Site of Confederacy's finest hour must be saved from developer
Date published: 9/22/2002
Why did we run? Well, those who didn't run are there yet. --an Ohio soldier
CHANCELLORSVILLE--The 12- mile march on May 2, 1863, took Stonewall Jackson from the clearing in the woods where he conferred for the last time with Robert E. Lee, to a spot from which Jackson and 30,000 troops surveyed the rear of the Union forces. Those forces, commanded by a blowhard, Joe Hooker ("May God have mercy on General Lee, for I shall have none"), were about to experience one of the nastiest shocks of the Civil War.
Two hours before dusk, federal soldiers were elated when deer, turkeys and rabbits came pelting out of the woods into their lines. It was not dinner but death approaching. By nightfall federal forces were scattered. When the fighting subsided four days later, Lee was emboldened to try to win the war with an invasion of Pennsylvania. The invasion's high-water mark came at the crossroads town of Gettysburg.
One hundred and thirty-nine years after the battle here, a more protracted struggle is under way. In 1863 the nation's survival was at stake. Today, only the nation's memory is at stake. Only? Without memory, the reservoir of reverence, what of the nation survives?
Hence the urgency of the people opposing a proposal to build, on acreage over which the struggle surged, 2,350 houses and 2.4 million square feet of commercial and office space. All this would bring a huge increase in traffic, wider highways, and the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.
Northern Virginia, beginning about halfway between Richmond and Washington, is a humming marvel of energy and entrepreneurship, an urbanizing swirl of commerce and technology utterly unlike the static rural society favored by Virginia's favorite social philosopher, Jefferson.
Chancellorsville is in an east-west rectangle of terrain about 15 miles long and 10 miles wide, now divided by Interstate 95, that saw four great battles--Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, the Wilderness--involving 100,000 killed, wounded, or missing.
Date published: 9/22/2002
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