Review - "Dranesville: A Northern Virginia Town in the Crossfire of a Forgotten Battle, December 20, 1861" by Ryan Quint

[Dranesville: A Northern Virginia Town in the Crossfire of a Forgotten Battle, December 20, 1861 by Ryan T. Quint (Savas Beatie, 2024). Hardcover, 6 maps, photos, illustrations, footnotes, appendix section, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xviii,194/252. ISBN:978-1-61121-693-6. $32.95]

Located in Fairfax County, Virginia close to the Potomac River and roughly halfway between Washington, D.C. and Leesburg, Dranesville sat in the proverbial no man's land between frontline Union and Confederate forces in 1861. The small settlement's early involvement in the Civil War is the subject of Ryan Quint's Dranesville: A Northern Virginia Town in the Crossfire of a Forgotten Battle, December 20, 1861. The volume is a dual wartime community history and battle study that offers admirable contributions to both of those scholarly arenas.

The local history element of the book explores the founding and early history of Dranesville along with the growing social and political divisions among its residents as secession and Civil War forced citizens to take sides. As was the case across the country, neutrality was never really a lasting option for any Dranesville family naively hoping to ride out the growing conflict. Quint's investigation uncovers many of the hallmarks of the inner war, household war, or whatever one chooses to call the multi-faceted intersection between battlefield and home fronts. In this case, emphasis is placed on the formation of a pro-Confederate Home Guard and that group's monitoring and harassment of Dranesville's pro-Union minority. The roles of prominent individuals and families involved are traced, and one particular set of local episodes—the ambush at Lowe's Island and the subsequent military arrest and confinement of its alleged Home Guard perpetrators—spotlights the dynamics of the situation and the early-war struggles U.S. authorities underwent in trying to determine how to effectively deal with active enemy civilians (and others of doubtful loyalty) residing near the fighting front.

Internal political divisions aside, communities such as Dranesville were also caught between the opposing military forces. During the 1861 period covered in the book, Dranesville was occupied by neither side's army but was nevertheless subjected to foraging expeditions and other temporary military incursions. Highlighted among the latter in the book are the September 11 engagement at Lewinsville, an October reconnaissance mission conducted by Pennsylvania Reserves that roughly coincided with the Ball's Bluff debacle, and First Pennsylvania Cavalry Colonel George Bayard's November raid on Dranesville that made the civilian arrests referred to earlier.

As fall went into winter, the food and forage resources collected around Dranesville assured the continued interest of quartermasters from both sides, and the resulting December 20 battle was a clash between competing 'use it or lose it' foraging expeditions and the desire by Union leaders to press back the enemy's forward picket lines in the area. On one side was J.E.B. Stuart leading four infantry regiments, a small contingent of cavalry, and an artillery battery and on the other a combined arms force of Pennsylvania Reserves led by Third Brigade brigadier general E.O.C. Ord and consisting of five infantry regiments, a cavalry regiment, and a battery. The resulting clash between the two was an unexpected meeting engagement of roughly two hours duration. Having the advantage of both numbers (Ord had perhaps twice the number of men available to Stuart) and position, Union forces halted the Confederate advance that struggled through thick woods all along its front, inflicting 195 casualties and receiving 73 in return. Quint pens a very fine account of the battle, the most deeply researched, meticulously detailed, and best overall narrative of the action currently available.

A common thread in the historiography is that Dranesville, a small affair though it was, represented a significant setback to Stuart's otherwise rising reputation. It has been argued that elements of the defeat presaged personality, judgment, and generalship flaws in Stuart that would be more significantly exposed on a larger stage later on in the war. The author of this study as well as the most recent Stuart biographer, Edward Longacre, seem to largely adhere to those notions. On the other hand, much of the effusive praise heaped upon Ord along with many of the sharp criticisms leveled against Stuart by civilian and military critics (all of which are well outlined by Quint) might also be viewed to some extent as products of the time. During the early months of the conflict when everything about the war and those who fought it was still new, the larger meaning and merits of victories or defeats in tiny battles (along with the reputation boosts or hits that went with those events) were very often considerably exaggerated by soldier, civilian, political, and newspaper observers not yet exposed to the unprecedented, mass slaughter horrors of the post-Shiloh period. Perhaps it is appropriate to review conclusions regarding Dranesville through that contextual lens as well.

With that in mind, one might argue that the contemporary backlash against Stuart, while merited to a degree, was a bit excessive in places. While no documentary evidence confirms who ordered Stuart to undertake his mission to Dranesville, Quint offers a convincing scenario that the most likely candidate was D.H. Hill, and a cynic of human nature might assign some portion of of Hill's scathing criticism of Stuart's generalship to Hill's own professional self-protection. In this reviewer's mind, Quint's thorough and excellent account of the battle complicates more than confirms the reductive assessment that Stuart displayed poor leadership and simply lost control of the battle. As referred to earlier, in addition to being outnumbered roughly two to one Stuart faced a number of distinct challenges that mitigate against the most extreme charges against him. Indeed, in visually arresting fashion, the book's fine battle map reveals the striking elevation disadvantage that Stuart faced, the rough wooded terrain that the still inexperienced Confederates were obliged to maneuver through, and the consequent lack of good options when it came to deploying the command's lone battery (which was heavily mauled on the roadway). Suffering somewhere around 10% casualties during his failed mission, Stuart cleanly disengaged from the two-hour meeting engagement (in the process saving his vulnerable train of forage wagons) and was not pursued. For all his criticisms of Stuart, though, Quint does credit the cavalry officer for learning from his first experience leading infantry, with proof of that professional growth exhibited later on at Chancellorsville in 1863. There, as we all know, Stuart instantly stepped into Stonewall Jackson's shoes after the latter's mortal wounding and delivered a highly competent, and in some opinions even brilliant, handling of Second Corps under very challenging command circumstances.

On other other side, while Union forces achieved some successes in other theaters, Dranesville gave the northern public focused on the eastern theater some cause for celebration after a series of embarrassing defeats at Bull Run, Big Bethel, and Ball's Bluff. On an individual level, Ord's military reputation received a strong boost from his deftly handled defensive victory, marking him as a man solidly on the path toward higher command. As the author further notes, the result at Dranesville also went some way toward establishing the fighting reputation of the Pennsylvania Reserves, a division that would go on from there to forge a strong combat record with the Army of the Potomac for the duration of its existence.

Before now, the military history literature has presented students of the eastern theater's early-war period, even the most well read ones in that group, with a pretty vague picture of the Dranesville battle and battlefield. Ryan Quint's eye-opening study more than satisfactorily addresses that gap with the first full treatment of both. In its similarly extensive examination of the targeting of civilians by both sides (along with a number of issues tied to that, including legal justifications for indefinite detainment and the need to more clearly define who was and who wasn't a lawful combatant) Quint's Dranesville also succeeds as a meaningful glimpse into a small rural community riven from within and caught between the lines.