The Commonwealth of Virginia military largely left Richmond and the eastern counties after Commonwealth and Federal law enforcement officers burned downtown Lexington to the ground and kidnapped the mayor and his family. It was not an entirely bloodless affair. Most of the higher ranks were loyal to Richmond, while most of the enlisted soldiers were loyal to the rest of Virginia. The torching of Lexington was the proverbial straw that broke the camel\u2019s back. Firefights raged all over eastern and central Virginia for over a week, sometimes touched off by a unit moving without orders. Sometimes loyalty tests conducted by Commonwealth officials touched off the fighting when soldiers refused to be arrested for being insufficiently loyal to Richmond. Those units that made it to the west were rarely complete.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Commonwealth of Virginia military largely left Richmond and the eastern counties after Commonwealth and Federal law enforcement officers burned downtown Lexington to the ground and kidnapped the mayor and his family. It was not an entirely bloodless affair. Most[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diaries","uentry","postonpage-1","odd","post-author-charles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10270,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10269\/revisions\/10270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}