East of Appomattox: Where Old Times Are Still Not Forgotten

One of the great joys of Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee is that when I am out hiking the mountainous landscape of the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains, I often come across plaques, placards, and other signs dedicated to Civil War memory. Being an Ohioan by birth, many of these memorials have a special significance to me: many of the Union forces in this region of the war were from Ohio. When in Roanoke, Virginia, after hiking the Triple Crown of the Appalachian Trail, I decided to walk a battlefield trail within the city to pass the time while waiting for a blues band performance at a brewery.

Hanging Rock battlefield, where Union forces were defeated by a Confederate cavalry raid as they fell back from Lynchburg in 1864, is an odd battlefield since it lacks the splendor and majesty of Manassas or Gettysburg. It is just a winding gravel trail alongside the roads of the city, flanked by trees and the gentle rushing water of Mason Creek. Walking through the lush vegetation and singing birds with the occasional whoosh of a passing vehicle, to my surprise a poorly kept memorial placard along the trail informed me that two future Presidents from Ohio were Union officers during the engagement: Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley. Surprises like this make these moments special. I had no idea and wasn’t planning to do another 5 miles of walking after having just hiked 20 miles earlier in the day while waiting for a musical performance at a local brewery as the night sky approached.

Like many Americans who developed a fascination with history, the American Civil War was my first love and gateway into studying history. My father was a part-time reenactor during his spare time, and we attended those small and even large-scale reenactments when young and the replica musket that he used hangs on the fireplace mantle of his home back in Ohio. I was raised on Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. There were some John Wayne movies sprinkled in too. Not to mention Gettysburg. Then there were the trips as a child to battlefields like Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg. Somewhere in an attic in Cleveland, Ohio, there is a cardboard box of old polaroid photographs of me and my younger brother walking those sacred grounds somewhat oblivious to the sacred memory these parks were established to preserve and pass on to new generations.

The Civil War is a contentious episode in American history. In part because of the extensive post-war mythology that was constructed in the reconciliation between the white north and white south, at the exclusion of black Americans. The mythology of the Lost Cause still runs deep, especially on social media, even though secession documents state very clearly the intent to preserve the institution of slavery as among the reasons of the southern states leaving the Union. We know the tempered Lost Cause mythology: The Civil War was tragic but both sides fought bravely, honorably, nobly; this stands in contrast to the more Unreconstructed Confederate mythology which portrays Lincoln and the Union as vile, vindicative, and militant tyrants who victimized a good, moral, and Christian southern people. Sometimes this Lost Cause mythology says it was a war that need not have been fought. But the war was fought. It was tragic, but the Union prevailed, and the United States came out a strong nation because of it and that unified United States of America would prove indispensable in the terrible and ferocious wars of the twentieth century which set a captive humanity free. We are all probably familiar with this tempered version of Civil War memory and legacy.

History is not merely facts as dilettante amateurs often claim on the Internet and the world of social media. History is really the collective memory and the stories from that collective memory of events that people tell. Stories glorify. Stories vilify. They use the same facts but the conceptual relationships that the storytellers have to those facts shape their telling of the stories. As an Ohioan by birth, one of the most important Union states during the war, I was raised with pride for the Union but a respect for the Confederacy: they were wrong but nevertheless fought bravely. Ohio was, after all, the state that gave the Union William Tecumseh Sherman – the general who made Georgia howl – and the aforementioned Hayes and McKinley who were memorialized in that plaque in a forest gravel trail in Roanoke, Virginia that I decided to walk waiting for a band to arrive and play music at a local brewery I was to spend the evening.

The point of telling stories is to keep the soul of the individual alive. The stories of the soldiers who fought and suffered are not that of a bland and collective mass, but, as Shelby Foote recovered in his narrative history of the Civil War: personal, individual, Homeric. Even when driving and walking trails and across ridges, plains, and mountains that wouldn’t strike one as a battlefield, one suddenly finds a battlefield memorial commemorating a fight between Union and Confederate forces. Some were large. Some were small. Some are in towns, right next to the local Walgreens. Some are hidden off the side of the road, next to a river or lake, covered by weeds and grass. Many had Ohio regiments.

I do not know those brave and valiant men. My ancestors did not fight in the war. They were still living in the Philippines and Europe in the 1860s. But the men who did fight had loved ones nervously praying for their deliverance. Some of those prayers were answered. Others were not. But stories of heroism, death, and sacrifice ensured that those prayers were not in vain. Those stories also reflect the love that the dead had among the living. Names that would otherwise be forgotten, now forgotten in the twenty-first century, could still echo in eternity.

As I often looked at those memorials, reading about those battles that were not in the history books I had read growing up, I wished I knew the faces and souls of the men who crossed rivers under cannon fire; I wished I knew the faces and souls of the men who were wounded but survived to tell their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and cousins about their service; I wished I knew the faces and souls of the men who died and whose mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and cousins wept upon receiving the news. In these moments I became united with the dead I never knew. That’s what the best stories always achieve: they bring us into communion with the persons, personalities, and souls who came before us.

The story of the Civil War is multifaceted because of what we decide to concentrate on. A purely and merely political, institutional, and ideological retelling of the story loses the faces, souls, and persons who were actually involved in the war; the faces, souls, and persons who were freed in the war; the faces, souls, and persons who were forever changed by the war. Looking at the Hanging Rock battlefield memorial with photos of Hayes and McKinley, I was reminded of the human part of the story. Moreover, the still calm spirit that came over my soul having just hiked 20 miles of mountainous trail in the morning and early afternoon was instinctively and entirely human. I felt a bond with those two famous Ohioans whom I knew about and had read about in an earlier life but never felt a face-to-face connection with until that moment. They looked at me. I looked at them. I couldn’t “look away.”

Hayes and McKinley were not just great men who were presidents; they were, in that brief moment that lasted several minutes, as if brothers and kinsmen to me—they were people I felt as if I knew. These souls were likely frightened, nervous, and feeling the avalanche of human emotions as guns and sabers clashed and men cried out in pain as they were wounded and whose cries faded into nothingness. Here, the stories of Hayes and McKinley intersected with mine, separated by two centuries.

By the time I had sat down at a table at the brewery, an IPA in my hand and turning my gaze to the sweet saxophone player on the stage, my feet were sore, and this too brought me into communion with the soldiers whose names I saw carved in a memorial for the dead. They walked across these fields too. My feet tread the ground their feet had treaded 160 years before. Our stories were now intertwined through the mystery of time.

The soil of the south where much of the war unfolded also means something to us Northerners. Walking the ground of Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina over the past three years has made me appreciate being an Ohioan even more than when I grew up in Ohio learning about the Civil War. Coming across the graves, monuments, and plaques might just cause a tear and lead you to bow your head – a human gesture, a human act, that shows that we are all still human in an increasingly anti-human age.

I like to think as a Yankee who has slowly moved south, who walks the fields long forgotten by most but not forgotten by all, that those famous lyrics can unite people together in a shared story of tragedy and triumph, love and hate, anguish and hope: “I wish I was in the land of cotton, Old times they are not forgotten.” Those words ring true to me. To forget the faces, the hearts, and the souls of the men who died is to truly lose all touch with why history matters: not as a memorization of dates, facts, and fascinating characters, but as the memorialization of sons and fathers, daughters and mothers, whose hearts were grieved with loss and sung songs of memory which became part of history to sooth the cry of the human soul amid tragedy. The real purpose of history is to make us better humans through the love we show in remembering the dead. That is why song has always been the most human and most intimate way to remember history and remember the dead. Because songs are ultimately expressions of love. The land remembers, do we?

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