Romney, West Virginia in The American Civil War

Romney, West Virginia In The American Civil War

The city of Romney, Virginia (now West Virginia) traded hands between the Union Army and Confederate States Army no fewer than 10 times during the American Civil War, assuming the occupying force spent at least one night in the town. (Oral tradition and an erroneous state historical marker claim the town changed hands 56 times.) The story of the small town is emblematic of the many military campaigns that swept through western Virginia and, later, the new state of West Virginia.

Read more about Romney, West Virginia In The American Civil War:  1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866–1867, Civil War Sites

Famous quotes containing the words civil war, west, american, civil and/or war:

    He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.
    —Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)

    Wild Bill was indulging in his favorite pastime of a friendly game of cards in the old No. 10 saloon. For the second time in his career, he was sitting with his back to an open door. Jack McCall walked in, shot him through the back of the head, and rushed from the place, only to be captured shortly afterward. Wild Bill’s dead hand held aces and eights, and from that time on this has been known in the West as “the dead man’s hand.”
    State of South Dakota, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    [Rutherford B. Hayes] was a patriotic citizen, a lover of the flag and of our free institutions, an industrious and conscientious civil officer, a soldier of dauntless courage, a loyal comrade and friend, a sympathetic and helpful neighbor, and the honored head of a happy Christian home. He has steadily grown in the public esteem, and the impartial historian will not fail to recognize the conscientiousness, the manliness, and the courage that so strongly characterized his whole public career.
    Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)

    It is inhuman to continue a war which could easily be ended.
    Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)