Hunter's raid, 1864: Staunton's depots and the burning of VMI

In June 1864, fresh from victory at Piedmont, Union General David Hunter marched up the Shenandoah Valley and set out to wreck what fed the Confederacy. At Staunton he burned its depots and workshops. At Lexington he burned the Virginia Military Institute — an act that still divided his own officers, and that the South never forgave.

Staunton: the supply hub

Staunton was where the Valley's food went to war. The Valley Pike, the Staunton–Parkersburg Turnpike and the Virginia Central Railroad met there; so did an army depot, quartermaster and commissary posts and a training camp. Hunter's army marched in on June 5, and from June 7 destroyed the railroad depots, a woollen mill, storehouses and a military workshop. "All the railroad bridges and depots, and public workshops and factories in the town and vicinity," Hunter reported, "were all destroyed."

The march south

Hunter wrote that McCausland's resistance could have justified destroying the whole town, but that he preferred "to spare private property and an unarmed population".

Burning VMI

He did not spare much. His troops looted nearly every house, business and institution in Lexington — but the burning of VMI's barracks stood out. The cadets were gone and the campus undefended. To Hunter it was a military target. His cousin and chief of staff, Col. David Hunter Strother, called it a place "where treason was systematically taught", and added a military reason: its professors and cadets had fought as a corps against the government — most recently a month earlier, helping win the Confederate victory at New Market.

• Burned: the barracks, several faculty houses, the library, some laboratory equipment.
• Taken: a statue of George Washington, sent to Wheeling, West Virginia, and returned to VMI in 1866.
• Objections: not every Union officer approved. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes, a future president, wrote that it did not suit many of them, and that General Crook disapproved.
• Outrage: a Southern paper called it "one of the most wanton and barbaric acts of the war".

What else burned, and what did not

Hunter had the home of former Virginia governor John Letcher burned. He meant to burn Washington College — now Washington and Lee University — too, but so many of his officers protested, because of its link to George Washington and because it was a civilian school, that he relented. His men ransacked it instead: they defaced buildings, wrecked laboratories and carried off college property.

These raids were part of a strategy to destroy the Confederacy's economic base. They also fed a cycle of reprisal: a month later, Confederates burned Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in revenge for Hunter's burnings.

Sources

Written from "Raids on Staunton, Lexington, & Virginia Military Institute", National Park Service, Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historical Park, a work of the United States government in the public domain.