Ike didn’t really like his “stuffy” living room above, but it contains some wonderful gifts from around the world, including Prague above the mantle, Korea, Iran and Grant’s fireplace from the White House. Ike preferred to chat with de Gaulle and Khrushchev in his enclosed porch. My favorite room is the den, which is more of a library, but it’s harder to photograph.
The house is well-preserved in 1950’s style, with almost all original artifacts, since the Eisenhowers lived here until it was given to the park service. Mamie’s home furnishings and decor recall her devotion to Ike, their family and all their guests. Much of the site is devoted to the farm & ranch—blue ribbon Angus cattle—, with various barns and related buildings, but there are a few less common features, such as a putting green, skeet range, helipad and Secret Service office.
The ranger didn’t know that Ike was a cheerleader, but she did explain what this place meant to Ike and why they chose it as their only real home as opposed to the dozens of places they lived temporarily. Ike trained the army’s WWI tank corps here in Gettysburg, and he loved to study the battlefield. That explains a lot.
This Virginia park spans the history of Colonial America, from the first settlement and seat of English government to Yorktown which marked the end of British military control. While in theory the park can be visited in a day, take two. The pretty town of Yorktown is nice with a little beach. Jamestown has several areas to see, and the park road connecting them runs through Colonial Williamsburg, which alone is worth time. This is my favorite colonial era park.
Yorktown has a very good visitor center, film and two auto tours. Even I was able to follow what happened, and long story short, the victory was as much or more French than American. Alexander Hamilton led the successful joint French & American assault on the last two key British defensive positions, one of which is eroding into the bay. The Rhode Island Light Infantry Regiment—largely African American—were critical in the assault, which employed bayonets on unloaded muskets to ensure both silence and an aggressive attack. Washington maneuvered his armies & Lafayette executed the siege in their most successful and determinative battle of the war with the assistance of the French fleet blocking the large mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. There are also remnants of the Confederate defense of Richmond on the same battlefield, although that is not the main focus of the park.
Jamestown needs explanation. Simply, there are three parts: 1) the park service Loop Road which is a swampy wooded drive or bike ride through the eastern end of the island, 2) the state’s very well funded living history settlement, and 3) the oldest Jamestowne part that has been run by a private group which predates the park service and is now an affiliated National Historic Site. All three are amazing. I saw a bald eagle, baby turtles, deer and more. At the settlement you can climb aboard recreations of all three ships, visit a Native American village, a reconstruction of the fort and an impressive museum, and there are many helpful staff throughout, some clothed in period garb, making the history extremely accessible. But don’t miss the third part, Olde Jamestowne.
This is the original remote outpost of the Elizabethan era that excited imaginations at the time, including Shakespeare whose Tempest is based on a shipwreck here. The most exciting work today is happening above in the oldest section of the park: an active archaeological dig with many world class discoveries. The fort there is built on the original fort site, and one of the archaeologists who began the dig in the 1990s gave a guided tour. There’s also a museum showcasing their discoveries.
Pocahontas married her husband John Rolfe in the church to her right, her husband witnessed the arrival of the first Africans at Fort Comfort (now Monroe), and the most recent excavation of a well is happening over her left shoulder. One of the gruesome discoveries was evidence of cannibalism among the settlers, but other discoveries speak to the diversity of the colony and its early peace with the natives, thanks mainly to the young woman above.
As befits any mystery, little remains of the fabled Lost Colony of Roanoke Island NC. There is a map, a cross and “CRO” carved in a post, archaeological remains, and various accounts, both trustworthy and not. The fort above is a reconstruction. The English brought explorers, scientists, soldiers and settlers here in a few journeys in the late 16th century, but the location was deemed a failure. There was little metal, poor soil and no deep water port, and several supply ships were lost in the shallows & storms. Most of the expedition returned to England.
It was however an excellent location for piracy with many hidden coves and inlets behind the barrier islands to wait for the Spanish treasure galleons riding the Gulf Stream back to Spain with stolen Aztec and Incan gold. Many of the last colonists here had wanted to land near Jamestown, but their pirate captain dropped them here instead. When war broke out between England and Spain, Queen Elizabeth kept all English ships at home to protect against the Spanish Armada invasion of 1588. So the colonists were abandoned by the Queen for years, while they were expecting supplies within months.
Likely, they became desperate and split up with a group traveling north and others initially staying behind to wait for help. There are reports that some armed men were killed in Native American skirmishes north of here, so those remaining must have decided to go to a nearby island to seek help from the Croatoans whose chief spoke some English and had been a guest of Sir Walter Raleigh in England for 6 months. The colonists were presumed dead by the English at the time, but much later reports of a few blue-eyed Croatoans suggest at least a few survived. And the cross and letters were likely a shorthand way of letting the English know where they were without letting the Spanish know.
I arrived too early to see the stage performance here which starts in June, and I declined to pay admission to tour the Elizabethan Gardens. But the rangers and museum tell the story, along with more stories about piracy—Sir Francis Drake raided St Augustine in 1586 and brought back some Roanoke colonists on his way home—, about the Freedman’s Colony of 1862 and more modern ventures. Coming from New England, I appreciate the efforts to honor our English heritage, such as the monument here to the first English child born in the Americas. Virginia deserves more credit for being the first English colony, after all, Captain John Smith named ‘New England’ after leaving Jamestown and mapping the north east coast. Still, it would be nice to have more information about what happened to the other ethnicities who lived here, especially the Native Americans.
Please understand this is not Madam CJ Walker, the hair care entrepreneur and millionaire, but a contemporary, Maggie Lena Walker, who helped lay the foundations of the Civil Rights movement through her civic efforts. Maggie’s mother was a slave in the house of Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond lady and top Union spy. Evidently, Maggie’s mother conveyed some of that rebellious spirit to her daughter, who helped organize a school strike when denied the benefits given to white students. Throughout her life, Maggie Walker worked to advance her community, becoming the first African American woman to found and run her own bank, to run an insurance company, a newspaper, a department store and many other civic leadership roles, especially those designed to educate and employ African Americans. Her solidarity with like minded friends including Mary McLeod Bethune and Nannie Burroughs, helped combat Jim Crow, advance women’s suffrage and promote Civil Rights. Even in the old Confederate capital, she helped build a prosperous African American community that avoided both physical destruction like Tulsa and also financial destruction during the Great Depression. The Jackson Ward of Richmond is famous for beautiful old homes, delicious restaurants (try Mama J’s catfish!), businesses and sites where Jazz greats performed. The tour of her home is fascinating and covers history which is so important for all Americans to understand today.
Booker Taliaferro Washington slept outside with the farm animals on the tobacco farm above or crowded in with many other slaves and enslaved children on rag-covered dirt floors. His price was recorded, but no birthday. When Lincoln freed all slaves forever, Booker went to work mining salt for his stepfather. Realizing that this was not much of a life for a boy, he sought education, first trying to teach himself from a spelling book, and then walking 500 miles across Virginia to an African American school near Fort Monroe on the coast. He trained to be a teacher and eventually was asked to start what became Tuskegee Institute, where he hired another teacher born into slavery, George Washington Carver.
Booker T. became the most influential educator in America, in terms of building institutions, guiding policy, and teaching teachers of illiterate freed slaves and under-educated African Americans. WEB DuBois criticized him for being too accommodating with segregation, but Booker T. quietly supported the same anti-segregation campaigns, while working to improve the lives of as many African Americans as possible. Many celebrated his accomplishments, including Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Harvard (first African American honorary degree), and Eisenhower, who designated this monument. Others resisted, including those in Congress who refused to support or fully fund a park and those in the community who were hostile to his student building a memorial here.
“The happiest people are those who do the most for others. The most miserable are those who do the least.”
The Maryland home was donated by wealthy business partners who wanted to attract people to their lands along the Potomac, and it was built to meet Clara’s specifications. She was all business. The lamp is hung by bandage cloth, and the walls are all supply closets with blankets, food and emergency items. The design is similar to the early Red Cross disaster buildings first used by Barton at Johnstown. The top floor windows have Red Cross images so that travelers can see it from the road at night. And the staff had both offices and rooms to live and work. The home is currently empty in preparation for a major restoration, but there are large photos to see what each room looked like furnished.
A week after the Civil War broke out, a contingent of the 6th Massachusetts was attacked in Baltimore while on their way to defend the Capital. Clara Barton tended them in the Senate Chamber with her household materials, and she recognized many as her former students. She asked them to tell their parents to send relief supplies to her, so that she could support the Union’s war effort and care for the wounded. She followed the sounds of battle and pre-positioned wagons of supplies as close to the fighting as possible.
There’s a monument to her in the middle of the bloodiest site at Antietam, where she extracted a bullet from a soldier’s face. She became known as the ‘Angel of the Battlefield’. She followed the fighting for years from Manassas to Spotsylvania, she petitioned Lincoln to help prisoners of war, and she went to Andersonville to walk the thousands of graves identifying ‘missing’ soldiers. Sent to Europe to recuperate, she went to Switzerland to work on getting the US to sign the Geneva Convention and join the International Red Cross. Her tactic was to reframe the Red Cross as also providing disaster relief, and not solely as a war organization, and she prevailed on both. She started First Aid kits and training programs. Her missing soldiers department grew into an important bureau of the Defense Department.
Clara Barton was directly responsible for saving many thousands of lives, and her initiatives save millions. She devoted her life to making this country and the world better and safer. But she never had the right to vote.
Lincoln wanted “malice toward none” and for the Confederates to return their allegiance to the Union, so he let them all go home, with passes, with their horses and even with Union provisions, as long as they gave up their guns. After his son reported to his father about Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in Virginia, Lincoln went to the theater, believing that his charity would prevent further bloodshed, and that night, only five days after the scene above took place, the President was assassinated.
Contrary to the explanation given at this park site, the Confederacy did not rise in response to “northern aggression”. Fort Sumter was not an act of northern aggression. Secession was not northern aggression. The south insisted that the Fugitive Slave Act apply nationally; so much for states’ rights. Even the pamphlet that attempts to give reasons other than slavery for why the Confederates fought, reveals that it was still about slavery: “submit to Abolitionists”, “lose property”, and “our negroes”. And after the insurrection was defeated and federal troops left, the Klan arose and African Americans have been systematically denied their rights for more than 150 years. No honor in that.
The site is beautifully restored to its 1865 appearance, and there are talented living history actors who bemoan how difficult it will be now that they have to plant and harvest their own crops. Not sure how they can get every fence post to look as it did, but somehow still find it difficult to present the main cause of the war plainly. The film is excellent and explains all the details of the surrender, such as that the signing did not occur in the courthouse but in a nearby house also open to the public. Visiting such a superbly preserved and restored place is a wonderful way to appreciate the scene of such an important historic moment.
Here are my visits to all parks in Virginia and all Civil War parks.
“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.”
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Grant recognized that although he might not be able to take Richmond with frontal assaults, he could cut it off by taking the rail junction city of Petersburg on the Appomattox River to the south. Lee had more forces in North Carolina, so Grant needed to keep them separated. Grant poured troops, mortars and supplies into the area to besiege both cities. And most importantly, Grant ordered his men to dig: new defenses and longer trenches, to close the gap with the enemy. Over the winter, the captured Fort Harrison near Richmond was reinforced, clearly in sight of Confederate defenses, and it became part of a line of forts beginning to surround Richmond.
The photo above shows examples of siege fortifications—including the cannon aimed right at you—near Battery 9, captured by African American troops. Lee desperately counterattacked inflicting the worst single regimental loss of the war, on the First Maine Heavy Artillery, but at the next fort, the Union held. By now, Grant had far more troops here than Lee and was proceeding to cut off both cities and attack them simultaneously. To avoid being surrounded and running out of moves, Lee withdrew from both cities and fled west. Richmond had fallen. Grant pursued to block Lee before he could move south. Now the race is on, and Union cavalry victories at the Five Forks Battlefield to the west mark the beginning of the end. No longer behind defensive walls, Lee heads west across country towards a town called Appomattox.
Here are my visits to all parks in Virginia and all Civil War parks.
Like the Union capital, the Confederate capital was surrounded by a series of forts and fortified trenches, with one complete ring around the city and another outer line of defenses about 2/3 of the way around Richmond. The Confederate earthworks above are massive, up to 15 feet added to the tops of hills, running for miles with deep trenches. In many previous battles, the federal troops staged bloody frontal assaults on similar high-ground, well-defended positions, often losing thousands of men. Going back to the age of castles in Europe, this has proven to be a waste of human lives with little prospect for success. In the Revolutionary War, Lafayette knew that siege warfare against cannon required carefully building successive trenches at night to approach under cover. General Washington listened to him and took Yorktown using that technique.
In 1862, General McClellan tried to take Richmond, leading troops up the York River. Despite fighting at the exact same defenses around Yorktown 75 years after Washington, McClellan still relied primarily on mass frontal assaults without trench cover, revealing a dumbfounding lack of literacy. Robert E. Lee replaced the Confederate commander and executed seven days of battles that forced the Union to retreat from Virginia.
In 1864, after Spotsylvania, Grant tried again at Cold Harbor, again wasting most of 6,000 troops in an hour. Lee was prepared to defend Richmond again from another expected northeast attack, but here at Fort Harrison, Grant managed to swing his troops around to attack from the southeast in a surprise attack on 29 September 1864. General Burnham was killed, but the fort was taken. African American regiments were critical in these Union battles.
This victory gave the Union a chance to control the James River which runs through Richmond, exposing southern rail lines to Union forces, and it forced Lee to redeploy his defensive troops. If Grant could just gain one more victory at Petersburg, he could lay siege to Richmond, which was Lee’s great fear. Richmond was critical to the Confederate war effort.
Even today, Richmond is the hub of Virginia’s road and rail network. The Tredegar Iron Works—now gone—was a massive operation supplying artillery, ammunition, and armor plating for ironclad ships. The large plateau in the city housed its Chimborazo Hospital—now the site of a large park and a small medical museum—and was full of troops in various stages of recovery or not. Disease likely killed more soldiers than battle, as troops who had never been far from home suddenly congregated in close quarters. If Richmond was cut off from the south, then their ships couldn’t sail downriver, and the only safe access would be from the east without rivers, good roads or rail.
The war, blockades, lost slave labor and plantation burnings devastated the Confederate economy, and their currency was nearly worthless. If Richmond became surrounded, the Confederacy might collapse entirely. With one more victory, the war might end.
Here are my visits to all parks in Virginia and all Civil War parks.
While this is the longest park name, they could have gone with “Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House Battlefields Memorial National Military Park”. This is the largest US military park covering 70 miles and three years of battles. Outside historic Fredericksburg, there are few buildings to see, including the Old Salem Church (another battle site), Ellwood (where Jackson’s left arm is buried) and the Stonewall Jackson Shrine. There are miles of fields, forests, trenches, historic trails, foundations, key military positions, markers, and memorials, with well over 40 tour stops, and there were visitors at every battlefield even until dusk.
Fredericksburg is roughly halfway between DC and Richmond, the Confederate Capital, which explains the numerous, bloody battles fought in the area. Spotsylvania is the name of the county. Fredericksburg was a Union disaster, under General Burnside, who ordered repeated attacks up the steep hills held by entrenched Confederates, but unlike Antietam all attacks failed and ended in retreat. At Chancellorsville—a one house village— the next year, General Hooker had executed an end run around Lee’s forces in the hills above Fredericksburg, but Stonewall Jackson executed an end run around Hooker’s forces. Jackson was killed, but the Union retreated in another defeat. Lee, confident after many victories, went north to Gettysburg. Another year later, General Grant returned to the Wilderness and Court House of Spotsylvania, finally making progress towards Richmond.
Chatham House, the Union HQ where both Clara Barton and Walt Whitman worked in the hospital, has a commanding view of Fredericksburg above, where Union artillery supported the failed assault. Washington, Jefferson and Madison were among the visitors to the wealthy plantation home that predates the country. Lincoln met with some of his generals here during the war. In the 1920’s the owners built a magnificent formal garden, which makes a nice break from the gruesome battlefields. Fredericksburg also has a historic walking tour, with some buildings that predate the Revolution, monuments to founding fathers and a slave auction block.
There is a common factual error in too many park films on the Civil War: that slavery only became an issue when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This conceit defies all plain fact. Lincoln was anti-slavery from childhood and argued against it his entire life, including all his campaigns and in every office he held. The primary political division in the country pre Civil War was about slavery. Most northern states were not only anti-slavery but had worked on ending slavery since the Revolution. The Abolitionist movement began in Europe in the 1770s and was active openly in the north and in secret in the south before the Civil War. Every southern state that seceded, cited preservation of slavery as the reason. Lincoln’s hesitancy in making it official policy at the outset was due to the few northern border states that were still in the gradual process of ending slavery. Lincoln might have accepted a negotiated settlement early in the war, but the Confederates rejected it, being willing to fight to the death to keep their fellow humans in eternal bondage.
General Lee is quoted at the visitor center in Fredericksburg as expressing his sympathy for the white refugees fleeing south, but he apparently had zero regard for the far greater number of black refugees fleeing north. The Fredericksburg park film expresses much anguish for the destruction of pianos and other household goods, but only briefly mentions that 1/4 of the town were slaves when the Union troops arrived to liberate them. Tens of thousands of slaves fled Virginia through here during the war, crossing the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg and getting passes to travel to refugee camps at Fort Monroe and near DC, seeking the safety of the Union. The lost property that the Confederate newspapers bewailed was largely human property.
Those who hold these Confederate generals in high esteem need to ask themselves why their heroes cared so much about the white residents and not at all about the black residents? It’s possible to admire Von Manstein for his strategies and Rommel for his tactics, but it’s not possible to ignore the 6 million Jews their government killed in the Holocaust. The Civil War ended 158 years ago. Moral judgements must be made about the cause of the war and the motives of the participants. The Confederate cause was evil, and we must not make heroes of those who served the cause of slavery. Stonewall Jackson was not a saint, so he does not deserve a shrine on national park land.
Here are my visits to all parks in Virginia and all Civil War parks.
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