Augustus Henry Drewry (November 1817–6 July 1899), Confederate artillery officer and planter, was born in King William County and was the son of Martin Drewry, a planter, and Mildred S. Fox Drewry. He attended private schools in King William and Amelia Counties and in Richmond, where about 1836 he began working for a wholesale dry goods business. In 1841 he and three partners established their own dry goods company, but Drewry withdrew several years later to concentrate on farming. He borrowed money from an uncle and in February 1847 purchased more than a thousand acres of land about seven miles south of Richmond, along the James River in Chesterfield County. With the labor of twenty-two taxable slaves whom he owned by 1851, and later the fifty-four enslaved persons he reported to the census enumerator in 1860, Drewry transformed the tract, soon known as Drewry's Bluff, into a prosperous farm by constructing dikes to reclaim marshland from the river and by fertilizing and deep-plowing the higher ground. On 22 October 1845 Drewry married Lavinia E. Anderson. They had no children before she died of pneumonia in June 1867.
In June 1856 Drewry was elected a justice of the Chesterfield County Court. Late in that decade he sponsored the short-lived Chester Male Academy and later co-owned Richmond's Saint Charles Hotel. The month after Virginia seceded from the Union, Drewry served on committees that sold county bonds and distributed the proceeds to the families of military volunteers. He helped raise and equip local companies for Confederate service, and in January 1862 he organized and was elected captain of the Southside Heavy Artillery, assigned to the 2d Regiment Virginia Artillery until it became an independent unit at the end of May.
Confederate withdrawal from Norfolk opened the lower James River to Federal control and placed Union gunboats in position to advance toward Richmond. Though Drewry later asserted that he had been first to recommend obstructing the James near the capital, Confederate officials were already mindful of their inadequate defenses and looked for the most advantageous location for a fort. Drewry and the two engineers responsible for choosing a site settled on Drewry's Bluff. He requested that his men be stationed there, and they occupied the bluff on 17 March 1862, after work on the defenses had commenced.
Under an engineer's supervision Drewry's men constructed earthworks and emplacements for three heavy guns and assisted in efforts to block the river channel with logs, stones, and sunken ships. Additional army and navy troops arrived to help defend the bluff, and early in May naval officer Ebenezer Farrand took command of the combined forces. On the morning of 15 May, five Union ships, including the ironclad Monitor, approached the fortifications and opened fire. Confederate sharpshooters, who had been harassing the advance of the Union vessels, shot back from the woods along the riverbank, while naval troops on the bluff's edge and across the river fired guns they had removed from their ships. Inside the fort, Farrand issued orders to return fire, and Drewry guided soldiers manning the two eight-inch guns that inflicted the heaviest damage on the Union vessels. After a four-hour confrontation, the gunboats retreated down the James River, leaving Richmond unscathed.
On recommendation of the Confederate secretary of war, President Jefferson Davis rewarded Drewry for his role in the victory by nominating him major of artillery in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States. On 4 October 1862 the Confederate States Senate confirmed his appointment to the rank of major, effective 30 May. Davis approved a congressional joint resolution of thanks to Farrand and Drewry on 16 September, but by that time Drewry had resigned his commission. The bluff remained fortified throughout the war and became the site of the Confederate States Naval Academy. In May 1864 Confederate forces rebuffed a Union land attack near the fort.
In March 1865 Drewry unsuccessfully ran for the House of Delegates. He took the amnesty oath on 20 June and on 3 July received a presidential pardon, required because the value of his property exceeded $20,000. In December, Drewry traded the bluff property for two farms in Chesterfield County and one in Hanover County. The following March he purchased Westover, the ancestral Byrd-family plantation in Charles City County. Occupation by Union soldiers had left the 1,232-acre Westover in disrepair, but Drewry transformed the James River estate into a profitable and widely respected farm. While other plantations struggled, he grew a variety of crops, employed new machinery, and navigated the transition between slave and free labor.
On 10 February 1870 in Charles City County, Drewry married Mary A. Harrison. They had no children. During the 1870s and 1880s he bought many nearby parcels of land, including the western portion of Evelynton, a Ruffin-family plantation. He sat on the executive committee of the Virginia State Agricultural Society (later the Virginia State Agricultural and Mechanical Society), was a vice president from 1873 to 1876, and served a three-year term as president beginning late in 1876. Declining another term as president in 1891, Drewry regularly served on the society's advisory board on machinery and agricultural implements. For several years late in the 1890s he was president of the Virginia Navigation Company, which operated steamships between Richmond and Norfolk. Augustus Henry Drewry died at Saint Luke's Home for the Sick, in Richmond, on 6 July 1899. He was buried in the cemetery of Westover Episcopal Church, in Charles City County.
Sources Consulted:
S. Bassett French MS Biographical Sketches (with birth date of 7 Nov. 1817), Accession 21332, Personal Papers Collection, Library of Virginia (LVA); Chesterfield Co. Marriage Register (1845); Marriage Register, Charles City Co. (1870), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, LVA; Richmond Enquirer, 24 Oct. 1845; Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers (1861–1865), War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, D.C.; United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880–1901), 1st ser., 51, pt. 2, 619; Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865, 58th Cong., 2d sess., 1904–1905, Senate Doc. 234, serials 4610–4616, 2:366, 422, 5:401; Virginia Case Files for United States Pardons (1865–1867), United States Office of the Adjutant General, Record Group 94, NARA; Southern Planter and Farmer 37 (1876): 461–464; ibid. 38 (1877): 611–613; ibid. 41 (1880): 87–90; Southern Planter 53 (1892): 91–92, 94–96, 385–387; Washington Post, 29 Jan. 1893; Richmond Dispatch, 9 July 1899, 17 Nov. 1901; Richmond News Leader, 8 Sept. 1906; Ed Bearss, River of Lost Opportunities: The Civil War on the James River, 1861–1862 (1995); John M. Coski, Capital Navy: The Men, Ships, and Operations of the James River Squadron (1996); will and estate inventory in Charles City Co. Will Book, 7:469–471; obituaries in New York Times, 7 July 1899, Richmond Dispatch (birth date of 17 Nov. 1817 and portrait), 7 July 1899, Richmond Times (birth date of 6 Nov. 1817), 7 July 1899, Washington Post, 7 July 1899, Confederate Veteran 7 (1899): 461, and Southern Planter 60 (1899): 394; accounts of funeral in Richmond Dispatch, 9 July 1899 and Richmond Times, 9 July 1899.
Image in Richmond Dispatch, 7 July 1899.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Jennifer R. Loux.
How to cite this page:
Jennifer R. Loux, "Augustus Henry Drewry (1817–1899)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Drewry_Augustus_Henry, accessed [today's date]).
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