History in Progress

Last week, I spent three days with my old friend Bob Johnson rambling around Virginia. We were traveling from Gettysburg to Appomattox Court House for a National Park Service living history event put on by the Liberty Rifles that illustrated the nascent moments of the Confederate army. It was a cool idea – to show people how local companies were created, organized, and drilled all the while reminding them EXACTLY why these companies were organizing and the ideas and social organization, they were willing to go to war to protect.

And the event itself was fantastic. The visual representation of the founding moments of the Confederate military forces helped visitors understand both the blithe approach to what we now know as a four-year period of unprecedented violence and understand how the defense of the Southern slave society stood as the very cornerstone of what these newly minted Confederates were doing. Appomattox County was on the western edge of the Virginia slave society – 54.2% of the county’s inhabitants were enslaved in 1860 and the company being portrayed was made up of men who had lived their lives in a society dominated by the values, attitudes, and assumptions that justified and encouraged the enslavement of Black Americans.

Though the soldiers being portrayed first served in western Virginia and were captured in North Carolina, they (as Company B of the 46^th Virginia Infantry) eventually were assigned to the armies operating around Richmond and Petersburg and spent the last months of the war with the Army of Northern Virginia. In April 1865, the remaining men of the regiment surrendered at Appomattox Court House.

The visual effects were powerful. Men and boys, both soldiers and citizens surrounded by women and girls encouraging the men really captured the summer picnic vibe of the early days of the Civil War. That this portrayal of military innocence was being performed on the very ground on which the men of the 46^th Virginia surrendered and the war in the east ended was even more powerful than I had imagined.

But the event was only part of the trip. All day Friday, on the way south, we stopped at historic sites; Stonewall Jackson’s Headquarters in Winchester, the Kernstown Battlefield, and Cedar Creek. Some of the interpretations were old-school military history which was entirely appropriate, and some incorporated the newer insights provided by social and cultural historians over the last 30 years.

Once we had our fill of “being” 19^th century folks on Saturday, we began to tour again. We went to the American Civil War Museum at Appomattox where the objects of the Confederate military were displayed no longer as objects of veneration but as physical reminders of a time when slave-holding Southerners sought to create a republic dedicated to the idea that Black men and women were inferior and deserved to live lives enslaved. It was a powerfully effective exhibit. In the evening, we headed to Farmville to see Union Theological Seminary. I had to see where R. L. Dabney had taught and written – I find it especially helpful to occupy the space where the people I am writing about did their thing. The detour did not disappoint. We saw the seminary, Hampden Sidney College, and Dabney’s grave.

We headed north early Sunday morning. And before breakfast had made our way to Charlottesville. It was a beautiful, cool morning and the old campus was as awe inspiring as ever. We talked about Jefforson’s troubling legacy and how it reflected so much of America’s troubled legacy. We talked about the Confederate leaders – including more than a few of the chaplains I’ve been studying and Willie Pegram – who had graduated from the school. And we looked for the traces of the enslaved who had toiled to provide the students with the leisure to pursue their studies without worrying about the tedious labor of life.

There we thought about the settled past – or at least reasonably settled past. But we had another stop planned – one that I was almost afraid to make. Indeed, I had been in Charlottesville a year ago and had decided not to drive to the other side of town to see where Heather Heyer had been murdered by a 20-year-old white supremacist in the midst of the counter protests to the Unite the Right march and rally. It felt too painful. So, I took the easy way out and passed. This time, though, I felt compelled to go and remember.

I was not surprised by the emotion that swept over me. And it was powerful. In my lifetime of visiting historic sites, only a few sites of remembering impacted me like this one – the site of the World Trade Center, the Gettysburg Cyclorama, the small signs next to bullet holes honoring the Resistance fighters around Paris, and the small plaques on buildings in the Marais honoring victims of the Holocaust, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (especially the Emmet Till gallery) all have brought a similar feeling of overwhelming anguish.

This was different. This history was not past. We struggled to make sense of what it was about the place that was so emotive. The best we could do was to compare it to visiting the site of the Boston Massacre in 1777 or passing by the Lorraine Motel in 1970. Then, as now, the events were a part of a past about which consensus had not yet been agreed upon, a history without official monuments or definitive studies. They were a part of a living present which was being made right then and right there. I think this is why going to the corner of Water and 10^th Street was so wrenching – the memorial (except for a city sponsored street sign that honored her) was contingent, written in spray paint, embodied in wilting bouquets. It was part of a living present that we are still writing. And that writing is perilous and uncertain.