Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community At War, 1861-1865

By Richard R. Duncan
Illustrations, maps, endnotes, bibliography, index, 380 pp., 2007. Louisiana State University Press, P.O. Box 25053, Baton Rouge, LA 70893, $40 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Michael Russert
Michael Russert, a member of the North Shore Round Table of Long Island and the Company of Military Historians, has a MALS plus 60 hours in American Studies. He is Coordinator of The New York State Veteran Oral History Program.

Review:
There are innumerable studies of the three Winchester battles along with in-depth coverage of the 1862 and 1864 Valley Campaigns. All readers of Civil War literature are also well aware of the fact that the Shenandoah Valley city of Winchester changed occupiers' hands at least 70 times. Winchester changed hands so often that the visiting British military observer, Lt. Col. Arthur Fremantle, referred to it as "a regular shuttlecock."

Beleaguered Winchester, however, is a masterful analysis of how these military struggles affected the social structure of the city's inhabitants between 1861 and 1865. As the author notes in his Preface, "Military movements and battles receive only a cursory coverage to provide context in this book." Thus, the primary focus of the text is on the Winchester community.

Winchester held a pivotal location as a military base for both the Union and the Confederacy. From there, Southern forces could deliver blows at the critical Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, West Virginia, Maryland or Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Union units could use it as a base to cut into one of the South's vital food sources or at the equally important Virginia Central Railroad.

Author Duncan compellingly traces the evolution of the political, social and economic forces that altered daily life in Winchester, from the raid of John Brown to the Reconstruction period. Between 1861 and 1865 the city's inhabitants experienced what Mark Grimsley termed the hard hand of war in his book of that title (1995).

What occurred in Winchester is a case study of the effects of continual military occupation on the members of a society. Little did the journalist who penned the following words in the April 19, 1861, issue of the Winchester Republican realize their prophetic nature for the Winchester community: "Civil War which may soon deluge the country in blood’Ķis upon us. The dogs of war have been let loose."

Professor Duncan's book certainly chronicles this through a wide use of firsthand accounts of those Southerners, Unionists and slaves who lived through this deluge in Winchester.

The author, through his judicious blend of primary sources along with a mastery of the most recent research on the topics covered, weaves an important contribution to Civil War history. Beleaguered Winchester is an excellent social history analyzing the disastrous effects of war on a civilian population, especially, in this case, upon the women and slaves.

Duncan relates the day-to-day hardships wrought by occupation of the regular military on this community, along with the bitter seeds sown by irregular forces.

This masterful study of the tragic consequences of war on a community is written in a fluid and readable style. Beleaguered Winchester is a book that should be read by a larger audience than just readers of Civil War history.