(You may know James Ewell Brown- “J.E.B.” Stuart by his portrait as a fiercely bearded warrior. This one shows his other side.)
Trust me, I have been all over the map this morning on matters of real national urgency. There is something so banal and yet completely sinister going on in Your Nation’s Capital that one is left with only two possibilities: the Government has either become too large to be managed in anything like an efficient manner, or that it is being managed in a way that is so breathtakingly intrusive that it has become a police state in all but name.
The old Stasi of the GDR would be envious of the capabilities at the fingertips of the new Information State.
It is sad commentary that our only defense may be its general incompetence. As of this morning, I heard that our friends were not only monitoring the externals of our phone calls and registering our activity on the internet, but they are also imaging the snail mail. I have no idea what they are going to do with all those advertising flyers, but there is all is, data warehoused someplace in a vast electronic storage area to be trolled through should any of us suddenly become of interest to the bureaucrats.
That is too much to deal with, and in response I did the only possible thing: I stopped listening to the radio and felt the capital draining out of me with each mile west and south.
Driving out the interstate, you can see that the development has continued apace. Little Haymarket, further out even than distant Manassas Junction, is becoming overwhelmed by the new Big Box mall, and negotiating the old short cut to dodge around Gainsville’s parallel sprawl to Route 29 is becoming a pain in the butt.
Once on 29 south, things get easier, light by light, as Warrenton disappears into the rear view, and Opal and Remington.
The vast battlefield of Brandy Station is next to appear in the windshield, dominated by the highland of Fleetwood Hill.
I noted with some surprise that the anniversary of the largest cavalry engagement of the Civil War, and the largest ever to take place on American soil. The battlefield is huge, as you would expect from a mounted encounter- there were skirmishes as far away at Kelly’s Ford to the northeast, miles away, and Beverly Ford to the northwest before they got to the main scuffle at Fleetwood Hill, where the crest changed hands all day, and over 900 Yankee troopers died against nearly 600 Rebels.
There is a grand story in this, which I will not attempt to tell you this morning. It has everything of the panoply and horror of war conducted at the speed of thundering war horses, and the personalities: the Beau Sabreur of the Lost Cause, J.E.B. Stuart and Gallant Peckham, and a cast of the usual Federal clowns who were just starting to get their cavalry act together with grim efficiency. You can get an overview of it at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Brandy_Station
To fix it in the historic stream, it is the beginning of Lee’s second invasion of the North, the Gettysburg Campaign, and the last winter camp of the butternut-gray Army of Northern Virginia in Culpeper, and the one before US Grant and the blue-clad Army of the Potomac replaced it in the fields around Refuge Farm.
(The bearded Stuart of his glory days at Brandy Station.)
Before Brandy Station and Gettysburg, the South had a shot at defeating the Federals. After the high water mark there would be Lincoln’s appointment of Unconditional Surrender Grant and a series of hammering blows that brought down the Confederacy.
You can’t not take it all personally, with the contested land all around. Longstreet’s Corps was bivouacked here on what is now Refuge Farm. What’s more, the Socotra clan helped build the Orange & Alexandria railway that served Brandy Station, and points south, and Lee’s men sacked the family store on the way to the battle at Gettyburg. It is a nexus that resonates down through the years as hauntingly as the horn from the freight train in the night headed south.
The junction of 29 and The Old Carolina Road is where the remaining structures that date from the war are located. Graffiti House is very cool- haunted for sure- and is called that because the occupying troops of both sides covered the interior with their names and units in the quaint calligraphy of the era.
I pass under the brow of Fleetwood Hill coming and going from the farm, and it makes me seethe each time I go by. Not so much on the southern direction, but headed north that big ugly new McMansion broods on the summit, a recent and alien addition to the field of conflict.
It radiates hostility, and is a relic of the phony third battle for Brandy Station. The second battle over the land was when developers decided that what Culpeper County needed was a sprawling NASCAR track and entertainment venue next to the airport just to the north of the main battlefield.
That was defeated, and the publicity got the attention of the Park Service and of the preservationist fringe loonies of which I am proud to be one. There is plenty of land all around where nothing except the mundane affairs of daily life occurred. There are few in which the fate of the Republic once teetered in peril.
As part of the preservation effort, I have contributed small amounts of money to the Civil War Preservation trust. You may have heard my bitter diatribe before about the ‘spite house’ on the summit of the hill; apparently the land owner could not get what he wanted form the miserly preservationists and erected the gigantic house of baronial scale to stick an aggressive finger in the eyes of the historically inclined. It occupies the site of J.E.B.’s HQ, the epicenter of the swirling horseman on that day .
I have no idea of what they found while excavating- the owner did not care. When you visit the Daughter’s of the Confederacy monument on the county lane near the summit, instead of a panorama of the field, you look into this guy’s garage. It sucks.
Anyway, there is a campaign ongoing to buy that property; I have thrown two donations of $100 each at the project, since this is one battlefield that isn’t just the right thing to preserve, it is part of the fabric of my life. http://www.civilwar.org/
They are about halfway in raising the money, for which matching funds make $1 in donations equal $18. I have looked at their books, and the Civil War Preservation Trust is worthy and a decent charity with fairly low overhead. Here is the freaking spite house:
(The Spite House rises behind the Daughters of the Confederacy plaque on Fleetwood Hill.)
I hope the fund raising is successful and they rip that sucker down. Consider helping, if you can.
150 years ago today, the summit of this hill was the most dangerous place on planet earth. It is worth remembering
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicscotra.com