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Richard Smith Cox lived at Burleith, which stood about where the Washington International School is today, near 36th Street and Reservoir Road. In 1861 he was 36, an official in the Paymaster-General’s Office of the War Department, and a colonel of the District of Columbia militia. His father, John Cox, had been mayor of Georgetown, as had his grandfather, John Threlkeld. Nothing made it inevitable that he should resign his position and his commission, and cross the Potomac to join the rebellion of the southern states, except that his wife was a Virginian whose four brothers had all enlisted the Confederate army.
Richard’s brother Thomas Campbell Cox, an official in the State Department, and loyal to the Union, looked out for his absent brother’s interests. When the city of Georgetown put Burleith up for auction for nonpayment of taxes, it was Thomas Cox who rescued it from being sold out of the family. He was, however, unable to prevent the government from putting Burleith at the disposal of an organization that cared for some of the fugitive slaves who were crossing into the District from Virginia every day.
In 1865 Richard Cox, having renewed his allegiance to the Constitution and received his pardon, returned to Burleith to evict its wartime occupants. Author Mary Mitchell writes that Cox was thus able to bring his wife and children back to Georgetown. In fact, the Cox family took up residence at Stoke, in Aldie, Virginia, which Cox bought from his wife’s brother, with money borrowed from the husband of his half-sister Sallie Cox Smith; Burleith was his collateral. When Cox defaulted on this loan in 1876, Burleith passed to his half-sister. Six years later Cox lost Stoke as well.
In 1884, more than two decades after leaving Burleith, Cox returned to live in the District of Columbia. He had for some years been applying to members of Congress who had served on the Confederate side during the war, in hopes of being recommended for “some position in the gift of the Democratic party”, but without success. He died in Washington on October 12, 1889, and was buried with his ancestors in Rock Creek Cemetery, in an unmarked grave.
Carlton Fletcher
(The information in this article originally appeared in the Glover Park Gazette in January, 2005. All rights reserved.)
Sources:
(Threlkeld and Cox files, 1785 Assessments: Peabody Room, Georgetown Branch Library; National Intelligencer, February 27, 1862; DC Liber NCT58 (1865) f.453; 1870 Loudon county census, roll 1659, p.247; Abstract of Title to “BURLEITH” in Frederic W. Huidekoper, 1887: MS. 127, Historical Society of Washington; R.S. Cox Papers, in the possession of the Cox Family; 1855 Washington County Assessments; Star, April 24, 1861, May 29, 1863; Georgetown Courier, August 17, 1867; The Loudon County Washingtonian, October 15, 1889; Biographical Cyclopedia of Representative Men of Maryland and the District of Columbia, p.99; Edgar Farr Russell, A Short History of Burleith, 1955;; Washington, City and Capital, 1937, pp.369, 745-6; Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1941; Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950, Vol.1, pp.259, 272-4, 294; Mary Mitchell, Divided Town, 1968, p. 107; Ann Lange, “A Brief History of Burleith”, Burleith Newsletter, 1985, September-October 1998; http://www.burleith.org/history.html)
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