Loudoun’s Loyalty

  Resolutions of Loudoun County

  Revolutionary Committees

  Soldiery

  Quaker Non-Participation

  Loudoun’s Revolutionary Hero

  Army Recommendations

  Court Orders and Reimbursements

  Close of the Struggle

WAR OF 1812

  The Compelling Cause

  State Archives at Leesburg

THE MASON-MCCARTY DUEL

HOME OF PRESIDENT MONROE

GENERAL LAFAYETTE’S VISIT

MEXICAN WAR

SECESSION AND CIVIL WAR

  Loudoun County in the Secession Movement

  Loudoun’s Participation in the War

  The Loudoun Rangers (Federal)

  Mosby’s Command in its Relationship to Loudoun County

  Mosby at Hamilton (Poem)

  Battle of Leesburg ("Ball’s Bluff”)

  Munford’s Fight at Leesburg

  Battle at Aldie

  Duffie at Middleburg

  The Sacking of Loudoun

  Home Life During the War

  Pierpont’s Pretentious Administration

  Emancipation

  Close of the War

RECONSTRUCTION

  After the Surrender

  Conduct of the Freedmen

CONCLUSION

Introduction.

I know not when I first planned this work, so inextricably is the idea interwoven with a fading recollection of my earliest aims and ambitions.  However, had I not been resolutely determined to conclude it at any cost—­mental, physical, or pecuniary—­the difficulties that I have experienced at every stage might have led to its early abandonment.

The greatest difficulty lay in procuring material which could not be supplied by individual research and investigation.  For this and other valid reasons that will follow it may safely be said that more than one-half the contents of this volume are in the strictest sense original, the remarks and detail, for the most part, being the products of my own personal observation and reflection.  Correspondence with individuals and the State and National authorities, though varied and extensive, elicited not a half dozen important facts.  I would charge no one with discourtesy in this particular, and mention the circumstance only because it will serve to emphasize what I shall presently say anent the scarcity of available material.

Likewise, a painstaking perusal of more than two hundred volumes yielded only meagre results, and in most of these illusory references I found not a single fact worth recording.  This comparatively prodigious number included gazeteers, encyclopedias, geographies, military histories, general histories, State and National reports, journals of legislative proceedings, biographies, genealogies, reminiscences, travels, romances—­in short, any and all books that I had thought calculated to shed even the faintest glimmer of light on the County’s history, topographical features, etc.