Pedaling through New Market yesterday, battle field monuments and a battlefield reenactment site recite the history of the Civil War.
"That was 200 years ago. Get over it," I used to think. But now I see things differently.
Butch knows someone whose grandfather fought alongside Stonewall Jackson.
And on the weekend, the Daily News Record (Harrisonburg, Virginia) told of Carrie Allen McCray Nickens (94), the black descendant of John Robert Jones, a Harrisonburg man Jackson had nominated to become a general. Though Gen. Robert E. Lee and President Jefferson Davis endorsed the nomination, the Confederate Senate never confirmed Jones. Captured in 1863, he spent the last two years of the war in prison camps.
Two Confederate soldiers. Two Virginian's grandparents. Suddenly 200 years ago just doesn't seem that long ago.
1 comment:
I think when something significant happens in your own back yard like that, it gets passed on and remembered. The Civil war wasn't fought in upstate NY (or Iowa), so we don't think about it much. But for my relatives in Tenn., it is a big deal since there was a battle in Murfreesboro.
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