the Valley of Virginia

Wednesday, July 6

Again, multiple paths beckoned. After a while, I ended up on U.S. 460, headed up the New River Valley through Giles County, Virginia, and on to Blacksburg, Roanoke, and I-81, a road I once knew well.

The interstate parallels U.S. 11, one of the oldest roads in America. It was the route followed by settlers down the great Valley of Virginia toward the west, meeting up with the Wilderness Road of Daniel Boone across the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. By the 1860’s, it was the Valley Pike, a well-maintained road that became the focus of Jackson’s Valley Campaign. The Blue Ridge Mountains lie to the east; the Allegheny Mountains to the west. The Valley was the breadbasket of the Confederacy until Phil Sheridan and his Federal soldiers burned it in the latter stages of the War, under orders from General Grant, leaving not a farmstead untouched.

Those days still seem close in this part of Virginia, and nowhere closer than the town of Lexington. I stopped there to pay my respects to that great Episcopalian, R. E. Lee, and his friend, the Presbyterian deacon Thomas Jackson, both of them buried there. Jackson taught at the Virginia Military Institute, by all accounts not much of a teacher. But when the war came, he mustered a regiment from the town and its environs. He recruited and trained four other regiments, all from the Shenandoah Valley and the mountains to the west. Under his leadership at the Battle of Manassas, they earned a name etched in the heart of every son of the South: the Stonewall Brigade. At the Lee Chapel on the campus of what is now Washington & Lee University, one can view the memorial book from the Brigade. A majority of the men perished in the war, their great Commander among them.

Later, I visited his grave, a few blocks west of the campus in the old cemetery. I had nothing for Jackson beyond my respect, but others had left small Confederate flags -- and lemons. He loved them, and could often be found sitting on a rail fence in his battered cast-off VMI cadet's hat and ill-fitting ragged clothing, thoughtfully sucking on a lemon as he pondered some problem of strategy or battle.

I love Jackson, that uncouth genius of the hill country, with his stern Calvinistic vision of Divine Providence. But I wish I were more like Lee, the Episcopal gentleman from the banks of the Potomac. He bore the Light of Christ through the defeat at Gettysburg, the slow death of his army in the winter of 1864-5, the day at Appomattox, and beyond.

In the museum under the Chapel, I read General Order #9 in his handwriting, one of the great documents of American history. Lee was not a man of words, but in these few sentences he gave hope and honor to his defeated nation. I followed the tour through the Chapel, with its portraits of Washington and Lee, the two greatest Virginians; I saw the front-row pew where Lee sat erect for daily chapel before going downstairs to his office and his duty. I went across the green to his church where he was Senior Warden, seeking to lead church as well as college and a generation of students through the dark aftermath of war.

During this trip, I have also stood by the river where Ulysses Grant spent his boyhood. Grant is harder to admire than Mr. Lee; troubled by depression and drink, he was a failure at most everything he tried, including the Presidency. But he was stubborn. Others would have retreated from Vicksburg, or after the Wilderness, or Spotsylvania Court House, or Cold Harbor. Not Grant.

Lee respected him and so do I, most of all for his graciousness at Appomattox, a spirit that began to heal the nation, as Lincoln had hoped:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding....

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.