Southern Morale Soared

I like to read historic road markers, or at least try to read them as I drive by. One that I have read countless times is VA-E2, Intermediate Defenses, at the corner of Chamberlayne and Laburnum, where the red light allows me to savor the text:

Here ran, east and west, the intermediate line of Richmond defenses during the Civil War. Near this spot on 1 March 1864 Union Brig. Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick halted his raid that was intended to free Union prisoners and lower morale in the Confederate capital. A detachment led by Col. Ulric Dahlgren was defeated to the west of the city. On 2 March Dahlgren was killed; Southern morale soared.

Of course, it is the last, succinct phrase that is so compelling. Another favorite is the heading on the marker at Cedar Lane and Ashcake Road: Stuart Turns North. Both would be excellent titles for short story collections, I think. The roads are filled with markers, most of them about the Civil War, given how much action this part of the world saw in the 1860s.

Growing up in Manhattan, I got the usual bullet-point version of the war from the Northern perspective. Add to this Catholic school Manichaeism and you have a fairly straightforward story of good triumphing over evil. In the eighth grade I did a history report called “The Civil War in Song” and it was quite clever. The report was bound in burlap-covered cardboard and each section opened with a stanza from a different song of the era, ending up, I think, with the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

The South was a very different, kind of scary place to me. I did not really know anyone from below the Mason-Dixon line until grad school. My friend Gerald, from Winston-Salem, was Baptist to boot, and altogether a new breed for me in a city whose immigrants, when not Dominican, seemed to be mostly from Ohio.

But despite my utter ignorance of things Southern, I had always felt a direct connection to the Civil War. My great-grandfather fought in an upstate New York regiment and did time at Andersonville. Later he was part of a prisoner exchange and was transferred to a hospital in North Carolina before being sent home. We know this because we have a wonderful letter he wrote to the U.S. Pension Office in the 1880s asking where the hell his veteran's pension was. The letter is filled with details of his service: where he was inducted, his commanding officers, the names of comrades and battles, and his time as a prisoner and invalid. I do not know if he ever got his pension. I certainly hope so.

In my late thirties I started drifting south, first to Baltimore, then to the DC area, and now Richmond for the past six years. I have tried to educate myself, and road markers are just a small part of this. They cluster in some areas, two or three in a row, lending depth and meaning to the land. Blood was spilled here. Exhaustion, hunger, homesickness. Even victories – “Southern morale soared” – can be heartbreaking.

It is hard to scrape away almost forty years of prejudice and stereotype, but I feel I owe it to Richmond and to the South in general. Plus, battles took place on the ground I live on, the roads I drive over every day. It is a confusing, tragic history, one many people still debate. I am not about to mourn the Lost Cause or ignore the misery that sustained the South’s economy and way of life. Recent scholarship has shown how much the slave trade sustained New York’s economy as well. I just know that I am part of this history, and that I cannot live in a place without trying to understand its people and its past.