Lee Comes to Leesburg

On the afternoon of September 4, 1862, five days after the Confederate victory at the Second Battle of Manassas, throngs of well-wishers lined Leesburg's streets, including King Street, to welcome the threadbare but jubilant Army of Northern Virginia as it marched through town. Among its 55,000 men was a horse-drawn ambulance carrying the army's injured commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee. Before the grand entrance to Harrison Hall, home of a distant relative of the Lees, the ambulance halted, and Lee, his hands bandaged after one was broken and the other badly sprained when his horse Traveller bolted at Second Manassas, was escorted inside and treated by local physician Samuel Jackson. That afternoon, in a first-floor room there, Lee quietly visited with his son Robert, a private in the Rockbridge Artillery. Later, escorted by two young daughters of the household, he walked to the home of John Janney at 10 Cornwall Street. Janney had served as president of the Virginia Secession Convention in 1861, and although he had voted against secession, he had handed the sword of command of Virginia's troops to Lee. The next morning, Gens. Lee, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, and Lewis A. Armistead assembled in the dining room for a rare conference, and when they rose from the meeting they had planned to carry out Lee's decision to invade Maryland, a campaign that culminated at Antietam in the bloodiest day in American history.

Leesburg, Virginia · United States