Download Wilmer McLean`s Civil War odyssey Enid News and Eagle

Wilmer McLean’s Civil War odyssey
Enid News and Eagle
Yet, you will be hard-pressed to find a more paradoxical story than that of
Virginian Wilmer McLean, and his curious, fate-laced saga.
If you haven’t heard of Wilmer McLean or his family, it may be because he was
not a famous general, a leader in the Confederate government or a firebrand
secessionist.
At the outbreak of hostilities in spring 1861, McLean was a wholesale grocer — a retired major in the
Virginia militia too old to return to active duty and assist the South on the battlefield.
Yet, the Civil War could be said to have gravitated to this man in his very backyard.
Leading up to the first great battle of the war, on July 18, 1861, along a creek known as Bull Run near
the rail crossroads of Manassas Junction, Va., it was McLean’s property — known as Yorkshire
Plantation — on which a portion of the first major battle between Confederate and Union forces took
place.
Southern army commander Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard had made his headquarters in McLean’s
house, when Union artillery fired on the structure, dropping a cannonball through the kitchen fireplace.
“A comical effect of this artillery fight was the destruction of the dinner of myself and staff by a Federal
shell that fell into the fireplace of my headquarters at the McLean House,” wrote Beauregard of the
incident.
As fighting raged on and near his property, it would soon become obvious to McLean northern
Virginia was going to be the focal point of fighting as the war progressed. So, in a desire to protect his
family from repetition of being a civilian caught between two great armies and the accompanying threat
to life, limb and property, he decided to move his commercial activities to southern Virginia.
As the war raged in northern Virginia, the McLeans moved in the spring of 1863 about 120 miles south
to a quiet, south-central Virginia community near Appomattox Court House.
A slave owner, McLean made a small fortune running sugar through the Union blockade to supply one
of the luxuries in which the South had a keen shortage. But for all the notoriety McLean gained at the
start of the war from having a major battle fought on his property, it didn’t hold a candle to what would
happen a little less than four years later.
For you see, the war came back to Wilmer McLean in April 1865.
Robert E. Lee’s starving and shrinking Army of Northern Virginia was chased from the trenches of
Petersburg and the sight of church steeples in Richmond by the Union Army into the southern Virginia
countryside. That’s when history once again paid a visit to Wilmer McLean.
On April 9, 1865, the parlor of the McLean house would be immortalized as Lee surrendered his brave
army to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant — effectively and symbolically ending the bloodiest chapter in American
history.
“The war began in my front yard and ended in my parlor,” McLean is supposed to have said after the
surrender.
As Rebels laid down their arms, furled their regimental colors and began long, arduous and at times sad
journeys back to homes and farms across the South, the McLean house became an instant shrine.
Union Army officers began taking tables, chairs and any furnishings they found in the house as
souvenirs of the surrender — handing money to a protesting McLean as they made off with his
property. Cavalryman George Armstrong Custer was given the table at which Grant had drafted the
surrender document.
After the war, as across so much of the ruined South, McLean had to sell the family house in 1867,
unable to keep up his mortgage and returning to Manassas.
Although he had made a lot of money in the sugar-smuggling business during the war, it was all in
worthless Confederate currency — one of the final nails in the economic coffin that was the South’s
bitter legacy.
Wilmer McLean later would move to Alexandria, Va., along the Potomac River outside of Washington,
D.C. There he worked for the fledgling Internal Revenue Service, which had been created by President
Abraham Lincoln and Congress in 1862 to help collect money to pay for the war.
Appomattox Court House National Historical Monument was created by Congress in 1940. The
McLean house opened to the public April 9, 1949 — exactly 84 years after Lee had surrendered to
Grant. And as we are fond of saying, the rest is history.
Write a Wilmer McLean haiku poem. Remember a haiku
is 3 lines (syllable pattern for each line is 5, 7, 5).
Write the final the draft of the haiku on the blank side
of an index card. Poetry looks nice, so make your poem
look nice!!!!!