Sally Cary, Fairfax Harrison, and F.F.V. Pedigrees

I grab my trusty pocket knife, make short work of the tape, and open the box. Inside is a book, but not one I ordered. It’s a gift, courtesy of my friend Percy Gryce, a bookman’s bookman.

The Book

Sally Cary: A Long Hidden Romance of Washington’s Life by Wilson Miles Cary (1838-1914). Its format or size is common. Octavo they call it, 8vo for short. Cloth-bound in orange, plain as a church pew, marked only by a simple paper label on its spine. I found a single copy for sale; the majority reside in libraries.

On the front free endpaper (ffep), there’s an inscription, which I can’t fully decipher: “Gift of Fairfax Harrison[’s heirs?] to Engineer School Library & Museum – Fort Belvoir, VA (Ursula Harrison Baird & Sally C.F.H. [Cary Fairfax Harrison] Dieke)”

I turn to the title page. It was printed privately in 1916 by The De Vinne Press. There’s mention of “Notes by Another Hand.” Soon enough, I find that hand belongs to Fairfax Harrison. The “Prefatory Note” is signed F.H. Belvoir House, Fauquier County, Virginia, June, 1916.

Initially, the book felt out of my element, I wasn’t familiar with any of the names, except the one—Washington, of course. Yet, I knew I’d write about it, for writing is the path to knowing, and knowing fills the shelves with more books.

I checked the old quarterlies for reviews and found them. One reviewer remarked on the good fortune of acquiring such a handsome volume. Another mentioned the author, Wilson Miles Cary of Baltimore, a man with many ambitions but only one book to show for it—and even that, unfinished.

Ladies First

I’d seen the name Sally Cary [Fairfax] in print before. But my memory is as reliable as a politician’s promise. I open my Google Drive (the digital Villa of the Papyri of the South) and call her name.

I find her in:

– several volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman’s George Washington.¹
– Jay B. Hubbell’s essay “Thackeray and Virginia”.
– the footnotes of George Washington, the Virginia Period, 1732-1775.
– the niche volume The Library At Mount Vernon.
– the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography essay “George Washington in American Fiction”.
– Samuel Eliot Morison’s address “The Young Man Washington”
– the great-titled book George Washington’s South.
– The Diaries of George Washington.
– John Richard Alden’s George Washington: A Biography.
– Bernard Mayo’s lecture “George Washington,” delivered at Mercer University and included in his Myths and Men: Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson.

All covered similar ground—the same dirt, no matter where you dig. Young Washington, not yet etched into numismatic immortality, had ambitions vast as the frontier.  He was a man. His heart stirred. As men’s hearts do. Yes, “there were the slanders about his love affair with Sally Fairfax,” the wife of his friend George William Fairfax. But his character was unyielding. The understood lines. They weren’t crossed. Born A gentleman born, a gentleman he died.^[1] But I’m not here to sift dirt. You can read all about it on the information highway. The Lady of Belvoir isn’t my main focus today, and you can’t chase every rabbit that crosses your path.

Fairfax Harrison

A man wonders. What if money came down like manna and didn’t go bad in the morning, or better yet, what if you’d slid out of the womb with a silver toothpick dangling from your lips? There’d be signs. I’d basically become Mr. Fairfax Harrison.

Lawyer, Railroad Tycoon, historian, and Virginiana collector, Reginald Fairfax Harrison (1869-1938), lived in the shade of history. The son of Burton Harrison, secretary to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Constance Cary Harrison, a writer who, together with two cousins, were dubbed the “Cary Invincibles” and stitched the first few Confederate Battle Flags.^[1]

Harrison started his railroad work in New York, wrestling with legal matters for the Southern Railway. By 1896, he moved to Washington as its solicitor and penned a legal history in 1901. He rose to assistant president in 1903 and vice-president by 1906, steering the company through the panic of 1907. After a stint leading the Monon Railway, he took over Southern in 1913, facing war and economic collapse head-on. In 1917, as chairman of the Railroads’ War Board, he took the reins, driving a hard effort to unite the railroads and keep the government at bay. Even in the depths of the 1930s, he cut his own pay and fought for the company’s survival. By 1937, when he retired, Southern Railway had begun to rise again.

“Fairfax Harrison, son of Burton N. Harrison, private secretary to President Davis, and himself a brilliant inheritor of great traditions, gave encouragement at every stage of the work and critically read the MS. of the final operations of the war.”
– Douglas Southall Freeman^[2]

He was friends with Lyon Gardiner Tyler and corresponded with Classicists, Lord Fairfax, William Cabell Bruce and historians such as William E. Dodd, Ulrich B. Phillips, Charles McLean Andrews, Percy Lee Rainwater,  J. Franklin Jameson, and Douglas Southall Freeman.^[3]

Harrison came to the lettered world and planted his flag there. His natural gift for the written word mingled with his command of languages, both the moth-eaten tongues of antiquity and the new ones. He wrote on classical education, the renewal of the postbellum South, and horses—iron and equine. Things that called to such a man. But the old blood sang louder still. It sang of Virginia and her First Families.

Harrison’s commitment to the history of the Old Dominion and the South was not so much a calling as it was the very marrow of his being. He was devoted, almost reverently—a gentry monk, genuflecting at the altar of the Mother of States. When precious manuscripts or maps eluded his grasp, he took decisive action, ensuring that copies found their way into the hands of other scholars and institutions. He “originated the Virginia Historical Index,”^[4] born of a conviction that to chart the future, one must first map the past. He selected 120 volumes, each a repository of truths he deemed essential. His hope was that other states would follow his lead and do the same.

Old Harrison stood firm, a stubborn guardian against the tide of forgetting. A keeper of the flame. Memory’s custodian. A steadfast link to what had come before. It’s easy enough to understand why the Cary book found its way into print.

As with Mrs. Fairfax, I had encountered Harrison’s name before, a fact that only became apparent upon discovering its repeated presence in the footnotes and bibliographies of several major works I’ve read. Yet, most of his works remain obscure, hidden away. He’d not sell them. Nor print them in number. But the web. It found them. Dragged them into light. I know where they lie.

• Landmarks of Old Prince William, a Study of Origins in Northern Virginia, Volume I.
• Landmarks of Old Prince William, a Study of Origins in Northern Virginia, Volume II.
• Virginia Land Grants: A Study Of Conveyancing In Relation To Colonial Politics.
• A Selection of the Letters of Fairfax Harrison.
• Early American Turf Stock, 1730-1830: Being a critical study of the extant evidence for the English, Spanish and Oriental Horses and Mares to which are traced the oldest American Turf Pedigrees, Volume One, Mares.
• The Equine F.F.Vs: A Study of the Evidence for the English Horses Imported Into Virginia Before the Revolution.
• The John’s Island Stud (South Carolina), 1750-1788.
• The Belair Stud, 1747-1761.
• The Roanoke Stud, 1795-1883.
• Aris Sonis Focisque: Being a Memoir of an American Family, the Harrisons of Skimino, and Particularly of Jesse Burton Harrison and Burton Norvell Harrison.
• The Proprietors of the Northern Neck, Chapters of Culpepper Genealogy.
• The Devon Carys, Volume I.
• The Devon Carys, Volume II.
• The Virginia Carys: An Essay In Genealogy.
• A History of the Legal Development of the Railroad System of Southern Railway Company.
• The Southern Railway Belongs To The People Of The South, Address Delivered In Chattanooga, Tennessee 1914.
• The Southern Railway As A Factor In The Progress Of Georgia.
• The South and the Southern Railway.
• A Frenchman In Virginia.
• Cato’s Farm Management; Eclogues From the De Re Rustica of M. Porcius Cato, Done Into English, With Notes of Other Excursions in the Pleasant Paths of Agronomic Literature.
• Roman Farm Management: The Treatises of Cato and Varro Done into English, with Notes of Modern Instances. A Virginia Farmer.
• Miscellany.

A Call to Action

It’s unfortunate that no biography of Fairfax Harrison exists. Burke Davis’ The Southern Railway: Road of the Innovators, comes closest but lacks a bibliography and is only a partial treatment of the man. In my limited knowledge, even a dissertation is lacking. With his Collected Papers at several institutions in Virginia and Maryland, there’s a great research opportunity waiting for someone. I’m looking at you current and soon-to-be grad students.

I’d especially like to see the following published: His “notes concerning thoroughbred horses compiled for a planned publication, ‘Portraits of English Turf Horses before [George] Stubbs’ (copy of manuscript included).” And a catalog of his collection of books on the history of sport, both in the Fairfax Harrison Papers at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

Take a look at The Library of Virginia’s Fairfax Harrison collection, 1730-1931. It has the Virginia First: The 1607 Project written all over it. I would love to see more of his letters published. His correspondence is rich, covering many topics. A few examples from his Letters:

–“We have too few ancient place names left on the map of this vicinity and some day we may realize that the history of the U. S. did not begin in 1776.”

–“A year or so ago John S. Mosby, the Confederate raider, was spending a Sunday with me just before he died. (I live in the midst of the territory which was known as ‘Mosby’s Confederacy.’) In the course of conversation I discovered that this stout partisan also had been a youthful worshipper of Labienus, though to his cost, for he said that during our War between the States he several times undertook to imitate Labienus’ strategy, but never with success—’the Yankees wouldn’t fight like the Gauls’. That afternoon I looked out the passages about Labienus in the Commentaries and old Colonel Mosby read them aloud with a critical apparatus out of his own military experience and with the utmost gusto, but it must be admitted with a pronunciation of latin which would have shocked one of your classes: it was, however, probably not unlike that of Sir Walter Scott when he found to his mortification that the scholars of Naples could not understand his latin speeches at all.”

–“The subject is baleful and protentous in politics in the South today; but so long as religion and politics are the two things the Southern people take passionately, I do not see how they can be separated. When the South tolerates two political parties it will doubtless tolerate two religions, but not before.”

–“The war between the States suspended this difference of political opinion in the South. In order to stand against the conquering Republican party and its organization of freed negroes, Southern men waived all intellectual differences and united as Democrats to maintain the political domination of their race in the affairs of local government. The reason for this has existed until very recently, and perhaps still does in some communities, but the result has been political emasculation of the South in national life. The fear of the negro in local politics has caused Southern men to surrender their independence of opinion on all national questions and to stand upon the outworn principles of States’ Rights. As a result they have been used as mere counters by the Democratic politicians of the North and West.

The development of industry in the South and the habit of doing business across several State lines has, during the past ten years, demonstrated the inefficiency of principles which were formulated before the days of our existing methods of interstate communication and transportation, and this has caused a revolt of the more stirring Southern men against their bondage to a tradition. Some few have dared the social opprobrium of joining the Republican party, but more have continued to call themselves Democrats in order to have a voice at the primary. In their hearts they have longed for freedom, but there was no hope of articulate expression of their principles until a new party of opposition was launched. The mere name Republican has made as many political slaves in the South as it freed negroes.

There are many Southern men who believe as I do, as the result of experience, that a strong centralizaton of power in the hands of the Government at Washington is the only effective way to deal with the industrial problems which today face the American people, and they now, for the first time in a generation, have the opportunity to express their faith without assuming the hated badge of the Republican party.”

— “Dear Mr. Canfield: I have read with interest the letter of John Stuart Thomson to the New York Times, which you were good enough to send me, but with more interest your own contribution on the subject of the war. I am glad to see your temperature rising. The South is not at all Pro-German, and never has been. It has long been a pleasant game in the South, as well as in other parts of the United States, to twist the lion’s tail, and some of our Southern politicians are now engaged in that occupation, using the cotton situation for the purpose. They should not, however, be taken seriously.”

–“It is only frank, however, to let you know my judgment that the new ‘American Society’ will not get any real support in the South. This is not because the Southern people are not in sympathy, but because they are chary of following the lead of New York. Your list of Directors contains conspicuous names which the Southern people identify as ‘Wall Street’ and also many of the names of those who are supposed to have made fortunes out of the war.”

–“John Stewart Bryan, Esq., Richmond, Virginia. Dear Stewart: It may not be agreeable to remember, but, speaking historically, Bishop Cannon is a “Virginian” de vieille souche as ever were Washington and Lee. His spiritual ancestors were in Birkenhead’s plot of 1663; in Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676; in the Gloucester plant cutting of 1684; in the Warehouse riots of 1732; and in the Tory baitings of 1776. During all those heroic adventures they were “bond’’, but T. Jefferson set them ‘free’. Thereafter they swarmed South and West, Always warm of heart, emotionally generous, and militantly loyal, they have made indomitable soldiers. If they differed from Pilgrim Fathers they were nevertheless true puritans in their fundamentalism and obscurantism. To deny them their part in making the United States of today would be to shut one’s eyes to the strength of the Democratic party and to delete William Jennings Bryan and Dayton from the chronicles of America.”

–“While in England, on my way home, I made an excursion into Norfolk to see the Pocahontas portrait: and was received with cordial hospitality (and on the footing of a cousin!!) by a large, respectable, and quite charming Rolfe connection, who cherish their Virginia tradition with that of a (rather mythical) crusading ancestor.”

–“What modern ‘democratic’ Virginia really resents is the suggestion that she represents a ‘poor white’ tradition. That is the explanation of the general opprobrium in which Virginians hold Wertenbaker and his writings.”

Raises a glass to Percy:

“. . . as from one laborer In the vineyard to another expresses a common ambition for the future of the South. I salute you with best wishes.” – Letter to Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman, Richmond, Virginia. December 27, 1916.

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^[1] I used several sources for the bio. “Fairfax Harrison.” Dictionary of American Biography. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944. “Fairfax Harrison, An Appreciation”. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 46.2, 1938. “Fairfax Harrison”. William and Mary Quarterly 18.2, 1936. Other good sources on Harrison: “Who was Reginald Fairfax Harrison?”; Online Books Page; Archive results, He’s mentioned a bunch.

^[2] R. E. Lee, A Biography IV, p. 531.

^[3] See his A Selection of the Letters of Fairfax Harrison, his Papers and Correspondence across several institutions, at and Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: Historian of the Old South. Dillon, Merton L. Published by Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1985.

^[4] “Fairfax Harrison”. William and Mary Quarterly 18.2, 1936.

^[1] See Mayo’s “George Washington”.

Chase Steely

Chase Steely is a Tennessean, Veteran, and Student of all things Southern.

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