching the site into national prominence. The enslaved people who lived here utilized the war as an opportunity to seize their freedom. Despite the many significant events that took place here during the Civil War, over time public attention became fixed on a single moment—the death of Thomas Jackson.
The last stop on the tour is the stone marker, located along the edge of the parking lot.
Description
The Civil War comes to Guinea Station at the third stop on the Jackson Death Site Audio Tour. Fairfield Plantation, ideally situated near the railroad, was caught in the middle of moving armies during the war. While the death of Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was the most famous wartime incident that happened here, living near a key supply hub meant that no life would go untouched by the conflict. What did it mean for war to come to Guinea Station?
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NPS
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