John Rowan and the Jefferson Guards led the volunteers into Harpers Ferry three hours later, meeting no opposition and noticing that while 15,000 weapons had been destroyed, townspeople had saved the buildings and weapon-producing machinery inside.

VMI professor Thomas Jonathan Jackson arrived on Monday, April 29 and organized the volunteer craftsmen, laborers and farmers of the ten drilled companies into regiments, revolutionizing their notions of war in a short time.

Troops burned the Shepherdstown bridge (private Henry Kyd Douglas realizing that his father was a stockholder in the property being destroyed) and joined Johnston's army four miles south of Charles Town.

[5] The 2nd Virginia was accepted into Confederate service in mid-July, then ordered on July 18 to Manassas Junction (traveling by railroad) to reinforce General P. G. T. Beauregard's Army of the Potomac.

Later, the unit was involved in Jubal Early's operations in the Shenandoah Valley and finally surrendered at the end at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, with 9 officers and 62 men.

Nadenbousch (initially of Company D, the Berkeley Border Guards, raised at Martinsburg); Lieutenant Colonels Francis Lackland (a VMI graduate of the same 1849 VMI class as Col. Allen, who would be hospitalized with pneumonia and die in September 1861); Raleigh T. Colston (initially of Company E, the Hedgesville Blues, and who became the unit's colonel after Nadenbousch was forced to retire following complications after the Battle of Gettysburg and who died at the Battle of Mine Run in November 1864), and William W. Randolph; and Majors Francis B. Jones, Edwin L. Moore, and Charles H. Stewart.