Editor’s Note: There is some stuff going on all around us that is extremely interesting, and while tinged with some of the appurtenances of the old United States, seems like something altogether new. It will be fun to see it unfold, and naturally the entire editorial slate was summoned for critical theory indoctrination and the new revised oath with all the Footnotes. Given what is going on now I thought it might be worth a trip back down memory lane and look at where we came from as a nation. This tale is about a place that saw growth and contraction, family, war, life and death. It saw bright new life each year from its fertile soil. It is not far from Refuge Farm, and some say it is the oldest family business in the country. Eleven Generations of a Virginia family have operated it, with the usual occasional catastrophes of anything of long-standing. I hope that is true today. Seeing the place is worth the experience. And the perspective.

– Vic

Shirley Plantation

I left the undisclosed location with a couple hours to kill before I needed to be back in Washington. Today I resolved not stop at another of the battlefields of the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, but to try an earlier generation. The center of gravity of the Colonial world was down on the banks of the James River, and several of the great houses remain. I had seen the signs many times and today was the day. The top on the Mercedes was down for the first time, the breeze was gentle in March, and the temperature was climbing into the low seventies. Perfect for a road trip. I left the highway and began to slip back in time. The two-lane ran down toward the River, the original highway. Understand that and all the geography makes sense. They lived by water, we do not. They were connected to their world, and we are not.

I was startled to run into several interesting men and an astonishing line of women. Robert “King” Carter, Thomas Jefferson, R.E.Lee, “Little Mac” McClellan were major players in my afternoon, along with a couple hundred thousand angry men in blue and gray. Minor characters included the Marquis de Rochambeau, George Washington and “Light Horse Harry” Lee. But the pivotal characters in the drama are those who have softer voices, or no voices at all. The women of the Peninsula saved the plantation, saved it by grace and compassion and Christian love. And they bore an endless line of children, a bulwark against the endless stream of youngsters who faced a less than halfway chance of growing to adulthood. And the slaves who made it work. Hundreds of slaves, on whose backs this enterprise depended.

This small place was the center of the world for a couple centuries, at least the overseas English world, and certainly the fulcrum on which the seaboard English colonies balanced.

And that is the point. Virginia has three peninsulas that protrude into the lovely Chesapeake Bay. The water was the highway of the time, the ability of Englishmen to board a small sailing ship moored at The Pool in London and sail down the Thames, out the Channel, across the Atlantic, up the Chesapeake and into the broad placid rivers that feed it from the rich heartland. Take the Potomac and a good sized ship can navigate a hundred miles inland. Think of those bold seadogs and what they did. Sir Francis Drake raided the West Coast of North America, burned old Panama City to the foundations. Left a plaque at what would someday be San Francisco, and sailed home with Spanish Gold. The voyages of discovery had left England with vast claims on North America. The Portuguese and the Spanish were way ahead of the English, but the King was fixed on commerce and trade. That is the key element on why their Empire worked, and has left its legacy in our lives today, while the Spanish has blown away with the dust. It is a business model of an antique time. The export of Englishmen and Irish and Scots to run the business of Britain overseas. Just being expunged this week in the former Rhodesia. But a grand run of nearly a half millenium, and not done yet in the U.S. and Canada and Australia and New Zealand.

To that end he let Royal deeds on thousands of acres of the easiest land to access from the sea. Jamestown was founded in 1609, and became the center of the English world overseas. It was not based on gold, or the plunder of the indigenous peoples, at least not directly. What fueled the growth of America was the peculiarly addictive properties of tobacco. Dozens of strains of that plant existed in North America, of which our sole remaining example, the Virginia broad leaf is the mildest. Tobacco and river access are the roots of this tale. I have told both my boys as they attacked U.S. History in high school, if you remember tobacco and the relative value of labor you have got this thing knocked. That is all that it is about.

Though I must say that the doctrine of primogeniture plays a part here, and the value of labor in the form of slavery and the chattel status of women. But enough of that for now. The story tells itself, really. I am just a walk-on.

A few miles of winding road brought me to wide fields still barren from winter. The trees were showing buds, and the lawns were decorated with flags and patriotic memorials to the September attacks. It is six months to the day that it happened, and the concrete is being poured to complete the proud facade of the Pentagon.

I passed signs for Plantations. I don’t know why I picked the one that I did, some powerful hand drove mine under the gentle sun. “Shirley Plantation” was the one. I left Route 5 and rolled over a narrow, paved lane through broad fields. There were small homes tucked back from the road, modest places, but once this was all part of a vast holding. I followed the signs and left the pavement and crunched along over dirt and gravel, straight as a die. I wondered what I might find at the end of the road, and as chance and the fates had it I found exactly the right one.

I parked the convertible near a round brick building with a sign advertising it as the “Dove Cote.” It was ancient in a way that few things are in our country.

I walked in through the gate and bought my ticket in a building. The estate itself was comprised of a formal court surrounded by stately brick buildings. All lines were crisp and brought the eye to the Manor house, three stories tall and surmounted by a pineapple of welcome.

Of course this approach is all wrong, not the way it was designed to be viewed. Today we walk through the outbuildings to get to the big house. They designed this to be seen from the River. The big house is at the top of the bluff, and from the water it is an imposing structure of graceful Colonial proportions. The effect was to invite and impress the eye from the water, then focus it through the house onto the elegant Queen Anne Square behind it. There are the four remaining brick outbuildings, including a large two-story kitchen house, laundry house and two L-shaped barns. There were two other structures here, both of which featured the bedrooms for the throng of Carters and their guests. One burned down and only the root cellar remains. The other was dismantled, brick by brick, and relocated to a new estate just up the road. “We can’t go there” sniffed our guide. “They call it Upper Shirley, and it comes with a tennis court and a Lexus in the forecourt.” Apparently the vicissitudes of the years took their toll on the acreage and the appurtenances of Shirley. But there is still 800 acres and most of the original buildings.

The barns have their own history, more of which anon. One of them has the plantation ice cellar beneath it, a great arched brick vault. I imagine the ice would have been cut from the James River below, but it is almost unthinkable in this warmest of winters that the river would freeze thick enough to harvest. The river in those days was Main Street and I-95 all wrapped in one. People coming and going to the upper plantations, even on to the head of navigation at Richmond. Shirley Plantation beckoned proudly at the top of the bluff, a citadel of hospitality and it thronged with guests.

I wandered the grounds, thoroughly out of time. Digital camera in hand, cell phone in pocket, I looked at trees planted by the builders. At length a bell rings, summoning me to the back of the house. A dashing man, dark-haired and slim, is our guide. He has a melodious voice and a pale look. I would have called it consumptive in another generation, a look a bit like Edgar Allen Poe. He invites us into the house, cautioning us that the Carter’s still live upstairs on the second and third floors. We are to turn off our cell phones and be respectful.

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The guide finds a key and inserts it into an ancient wooden door. He notes the keyhole is upside down and we enter a dark paneled room. Above us is the famous square-rigged flying staircase that rises three stories with no visible means of support. It is built on great springs that connect to the structural walls. It is unlike anything in America. We get the guided tour of the main floor. No more than that, because the tenth and eleventh generations of the Carters still live here. The tenth generation is ten years off the tractor, he is 87. His son is 37 and working the fields. Imagine that, in today’s mobile America. Eleven generations on the same land!

This is, the guide informs us, the oldest continuous commercial enterprise in the land of the free, continuously operating here since the 1660s. An astonishing thing.

The place is original. The woodwork is hand carved and a little quirky. Family portraits abound of the original residents. This land was first platted in 1611, a grant of 8,000 acres to a man who named it after his wife, the Lady Shirley. He took sick in the islands while en route, and arrived to die here. Fifty years later the Hills arrived and built a small frame house and worked 4,000 of the acres. The Hills had but one son, and his portrait is central in the parlor. He is dressed as a miniature Roman noble, but his hand points toward a small dark horse and the home in the background has no roof. The boy was two years in his grave when it was painted three hundred years ago. The guide said the Louvre wanted the painting, but the Carters were having none of it. It belongs here.

The death of the male heir put the Hills in a quandary. The legal concept of primogeniture dictated that the property could only pass to a male heir, and the Hills had none. They would lose the plantation if they could not find a likely family with which to ally their daughter. This was high stakes, and the Hills were winners. Their daughter took a liking to one of Robert “King” Carter’s sons, John, and they married well. This was a striking match. King Carter was the royalty of this new land. At his peak he owned most of the Middle and Northern Necks of Virginia, 32 plantations, thousands of square miles and 800 slaves.

I have touched the weather stone of his crypt, my hand inches from his earthly dust. He is located outside his church which sleeps amid towering oaks on the Northern Neck, just up the lane that runs straight as plumb line to the plot where his primary residence once stood.

“King Carter was here?” I asked.

“King Carter was this place. He directed its building, the architecture. He had his place at Carter’s Grove just up the road. This is Carter, right to its soul.”

The whole forecourt is wrested from the Virginia soil. The wood is hand selected from trees on the property. The brick was fired on the site from the native clay. We walked through the paneled rooms and gazed at the portraits. The early ones, he explained, looked oddly similar. It was that way for a reason. During the winter the artist would paint torsos and then take the canvases on the road, from great house to great house. He would then contract to paint the face of the nobility on the partly finished works. That is why the heads looked out of proportion on some, and why they all looked so much alike. The artist could really only paint two sorts of face, a male one and a female one. Carters from more than one generation could be seen wearing the identical coats and dresses. These are the earliest known Polaroid pictures.

The Carters entertained the great ones of the day in this place. The Harrisons, the Byrds, assorted Lees, Washingtons and Tylers came here for hospitality. Mr. Jefferson came here and expressed his pleasure at the place, I imagine him particularly liking the arrangement for running water in the living room. The Carters put a 1,500 gallon tank up in the attic, and drained the lines through pipes, one of which was wound around the chimney flue. The fires burned around the clock here, and thus there was hot and cold- or at least hot and tepid running water. The question was how the 1,500 gallons got to the roof. There perhaps was an intricate pumping system. Or perhaps the slaves just carried it. There were thirty-two of them who served the personal quarters of the big house. They remain a palpable presence here, you strain to hear them, their voices, their sorrow, their laughter.

Our guide makes no pretense of airbrushing the slaves out of this picture today, but conspicuously absent is the slave village where the 300-odd Africans lived who worked this place, this particularly English place. After the Peculiar Institution was eradicated, the trappings of their bondage seem to have been removed with a vengeance. There are no black faces on these walls that were built on the strength of their backs.

The passing of the Colonial Age is documented in the formal dining room as we travel clockwise around the first floor. John Carter and his wife survived the building of Shirley by only several years. He died of the dropsy, or abdominal inflammation, their term for cirrhosis. She was taken by a fever, and the estate passed to the sole surviving male, a ten-year old named Hill Carter, after the forebears of the estate. He could not manage the place, clearly, and an uncle was found at the gaming tables of Paris to serve as regent of the place until Hill attained his majority.

The Uncle was a rake-hell and a dissolute. They say that the party at Shirley went on for a decade, until Hill Carter could claim his inheritance. Tobacco is a fierce plant that leeches the life from the earth. This is what drove the planters west as they exhausted the soil of the Peninsulas. A careful planter who expected to stay on his land carefully rotated his crop, allowing no more than a quarter of the land to be in tobacco at any time. The Uncle put it all in tobacco, every square foot. He burned the soil and he burned the resources of the place. When it was near the end of his time he even sold the lead from the mansard roof to the government to make bullets. When he left and Hill came into his patrimony, there was barren dirt in the fields and rainwater coursing down the inside of the great house. Hill was a man of rectitude and forced economy and he brought the plantation back to health.

Weddings were common, and few were for pure love. One Carter girl sought to escape her arranged marriage by exclaiming that the engagement ring was a fake, that its stone was not diamond but paste. To demonstrate the fraud she advanced to the window and scratched her soon-to-be married name on the window. The stone was real, and the name “Byrd” is still there. A tradition was born, and the next ten eight generations of Carter girls scrawled their names on the windowpanes. The latest of them is in 1995.

One of Hill’s daughters, Ann, married a dashing Virginia Cavalier named Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee in the parlor. He went on to become Governor of the Old Dominion and a celebrated hero of the Revolution. He built his magnificent estate at Stratford in the Northern Neck, still as lovely and symmetrical as the day the last brick was laid on its six chimneys. Harry’s young son Robert, later known simply as R.E. Lee, frequently traveled to his mother’s girlhood home and attended school in the rooms above the laundry.

Light Horse Harry was still a hero in the days of my father’s youth in New Jersey. When we visited there he regaled us with the tale of his leap on horseback of a cliff to escape the British. Unfortunately, Harry was as bad a businessman as he was a heroic horseman and he lost his house and his fortune. The fireplace in young Roberts room has an iron back-plate that can only be seen by leaning under the mantel. It is ornamented by a pair of cherubs. Robert looked in to say goodbye to them on his departure from the plantation. I showed them to my own boys when they were young enough to look up at them without stooping. Robert re-located to Alexandria with his Father, but he returned to the Middle Neck in a dramatic way.

Shirley played a role in the Revolution, serving as a supply center for the Continental Army and a spy post for Lafayette’s rebel army encamped at Malvern Hill just up the road. The British were still at Hopewell on the James River, eventually pulling back to the lines at Yorktown. It was there that the world turned upside down, and the British marched out in surrender, hats reversed, past the upstart Washington and his French allies. There was no place more central to the beginning of this democracy than the Middle Neck.

The swirl of American history was moving west, but the Carters remained productive at Shirley. When R.E.Lee declined President Lincoln’s offer of command of the Union Amy he rode to Richmond and joined the Confederacy. He had a series of tough jobs, losing western Virginia to the Union and then directing the construction of the defenses of the capital. He became known as the King of Spades, a term that grated on him. Six Carter sons joined him in the Confederate service, and five of them would survive the bitter years. The sixth, whose picture is in the front bedroom was killed at Chancellorsville to the North, where Lee did the unthinkable and divided his forces in the face of the enemy. The women were left to manage the affairs of the plantation. Two major campaigns roared up the Middle Peninsula, one early and one late in the war.

The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was called Operation ANACONDA, after the snake the crushes and suffocates its prey. But this is a quotation. The Union strategy in the Civil War used the same name, and the Anaconda Plan used the Navy was used to blockade the ports and rivers of the Confederacy and starve them into submission. Smugglers ran the blockade up the James, and ominous black riverine gunboats pursued them. In 1862, General McClellan brought his Army of the Potomac to the Peninsula by sea and drove to the northwest in an attempt to capture Richmond.

Joe Johnston had been wounded badly at the battle of Fair Oaks and Jefferson Davis needed a new commander for the Army of Northern Virginia. He selected Lee, who took command on June 1, 1862 to defend the county of his birth. He immediately took the fight to the enemy. The Army of the Potomac had over 100,000 men in the field and Lee brought 65,000 against them. Lee hit McClellan’s exposed flank north of the Chickahominy River and rolled iut up. Then followed the Seven Days, a series of savage engagements that broke Little Mac’s army, forcing it back to the James. Down the Peninsula the chaos came: Mechanicsville, Gaine’s Mill, Savage’s Station, Frayser’s Farm. The ultimate battle was at Malvern Hill, where the surging Confederates were mowed down by the union guns parked hub-to-hub at the top of the ridge. The day long encounter sapped the will of the Confederates to pursue, and McClellan had time for an orderly withdrawal to the cover of the Navy’s guns on the River. Shirley was one of the places he went on the way to his evacuation port at Harrison’s Landing.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the Mistress of a Great House. Your men are gone, lost in the grim sound of the guns that rattle your windows. You are supported by your daughters and sister kin. The enemy has heard of your brick barns and your wharf. They need a place for hospitals for their wounded. They swarm down upon you, thousands of them, occupying your property, usurping your house as a military headquarters. They are hurt and they are hungry and they are angry at their loss. What the mistress of Shirley did was mobilize her ladies to do their Christian duty. They served as nurses to the Union wounded, the men who would slaughter their men in the field. They ministered to the dying and helped carry the severed limbs of the butchers who called themselves surgeons to the pits. They wrote to the mothers and loved ones back North. They prayed and carried water and did the best that they could to give the last the last hours of the dying some dignity.

McClellan thanked the Carters for their service. Most of the great houses along the River were razed or shelled by the Navy in righteous frustration. McClellan placed Shirley under his protection, and directed that flags be crossed in front of the Great House as a warning to the Navy gunners. Shirley was saved, and his protection lingered through the last great campaign at Petersburg late in the war. It is the only plantation that exists as it did, laid down in 1722 and completed in 1738. The charity of the mistress of Shirley saved it. It is a national treasure.

The South was prostrate after the war, and it seems as though history wrapped it in cotton wool and put it away. The River was no longer so important. Power now rested in Washington, not the states, and the frontier drew the adventurous ever westward. Life continued here with the rhythm of the seasons, the crops were planted, hard times endured. But this was no longer the center of anything. It was just a place on the river.

The tour was over, history was ended for today. Our guide bade us farewell from the back porch. I looked at the dirt road that led straight from the door through the forecourt, through the gate framed in pineapple. It lit the graceful trees, and pointed as an arrow to City Point, once known as the Hopewell Plantation. In the fall, they have a re-enactment of the plantation in the awful days of the Union occupation, when the groans of the dying filled the barns and the rattle of muskets and the roar of the guns shook the earth.

When I come back, I am going to take that road, and see why the Carters cut it in the land.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra
www.vicsoctra.com