Reginald Fairfax of 19th Century Fairfax County

This article is a biographical sketch of Reginald Fairfax, who owned land in the Vienna area in the mid-1800s. The article is based on a post I made on Nextdoor in early 2021, looking at the history of the area northwest of Northeast Vienna, Virginia.

Introduction: From the Northern Neck Land Grant to Reginald Fairfax

To set the stage, we’ll start with the colonial era and the history of Fairfax County, Virginia. In 1649, as part of the political maneuvering growing out of the English civil war, the exiled Charles II awarded to a group of loyalists some five million acres of land in Virginia between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. This is known to history as the “Northern Neck” land grant. The vast swath of territory included all of modern day Fairfax County. By 1719, the entirety of the land grant was consolidated in the hands of Thomas Fairfax, the sixth Lord Fairfax. In 1843, the ninth Lord Fairfax gave to his fourth son, Reginald, some 8,000 acres that included present-day Reston as well as an additional 481 acres in what is now the Vienna area, according to Spencer Potter’s “Reston, Virginia: An Unfinished History.” (See Figure 1).

Figure 1: Bryan Fairfax land in northwest Fairfax County, a portion of which Reginald Fairfax would eventually own some 80 years later.

Reginald Fairfax and the U.S. Navy

When Reginald acquired the land, he was 21 years old and a US Navy officer on the USS Union, an experimental steamship. He had entered the service in 1839 at age 17. During his 22-year career with the Navy, he served on several ships, including vessels in the African and Pacific Squadrons, in addition to duties ashore and a leave of absence in 1848. In 1847, he was on a store ship that called in Vera Cruz during the war with Mexico. (After the war, he applied for a land grant eligible to veterans of the conflict but was rejected). In 1849, he was on officer on a ship with a special mission: “Exploration of the Gulf Stream.” (See Figure 2).

Figure 2: Reginald Fairfax With the U.S. Navy in the Western Hemisphere

Between 1850 and 1853 for some 32 months, Reginald remained outside the United States aboard the sloop-of-war USS Dale. The Dale was conducting antislavery patrols off the west coast of Africa between Monrovia, Liberia and Luanda in what is now Angola. (See Figure 3). The ship spent 450 days at sea during this time and traveled 46,000 miles. In 1851, the Dale, with Reginald on board, was pulled off patrol and sent to the Comoro Islands, between Madagascar and Africa’s east coast. The Navy Department had ordered the African Squadron to investigate a hostage incident from the year before on Johanna Island in the Comoros. The African Squadron then tasked the mission to the Dale.

Figure 3: Reginald Fairfax and the U.S. Navy’s African Squadron: Antislavery Patrols off Africa’s West Coast and a Hostage Incident Off the East Coast

In the hostage incident, Sultan Selim, frustrated at being cheated by whalers, had demanded that the captain of an American whaler pay for what a previous captain had stolen. When the American refused, Selim held him hostage. Word made it slowly back to Washington, as was typical in that era for events halfway around the world. Well before the Navy’s order to intervene, Selim had released the hostage unharmed. Nonetheless, when the Dale arrived at Johanna Island, the captain demanded compensation from Selim for the detention. Selim refused, and the Dale bombarded the island. The Dale then dispatched Reginald Fairfax and a landing party to negotiate with Selim, who continued to refuse, resulting in more bombardment. Reginald went ashore again, and finally Selim capitulated in return for a much smaller fine. As a National Archives account puts it, “The Dale was a small ship—only 117 feet…in length and carrying sixteen 32-pounders—but it was more than adequate to coerce damages from the Sultan Selim.” Later that same month, the Dale intervened in an incipient mutiny on an American vessel. Anti-slavery patrols, gunboat diplomacy, and maintaining order on the high seas: the Dale’s experiences, and by extension Reginald’s, highlight some of the activities of the antebellum US Navy.

Reginald Fairfax almost certainly participated in another incident that’s recorded to history, judging from the timing of his service on the steamer USS Massachusetts

. The incident was The Battle of Port Gamble. In 1856, the Massachusetts intervened at Port Gamble, a logging community on Puget Sound, to protect native tribes on American soil. These tribes were the victims of raids by the Haida tribe from Canada. After the Haida refused the Massachusetts’s offer of transport back to Canada with their canoes in tow, the Massachusetts and another vessel shelled the raiders’ encampment until the Haida relented. One sailor died in the engagement and is popularly considered the first American battle death in the Pacific. (Historian J. Overton is skeptical of the claim, however, in view of the many years that the US Navy had already been operating throughout the Pacific and East Asia).

Lieutenant Fairfax, Civil War, and the Confederate Navy

The onset of the Civil War ended Reginald’s career with the Navy. But not, for a short time, his career as a naval officer. In late 1860, several weeks after the election of Abraham Lincoln and as the sectional conflict in the United States careened towards civil war, the New York Herald’s correspondent in Panama reported:

“The secession movement in the United States has occasioned a profound sensation here, particularly among the naval officers attached to the Pacific squadron….Lieut. Reginald Fairfax, of Virginia, who is attached to the St. Marys, it is understood… tendered his resignation; but in view of the fact that the officers and crew of that vessel are soon to be relieved, he was induced to withdraw it.”

But only temporarily. Two days after Fort Sumter, on 15 April 1861, as sentiment in Virginia swayed decisively towards secession, Lieutenant Reginald Fairfax resigned his commission in the US Navy. Two months after that, he entered service in the Confederate Navy as a Lieutenant. He served at the Gosport Navy Yard in the Norfolk area and in the naval defenses of the James River. It was while participating in the latter that Reginald Fairfax, 40, died in 1862. He died unmarried but not unloved, judging from this account by his niece, the memoirist Constance Cary Harrison:

“A solemn scene was to be enacted in the July moonlight at Hollywood [Cemetery, in Richmond] when they laid to rest my own uncle, Lieutenant Reginald Fairfax, of whom in the old service [that is, the Navy] of the United States, as in that of the Confederate Navy, it was said ‘he was a spotless knight.’ My uncle, who had commanded a battery on the James, was prostrated by malarial fever and taken to Richmond, where he died at the Clifton House, tenderly nursed by his sisters. He was to my brother and me a second father.”

Reginald Fairfax’s death spared his estate from suffering a consequence for his betrayal of the United States. In 1863, the US Marshal, acting under the Confiscation Act, attached the property that remained in Reginald’s name. Soon after, however, the District Attorney informed the court that Fairfax was dead, and the court dismissed the matter.

Conclusion: The Fate of Reginald’s Land

As for the Fairfax land of our interest: in 1852, a decade before his death and in the midst of his naval career, Reginald Fairfax sold his Reston and Vienna-area property to Benjamin Thornton of Orange County. (See Figure 4). He made the sale through his local representative, Joshua Gunnell of the ubiquitous Gunnell family. The sale of the approximately 8600 acres, at $5 per acre and totaling some $43,000, almost certainly would have earned Fairfax more than he had received in salary over the course of his naval career, judging from his pay for 1847: $690 plus allowances for rations and travel.

Figure 4: Reginald Fairfax Sells to Benjamin Thornton

[Sources for this post: Alexandria Gazette; Annette D. Amerman, “Suppression of Piracy on Johanna Island, August 1851”; Baltimore Sun; Bradford (PA) Reporter; Nathaniel Cheairs et al, ed., Refugitta of Richmond: The Wartime Recollections, Grave and Gay, of Constance Cary Harrison; Daily Republic; Historic Records Center of the Circuit Court of Fairfax County, deed book Q3 page 274; Beth Mitchell, “An Interpretive Historical Map of Fairfax County Virginia in 1760”; Kenneth R. Stevens, “Of Whaling Ships and Kings: The Johanna Bombardment of 1851,” Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives; Louisville Daily Courier; New Orleans Times-Picayune; New York Daily Herald; New York Times; Newspapers.com (for various papers cited previously); Spencer Potter, “Reston: An Unfinished History”; Public Ledger of Philadelphia; US Naval Academy Musuem, Preble Hall podcast, Episode 9, “The Battle of Port Gamble with J. Overton”; US Navy and Marine Corps Registries, 1814-1992, via Ancestry.com; Virginia Chronicle/Library of Virginia.]

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