During Memorial Day 2015, my wife and I did a tasting tour of the Virginia wine region. (The following summer we went to Napa. Maybe I’ve gotten used to this life.) By the end of Saturday morning, maybe we had twelve ideas for sipping other crops and obviously we were in a position to have lunch, so we asked an heir to Horton Vineyard to get the most productive barbecue. She pointed us to Gordonsville Road, where the railroad crosses the Stonewall Jackson Expressway.
Later we had to leave the pig lying down and the puppies silent. So we crossed the tracks to walk through the captivating Exchange Hotel and the Civil War Museum of Medicine.
Location, location, location. Gordonsville has been a crossroads since colonial times, roads coming from the coast and mountains, with the railroad connecting Northern Virginia with the Carolinas. As soon as the trains arrived, the local slaves began to promote baskets of food, fruits and chips to passengers. It is the best position to build a hotel; The inventory exchange opened in 1862.
Bad timing. The sovereign state of Virginia took advantage of the inventory exchange as a hospital for the tens of thousands of others who fell in places like Balls Bluff, Manassas and Malvern Hill.
Losses were the duty of all insurgent states, so Gordonsville was the first place to perform an official triage. Those who can only hopely (usually an amputation), if they lived to be removed from the box, would be transported to the inventory exchange. There was a lot of sniffing of sores when the exercise stopped. The rest went to the Carolinas.
That’s why the Stock Exchange is a civil war medicine museum, with exhibits showing the heroic and the horrible: as we remember, it was a particularly unpleasant war. (Cauterization of irons: said.) The inventory market brings this house unexpectedly. The former conservative (who bothered to tell us that he is a descendant of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy) told us that the motor park was originally a mass grave for six hundred Confederates who died in the hospital. Mass graves had already passed in Gettysburg; It was strange to think I was parked in one.
But, he said, after the war, the United States turned the exchange hotel and the hospital into a Freedman’s office. A significant number of locals opposed their heroes being buried where the literal Americans who had recently enslaved were learning to read and write, so they dug them up and reburied them in a Jim Crow cemetery a mile away. The curator told us that since it was a memorial weekend, we deserve to stop by and see how this mass grave is decorated every year during the holidays.
But that’s not the story I’m telling. I’m not even telling you how we’re moving that we find out you’re visiting a Freedman Office, especially for other people who look the other way at Reconstruction and think that “tapisbaggers” is an appropriate term of opprobrium.
A weekly summary and economics of an NR sensitivity.
While we were talking about mass graves, been on the captivating porch of the Exchange Hotel, overlooking the train tracks and towards the barbecue, the curator casually explained that there was still a complete gap of human bodies on the site. He pointed to an Osage orange tree and told us that in the war, 30 slaves were hung from that tree and buried somewhere near the tracks, for giving army data to the U.S. army.
My head turned. He tells me, I mean, that the slaves have been hanged here, and that there is no flag or stone, no monument of any kind?
I think you were surprised by my reaction. We talked about it and the main points were motivating. Made to kneel on a bench, dolls attached to the ankles. Matrix Matrix No slow strangulation of the damaged neck.
I had five years to think about it. I’m stubborn. I don’t think it is imaginable to conceive of a greater example of Americans who died for freedom than slaves executed for helping to save America by abolishing slavery. Maybe the story is true but exaggerated. But even though it’s 3 people, not 30 years old, I’d like to know that I did the most productive thing for their memory.
Now, to be fair: the Exchange Hotel and the Museum of Civil War Medicine is the Smithsonian. His marketing plan (at least in 2015) revolved around ghost stories and cable TV shows.
But I’m not some kind of ghost story. I’m methodical, and there’s four kinds of evidence for a story like this.
First, there are no surviving eyewitness accounts. But it is not decisive; it’s not the kind of thing a survivor would communicate about. (There are letters from former slaves at the Freedman School Exhibition, explaining in writing that the locals tried to tell everyone that emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment were not real.) There was a lynching at the site, a period of 15 years. old African-American teenager a year later, with eyewitnesses. But a wonderful extrajudicial execution of the civil war? It’s different.
Secondly, there is no documentary evidence to prove it. However, Robert E. Lee himself explained that while he received invaluable data from locals (remember the difficult direction Stonewall Jackson took to Hooker in Chancellorsville), the U.S. military received much of its data from enslaved people. According to martial law, abstract execution of spies was legal. Therefore, it is very likely that any project like this has been carried out through irregularities, anyway: you don’t need a Lee order.
Third, circumstantial evidence obviously indicates the possibility. Cornelius Boyle, the Confederate general rector of Gordonsville, reports the arrest of several slaves and a loose black man for fleeing their owners, leaving the Confederate job, or helping slaves along the lines of the Union. Most of the slaves were returned to their owners, according to the policy of the Confederate army; a few were sent to a higher-ranking rector.
Boyle’s reports can be discovered in the archives of the Confederate Officer and inspector general in the War Department’s Collection of Confederate Records. No executions are reported. But again: this was not the practice. In Black Flag Over Dixie, the definitive collection of essays on racial atrocities and reprisals during the Civil War, for example, at Fort Pillow, Poison Spring, and Olustee (where African-American infantrymen stored my wounded great-great-grandfather) is transparent. that blood doesn’t leave a written trail.
Which leaves evidence. Either there’s a hole with heroes or not.
Five years ago, I told the curator that I would pay for the radar that penetrated the floor necessary to verify the story, intelligently and yes. (It turns out it’s a craft industry: rural real estate developers are afraid to locate cemeteries in the country, just a circle of family plots, under possible subdivisions. Therefore, you can hire the device to look). The museum refused. And here’s the consultation.