To get back to the subject at hand: Tuesday was History Immersion Day, beginning in Yorktown and ending outside of Appomattox Court House. I covered over 250 years of history and never left the state. Or, rather, the commonwealth. And then just to prove that wasn't a fluke, I spent the next morning at Monticello, just outside of Charlottesville.
Up until the Driveabout, I didn't know a lot about American military history - by that I mean the strategies and events that impacted various battles even when I knew the names of those battles. Case in point: The Siege of Yorktown. This is the battle that, in 1781, led to British General Cornwallis surrendering his army to George Washington and effectively ending the American Revolution. (I say "effectively" because the Treaty of Paris wasn't signed for another two years.)
Not being a military historian, I'm not sure I should overstate this, but it seems to me that the Americans beat the British at Yorktown because of the French and bad weather. The French navy turned back the British fleet, preventing them from bringing reinforcements and supplies to Cornwallis who was penned in at Yorktown. French soldiers, committed to Washington's command, played a significant role in capturing land controlled by the British. And the weather? Cornwallis had as his back-up plan to retreat across the York River, which is very wide at that point. But a sudden storm came up and prevented the British from escaping. Given his desire to avoid further heavy casualties and with nowhere to go, Cornwallis surrendered.
Not that I want to sound like I'm minimizing the role of Washington and the Americans here, but they were basically on par with the British (which in itself is quite a thing to say, as the British were the world's premier colonial power and the Americans had started the war as a bunch of untrained farmers and shopkeepers). The war had become a series of bloody draws. It was the addition of the French, and the luck of bad weather, that finally pushed the British over the edge.
Ten days after the victory at Yorktown, the Continental Congress authorized the building of a Victory Monument. Of course, they didn't authorize any actual money to build the monument, and didn't get around to doing so until about 100 years later, in 1880. In 1956, lightning damaged the statue at the top of the monument so they rebuilt the statue, replacing Lady Liberty with a different pose. Here is the statue today:
Yorktown is part of the Colonial National Historic Park which means your $10 admission gets you into the National Park Service facilities at Williamsburg and Jamestown in addition to Yorktown. They're all within about a 30 minute drive of each other, and the drive itself, along Colonial Parkway, is very pretty.
Since I wanted to get to Appomattox Court House before it closed later in the afternoon, I skipped Williamsburg and headed to Jamestown, where British colonists settled in 1607.
One of the first industrial efforts of the colonists was to make glass. Being something of a glass artist myself, I stopped in at the glass shop which the Park Service operates using more or less the same technology as the Jamestown settlers used in 1608. Although they were able to produce glass to send back to England - the first factory-built product in America - a variety of factors caused the effort to fail. Still, it's interesting to watch the glass blowers, and I bought a couple of glasses for my new home in Chicago.
Then onto Jamestown, which is a little more confusing than it sounds. You see, there are two Jamestowns. One is a privately run living history museum and the other is the Park Service's operation which is located on grounds of the original settlement and showcases the archaeological excavation there. The signage is sometimes clear and sometimes not, but eventually I found the excavation, complete with an archaeologist.
Before long her boss came over and shooed us all out so that she could get back to work. Then I started talking with Howard, a very knowledgeable volunteer. He showed me the excavation of this storeroom, complete with an oven in the back corner:
Next to the rebuilt church is a tower which Howard said has been here since the mid-17th century. They plan to restore it, making bricks and tuckpointing the way it would have originally been done.
But even here, in a colonial settlement, you see evidence of later history because this is Virginia. The berm in this picture was built as part of a Confederate fort that was used to defend against Union penetration along the James River.
The bugs are terrible at Jamestown, by the way, and the water is brackish (a combination of fresh water and sea water). The settlers put up with these conditions and lived at Jamestown for nearly 100 years despite the ample supply of fresh water further inland. Neither Howard nor I could figure out why. Nowadays they have a nice little cafe so I had lunch (inside, to avoid the bugs) and drove west.
The road (or, really, roads) from Jamestown to Farmville, my next stop, inadvertently led me along the path of the Confederate retreat in 1865. I guess that wasn't entirely surprising, as the reason I was going to Farmville was to see a bridge which had been part of that retreat, but I hadn't set out that morning with the intention of driving along with General Lee. The route is well marked - certainly the people in charge of signs in Northern Virginia could take a lesson from the Civil War tourism people - and you follow both state highways and, occasionally, local roads.
I sort of picked this up at Petersburg which coincidentally was along my path and where, fortunately, I followed a sign to see General Grant's headquarters at City Point where two older couples and I got a great tour from a young park ranger named Emmanuel.
In 1864, things were going badly for the North. In the summer, it wasn't entirely clear that Lincoln would be re-elected or even renominated, although, in the end, both occurred. Emmanuel explained that Lincoln needed a winning general and so far hadn't found the right man. He brought Ulysses S. Grant back from his posting in the west and made him commander of all Union troops. Grant was a field general and didn't want his headquarters in Washington, so he set up his operation on a temporarily abandoned plantation owned by Dr. Richard Eppes. The property sticks out into the James where it meets the Appomattox River - which, like the York River further east, is very wide and feels a bit more like a lake. From this vantage point, you can see what's coming for quite a ways and it would be pretty easy to defend. In addition to (and strategically more important than) Grant's headquarters, City Point was the Union's major supply depot. The key to winning a siege, of course, is making sure you have plenty of stuff and, when necessary, the ability to bring in fresh troops. This makes it a lot easier to win from the outside than from the inside. (Unless, of course, you're the Germans and decide to lay siege to a Russian city over the winter. Kind of an odd coincidence that the city in Russia was St. Petersburg, known as Leningrad at the time. Remind me never to live anywhere named Petersburg.)
Grant had his men expand railroad lines to the front at Petersburg, so that supplies could be shipped in by water to City Point and then by rail to the army. There's a park on the way from Petersburg to City Point that was a Union fortification and still has the earthen berm to prove it. A sign at the park says that nearby the Federal railroad construction brigade was instructed to build "an immense building for a bakery" in August of 1864 which then shipped that bread by rail a few miles south to the Union troops.
The end of the Siege at Petersburg was not the end of the Civil War, but the city's fall sent the Confederates into retreat. Lee's plan was to lead his starving men to a town called Amelia Court House where provisions were supposed to be waiting, then further west where they would either defeat the Union troops or, failing that, disappear into the mountains of North Carolina to begin a guerrilla campaign. At this point the Confederates were ahead of the Federal troops. But the provisions at Amelia Court House had been stolen, and Lee's starving men spent a day foraging, which cost the army valuable time.
For some reason I had become fascinated, perhaps even slightly obsessed, with the idea of seeing High Bridge, which is a bridge that the Confederates attempted to destroy after they crossed it to prevent the Federal troops from following them. The bridge was largely stone and their efforts were unsuccessful. That allowed Grant to pursue Lee from the east as well as from south. More terrible fighting ensued and the rest, as they say, is history.
The bridge is still there - all 2,400 feet of it, over 100 feet above the Appomattox River - but it's really only accessible from a bike path, and my bike is in Fort Wayne being tuned up. At that point in the afternoon I was more focused on getting to Appomattox Court House before it closed than I was at continuing my snipe hunt, so I abandoned my dream of seeing High Bridge and drove northwest.
Following both Google Maps and Lee's Retreat tourism signs, I arrived at Appomattox Court House 33 minutes before it closed for the evening.
Perhaps you already know this but I didn't: Appomattox Court House is the name of a town, not a building. Of course, the reason for the town's name is because it is where the Court House for Appomattox County is located (and in which currently resides the National Park Service Visitor Center), but the structure where the terms of surrender were signed is actually a private residence, owned by one Wilmer McLean. For a civilian, this poor guy just kept running into the war. A businessman, he and his family had lived in Manassas where his home had been taken over by General Beauregard during that battle. To get away from the war, he moved to what seemed like a relatively safe place, Appomattox Court House. Then one day in April of 1865 there's a knock on the door with another Confederate officer explaining that they'd need to use his house for a day or two.
You can see the living room where Lee and Grant sat, each at a different small table (although Lee sat at the nicer one), to sign the surrender papers. The house itself is open to the public and there are several other town buildings maintained as part of the national monument.
Having seen where the Civil War began, it was good for me to see where it ended. The film at the Visitor Center is a little self-congratulatory about how we as a nation were able to get on from the Civil War. I think that's more true for some people than for others, but certainly President Lincoln and Grant took every step they could do bring the Confederacy - which was, of course, responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand Federal soldiers, if nothing else - back into the Union. And it seems that Lee did the same on his side. The fact that a lot of other people didn't go along with this plan (not the least of whom was John Wilkes Booth when he assassinated Lincoln) was beyond their control.
On my way northwest to Charlottesville I drove by a number of spots marked by signs indicating that they were places where Lee stayed either before or after the surrender. After a while you stop looking at the signs because there were so many of them. Did I mention how saturated Virginia is with history?
I had selected Charlottesville to stay for a couple of nights because it seemed like it was close to the Shenandoah National Park. I was a little embarrassed to learn that it is also home to the University of Virginia and, of more interest to me, Monticello. Not sure how I'd missed that, but I was glad to be here.
Monticello, of course, is the home of Thomas Jefferson. It is a beautiful house that he designed and built, over several decades, sitting on top of a mountain where you can see views like this:
And this:
And I like this picture of the house because I took it from behind a tree:
Jefferson loved technology and included all sorts of gadgets in the home: dumb-waiters for wine (what a great idea!), an indoor-outdoor clock that also tells you the day of the week, a writing machine so that when he wrote letters there was a copy automatically made - very impressive. His book room (they don't call it a library for some reason) is the second largest room in the house, after the dining room which was arranged to maximize the ability of guests to have stimulating conversations.
In addition to the tour of the house, I went on a guided tour called Slavery at Monticello. Jefferson wrote strongly and passionately against slavery, but, of course, he owned several hundred people over his lifetime. At his death, he freed only five (of over 100) slaves - three people who were confidants or, you might say, senior managers, and two who were likely his sons from his relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. (Hemings had two older children, also presumed to be fathered by Jefferson, who were allowed to escape prior to his death. Since both of them were very light complected, they were able to pass as white and have since disappeared from history.)
You never know for sure how a museum, dedicated to a person or a company, is going to treat material that shows its person or company in a less than favorable light. I think the folks at Monticello do a good job of being fair. They don't try to rationalize Jefferson's inconsistency, or try to evaluate it (i.e., "he was more good than bad, or more bad than good.") Rather, they just present the facts - which include his considerable writings on the topic of liberty and slavery (which were important - he is arguably the reason we have religious liberty in this country, for instance) and also his behavior - owning slaves, and not even taking any steps to protect most of them after his death, when they were sold to pay his estate's significant debts. Although he was generally pretty benign in his treatment of slaves - if you can get around the whole "holding people in bondage" thing - he was gone from Monticello a lot before his retirement and he employed white overseers who were brutal.
So you are left to mull this around on your own, and I guess that's probably the only way to do it. History, like people, is sometimes both black and white at the same time.
The bugs are terrible at Jamestown, by the way, and the water is brackish (a combination of fresh water and sea water). The settlers put up with these conditions and lived at Jamestown for nearly 100 years despite the ample supply of fresh water further inland. Neither Howard nor I could figure out why. Nowadays they have a nice little cafe so I had lunch (inside, to avoid the bugs) and drove west.
The road (or, really, roads) from Jamestown to Farmville, my next stop, inadvertently led me along the path of the Confederate retreat in 1865. I guess that wasn't entirely surprising, as the reason I was going to Farmville was to see a bridge which had been part of that retreat, but I hadn't set out that morning with the intention of driving along with General Lee. The route is well marked - certainly the people in charge of signs in Northern Virginia could take a lesson from the Civil War tourism people - and you follow both state highways and, occasionally, local roads.
I sort of picked this up at Petersburg which coincidentally was along my path and where, fortunately, I followed a sign to see General Grant's headquarters at City Point where two older couples and I got a great tour from a young park ranger named Emmanuel.
In 1864, things were going badly for the North. In the summer, it wasn't entirely clear that Lincoln would be re-elected or even renominated, although, in the end, both occurred. Emmanuel explained that Lincoln needed a winning general and so far hadn't found the right man. He brought Ulysses S. Grant back from his posting in the west and made him commander of all Union troops. Grant was a field general and didn't want his headquarters in Washington, so he set up his operation on a temporarily abandoned plantation owned by Dr. Richard Eppes. The property sticks out into the James where it meets the Appomattox River - which, like the York River further east, is very wide and feels a bit more like a lake. From this vantage point, you can see what's coming for quite a ways and it would be pretty easy to defend. In addition to (and strategically more important than) Grant's headquarters, City Point was the Union's major supply depot. The key to winning a siege, of course, is making sure you have plenty of stuff and, when necessary, the ability to bring in fresh troops. This makes it a lot easier to win from the outside than from the inside. (Unless, of course, you're the Germans and decide to lay siege to a Russian city over the winter. Kind of an odd coincidence that the city in Russia was St. Petersburg, known as Leningrad at the time. Remind me never to live anywhere named Petersburg.)
Grant had his men expand railroad lines to the front at Petersburg, so that supplies could be shipped in by water to City Point and then by rail to the army. There's a park on the way from Petersburg to City Point that was a Union fortification and still has the earthen berm to prove it. A sign at the park says that nearby the Federal railroad construction brigade was instructed to build "an immense building for a bakery" in August of 1864 which then shipped that bread by rail a few miles south to the Union troops.
The end of the Siege at Petersburg was not the end of the Civil War, but the city's fall sent the Confederates into retreat. Lee's plan was to lead his starving men to a town called Amelia Court House where provisions were supposed to be waiting, then further west where they would either defeat the Union troops or, failing that, disappear into the mountains of North Carolina to begin a guerrilla campaign. At this point the Confederates were ahead of the Federal troops. But the provisions at Amelia Court House had been stolen, and Lee's starving men spent a day foraging, which cost the army valuable time.
For some reason I had become fascinated, perhaps even slightly obsessed, with the idea of seeing High Bridge, which is a bridge that the Confederates attempted to destroy after they crossed it to prevent the Federal troops from following them. The bridge was largely stone and their efforts were unsuccessful. That allowed Grant to pursue Lee from the east as well as from south. More terrible fighting ensued and the rest, as they say, is history.
The bridge is still there - all 2,400 feet of it, over 100 feet above the Appomattox River - but it's really only accessible from a bike path, and my bike is in Fort Wayne being tuned up. At that point in the afternoon I was more focused on getting to Appomattox Court House before it closed than I was at continuing my snipe hunt, so I abandoned my dream of seeing High Bridge and drove northwest.
Following both Google Maps and Lee's Retreat tourism signs, I arrived at Appomattox Court House 33 minutes before it closed for the evening.
Perhaps you already know this but I didn't: Appomattox Court House is the name of a town, not a building. Of course, the reason for the town's name is because it is where the Court House for Appomattox County is located (and in which currently resides the National Park Service Visitor Center), but the structure where the terms of surrender were signed is actually a private residence, owned by one Wilmer McLean. For a civilian, this poor guy just kept running into the war. A businessman, he and his family had lived in Manassas where his home had been taken over by General Beauregard during that battle. To get away from the war, he moved to what seemed like a relatively safe place, Appomattox Court House. Then one day in April of 1865 there's a knock on the door with another Confederate officer explaining that they'd need to use his house for a day or two.
You can see the living room where Lee and Grant sat, each at a different small table (although Lee sat at the nicer one), to sign the surrender papers. The house itself is open to the public and there are several other town buildings maintained as part of the national monument.
Having seen where the Civil War began, it was good for me to see where it ended. The film at the Visitor Center is a little self-congratulatory about how we as a nation were able to get on from the Civil War. I think that's more true for some people than for others, but certainly President Lincoln and Grant took every step they could do bring the Confederacy - which was, of course, responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand Federal soldiers, if nothing else - back into the Union. And it seems that Lee did the same on his side. The fact that a lot of other people didn't go along with this plan (not the least of whom was John Wilkes Booth when he assassinated Lincoln) was beyond their control.
On my way northwest to Charlottesville I drove by a number of spots marked by signs indicating that they were places where Lee stayed either before or after the surrender. After a while you stop looking at the signs because there were so many of them. Did I mention how saturated Virginia is with history?
I had selected Charlottesville to stay for a couple of nights because it seemed like it was close to the Shenandoah National Park. I was a little embarrassed to learn that it is also home to the University of Virginia and, of more interest to me, Monticello. Not sure how I'd missed that, but I was glad to be here.
Monticello, of course, is the home of Thomas Jefferson. It is a beautiful house that he designed and built, over several decades, sitting on top of a mountain where you can see views like this:
And this:
And I like this picture of the house because I took it from behind a tree:
Jefferson loved technology and included all sorts of gadgets in the home: dumb-waiters for wine (what a great idea!), an indoor-outdoor clock that also tells you the day of the week, a writing machine so that when he wrote letters there was a copy automatically made - very impressive. His book room (they don't call it a library for some reason) is the second largest room in the house, after the dining room which was arranged to maximize the ability of guests to have stimulating conversations.
In addition to the tour of the house, I went on a guided tour called Slavery at Monticello. Jefferson wrote strongly and passionately against slavery, but, of course, he owned several hundred people over his lifetime. At his death, he freed only five (of over 100) slaves - three people who were confidants or, you might say, senior managers, and two who were likely his sons from his relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. (Hemings had two older children, also presumed to be fathered by Jefferson, who were allowed to escape prior to his death. Since both of them were very light complected, they were able to pass as white and have since disappeared from history.)
You never know for sure how a museum, dedicated to a person or a company, is going to treat material that shows its person or company in a less than favorable light. I think the folks at Monticello do a good job of being fair. They don't try to rationalize Jefferson's inconsistency, or try to evaluate it (i.e., "he was more good than bad, or more bad than good.") Rather, they just present the facts - which include his considerable writings on the topic of liberty and slavery (which were important - he is arguably the reason we have religious liberty in this country, for instance) and also his behavior - owning slaves, and not even taking any steps to protect most of them after his death, when they were sold to pay his estate's significant debts. Although he was generally pretty benign in his treatment of slaves - if you can get around the whole "holding people in bondage" thing - he was gone from Monticello a lot before his retirement and he employed white overseers who were brutal.
So you are left to mull this around on your own, and I guess that's probably the only way to do it. History, like people, is sometimes both black and white at the same time.
Great review of some of our significant history, Karen. Dad and I saw much if it with the Echols a few years ago...glad you have had a chance to see it. Love, GAGA
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