History Is Fun!

Monday morning, having already explored all I cared to see of the Natural Bridge, I told my roommate to go have fun with her new friend and then set out for the library, which, as it turned out, did not open until 10. I decided to make the best of the deprivation, and set out for Washington and Lee College. I had no idea what I'd find there, but I knew it was in the history books, so it must have some kind of historical display for the tourists.

I wasn't wrong.

The Lee Chapel, as it turns out, is the final resting place of Robert E. Lee, his father, Light Horse Harry, and many other members of their family both immediate and continuing. The tour guide informed us there is a 90-year-old Robert E. Lee the Fourth and a 12-year-old Robert E. Lee the Sixth who have both been cleared for burial there in the (we hope) far off someday.

For those of you who don't recognize the name Light Horse Harry, that's okay. He's one of the lesser known heroes of the Revolutionary War, close friend of the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, on whose story The Patriot was very loosely based. Light Horse, Swamp Fox, and the Gamecock (Thomas Sumter) were the three guerilla leaders in South Carolina. I did my paper for US History 1 on Francis Marion, loved the collaboration and trust between him and Light Horse, and didn't care for the show-off, stuck-up Gamecock at all. I did remember that Light Horse was related to Robert E. Lee, but forgot that they were father and son. Still drops my jaw to remember that the Revolution and the un-Civil War were so close together in time.

Anyway, the chapel got an addition after Robert E. Lee's death. Instead of a window behind the pulpit there's now this shrine to the late great general. Per his wife's request, he is humbly posed; asleep on the battlefield, with his sword at his side.

These days, with the Confederate Flag being removed and the Southern legacy being (rightfully) called into question, I feel a bit conflicted about venerating Lee and Jackson. They fought for a cause that I detest, when they had the power to try to stop it. The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in all our history and, for all the talk about state rights, it was at its heart, a fight for the ability to go on denying human rights to much of its population. I recognize all this.

But, at the same time, they were men of honor, who did their best to live up to the True and Right and Beautiful as they knew it. Lee was a gentleman, who did his best, after the war, to set an example to his fellow Southerners of what it meant to be a loyal citizen of their full nation. Jackson was a gardener whose greatest wish was to have a home and a family, but his only child to survive infancy was born during the war and his wife could not keep their house after his death. It seems a disservice to both dead and living to forget that truly good, honorable, brilliant men can be blinded by tradition or culture or secondary concerns into fighting for something so wrong.

As we were waiting for the chip card to take, the lady in the Lee Chapel gift shop informed me that the Virginia Military Institute, right next door, has a historical display including Little Sorrel, famous among horses both living and stuffed. Once I realized Little Sorrel was so close, I had to walk down and take a look. You can easily tell the difference between the two campuses, because Washington and Lee has colonnades and prettiness, but VMI looks like it was planning for the zombie apocalypse until someone with an eye for aesthetics insisted that they at least try to make the buildings look like castles.

VMI's Chapel. The museum's in the two basement floors.

VMI is proud to proclaim that Thomas J. Jackson, the famous Stonewall Jackson, was a professor there at their college, and they're equally proud of their student, George S. Patton, despite the fact that he only spent a year at VMI.

Little Sorrel, favorite mount of Stonewall Jackson

Jackson's first wife (who died in childbirth and was buried with their son) was actually the daughter of the president of Washington and Lee. As Jackson had no house of his own, he and his wife lived with her parents. After her death, Jackson continued to live with her parents until he was finally able to purchase his own house in town, where he moved with his second wife, who was also the daughter of a college president. When the war broke out, Jackson's former father-in-law resigned from Washington and Lee, then just called Washington College, and moved north.

Jackson's own sister, with whom he was very close, became a Union nurse and never spoke to her brother again. She noted that her brother was hurting the men that she would try to heal.

Not for nothing is the Civil War called the war between brothers.

"Solitude:" a wood sculpture of a horse running alone through a Civil War battlefield. Around his feet, the dropped gear of the dead soldiers, including a hat and a sword.

Thomas Jackson's dream house

The garden, where Jackson spent much of his leisure time, working alongside the three slaves his wife had inherited. Jackson loved his fruits and vegetables and used hot-house frames to keep them growing out of season. Interesting fact; his wife always referred to the slaves as "servants." I wonder if the word choice indicates a troubled conscience?