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JONATHAN ROBERTS: THE CIVIL WAR’S QUAKER SCOUT & SHERIFF

INTRODUCTION


 * Jonathan Roberts (born: September 10, 1818, Burlington County, New Jersey; died: March 30, 1901, Gloucester County, New Jersey) was a simple New Jersey farmer, surveyor, and family man. When he moved to Fairfax County in 1849, he also became an outspoken Union and anti-slavery man, which made him increasingly unpopular with his secessionist-minded neighbors as conflict and disunion loomed. Soon after Virginia voted to secede from the Union, General P. G. T. Beauregard, C.S.A., ordered him and five other men arrested because they were “dangerous” to the Southern cause of independence and the perpetuation of slavery. In Beauregard’s views, their social and political views were “inimical” to the future of Virginia and the nascent Confederacy.


 * Consequently, Roberts became a hunted man, threatened alternatively with hanging by local vigilantes or arrest by Beauregard’s Black Horse Cavalry. Ultimately, he had to flee his home and farm at Cedar Grove in Accotink (now Fort Belvoir), Virginia, and ride to safety in Alexandria. The next day he volunteered to become a scout for the U.S. Army of Northeastern Virginia, Third Division, under the command of then Colonel Samuel P. Heintzelman. The following year, he won election to his first of two terms as the Union’s Sheriff of Fairfax County. He retired after the war and later became of Justice of the Peace appointed by the occupying military government in Virginia.


 * Jonathan Roberts was simultaneously a US Army scout and civilian sheriff during most of the American Civil War. Ironically, he also was a sixth-generation member of the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers, whose ancestors fled Great Britain in 1677 because of religious persecution there.

LIFE BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

 * A peaceful, nineteenth-century man with deeply religious, social, and political convictions, Roberts was not afraid to act on his beliefs, at times putting his life and future well-being at risk to do his duty as he understood and interpreted it. Roberts believed unquestioningly in his faith, which clearly was tested during the Civil War. In an article he wrote thirty years after the war began, Roberts described growing up in Burlington County, New Jersey, which was part of the underground railroad to Canada and freedom for escaped slaves. “Many are the tales I have heard of the wrongs and outrages they suffered from their cruel taskmasters;” Roberts wrote; “Under such influences I grew to manhood, hating the very name of slaveholder.”


 * Roberts first introduction to Virginia was when he attended Quaker Benjamin Hallowell’s Alexandria Boarding School in 1839–1840, where be learned to be a surveyor. Jonathan Roberts married Abigail Amanda Haines in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 3, 1842. He and his wife had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood: Achsah; Franklin; Kendall; Phillip; Anna Maria; Jonathan, Jr.; and Mary Ella. They lived on the 400+ acre Cedar Grove farm roughly five miles west of Mount Vernon and just south of the old village of Accotink between the Accotink Creek and Pohick Bay. Today, Roberts’s Cedar Grove farm is protected and partially accessible as part of the Accotink Bay Wildlife Refuge, US Army Garrison, Fort Belvoir, Virginia.


 * Roberts was also one of the socio-agrarian pioneers in the late-1840s Quaker experiment to bring scientific farming methods to Fairfax County and northern Virginia to prove to men he referred to as the First Families of Virginia (FFV)—the local landed gentry and slave owners—that tired tobacco lands could be farmed productively and profitably without the need for slave labor. He and his family raised milk cows and pigs, and grew corn, wheat, and rye. According to the Alexandria Gazette, his Cedar Grove orchards produced the finest peaches in Fairfax County.


 * Roberts also was a surveyor in northern Virginia, which included two failed elections for county surveyor in 1852 and again in 1858. This training and experience throughout Fairfax County served him well later during the rebellion, not only as an army scout and guide, but also as a contributor through General Philip Kearny, U.S.A., to the topographical engineers working on the 1862 map for General George B. McClellan, the second commander of the Union’s Army of the Potomac.


 * Originally an active Whig, he later became a strong Union man, who supported the fledgling Republican Party under President Abraham Lincoln and then served in the Restored Union Government of Virginia during the Civil War. Eventually, he became a Radical Republican during Reconstruction, strongly opposed to what he thought were the far too lenient policies of President Andrew Johnson.


 * Yet, he pushed the boundaries of the Quaker testament against war as a direct result of the rebellion in his backyard. Viewed as a “Yankee” and “black abolitionist” by his political foes and secessionist neighbors, he escaped several attempts to lynch him before and during the war. After First Manassas/Bull Run, the confederates put a $1,000 price tag on his head.


 * In early 1861, Jonathan Roberts became increasingly vocal in his opposition to both secession and slavery. He clashed in Fairfax County Clerk of Courts Alfred Moss at a public meeting in January, at which noted secessionist James W. Jackson threatened to lynch him on the spot because of his political views. The day after Virginia voted to secede, Jackson killed Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth at his hotel in Alexandria, just before he was killed by one of Ellsworth’s men. A week later, a group of vigilantes under the leadership of Captain Frederick R. Windsor of the 60th Virginia Militia tried to forcibly expel a group of local “incendiaries’ – northern men like Roberts for favored the Union and the abolition of slavery – at a series of meetings at the old Valley Church on Telegraph Road in Fairfax County. Sometime around Virginia’s popular vote on secession, Fairfax County Justice of the Peace Dr. Richard C. Mason intervened to stop of group of unnamed men from the West End outside Alexandria who rode to hang Roberts one night. When Mason asked the men why they wanted to hang Roberts, they told him that they heard Roberts would free all the slave by the next sunrise if he had his way.


 * Captain Windsor and Roberts confronted one another again on the day that Virginia voted to secede. An armed Windsor and his armed cavalry backed the polling place at Accotink so pro-Union men could not vote. Roberts rallied the Union men and led them into the polls to vote. Accotink was a Union enclave, and voted 76 to 19 to remain in the Union, but the rest of Fairfax and Virginia did not, and consequently seceded on May 23, 1861.


 * On June 9, 1861, General Beauregard issued his arrest order for Roberts and five other men noted above. The Black Horse Cavalry spied on Roberts to gather information about his activities to use against him under Beauregard’s order. But thanks to advanced warning by a native Virginia blacksmith in Prince William County who was a friend of Roberts, the Confederate’s Black Horse Cavalry, following Beauregard’s orders, failed to arrest him on July 6, 1861. On that day, Roberts faced a life-altering decision, with only three realistic options. First, he could pack his possessions and leave his home to flee north, as other Quakers had done months before. Second, he could stay at home to protect his family and defend his Cedar Grove farm at Accotink, but risk either being arrested and imprisoned in Richmond—or hanged.


 * Instead, he chose a third option. Roberts escaped to safety in Alexandria, Virginia, behind Union lines, where in the long run he could do more for his family and the causes in which he believed. Riding his horse to Alexandria that same night with only the clothes on his back, He volunteered the next day—the Quaker’s First Day or Sunday—as a scout and guide for then Colonel Samuel P. Heintzelman, commander of the Third Division in Gen. Irvin McDowell’s newly formed but untested Army of the Potomac. Jonathan had no previous military affiliation or training, but was described by a Union soldier who knew him in 1861 as a “stout, hearty” man “who at times was worth a whole regiment to the Union cause.” Just two weeks later, this forty-three-year-old farmer and surveyor guided Col. Heintzelman’s division and Col. William B. Franklin’s First Brigade to and from the first major land engagement of the rebellion, First Manassas, on July 21, 1861.

LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR

 * After that first major land battle of the Civil War in his adopted Virginia, life would never be the same for the former farmer and surveyor. Roberts served as scout for the Union army from that first battle until November 1864. His knowledge of the local citizens and environment because of his surveying work made him an invaluable scout and guide for General Heintzelman and other Union officers. His new career paid him $75-per-month as a civilian scout and guide (September 12, 1861, to November 4, 1864), including the use of his horse.


 * In November 1861, Roberts was named in a Confederate scouting report as the scout who guided General Heintzelman’s troops on a reconnaissance to Occoquan and Colchester to expel the Confederate troops encamped near Pohick Church and pushed them back across the Occoquan Rover into Prince William County. General J. E. B. Stuart passed the intelligence of this Union reconnaissance to his commanding officer, General Joseph E. Johnston, who in turn passed the information onto Richmond.


 * Jonathan Roberts sustained his first war injury the following spring. In late May 1872, after completing a 50-mile scout during the day, Roberts returned home to have dinner with his family. His wife, Abby, told him that General Edward O. C. Ord wanted to see him immediately for an urgent mission: delivering dispatches from Secretary of War Edwin H. Stanton to Ord’s forces in the field near Dumfries in Prince William County. Stanton had requested Roberts personally for the dangerous job. Roberts went to see Ord, who gave him his orders. After securing a fresh horse, Roberts rode off alone at night to complete his mission. He eventually found Ord’s troops and gave them Stanton’s dispatches. On his return home, Roberts was thrown from his horse and injured. He was able to ride as far as Accotink, where he rested at the home of his brother-in-law and Accotink Home Guard, Levi B. Stiles until he resumed scouting a few days later.


 * In his dual role as scout and newly elected sheriff, Roberts was uniquely positioned to retrieve Fairfax County Court records that were taken by former clerk and later Major Moss, C.S.A. to the court house at Warrenton in Fauquier County for safe keeping. Part of the records Moss took was the vote on secession. When Roberts got word through his intelligence network of former slaves and freed African Americans that the Fairfax records were in Warrenton, he convinced his military superiors to give him a cavalry company to retrieve the county’s records. Warrenton then was under the control of General James B. Ricketts, who was in Heintzelman’s division that Roberts guided to First Manassas/Bull Run. Roberts secured the records, and had a copy made of the vote on secession and sent to Secretary Stanton so it could be used to punish returning rebels after the war. But nothing ever came of Roberts’s efforts to secure the evidence necessary to prosecute his former neighbors after the rebellion ended.


 * As the Army of the Potomac returned from its failed Peninsula Campaign in the summer of 1862, Scout Roberts rode to Chantilly once night to visit some Union friends and find out for himself what was going on during the flurry of troop movements in late August. The next day, he observed from his perch on a hill in Centreville what he thought were rebel troops at Manassas junction. He had to get this information to General Franklin in Alexandria, but he was arrested and detained for several hours by his own Union troops. Eventually he was released when they realized their mistake, and he rode more than twenty miles to alert Franklin The next day Roberts met Franklin at Fairfax Court House and once again guided him to the battle-front, only to find General John Pope’s forces in full retreat, which Franklin could not stop.


 * The following year, 1863, Roberts spent much of his time guiding US cavalry companies to try to capture the Confederacy’s Gray Ghost, then Major John Singleton Mosby. He was injured for life during a Union cavalry charge near the village of Fairfax Court House after receiving word that than Major John Singleton Mosby and his partisan rangers were nearby plundering sutlers’ wagons. Once again, Roberts was thrown from his horse and this time knocked unconscious. Eventually, the Union cavalry returned when they discovered him missing, found him lying on the Little River Turnpike, and sent him home by train to Alexandria to recover. He recuperated in the abandoned home in the West End of former Alexandria and New Orleans slave trader, Joseph Bruin, a home Roberts later bought under the US Confiscation Act. While he was recovering, his youngest son, Jonathan, Jr., died and was buried in Alexandria’s Quaker Burial Ground.


 * In his role as Fairfax County Sheriff, in early 1863 Roberts was the court appointed “curator” Confederate Col. John A. Washington III’s Mount Vernon estate; Washington had been killed by Union soldiers early in the war. He was appointed to stop the “depredations” on Washington’s land by some of his former slaves, who were logging his forests and selling wood to the US Army. Ironically, some of these same former slaves filed claims again the Quaker sheriff and curator after the war for throwing them off Washington’s former estate, the only home some of them had known.

LIFE AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

 * Jonathan Roberts soon became associated with the Radical wing of the new Republican Party in northern Virginia. In 1866, while still sheriff, he testified about life during the early days after the war to the Congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction. While he struggled to find full time employment with the federal government, he was appointed a justice of the peace by the US military government during the occupation of Virginia. In 1869, he was selected as chairman of the Fairfax County Radical Republicans, his last known political office.


 * As 1869 ended, Roberts grew tired of his life in his adopted Fairfax County because of Reconstruction and the return his former secessionist neighbors, who resumed political power soon after the war ended. In 1870, Roberts and his family moved from Virginia to Marietta, Marshall County, Iowa, where, in his words, it was no disgrace to be a Union man. He returned to a simple life of farming with his two sons. He also failed in his efforts to become a US government agent for the Sac and Fox Nation of Native Americans. While living in Iowa, he waged a five-year battle with a Republican government to obtain an “invalid pension” for his war injuries while in the US service.


 * In 1881, his first wife, Abigail, died and was buried in the Marietta Cemetery across from his farm. Years after her death, Roberts had a premonition about a woman he had known from his youth, Rachel Clark Haines, who he later married in their native New Jersey. While living in New Jersey, Roberts penned his three “Quaker Scout” articles for the National Tribune, which he wrote to set the record straight in a thirty-year-old controversy with another Union scout, Judson Knight, about their respective contributions to General McClellan’s 1862 map.


 * Jonathan Roberts died in relative obscurity on March 30, 1901, in Clarksboro, New Jersey. He is buried with his second wife, Rachel, in Mickleton Friends Cemetery, East Greenwich Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey.


 * For more information about the life of Jonathan Roberts, see: