PicoSync

Chapter One: The Pattons of Virginia

We ne'er shall look upon his like again.--TRIBUTE TO COL. GEORGE S. PATTON, VMI, CLASS OF 1852

The first Patton in America was an enormously successful merchant and trader named Robert, who emigrated from his native Scotland to Virginia around 1770. Although little is known of this great-great-grandfather of George S. Patton Jr., he is thought to have been a rebellious Scottish patriot who "fled Scotland apparently after opposing the Crown in the interminable conflict for Scottish independence" and later emigrated to Fredericksburg, Virginia, around 1770, via Bermuda.

According to Patton family lore, he fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, and his real name was not Patton. Robert Patton has been variously described as "a smallish man who was hot-tempered and something of a dandy" and "a mule-headed, fiery little man with a fondness for ruffled shirts." He is also believed to have dropped hints from time to time that he was the son of a landed aristocrat, and that Patton was the name he had adopted and was known by in Virginia. Another story has it that before his arrival in Virginia Robert lived in Bermuda, where he got into serious trouble when he killed the governor with a pistol after the latter insulted him. The only known painting of Robert, depicting a clear-eyed, well-dressed young man, gives no hint of his personality. All this is myth. In fact a great deal is known of the first Patton. Probably born Robert Paton in Mauchline, Ayr, Scotland, on September 24, 1750, well after the Scottish revolution, he emigrated to Culpeper in 1769 or 1770 from Glasgow. Apparently indentured for a period of (probably five) years to the great Scottish mercantile syndicate of William Cunninghame, Robert was based for a time at the Cunninghame depots in Falmouth and Culpeper before moving permanently to Fredericksburg. Patton's steady move upward within the Cunninghame syndicate to positions of greater responsibility is well documented. In 1773 he was placed in charge of the Cunninghame operation in Culpeper and appears to have been one of its rising stars.

Robert Patton prospered in Virginia as a businessman and subsequently, in October 1792, married well by gaining the hand of Anne Gordon Mercer, whose late father was Brig. Gen. Hugh Mercer, also a Scottish patriot and a legendary Revolutionary War hero. The wedding took place on October 16, 1792, and was duly reported in the next edition of the (Fredericksburg) Virginia Herald.

That Robert Patton was well established as a merchant in Fredericksburg by 1774 is clear from the fact that the master of the sloop Speedwell assigned a debt of forty-two pounds (more than sixteen hundred dollars--a huge sum at the time) to be repaid to him for wages advanced between July 1774 and May 1776. He is reputed to have "made a competent fortune in business." As a merchant and trader, Patton dealt in highly sought-after goods of the time, advertising for sale in 1792 in the local paper, the Virginia Herald, shipments of coal, salt, queensware (a beige-colored earthenware, popular at the time, often made by Wedgwood), eight to ten thousand "good" bricks, claret and other wines from London, Antigua rum, Holland gin, molasses, coffee, cotton, pepper, and muscovado sugar. Until 1805, when the partnership was dissolved by mutual consent and the business run solely by Patton, he was associated with another local merchant named Williamson.

About 1800 Robert Patton used his wealth to build a stately mansion he named "White Plains," on five acres overlooking the Rappahannock River and the falls north of the town. In 1802 Robert was elected a vestryman in St. George's Episcopal Church, but like many other citizens of Fredericksburg, he and his wife soon grew disenchanted with the church and turned to Presbyterianism. The Patton family name appears prominently in references to the organization in 1808 of Fredericksburg's First Presbyterian Church, which was erected on land donated by Robert's wife.

There is no evidence to suggest that Robert Patton was anything more than a conservative, upstanding merchant and benefactor of Fredericksburg, where he apparently spent his entire adult life. There is no record of service in the Revolutionary War, and according to Robert H. Patton, he "declined to serve in the Continental Army." He is known to have returned temporarily to Glasgow, via England, in the summer of 1777 for his employer. One surviving description of him by a Fredericksburg native was that "Mr. Patton was one of the noblest, most upright, most generous men she had ever known," while another noted that "Mercer's daughter was as frail as her husband was majestic."

Robert Patton died in Fredericksburg on November 3, 1828, at the age of seventy-eight, and a brief obituary, which appeared in the Virginia Herald, read: "On Monday morning last, ROBERT PATTON, Sen., Esq.--an old and worthy citizen, and for many years a highly respectable merchant of this town." Robert's Fredericksburg epitaph seems to have been that "he was one of the many fine Scotch merchants who have by their splendid integrity and thrift added much lustre to the commercial, social and religious history of old Fredericksburg."

The union of Robert Patton and Anne Mercer produced seven children. Their third child, John Mercer Patton, a physician, lawyer, and politician. was born in 1797. Like his maternal grandfather, John Mercer Patton studied to become a physician and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1818. However, he never practiced the profession that was apparently forced on him by his father. The two are said to have quarreled repeatedly; nevertheless, John Mercer Patton eventually returned to Fredericksburg to fulfill his ambition to obtain a law degree. Patton prospered as a lawyer and served as a Virginia congressman from 1829 to 1838, before settling in Richmond. He was elected to four consecutive terms on the Executive Council of Virginia, and when Gov. Thomas W. Gilmer resigned in 1841, Patton became acting governor of the Commonwealth for a period of thirteen days.

John Mercer Patton was an independent-minded Democrat who was never afraid to speak with honesty and candor. In 1832 a major controversy erupted over a bill in Congress, sponsored by President Andrew Jackson, to recharter the Bank of the United States, during which Patton publicly rebuked the governor of Virginia for attempting to intimidate him into changing his vote."

However, John Mercer Patton's greatest achievement was his pioneering work in helping to revise the Virginia civil and criminal codes. The resulting Code of Virginia of 1849 remained in force for the next quarter century. To the end of his life, Patton spoke out against any interference in America's religious or civil affairs by another country. Patton and his wife, Margaret French Williams, produced twelve children, including nine sons, seven of whom were to serve in Confederate gray during the Civil War.

Four of John Mercer Patton's nine sons attended the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, including the first George Smith Patton, who was born in 1833 in Fredericksburg and matriculated at VMI at the age of sixteen. George Patton had been carefully groomed by his parents to qualify for admission to VMI, and he became one of a large class of twenty-four. When he graduated in 1852, George Patton was second in his class and was rated first in tactics, French, mathematics, Latin, and geology and chemistry.

After graduation Patton seemed destined for a career as a teacher, and in this he was assisted by the first superintendent of VMI, the legendary Col. Francis H. Smith. Patton taught in Richmond for two years while also studying for the bar in his father's law office. In November 1855 he continued the Patton tradition of marrying well when he wed Susan Thomton Glassell. Their union produced four children, the eldest of whom was Patton's father, the second George Patton, born on September 30, 1856, and christened George William Patton.

Susan Thornton Glassell was descended from a distinguished family that could trace itself to George Washington's great-grandfather, King Edward I of England, and France's King Philip III. "Even farther in the dim recesses of time were sixteen barons who signed the Magna Carta, all of whom the Pattons believed were their direct ancestors."

The family settled in Charleston, Kanawha County, in what is now West Virginia, where Patton practiced law with considerable success. He soon became a well-liked citizen and acquired the nickname "Frenchy" because of his goatee. "He was arrogant, a smart dresser, and displayed classic chivalry toward ladies, making him a dashing, romantic figure." A photograph of Patton taken around 1860 depicts a dashing young man of aristocratic good looks who conveyed the perfect image of a successful lawyer. He has been described as "graceful and elegant as a speaker [who] was the charm of the social circle, where his genial wit, sparkling humor, ready repartee, and ringing laugh made him ever welcome. He seemed never to forget what he had once learned and could at will produce the choicest sentiments of the poets for the young and gay." Devoutly religious, Patton also encouraged his men to attend chapel and rarely missed an opportunity to pray on his knees before his God.

Despite his youth, Patton was a visionary who saw war clouds on the horizon and was determined to prepare for action. Soon after moving to Charleston, he organized and commanded a company of militia, which became the Kanawha Riflemen, to which he attracted young aristocrats of high standing in the community, like himself. "Its bright uniforms and sharp drill were well-known throughout the area. The Kanawha Riflemen were said to be the best-drilled company in the entire Confederate Army, the result of Patton's superb military training." Despite their ceremonial status as a unit that "could dance as well as, and maybe better, than they could fight," their commander was nevertheless well known as stem and authoritarian.

John Brown's insurrection in 1859 was the spark that galvanized Patton to action, and the Kanawha Riflemen was one of the Virginia militia units that converged on Harper's Ferry in the aftermath. By April 1861 Patton's unit had become Company H of the 22d Virginia Regiment, and Patton himself had become an ardent advocate of secession.

Anticipating war, Patton moved his family from Charleston to the ancestral home. Spring Farm, near Culpeper Court House, shortly before Virginia seceded. His six-year-old son remembered "the coach coming to the door and my indignation at the fact that my to drum, of which I was very proud, being left on the mantelpiece in the nursery. I cried bitterly as I was put into the coach." At Culpeper the entire Patton clan had gathered, including a number of cousins.

The Patton homestead became a beehive of activity as the family prepared for war en masse. While the women made ponchos and uniforms, the Patton men went about the grim business of preparing themselves for war. "My grandmother gave each of her sons a T.B. [thoroughbred]) horse for himself and a nigrow [sic] body servant, with a second less well bred horse for the nigrow."" The matriarch of the family and the widow of John Mercer Patton was Margaret French Williams Patton, a strong-willed, resolute Virginia woman. Many tales about her have been passed down through generations of Pattons, one of which is that when she learned of the wounding of the youngest of her eight surviving sons, "she cried for the first time, but added it was because she had no more boys to send to fight the Yankees." Margaret Patton never accepted the defeat of the Confederacy and Patton's father relates that,

After the war ... [she] was riding back from church on horseback with a Confederate officer. As they rode along she asked him, "Colonel, did you say `Amen' when the minister prayed for the President of the United States and all others in authority?" When the colonel said that he had, Mrs. Patton struck him with her whip.

With secession, all the Patton brothers went off to war, except the eldest brother, Robert, who lived with a bulldog in one of the back rooms of the Patton homestead, and was an alcoholic former naval officer. Rarely mentioned in the family history, Robert was found dead in a farmyard near Culpeper in 1876, apparently the victim of drink. The next eldest, John Mercer, became a colonel in command of the 21st Virginia Infantry but served only until mid-August 1862, when complications from a stomach disorder forced his permanent return to civilian life. Isaac Williams Patton (1828-90), who had previously settled in New Orleans, returned there to command a regiment of Louisiana infantry and was captured at Vicksburg.

Waller Tazewell Patton was the sixth son of John Mercer Patton and in 1855 became the third Patton to graduate from VMI. After graduation Tazewell (or "Taz," as he was known within the family) taught at VMI for two years before becoming a lawyer in Culpeper. Soon after settling in Culpeper he was chosen to command the Culpeper Minutemen, a militia company that had first been raised in 1776 by one of his ancestors. Two of his younger brothers, Hugh Mercer and James French Patton, enlisted as privates, while both were still in their teens. Both later became lieutenants and were wounded, one at Cold Harbor and the other at Bull Run.

Tazewell was severely wounded at Second Bull Run in late August 1862. After a long recuperation, he returned to his regiment in the spring of 1863. Elected to command the 7th Virginia Infantry, in July 1863 he met his destiny at Gettysburg, in the debacle on the third day of the battle that has been immortalized as Pickett's Charge. It has been aptly described as "a magnificent mile-wide spectacle, a picture-book view of war that participants on both sides remembered with awe until their dying moment--which for many came within the next hour."

Of the more than fourteen thousand men who began the attack, less than half would return to the safety of their own lines. Among the first to perish were the officers who led their men into the cauldron of fire. The men of Pickett's division suffered the worst losses, nearly two-thirds, including all three brigade commanders. Of the thirteen regimental commanders, every single one was either killed outright or wounded.

One of those commanders, lying mortally wounded near a stone wall that afternoon, was twenty-nine-year-old Col. Waller Tazewell Patton, whose 7th Virginia had advanced the farthest before it was repulsed. Terribly wounded in the mouth, he was eventually removed from the battlefield and taken to a nearby Union hospital in Gettysburg. He was treated with kindness by a nurse who ministered to him during the final days of his life. Before the battle he had been troubled by a premonition that he would die that day.

The incident in which Tazewell was wounded was witnessed by an enemy artillery officer, Lt. Henry T. Lee, whose battery had been positioned just behind the stone wall. During the attack, he saw the two officers jump on the wall holding hands and instantly fall. The act so impressed him that when the charge was repulsed he went to look for them. One, a boy of nineteen, was dead, the other had his jaw shattered and was dying from a ghastly wound. The wounded officer motioned to Lee for a pencil and paper and wrote as follows: "As we approached the wall my cousin and regimental adjutant, Captain (name forgotten) pressed to my side and said: `Its our turn next, Tazewell.' We grasped hands and jumped on the wall. Send this to my mother so that she may know that her son has lived up to and died according to her ideals."

Fortunately a close relative was present to offer consolation, and he noted that Tazewell's only method of communication was to write, painfully, on a slate board. Foremost in his mind were his God, his mother, and his country. Shortly before his death, in a poignant letter to his beloved mother, he reaffirmed devotion to God and asked for her prayers. The young colonel ended by scribbling on his slate board: "Tell my mother that I am about to die in a foreign land; but I cherish the same intense affection for her as ever." When Waller Tazewell Patton died, on July 23, 1863, he was the first--but not the last--member of his family to perish in the service of the Confederacy.

George Smith Patton fought his first battle in nearby western Virginia, at a place called Scary Creek, in July 1861. He narrowly escaped death when he was thrown from his horse by the impact of a spent minie ball containing an ounce of pointed lead one-half inch wide. The bone in Patton's upper right arm was shattered. and he was taken prisoner when he could not be moved and his comrades reluctantly left him behind. At a Union hospital the doctors told him the arm required amputation, but Patton adamantly refused. He had somehow been permitted to retain his pistol and made it uncompromisingly clear that he would shoot anyone who attempted to try. The arm did not heal property, and Patton never regained full use of it. His young son later remembered watching his father use a knitting needle to remove a piece of bone from the wound. Patton was eventually paroled and permitted to return to his family. When he recovered sufficiently from his wound he returned to the 22d Virginia as its commander, with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Patton continued to gain experience under his former VMI professor, Stonewall Jackson, and once again barely escaped death in May 1862, during the battle of Giles Court House. According to his son:

Being struck in the belly with a minie ball he thought the wound was fatal and so dismissed the surgeon, telling him to spend his time on those he could save. Shortly after this General Wharton [Patton's division commander] rode by and, having heard of the wound, asked ... [him] how he was. Col. Patton replied that the wound was fatal and that he was writing a letter to his wife but that he did not feel like a dead man. Gen. Wharton dismounted and asked if he could examine the wound. He stuck his unwashed finger in it and exclaimed, "What is this," as his finger hit something hard. He then fished around and pulled out a ten dollar gold piece. The bullet [had struck] this and driven it into his flesh, and glanced off.

While he had escaped death, Patton nevertheless suffered from blood poisoning and returned to the family home, now in Richmond, to recuperate. Patton's regiment had been operating in western Virginia, and in 1863 he again moved his family, this time from Richmond to Lewisburg, a small town near White Sulphur Springs. Patton's regiment was in the thick of the fighting during the Battle of Droop Mountain, in November 1863, where the Confederates were defeated by the Union cavalry of Maj. Gen. William Averell, a onetime friend of Patton. His son vividly recollected the grim aftermath:

I remember seeing them retreating through Lewisburg.... Father had sent an ambulance with a pair of mules to the house and told my mother to take it and follow the army.... Late in the night my father came by with the last of the rear guard and stopped to tell us goodbye and give my mother a letter for General Averill [sic] asking him to see that we were not bothered.

This was not Patton's last encounter with Averell. One morning he was breakfasting at a house when an orderly suddenly yelled: "The Yankees are coreing!" Patton and his staff barely had time to escape Averell's cavalry by jumping out the back window while the lady of the house rushed to hide his saber under a mattress.

Susan Thornton Patton helped to care for both Confederate and Union wounded who were brought to the hotel in White Sulphur Springs. Young George followed his mother around with a bucket and sponge, and recalled that the smell was so awful that she fainted and had to be carried from the room."

The greatest triumph of the Patton family during the Civil War took place at the Battle of New Market. When a Union force threatened Staunton, Confederate units were hastily assembled at New Market under the command of Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge. Vastly outnumbered, the Confederates were so desperate for reinforcements that the 247 young men of the VMI Corps of Cadets (the eldest of whom was only seventeen) were rushed from nearby Lexington. Federal and Confederate forces met on the Valley Turnpike at New Market on May 15, 1864. Here the South won a famous victory that forever immortalized the VMI Corps of Cadets. Four Pattons and their kin participated in the Battle of New Market. During the battle George Patton's 22d Virginia came to the rescue of his close friend and first cousin, Col. George Hugh Smith, whose 62d Virginia was in dire straits after being trapped in a ravine and badly decimated by Union canister. As one historian notes. "In retrospect, it emerges as a Patton military picnic."

New Market established once and for all George Patton's credentials as an outstanding and innovative commander. When, during the battle. Federal cavalry attempted to penetrate the battalion on his left flank, Patton quickly improvised a hasty defense that shattered the charge. His brigade commander was often absent, and when he was present proved an ineffectual leader. Patton filled the void so often that most considered him the real brigade commander.

By the spring of 1864 the Pattons had moved again, this time to John Mercer Patton Jr.'s house, the Meadows, in Albermarle Country. Susan Thornton Patton received a letter from her husband that he had joined Lt. Gen. Jubal Early's army and would soon be on a train passing through on the railway line at the bottom of the garden. As his son recalls, "He got off and stayed with us for several hours ... then the last train composed of flat cars loaded with artillery stopped for him. I remember seeing a soldier on a car give him a hand to get aboard and as the train moved out he was leaning against a gun and waved us goodbye. I never saw him again."

In July 1864 Patton's 22d Virginia was one of the units leading Early's fifteen-thousand-man Confederate Army of the Valley, which had advanced to the outskirts of Washington, within five miles of the White House. Although hastily emplaced Union reinforcements prevented Early's raiders from capturing Washington, he had become a very dangerous thorn in the Union hide. The seriousness of the threat posed by this large Rebel army was not lost on Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who sent Gen. Philip Sheridan's Army of the Shenandoah to deal with Early "to the death," and to plunder the Shenandoah Valley. The two sides met on September 19, 1864, in the Third Battle of Winchester.

Outnumbered by twelve thousand, Early's army could not withstand a whirlwind Union attack on the Confederate left flank. Patton was then in command of his own "Patton's Brigade," and, although he had survived three earlier wounds, this time his luck ran out. The circumstances surrounding his death remain vague. Jubal Early's postwar memoir says only that "Colonel G.W. Patton [sic], commanding a brigade, was mortally wounded, and fell into the hands of the enemy." It is known that Patton's brigade was attempting to defend the left flank that was eventually crushed by Sheridan's cavalry, which captured two thousand Confederate soldiers, among them the mortally wounded George Smith Patton.

Patton was one of several senior Confederate officers killed at Winchester, and Early later referred to him as "a gallant and efficient officer" whose loss "was deeply felt."

A VMI memorial tribute published some years later indicates that Patton lingered for several days after being wounded. The house to which he had been taken was that of his cousin, Mary Williams. In this interval the hope of recovery was inspired and sustained by the opinion of his surgeon that his wound though serious, was not mortal. A part of the last day of his life he was alone in his chamber. Cheerful, even buoyant, not fears were felt that a few brief hours would close his earthly course. A later visit to his chamber disclosed a great change, and warned his friends that death had sealed him for his own. A few words, unintelligible to the kind ones who ministered to him, escaped his lips, and his voice was hushed forever.

Colonel Patton's death, on September 25, 1864, was apparently from a combination of fever and gangrene. He was barely thirty-one years old.

When she learned of Patton's death from a Union newspaper some four days later, his distraught widow traveled to Winchester but arrived too late to attend his burial service. In the 1870s, when George S. Patton II was a cadet at VMI, George and Waller Tazewell Patton were interred together in the same grave in Winchester. According to his son's recollection:

He [George Patton] was dug up and taken to the railroad station. When the train arrived with the body of Tazewell the two coffins were placed on a gun limber ... and covered with a Confederate flag.... Many old soldiers were at the station, including a band with their instruments all draped in black. No noise was made and in utter silence by moonlight the cortege moved to the cemetery, Papa in [his VMI cadet] uniform, walking behind the limber.

Those who had come to honor the Patton brothers did so in Confederate uniform and at great risk of arrest and incarceration. They formed an honor guard around the grave site, and as the coffins were lowered into the twin graves, they struck one another, causing the corpse of Waller Tazewell to break free. Patton later recounted that his uncle looked little different in death than he had in life.

It was later said of the second Patton to die on the field of battle that, preferring the profession of law to any other business and the sanctities of the home and family to all other pleasures, he had nevertheless, peculiar aptitude for a soldier's duty and a soldier's life. He enforced discipline without exciting dislike, and commanded his men without diminishing self-respect.... Colonel Patton appreciated the soldiers of our army as volunteers fighting in a sacred cause, and commanded their admiration while he won their love ... "we never shall look upon his like again.""

Few Virginia families could claim to have contributed more to their cause or shed more of their blood than the Pattons and the Mercers. All were men of honor and principle who did their duty as they saw it in defense of their way of life and for their beloved Virginia. The list of their accomplishments was as long as it was distinguished. In all, some sixteen members of the Patton family and their kin fought for the Confederacy, and three of them died in its service.

After the death of George Patton, his family suffered destitution from the effects of a war that had finally overwhelmed the Confederacy and devastated Virginia, whose economy was in ruins, its currency worthless and its people desperate for the bare necessities of existence. The Pattons spent the winter of 1864-65 at Goochland, near Richmond, like so many others, "in great want of food and clothing." The widow Patton's hardship included responsibility for her blind father, the care of her four young children, and soon after Lee's surrender, the additional burden of caring for her brother, the gallant Capt. William T. Glassell, a former Confederate naval officer who had arrived suffering from tuberculosis contracted during his imprisonment in a Union POW camp. If Uncle John Mercer Patton had not sent them a steer, young George Patton believed that they would have starved. Small wonder that, as a Northerner observed not long after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, across the land there was "no sign of human industry, save here and there a sickly, half-cultivated corn field. The country for the most part consisted of fenceless fields abandoned to weeds, stump lots and undergrowth."... Some 20,000 to 30,000 Virginia soldiers were dead. Thousands of others hobbled along city streets and country roads with an arm or leg missing ... two generations of Virginians were maimed beyond description.... The future held no promise.

Shortly afterward young William Patton showed up, driving an old Confederate ambulance pulled by two horses. With his help the Pattons packed their belongings and moved to a colonial mansion near Orange, Virginia, that had once belonged to the brother of President Madison. Other members of the Patton family also moved in, including the family matriarch, Margaret French Williams Patton, Uncle Hugh Mercer Patton, and a brother, George Glassell. The family farmed a small patch of land in the nearby river bottom. The task of Colonel Patton's young son was to walk behind the plough, dropping corn seed into the furrows and covering it up with his bare feet.

Finally, in the autumn of 1866, a letter arrived from Susan Glassell Patton's elder brother Andrew, who had settled in Southern California before the Civil War. It contained six hundred dollars and a request that she bring her family west. Although it was a princely sum for the time, it was not enough for eight people. To raise the extra money required for their forthcoming journey, Susan Patton sold everything the family owned "except her husband's sword, saddle, gold watch and his Bible. Willie sold what he had, and old Mr. Glassell had already given his worldly goods to the Confederate cause. There was nothing left for them [in Virginia] in the ruins of their politics and their plantations--and their way of life."

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