Washington and Lee University
Six diaries written by a Confederate soldier and providing a first-hand account of the Civil War in Virginia are now part of Special Collections at Leyburn Library, the result of a multi-donor gift to the University. Archivists and researchers would be delighted enough over the newly discovered set of diaries. What lifts this collection into a special category for W&L, however, is the identity of the diaries’ author: Alexander Sterrett Paxton, a member of the Class of 1861 who belonged to the famed Liberty Hall Volunteers, a company of Confederate infantry made up of W&L students.
“The diaries relate so well to Lexington and to Washington and Lee that it seemed very appropriate for them to have a permanent home in Special Collections,” said one of the 11 donors, a W&L alumnus who wishes to remain anonymous. “It was a pleasure to help make that happen.”
When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Alexander Paxton and other students at Washington College (as it was then called) enlisted in the Liberty Hall Volunteers. Their captain was James Jones White, a professor of Greek and Latin, and their name referred to Liberty Hall Academy, a predecessor to Washington College, and to a military unit with the same name that had fought in the Revolutionary War. The students became Co. I of the 4th Virginia Infantry, part of the Stonewall Brigade commanded by General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, a professor at neighboring Virginia Military Institute.
From 1861 to 1865, Paxton penciled his emotions and observations into six notebooks. He described the feeling when “the cannon balls from the enemy’s guns would whiz just a few feet above our bodies”; his admiration for Jackson’s “bravery & coolness”; and his surprise at “how strange that the better & kinder feelings of our natures should be thus changed” when shooting at the enemy. His diaries remained unknown to Washington and Lee and to the wider historical community until June 23 of this year, when some of his descendants put them up for auction.
The group of donors comprised another anonymous donor and members of the Fourth Virginia Infantry Association, reenactors from Indianapolis, Ind., including C.J. Roberts, president and CEO of the Tampa Bay (Florida) History Center, and David S. Klinestiver, an Indianapolis attorney.
Alexander Sterrett Paxton was born in 1840 in Rockbridge County. He started out as a private and wound up a second sergeant. He fought all over Virginia at the First Battle of Manassas, Balls Bluff, Cedar Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. He suffered wounds in three battles. After the war, Paxton became a teacher in and around Rockbridge County and in Tennessee, and he served as the principal of an academy in Statesville, N.C. He married twice and had five children. In 1908, he published Memory Days: In Which the Shenandoah Valley is Seen in Retrospection, with Glimpses of School Days and the Life of Virginia People of Fifty Years Ago. He died around 1914.