Karl Rhodes isn’t the first person to decide to research his ancestors. A retired, former executive editor of Virginia Business magazine and former managing editor from the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Rhodes just took his research a bit farther than most.
While doing genealogical research on the Rhodes family, he was striking out when it came to his great-great-grandfather, Henry H. Rhodes, who died before he turned 40. So it only made sense to search for Henry’s wife, Margaret H. “Peggy” Rhodes.
Google only produced one hit, but it was a doozy.
A brief reference to Peggy’s 1870s testimony before the Southern Claims Commission cited volume three of “Unionists and the Civil War Experience in the Shenandoah Valley” by David Rodes and Norman Wenger. That volume was part of a six-volume set published from 2003 to 2012 that highlights the stories of Mennonites and Dunkers (German Baptist brethren) who remained loyal to the United States during the Civil War despite living in Confederate states. “I found 20-plus pages of verbatim testimony from Margaret, her daughter, her foster son, her brother, her neighbors, and the bishop of her church,” says Rhodes, who felt he’d hit the genealogical jackpot. “And her name also popped up in other claims, usually in references to the Underground Railroad for Mennonites and Dunkers.”
Two years of research and six months of writing produced “Peggy’s War,” a meticulously researched novel about Rhodes’ great-great grandmother and her extraordinary life. Peggy ran one of the busiest depots on the Underground Railroad, while also serving as a postmaster for the underground, delivering and picking up letters between refugees and their friends and families. Rhodes will speak at the Library of Virginia on Thursday, March 7 to discuss and sign his book.
Peggy and her husband agreed to participate and smuggle men who were trying to escape being conscripted into the Confederate military over the lines into Union states, usually to Maryland or Pennsylvania. They were also known to shelter men who were deserting from the Confederate armies to return to their families and farms.
As the story of Peggy and the Underground Railroad started to emerge, Rhodes researched each person he could find who was connected with Peggy, including all her family members, neighbors, and all of the men she protected in the secret cellar under the trapdoor in her bedroom. “I ended up citing about 100 additional sources, but I plowed through perhaps ten times that number,” he explains. “I was looking for every little crumb of information that pertained to Peggy or any of the other characters in the book.”
After the war, Peggy sought federal reimbursement twice, failing in 1871 and succeeding in 1875 when the Southern Claims Commission ultimately paid her $569.25, which covered slightly more than half her property losses. Money aside, filing those claims was dangerous because many people in the Shenandoah Valley still harbored strong resentment against Union sympathizers, and Peggy’s declarations of loyalty were particularly bold. Rhodes’ book quotes her as having testified: “From the beginning of the rebellion to the end thereof, I was willing and ready to do all a woman could for the Union cause and its supporters.”
In reconstructing Peggy’s life, Rhodes sought to tell her story as completely as possible. While he expects people to pigeonhole his book as “historical fiction,” he insists that label is misleading. “’Peggy’s War’ merely uses the devices of fiction to make historical facts more accessible to a wider range of readers,” he explains in the introduction to his book. “In other words, I based the plot on every historical fact I could find about Peggy, her family, and the refugees who hid in her secret cellar. Then I connected those dots with fictional dialogue and day-to-day happenings that seem reasonable based on my research.”
For Rhodes, the most challenging part of writing “Peggy’s War” was rewriting entire chapters whenever an unexpected fact popped up in his research. He was determined to adhere as closely as possible to the historical facts, so he connected those facts with dialogue and events that were likely or at least plausible. At first, it seemed probable to him that Peggy’s 6-year-old son died of diphtheria, which was killing children at a horrific rate in Rockingham County in 1859. But then he discovered a document that listed the boy’s cause of death as “unknown.” Knowing that Peggy and her uncle, Doc Heatwole, would have recognized the symptoms of diphtheria, he scratched that off the list.
The question, as Rhodes saw it, was what fatal disease would have been mysterious to the family at that time? “How about ‘dropsy in the head’ or ‘brain fever,’ which we now call tuberculous meningitis? It’s rare today, but back then, it would have been common in young children with long-term exposure to tuberculosis,” Rhodes says, adding that Peggy’s husband had tuberculosis for several years before it finally killed him. “So, chapter three started out with the title ‘Diphtheria.’ then it was ‘Typhoid,’ then it became ‘Dropsy in the Head,’ and I was finally satisfied.”
And not just with that chapter, but with the opportunity to tell the story of his great-great grandmother’s exceptional life. What began as a desire to know more about his own family became something more far-reaching. “I wanted to tell that story in a way that is less intimidating than Rodes and Wenger’s six-volume set.”
“Peggy’s War” does just that.
The “Peggy’s War” book talk with author Karl Rhodes will be held on Thursday, March 7 at noon at the Library of Virginia, 800 E. Broad St., lva.virginia.gov.
