The Fortified Ring

On the morning of May 24, 1861, five weeks after Fort Sumter, Union forces crossed the Long Bridge and the Aqueduct Bridge from Washington and occupied Alexandria. By nightfall the mayor had surrendered; within a week Union engineers were laying out the earthworks that would grow into 4301 West Braddock Road Place 4301 West Braddock Road Earthwork fort raised in 1861 as part of the ring of Union fortifications around Washington; the fifth-largest of the Civil War defenses of the capital. After the war the fort's … and the sixty-seven other enclosed forts of the Defenses of Washington.

Alexandria would remain under federal occupation for the rest of the war. The city had been a slave-trading center ( 1315 Duke Street Place 1315 Duke Street Brick Federal-era house and compound at 1315 Duke Street, operated from 1828 to 1836 as the headquarters of Franklin & Armfield, the largest domestic slave-trading firm in the … ), a merchant port, and a southern county seat. It would now become a logistical hub: a Union rear area, a military hospital city, and, for thousands of people escaping slavery in northern Virginia, the first Union-held ground they could reach on foot ^[1] Source 1 NARA Civil War records Government record .

The outer line

The sixty-eight enclosed forts that came to ring Washington were connected by batteries, rifle trenches, and military roads. On the Virginia side the line began at Arlington and curved south and west through what is now Falls Church, Bailey’s Crossroads, and the high ground west of Alexandria. Fort Ward was among the larger of the Virginia works, its thirty-six gun positions commanding the Leesburg Turnpike. A short distance east, the hilltop campus of 3737 Seminary Road Place 3737 Seminary Road Episcopal theological seminary founded in Alexandria in 1823 and relocated to its present hilltop campus in 1827. Occupied by Union forces during the Civil War and used as a … — itself requisitioned by federal authorities as a hospital — served as a rear area for the forts on Seminary Hill ^[2] Source 2 HABS Alexandria survey Government record .

The forts never saw serious combat. Confederate forces never seriously contested the outer line of the Defenses of Washington after 1861. What the forts did instead was hold the ground — and that changed what was possible on the ground they held.

The people who came to the forts

Almost as soon as federal forces took up position around Alexandria, people escaping enslavement began arriving. Some came singly; others arrived in family groups; a few arrived driving wagons. Union authorities, after some hesitation, treated them as “contrabands of war” — not, in the formal federal framing, as free people, but also not as property to be returned to the farms they had fled. Camps sprang up at Shuter’s Hill, behind the fortifications, and around Fort Ward itself ^[1] Source 1 NARA Civil War records Government record .

The collective entity page for this community — Freedmen of the Contrabands Camp Family Freedmen of the Contrabands Camp founded 1861 Collective entity representing the several thousand formerly enslaved people who fled to Union-occupied Alexandria during the Civil War, settling in camps at Shuter's Hill, around … — exists because the story of occupied Alexandria is not legible without it. The same ground that held Union guns held, shortly afterwards, the first free settlements of many of the people who had built the plantations the guns had been trained on.

L’Ouverture

In February 1864 the Union Army opened 219 South Payne Street Place 219 South Payne Street Union Army hospital established in February 1864 for U.S. Colored Troops and Black civilian refugees in occupied Alexandria. Named for Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian … at South Payne and Prince streets, a purpose-built hospital for U.S. Colored Troops and Black civilian refugees. Named for Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian revolutionary, the hospital was one of the first federal medical facilities in the country explicitly dedicated to the care of Black patients.

The writer and abolitionist Harriet Jacobs Person Harriet Jacobs b. 1813 · d. 1897 Formerly enslaved author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) who, with her daughter Louisa, worked among formerly enslaved people living in and around Union-occupied … , whose Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl had been published three years earlier, was in Alexandria with her daughter Louisa during much of this period. They distributed clothing, opened schools for Black children, and reported conditions in the contraband camps and hospitals to the northern abolitionist press ^[3] Source 3 LOC Prints & Photographs Photograph . Jacobs’s dispatches from Alexandria are among the fullest contemporary accounts of Black life in the occupied city.

In December 1864 wounded soldiers at L’Ouverture signed a petition protesting the Army’s practice of burying Black dead in the segregated Freedmen’s Cemetery while white Union dead went into the new national cemetery at Wilkes Street. The petition was granted. Black soldiers who had died in the hospitals of Alexandria were reinterred in 1450 Wilkes Street Place 1450 Wilkes Street One of the original fourteen national cemeteries established in 1862, interring Union dead from the Civil War, including United States Colored Troops reinterred from L'Ouverture … in 1865 and 1866 ^[4] Source 4 Pippenger, Alexandria Death Records Book .

What the ring held

By the time the earthworks at Fort Ward were dismantled in 1865, the city that the Union had occupied in 1861 had become a different place. The forts had held their line; they had held, also, the space inside which thousands of people had, for the first time, become legally free. The community that formed on and around the old Fort Ward grounds after the war persisted into the twentieth century as an identifiable African American neighborhood — “The Fort” — before it was displaced in the 1960s by cemetery expansion and park development.

The fortified ring kept Washington safe. It did something larger, and less often remembered, for the people who walked into it from the countryside it enclosed.