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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — On this date in 1861, federal troops took over Alexandria, the same day Virginia's secession from the Union went into effect, according to the Office of Historic Alexandria.
The occupation produced one of the war's earliest and most widely mourned casualties. Col. Elmer Ellsworth of the New York Fire Zouaves and Alexandria innkeeper James Jackson, an ardent secessionist, were both killed in an incident at the Marshall House hotel on King Street. The deaths made the two men martyred heroes in the North and South. The original Marshall House was demolished around 1950, and the site at King and South Pitt streets is now occupied by The Alexandrian Hotel.
That same day, Alexandria military units with hundreds of men loyal to the South gathered at the intersection of Prince and Washington streets before leaving the city to fight with the Confederacy.
The intersection would mark the date again decades later. On May 24, 1889, a Confederate monument known as Appomattox, commissioned by the Robert E. Lee camp of the United Confederate Veterans, was dedicated at Prince and Washington streets — the same location where Alexandria troops had mustered 28 years earlier on the day Virginia's secession took effect. The dedication ceremony drew a vast crowd and was overseen by Fitzhugh Lee, then the governor of Virginia.
The bronze statue stood at the intersection for more than 130 years. It was removed on June 2, 2020, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which owned it, after years of controversy and new state legislation authorizing localities to take down Confederate monuments. The group took the statue to an undisclosed location, and the pedestal was later moved to Bethel Cemetery in Alexandria.
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