The majority of the Commonwealth of Virginia\u2019s military self-destructed and left its ruins all over eastern Virginia in a few days. A mix of Commonwealth troops loyal to Richmond and Federal special forces attacked troops that showed signs of declaring their support for Lexington, and the casualties in both men and material proved devastating to all sides. The National Guard forces were particularly savaged, and perhaps a quarter of those stationed in the Commonwealth of Virginia\u2019s eastern counties survived the fratricidal conflict. Many of them streamed into the western counties without weapons or vehicles to their name. The Richmond loyalists suffered similar casualty rates, and there were fewer of them to begin with. The Virginia Defense Force represented Virginia\u2019s primary surviving fighting force in the end, and nearly all of them had declared for Lexington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The majority of the Commonwealth of Virginia\u2019s military self-destructed and left its ruins all over eastern Virginia in a few days. A mix of Commonwealth troops loyal to Richmond and Federal special forces attacked troops that showed signs of declaring[…]↓ 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-10271","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\/10271","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=10271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10272,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10271\/revisions\/10272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}