Historically Quaker and abolitionist, Waterford broke sharply with Loudoun County's pro-Confederate majority by rejecting secession 220 votes to 31 in Virginia's May 1861 referendum. As Southern troops occupied the town and its Quaker meeting house to suppress perceived treason, many residents fled to Maryland. In January 1861, Confederate Capt. Elijah V. White came to recruit his 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry from local secessionists, while his troopers later patrolled the border for runaway slaves and Unionist spies until a Union offensive in March 1862 forced a temporary evacuation. After months of Confederate occupation and threats to burn their cursed Quaker settlement, townspeople welcomed Col. John W. Geary's 28th Pennsylvania Infantry as liberators. Local Unionists, including Quakers, joined Capt. Samuel C. Means's Independent Loudoun Rangers, the only Federal cavalry raised in Confederate Virginia. On August 27, 1862, White's cavalry attacked the Rangers camped by the Baptist church and defeated them, dismaying residents who had looked to them for protection. Means's command nevertheless served until the end of the war, operating nearby in a brothers' war against White's and Col. John S. Mosby's partisans. Waterford and nearby Lovettsville remained firmly Unionist, regained U.S. mail and trading privileges, joined the Restored Government of Virginia in Alexandria in 1863, and in 1864 saw three Quaker girls begin publishing the underground Union newspaper Waterford News.