From John Hennessy:
On Sunday October 27, 2013, the Central Rappahannock Heritage Center and Historic Fredericksburg Foundation will debut a new and important book of letters relating to Civil War Fredericksburg: The Circle Unbroken: The Civil War Letters of the Knox Family of Fredericksburg. What makes this book launch even cooler is that it will take place in the Knoxes former home, now the Kenmore Inn. You can buy the book, of course (and Jane Beale’s diary too), but you can also stroll the house that for more than five decades served as the home for a family that sent six sons to serve in the Confederate army. To those of you consumptively inclined, the launch includes a FREE, well-victualized reception, with wine. It runs from 3-5 p.m. The Kenmore Inn is at 1200 Princess Anne Street in Fredericksburg, 22401. And did I say it’s free? For more on the launch, click on the Knox launch flyer.
The publication of the Knox letters is something of a community effort. The letters were donated by the family to the Central Rappahannock Heritage Center several years ago, whose incredibly dedicated group of volunteers spent about two years transcribing and researching their contents. (If you haven’t used the Heritage Center, you should (its collections are fabulous). And if you don’t support them, you should do that too, whether you use them or not. It’s a first-class organization that by all appearances puts every dime it gets to good use.) The publication committee of the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation arranged for their publication. The two groups have collaborated with the Kenmore Inn (which is providing immense support) on the Sunday launch of the book. Members of the Knox family will be there. We hope you will come.
This is likely the best, most complete collection of family papers related to Fredericksburg I have seen. I wrote the following for the introduction to the book–it gives you a good sense of the letters:
The Knox house in the late 19th century. That’s diarist Jane Beale’s house to the left. Between Knox, Beale, and the Alsops across the street (all of them kept extensive papers or diaries), this has to be the best-documented Civil War neighborhood in Virginia. Courtesy Historic Fredericksburg Foundation and its executive director, Sean Maroney.
The Knox family would be unremarkable except for one thing: they left behind a trove of letters between them that chronicles a family and a community in dire crisis. These are more than just the letters of a Southern family in Fredericksburg during the Civil War; they are also the letters of a nascent, hopeful, ultimately defeated nation. They reflect much that’s important about the war: the immense risk secession represented for communities and towns across the South (risks willingly taken and fully realized for most), the tremendous effort involved in forging a new nation, the astonishing and thorough conversion of the Knoxes and thousands of other families from American to Confederate, and the immense efforts families undertook to maintain a structure and identity in the midst of chaos.
The Civil War produced thousands of letter collections, many of them published, many of them excellent. Some of them include letters incoming and outgoing, from soldier to home and from the folks at home back to the field. But few include the range of letters produced by the Knox family of Fredericksburg. All six of the Knox boys served the Confederacy, most of them in the local regiment, the 30th Virginia Infantry. The 30th was something of a nomadic unit, serving at times with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, but also in the Virginia Tidewater, North Carolina, and even Tennessee. Lieutenant Robert Knox’s letters home constitute most of the correspondence from the field, often writing on behalf of his soldier-brothers.
The Knox home became the Kenmore Inn in 1932. Courtesy HFFI.
For the Knox family and other residents of Fredericksburg—on the Rappahannock River midway between the warring capitals—the home front became the battlefront. The descent of armies on Fredericksburg in 1862, 1863, and 1864, inspired many local families to flee. Typically, families took to the roads to find safety in adjacent Spotsylvania County. But the Knoxes had uncommon means, and the family’s life as refugees took them as far away as Richmond, Danville, and Columbia, South Carolina. Invariably, mother Virginia Soutter Knox managed the family in flight. Father Thomas F. Knox held closer to Fredericksburg, trying vainly to watch over home and business. All the while, the family wrote letters. For most of four years, these letters constituted the connective tissue for a family dispersed by war. They reflect the often immense efforts families undertook to maintain a family structure and identity amidst chaos.
The war weighed heavily on Fredericksburg and the Knoxes. All the boys-turned-soldiers survived the war (an unlikely, happy outcome), but the family suffered huge economic loss. In 1860, Thomas Knox owned $50,000 worth of real estate and $22,000 of personal property (much of that surely slaves). But by the time the census taker came around in 1870, that $72,000 fortune had shrunk to just $8,000, including just $500 of personal property. The family, however, continued to thrive as a pillar of the Fredericksburg community for decades. They lived in their Princess Anne Street house until 1911.
The Knox house today, 1200 Princess Anne Street. Photo by Russ Smith, 2012.
Fredericksburg Remembered 