Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Brooks Simpson and Kevin Levin each have posts up this beautiful Sunday on the Virginia Flaggers’ project to put up a big Confederate Battle Flag on I-95, south of Richmond. Both essays are worth your time, and question whether the Flaggers have over-reached in this latest effort. Contra Brooks and Kevin, though, I think the Virginia Flaggers are doing exactly the opposite, making a strategic withdrawal into a well-trodden, clichéd effort that effectively cedes their self-promoted role as leaders in the Confederate Heritage™ movement. Going forward, there will be little reason to view the Virginia Flaggers as much different from any other Confederate heritage group, either in their tactics or their ability to influence broader public opinion.

The I-95 flag project is tacit acknowledgement that the Virginia Flaggers’ two central causes, the Confederate Memorial Chapel in Richmond and the display of flags on city-owned property in Lexington, are not going to have favorable resolutions in the foreseeable future. In Lexington, there were two avenues of challenge, (1) litigation in federal court and (2) electing a new city administration more amenable to the Flaggers’ wishes. As of now, though, the lawsuit is effectively on life support, having been rejected by both district and appeals courts, and back in November the mayor of Lexington was re-elected with a larger share of the vote than she got before. The lease on the chapel comes up for renewal in 2015, but unless I badly misread human nature, the museum administrators who’ve been putting up with years of nasty e-mails, ridicule and name-calling are not going to be inclined to be generous when it’s time to re-negotiate a lease where (as in 2010) they hold all the cards. People just don’t usually react that way.

(Confederate Heritage folks are very proud of their defiance and steadfast resolution in the face of adversity, but never seem to realize that trait exists in others, including those who disagree with them. It was true in 1861 and it’s true today.)

The I-95 project isn’t over-reach, but quite the opposite — it’s grabbing the low-hanging fruit. It’s confirmation that, for all their efforts to promote themselves as being in the vanguard of “restoring the honor” of Confederate veterans, the Virginia Flaggers are no more innovative or successful than a half-dozen SCV camps that have completed (or are working on) similar highway flag projects, from Florida to Texas. The I-95 project doesn’t challenge any institutional or powerful interests. It doesn’t require a successful challenge to authority or overturning any rule or regulation or city ordinance, and doesn’t require winning widespread public support. It doesn’t require voting an elected official out of office, or getting a museum board to fire a director you don’t like. You don’t have to file a lawsuit. There are no great legal, administrative or public opinion obstacles to be overcome if your goal is limited to putting up a big-ass flag on private property — even in Lexington. The I-95 project just requires a relatively small amount of money and some willing supporters, both of which are easily obtained. It’s an easy and highly-visible accomplishment that, among the Flaggers’ supporters, will divert attention away from the resources invested in two high-profile disputes that have consumed thousands of volunteer hours and dollars, and have precious little to show for it – nor are ever likely to.

Brooks is exactly right when he writes that the Virginia Flaggers’

Just so. A giant, automobile-dealership-style Confederate Battle Flag out on the freeway does nothing to “educate” the public about the honor of the Confederate veteran, or any of the other things the Flaggers frequently claim their activities do, one-on-one with the public. The I-95 flag will not change the way visitors to Richmond view that emblem, or encourage people who are now indifferent or hostile to the Flaggers’ view of history to become more sympathetic to it. It will simply reinforce what people already believe about that symbol.

This is not about education or encouraging a dialogue about history; it is not about what Susan Hathaway once referred to as “civil discourse and education.” In this project, the Flaggers have tossed aside such high-minded goals in favor of simply marking their territory, as surely as a dog pissing on the curb. Of all the historic flags associated with the Confederacy and Virginia (e.g., that of the Commonwealth, or the First National), the Virginia Flaggers have chosen the one they know to carry the most ugly historical baggage, the one irrevocably associated over the last three generations with segregation, bigotry, and white nationalism. There are a lot more folks alive today who remember this, than remember this. The I-95 flag in Richmond carries the same meaning and intent that all the other highway flags do – you’re entering unreconstructed territory. For some, that will be a point of Southron Pride. For many others, it will have a much more concrete meaning.

Welcome to Crackertown.

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An 1864 stock certificate for shares in the Richmond & York River Railroad Co., one of the five roads that converged at Richmond. From Dave Bright’s incomparable Confederate Railroads website.

The first chapters of Carl Park’s Ironclad Down: USS Merrimack-CSS Virginia from Design to Destruction set the historical context for the design, construction and deployment of that most famous Confederate ironclad, C.S.S. Virginia. Park summarizes the evolving technology of shell-firing naval artillery, screw propulsion, U.S. naval policy, and the early careers of men like Stephen Mallory,  John Luke Porter, and John Mercer Brooke, before getting into the real heart of the book, which is the fine, granular detail of the ironclad’s construction. I may talk more about that later, but for now I want to highlight something that caught me a little by surprise.

In Chapter 10, “The Long Road to Portsmouth,” Park discusses the logistical challenges present in moving the iron plate armor for C.S.S. Virginia from the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, where it was rolled, to the (formerly U.S., now Confederate) navy yard at Gosport, where Virginia was being fitted out. In the process, he mentions an aspect of Richmond’s position as a railroad hub that had substantial implications for the large-scale movement of men and materiel through the city and the region that would see almost non-stop campaigning and fighting between two major armies for four long years:

To illustrate this problem, Park includes a well-known map of Richmond, dated 1864 and published as part of the atlas accompanying the Official Records, but actually drawing on antebellum, civilian maps as its source material. I’d looked at this map many, many times, and even made note of the different rail lines and depots, but never thought about its significance in terms of military logistics. Here’s the map from the OR, showing the location of the terminals for four of the five railroads reaching Richmond:

A fifth rail line, the Richmond & York River Railroad, came to an end southeast of town, between the base Chimborazo Hill and Rocketts. All the space in between the depots had to covered on foot, by carriage, or (in the case of cargo) by drays, all of which added time, inconvenience and expense — especially when you remember that everything in Richmond is uphill from everything else.

To be sure, situations like this were hardly limited to Richmond or the South. Railroads construction across the United States was a free-for-all in the decades before the war, with little standardization, and few incentives for railroad builders to find ways to interlock their roads. The primary only rail hub in Texas, Houston, was the terminus of five roads, all with their own depots and freight yards, running on at least two different gauges. It was a bigger problem for the Confederacy, of course, because the South lacked the industrial resources to expand its railroads quickly. Tredegar had enough trouble supplying armor and guns for ships like Virginia, let alone rolling out miles and miles of new, iron rail.

It’s also to the credit of Richmonders that they recognized this rail transfer problem early on, and took some measures to correct it. Just days after the fall of Fort Sumter in Charleston, the Richmond City Council voted to authorize the state to construct rail connections through the city streets to link different roads, “to be used only for the purposes of the State, or of the Confederate States, during the war, and to he removed when no longer required for these purposes.” Good progress was reported almost immediately, but at some point work stalled, to be picked up again in fits and starts through the remainder of the war. Most of the terminals remained isolated, leading to bizarre spectacles like this one from March 1862, with a steam locomotive being hauled through the streets by both mules and curious bystanders:

Allen’s locomotive ended up being dragged through the heart of Richmond’s commercial district, close by the Capitol; I wonder if the sight caused any Commonwealth or Confederate legislators to push harder for completion of the rail connections.

It seems that, for all their recognition of the problem and intentions on fixing it early on, Richmond’s success in linking its rail depots was limited. A map of Richmond (available here) dated 1867 but almost probably surveyed in mid- to late 1865, shows that only two railroads — the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac, coming into town from the northwest, and the Richmond & Petersburg, coming up from the south — were eventually connected via 8th Street. A second line from the R.F. & P. depot ran east a short distance along Broad Street toward the Central Railroad depot on the east side of town, but never made it past the Capitol.

 
Richmond city plan, drawn by U.S. military engineers shortly after the war, showing (red) additional lines of track laid to connect the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad depot (upper left), and the Richmond & Petersburg depot, lower left. Map from Civil War Richmond. The total length of new street rail laid appears to be only about two-thirds of a mile.

You can’t read much about the conflict of 1861-65 without getting a heavy dose of life in wartime Richmond, and one quickly comes to understand how it’s been rightfully called “one of the most heavily networked cities in the Confederacy.” [3] Nonetheless, its easy to forget how the little things in peacetime — like, say, an accommodation to the protectionist lobbying of draymen and carriage hacks, looking to maintain a demand for their trade — can complicate life tremendously during the stress of war.

And what I wouldn’t give tohave seen that big steam locomotive dragged through the streets of the Confederate capital by men and mules, for want of a mile or so of decent track.

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[1] Carl D. Park, Ironclad Down: USS Merrimack – CSS Virginia, from Construction to Destruction (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 2007), 127-30.

[2] Richmond Dispatch, March 8, 1862, 2.

[3] William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (New Haven: Yale, 2011), 93.

Veterans of R. E. Lee Camp No. 1, Richmond, Virginia, at the reunion at Gettysburg, 1913. Library of Congress photo.

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