Warren County Report

To me, as the product of a “mixed marriage” – a Pennsylvanian father and North Carolinian mother – born in Washington D.C., growing up across the Potomac in Alexandria and eventually gravitating to nearly two decades of residence in Richmond, the dichotomy between the warring sides of the American Civil War has been an ongoing source of fascination.

I’ll never forget the puzzlement with which some German tourists once inquired about the statues of Lee, JEB Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and others punctuating intersections along Richmond’s Monument Avenue – “And they lost?” they wondered in amazement.

 
From left, Mosby Camp officer Richard Hoover, Camp Chaplain Dr. Carlysle C. Crank, Past UDC President General Suzanne Silek, featured speaker military historian Kim B. Holien and historian adjutant Mary Jane Lyons. Photo by Roger Bianchini. Copyright 2008 by Warren County Report. 

Indeed, the openness with which heroes of the Confederacy may be viewed in this nation is not typical of how defeated insurrectionists are memorialized throughout the world. However, that fact does not preclude a certain revisionist history when America’s Civil War and the lives of some of its major players are recalled featured speaker Kim B. Holien told the UDC/SCV membership. Holien disputed some “biographical” accounts of Lee published in recent decades. Initially one might tend to be dismissive of an invited guest’s defense of Lee’s memory in front of Southerners clinging to genetic ties to a distant and perhaps over-Romanticized past.

However, Holien is a U.S. military historian tied to two D.C. area posts, Fort Myers and Fort Leslie J. McNair. As such, his observations carry the weight of a career steeped heavily in the U.S. military’s own archives. In fact, Holien’s casual reminiscences of his role in arranging state funerals for late Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, to the discovery of lost military archives that included Adolph Hitler’s dental records and a 1908 film of Orville Wright piloting a flight demonstration for the U.S. military, were fascinating portions of his presentations at the UDC/SCV event.

But to the point of the evening, Holien focused on the life of Robert E. Lee from his childhood in Alexandria carrying for an invalided mother, through the time he spent in the early years of the Civil War doing paperwork to facilitate his late father-in-law’s deathbed wish to free his 196 slaves.
 “Lee never owned a slave in his entire life,” Holien stated, contradicting some published claims.

Between Lee’s youth and the onset of the Civil War, at which point Holien ended his reminiscence, were such highlights as Lee’s never earning a demerit during his West Point years while achieving a cadet’s highest rank; an engineering survey of St. Louis’s eroding port during his first military posting and recommendation of a series of jetties Holien credited with “saving St. Louis as a port” on the Mississippi River; to a lone, except for his horse, 36-hour reconnaissance of Mexican Gen. Santa Anna’s forces that led Gen. Winfield Scott to describe Lee’s Mexican-American War mission as “the greatest physical and moral feat in my knowledge.”

Following his remarks, Holien addressed questions about legalities surrounding the Civil War. Addressing Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s unfulfilled request for a trial before the U.S. Supreme Court to determine the legality of the South’s secession, Holien noted a historical difference between two American presidents and their “nations’ ” rebellions.

“The Union blockade prevented the South from replacing lost manpower,” Holien observed. He noted that during the Civil War European immigration in the North allowed the Union to replace lost troops through forced conscription at a rate of over 2 to 1.

“The South did not have that luxury,” Holien said, adding that George Washington “went from rebel to patriot” because European nations were able to give material support to the American rebellion against the British. “Unlike George Washington, due to the Union blockade Jefferson Davis didn’t get European support for his war effort.”

 
A band of confederate re-enactors entertained prior to dinner on the 201st anniversay of Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Photo by Roger Bianchini. Copyright 2008 by Warren County Report. 

In support of Davis’s contention Southern secession was Constitutional, Holien referenced the federal government’s own archives. He pointed out that Union communications with the Confederacy were found filed under the U.S. Department of War’s “foreign powers” section –“Essentially giving them recognition, which is what they said they wouldn’t do.”

Later questioned about inconsistencies in Northern attitudes toward secession, Holien said “all of New England” flirted with the notion of secession during the War of 1812, and added that in 1859 Wisconsin passed a law authorizing its own secession.

Holien also pointed out that years later, President Lincoln’s suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus in Maryland at the war’s outset was declared to have been unconstitutional, as was the federal government’s post-war seizing of Lee’s estate on the bank of the Potomac River where Arlington Cemetery was established to bury Union dead.

But to the victors go the spoils of history, and to the vanquished – I guess a few statues in Richmond and permission to fondly reminisce over dinner will do.