Originally aired on March 13, 1998 - In part 185 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson traces the wartime history of Company I of the Fourth Virginia Infantry Regiment, better known as the Liberty Hall Volunteers.
#185 – Liberty Hall Volunteers
So beautiful and so moving is the interior of the Lee Chapel on the campus of Washington and Lee University in Lexington that it is easy to overlook a metal cabinet on one of the walls. A tarnished text calls attention to college students of another time. The tablet is a memorial to Company I of the 4th Virginia Infantry Regiment. Known as the “Liberty Hall Volunteers” and esteemed as one of the Civil War’s most gallant boy companies.
The unit came into existence following Virginia’s secession and the Governor’s call to defend the state. Fifty-seven of the company’s original seventy-three members were students at Washington College. A fourth of the recruits were studying for the ministry. The group may well have been, as one authority declared, “the most educated infantry company in Confederate service”.
The boys whose average age was twenty were from the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley. Most of them had grown up in a strong Calvinistic environment. Their captain was James J. White. He was thirty-two and a Greek professor at the college. That explained why those under his command called his “Old Zeus”.
Filled with much enthusiasm and no experience the little band departed for war. Patriotic ladies in Lexington completely outfitted the college company, even to red flower waistbands to be worn next to the skin to ward off diarrhea. The boys also had an embroidered flag donated by a local Presbyterian church. On the banner was a Latin inscription that said, “For altar and home”.
Seven of the lads died in the opening Battle of Manassas. For a year thereafter, the company served as a headquarters guard for General Stonewall Jackson. The boys took their job seriously until late one evening when a sentry started s whistling beat that ninety others joined. Things were quite happy until an awaked Jackson stepped out the door and in the words of one volunteer, “squelched it”.
More losses followed in Jackson’s famed “Valley Campaign”. The most noted of the company’s leaders was Hugh White, son of Jackson’s pastor in Lexington. Captain White was killed at 2nd Manassas while leading a charge with the flag of the 4th Virginia. Also slain in that battle was Willie Preston, the seventeen year old son of one of Jackson’s closest VMI friends. The seemingly emotionless Jackson walked away in tears when told of young Preston’s death.
At Chancellorsville sixteen members of the company fell wounded. Twenty-one were left when the Confederate Army reached Gettysburg. In the second day’s fighting the Liberty Hall Volunteers ran out of ammunition while being attached on three sides. Some fell, others surrendered. Only three men escaped. One of them was teenager Ted Barkley. He wrote home, “I would like to survive the conflict. I would like to see our land free from the tyrant’s grasp and established as one of the stars in the galaxy of nations. But if I am to fall, God help me to say ‘Thy will be done”.
Some replacements partially refilled the ranks. Most of them were casualties in the May, 1864, fighting in the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania. By the autumn of that year, the once animated company was down to a lieutenant and two privates. It ended the war in that pitiful shape.
Statistics on the Liberty Hall Volunteers border on the unbelievable. Of one hundred and eighty-one members of the company; twenty-six were killed in action, forty-two died of disease, sixteen perished from other causes, seventy-six were wounded, and forty-three were captured. The unit had a 46% death rate. There were more casualty numbers than there were company members. The one hundred and eighty-one soldiers suffered two hundred and three cases of death, wounds and detention.
One other fact deserves mention. It is said that no punishment was ever inflicted on any original member of the Liberty Hall Volunteers for disobedience, or for misconduct.