Burning of Winchester Medical College facts for kids
The Winchester Medical College (WMC) building, located at (modern address) 302 W. Boscawen Street, Winchester, Virginia, along with all its records, equipment, museum, and library, was burned on May 16, 1862, by Union troops occupying the city. The College never reopened.
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Winchester a secessionist stronghold
According to the Encyclopedia of Virginia, "during the [Civil] war and after, Winchester enjoyed a reputation as a secessionist stronghold." Support for Southern slavery was therefore also strong. As in other Southern cities, there were some who opposed slavery and supported the Union, but they kept their heads down and their mouths shut. In any visible way Winchester, including its politicians, professionals, and intellectuals, was pro-slavery. The Piedmont region of Virginia, including Frederick County, was where secessionist sentiment was strongest in the state. From the Union point of view, Winchester was "a hot bed of treason".
Winchester was the champion of everything the North was fighting against, or put more crudely, it defended, indeed celebrated chattel slavery. Other Southern cities did as well. But of the cities in northern Virginia, those the Union troops came into most contact with, it was the enemy and it was hostile.
Senator James M. Mason
The most important man in Winchester in the Antebellum period was three-term Virginia Senator James M. Mason (1798–1871), owner of the estate Selma, overlooking the city. Mason, who "spent his long career fighting against change," represented Virginia in Congress from 1837 until he was expelled in March of 1861 for supporting the Confederacy. Mason's commitment to slavery can be concluded from the fact that he wrote the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, arguably the most hated and openly evaded federal legislation in the nation's history. He was the Chair of the Senate Select Committee investigating John Brown's raid and wrote its report, informally known as "the Mason report". He was also the Confederacy's leading diplomat, having been chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1861 the Confederacy sent him to Europe in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain diplomatic recognition or financial help from England or France (see Trent Affair).
Mason, the politician most identified with the "old South", was not only a white supremacist—most white Southerners and many Northerners were—, he believed that negroes were "the great curse of the country". Giving Blacks the vote particularly offended him; it was, he thought, the rule of the mob and the "end of the republic." Mason did not consider it "expedient or wise...to educate the Negro race at all, bond or free," and thought that freeing the slaves "would end...in their relapsing into utter and brutal barbarism." He opposed the "colonization project"—sending free blacks to Africa—as he believed, and said publicly, that they were much better off as American slaves. In short, Mason believed bondage was the best place for blacks. "Mason had a paternalistic relationship with the few slaves whom he owned, and he made the mistake of assuming that kindness and generosity were the norm for Southern slave holders."
Mr. Mason's residence became an object of much curiosity, and as a guard was detailed from the Thirteenth to protect the premises, we had an opportunity of becoming distantly acquainted with his family. Their sentiments were of the rabid kind. They believed a dead Yankee was the best kind of a Yankee. We did our best, by good nature and politeness, to remove their impressions; but it was no go, as the gangrene of contempt had too deeply affected their minds to allow a change of heart.
Union troops in Winchester at first used Selma for regimental offices. The lower officers might not have known who Mason was, but they soon learned. In the first religious service after occupying Winchester, held in the square in front of the courthouse, Chaplain Noah Gaylord from the courthouse steps addressed "a large assemblage of citizens and soldiers[,] beside[s] our own regiment", and "preached a rattling sermon on the evils of secession":
I think he must have forgot it was the Sabbath when he spoke of Senator Mason. He called him a traitor and everything but what was good; he told his hearers that he had dragooned the people of Virginia into this rebellion, and it was such as he, and his kind, that had got the whole South drawn in.
Furthermore, the general in charge of the Union troops was Nathaniel Banks, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and Governor of Massachusetts, who sought the Republican 1860 vice presidential nomination, with Salmon Chase. Banks knew perfectly who Mason was and what he stood for.
Once the Union men using Selma learned that Northerners viewed Mason with "disdain and hatred", that they "reviled him", they proceeded to destroy his house, using pick-axes. The entire roof was removed, some time later the walls were pulled over, and anything burnable was chopped into firewood. They did their work so thoroughly that "from turret to foundation stone, not one stone remains upon another; the negro houses, the out-buildings [there was an ice house], the fences are all gone, and even the trees are many of them girdled". Stone from the foundation was used to build Star Fort, nearby. As Mason wrote later, it was "destroyed, or rather obliterated". Mason never lived in Winchester again. After his return to the U.S. in 1868—he was in exile in Canada—and living in Arlington, Virginia, he made a point of not hiring any negroes for household labor, going to some trouble to get whites for these positions.
Hugh and Hunter McGuire, father and son physicians
The second most influential man in Winchester was arguably Dr. Hugh Holmes McGuire (1801–1875), founder of the Winchester Medical College; he was certainly the most distinguished doctor in northern Virginia. "Although well advanced in years [he was 60], Dr. McGuire was with the cause so heartily that he accepted a commission as surgeon in the Confederate Army, and had charge of the hospitals at Greenwood and Lexington."
Even more a devotee of the Southern cause was his son Hunter Holmes McGuire (1835–1900), a graduate of and briefly professor of anatomy at the College. At the time of John Brown's execution he was studying medicine in Philadelphia, as many Southern students did. He was "acutely upset" that John Body's body would travel through Philadelphia, where according to an announcement it would be embalmed. (In fact Brown's body did not stop in Philadelphia, and it was embalmed in New York; to distract the crowd a sham coffin was taken off the train on which his widow was travelling.) He organized a movement through which three hundred medical students attending the University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson Medical College, including him, left Philadelphia en masse on December 21st, 1859, on a "very large" special train for Richmond, paid for by the Medical College of Virginia. They were received there with "great enthusiasm" by an "immense throng", and addressed by Governor Wise.
When the war arrived, he became medical director of the Confederate Army of the Shenandoah and the personal physician of Confederate Generals Stonewall Jackson and Jubal Early. "During the 1890s he headed a Confederate veterans association committee that analyzed history textbooks to make sure that the Southern viewpoint was presented fully and correctly." In 1907 he published in a book papers sponsored by the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans of Virginia, supporting the Lost Cause tenets that "slavery [was] not the cause of the war" and that "the North [was] the aggressor in bringing on the war". The book quickly sold out and required a second edition.
Richard Parker
Richard Parker, the judge who, in nearby Charles Town, sentenced John Brown to death, lived in Winchester.
Stonewall Confederate Cemetery
The Stonewall Confederate Cemetery contains monuments from every Confederate state, plus Kentucky and Maryland, plus monuments to the unknown Confederate dead. At the dedication of the latter in 1879, Winchester invited racist Alabama senator John T. Morgan, who complained in his address of the Union plan to end slavery, "in defiance of the Constitution".
There are Confederate cemeteries all over the South, but they are almost all local. There are places with the flags of every Confederate state, such as the Confederate Memorial of the Wind and Stone Mountain. But a cemetery with a stone marker for each Confederate state, with burials of soldiers from each state: there is no other in Virginia, and only two others elsewhere (Marietta Confederate Cemetery and McGavock Confederate Cemetery, in Georgia and Tennessee respectively).
The Winchester Medical College
The medical school in Winchester was the first in the state. The Medical College of the Valley of Virginia was incorporated December 30, 1825, by the Virginia General Assembly. It operated from 1826 to 1829. The location is not known, but it was not the same location as the Winchester Medical College, as Preservation Historic Winchester mistakenly suggests. A. Bentley Kinney offers what he calls an "educated guess": that it was "in a small brick office in the back yard of the McGuire home". the home survives and is still in use, at 103 North Braddock Street. Hugh Holmes McGuire was one of the three physicians on the staff. "It is also possible the early classes, which only had six or seven students, moved from the office of one faculty member to another, since they all lived within three blocks of each other, the article posits." The college closed after the senior physician, John Esten Cooke, left for Transylvania University.
McGuire, 20 years later, would restart the medical school as the Winchester Medical College, incorporated March 11, 1847. The state Legislature loaned it $5,000 (equivalent to $157,036 in 2022), and later accepted ownership of the college as repayment for the loan. The college built a red brick building at the northwest corner of Boscawen and Stewart streets, near Mason's and McGuire's homes. It had an operating amphitheater with a large dome for light (daylight), two lecture halls, a dissecting room on the third floor, and a chemical laboratory, as well as a museum-library and offices. It graduated 72 students before it closed in 1861, soon to become a hospital, when Virginia seceded and joined the Confederacy, at the beginning of the Civil War, and all the students enlisted. Hugh's son, Hunter Holmes McGuire, began his medical studies there.
Like other Southern medical schools, most bodies used in the dissection laboratory were Black.
For this reason, the College was both feared and hated by the Blacks of Winchester. "One Virginia student at the Winchester Medical College took evident satisfaction recounting the terror with which African-American inhabitants of the town regarded student doctors like himself, and boasted of his midnight raids on the graves of his black neighbors.
A cemetery discovered
In 1928, a barn was razed on the farm of "wealthy farmer and fruit grower" Edward W. Cather, presumably near Cather's Farm Market, on Route 50 west of Winchester. While excavations to build a house were underway, a cemetery was found underneath the foundation of the former barn. In it there were not bodies or skeletons but loose human bones, enough of them to assemble several skeletons. "It is generally accepted that the bones were those of bodies dissected many years ago by students of the old Winchester Medical College." There was no identification with the bones and WMC's records were burned along with its building, so there is no way of knowing if any of the bones were from one of Brown's Negro raiders. There is also no note on what was done with the bones after they were dug up in 1928.
What the Union soldiers found at the College
On March 11, 1862, the forces of then–Major Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson abandoned Winchester. When Union troops, under the command of General Nathaniel Banks, entered the city on the 12th, they found the Winchester Medical College empty. No lectures had been given "for a twelvemonth past", and in the summer of 1861 it had been used as a field hospital "by [Gen. Joseph E.] Johnston".
Union troops found two things in the medical college which horrified and angered them.
Burning the College
The Winchester Medical School was burned to the ground by Union soldiers under General Banks on May 16, 1862, just before retreating as Stonewall Jackson's army came down the Shenandoah toward the city. Soldiers prevented fire trucks from extinguishing the blaze.
As put by a former student:
Winchester, Va., Sept. 7, 1894.
James Monroe,
Dear Sir: — The postmaster asked me, as the oldest living graduate of the old Winchester Medical College, to answer your note. The college was burnt by General Banks' army in May, 1862. He himself regretted it, but his New England doctors and chaplains did it—applied the torch with their own hands. They proclaimed that theirs was a campaign of education. ...Only one of the professors now lives—Dr. Hunter McGuire, of Richmond.I am, sir, respectfully yours, D. B. Conrad.
