Day 87. May 26, 1862.
87
You had better take the larger horse; he will carry you better….
May Monday 26 1862
Very cold this morning and a very heavy dew like a shower of rain. We were camped in a grain field that was out in heads. We was some 9 miles from Fredericksburg. We got up very early and eat our breakfast and took up the line of march at 6ocklock. We had a very warm day. We marched on to the RR Cattett Station. Arrived there at 9½ oclock where we bivouacked for the night where all Shields Division had come. We marched 20 miles today and we are very much fatigued and we all feel very much like resting for awhile. The 1 & 2 & 3 brigades went down towards Manasses gap.* Things looked as if there was something to be done. It is going to be very cool this night and the 110th are camped in a clearing
*The Manassas Gap Railroad (completed in 1854, 77 miles) ran from Mount Jackson, VA. to the Orange and Alexandria Railroad’s Manassas Junction, later called Manassas City. The gap itself is a “wind gap” (where a waterway once flowed), 887 feet in elevation, & is the lowest crossing of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Manassas Junction is 30 miles southwest of D.C., & the tracks intersected the O&A Railroad. The Appalachian Trail now crosses the gap. https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/manassas-gap For a description of this area of VA., see Ephraim’s entry June 14th.
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 116
“May 26, 1862: Telegraphs McClellan: “Can you not cut the Acquia Creek Railroad also? What impression have you, as to intrenchments—works—for you to contend with in front of Richmond? Can you get near enough to throw shells into the city?’”
Stonewall Jackson Valley Campaign Shenandoah 1862 Peter Cozzens P. 376-377
“If anyone was demoralized by defeat, it was not Banks. One of his first acts on the morning of May 26 was to telegraph Stanton assurances of the army’s well-being: “We believe that our whole force, trains and all, will cross in safety. The men are in fine spirits and crossing in good order. The enemy… has not made his appearance this morning.” At midday the last of the Union army crossed the Potomac. With understandable pride he told the president that afternoon: “The substantial preservation of the entire supply train is a source of gratification. It numbered about five hundred wagons. On a forced march of fifty-three miles, thirty-five of which were performed in one day, subject to constant attack, not more than fifty wagons were lost.”
Despite employing a four-to-one superiority in numbers, Jackson had not destroyed Bank’s army. At Winchester only the 29th Pennsylvania and 27th Indiana had been roughly handled; in Donnelly’s brigade, not a single man had been killed. Banks spoke the truth when he reported: “My command had not suffered an attack and rout, but had accomplished a premeditated march of nearly sixty miles in the face of the enemy, defeating his plans and giving him battle wherever he was found.”
The losses at Winchester are hard to calculate. Union reports lumped together casualties incurred at Front Royal, on the retreat of March 24, and at the battle of and retreat from Winchester. Total Federal casualties for the three days were 71 killed, 243 wounded, and 1,714 missing. Many of those listed as missing later turned up, having wandered the Virginia countryside between Winchester and the Potomac River for days. Perhaps 800 were captured at Winchester or gathered up by the Confederate cavalry during the retreat– a considerable number, but by no means a crippling blow. For the three days of fighting, Jackson reported casualties of 68 killed and 329 wounded, with just 3 men reported missing. Jackson claimed to have taken 3,050 prisoners, nearly a third being sick or wounded men found in Union army hospitals at Strasburg and Winchester. Of far greater importance than the number of prisoners taken was the seizure of 9,364 stands of small arms, half a million rounds of ammunition, 34,000 pounds of commissary stores, and $125,185 worth of quartermaster supplies.’”
[Telegram.]
“Washington, May 26, 1862. 12:40 p.m.
Major-General McClellan.
We have General Banks’s official report. He has saved his army and baggage, and has made a safe retreat to the river, and is probably safe at Williamsport. He reports the attacking force at 15,000. A. Lincoln, President.”
Stonewall Jackson Valley Campaign Shenandoah 1862 Peter Cozzens P. 393
“This morning Jackson will write his wife: about “an ever-kind Providence” and that, “I do not remember having seen such rejoicing as was manifested by the people of Winchester as our army yesterday passed through the town in pursuit of the enemy. The people seemed nearly frantic with joy; indeed, it would be almost impossible to describe their manifestations of rejoicing and gratitude. Our entrance into Winchester was one of the most stirring scenes of my life.’”
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James M. McPherson P. 457-458
“Jackson’s campaign accomplished the relief of pressure against Richmond that Lee had hoped for. When Lincoln learned on May 24 of Jackson’s capture of Front Royal, he made two swift decisions. First he ordered Frémont to push his troops eastward into the Valley at Harrisonburg, from where they could march north and attack Jackson’s rear. Second, he suspended McDowell’s movement from Fredericksburg toward Richmond and ordered him to send two divisions posthaste to the Valley to smash into Jackson’s flank. Both McClellan and McDowell protested that this action played into the enemy’s hand. It was a “crushing blow to us,” McDowell wired Lincoln. “I shall gain nothing for you there, and shall lose much for you here.” Nevertheless, McDowell obeyed orders. Back to the Valley he sent James Shields’s division, which Banks had sent him only a few days earlier. McDowell himself followed with another division. Sitting in the War Department telegraph office in Washington, Lincoln fired off telegrams to the three separate commands of Frémont, Banks, and McDowell, hoping to move them like knights and bishops on the military chessboard. But his generals moved too slowly, or in the wrong direction. Instead of crossing into the Valley at Harrisonburg, Frémont found the passes blocked by small enemy forces and marched forty miles northward to cross at a point northwest of Strasburg. This angered Lincoln, for it opened the way for Jackson’s 16,000 to escape southward through Strasburg before Frémont’s 15,000 and Shield’s 10,000 (with another 10,000 close behind) converged on them from west and east.
That was precisely what happened. After the battle of Winchester, Jackson had marched to within a few miles of Harper’s Ferry to give the impression that he intended to cross the Potomac. On May 30 his force was nearly twice as far from Strasburg as the converging forces of Frémont and Shields. Nothing but a few cavalry stood in the way of the Union pincers. But a strange lethargy seemed to paralyze the northern commanders. Jackson’s foot cavalry raced southward day and night on May 30 while the bluecoats tarried.”
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 115
“May 26, 1862: Takes military possession of all railroads in U.S. “Library of the Executive Mansion” orders books from W.F. Richstein: “1 Pearls of Ord Island $1.25, 1 Agnes of Sorrento $1.25.’” [Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Boston, 1862; Agnes of Sorrento, Boston, 1862.]
Note: Skipping to this day in 1864:
The Late Gen. J.E.B. Stuart–His Last Hours–How He Received His Death Wound.
May 26, 1864
The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
May 26, 1864, Page 3
“From a long obituary of STUART — whom the rebels call the “flower of Cavaliers” — in the Richmond Examiner, we clip as follows: “No incident of mortality, since the fall of the great JACKSON, has occasioned more painful regret than this. Major-Gen. J.E.B. STUART, the model of Virginian cavaliers and dashing chieftain, whose name was a terror to the enemy, and familiar as a household word in two continents, is dead, struck down by a bullet from the dastardly foe, and the whole Confederacy mourns him. He breathed out his gallant spirit resignedly, and in the full possession of all his remarkable faculties of mind and body, at twenty-two minutes to 8 o’clock, Thursday night, at the residence of Dr. BREWER, a relative, on Green-street, in the presence of Drs. BREWER, GARNETT, GIBSON and FONTAINE, of the General’s staff, Rev. Messrs. PETERKIN and KEPPLER, and a circle of sorrow-stricken comrades and friends.
We learn from the physicians in attendance upon the General that his condition during the day was very changeable, with occasional delirium and other unmistakable symptoms of speedy dissolution. In the moments of delirium the General’s mind wandered, and, like the immortal JACKSON, (whose spirit, we trust, his has joined,) in the lapse of reason, his faculties were busy with the details of his command. He reviewed in broken sentences all his glorious campaigns around MCCLELLAN’s rear on the Peninsula, beyond the Potomac, and upon the Rapidan, quoting from his orders, and issuing new ones to his couriers, with a last injunction to “make haste.”
JEFF. DAVIS VISITS STUART.
About noon, Thursday, President DAVIS visited his bedside, and spent some fifteen minutes in the dying chamber of his favorite chieftain. The President, taking his hand, said: “General, now do you feel?” He replied, “Easy, put willing to die, if God and my country think I have fulfilled my destiny and done my duty.” As evening approached, the General’s delirium increased, and his mind again wandered to the battle-fields over which he had fought, then off to wife and children, and off again to the front. A telegraphic message had been sent for his wife, who was in the country, with the injunction to make all haste, as the General was dangerously wounded. Some thoughtless or unauthorized person, thinking, probbably, to spare his wife pain, altered the dispatch to “slightly wounded,” and it was thus she received it and did not make that haste which she otherwise would have done to reach his side.
As evening wore on the paroxysms of pain increased, and mortification set in rapidly. Though suffering the greatest agony at times, the General was calm, and applied to the wound, with his own hand, the ice intended to relieve the pain. During the evening he asked Dr. BREWER how long he thought he could live, and whether it was possible for him to survive through the night. The doctor, knowing he did not desire to be buoyed by false hopes, told him frankly that death — the last enemy — was rapidly approaching. The General nodded, and said, “I am resigned if it be God’s will; but I would like to live to see my wife. But God’s will be done.” Several times he roused up and asked if she had come.
To the doctor, who sat holding his wrist and counting the fleeting, weakening pulse, he semarked [sic], “Doctor, I suppose I am going fast now. It will soon be over. But God’s will be done. I hope I have fulfilled my duty to my country and my duty to my God.”
At 7 1/2 oclock it was evident to the physicians that death was setting its clammy seal upon the brave, open brow of the General, and told him so — asked if he had any last message to give. The General, with mind perfectly clear and possessed, then made dispositions of his staff and personal effects. To Mrs. Gen. R.E. LEE he directed that the golden spurs be given as a dying memento of his love and esteem of her husband. To his staff officers he gave his horses. So particular was he in small things, even in the dying hour, that he emphatically exhibited and illustrated the ruling passion strong in death. To one of his staff, who was a heavy built man, he said, “You had better take the larger horse; he will carry you better.” Other mementoes he disposed of in a similar manner. To his young son, he left his glorious sword.
His worldly matters closed, the eternal interests of his soul engaged his mind. Turning to Rev. Mr. PETERKIN, of the Episcopal Church, and of which he was an exemplary member, he asked him to sing the hymn commencing,
“Rock of ages cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee,”
he joining in with all the voice his strength would permit. He then joined in prayer with the ministers. To the doctor he again said: “I am going fast now; I am resigned; God’s will be done.” Thus died Gen, J.E.B. STUART.
HOW HE RECEIVED HIS DEATH WOUND.
Dr. BREWER, the brother-in-law of Gen. STUART, has furnished us with some particulars, obtained from the General’s own lips, of the manner in which he came by his wound. He had formed a line of skirmishers near the Yellow Tavern, when, seeing a brigade preparing to charge on his left. Gen. STUART and his staff dashed down the line to form troops to repel the charge. About this time the Yankees came thundering down upon the General and his small escort. Twelve shots were fired at the General at short range, the Yankees evidently recognizing his well-known person. The General wheeled upon them with the natural bravery which has always characterized him, and discharged six shots at his assailants.
The last of the shots fired at him struck the General in the left side of the stomach. He did not fall, knowing he would be captured if he did, and, nerving himself in his seat, wheeled his horse’s head and rode for the protection of his lines. Before he reached them his wound overcame him, and he fell, or was helped, from his saddle, by one of his ever-faithful troopers, and carried to a place of security. Subsequently he was brought to Richmond in an ambulance. The immediate cause of his death was mortification of the stomach, induced by the flow of blood from the kidneys and intestines into the cavity of the stomach.
Gen. STUART was about 35 years of age. His oldest offspring, a sprightly boy, died a year ago while he was battling for his country on the Rappahannock. When telegraphed that the child was dying, he sent the reply, “I must leave my child in the hands of God; my country needs me here; I cannot come.'”
Note: Stuart asked Reverend Peterkin to sing the hymn “Rock of Ages” as he lay dying. (Here is a two stanza excerpt)
“Let the water and the blood
From Thy riven side which flowed
Be of sin the double cure
Cleanse me from its guilt and pow’r
Nothing in my hand I bring
Simply to Thy cross I cling
Nothing in my hand I bring
Simply to Thy cross I cling”
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War Tony Horwitz P. 286-288
“I ended my drive at Stone Mountain, just east of the city. Reputedly the largest hunk of exposed granite in the world, the dome-shaped mountain poked up from Atlanta’s wooded perimeter like a very tall, very bald man in a crowd. Chiseled on its face was the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture, a three-acre carving of the Confederate trinity– Lee, Jackson and Davis– riding horses and holding hats over their hearts. Lee alone stood nine stories tall.
Commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1915, and begun by the same artist who crafted Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain was intended as the South’s foremost Confederate shrine. It also became a rallying place for the Ku Klux Klan, which was reborn there in 195 and later declared Atlanta its Imperial City. But eighty years later, when the park at Stone Mountain’s base was named an Olympic venue, the Invisible Empire became, well, invisible. A museum exhibit on Stone Mountain, opening just before the Games, omitted any mention of the Klan. “I think some chapters are just better left to the historians,” Atlanta’s mayor told the local press.
The park’s management had also chosen to soften the Confederate content of a popular laser show that used the sculpture as a backdrop. Curious to see the result, I joined several thousand people strewn on blankets and banana chairs at the mountain’s base. As the lights came up, I was struck by how different Stone Mountain was from Mount Rushmore. Here, the figures were shown in profile, in relatively shallow relief, as though a huge Confederate coin had left a fossil-like print in the mountain’s face.
This impression lasted about ten seconds, the time it took for the sound track to kick on, playing as overture a familiar soft-drink jingle: “There’s always Coca-Cola!” Laser beams created a Coke bottle dancing across the mounted Confederates. This was followed by a cartoon strip featuring a good ol’ boy named Buford, traveling through a time tunnel– though not very far. Animated rock guitarists flashed onto the mountain to the strains of ZZ Top and the Beatles. This segued into the theme song from Beverly Hills Cop, accompanied by abstract images: trapezoids, stars, clusters.
No musical riff or laser image lasted more than a few seconds. I caught snatches of the B-52s singing “Heading down the Atlanta Highway” and Alabama doing “Forty Hour Week.” Charlie Daniels’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” collided with Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles as airplanes landed to the strains of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Then came sports iconography– the Braves, the Falcons, the Hawks– before Elvis appeared, thrusting his pelvis across Traveller’s rippling flank. At this point, I felt sure I could hear Robby Lee and his famous mount rolling over in their graves up in Lexington.
The show concluded in a blur of cliches: Scarlett O’Hara, peaches, plantations, and the mascots of various Georgia universities. Then Elvis appeared again, singing “Dixie” in a slow, sensual drawl as the lasers outlined Lee, Jackson and Davis. The crowd began to cheer. But as the mounted men sprang to life and galloped across Stone Mountain, “Dixie” segued into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and Lee broke his sword across his leg. The two halves of the blade quickly transmogrified into a map of North and South, merging together as the sound track belted, “His truth is marching on.” Finally, to expunge any last hint of the Cause, the sound track played “God Bless the U.S.A.” amidst images of the Lincoln Memorial,** JFK’s grave, Martin Luther King Jr., and a ballot box. Fireworks exploded and the mountain became, in turn, an immense American flag, the Statue of Liberty*** and Mount Rushmore. The music and lasers abruptly cut off and the three horsemen of the Confederacy melted into the night.
I sat there for a while, letting “Dixie” and the “Battle Hymn” and Lee and Lincoln and Elvis all jangle around in my head. The show was a puddle of political correctness. The message seemed to be that there was no message– no real content to any of the divisive figures or songs or historic episodes the laser show depicted in its fast-paced cartoon. Why debate who should or shouldn’t be remembered and revered when you could just stuff the whole lot in a blender and spew it across the world’s biggest rock?
Like so much in Atlanta, Stone Mountain had become a bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament. Not for the first time, though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of affinity for the neo-Confederates I’d met in my travels. Better to remember Dixie and debate its philosophy than to have its largest shrine hijacked for Coca-Cola ads and MTV songs.”
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 434-435
“In this case, it is the question of the exercise of power, of the backing up of power by force, the issue of the government, the organization, as against the individual, the family group– for the South that fought the war was a family group. This issue presses hard on our time. There are moments one may wonder today– as one’s living becomes more and more hampered by the exactions of centralized bureaucracies of both the state and the federal authorities– whether it may not be true, as Stephens said, that the cause of the South is the cause of us all. It was the renewal of the suspension of habeas corpus at the end of 1864 as well as the results of conscription, which he believed to have been fatal to the army’s morale, that impelled him at that time to make efforts for peace; and may we not grant that in a sense he was right? That a society which resists coercion in the defense of local freedom should not acquiesce in coercion by even a new governmental machine which has been chosen from among its own members? Better lay down your arms and collapse than adopt the enemy’s methods! They had fought against the British Crown, they had fought against the dictatorship of Lincoln; why should they not repudiate their own President when he sought to become dictator, too? Why should they worry about the Negroes, with whose servitude the English had saddled them, when their own rights as independent whites were endangered?
The Northerner who would understand the Civil War must learn to grasp this point of view. He will otherwise be very much puzzled when, for example, in The Creed of the Old South by Basil Gildersleeve, the great Carolinian Greek scholar, he comes upon such a statement as “to us submission meant slavery . . . the cause we fought for and our brothers died for was the cause of civil liberty, and not the cause of human slavery. . . .” Stephen’s writings will help us to grasp it, and we can most of us find a key in ourselves. There is in most of us an unreconstructed Southerner who will not accept domination as well as a benevolent despot who wants to mold others for their own good, to assemble them in such a way as to produce a comprehensive unit which will satisfy our own ambition by realizing some vision of our own; and the conflict between these two tendencies– which on a larger scale gave rise to the Civil War– may also break the harmony of families and cause a fissure in the individual.”
What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 38
“Geographers have noted that Americans, with remarkable uniformity and consistency, picture their country’s regions in ways that blur their diverse human characteristics into stereotypes. One of the chief features of that imagined lap is the Southern Trough, which cuts across Mississippi and Alabama, embracing parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia at its edges. This trough appears to most Americans as the least desirable place in the United States in which to live. Other Southern states cannot take too much grim comfort from such disparagement of their deep South neighbors, for the sides of the trough rise only gradually until they reach the usual boundaries of what Americans take to be the North, the Midwest, and the West. The whole South appears to a vast saucer of unpleasant associations.”
**The Lincoln Memorial will get defaced in June 2020 while Trump gets fast in the #bunkerbitch built below the White House because the grounds are breached, with hashtags #babygate next day (Even FDR, during Pearl Harbor, never parked tanks at the White House for how it would look to American Democracy). Protesters showed up at Stone Mountain of course, & Ole Miss, Athens Georgia. Birmingham’s Charles Linn statue saw ropes hitched to a truck that gunned it, pulling it down. What they couldn’t get– the inscriptions– they chiseled off. They’ll forfeit the horses but they get JEB Stuart, Jeff Davis too. In Alexandria the Appomattox statue erected in 1889 captured, the white paint chipped off like a loan word. And as is the RE Lee bust, taken from downtown Fort Myers, a mystery where he got off to. In Bentonville Square, AR., the Confederacy is to be relocated shortly. Calhoun in Charleston is knocked back to 1865, arrivederci. And at Oakland Cemetery, home to 70k Atlantan Rebels, the “Lion of Atlanta” got swathed with so much blood-looking red paint that the remains of 3k unknowns under it can no longer hear its roar. Even the Northern Bull Connor spotted late one night; they had him on the rope dancing before being driven away in a black-slatted cattle truck far off the scene to an undisclosed location. Took under 2 hours to get him floating free through the air & waving goodbye, flying through the air, a long flight with the straps around his head like a noose. Then a Bronze Frank Rizzo take down, too, off to vote white with Jimmy Hoffa, wherever he is. Forced for once, dangling at the end of a long rope, to swing & look in all four directions. Last, Virginia again, & Ohio, where Christopher Columbus just got up & set himself afire, after which he dragged himself to the nearest lake (others say he shouldn’t have been resisting progress, or he must have tripped). Later that same night, he got spotted in Boston, headless. All across the nation, over the next 24 hours, each Columbus self-destructed, poached their own due process, the residuum of all they had done to others. The one in the CA. Capitol discovered a new land: the exit. Saw himself to a storage room where there is room for blocks of meaninglessness. President Davis took a fatal dive at the intersection at David & Monument avenues about 11pm on a June night. A few policemen scooped up half of Jeff’s cracked-open head, left the other half to the small mob to do with as they may. And then a 12-foot Jeff Davis finally left the building in Kentucky, the State Capitol, where he stood smug in the rotunda for 8 decades. Inside the base were found a 1936 newspaper and a bottle of Glenmore Kentucky bourbon.
For all who ask how are they going get Lee down off Monument Avenue? It’s like bringing down the moon. What’s known now is this: it takes a couple hours, after all, not a couple centuries. You drop out one loose screw, & the whole thing goes. Nearly everyone forgetting through & through that every last statue was on land poached from Indigenous populations virtually no one can remember the names of. Flash forward to the first week of 2021: turns out the same people who want us all to just move on from January 6 & the Rebel flag waving through Capitol halls in front of Sumner’s portrait are the exact same folk who can’t let the fuck go of a war they lost 160 years back.
Note: For a great picture of him, see britannica.com; General Winfield Scott, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Army, February 1861, to Lucius Chittenden:
“I have that any man who attempted by force or unparliamentary disorder to obstruct or interfere with the lawful count of the electoral vote for President and Vice President of the United States should be lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of a window of the Capitol. I would manure the hills of Arlington with fragments of his body, were he a Senator or chief magistrate of my native state! It is my duty to supress insurrection. My duty!” Scott’s native Virginia went with the Confederacy.
****240 people per day are allowed to walk stairs up to the top to stand in the crown of the Statue of Liberty. They look out over Ellis Island (formerly “Castle Garden” before 1872) where ships passed the New York Harbor with foreign cargoes of rock that were shaped into Confederate monuments. Please Note: It may bear repeating: If you are in America, you are one (or more) of four options: Native American, slave-descended, refugee, or immigrant. That’s it.
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we all feel very much like resting for awhile….
The biggest White Supremacy statuary in the world: butt-ugly Stone Mountain in Georgia– elevation 1,043’– Davis, Lee, Jackson carved in quartz sitting atop horses with right hands over their hearts. Bits of face emerging on a sway-backed cliffside, the dead presidents carved in like a loan word naming all the embarrassing relics of empire, faces as composites of other things. This mountain is 350 years old.
Georgia state government voted to buy the rock because a major factor torn loose from the facts was the cause: slavery. They’re well past dead yet still need everyone to put their hands in the air more and more; they might think they washed all the blood off but it stays on their skin as long as it stays on. After three calls to halt, any runaway slave may be shot. This is more than we get now, the tail of this passing over where the eye’d been into the present day: always keep your palms open & visible to avoid suspicion, keep them on the steering wheel, don’t reach for the glovebox, your wallet. Don’t reach. It is a strain similar to what once existed but something those white devil juries won’t consider. If we had no footage, would they even believe any of it takes place? Or would it be like Rodney King, where there’s actual footage yet some refuse to see, like so many I can’t breathe deaths. Eric Garner. George Floyd. Manuel Ellis. Javier Ambler. There are only so many ways to tyrant before the masses come for you, and they will come. Bet.
Disenfranchisement whether by State constitutional amendment, poll tax, or other does not present itself by its own name. It does not have to. Everyone knows who’s who. You just look at who these people tell the world they are, then at what they do. Because you can’t depend on what they say ever. See: the gerrymandering, redlining, the dogs, batons, & hoses set on folks once again at a later date, 1874, when Democrats take back the House then it all goes straight back to hell. By 1877 Reconstruction over, the Devil has won, the new act starts soon, & like a fire burning upward and outward White Supremacy will set fire in some ways hotter. But 1877 runs from 1900 to 2022 like an arrow no matter the histories we tell & those we deny about what it means to be Black in this country.
Summer of 2021, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association votes to alter its logo to erase the Confederate carving. Goodbye Jeff, Jackson, RE Lee. The Union Army waiting in the tall grass for as long as it takes, the new one with a “more natural view of the mountain, greenery and a surrounding lake.”
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