ied
that the valley would be a battle-ground for the contending hosts;
that the fields would be overrun, the crops destroyed, grain and
stock confiscated; and the slaves carried off and set free. His
address brought him for a time into ridicule. He lived to see his
word-picture appear as only a vain, faint representation of the
reality. When the war came, and his sons and friends joined the
Confederate Army, his sympathies were with the South. He often
recurred, however, to his more than fulfilled prophecy. He lived
to see the valley for ninety or more miles of its length reek with
blood; the houses, whether in city or village, turned into hospitals,
and the war-lit fires of burning mills, barns, and grain stacks
illuminate the valley and the mountain slopes to the summits of
the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies on its east and west. Pen cannot
adequately describe the hell of agony, desolation, and despair
witnessed in this fertile region in the four years of war; and long
before the conflict ended not a human slave was held therein. It,
however, has long since, under a new civilization, recovered its
wonted prosperity, and no inhabitant thereof, though many are the
sons and daughters of slaveholders, desires to again hold slaves.
Not all the affluent ante-bellum inhabitants of this valley owned
slaves or believed in slavery. Many were Quakers, others Dunkards
(or Tunkers), all of whom were, by religious training and conviction,
opposed to human slavery, hence opposed to Secession and a slave
power. Some of the younger men of Quaker or Dunkard families
through compulsion joined the Confederate Army, but the number was
small. Though opposed to war, no more loyal Union people could be
found anywhere. Their Secession neighbors called them "_Tories_,"
and the Quakers descendants of Tories of the Revolution. It was
common to hear related the story of the imprisonment at Winchester,
under General Washington's order, of certain Quakers of Philadelphia,
claimed to have been Tories, who were given a twenty-mile prison-
bound limit, and who, when peace came, coveting the rich lands of
the valley, and being humiliated over their imprisonment, sent for
their families and settled there permanently. Whether or not this
story gives the true reason for the early settlement of the Quakers
in Virginia, certain it is that they were loyal to the Union that
Washington helped to found and opposed to human bondage.

Milroy's enth