CHARLES TOWN, W.Va. — In the Zion Episcopal churchyard in Charles Town, West Virginia, lies the grave of John Yates Beall, one of the state’s most audacious Confederate partisans.
Beall was born in Jefferson County, Virginia, in 1835, and grew up in a wealthy, slave owning family. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, he inherited a plantation of his own and claimed more than 100 enslaved people as his property.
Believing his material interests were threatened by the election of Lincoln to the presidency, he didn't hesitate to join the Confederate cause, enlisting as the Captain of Company G, 2nd Virginia Infantry, which was attached to Stonewall Jackson’s Brigade.
John Yates Beall in Charles Town
Six months into the war, Beall received a severe chest wound in a skirmish with Union troops in Jefferson County, a wound that never fully healed. Undaunted, he attempted to rejoin Jackson during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign but was physically unable to keep up.
For a short time, it seemed he was done with war and went to Iowa, where he took a job at a gristmill under an assumed name. But when his Confederate identity was exposed, he fled to Canada and came up with a new plan to help the Confederacy—launching naval raids across the Great Lakes, using Canadian waters as a safe haven.
Raids from Chesapeake to Potomac
When he pitched the idea to the Confederate Government, Richmond hesitated, for they feared such actions might antagonize Great Britain and draw them into the conflict on the Union side. But Beall did not give up easily.
He soon adapted his plan to leading privateering raids in the Chesapeake Bay, and acquired two small vessels—the Raven and the Swan—recruited a band of eighteen men to launch raids across the Chesapeake Bay and into the Potomac River, and began disrupting Union supply lines and capturing merchant ships carrying goods to Union ports.
In November of 1863, Union forces caught up with him. He was arrested and held at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry but released in a prisoner exchange six months later.
Confederate Plans from Canada
As soon as he was released, he slipped across the Canadian border and traveled to Amherstburg, Ontario, where he learned Confederate agents were planning a dramatic prison break. Their target was Johnson’s Island, a prison camp off Lake Erie’s Ohio shore, where hundreds of captured Confederate officers were detained.
On September 18, 1864, Beall and his men seized a commercial steamer called the Philo Parsons after walking on as ordinary passengers and seizing control of the vessel in the middle of the lake. They then approached another ship, the Island Queen, and scuttled it.
Their next target was the U.S.S. Michigan, which guarded Johnson’s Island, but some of Beall’s crew lost their nerve, and Beall was forced to abort the mission. While one of his co-conspirators was arrested when they returned to Canada, Beall managed to slip away, determined to launch one more desperate scheme to derail a train near Niagara, New York, to free Confederate officers in transit.
The plan, however, was thwarted before it began. Beall was arrested on December 16, 1864, and imprisoned at Fort Lafayette. A co-conspirator agreed to testify against him in exchange for leniency.
Execution of John Yates Beall
Beall’s trial was swift and secretive. Held before a military commission under General John Adams Dix, his trial in January lasted only a few weeks. On February 8, he was found guilty of sabotage, espionage, and violating the laws of war and sentenced to death.
Surprisingly, many members of the public and some politicians appealed to Lincoln to spare him. It appeared that many were impressed by his courage and audacity. But Lincoln refused a pardon.
On the morning of February 25, 1865, with the end of the war near and the Confederacy in its death throes, Beall ascended the scaffold. Declining to wear a blindfold, his last words were: “I protest against this execution. It is absolute murder—brutal murder. I die in the service and defense of my country."
His body was returned to Jefferson County, West Virginia, and lies just a few blocks away from the spot where John Brown was executed just six years earlier.
Zion Episcopal Cemetery in Charles Town
A book by William C. Harris, The Life of John Yates Beall: Confederate Privateer, tells his full story. You can visit John Yates Beall’s grave today in the Zion Episcopal Cemetery in Charles Town, West Virginia.
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