A Member Of Jefferson Davis' Confederacy

From Old Virginia Blog:

4:30 PM (10 hours ago)A Member Of Jefferson Davis' Confederacyfrom Old Virginia Blog by Richard G. Williams, Jr.




Confederate soldier's Bible makes its way back home to Lynchburg:





The obituary of Confederate veteran Dewitt Clinton Guy in the Lynchburg Daily Virginian of Jan. 7, 1889 noted: “He was true to his colors and never apologized for the part he took in the lost cause.”





That final notation also confirms that Guy still considered himself “a member of Jefferson Davis’ Confederacy.”





Complete story here.
From The Lynchburg News & Advance:

Bible makes exodus back to Confederate soldier's Lynchburg home




Credit: Jill Nance

A Bible belonging to a Lynchburg Civil War soldier has made its way from New York to the Lynchburg Museum.

By Darrell Laurant

Published: November 30, 2010

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The obituary of Confederate veteran Dewitt Clinton Guy in the Lynchburg Daily Virginian of Jan. 7, 1889 noted: “He was true to his colors and never apologized for the part he took in the lost cause.”



Guy’s part was to fight with the 11th Virginia Infantry throughout the Civil War, receiving wounds at the battles of Seven Pines, Gettysburg (where he may have been part of Pickett’s charge) and Drewry’s Bluff. By the end of the war, he was a prisoner at the notorious Point Lookout POW camp in Maryland. Forever after, he walked with a pronounced limp.



Only his name provides a clue to the ambivalence that Guy must have felt in taking up arms for the South. He was raised in upstate New York before moving to Lynchburg after the death of his father in a construction accident, and he was named for then-New York governor DeWitt Clinton.



“Maybe he just enlisted because of peer pressure, because everyone else was doing it,” said director Doug Harvey of the Lynchburg Museum. “I guess we’ll never know.”



What is known is that Guy carried a small brown Bible with him as he marched from Virginia to Pennsylvania to Maryland. And as of last week, that Bible has joined the ranks of the Lynchburg museum’s Civil War collection.



“It had been in my possession for quite a few years,” said Joan Steward of Spencerport, N.Y., DeWitt Guy’s great-great-grandniece by marriage, “and my mother had it for a long time before me. I didn’t want something to happen to me and have it sold at auction.



“My brother and I had a discussion about where to take it, and Lynchburg just seemed like the most appropriate place.”



Along with the Bible, Joan and her husband Doug brought some photographs of Guy and a short family history when they stopped in Lynchburg.



“I just got a phone call that was kind of unexpected,” Harvey said, “although I had received a letter about it a year or so ago.”



DeWitt Guy’s father had worked on the James River & Kanawha Canal, which originally brought him to Lynchburg. Later, he migrated north to help with construction on the Erie Canal, referred to by the more cynical New Yorkers as “Clinton’s Ditch.”



“He was killed by a cave-in while he was working on a lock in Lockport (N.Y.),” Joan Steward said. “After that, his family came back to Lynchburg.”



When the war ended, Guy returned to the small western New York town of Ogden to court and marry Martha Flagg, a young woman he had known before moving south. After the wedding, however, he and his bride traveled back to Virginia, where he became a partner in a wholesale grocery firm (Bigbie, Guy & Thaxton) and a Mason.



Even in death, Guy crossed the line between North and South. Buried in Spring Hill Cemetery in Lynchburg, he was eventually disinterred at the request of his sister-in-law and his body moved up to Spencerport to be buried next to that of his wife.



“It’s one of the few graves in a northern cemetery with a Confederate flag and insignia on it,” Harvey said.



Meanwhile, said Steward, her mother “was always fascinated by the story and tended his grave most of her life.”



The Bible is in surprisingly good condition (“We can exhibit it pretty much as is,” Harvey said), and some faded writing on the title sheet and the end page provides a small nugget of Guy’s war experience.



“The first date he has entered is the first day his unit saw combat,” Harvey said. “The last date was when he was in prison.”



That final notation also confirms that Guy still considered himself “a member of Jefferson Davis’ Confederacy.”








(Hat tip to Kenny Rowlette of the National Civil War Chaplains Museum in Lynchburg, Virginia)

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