Chapter 7 - Berkeley Plantation
After the Seven Days Battles in 1862, the Union Army had retreated to Berkeley for protection provided by Federal gunboats in the James River.
Berkeley Plantation, twenty-two miles downriver from Richmond at Harrison’s Landing, was the birthplace of the ninth US president, William Henry Harrison. On July 8, 1862, the sixteenth US president, Abraham Lincoln, visited the plantation.
Around the same time, the Army bugle call “Taps” was arranged and played here for the first time, a sad foreshadowing of how much longer the war would last.
“I went to school at the University of Richmond and decided to get a job here. Are you between battles?”