New Edition of Judge Daniel A. Grimsley’s Battles in Culpeper County, Virginia Is in Print
After months of intense effort led by Perry Cabot, the new edition of Judge Daniel A. Grimsley’s Battles in Culpeper County, Virginia was sent to the printer August 28, 2007. The first print run is expected to be delivered about September 15.
The new edition has been completely re-mastered and is being printed in a larger, more readable format than was available for previous editions. The first edition was compiled, edited and published in 1900 by Raleigh Travers Green and printed at the Exponent Printing Office in Culpeper. The book is a compilation of articles and memoirs of the war written by Judge Grimsley at various times before 1900. A facsimile offset print edition was published in 1976 in connection with Bicentennial events. Re-mastering for the new edition involved manually re-keying the entire text of the original 1900 volume to create a digitized electronic file. Frances Byrd Goddard and Peter Stetson assisted Perry Cabot in this detailed work by carefully proof-reading every character in comparison to the 1900 imprint. The result is an edition featuring a larger, more easily read typeface and page size. While preserving all of the original content, the new edition includes a new introductory essay and an expanded index. The new edition also includes detailed notes regarding errata and lacunae in the original..
Grimsley’s accounts convey the intensity and detail of a first-hand observer. Battles in Culpeper County, Virginia opens with a vivid description of the great Brandy Station battle ground where the cavalries of the armies of Northern Virginia and of the Potomac clashed and “thousands of horsemen met in the rude shock of conflict.” The tactical advantages of the landscape around Brandy Station and the devastating impact of warfare on the countryside were succinctly described by Judge Grimsley:
The country around the Station was admirably adapted to cavalry movements. It was a broad, open, undulating plain without forest or other serious obstruction to the movement of large bodies of troops, but sufficiently rolling to furnish select positions for use of artillery.
In the early part of the war the country was well fenced, occasionally by a hedge and ditch, which offered serious obstruction to the movement of cavalry, and was not unfrequently, both in charge and retreat, the occasion of serious mishap to the bold cavalier, being especially disastrous in retreat. However, the fences soon disappeared, and the hedge rows were leveled to the earth, and it became an ideal locality for cavalry.
Grimsley’s account of his regiment’s passage through the town of Culpeper during the Campaign of Second Manassas provides a poignant image of small comforts that enable a soldier to endure the hardships of battle. He describes himself in the third person as “the writer:”
He (the writer) was on picket duty the night before, at Rapidan Station, with a squadron of cavalry, and was ordered to join his regiment the next day at Brandy. This put his line of march through the town of Culpeper, and he entered it on the heels of the retreating enemy. When he had arrived on Main street, at the point opposite the store of Dr. Gorrell, he found that gentleman, in anticipation of the coming of the Confederates, had prepared a hug tub of lemonade to refresh the tired soldiers. Just think of it! Ice cold lemonade, with plenty of lemon in it to make it sour, and plenty of sugar to make it sweet, and ice to make it cold, to a tired, weary, dirty, dusty Confederate soldier, on a hot day in August. I think of it now, and, although it is winter time, I thirst for that lemonade today, and would enjoy so much a draught of it from a clean, shining tin cup. We thank him for it still. May he live long and prosper.”
The series of accounts written by Judge Grimsley ends with a description of Rosser’s Raid on Beverly. While not in Culpeper County, this action in the western mountains in January 1865 included many Culpeper men and it illustrates the desperate zeal with which they fought in the last days of the conflict. The surrender at Appomattox was only three months away. Duty sustained them even as hope was abandoned:
As we were descending the western slope of the Cheat Mountain, late in the afternoon, there appeared on the summit of the Laurel Ridge, a parallel range of mountains just in our front, a dark angry looking cloud, such a we sometimes see in the summer time, which hung on the summit of that range for a short time, when a wind arose and seemed to lift it bodily up, and hurled it against the Cheat, and it enveloped our column in its dark mantle. With it came the most vivid lightning, terrible peals of thunder, and terrific hail storm that I have ever before or have ever since encountered. Our horses refused to proceed. We could not force them against the storm; they would turn there from and huddle themselves together for protection. We seemed to be in the very midst of the clouds, and the lightning and the thunder were near us, at us, and all around us. As I recall this occasion now, it does not seem to me that more than five minutes elapsed from the cessation of the storm, before the cold had become more intense than I had ever felt it before or have ever felt since. Our overcoats and clothing, wet from the recent rain, became as hard as boards. The snow, saturated with water, became a solid mass of ice; when we reached the clearing at the foot of the mountain a little after dark. The men were almost frantic with their sufferings. We stopped there, for a time, to feed our horses, and as I recall it, we took the last ear of corn and mouthful of forage that the old farmer had for this purpose.
For researchers, a valuable aspect of the book is its extensive listing of both Confederate and Union dead buried in Culpeper County.
Daniel Amon Grimsley, the son of the Reverend Barnett Grimsley and Ruth U. Grimsley, was born April 3, 1840. At the age of 20 he enlisted in the Rappahannock cavalry, under the command of Captain John Shackleford Green, and was soon appointed orderly sergeant. Grimsley was elected lieutenant of the Rappahannock cavalry in 1862, subsequently attaining the rank of captain and then major of the Sixth Virginia Cavalry of which the Rappahannock unit was a part. Major Grimsley served actively from 1861 to the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865.
After the war Daniel Grimsley read law under H.G. Moffett of Rappahannock and was admitted to the practice of law at Culpeper in 1867. He served in the Virginia Senate from 1869 to 1879, and in 1880 he was appointed judge of the sixth judicial circuit by Governor Holliday to fill the vacancy created by the death of Judge Henry Shackleford. He served the incomplete term until 1882. He returned to private practice of law from 1882 to 1886, and he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates to represent Culpeper county in 1885. In 1886, Judge Grimsley was elected to a full term as judge of the sixth judicial circuit. He was subsequently reelected and was serving as circuit judge in 1900 when Battles in Culpeper County, Virginia was first published.
Raleigh Travers Green, the editor and publisher of Battles in Culpeper County, Virginia was a great uncle of Angus Green of Greenwood.
Copies of the Battles in Culpeper County, Virginia will be donated by SPCH to the Culpeper Library, local schools, and the Museum of Culpeper. Arrangements for sales of the book will be announced later. In addition to distribution of printed copies, SPCH plans to make the book available for download in electronic format from the Society’s website in the near future.