The Boy Gangs of Confederate Richmond
by Priscilla Rhoades

One hundred and fifty years before the Crips and the Bloods, there were the Butcher Cats and the Hill Cats, neighborhood gangs from the streets of Confederate Richmond. Instead of assault rifles, the Cats used stones or bricks; instead of colors, they wore sack coats or Eton jackets. They cruised on foot instead of by car, and they were younger than today's gangs - in most cases the Cats were younger by half than the Crips and the Bloods. They called their own members "boys" and the hated gangsters "cats" - "The term 'cats' being applied to the enemy and being the ultra expression of boy contempt."(1)

The Butcher Cats lived in Shockoe Valley in the section of Richmond, Virginia known as Butchertown. In the years before the Civil War, Shockoe Valley housed the city's slaughterhouses and tanneries and soap factories. "From an olfactory angle," Mary Wingfield Scott wrote in Old Richmond Neighborhoods, "this whole area of Richmond in the first quarter of the nineteenth century must have been trying."(2) A Butcher Cat would have said, less politely, "It stunk."

Like so many boys who grow up poor, the Butcher Cats were blamed for the consequences of their poverty. "Accustomed to the sight of slaughter and blood," Richmond resident Samuel Mordecai complained, "its juvenile citizens are a belligerent race." (3) Neighbor Fannie Beers agreed. "The boys of this region, from generation to generation, had been renowned for exceeding pugnacity. Between them and the city boys constantly-recurring quarrels were so bitter that sometimes men were drawn in through sympathy with their boys."(4) With few prospects for the future - knowing they'd be sent to war as teenagers- the Butcher Cats defended the one thing they could claim as their own, their territory.

A century before the Butcher Cats were born, William Byrd II had turned the dense woodland that was Shockoe Valley into a hub of commerce, creating the first urban development in the Richmond area. By the nineteenth century, Shockoe Valley had become a thriving industrial center. Warehouses, factories, shopfronts and markets defined its streets.

Geographically, Butchertown lay in the plain below Shockoe Hill to the west and Church Hill to the east. Its boundaries stretched from around Fourteenth Street to Twenty-fifth Street, following Cary and Main. As if nature had drawn a line, Shockoe Creek ran between the Valley and the Hill, separating the lower classes from the upper.(5)

White and Black lived together in Butchertown, European immigrants and freed African-American slaves. During the War, Shockoe Valley became a place "where residents and industry came together in a strange mix of homes, hospitals, prisons, taverns and brothels."(6) In contrast, Shockoe Hill was a long mile and a social class away. The Hill was home to some of the "best" people of Richmond, its lawyers and doctors and statesmen. From 1861 to 1865, President Jefferson Davis lived there in the White House of the Confederacy, with his wife Varina and their children.

If the Butcher Cats were loyal to Butchertown, the Hill Cats were just as protective of Shockoe Hill. From their vantage point, privilege had to be defended, a clear case of "the children of the poor against the gentlemen's sons."(7) It was common knowledge that Jefferson Davis, Jr. fought with the Hill Cats, and always the battle was for turf.(8) As Varina Davis noted in her memoir, domicile determined allegiance.(9)

Jefferson Davis, Jr.

Former gang member Charles Wallace explained that at issue was a piece of land located at the foot of Shockoe Hill. "The Butchertown boys said it was theirs, because the territory was not on the hill; while the Shockoe Hill boys contended that it was theirs because it was on their side of the creek." There was a military logic to it, Wallace observed. "[These are] arguments as sound as those that are used by the most powerful nations of Europe."(10)

Like nations, the Cats developed martial laws and strategies. The Butcher Cats - Mrs. Davis called them "sturdy little lowlanders" - attacked from below, "showering the Hill Cats with stones and bricks." In response, the Hill Cats "sallied down with hands full of like weapons, to flee again to their hill-top as soon as they had discharged them." Although the Hill Cats had the advantage of position, "the Butcher cats most often came out victors."(11)

There were also set battles at designated locations. Besides Shockoe Hill, the Cats engaged in regular skirmishes on Navy Hill and Gamble's Hill. Often these battles were scheduled for a Sunday afternoon, after church services had ended and the streets had been cleared of traffic. But sometimes the gangs fought late into the evening, and sometimes bystanders were hurt.

"A little daughter of Mr. William Haily, living on Fifth street, near the hill, was struck in the forehead by a random missile, " the Richmond Examiner reported. "[The] wound inflicted [was] so serious as to threaten fatal consequences." (12)

In the early days of the war, the editors of Richmond's newspapers saw the gangs as a problem best handled by the police. "The police would be doing a good service if they would arrest and break up these several gangs," they recommended, "or at least effectually disperse them."(13)

Among the policemen assigned to the Cats were officers Chalkley, Morris, Seal, Perria, Jenkins and Clem White. These particular policemen were "a terror to the rockbattlists," according to Ernest Taylor Walthall, another neighborhood boy.(14) The Richmond Whig attested to the Cats' aversion to local police.

"Last Sunday afternoon the [Butcher Cats and Hill Cats] waged a fierce contest on Navy Hill, about one hundred boys being engaged on each side...The progress of the fight was fortunately arrested by the timely arrival of officer, Chalkley, Seal, Davis, Quarles and Crone, in one direction, and officers Pleasants, Perria and others, in an opposite direction. At the sight of the police, the boys fled the field, but all of them did not make their escape. Six white boys and ten negro boys were captured and taken to the station house."(15)

Despite police efforts to control them, the Cats continued their endless battles. The women of Richmond were particularly disturbed by the failure of the authorities to protect its citizens from gang warfare. "The law seemed powerless to put an end to this state of things," Mrs. Beers complained.(16) And Mrs. Davis described an incident that hit uncomfortably close to home. Its victim was Jim Limber, an abused Black boy taken in by the Davis family.

"Once he came in with the blood pouring over his face from a scalp wound made by a stone," wrote the First Lady of the South. "Mr. Davis was much troubled, for we were fond of the little boy. He descended the hill and, relying on his popularity with children, he made a little speech to the Butcher cats, in which he addressed them as the future rulers of their country.

"They listened attentively, nudging their approval to each other, but when he concluded, the tallest boy said, 'President, we like you, we didn't want to hurt any of your boys, but we ain't never goin' to be friends with them Hill cats.'

"So the President, like many another self-appointed peacemaker, came back without having accomplished anything except an exhausting walk."(17)

Not even the President of the Confederate States of America could sway the Cats.

The Cats did not die out when the Civil War ended. If anything, they became more violent. "The boys who had seen as children the last years of the Confederate Army's battles, had a greater urge for war," Wallace wrote, "Pistols and shot-guns were sometimes brought into play...."

Wallace witnessed this violence before his fourth birthday. On a carriage ride one afternoon, Wallace sat on Shockoe Hill with his mother and father, enjoying the view. Nearby a group of older boys amused themselves by shooting at bull bats, also called nighthawks, a favorite pastime of Richmond's "bad boys."(18)

"Of a sudden came the Butchertown cats, swarming up the hillside and throwing rocks," Wallace remembered. "The boys on top the hill stopped their game and ran to the brow of the hill to defend the position. And a sharp battle developed in a few seconds."

As an impressionable young boy watching older boys fight, Wallace was - in his own words - "perfectly charmed with the combat."

"One of the Butcher cats drew a pistol-it was a single-shot, breech-loading, .22 calibre, nickel-plated pistol." Wallace recognized the gun - "I had seen another such at a store one day." Shots were fired, but no one was hit. "Thereupon, my father, very wisely, told the driver to drive away from there."(19)

Like many other boys in post-war Richmond, Wallace joined a gang as soon as he was asked. According to his memoir, later members of the Shockoe Hill Cats included "Reid (sic) Carrington, French McCann and Ashby Jones."(20) Richmond's 1880 Census revealed that the fathers of these Shockoe Hill Cats were some of the city's most respected citizens.(21) Reed's father, W.C. Carrington, was the city's mayor in the 1880s. French's father, D.C. McCann, was a proofreader for the Richmond Dispatch. And Ashby's father, J. William Jones, was a Baptist minister. Other Shockoe Hill Cats, like Herbert Ezekiel, Fairfax Christian, Phil Powers, Spencer Gilliam, Wythe White, Willard Sweeney, and Mel Hughes bore the surnames of men listed in the Richmond Business Directory.(22)

Some boys, like Wallace, passed through gang membership with nothing more harmful than bitter-sweet memories. Other boys were less fortunate. With the use of firearms, "there were many casualties. At length there occurred two or three tragedies; and then the press, the clergy and the civil authorities made a determined and united effort to break those battles up; and at last succeeded in putting a stop to them."(23)

But did the Cats really die? Wallace says no, they just reinvented themselves in another form, as "lesser boys, later on." And these lesser boys "sprang up again, for that has gone on from time when first boys were boys and will continue to the end."(24)

More than a century later, his words ring disturbingly true.

Notes

1. Wallace, Charles M. "The Boy Gangs of Richmond in the Dear Old Days." Richmond: Richmond Press, 1938, 7.

2. Scott, Mary Wingfield. "Old Richmond Neighborhoods." Richmond, VA, 1950, 76.

3. Mordecai, Samuel. "Richmond in By-Gone Day: Being Reminiscences of An Old Citizen." New York: Arno Press, 1975, 227.

4. Beers, Fannie A. Memories: A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1891. Online: February 2002.

5. Scott. "Old Richmond Neighborhoods." 63-67.

6. www.richmonddiscoveries.com.

7. Davis, Varina. "Jefferson Davis, A Memoir By His Wife, Vol. II." Baltimore: The Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1990, 198.

8. McMillan, Ann. "A Civil War Mystery." New York: Viking Press, 2001, 36-37. (An engaging and historically accurate fictional account of the Cats).

9. Davis, 198.

10. Wallace. 17. (Wallace refers to himself as "a poor little hell-cat," 50.)

11. Davis, 199.

12. Richmond Examiner, April 4, 1863.

13. ibid.

14. Walthall, Ernest Taylor. "Hidden Things Brought To Light." Richmond: Dietz Printing Company, 1933, 3.

15. The Richmond Whig, September 10, 1861.

16. Beers, 1.

17. Davis, 198-199.

18. Wallace, 16. (Mordecai also noted this in his memoir: "The birds would probably be more numerous, but that boys amuse themselves with throwing stones in the Capitol square, to the annoyance of pedestrians as well as of birds.")

19. ibid, 16-17.

20. ibid, 17.

21. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Virginia, 1880.

22. See www.mdgorman.com for extensive information on Civil War Richmond.

23. Wallace, 20-22.

24. ibid, 21.

Images:

Cover: Civil War Boys, Library of Congress
Top: Butchertown from Church Hill with Shockoe Hill in distance, 1865, LOC
Bottom: Jefferson Davis, Jr. Public domain.

Copyright © 2002 Priscilla Rhoades
All rights reserved

About the Author

         Priscilla Rhoades is a writer of short stories, poetry and features whose work has appeared in The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Long Beach Press-Telegram, The Iowa Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, In Posse Review, and other publications. A transplanted Californian, she now lives on two acres in the mountains of western North Carolina.
 
For other historical articles by Priscilla Rhoades that have appeared in Kudzu Monthly, please see King of the Confederate Counterfeit and The Women of Castle Thunder.

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