Dead Horses, Dead Confederates, Dead Confederate Horses...

A caveat for my Fearless Readers -- Beware: naked History ahead.  Due to capricious connectivity where I am at present, this and subsequent posts are being composed on the fly, as it were, without the fact-checking I would normally perform.  Therefore, please excuse, and please correct any errors of fact I may have committed.  I also welcome comments, alternate interpretations, rants, etc.  Also, for geographical reference, you can use the map accompanying my Strasburg photo essay.

This is my third visit to the famed Shenandoah Valley, and the first time visiting the lower reaches (confusingly, the northern extreme, since the Shenandoah River runs from south to north).  The first time I ventured to these parts, some seven years ago along with my wife Éva, we entered towards the southern end near Lexington, Virginia, home of two famed educational institutions dating to before the Civil War: Washington College (soon to append R.E. Lee to the name), and the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). 

That trip was, like most of my road trips, a whirlwind of hysterical tourism as well as communing with nature.  Ultimately, our wanderings would encompass hours of touring in the ever truly beautiful Valley along with camping in the spectacular Shenandoah National Park astride the Blue Ridge; we also made a quick two-day visit to D.C. and ended up by swinging northwards to camp in the mountains of western Maryland and tour the battlefields of Antietam and nearby Gettysburg.  Oh, and somewhere in there we spent a day in and around Charlottesville, soaking in the Jefferson aesthetic at his estate, Monticello, and at the University of Virginia, the college he founded and designed (see my photo essays on the UVa, and also Poplar Forest, the retirement estate he designed and built while he was serving as our third President).  It was a glorious road trip, but it makes me tired just to think about it.

Gen’l Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, 

whose left arm is buried 150 miles from 

where the rest of him is.

In Lexington, our first stop, we visited the home of Thomas J. Jackson, who, before the war (one wants to say “befowa the woawa”) was a well respected, even beloved instructor at VMI.  From the opening battle of the war, the First Battle of Bull Run (known to southerners as the First Battle of Manassas), he was universally known as Stonewall Jackson, for the inspiring stand he took against the attacking Federals, thereby turning a probable Confederate defeat into a panicked Union rout.  The nice southern lady docent on that visit fairly swooned as she led us around the house, bubbling over with such breathless enthusiasm about ‘The General’ that I was pretty near certain she would have acted downright indecorously had Jackson suddenly come to life and returned home.  I also suspect that Éva came away with a bit of a crush on the old reb.  We also walked the campus of Washington and Lee University, so re-named because the school invited the Confederate icon General Robert E. Lee to spend his years of semi-retirement as President of the school.  It was intended as a sinecure, but he took the job seriously, made reforms, pissed a few people off and gained renewed respect. He is buried in the crypt of the campus chapel that he commissioned, underneath a beautiful glowing white marble sarcophagus, which he almost certainly did not commission.  Curiously, his beloved horse, Traveler, who faithfully carried Lee throughout the war and similarly entered into retirement at W&L U., is buried right outside the door.  When we exited the cool refuge of the crypt, I stopped to pay homage to the noble steed; some romantic soul had left an apple on his gravestone.  Oddly enough, when we visited the little museum at VMI right next door, we suddenly found ourselves face to face with Stonewall Jackson’s horse, Little Sorrel, who also enjoyed a long and peaceful retirement.  The former battle horse spent his twilight years happily munching clover on the parade ground, beloved as a sort of campus mascot at VMI.  When he finally passed on, he was stuffed and mounted (oh, the terrible unintended pun) by admiring students to preserve his memory.  Somehow I feel Traveler got the better deal….

General Lee in Repose

(Fast forward to just yesterday late afternoon, on a tour one of the staff archaeologists at Montpelier was giving us dig volunteers of the grounds.  We ended up in the northwest corner of the formal grounds, sitting around Madison’s ‘Temple’, and Mark, aka ‘Mark the Brit’, asked if we had any questions.  I had spied, a bit further off under a spreading evergreen tree, three large gravestone looking objects, and asked what they were.  Turns out they were, in fact, large gravestones.  The last owners of Montpelier, the duPonts, were horse people and had buried three of their thoroughbreds on the grounds – including Annapolis and Battleship,* the latter of which, Mark ruefully informed us former colonials, was the first American horse to win the prestigious British Grand National Steeple-Chase.  I am reliably informed that the horse-burying thing is not a Southern thing.  Just a horse people thing.  Then again, I know where all the cats I have owned are buried, so there is that.  The stuffing and mounting thing is simply nutty.

Little Sorrel, not so reposed

To Éva, born and raised in Hungary, this was her first taste of how terribly current the war still is in the South.  The past is the present is the past in these parts in a way many northerners find hard to understand.  For one thing, the war and defeat devastated the South physically and psychologically and forever altered its economy, and its very way of life, and left it with few resources with which to reconstruct itself.  On the other hand, the North, if anything, emerged economically stronger, certainly more industrialized, with a robust infrastructure and confidence in itself and a future full of promise and progress.  Also, the impact of the war is present and tangible in the landscape of Virginia, especially.  Every major battle save one (Gettysburg) was fought on southern soil – most of them occurred in northern and western Virginia – and it tells.  For four years mighty armies ranged back and forth between Washington and Richmond, only 100 miles apart, and up and down the Shenandoah Valley, a mere 90 miles long.  This is why there are so many ‘firsts’ and ‘seconds,’ as in ‘First/Second Battle of Manassas,’ ‘First/Second Battle of the Wilderness,’ First/Second/Third Battle of Winchester.’  With both sides’ armies maneuvering in such a relatively constrained geographic area for four long years, they were bound to contest the same strategic spots more than once.

And the Shenandoah Valley, I was soon to fully appreciate (as opposed to simply read about), was a critically strategic piece of real estate for the South.  Before the war (befowa…), the South, though an overwhelmingly agricultural region, was a net importer of grain for its tables.  The economy being based on cash crops such as tobacco and cotton, which were hell on the soil not to mention on the enslaved people who planted, tended, harvested and processed them, there was little incentive to grow wheat and barley and corn in sufficiency to feed its population.  With the coming of the war and the increasingly effective Northern naval blockade of Southern ports, suddenly the South needed all the homegrown foodstuffs it could produce.  The Shenandoah was the most fertile land in the region, what with the rest of Virginia having ruined its already poor soil with intensive tobacco production.  Additionally, having been settled in the main by Germans, many of them Mennonites, the agriculture of the valley was characterized by modest, sustainably managed farms producing copious amounts of grain needed to feed the Southern armies and population.  This made the valley intensely contested; as a result, you can hardly spit around here without hitting some battlefield, skirmish site, fort, encampment, general’s headquarters, or something to do with that war.

We got a feel for just how critical the Shenandoah was in the Civil war by driving from the upper (southern) valley to about the middle on that road trip seven years ago.  The farthest north we ranged was also the most wrenching of the sites we visited or passed by, the Battle of New Market.  Thankfully there was only one of these.  There we toured the museum and extensive grounds dedicated to the battle, in which a scratch force of Confederates, including young cadets rushed up from the now-dead Stonewall Jackson’s old school VMI, tried to hold off the Yankees one more time in May of 1864.  They succeeded, but at terrible cost; there is an area of the battleground called the “field of shoes” where the youngsters made a valiant and unspeakably heart-wrenching stand against a make-or-break Union charge, during which many lost their shoes to the mud.*

Virginia Mourning her Dead, 

sculpted in 1903 by Moses Ezekiel, 

VMI Class of 1866, stands in front

 of the parade ground at the college.  

Ezekiel, who was a veteran of 

New Market, was the first 

Jewish cadet at VMI.

Then last year, on my next visit to the Valley, I stayed in the middle part, including a day following in the footsteps of old Stonewall himself as he deftly parried and thrust at one of the superior Federal forces after him in a series of battles around the town of Port Republic, southeast of Harrisonburg and hard up against the western slope of the Blue Ridge.  This was another chapter in the storied 1862 Valley Campaign I mentioned in my last post.  As I traveled by car from battle site to battle site I marveled, as rest of the world did at the time and has ever since, at the rapidity with which Jackson’s vaunted ‘foot cavalry’ covered ground to always be one step ahead of the bluecoats.  All the while I was struck by the perverse contrast in what I was doing.  I was, on the one hand, taking in some of the most varied and beautiful countryside I know of, all the while contemplating some of the most blood-soaked soil in the bloodiest war this country has yet fought, a tragic, existential crisis in our nation that touched virtually every town and family, north and south, with death and maiming and grief. 

Finally, on this last trip, this time to the lowest extremity of the Shenandoah, I was on the most contested ground in this contested valley.  The town of Winchester, some 15 miles to the north of where I was staying in Strasburg (see post and album), is like a cork in the northern bottleneck of the Shenandoah Valley.  Whoever controls this town and its environs controls the lower valley.  Hence the First and Second and Third Winchesters.  The town, in fact, fairly boasts that it changed hands by some counts as many as 70 times during the war.  One can imagine that at first this untoward popularity must’ve been the cause of no small anxiety and panic for the local citizenry – frantic, unpredictable upheavals during which one had to be constantly on one’s toes, ready to run for the cellar (or for the hills) at a moment’s notice.  There were several occasions when the soldiers of one side or the other – frankly, mostly the blue side – were skedaddling at speed through the streets of their town with the cavalry (or foot cavalry) of the opposing side following in hot pursuit.  But 70 times?  I mean, eventually it must’ve become a matter of, “Oh crap, gotta switch out the flags again....”

On Sunday morning early, I left the Hotel Strasburg and turned north towards Belle Grove, a plantation house built in 1797 in which Thomas Jefferson himself had a hand in designing.  I had no intention of doing any Civil War tourism at all.  I had planned a day strictly devoted to history from befo…prior to that particular conflict.  However, the Valley had other plans for me, as it often seems to do.  Hence the disquisition above which I hadn’t planned to write.  As well as the next installment in these pages, which, fearless readers, will have to wait until tomorrow.

________________________

*Both sired by Man-o-War

**At the cost of 10 dead and about 50 wounded out of 250 cadets.  The were ordered in to fill a gap caused by the panicked retreat of other units; forced to order them out of reserve, General Breckenridge – last pre-Civil War Vice President and southern Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1860 – was heard to lament “And God forgive me for the order.”