The Winchester Medical College (WMC) building, currently located at 302 W. Boscawen Street, Winchester, Virginia, along with all its records, equipment, museum, and library, was burned on May 16, 1862, by Union troops occupying the city. This was "retaliation for the dissection of cadavers from John Brown's Raid". More specifically, it was in retaliation for the desecration they discovered of one of those cadavers, the body of one of John Brown's sons, identified years later as Watson. 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, Jeremiah Anderson) and a black boy was apparently tortured and killed there for favoring the Union.
The College never reopened.
Winchester and secessionism
According to the Encyclopedia of Virginia, "during the [Civil] war and after, Winchester enjoyed a reputation as a secessionist stronghold." Support for Southern slavery was therefore also strong. As in other Southern cities, there were some who opposed slavery and supported the Union, but they kept their heads down and their mouths shut. In any visible way Winchester, including its politicians, professionals, and intellectuals, was pro-slavery. The Piedmont region of Virginia, including Frederick County, was where secessionist sentiment was strongest in the state. From the Union point of view, Winchester was "a hot bed of treason".
Senator James M. Mason 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," 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, arguably the most hated and openly evaded federal legislation in the nation's history. He was the Chair of the Senate Select Committee investigating John Brown's raid and wrote its report, informally known as "the Mason report". He was also the Confederacy's leading diplomat, having been chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1861 the Confederacy sent him to Europe in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain diplomatic recognition or financial help from England or France (see Trent Affair).
Mason, the politician most identified with the "old South", was not only a white supremacist—most white Southerners and many Northerners were—, he believed that negroes were "the great curse of the country". Giving Blacks the vote particularly offended him; it was, he thought, the rule of the mob and the "end of the republic." Mason did not consider it "expedient or wise...to educate the Negro race at all, bond or free," and thought that freeing the slaves "would end...in their relapsing into utter and brutal barbarism." He opposed the "colonization project"—sending free blacks to Africa—as he believed, and said publicly, that they were much better off as American slaves. In short, Mason believed bondage was the best place for blacks. "Mason had a paternalistic relationship with the few slaves whom he owned, and he made the mistake of assuming that kindness and generosity were the norm for Southern slave holders."
Union troops in Winchester at first used Selma for regimental offices. The lower officers might not have known who Mason was, but they soon learned. In the first religious service after occupying Winchester, held in the square in front of the courthouse, Chaplain Noah Gaylord from the courthouse steps addressed "a large assemblage of citizens and soldiers[,] beside[s] our own regiment", and "preached a rattling sermon on the evils of secession":
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. Banks knew perfectly who Mason was and what he stood for.
Once the Union men using Selma learned that Northerners viewed Mason with "disdain and hatred", that they "reviled him", they proceeded to destroy his house, using pick-axes. The entire roof was removed, some time later the walls were pulled over, and anything burnable was chopped into firewood. They did their work so thoroughly that "from turret to foundation stone, not one stone remains upon another; the negro houses, the out-buildings , the fences are all gone, and even the trees are many of them girdled". Stone from the foundation was used to build Star Fort, nearby. As Mason wrote later, it was "destroyed, or rather obliterated". Mason never lived in Winchester again. 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.
Hugh and Hunter McGuire, father and son physicians The second most influential man in Winchester was arguably Hugh Holmes McGuire (1801–1875), founder of the Winchester Medical College; he was certainly the most distinguished doctor in northern Virginia. "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."
Even more a devotee of the Southern cause was his son Hunter Holmes McGuire (1835–1900), a graduate of and briefly professor of anatomy at the College. At the time of John Brown's execution he was studying medicine in Philadelphia, as many Southern students did. He was "acutely upset" that John Brown's body would travel through Philadelphia, where according to an announcement it would be embalmed. (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.) He organized a movement through which three hundred medical students attending the University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson Medical College, including him, left Philadelphia en masse on December 21st, 1859, on a "very large" special train for Richmond, paid for by the Medical College of Virginia. They were received there with "great enthusiasm" by an "immense throng", and addressed by Governor Wise.
When the war arrived, he became medical director of the Confederate Army of the Shenandoah and the personal physician of Confederate Generals Stonewall Jackson and Jubal Early. "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." In 1907 he published in a book papers sponsored by the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans of Virginia, supporting the Lost Cause tenets that "slavery [was] not the cause of the war" and that "the North [was] the aggressor in bringing on the war". The book quickly sold out and required a second edition.
Richard Parker Richard Parker, the judge who, in nearby Charles Town, sentenced John Brown to death, lived in Winchester.
Stonewall Confederate Cemetery The Stonewall Confederate Cemetery contains monuments from every Confederate state, plus Kentucky and Maryland, plus monuments to the unknown Confederate dead. 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".
There are Confederate cemeteries all over the South, but they are almost all local. There are places with the flags of every Confederate state, such as the Confederate Memorial of the Wind and Stone Mountain. But a cemetery with a stone marker for each Confederate state, with burials of soldiers from each state: there is no other in Virginia, and only two others elsewhere (Marietta Confederate Cemetery and McGavock Confederate Cemetery, in Georgia and Tennessee respectively).
The Winchester Medical College
The medical school in Winchester was the first in the state. The Medical College of the Valley of Virginia was incorporated December 30, 1825, by the Virginia General Assembly. It operated from 1826 to 1829. The location is not known, but it was not the same location as the Winchester Medical College, as Preservation Historic Winchester mistakenly suggests. 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". the home survives and is still in use, at 103 North Braddock Street. Hugh Holmes McGuire was one of the three physicians on the staff. "It is also possible the early classes, which only had six or seven students, moved from the office of one faculty member to another, since they all lived within three blocks of each other, the article posits." The college closed after the senior physician, John Esten Cooke, left for Transylvania University.
McGuire, 20 years later, would restart the medical school as the Winchester Medical College, incorporated March 11, 1847. The state Legislature loaned it $5,000 (), and later accepted ownership of the college as repayment for the loan. The college built a red brick building at the northwest corner of Boscawen and Stewart streets, near Mason's and McGuire's homes. 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. It graduated 72 students before it closed in 1861, soon to become a hospital, when Virginia seceded and joined the Confederacy, at the beginning of the Civil War, and all the students enlisted. Hugh's son, Hunter Holmes McGuire, began his medical studies there.
Like other Southern medical schools, most bodies used in the dissection laboratory were Black. The owner of a slave could do with his (doctors were less interested in female bodies) corpse whatever he wanted. Donating it to a medical college disposed of it without using slave time to dig a grave. 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. "The majority of cadavers were African-American—not because they were being targeted, but they were more vulnerable to grave-robbing. Municipal cemeteries—they were open, they were unguarded, whereas white folk of the time were buried in churches, [or] on their own property, and it was very difficult to steal them."
For this reason, the College was both feared and hated by the Blacks of Winchester. One Virginia student at the Winchester Medical College took evident satisfaction recounting the terror with which African-American inhabitants of the town regarded student doctors like himself, and boasted of his midnight raids on the graves of his black neighbors.
Four bodies taken by Winchester Medical College
Those killed during the raid Human bodies for student dissection were in short supply. (See Body snatchers.) They were only from Harpers Ferry, much closer than the next closest medical school, the Richmond Medical School, and there was a train every day. Hearing of the ten killed during the raid, some students went down to Harpers Ferry in search of bodies. An anatomy faculty member may have accompanied the students.
All sources report that the train stopped before Harpers Ferry, everyone had to get off, and the students found a body: