Editorial
Ten years ago this month, thousands of visitors, dignitaries and reenactors descended upon the reconstructed village of Appomattox Court House.
They were there to mark the 150th anniversary of the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army to U.S. Grant’s forces, the event that essentially marked the end of the Civil War.
The commemorative events of April 9, 2015, were, yes, about history. Visitors could learn a lot about the Civil War, its soldiers, slaves and civilians, from the various speakers and from the reenactors.
But the Civil War has never been just history. Its root cause, slavery, may have been ended, but the oppression of Blacks and the racism continued into modern times. How we remembered the war changed, with the Lost Cause ideology, with its Confederate imagery, holding sway through the 20th century and even into this century until deadly racially motivated events finally starting making people rethink the war’s symbols.
As we noted on this page 10 years ago, there had been a number of high-profile incidents of white police officers shooting unarmed Blacks in the previous year. Those incidents were on the minds of some of the speakers at the Appomattox commemoration.
“America in 2015 is not as sharply split as during the time of the Civil War, but anyone watching the news knows we are too divided,” Sen. Tim Kaine said that day.
If only he could have seen the future.
Just two months later, a 21-year-old white supremacist who literally had wrapped himself in a Confederate flag killed nine Blacks at a church in Charleston, S.C. The incident renewed calls for the removal of Confederate symbols, with the Confederate flag outside the South Carolina statehouse coming down almost immediately. Other racially motivated incidents would follow.
Then came the summer of 2020 - amid the Covid crisis that rocked everyone’s world and the death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
That changed everything.
Riots followed in the big cities and the years-long debates over what to do with statues honoring Confederate generals and soldiers quickly ended. Most of them came down.
Floyd’s death also accelerated discussions of how Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee University should deal with their deep connections to the Confederacy and slavery.
At VMI, stories published that summer alleging “systemic racism” by several VMI Black alumni led to a state investigation of the “culture” at the school. The superintendent at the time, Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, resigned just days after the investigation was announced, he said, at the request of Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam and certain legislative leaders. The statue of former VMI instructor and Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson came down that December and was moved to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park. The board of visitors appointed Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins, a Black alumnus, as interim superintendent and then removed the “interim” title the next year.
At W&L, the board of trustees undertook an 11-month review of the school’s ties to his past and whether or not it should change its name, but in the end decided not to. The board, though, did change the name of Lee Chapel to University Chapel and eventually all historical plaques and paintings would be removed from the building and a permanent partition installed to hide the recumbent statue of Robert E. Lee from the view of those in the sanctuary.
While W&L and VMI were undertaking steps to promote inclusivity and diversity, the name-change debate made its way to Lexington City Council. After the city’s street naming policy was updated, New Market Place was renamed Evergreen Place, but the streetrenaming sputtered after that. Approval by three-fourths of the residents on a street is needed for a name change.
Since the days of 2020-21, of course, the political winds have changed. Things moved too far “left” for many people. “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” became dirty words for them and now a new president is endeavoring to root out DEI wherever it exits. Under a different governor, General Wins is being ousted from VMI, as accusations of playing politics have been leveled by both sides.
So, yes, 10 years after this country marked the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox, we still have sides when it comes to racial issues. We are still “too divided,” perhaps more divided than we’ve been in a long time, now over a wide range of issues.
While politics may have continued to divide us over the past 10 years, we can take heart that professional historians and preservationists have continued to make great strides in telling a fuller story of our nation’s history and all of its people.
Tours of Civil War battlefields by National Park Service and battlefield preservation group personnel are no longer just about generals and soldiers, but about the enslaved and the civilians. Rockbridge area historians have been adding to our knowledge of the locally enslaved and those Blacks who fought for their freedom in the Civil War, some of those stories having appeared in this paper. The Brownsburg Museum’s ambitious exhibit, “Interwoven: Unearthed Stories of Slavery,” was completed last year and can still be seen on weekends this year. The Jackson House continues to tell the stories of those enslaved under Jackson.
Next week, the commemoration of the anniversary of Appomattox will be a lot lower-key than it was 10 years ago. The National Park Service, however, will offer six days of programs and tours. We invite those who can to attend some of those events. We encourage everyone to take some time to learn more about the Civil War, what came before and what has happened since.
We can learn from history.
