Walking the Sunken Road and the Killing Fields

The Sunken Road, photo by Lori Korleski Richardson

FREDERICKSBURG, Virginia – Every age, it seems, glorifies war, and every age needs to be reminded of the Sunken Road.

Here in December 1862, the Union Army attacked the Confederate forces led by Robert E. Lee. The federal soldiers crossed the Rappahannock River, and took the town of Fredericksburg. But when the Union soldiers charged up Marye’s Heights, on the western side of town, they were met with ferocious fire from rebels entrenched on a road behind a stone wall.

This killing field became known as the Sunken Road.

The total killed or wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg: 18,000 on both sides in four short days. The Union casualties just at the Sunken Road was 7,000 dead and wounded. The bodies were piled deep, the blood soaked the ground, and most were ever after identified with a number on a stone grave marker.

Sunken Road, photographed 1863

On Friday, Lori and I walked the Sunken Road, and we spent the day exploring the battlefields around Fredericksburg.

Since moving to Virginia four years ago, we’ve been to Harper’s Ferry, Appomattox Courthouse, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Gettysburg, and now Fredericksburg.

During the course of war, there were four major battles near Fredericksburg, and by war’s end 105,000 soldiers were killed or wounded in the immediate vicinity.

In each of these places, I am continually struck by how small these battlefields are. Huge armies crashed into each other in very confined spaces. The Napoleonic tactics of an earlier age met the industrialized warfare of a later age, and the results were lethal on an enormous scale.

As we walked the Sunken Road, Lori remarked that the Civil War was “a personal war.” Unlike wars of our age, with airplanes, missiles and drones, those who fought the Civil War saw who they were killing. They could see each other’s faces when they pulled the trigger; they often fought hand-to-hand with knives, rifle butts, and even rocks. They watched each other bleed to death. It was a personal war. “That’s why we’ve never gotten over this war,” Lori observed.

Sgt. Richard Kirkland

Each of these battlefields has stories of great courage and cowardice, bravery and dumb luck, and stories of cruelty and stories of mercy. Here at Fredericksburg, a 19-year-old Confederate soldier, Sgt. Richard Kirkland of South Carolina, left the protection of the Sunken Road and took water down to the wounded Union soldiers as they lay dying. Both sides stopped shooting to let him pass. Kirkland became known as the “Angel of Marye’s Heights” and he was killed in a subsequent battle. The only large monument dedicated to a soldier of either side at the Sunken Road is to Kirkland.

It was a very personal war.

Later in the day, we crossed the Rappahannock River and went to Chatham Manor, a huge slave plantation that became a hospital for the Union wounded. By the end of the battle, the walls and floors of Chatham Manor were covered in blood, and amputated limbs were stacked outside. The plantation never recovered as a plantation.

I was born during the Korean War, grew up during the Vietnam War, and I’ve lived through our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even though these wars are broadcast instantly into our living rooms via television, ironically warfare has become more impersonal. It is fought from command centers thousands feet in the air, directed by generals and presidents halfway around the globe in “situation rooms.”

Confederate cannon, Marye's Heights

We don’t see the carnage directly. We have a “volunteer” military, and no one is drafted from our households to fight these wars. Less than 1 percent of the American population serves in the military. We don’t see the personal cost unless we go out of our way to see it, or unless it comes unwanted to our own doorstep when someone we know is wounded or killed.

Once again we have political leaders who are pushing us toward another war, this time with Iran. They talk of “preventative war” and “red lines” that Iran may not cross. We do well to remember that wars never turn out the way their architects promise, even when those wars seem unavoidable, and even when a war, like the Civil War, is fought for the highest of principles.

We do well to walk the Sunken Road now and again.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
– Psalm 23:4, appointed for this evening

Tracing my ancestor’s footsteps

The Rev. George W. Richardson
1824-1911

For a number of years, I've been working sporadically on a biography of my ancestor, The Rev. George W. Richardson (1824-1911), who was Methodist circuit rider in the mid-19th century and the white chaplain to a black regiment in the Civil War. He went on to found a school for freed slaves, what is now Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, one of the historically African American colleges.

For several years I've been retracing his footsteps, and I've written about this for the Alicia Patterson Foundation of Washington DC, which is a terrific journalism foundation that funded me in 1993 to write a book about Willie Brown, the powerful speaker of the California Assembly.

My biographical essay on my ancestor has just appeared on the Alicia Patterson Foundation website this week, and appropriately as we mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

I hope you'll get a chance to read it, and please lend me your thoughts either on this blog or on the APF website. You can read the full piece by clicking HERE. I greatly indebted to Margaret Engel and the foundation for its continued interest and support of my work these many years.

Here is the beginning of piece:

My journey to the crossroads
of race, faith and family in America:
Tracing my ancestor’s footsteps 

By James Richardson

CANTON, Mississippi – Federal Union soldiers fought here in 1864, riding south from Memphis looking to ambush and kill rebel troops, and disrupt their supply lines. Moving swiftly on horseback, the Union soldiers slept on a bluff on the night before a surprise raid on a Confederate-held bridge. It was not a particularly notable engagement and never made the history books. It was just one of many sharp and lethal encounters that would eventually dismantle the Confederacy and destroy slavery.

What was extraordinary about this engagement is that the Union troops were ex-slaves – an all-volunteer “colored” regiment. And one of my ancestors, The Rev. George Warren Richardson, a Methodist circuit-riding preacher, was the white chaplain – and also a volunteer – to this black Union regiment.

Not long ago, I traveled to Mississippi to walk on the same ground where my ancestor and his soldiers slept on the night before the raid. I was brought to this place by his writing; I was especially moved by his journal description of the camp that night:

“The voice of prayer from so many at the same time, made the place seem wonderfully sacred. I said ‘Surely God is in this place.’ This circumstance impressed me deeply.”

I could not be sure if this was the exact spot that he had described. But all that I learned on that trip convinced me he was here, or in a place like it near here.

My journey to Mississippi was one of many trips I have made in the decade attempting to retrace my ancestor’s footsteps. Other trips took me to Tennessee, Illinois and Texas, and to the banks of the Sacramento River north of where I’ve lived much of my life in California. Remarkably, George Richardson wrote about all of these places in his handwritten journal that has come down through my family and to me.

To read the rest, please click HERE.

Harper's Ferry: May the angels of the Lord camp around you

Earlier this week, Lori and I visited Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, a peaceful and beautiful place where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers join.

Harper's Ferry looks like it is out of one of those sublime 19th century landscape paintings, with rocky gorges, forests and rivers with smooth rocks and shimmery pools.

Yet it is also a place where great violence took place long ago.

You may recall from your American history books that it was here that John Brown, an ardent abolitionist, attempted to start a slave uprising in 1859.

Brown came to Harper's Ferry because it was where the federal government mass-produced rifles and other arms and kept them stored. Harper's Ferry was the first "military industrial complex," as a National Park Service sign explains.

What makes Harper's Ferry beautiful is also why it became a 19th century armament center -- the rivers powered wheels that turned the lathes that produced the guns. And so it was that John Brown wanted to seize the guns and distribute them among the slaves.

He and his band took control of Harper's Ferry for a few hours, but their control did not last long. Robert E. Lee, then still a federal officer, led a squad of Marines who captured Brown, killed several of his followers and re-took control of Harper's Ferry.

Brown was hung two weeks later, becoming a martyr to African American slaves of the South and abolitionists of the North. His aborted raid, however, sparked enormous fear among Southern politicians and plantation owners and helped fuel the already hot political drive toward succession, ultimately igniting the Civil War 18 months later.

The war was not kind to Harper's Ferry or to the people sheltered there. Escaped slaves by

thousand found refuge with the Union Army in Harper's Ferry. But in 1862, the Confederates took the town, and captured thousands of blacks, taking them into slavery.

The town was damaged badly, and the damage is still there to see. The original St. John's Episcopal Church was destroyed, and all that remains today are the stone outer walls (see photo above).

Harper's Ferry is a place of contrasts. It's violent history is inescapable. But the peacefulness of the rivers and mountains is also inescapable.

Today Harper's Ferry sits astride the Appalachian Trail, and we walked several of the footpaths in the area including along the old C&O Canal. Harper's Ferry now thrives on tourism, not gun manufacturing. We stayed in a nearby American Youth Hostel, and I highly recommend you read Lori's description of where we stayed by clicking HERE.

The rivers and surrounding mountains remain unspoiled, though there are many reminders of the unspeakable violence long ago and the industrial revolution that brought the town its prominence. Yet Harper's Ferry also exudes a certain serenity as if it has come to terms with its past and is waiting for the rest of us to catch up. New life is built atop the rubble.

St. John's Episcopal Church was

rebuilt in a wooden clapboard church about a mile from the old ruined church. St. John's has found a very special ministry as a station for hikers on the Appalachian Trail.

A big water jug sits outside the church, and hikers are invited to refill their canteens and come inside to cool off.

The church wrote a prayer for hikers, putting it on cards to take with them. Here is the prayer, I rather like it:

Prayer for Appalacian Trail Hikers

May the angels of the Lord camp around you,
And may you commit your way to the Lord.

May you walk in integrity,
Sure as the feet of deer in high places

May you know in your heart
That all the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth.

May you be led beside still waters,
As well as along rocky paths.

May the Lord make your mountain stand strong,
And be your rock and your fortress.

May he strengthen your heart,
And teach you his paths.

May God be your salvation and glory,
And may you find water when you are thirsty.

May you finish your journey in peace,
And live in the habitation where his honor dwells.

The Rev. Georgia C. DuBose and the congregation of
St. John's Episcopal Church
898 Washington Street
Harper's Ferry, West Virginia
georgiad@ctlink.net
House of the AT Water Ministry
(Prayer phrases taken from the Psalms of David)

Photos by Lori Korleski Richardson

A trip to Appomattox, a reminder of the consequences of war

Lori and I, and our house guest, Tony, took a road trip Friday. We were much in need of a day off, and realizing we have not done much to explore our new surroundings, we set out to rectify that situation.

Our tour guide for the day was Bill Bergen, a member of St. Paul's and an accomplished Civil War historian. We went to Appomattox Court House, the place where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysess S. Grant in April 1865, drawing to a close the most lethal conflict in American history.

Bill described for us how Grant's army chased Lee's army westward, finally surrounding Lee at this obscure stage coach stop in the rolling piedmont of central Virginia. The final battle was sharp and short, and Lee gave up rather than face certain annihilation.

Grant and Lee met for 90 minutes in a small parlor inside a house in the town of Appomattox Court House. What they said is lost to history, but Grant offered a "parole" to the Confederate soldiers, allowing them to surrender their arms and flags on the promise they would fight no more, and then he let them go home.

Lee accepted, and the next day his army marched into town, unit-by-unit, stacking their guns and shrouding them with flags. It took seven hours to complete the disarmament of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

The Appomattox Chamber of Commerce has long ago ballyhooed their town as the place "where the nation reunited," but it is really much more than that. The nation was reunited not as it had been before. Appomattox is where a terrible war ended, where slavery ended, and where Abraham Lincoln's vision triumphed "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Yet there is a sadness to this place. The sadness is in the graves of soldiers. The sadness is embedded in the historical markers that were attempts, long after the fact, to cast the war as a noble clash of noble principles. As Lincoln more aptly put it, "the prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully."

In fact, the war was a terrible miscalculation of Southern political leaders grossly underestimating their opponents, and a terrible miscalculation by Northern political leaders grossly underestimating the threat that they posed. The overheated political rhetoric of the time had real life consequences. Those who paid the price in blood were common soldiers and common people caught in the path of a horrific war through no fault of their own.

Here is the question for us: Can monuments like Appomattox better serve as reminders to us of the folly of resolving our differences by violence, either through arms or words? Can this terrible war long ago serve as a reminder to us that the overheated rhetoric of our own political conflicts has consequences? Can the ghosts in the soil of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri, the Carolinas, and across this great land remind us of the cost of a civil war and how we should pledge to never repeat it?

Postscript: My great-great grandfather, George W. Richardson, served in the Union Army in Memphis. He was the white chaplain to a black artillery regiment. He understood well the stakes of the war for his men and for the nation, and this is what he wrote in his journal about the end of the war:

About 4 o’clock in the afternoon of April 4th the news of the surrender of Lee and the fall of Richmond reached Memphis. The city was illuminated and guns were fired and there was wild joy among all the Union men. It meant that the hardships of the field were about at an end. It meant that the soldiers, after an honorable discharge, could return to their families, and to their peaceful occupations. It meant that the thousands of prisoners who had languished in military prisons or in prison pens would at once be liberated, and breathe the air of freedom once more. It meant that the principles for which our nation had contended for four years had at last triumphed, and that America would henceforth be “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. It meant that the four and a half million of men, women and children of African dessent [sic] would have a chance to become intelligent American citizens; and this class were very demonstrative in their joy.