But a moment when you enlist, or are discharged, from the army--as happened for thousands at this camp--is a doorway of life. At NIAHD we love to stand in those and try to peek through.

Mainly, what my students took away from this is right--it's revelatory to 'see' all this in a place that we generally do not associate with the colonial era, on 'new campus' far from our 'ancient' buildings. The built environment of the College Camp was ephemeral.

He'd just been in the battle at Green Springs + seen death for the first time at war. He said he had to "endeavor to conquer this disposition or weakness" because the sight sickened him so. Pension records have plenty of files of people whose hardest service day saw shots fired but no one killed.

These Continental Army camp sites around the country were cosmopolitan in the way the military still is--people from other states, and social classes, who never would have otherwise had reasons to meet each other. I've thought a lot about what Ebeneezer Denny said in his diary about this time:

I do feel a bit patriotic about this--not because I think that Patriots had in general the superior moral position (they didn't, esp on slavery). But because this is full pluralism on display, it's people figuring out how to get along, the proverbial 'common cause'. And because it's just... strange.

One of my students came to believe after this class session that Robert Mursh, a Pamunkey alumnus of W&M's Brafferton Indian school, having served under Lafayette, would have been at this site in September 1781. She poignantly imagined him passing the Brafferton, closed, on his way to Yorktown.

James Harris, part of a very old free Black family from Charles City County, probably served at the camp--his pension app says he served at 'stations around the city' before being deployed to Monmouth, Valley Forge, etc.

"The people hearing that we came from the backwoods, and seeing our savage-looking equipments, seemed as much afraid of us as if we had been Indians. We took pride in demeaning ourselves as patriots and gentlemen, and the people soon treated us with respect and great kindness..." -Philip Slaughter

Cornwallis had burned the new barracks on the way out of town, meaning the 'old' camp sites would have been useful again (and they'd also built a new powder magazine up the Richmond road in the interim). Many different sorts of people came and went.

We can see the French/American allied positions on the wonderful 1781-82 Desandrouins map, georeferenced here, and hence it's known that Lafayette's forces encamped at the site where we stood--around the new West Woods dorms and near the Commons dining hall.
wm-gis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant...

The supposition we made is that the site where Lafayette's American forces encamped in the weeks before Yorktown, was probably the site of the by-then-bygone College Camp, which had been heavily used ca. 1775-78, before they built a barracks elsewhere, and before the capital moved to Richmond.

What the hell is the point of the filibuster if not to prevent something like this? I'm at a loss for words.