Longwood University Alumni magazine, June 2005

"In the Eye of the Storm"

An Alumna's perspective on Culpeper County and the Civil War

By Kent Booty, Associate Editor

If Virginia Beard Morton has her way, the world will eventually know of Culpeper County’s pivotal role in the Civil War.

The Longwood alumna (‘66) has led virtually a one-woman crusade to publicize and promote the fact that the county was, as she says, “in the eye of the storm” from 1861 to 1865. She leads Civil War walking tours of downtown Culpeper and battlefield tours at nearby Cedar Mountain and Brandy Station, the largest cavalry battle in the Western Hemisphere. She tells Culpeper’s story to Civil War roundtables, book clubs, civic clubs and women’s clubs. Her speaking engagements this year will take her all the way from New Jersey to Florida.

She has told the story in print as well. She is the author of Marching Through Culpeper, a historical novel that she published in the summer of 2000. The 542-page hardback, now in its ninth printing, has sold 8,000 copies and earned her rave reviews, comparisons to Gone with the Wind and a legion of fans across the country, many of whom send her letters and e-mails.

“Culpeper County was the most marched across and camped upon locale in the Civil War,” says Morton, who has lived in Culpeper for 35 years. “There were more than 100 battles and skirmishes in Culpeper County. The action was constant.”

Even though the book is fiction, all but two of the military characters were real people, as was the woman on whom the book’s heroine, Constance Armstrong, was based. The book has been acclaimed for its meticulous research and attention to the War’s devastating toll on civilians.

“I wanted to tell about the valor and sacrifice of the civilians, especially the women,” says Morton, a former math teacher and interior designer with a lifelong interest in history. “That’s why I centered the book around the young ladies, so I could show both the military side and the civilian side of the War. The civilian population in Culpeper lost basically their entire food supply and also their fences. The county was ravaged. At least half of the people of Culpeper refugeed to the south. The town lost not only a lot of trees, which were cut down for heating fuel, but when the Army of the Potomac (the major Union army) headquartered in Culpeper in the winter of 1863-64, they also tore down bricks from churches and other buildings for their winter huts.

“Through Constance Armstrong, you see the ingenuity of the women and the romance. She’s based on the real-life Bessie Shackelford, whose family had a house on Main Street across from the Virginia House Hotel, which was a social center for soldiers in both armies. The house is still standing – the upper level is apartments and the lower level is shops. Bessie’s family also owned a large farm in the country, as did a lot of families.

“Modern women can identify with Constance, who has to roll with the punches and is ahead of her time. She’s a nurse for a while, and eventually she opens a bookstore in the front of her house. The women in the family are extraordinary, well-educated, and speak their minds on the public issues of the day. Her father, who’s a judge, raised her as the son he never had; she’s a good debater.”

Surprisingly, given the often divergent tastes of male and female readers in historical reading, Marching Through Culpeper has appealed to both men and women. “When I was writing the book, I knew women would enjoy it, but almost exactly half of my readers have been men,” she says. “Civil War buffs have applauded the inclusion of footnotes, a bibliography, maps and photographs.”

Morton’s readers range in age from 11 to 99, and the book has been sold in all 50 states and at least a half-dozen foreign countries. “The power of word-of-mouth recommendations has been amazing,” she says. Two groups were organized by her readers to promote the book: the Southern Literary Alliance, whose goals are to uphold traditional Southern values and to promote books that accurately depict the South, and The Fans of Marching Through Culpeper. J.E.B. Stuart IV, the great-grandson of the Confederate cavalry leader, and his grandson, J.E.B. Stuart VI, served as masters of ceremony at a celebration of 5,000 books sold in November 2002.

Three of the central military figures in Marching Through Culpeper were Culpeper natives: Captain Frank Stringfellow, one of Jeb Stuart’s most daring scouts; Major Robert Beckham, who commanded Stuart’s horse artillery from 1863 until February 1864; and General A.P. Hill, who commanded a corps in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. During the conflict Bessie Shackelford, the woman after whom Constance Armstrong was patterned, was courted by one of the Confederacy’s most dashing commanders, Major John Pelham. Called “the Gallant Pelham” and lauded by both Lee and Stonewall Jackson for his bravery, Pelham commanded Stuart’s horse artillery until March 1863. In Morton’s story, Robert Beckham begins courting Constance Armstrong before the War but confronts competition not only from Pelham but also from a fictional Union soldier, who recovers from battle wounds in the Armstrong home. Frank Stringfellow, Constance’s childhood friend, involves her in several of his hair-raising covert activities.

Culpeper’s strategic location between the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers and astride the vital Orange & Alexandria Railroad, a supply line for both armies, made it a natural point of invasion for the Union army en route to Richmond. One army or the other occupied the county for much of the War. The area around Brandy Station, about five miles northeast of the town of Culpeper, was fought over 12 times, including a June 9, 1863 battle that featured 17,000 cavalrymen and marked the first time that Federal cavalrymen were able to hold their own against their Confederate counterparts. Another battle in Culpeper County, Cedar Mountain, fought about five miles south of the county seat on Aug. 9, 1862, was the only time that Stonewall Jackson tried to draw his sword in battle (it was rusty and remained in its scabbard).

Reaction to the book, which is sold through Morton’s Web site (edgehillbooks.com) and at bookstores including Barnes & Noble, has been favorable from critics as well as readers. The book is “recommended for anyone who enjoys authentic wartime history blended with a compelling romance,” says a review in the magazine North & South. Clark B. Hall, a Civil War historian and writer, noted that the author “triumphed for a very simple reason: Virginia Morton did her homework,” and he called the book “rich, accurately rendered (and) beautifully written.”

“The entire project of writing the book took five years; I did two years of intense research before I even started writing it,” says Morton. “This is my quote-unquote retirement, my service to the community. I’ve done all the publicity and promotion myself. I’m trying to sell the rights to a larger publisher, and, along with my readers, I’m dreaming of a movie.” Civil War Interactive agrees with the movie potential: “This haunting masterpiece depicts the true South better than Gone with the Wind and provides rich material for a dynamite movie.”

She is passionate about historic preservation. “I try to protect battlefields and historic sites and to promote tourism, which is a clean industry. It’s within our grasp to do more. The enemy now is urban sprawl. The time to preserve is now – it’s now or never.” In June 2003 she started “Ghost Walks” in Culpeper, which recreated seven authentic scenes from her book, drew a crowd of 500 and netted $4,000 for the Brandy Station Foundation, on whose board of directors she serves. This April she held a similar fundraiser, “An Evening with A.P. Hill,” that raised $4,500 for the Friends of Cedar Mountain.

In February 2004 she served as the historian guide on the HistoryAmerica Tours’ first riverboat tour focusing on women, Petticoat Power. She was the only woman chosen to lead a HistoryAmerica tour solo. The week-long tour aboard the American Queen went round-trip from New Orleans to Vicksburg. She will be a guide on the same riverboat tour from Jan. 28-Feb. 3, 2006. From August through early November last year she had nine speaking engagements in four states, including Georgia and South Carolina, and during roughly the same period she led nine bus or walking tours. “All of these events have come about through word-of-mouth from people who have read the book, heard me speak, or taken one of my tours,” she says.

After graduating from Longwood, Morton taught math for four years, first at Manchester High School in Chesterfield County and then at Culpeper High School. The Richmond native moved to Culpeper in 1969 after her husband, a Farmville native she met as a Longwood student, took a job there.

Morton also is proud of how Culpeper residents fared during the Civil War despite their hardships. “Walt Whitman, who was a nurse and spent time in Culpeper during the War, said one woman was very well-educated and very high-spirited. Her clothes were faded and he felt sorry for her, but he said she maintained her high spirits. And they all did.”