Chatham Manor is a Georgian-style mansion home completed in 1771 by farmer and statesman William Fitzhugh, after about three years of construction, on the Rappahannock River in Stafford County, Virginia, opposite Fredericksburg.

It was for more than a century the center of a large, thriving plantation and the only private residence in the United States to be visited by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Her relatives sued, claiming that after the Dred Scott decision, slaves were legally incapable of choosing whether to remain enslaved or receive their freedom and enough money to establish themselves in another state.

Fitzhugh's daughter, Molly, married the first president's step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, and became a leading abolitionist together with her friend Ann Randolph Meade Page.

Their daughter Mary Anna, born at Ann Page's estate, later wed the future Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who freed the Custis slaves as the executor after his in-laws' deaths.

Fitzhugh named the mansion after the British parliamentarian William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, who championed many of the opinions held by American colonists before the Revolutionary War.

Fitzhugh sold the Chatham plantation to Major Churchill Jones, who had served under Col. William Washington and Gen. "Light Horse" Harry Lee.

Churchill's brother William Jones had long owned an estate, Ellwood Manor, in Spotsylvania County, and inherited Chatham around the time his wife of 40 years died.

Their 18-year marriage produced a daughter, Betty Churchill Jones, who in 1848 married her former tutor, James Horace Lacy of Mississippi, son of a Presbyterian minister.

Coalter died in 1838, so Chatham passed to his wife Hannah, who did not remarry (married women at the time could only hold property through their husbands).

Hannah Coalter owned 51 slaves in the 1850 census and, as an anti-slavery Methodist, unlike her late husband, tried to free enslaved people through her will upon her death in 1857.

[7] However, in 1848, Hannah's much younger half-sister Betty had married J. Horace Lacy, a prosperous businessman and slave owner at Ellwood Plantation, further to the south in the Wilderness area of Spotsylvania County.

When Lacy's court case took her freedom away, Mitchell, irate, loudly proclaimed how unfair this denial was, particularly as she feared being sent to a plantation in Monroe, Louisiana.

Aler, active in his church and unsure what to do with Mitchell, allowed her a 90-day pass to leave Fredericksburg in early 1860 on a tour during which she and one of her sons attempted to raise money to buy their freedom for $1000 (~$33,911 in 2023).

She gave speeches to church and political groups in Washington City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, raising enough money to return to Fredericksburg and buy her own freedom and that of her children.

An 1862 sketch by a Unionist New Jersey soldier during the Civil War shows some buildings at the Chatham site that were long gone by the time historians began speculating that most slave dwellings were likely to be in the "rear" or the field-side area of the estate.

[13] His wife and children remained at Chatham until the spring of 1862 when Union troops' arrival forced them to abandon the building and move in with relatives across the river in soon-beleaguered Fredericksburg, and after its fall later to Pulaski County.

Using pontoon bridges, Burnside crossed the Rappahannock River below Chatham, seized Fredericksburg, and launched a series of bloody assaults against Lee's Confederates, who held the high ground behind the town.

One of Burnside's top generals, Edwin Sumner, observed the battle from Chatham while U.S. artillery batteries shelled the Confederates from adjacent bluffs.

Assisting them were volunteers, including the poet Walt Whitman, Clara Barton (who later founded the American chapter of the International Red Cross), and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (as of 2015 the only woman awarded the Medal of Honor).

He later wrote a published description that, outside the house, at the foot of a tree, he noticed "a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc.-about a load for a one-horse cart.

Years later, when three additional bodies were discovered, the remains were buried at Chatham at the outskirts of the again-famous gardens, in graves marked by granite stones lying flush to the ground.

When not on duty, Union pickets slept at Chatham; Dorothea Dix of the United States Sanitary Commission operated a soup kitchen in the house.

When the Lacys returned in November 1865, over 750 panes of glass had been broken, blood stains spotted on the floors, graffiti marred its bare plaster walls, and much of the interior wood paneling had been removed for firewood.

Over the subsequent years, the Union Burial Corps removed many soldiers' remains from the gardens and lawn for reburial at the new national cemetery in Fredericksburg.

Unable to maintain their home properly without enslaved people, they moved to their house known as "Ellwood" and sold Chatham in 1872 to a Pennsylvania banker for $23,900 (~$542,162 in 2023).

[17] Betty Lacy helped found the Ladies Memorial Association of Fredericksburg, establishing the Confederate Cemetery, and her husband traveled and made speeches to raise money.

They also added a large, walled English-style garden designed by the noted landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman on the east side.

However, the DeVores sold Chatham in 1931 to move to Washington D.C., where they built a townhouse later also designated a historic site (and once offered to become the official residence of the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court).

The last private owners, Northern Neck native and General Motors executive John Lee Pratt and his wife, purchased the Chatham estate (shrunken to 256 acres) from the Devores in 1931 for $150,000 (~$2.42 million in 2023) cash.