• |
• 

• Home
• Virginians Decide
  • Virginia in 1860
  • Slavery
  • Sectional Crisis
  • 1860 Presidential Election
  • Secession Begins and Compromises Fail
  • The Virginia Convention
  • Virginia Convention Votes Against Secession on April 4, 1861
  • Surrender of Fort Sumter and Lincoln's Call for Troops
  • Virginia Convention Votes For Secession on April 17, 1861
  • Referenda on Secession and Taxation, May 23, 1861
  • Loyal Conventions in Wheeling Restore Virginia to the Union
  • Civil War Begins
• Explore
• People
• Timeline
• Callie's Mailbag
• For Educators
• Feedback

Recruiting for Virginia

David Hunter Strother, Recruiting for Virginia, Pierre Morand Memorial, Special Collections, Library of Virginia.

Artist David Hunter Strother sketched a scene of recruitment of soldiers in Virginia. In the Potomac River valley of Virginia where he lived in the spring and summer of 1861, some men enlisted in the army to defend the United States from the Confederacy and some enlisted to defend the Confederacy from the United States. During the ensuing Civil War, Strother remained loyal to the United States.

Born on September 26, 1816, at Martinsburg, Virginia, David Hunter Strother was one of the best-known illustrators in the United States by the eve of the Civil War. In 1853 he achieved fame as "Porte Crayon" for a series of illustrated articles on Virginia published by Harper's New Monthly Magazine. He served in the Union army during the Civil War. His memoirs of the war were published in eleven installments in Harper's Monthly between June 1866 and April 1868. Strother died at Charles Town, Jefferson County, West Virginia, on March 8, 1888.