Union League Club of Portsmouth (1862-?)

Bennett White, SMC Intern for Spring 2023


The Union League Club of Portsmouth was a Unionist political organization founded in Portsmouth, VA, on July 29, 1862. Union Leagues were Republican social clubs typically established Northern cities during the Civil War to provide political and financial support for Abraham Lincoln’s war effort. Unionists, a minority of whom lived in the South, were people opposed to secession and remained loyal to Lincoln’s government. However in May 1862, Northern troops captured the Confederate controlled cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth, VA—as well as Portsmouth’s prized Gosport Naval Yard—and would occupy most of southeastern Virginia and Northeast North Carolina throughout the remainder of the war.[1] Federal occupation would pro-Union community members living in southside Hampton Roads the ability to meet en masse to root out Confederate sympathizers in the two cities and further entrench Republicans within local city governments. The men of Portsmouth’s Union League still considered the Federally occupied areas of Virginia to be a part of the Union, and thus acknowledged the military government based at Fort Monroe and the Restored Government of Virginia (led by Francis Harrison Pierpont) to be the legitimate governing bodies in Virginia, not the Confederate capitol in Richmond.[2]

William H Lyons 

Source: Portsmouth Portrait Photographs, 

MSS 0000-669 (SMC)

The Portsmouth Union League’s founding member and first elected president, William H. Lyons, was a machinist at Gosport and informant for U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, providing him secret blueprints of the ironclad Merrimac (C.S.S. Virginia) and the Confederacy’s plans to attack federal ships while Gosport was still under rebel control.[3] Once under the protection of the federal military government, Lyons’s Union League Club of Portsmouth performed a variety of duties that furthered the Unionist cause in Hampton Roads. The Portsmouth Union League sought firearms from Union troops to protect Norfolk and Portsmouth from potential rebel attacks, reported suspicious community members suspected of having Confederate sympathies, raised money for the Northern war effort and the local poor, and actively nominated its members for political offices in Portsmouth.[4] Many of the League’s members served Portsmouth’s city government both during and after the war. This allowed the League increased access to and influence over local politics within occupied Portsmouth and Norfolk.


Lyons and other executive members recruited new initiates from the docks, warehouses, and workshops of the Gosport Navy Yard. Gosport employed hundreds of laborers and was one of the most advanced shipyards in the country that served as a vital naval repair facility for the Union Navy during the Civil War.[5] League members also canvassed the many wharfs along Norfolk’s waterfront for likeminded Union men to join their ranks. The League continued to grow its numbers by admitting Northern troops stationed in Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Suffolk. For example, on September 10, 1862, Lyons waived the traditional initiation requirements to admit eight infantrymen belonging to 58th Pennsylvania Regiment, their military service provided obvious proof of their loyalty to the Union.[6] Many additional members hailed from communities across Southeastern Virginia, including Norfolk, Portsmouth, Western Branch, Princess Anne County, Suffolk, and Isle of Wight.[7] They were local merchants, shopkeepers, shipwrights, and farmers who saw the Union League Club as a way to both improve their social station and demonstrate their loyalty to the Union. Due to the protection provided by Federal soldiers, the existence of the Union League Club of Portsmouth stands as a unique example of organized Unionist activity in the South and was one of the only known Union League Club chapters located in Confederate states during the war.


Perhaps the most unique aspect of the Portsmouth Union League was its members’ routine involvement in local political affairs. Prior to the war, Norfolk and Portsmouth’s city governments were dominated by Southern Democrats (as was the case in the vast majority of polities within the antebellum South), and the League’s Republican members jumped at the opportunity to populate municipal posts with ardent Union men. Federal military officials, despite declaring martial law at the beginning of the occupation, quickly realized they could not adequately manage every quotidian detail of municipal governance. In garrisoned towns like Norfolk and Portsmouth, Federal authorities revived civilian governments and relied on non-military officials to carry out routine administrative duties.[8]


Minutes from Portsmouth City Council meetings spanning from 1862–64 revealed that at least twelve League members were elected and appointed officials in Portsmouth’s city government during that same time span. Daniel Collins, a shipwright by training and League member since 1862, was elected mayor of Portsmouth in May of 1863 and remained in office until 1865.[9] Another prominent League member, Philip Gard Thomas, would eventually become the mayor from 1870 to 1871.[10] League men also populated various other council positions. Through running its members in local elections, the League successfully elected members W.W. Stephenson, Samuel Gildersleeve, Thomas Godwin, and William D. Dobbs for seats on the Portsmouth City Council by May 1863. Other members, including William F. Parker, James Hayes, Henry Fauth, William Lawrence, and John Henry Burroughs were appointed to positions ranging from Clerk of the Council to School Commissioner.[11] By taking advantage of the lack of Democrat opposition, the Union League attempted to seize local political power by filling Portsmouth’s city government with radical Republicans.


The League was also active in national politics to a limited extent. In early 1864, the Grand Union League of Maryland invited the Portsmouth League to send a delegate to the National Convention of the Union Party, which was held in Baltimore on June 7-8, 1864. There, the Union Party—the temporary name Republicans gave their party to differentiate themselves from Peace Democrats leading up to the 1864 presidential election—nominated Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson for the presidential ticket. William H. Lyons acted as Portsmouth’s representative and drafted a set of resolutions which endorsed Lincoln for reelection upon his return.


As loyal Union men, the Portsmouth League steadfastly supported Lincoln’s reelection. Lincoln provided the best chance to return the United States back to the country envisioned by its Founders, and the “crushing out of treason” was part and parcel of that process.[12] After the resolutions were unanimously adopted by the rest of the members, a printing committee was formed to publish the document in the Old Dominion, the Virginia State Journal (Alexandria, VA), and the Baltimore American.[13] Exact copies of the resolutions were printed in the Old Dominion on June 22, 1864, and in the Virginia State Journal on June 24.[14] The League also sent the resolutions to Lincoln himself. John Hay, Lincoln’s trusted administrative assistant, who would eventually serve as Secretary of State for William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, wrote to the Lyons on June 22, 1864, stating that “the President of the United States desired me to acknowledge the receipt of the resolutions of Lincoln Council No. 6 of Portsmouth, VA…”[15]


Unfortunately, the surviving Portsmouth Union League records end shortly after June 1864, with the last known meeting taking place on September 14, 1864. The final recorded meetings, however, involved electing a new group of executive officers, which would suggest the League continued their activities for some time after the records ceased. Nonetheless, the available minutes recorded by the League offered previously unknown insights into Unionist politics in the Civil War-era South, as well as provided a unique window into the daily lives of citizens living in a Union controlled region of Virginia previously held by the Confederacy.

 


Sources:

List of Members from the Minutes book from The Union League of Portsmouth, Virginia Records, July 29, 1862 – September 14, 1864, MSS 2016-088, Box 2, Small 2016 Collections, Sargeant Memorial Collection, Norfolk Public Library, Norfolk, Virginia, http://smcarchives.libraryhost.com/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=271&q=Portsmouth+Union+League.

Union League Club of Portsmouth Members List.xlsx

Sources:

 

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Abraham Lincoln to John A. Dix, October 26, 1862, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 5 (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1953), 476–78. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 5. (umich.edu).

 

Abraham Lincoln to John A. Dix, December 31, 1862, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 6 (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1953), Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 6. (umich.edu).

 

(The correspondence between Lincoln and Dix discussed an attempt by the citizens of Norfolk and Portsmouth to elect a representative to Congress for the next term beginning in January 1863. The League was involved by nominating one of its members, J. B. McCloud, for the position, but the election never materialized because of concerns over the validity of the election due to the ongoing conflict in Virginia.)


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