civil war – U.S. Highway 50

Southern Maryland — Harriet Tubman

Today’s Route 50 crosses the DelMarVa Peninsula (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia). This includes a part of Maryland that was quite familiar to Harriet Tubman, one of the most remarkable women in American history.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery near Cambridge, Maryland in 1822, but in 1849 she freed herself by escaping to Philadelphia. Shortly after, an advertisement offering $100 for her return was placed in a Cambridge newspaper. We know this because copies of the ad still exist today.

She returned to Maryland frequently, but not as an enslaved person. Instead, on thirteen separate occasions she led members of her family and other enslaved people to freedom. She took her charges through the night in secret, using the resources of the Underground Railroad. She preferred to take those dangerous trips in the winter, when nights were longer and concealment easier. She often began them on Friday evenings, knowing the local newspapers wouldn’t report the escape until Monday. Her identity as the person leading these escapes was not known at the time, but as stories of her successes circulated she became known as “Moses,” for leading her people to freedom.

Her summary of that time: “I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

During the Civil War, Tubman worked for the U.S. Army in various capacities, including as the leader of scouting patrols in the Confederate state of South Carolina. On one memorable occasion, she became the first woman to lead an armed assault in the Civil War, guiding troops on an expedition to the Combahee Ferry. That raid freed more than seven hundred enslaved men, women, and children.

But after the war, she struggled to receive a pension such as those awarded to male soldiers, and her activism, including in the campaign for women’s suffrage, kept her impoverished. Supporters had to raise money to help her.

Harriet Tubman died in 1913, at a home for aging African-Americans in Auburn, New York. Years before, she had helped to found that home.

In the photo below, Route 50 crosses southern Maryland between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay. This section of the highway is dedicated to Harriet Tubman.

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The photo of Harriet Tubman at the top of this page is in the public domain. The photo of Route 50 was taken by the author.

Winchester, Virginia — The Civil War

On June 21, 1863, near what is now a prosaic Route 50 intersection east of Winchester, Virginia (shown above), Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart skirmished with Union forces.

He prevailed in that minor battle, and his success gave him the freedom to move north across the Potomac River to Gettysburg, where he joined General Robert E. Lee.

Confederate and Union armies met at Gettysburg from July 1 to July 3, 1863, and the Confederate forces were defeated. Many regard that defeat as the turning point in the Civil War.

The site of a minor, yet important, Civil War skirmish

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Photos by the author.

Romney, West Virginia

Route 50 passes through the middle of Romney, a town of approximately 1,800 people in the eastern part of West Virginia. It is the oldest town in West Virginia (1762).

Romney is the county seat of Hampshire County, and both Romney and Hampshire County have had a difficult history with wars. In 1928, local citizens erected a statue in front of the Hampshire County courthouse in Romney to honor those killed in “the World War.”

The inscription on the base of the statue is a quote from the second stanza of the poem, “In Flanders Fields,” by John McCrae. He wrote it after the death of a friend in a World War I battle, while he sat in the back of an ambulance at Ypres, Belgium. Here it is:

We are the dead.
Short days ago we lived,
Felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved.

There are 27 names.

During the time of the American Civil War, Hampshire County voted in favor of the Confederacy. That didn’t settle the matter for Romney, which was on the preferred route for armies traveling north and south through the surrounding mountainous territory. The result? According to a historical marker in Romney, Union and Confederate forces swapped control of the town 56 times.

Today, Romney is fighting a battle of a different kind:

This is a spotted lanternfly, a species native to China, India, and Vietnam, where it is kept in check by natural predators. It arrived in the U.S. in eastern Pennsylvania, where it was first recorded in 2014. Finding no inhibiting predators, within five years it spread to 14 counties in Pennsylvania, and onward into the nearby states. It can badly damage trees and agricultural products. Romney and West Virginia are on the alert.

In more positive agricultural news, Romney hosts the West Virginia Peach Festival in late summer.

Should you attend, and if you are very fortunate, DoodleBugs Desserts will be there. That means you will be able to sample their Peach Foldovers — delicious! And an excellent way to remember Romney as you continue on Route 50.

Unkind folks have said that Hampshire County is named after a pig, specifically the Hampshire Hog. The connection is tenuous, however, since the breed was not officially recognized as “Hampshires” until 1907. It’s more likely the county was simply named after County Hampshire, in England. Still it could be considered an honor to be named after hogs that have been described as “exhibiting good carcass quality when used as meat animals.”

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The Hampshire Hog photo is from Wikimedia Commons.

All other photos by the author.

Route 50 in Missouri

It’s 272 miles on Route 50 between Missouri’s two major metropolitan centers, St. Louis and Kansas City. In the middle of the state, Route 50 passes through the state capitol, Jefferson City, where some fractious history took place.

In 1820 Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, in tandem with Maine, a free state. This was the “Missouri Compromise,” which sought to keep a balance between slave and free states in the U.S. Congress. The compromise satisfied few, and by 1861 Missouri was claimed not only by the government of the United States, but also by the Confederate States of America, which was made up of states that had seceded from the union.

The start of the Civil War increased the urgency of both claims, and Missouri, unclear itself on what it should do, sent delegations to the congresses of both the Union and the Confederacy.

Meanwhile, there were weapons and other military supplies stored in St. Louis, at the St. Louis Arsenal. An organization of Confederate sympathizers, called the St. Louis Minute Men, coveted the weapons. A similar group of Union sympathizers, called the Wide Awakes, opposed the Minute Men. The legal and political wrangling over the arsenal included a variety of insults, such as “wicked minions” and “unconstitutional edicts of the military despotism.” Eventually, the Union sympathizers prevailed in St. Louis, but 125 miles away, Confederate supporters controlled the state capitol in Jefferson City.

The Wide Awakes were inducted into the Union army, joining troops led by Nathaniel Lyon, a fiery pro-Union officer. Lyon marched his troops on Jefferson City, forcing the Confederacy-aligned Missouri government to flee first to Boonville and then to Neosho, both towns in Missouri. In Neosho, the government passed an ordinance of secession, proclaiming that Missouri had joined the Confederacy. At the time, the legitimacy of this attempted departure from the Union was called into question (as it still is today by historians) due to a most prosaic question: Did the secessionist government in Neosho have a quorum?

Meanwhile, supported by Nathaniel Lyon’s troops, a provisional government favoring the Union took power in Jefferson City, giving Missouri two dueling governments. Ultimately, the Confederacy proved unable to control the state, and the secessionist government was driven into exile. It “governed” from Arkansas and then from Marshall, Texas, until the end of the war.

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Was Nathanial Lyon really “fiery,” as I asserted above? Let him speak for himself, as he did to the Confederate state officials in Jefferson City:

“Rather than concede to the State of Missouri the right to demand that my government shall not enlist troops within her limits, or bring troops into the State whenever it pleases, or move troops at its own will into, out of, or through the State; rather than concede to the State of Missouri for one single instant the right to dictate to my government in any matter, however unimportant, I would [pointing at the state officials] see you, and you, and you, and you and every man, woman and child in the State, dead and buried. This means war. In an hour one of my officers will call for you and conduct you out of my lines.”

— Nathaniel Lyon to the governor of Missouri and his staff

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The map of Missouri is from Google Maps.