Back
before the giant shipyard, before the spider web of train tracks, the t reserve
ships and the open-air coal pier, there was a quiet, bucolic and very southern
place known as Newport News.
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| Gloomy scene on James River is all that's left of West farm after the war. From Harper's Weekly. From Marshall Rouse McClure. |
Especially
Newport News Point, the end of land where the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel
touches down. It’s hard to believe there was a plantation here and a pre-Civil
War lifestyle that might have been part of Gone with the Wind.
That’s
what is striking about After the Gunboats Landed, a newly republished memoir by
one of the last of the cast of characters that trod the stage of that bygone
era, George Benjamin West.
The
memoir, originally published as When the Yankees Came, was edited by the late Parke
Rouse Jr., a one-time columnist for the Daily Press and prolific writer on the
history of the Peninsula. It’s been re-published, along with numerous
illustrations, by Parke Press of Norfolk, owned by his daughter, Marshall Rouse
McClure.
West
grew up partly on the sprawling family farm at Newport News Point and partly in
Hampton. He wrote about the idle pleasures of boyhood, including coon hunting,
sailing and visiting with friends.
All
the while there were threats of war, but not enough to distract from daily
life. ”Though the times were threatening and the political clouds black and
gloomy . . . yet in our house all was joy, peace, and happiness, and we gave up
ourselves to the pleasure of the season,” he wrote. “Forgetting all things save
the present, we were entirely engrossed in the continual round of gaieties and
amusements of the neighborhood.”
This
would come to an abrupt end in the spring of 1861 when Virginia voted to secede
from the Union. West was then at the University of Virginia and almost couldn’t
get home because gunboats had already arrived on the James River.
There
followed a series of moves as the West family fled by horse cart to Williamsburg
and then to Richmond, where they witnessed the horrors of war.
“The
whole city was filled with the sick and the wounded,” he wrote, “every
available place a hospital, and a great many private homes with some loved one
or acquaintance. The hearses were busy all the day and did not take only one
body but as many as could be put in.”
They
fled again to Lynchburg and, then, as the war ended, returned to Newport News,
not realizing that much of the family property had been confiscated or sold. He
would spend years trying to get it back.
It
isn’teasy to work up much sympathy for West, who grew up in the lap of luxury
and scarcely did a lick of work, what with slaves always around to do his
bidding. It seems he was sickly and, probably like his father, a bit corpulent.
He did not join the Confederate army – except for a stint in local defense
forces around Richmond – but spent much of the war as a civilian supplying
uniforms and whatnot for the army.
He
held conventional southern views about slavery and a dislike for the “Yankees”
who invaded their land. It was galling to have to scrape out a living in
whatever way he could. A cousin allowed him to cut wood on his land, “and
borrowing a cart, I hauled it to Hampton and sold it to eat groceries. This was
the most humiliating business I ever did – to haul wood around town and sell it
to negroes.”
He was
forced to plow his own fields, and eventually put by enough money to buy back
some of the family land. Then more and more, and finally, when railroad magnate
Collis Huntington discovered Newport News Point, made a tidy sum selling it to
him – even though he hated doing business with this rich Yankee.
He
got into banking and left a permanent mark on the city, donating $10,000 in
1916 to create what became Riverside Hospital. At his death the following year
he left the bulk of his estate to pay for needy patients in its outpatient
clinic.
There
was not much left of the old Newport News, although, as Rouse wrote in an
epilogue, “something of the character of horse-and-buggy Virginia survived amid
the noise and traffic of the new age. . . .The ex-Confederate would have been
pleased at that.”
