Among the many first cousins of my great-great-grandfather, Fielder Montgomery Magruder, were the star-crossed sons of William Washington Magruder (1773-before 1822) and his wife Mary Elizabeth Hilleary (1780-1857). Alfred was murdered in 1840 by Mary Elizabeth’s cousin, Clement T. Hilleary, during a night of heavy drinking. Haswell (II) (1807-1869) and his wife, Adeline Elizabeth Boyd (1816-1864), spent most of their married life grieving, as four of their eight children died, one by one.
As the war began, their lives seemed quiet. Haswell, with one daughter married and settled, was still farming in Prince George’s County, as were two of his brothers. Another brother, Fielder (who in my mind will always be “the other Fielder”) had long been settled in Washington, where he owned a wood and coal business.
Within a few months, however, both Haswell and Fielder would make choices that could have cost their lives—both, perhaps, because the war was new and still felt more like adventure than real danger. Haswell would be arrested for treason, barely escape execution, and spend the war at Fort McHenry as a political prisoner. (Stay tuned for his story in another post.) Fielder’s motives are harder to parse but his luck would prove far better.
1862: One of the Few
Among Washington City slaveholders in 1862, Fielder Magruder (1798-1874) was a bit of a throwback. Only a thousand or so slaveholders remained, most of them wealthy, many holding onto human property more as a status symbol than a necessity. About 3,000 Washingtonians remained enslaved, their number dwarfed by the free black population with whom they mingled and intermarried. Fielder was holding six of them, not as pastry chefs or finely-dressed carriage drivers but as workers in his home and business.
Under terms of the Washington, D.C., Compensated Emancipation Act of April 1862, he lost ownership of those people and sovereignty over their lives but gained the right to petition for compensation. On 13 May 1862 he went to the courthouse and filed for the loss of George York (47), Duke Williams (40), Adeline Williams (35), and three Williams children, Lewis (8), Charles (6), and Maria (3). Witnesses were his business partner, Woodford Stone, and his only son, Samuel Cornelius Magruder.
One of the things that makes the DC compensation petitions such a valuable resource is that, among other requirements, petitioners had to describe how they came into possession of the people they were claiming. Atypically for Magruders, none of the six people for whom Fielder petitioned had come to him through his family. George York was purchased in 1858 from John Schooler and the Williams family (excepting baby Maria) in 1856 from John A. Throckmorton.
Fielder’s business took him across the Potomac to Fairfax, Virginia, where an 1860 slave schedule in his name recorded the same six people plus a seventh, a man about the same age as George York. Fielder’s petition states that York had been in the District since June 1861, while the Williams family, at the time of emancipation, had been at his farm in Fairfax County where he had sent them to “attend to domestic business intending to bring them back again.”
His petition was accepted and on July 18th George York, Duke and Adeline Williams, and the children received their certificates of freedom.[3]
As required by the petition, Fielder also attested that he bore “true and faithful allegiance to the United States” and was a resident of the District of Columbia. As I would soon learn, that was not always what he claimed.
1861: Just a Little Trip Across the River
If there is one indispensable source for researching events in the Civil War, it has to be the massive trove of documents fondly known as “the OR”—that is, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, published in 128 volumes from 1880 to 1901 and now available online. As the title specifies, it includes not just official records of the Union but Confederate records the U.S. government had managed to find and organize.
Researching our family in its pages requires hours (days, more like it) of searching and scrolling, including of course a name search for Magruder. There are hundreds of hits on General John Bankhead Magruder and a few for other Confederate officers. On the Union side two standouts are surgeon David Lynn Magruder of Maryland and Colonel James A. Magruder, a Georgetown resident who served in the 15th New York Engineers. Appearing for both sides is Captain William Thomas Magruder, a first cousin of all the brothers and cousins mentioned in this post.
The only civilian I expected to find in the OR was Fielder Montgomery Magruder’s brother, Thomas Jefferson Magruder, a shoe merchant in D.C. arrested in 1861 as a Confederate spy. But lo and behold, there was “the other Fielder,” trying to talk his way out of trouble—not with the Yanks but with the Rebs.
The pickle he got into is a fine example of the cavalier attitude toward secession that prevailed in the early months of 1861, when both armies were maneuvering in Northern Virginia but the Battle of Bull Run had not yet made the war seem real. Accustomed to moving freely between Washington and Virginia on business, it appears that Fielder had not yet learned that authorities took the new border seriously.
Here is his story, found among records of political arrests by the Confederacy in Northern Virginia. I will break up the long block of text for readability.
According to the memorandum, Fielder Magruder stated that:
Twelve years ago he purchased land in Virginia on Occoquan Bay. Three years ago he started a steam saw-mill on this land and fixed his own residence there, going up to Washington every three or four weeks on Saturday night and returning on Monday. His wife and his son reside in Washington. His son keeps a wood yard there. Prisoner considers himself now a citizen of Virginia…
Says he went to Washington a day or two after Alexandria was taken. [The Union occupied Alexandria on 24 May 1861, the day after Virginia voted to secede.] The Federal provost-marshal gave him a general pass to go up and return at pleasure. Went up to Washington once or twice after Alexandria was taken and before his last trip. Prisoner says he was taken sick at his residence at Occoquan… He went to Washington, where he was sick three weeks…
He says he found the state of things in Washington so much worse and distasteful to him…that he did not apply for a passport, but determined to make his escape. He applied to several longboatmen to bring him down, but they told him they had been required to give bond and security…not to touch on the Virginia shore and would not take him. He purchased a skiff and in the night went down the river on the Maryland side until after [he and his companion] passed Alexandria, when they went over to the Virginia side.
On the Monday after his return he went to the picket at Mrs. Wiley’s and reported himself and was permitted to return home. Subsequently he was arrested with others, taken to Dumfrees where he lay several weeks in jail and thence was sent here.
Had I been the one to take this statement I wouldn’t have swallowed more than half of it. Was he really a business owner bumbling around in a war zone, as clueless as he sounded? Or was he a spy? Take another look at Fielder’s year of birth–he was sixty-three years old.
Luckily for Fielder, the unnamed commissioner in Richmond who summarized his case had known him in Washington before he built his steam-mill in Virginia and knew him to be a slave owner, which counted in his favor. His report concludes: “His general character for veracity was good. He was considered an honest man. I was satisfied from his general character and from conversation with him he was a Southern man in his political feelings and opinions. I recommend his discharge on taking the oath of allegiance.”
The memorandum is undated but Fielder’s own timeline and other internal references place these events between mid-summer 1861 and January 1862, the last date in the collection of memoranda in which Fielder’s case appears. And yet, the Battle at Manassas Junction is not mentioned. If, after that bloody day, Fielder expected Confederate officials to tolerate an gray-headed businessman flitting across their lines for no good reason…well, he was lucky to get off with just a few weeks in jail.
By the following spring—presumably having taken the oath of allegiance to the Confederate States of America—he was once again using the pass furnished to him by the Provost Marshall of Washington, coming and going between Washington and his Fairfax farm in the occupied zone, and comfortable moving the Williams family back and forth, as well.
So Which Was It?
In the absence of evidence for powerful secessionist motives it is hard to imagine why Fielder would abandon his wife, son, and business in Washington, as well as the privilege of free movement across the Potomac, simply for the satisfaction of living in Confederate Virginia. It is not hard to imagine that he would say whatever he needed to say to get out of jail in Richmond or that the commissioner there, his friend or acquaintance, was willing to spin that threadbare story in his favor and send him home.
Nor, taking these documents together, is it hard to imagine that he would say whatever he needed to say to get compensation for the six enslaved people who had been working for him on both sides of the river. If he ever returned to the Confederate zone no trace survives of that now.
So there you have it: Fielder Magruder, a resident of Virginia loyal to the Confederacy, and “the other Fielder Magruder,” a resident of Washington and loyal to the United States.
One curious thing about Fielder is that he is not mentioned in his father’s will. There can be many reasons for that but I wonder if his 1826 marriage to Elizabeth Carroll (1807-1870) at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Washington had estranged him from his parents, especially if Fielder then converted. Are you a descendant of this family? Can you shed any light?
Also, while Fielder was doing whatever he did, his son–twenty-five-year-old Samuel Cornelius Magruder (1836-1878)—was mustering out after a three-month commission as First Lieutenant of the Putnam Rifles, serving as Company A, Fifth Battalion, District of Columbia Infantry. Unlike most in a local militia, he had served in a campaign beyond the District Line, marching north in June on what came to be known as the Rockville Expedition, charged with (among other things) guarding fords on the upper Potomac. He did not re-einlist–maybe because his father needed looking after. Samuel Magruder was a vehement Unionist.
Sources
District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Petitions, Petition of Fielder Magruder, 13 May 1862, Civil War Washington, https://civilwardc.org/texts/petitions/cww.00190.html.
1860 Slave Schedule, Fairfax, VA, South Orange & Alexandria Railroad, Fielder Magruder, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/91029836:7668?tid=&pid=&queryId=d75a9fd9-9c74-4eda-a9db-d894470ef32f&_phsrc=Gzo2451&_phstart=successSource.
OR, Series 115, Prisoners of War, Etc., Suspected and Disloyal Persons, Memoranda of various political arrests—from reports of Confederate commissioners, Fielding Magruder, 1445-1446, (https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records/115/1445.
Magruder's Landing 