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1776 January-June
In February, a company of cotton spinners arrived from Philadelphia, their expenses paid by Charles Yates. They set up shop on James Mercer's estate in the upper end of town (perhaps in the stone house still standing at 1207 Prince Edward Street).
In March, a public warehouse was ordered by the Fourth Virginia Convention to house arms, gunpowder, salt, and camp equipment. As James Hunter Jr. was appointed the manager, the facility may have been in the Hunter warehouses near the public wharf.
In April, three ships lying at Fredericksburg were presumed to be the property of British merchants. They were seized (and later sold at public auction).
So many soldiers and seamen were passing through town that Dr. John Julian was authorized to commandeer a building on Caroline Street as a hospital. It was across the street from Weedon’s tavern.
Charged with the defense of the river in addition to his other duties, Fielding Lewis acquired two cruisers. The crew of the Dragon, with Eliezer Callender as commander, was housed in the building Dr. Julian used for a hospital. (John deBaptist and Ambrose Lewis were local blacks who served on the ship during the war.) By summer, two row galleys were under construction on Mann Page’s river front below town.
In Williamsburg, the fifth and final Virginia convention voted for independence, passed a Declaration of Rights, adopted a constitution, and elected Patrick Henry as first governor of the new state.
With the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, the thirteen colonies became the United States of America and a nation at war.
1776 July-December
In July, the county justices of the court took a new oath of office, and local government resumed as before. Fredericksburg merchants suspected of being Loyalists were asked to take an oath of loyalty and surrender their guns. (Several refused.)
Across the river, James Hunter was now a major supplier of camp equipment and muskets; a visitor described the Rappahannock Forge as “a small village.”
The gun manufactory at Fredericksburg was instructed to receive all muskets needing repair. This became its principal mission although several hundred muskets of excellent quality were also produced.
The newly formed Virginia Assembly voted to raise six new regiments to meet the state's assigned quota of sixteen. Soldiers from the 8th Regiment and the new 15th Regiment were instructed to assemble at Fredericksburg to begin their march northward. (Local counties were in the 10th Regiment.)
Hugh Mercer and George Weedon, already commissioned officers in the Continental Army, were with General Washington in New Jersey.
The year ended quietly in Fredericksburg with news of the first victories of the Continental Army at Trenton and Princeton—where General Hugh Mercer was mortally wounded.
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William Reid managed the Fredericksburg store of Cunningham and Company, the largest chain of Glasgow merchants in the colony. The store was on lot 33 at the corner of Wolfe and Caroline Streets. Purchased in 1753 from young George Washington, it was a local landmark known as “Reid’s store,” even after the war.
Henry Mitchell was a Loyalist merchant who was deported but later returned and took the oath of citizenship. He owned several Caroline Street properties representing Glasgow merchants. Among them was the building now known as “Hugh Mercer’s Apothecary Shop.” (Mercer’s shop was actually in the next block). After the war, the building became the store of Callender and Henderson. Betty Lewis had an account there. |
1777
Fredericksburg was a very busy town in 1777. A committee appointed by the Assembly, under the chairmanship of Thomas Jefferson, met in January to begin a revision of Virginia’s laws. Weedon’s Tavern (now operated by William Smith) was the setting for the committee’s effort, which gave rise to Thomas Jefferson’s statute for religious freedom.
Local merchants were using small ships to scour for any merchandise they could find to make up for the lost trade with England. Fielding Lewis acquired the Betsey and bought half of a warehouse on Sophia Street from Charles Yates to house his cargos.
The local justices were struggling to meet the new military quotas and to deal with the confusing status of the English and Scottish merchants still in their midst. They were also charged with aiding poor families of absent soldiers. And there was fear of contagious disease, especially small pox, brought by the passing troops.
There were local tensions long simmering over dissatisfaction with Fredericksburg as the county seat. This time, the complaint was about the distance the southern county militiamen had to travel for the mandatory monthly musters.
Now, the new state government was sympathetic to a petition containing 499 signatures, and the southern county men were successful in obtaining a more central location. (And the dissatisfaction with Fredericksburg as the county seat, a periodic complaint for 45 years, was about to receive a sympathetic hearing as well.)
1778
This was the year that the economic consequences of the war hit home. Without tobacco as a supplementary form of currency, the state began printing unbacked paper money and inflation soared.
France had now come into the war as an ally, and ships with supplies and equipment began arriving. But they had to be paid for. In Fredericksburg, Benjamin Day became the state agent for finding and purchasing tobacco to revive its usage as currency.
This proved to be a formidable task, as the public warehouses were closed and there was no market. But by scouring the river and searching out prospects on court days, he somehow accumulated over 400 hogsheads, much of it stored at Fredericksburg.
Meanwhile, the British moved their military action to the south, capturing Savannah and restoring the royal governor of Georgia.
In October, the Assembly voted at last to move the location of Spotsylvania’s court from Fredericksburg, though a new location was not specified.
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Now managed by Daniel Delozier, Julian’s Coffee House at the corner of Amelia and Caroline Streets would become an important meeting place. The Long Ordinary disappeared about this time without a trace, perhaps lost to fire; and the Town House and the courthouse would be pre-empted by the military. |
Hospitality for the Enemy
One surprising incident a few months after the Battle of Trenton was the hospitality shown a group of Prussian officers interned after their capture. Their request for a transfer from Winchester had been granted and they lived here in style for several weeks from the end of December 1777 until their departure for Philadelphia in February in a prisoner exchange. (Ironically, this was the terrible winter the American troops were enduring at Valley Forge.)
Such hospitality toward the enemy’s officers was apparently not unusual—General Washington had received the same group. (Perhaps that was what had prompted their request for the transfer.)
In their comfortable quarters, an officer noted in his diary that Fredericksburg was “the most pleasing place I have seen in America.” The officers held a party for several ladies, offering many delicacies and refreshments. Among the guests were General Washington’s sister and his nieces.
Provisioning the war may have taxed Fredericksburg’s facilities, but it did not as yet seem to have caused great concerns among the townspeople.
At this very time, however, the commander of the new 15th Virginia Regiment was finding the cost of stationing troops in the town prohibitive “owing to the extravagant price of fuel and other necessaries,” and in an announcement in the Virginia Gazette, he ordered that no troops marching northward make any stay at Fredericksburg. Even those too ill to march were to be removed to Alexandria.
1779
Fredericksburg’s domestic problems were intensifying. The merchants organized strong opposition to moving the courthouse away from town. With no county site yet agreed on, the court continued to meet at Fredericksburg. Extraordinary inflation set in. (Virginia issued more than five times the amount of paper money as all the other states combined.)
The most burning issue in Fredericksburg in 1779 was the Hunters’ monopoly of the ferry service. The Thorntons still prohibited travel across their river front above the town. To get to the Falmouth ferry, even though it was on their land, one had to go up the Fall Hill road and double back.
Meanwhile, the service and facilities at the Wolfe Street ferry were inadequate, especially with the delays caused by the large numbers of troops which had to be transported. The embankments had deteriorated and the sides were precariously steep, which made the moving of wagons and equipment very difficult.
The debate was heated. The Hunters, of course, did not want a second ferry and claimed they needed the ferry income to make improvements. George Weedon supported the Hunters, probably because an extra ferry within the town would have lowered the value of the ferry route to the Washington farm, which was in the estate of his deceased brother-in-law, Hugh Mercer. But almost everyone else was in favor of a second ferry site in town.
There were heated petitions and counter petitions submitted to the Assembly by both sides and even by the Falmouth trustees and residents. A compromise site was finally agreed on in October—at the upper end of Fielding Lewis' land. The Thorntons had protected their riverfront, but at least the citizens of Fredericksburg did not have to go all the way up the Fall Hill and down again to reach Falmouth.
1780
This was surely the hardest year for all Americans and especially for Virginians. It was the bitterest winter in memory. The inflation rate soared. With money worthless, taxes could not be collected. Business was being transacted in commodities.
The courthouse had now been pre-empted for military use, forcing the court to move to temporary quarters in the county before the new facility was ready on the Po River.
The British had launched a southern campaign, and Virginia regiments were among those marched southward to re-inforce the southern army. They passed through Fredericksburg in February and made a fine impression at the ceremonies honoring General Washington's birthday, which were held at Julian’s Coffee House. When the regiments reached South Carolina, they were quickly forced to surrender at the siege of Charleston, and in May, they became prisoners there for the duration of the war.
Back in Fredericksburg, Fielding Lewis, though in very poor health, had launched a new enterprise, expanding his business to include shareholder merchants who invested in "adventures" to search in the West Indies and elsewhere for whatever could be purchased to replace the British imports. (The Fredericksburg Company would prove to be a failure which cost its investors dearly.)
Both the Congress in Philadelphia and the new state government were now floundering in red ink. The Congress assigned commodity quotas to the states—on flour, salt, hay, corn, and rum. Local commissioners were appointed to make mandatory assessments "of every family." Certificates were issued for compensation of appropriated items. Those claims, redeemed two years later at the county court, are an invaluable record of the mandated contributions.
Captain James Tutt, the commissioner for Spotsylvania County, stockpiled his collections in Charles Yates' warehouse on Sophia Street. The other half of the warehouse was now owned by Fielding Lewis for his Fredericksburg Company cargos.
The operation of the gun manufactory was being crippled by a lack of funds from the state. Charles Dick continued somehow to keep production going. The cumulative costs of the operation through 1780 had been £53,000, with Fielding Lewis's personal contribution of £16,000, of which he was still owed £7,000. Thoroughly disheartened by the lack of assistance, both leaders submitted their resignations in December.
At year’s end, the town was still urgently seeking a solution to its loss of court service. A petition was sent to the Assembly requesting that the town be incorporated (which would have allowed the proposed council to serve as a minor court). But more than 100 people submitted a counter-petition opposing incorporation. It was only a question of time, however, before the town was to be separated from the county. | 
