Winchester Medical College
The body of John Brown's son, fighting against slavery in the raid on Harpers Ferry, had been dishonored: made into an anatomical specimen in the College's museum, with the label "Thus always with Abolitionists" (mirroring Thus Always to Tyrants, the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia).
In addition, students at the school collected and then dissected the bodies of three other members of Brown's troop (John Anthony Copeland Jr., Shields Green, Lewis Sheridan Leary) and a black boy was apparently tortured and killed there for favoring the Union.
[9]: 52 The most important man in Winchester in the Antebellum period was three-term Virginia Senator James M. Mason (1798–1871), owner of the estate Selma, overlooking the city.
Mason, who "spent his long career fighting against change,"[10]: xv represented Virginia in Congress from 1837 until he was expelled in March 1861 for supporting the Confederacy.
Mason's commitment to slavery can be concluded from the fact that he wrote the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,[11][12] arguably the most hated and openly evaded federal legislation in the nation's history.
"[10]: xvi Mr. Mason's residence became an object of much curiosity, and as a guard was detailed from the Thirteenth to protect the premises, we had an opportunity of becoming distantly acquainted with his family.
[16]Furthermore, the general in charge of the Union troops was Nathaniel Banks, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and Governor of Massachusetts, who sought the Republican 1860 vice presidential nomination, with Salmon Chase.
Once the Union men using Selma learned that Northerners viewed Mason with "disdain and hatred",[10]: xii that they "reviled him",[10]: xvii they proceeded to destroy his house, using pick-axes.
After his return to the U.S. in 1868—he was in exile in Canada—and living in Arlington, Virginia, he made a point of not hiring any negroes for household labor, going to some trouble to get whites for these positions.
"Although well advanced in years [he was 60], Dr. McGuire was with the cause so heartily that he accepted a commission as surgeon in the Confederate Army, and had charge of the hospitals at Greenwood and Lexington.
(In fact Brown's body did not stop in Philadelphia, and it was embalmed in New York; to distract the crowd a sham coffin was taken off the train on which his widow was travelling.)
"During the 1890s he headed a Confederate veterans association committee that analyzed history textbooks to make sure that the Southern viewpoint was presented fully and correctly.
At the dedication of the latter in 1879, Winchester invited racist Alabama senator John T. Morgan, who complained in his address of the Union plan to end slavery, "in defiance of the Constitution".
[31] A. Bentley Kinney offers what he calls an "educated guess": that it was "in a small brick office in the back yard of the McGuire home".
[29]: 43 [1]: 842–843 [32] The college built a red brick building at the northwest corner of Boscawen and Stewart streets, near Mason's and McGuire's homes.
[33] It had an operating amphitheater with a large dome for light (daylight), two lecture halls, a dissecting room on the third floor, and a chemical laboratory, as well as a museum-library and offices.
However free Black corpses were also used, as grave robbers plundered African-American cemeteries and potter's fields where the poor were laid to rest.
[42]: 127 These were buried without marker, clergy, or ceremony in "an unusual place" (so it would be forgotten): across the Shenandoah River from Harpers Ferry, in Loudoun County.
"On Sunday last [March 15, 1862] considerable excitement was caused by the discovery of the remains of a negro boy, about seven years of age, in the dissecting room of the College.
[16] According to the same letter from Winchester, the students and faculty had to leave with the withdrawing rebel troops, "for they committed all sorts of depredations on Union people, and the negroes especially".
A student, after a triumphal parade of the slippers and a bloviating description of the processes by which they were produced, heroically exclaimed, 'That's the way we se've you d—d Yankees when you come 'mongst us an' don't walk afteh ouh style!
According to the General, it had been given "to my present Aid [sic] in Richmond last April [1861] by a Captain Sommers of the Confederate States army, and a friend of the doctor who has the skeleton, and who flayed and tanned the skin.
However, Union troops, needing space for barracks, offices, and especially hospitals, used "all the buildings that could be commandeered into service: ...hotels, churches, and private homes.
[61] A letter to the New York World from Winchester, dated March 15, reported: In the Medical College, here, is preserved the body of John Brown's son, killed at Harper's Ferry, first skinned, and only the frame and muscles retained.
[62][63]Another report, dated three days later, says that "the muscles, veins and arteries [were] all preserved, the top of the cranium sawn off, and the lips purposely distorted in disrespect.
They stated that it was well known in Martinsville that Johnson brought back from Winchester the body of one of John Brown's sons, although they had no way of confirming the identity of the corpse.
The Winchester Medical School was burned to the ground by Union soldiers under General Banks on May 16, 1862, just before retreating as Stonewall Jackson's army came down the Shenandoah toward the city.
"[4]: 298 To understand the Union soldiers' reaction, one needs to realize how important John Brown, executed for treason in Virginia, was to the North.
[84]: 19–20 That it was left there, then, implies that it and the boy were there for the Union soldiers to find, as an insult to them, dishonoring their hero, and showing what they thought of pro-Union blacks.
[71]) Unsure of what her reaction might be, rather than give Johnson's letter directly to Mrs. Brown, the paper said editorially, it passed it on to her stepson John Jr., whom she was about to visit at his home in Put-In-Bay, Ohio.
