Blacktop

It has been a week of encounters with history, incongruous ones, to be sure, from both sides of the Atlantic. The Pope was interred yesterday, in the grotto below the altar of Saint Peter’s. It is all they can talk about in the media still, and there are all-new pictures on the web this morning of the priests lowering the wooden casket into the raw ground.

I don’t know how they found any raw ground there below the great Basilica; after, all, the current church was built upon the foundations of an earlier cathedral, and that in turn upon the pagan works of a great temple of ancient Rome. The foundations run pretty deep there.

The other Holy Fathers in the grotto are commemorated with reverent and heroic sculptures intended to last the ages.

I think the Pope’s intent, right through the end, was to show the cycle of life, the whole earth-to-earth process. John Paul II apparently desired to continue his life’s homily to the logical conclusion.

But returning to the soil in Rome is a challenging business. The whole of that city is built upon something else, or rather several things. The Italians are reluctant to dig anything up, since they are always finding things that need to be investigated. It is much easier to just get on with it and ignore what is below.

When you walk through the city, the ruins are nearly always ten or fifteen feet below current ground level. It is a helpful reminder that the entirety of the classical city is the rubble beneath your feet.

I was forced to contemplate history, driving a late-model Cadillac through the rising sap of Spring in the oldest corner of America. It is historic because the land near the water in Virginia was all there was to America  was in the 17th century. The colonies, all of them, hugged the water for a hundred years.

It only took that long to reach critical mass, and for the land to call the English west, into collision with the Indians and the French in the interior. History was happening everywhere on the continent then, if I can be permitted the chauvinism to say that it is really the history of the tribe of the English that I am talking about.

It changed into something else, of course, including the Africans that were brought in chains, and the indentured Irish and Scots. And then American History was being made all over the continent.

I mention that because today is the anniversary of the day that Bobby Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to U.S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. I was there on a day much like this one, a fine day in the new Spring, a Commencement weekend. The historical park was closed, but there was no impediment to walking through the preserved village, among the stones.

Lee’s Army at that point was mostly composed of North Carolina kids hoping to get home. The last weeks of the war were a chaotic pell-mell flight to the west from the fallen citadel of Petersburg and smoldering Richmond. The North Carolinians were trying to get home, and so was the rest of the Army. It melted away to start the long trudge back to the farms.

Bobby Lee could have told those that stayed with him to the end to fade into the hills and continue the fight, but he did not. He executed his instrument of surrender, and then returned to his camp to say farewell to his officers and begin the long ride home to Arlington with his manservant.

The campsites are still there, carefully marked, and the MacLean House, where the parlor was used as the formal venue to end the bloodshed. The stones outside are inscribed with memorials to the last shots, and the little cemetery contains the remains of a dozen or so of the Last Dead, all Confederate except for one Yankee. Their resting places are marked with the appropriate flags.

One of the dead, the last Confederate casualty, had served all the way from Fort Sumpter to the last day, and was shot dead.

They were interred with haste,  since no one had much sleep. They were dug up, when there was time, later on. The Yankee joined the battle line of the dead a couple years later, found when someone began to till their land again. It is a hauntingly peaceful place, considering. Or maybe I should turn that thought on its head. It was only a violent place once, and for a very short time. But very intense.

I thought about that when I got the letter from the Civil War Preservation Trust people when I got back from Norfolk on Thursday.

They warned me of the threat of development to the historic sites in Spotsylvania County. One-third of the Battles in the Civil War were fought in Virginia, and one-third of these battles were fought in that once-rural County. I visited the trenches at Cold Harbor and Gaines Mill this week, killing time, waiting on a conference call that never happened.

So close to the history, I became alarmed. I made haste to send them a small check. The pressure to build and develop the land all around here is intense, and Northern Virginia is particularly rapacious in the treatment of her history. One of the famous real restate developers who transformed Fairfax County from an agricultural area to a dynamic urban landscape was famous for bringing in the bulldozers in the dead of night to ensure that no one would find the settling remains of a trench, or a button, or some relic that would impede progress.

Pave it over, make it go away. I used to take the kids to the movies at a multi-plex at the Fairfax Towne Center shopping mall. The “e” added to the word “town” was just about all the obvious historical context that remained. You could be anywhere; there are a couple upscale fast-foot places and a record store that the kids liked. The multi-plex is surrounded by hundreds of anonymous town houses and a miscellany of office buildings.

I didn’t notice it for a while, but there is a postage-stamp sized island of green in between the complexes, and in it are two monuments, similar to the dozens at Appomattox.

That is all that remains of the first battle of Ox Hill which was fought on the green fields here, since the preservationists lost the second battle to save it in the 1980’s. The two monuments were the sticking point, since their removal was considered a dishonor to the two Union General Officers who died there.

Ox Hill was a sharp encounter in the retreat of Union General John Pope from the battle of Second Manassas. Stonewall Jackson was attempting to cut off the retreating Federals. General Isaac Stevens was killed precisely at the place between the condos and the theater where his monument stands.

General Phil Kearney is commemorated by the other stone. It is not where he died. He was killed on the soil under the blacktop parking lot of the condominiums.

Phil was an interesting and prickly fellow, well worthy of commemoration. He was quite famous in his day. He became a millionaire upon his grandfather’s death in 1837, but always felt himself destined to be a solider. He obtained a commission in the 1st U.S. Dragoons, and studied cavalry tactics at France’s Saumur Cavalry School.

He served with the Chasseurs d’Afrique in Algeria, and later lost an arm while leading a charge at Churubusco in the Mexican War. He fought the River Rouge Band of Indians in California, and was disappointed that his exploits did not bring him more renown.

As might be expected from a millionaire junior officer, he was opinionated and not afraid to express himself. His frustration with those he considered incompetent in the chain of command was vocal, and he was encouraged to submit his resignation.

Kearney tried being a civilian. He married his first wife and had four children with her at his estate in New Jersey, but she departed after eight years of tumultuous union, refusing to give him a divorce.

He returned to Europe in 1859, and served in Napoleon III’s Imperial Guard. His daring charges against the Austrians earned him the Legion of Honor, and he returned to America with a young woman he eventually married, with great scandal.

But they say that every marriage begins with a scandal. Some said that his older son from the first marriage, John Watts Kearney, contemplated joining the Confederate Army so that he could shoot his father, though it is probably not true.

The action at Ox Hill was fought in one of those savage Virginia thunderstorms. Kearne often did his own reconnaissance, and in the murk he mistakenly rode into Confederate lines. When called upon to surrender, he fled and was killed by a bullet that entered at the base of his spine.

Kearney ‘s death was regretted by both sides, since the Army that had fought in Mexico was a small one and was well represented in Blue and Gray. Old comrade Bobby Lee sent Kearney’s horse and equipment to his second wife, now a widow, and his body was returned under a flag of truce.

Whether his son had much love for him or not, the General’s death left him the largest inheritance in the history of young America. John Watts Kearney eventually settled at his father’s estate at Bellegrove, near Newark, New Jersey.

It would be interesting to see the place, how the very wealthy lived in the century before the last one. But it was torn down in 1926 to make room for a real estate development. Blacktop looks pretty much the same, whether it is Ox Hill or Bellegrove.

It seals things up, and keeps the dust down.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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