A Visit to Chatham

Two weeks after the Battle of Fredericksburg, a correspondent from the New York Tribune visited the former antebellum estate known as the "Lacy House." He provided a sobering account of the devastation inflicted on the manor, which was being used as a hospital for the wounded. (Wikipedia Commons)

The fine mansion has for weeks been employed as a hospital for Union soldiers - the grounds were utterly defaced and destroyed - the cellars and storehouses of the mansion were long since gutted and completely emptied -  he fences were long since converted into fuel to feed the watch-fires of  Union sentinels -  the rare and costly exotic trees and shrubs have long since contributed their scanty fiber to feed the same fires to warm the same soldiers, any one of whom would doubtless have been shot like a dog by the aristocratic proprietor or his overseer, at the earliest opportunity, had not there been too great an array of union bayonets in the immediate vicinity to render such a manslaughter experiment a safe one.

The house I speak of is known as the “Lacy House.” It stands on the left bank, the Falmouth side of the river, on the bluff that immediately overlooks the river for miles each way, where the town of Fredericksburg lies spread out immediately before it, only the narrow breadth of the muddy Rappahannock intervening. The house itself is spacious and convenient, its architectural pretensions being by no means contemptible, though built so many years ago.

The Lacey House, as it is now called, was once known as the “Chatham Place," and was a small part of the celebrated “Fitzhugh Estate,”  which was held by virtue of a grant from the English crown, dated in 1690. The bricks of which the house is built were brought from England and were laid by English Masons. The sight is most lovely, and before this ruthless war crushed out the landscape, all of beauty that was susceptible to destruction, the earth estate compromising the Lacy House was one of the most attractive, elegant, and lovely in all of Virginia.

After the battle of Fredericksburg, it became necessary to provide instant accommodations for our suffering troops period until the field hospitals were erected, every house within reach was instantly required for the use of the surgeons, who were ever working so nobly for the relief of our suffering soldiers. Under this order the Lacey house was taken, by the order of Doctor Watson, the chief medical director of Sumner's Grand Division, and converted at once into a large hospital.

The splendid furniture was put to strange uses - the sideboard of solid rosewood, made in those honest days before cabinet makers had learned the rogue's tricks of veneering, instead of being crowded with generous wines or with good spirits that had mellowed for years in the cellars, was now crowded in every shelf with forbidding looking bottles of black droughts; with packages of salt and senns, and with ill-omened piles of raking pills, perhaps not less destructive in their way than shot and shell of a more explosive sort. The butler's pantry and store rooms had their shelves and drawers and boxes filled, not with jellies and marmalades, and preserves, and boxes of lemons, and preserved ginger, and drums of figs, and all sorts of toothsome and satisfying to the palette - but every here scammony and gamboge, and alloes and Epson salts and other dire weapons, only wielded by the medical profession, had attained exclusive sway.

“Began my visits among the Camp Hospitals in the Army of the Potomac. Spend a good part of the day in a large brick mansion, on the banks of the Rappahannock, used as a Hospital since the battle - Seem to have received only the worst cases. Outdoors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &, a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each cover’d with its brown wollen blanket. In the door-yard, toward the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel-staves or broken board, stuck in the dirt...the large mansion is quite crowded, upstairs and down, everything impromptu, no system, all bad enough, but I have not doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, then men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody.”

— In late December 1862, the poet Walt Whitman made an unexpected visit to the Fredericksburg battlefield in search of his brother, George Whitman. During his time with the army, he provided assistance to many wounded soldiers at the Lacy House, helping by writing letters and offering support for their recovery. On December 21st, he wrote a description of the Lacy House in his notebook, which he kept during his travels throughout the war.

On many a retired shelf, and in many odd corners, too, I saw neglected cartridge boxes, cast-off belts, discarded caps, etcetera, which told not of the careless and heedless soldier, who had lost his accouterments, but of the dead soldier, who had gone to a land where it is to be hoped he will have no further use for minie rifle balls or pipe-clayed cross belts. I saw, too, with these other land-aside trappings, dozens and hundreds of many and other cartridges, never to be fired at an enemy by the hand that had placed them in the now discarded cartridge box.

The walls of the various rooms of the Lacy House, like those of most of the old houses in Virginia, are sealed up to the top with wood, which is painted white. There is a heavy cornice in each room; There are the huge old-fashioned fireplaces, the marble mantle over the same, and in the main dining room, where it was the custom for the men to remain after dinner and after the ladies had retired, was a curious feature to be observed, that I have never seen but once or twice. Over the marble mantle, but quite within reach, runs a mahogany framework intended for the reception of the toddy glasses after the various guests shall have finished the generous liquor therein contained.

There are still some vestiges of the family furniture remaining - some rosewood and the hog any side boards, tables, bedsteads etcetera which the family have not been able to remove, in which the occupying soldiers have found no use for. The most notable of these articles is a musical instrument which may be described as a compound harp-organ. It is, in fact, an upright harp, played by keys which strike the wires by a by a piano-forte action, which has an ordinary piano keyboard. This is, in fact, the earliest form of the modern piano-forte. Then, in the same instrument is an organ-bellows and pipes, the music from which it is evolved by means of a separate keyboard, the bellows is worked by a foot treadle, like that most detestable abomination known to modern as a melodeon. Thus, in the same instrument, the performer is supposed to get the powers and effect both of an upright piano and a small organ, it is, perhaps hardly necessary to say that this instrument, which doubtless originally cost at least $3,000, is now utterly useless, the wires, many of them being broken, and the whole machine being every way out of order. The maker’s name is set down as "Longman & Broderap, 26 Cheapside, No. 13 Maymarket, London” The poor old thing has doubtless been in the Lacy House for more than a 100 years. It has been rudely dragged from its former place of honor and now stands in the middle of the floor; the spot formerly occupied has been lately filled by a hospital bed on which a capital operation was performed. The spouting blood from the bleeding arteries of some poor patient has covered the wall with crimson marks. In fact, everywhere all over the house, every wall and floor is saturated with blood, and the whole house, from an elegant gentlemen's residence, seems to have been suddenly transformed into a butcher's shamble. The old clock has stopped; The child's rocking horses riding away in a disused balcony, the costly exotics in the garden are destroyed, or perhaps the hardiest are now used for horse post. All that was elegant is wretched; all that was noble is shabby; all that once told of civilized elegance now speaks of ruthless barbarism.