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232 The American Civil War
Washington, was a direct descendant of the
first President, George Washington (through
George's wife and family; he had no natural
children). So was Ella. She and Lewis each
had ancestry back to the first President's
family on both sides of their own parentage,
and accordingly Lewis and Ella were
themselves distant cousins by multiple
connections. Lewis was more than two
decades older than Ella and had been
married before. Ella evidently had little or
nothing to do with his two daughters, who
lived with relatives in Maryland, but she was
fond of stepson James Barroll Washington.
The war's preliminaries had fallen on
Lewis Washington with alarming savagery
the year before he married Ella. On an
October morning in 1859, several men used
a fence rail to batter down the door of
Washington's home, 'Beall Air,' near Harpers
Ferry, Virginia. The intruders - a detachment
from the marauding party directed by John
Brown - knew that Lewis owned relics of
George Washington and demanded them as
booty. They carried Lewis off as a hostage.
He witnessed, as a prisoner, the storming by
United States Marines of Brown's hideout at
Harpers Ferry. Directing the storming party
was Colonel Robert E. Lee, United States
Army. Among the first men to the door of
the stronghold was Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart,
United States Army, acting as an aide to Lee.
The year after Lewis's brief ordeal at the
hands of Brown's merry band, his new bride,
cousin Ella, moved into Beall Air. In late
1861, the couple moved from Beall Air to
Ella's family place at Clover Lea. She
attributed the need to relocate to 'the critical
condition of my health.' Since Lewis's home
stood in a mountainous region, and Clover
Lea plantation lay in the relatively swampy
ground near Richmond, contemporary
notions would have suggested (not
inaccurately) that health considerations
would actually militate in favor of Beall Air.
Perhaps Ella's concern was to be near her
own family to secure their assistance. Not
'Clover Lea,' home of Ella Bassett Washington,
photographed in the 1930s. (Author's collection)
long after the Washingtons relocated to
Clover Lea, their baby daughter Betty
died. In June 1863, Ella bore a son,
William D. Washington.
The 1862 campaign around Richmond
nearly resulted in the capture of the
Confederate capital and an early end to the
war. Fortunately for the Southern army, its
timid commander fell wounded at the end
of May and General R. E. Lee assumed
command. In a week of fighting
denominated the 'Seven Days' Campaign,'
Lee slowly and at great cost drove away the
besieging Northerners and bottled them up
against the James river. Lee won the week's
biggest battle with the largest charge he ever
launched during the war, at Gaines' Mill,
just five miles (8km) from Clover Lea.
In the aftermath, suffering wounded men
clogged the entire countryside. A major
hospital mushroomed next to the Bassett-
Washington property. The Richmond Whig