Few communities suffered more from war than Spotsylvania County, where for two years armies traversed, occupied, and fought over the land. Most residents tried to stay out of the way, though some left altogether. Virtually every farm in the northern half of the county was damaged by vandalized houses, pillaged pantries, burned fences, and stolen livestock. Most white residents owned small farms of a few hundred acres, while more than 6,000 enslaved people, half the county’s population, labored on these farms, usually in groups of two or three and often alongside their owners. As war came, most white men left to fight for the Confederacy, though a few quietly supported the Union, and Isaac Silver and Ebenezer McGee secretly spied for the Union army. When the Union army first arrived in 1862, enslaved people fled to freedom by the thousands, and farming nearly stopped. The women, older men, and children who remained endured hunger and hardship, tending small gardens and sharing what they could. Some became refugees in Richmond, Charlottesville, or southwest Virginia, and those who returned found a shattered community that faced decades of recovery.