(Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, Angel of the Battlefield, and newsmaker in Culpeper County. Photo Mathew Brady).

I read the Culpeper Times this morning at the farm. I drove the silver Panzer down late yesterday to put the vehicle through its paces, and was generally pleased with the performance. It will take a while to get used to, after the powerful Hubrismobile, but sitting up higher with the rest of the SUVs is nice, and if six cylinders do not produce the kick in the pants that the mighty CLK500 delivered with eight, so be it.

The morning coffee was good and I had the satellite radio in the farmhouse cranked up. It is nice to be noisy with only the squirrels and the bunnies to bother.

The Culpeper Times is not a morning paper- it comes once a week, and is your usual local small town news. But I feel something that resonates as something unique and American.

The front page included an update on the Colonel Awards by the County Board of Supervisors, and a native son bursting into song. A photo and text box in an adjoining story announced that a real Colonel, albeit retired, would be visiting The Raven’s Nest coffee house in town to hold a public forum. Apparently Wayne Powell has been convinced to be the sacrificial lamb for the Democrats opposing incumbent Republican Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.

The Colonel reminds me a little of my pal Old Jim, who ran against Marion Barry for Mayor of the District- a quixotic but sincere attempt to ensure that the concept of democracy has to actually be put through its paces.

There was a story about the cop who shot that woman and is now being tried for murder, a salacious account that filled the space above-the-fold and extended treatment inside section one. The officer says his arm was caught in the car window of the victim, and he shot seven times in self-defense.

There is some strange stuff out in the country, just as there is back in the big city. I am thankful there is not as much of it.

The interesting thing about the paper was the other stories on the front page. The Washington Post and the New York Times I read on a normal morning are mostly about news as political and public advocacy. With the exception of a couple token op-ed players, both institutions should have their versions of the news printed in Blue ink.

Not that the Culpeper rag shouldn’t be printed in Red- but the issues are generally smaller and more personal. Like, can you imagine that Clara Barton made the front page? She has been in her grave a few months more than a century, and has not been making much news since then. Well, let me put a caveat on that.

Clara is still a presence in these parts. Up north, in Fairfax County, where I used to live, she established a field hospital on the grounds of a local white wooden house of worship to accommodate the casualties from the Second Battle of Bull Run. And she briefly popped up in the Washington Post when the papers of her Office of Missing Soldiers turned up in the attic of a building at 437 Seventh Street, NW, in the Gallery Place neighborhood of the District. Her last home, in the Maryland suburbs of the capital, has been preserved in her memory.

She was a remarkable woman. She became known as The Angel of the Battlefield through the conflict, and in the peace that followed the defeat of the Confederacy, she set about trying to locate the soldiers who had vanished without a trace in the fierce and sweeping conflagration. Some of those soldiers went missing right here, which is why this week Clara is front-page news in Culpeper County.

In 1860, Culpeper was largely composed of trees and small family farms. The vast majority of Culpeper farmers had no slaves, though it is clear that the Winston family and a few other large land-owners who held much of the land around the current Refuge Farm did.

African-Americans in bondage formed a 52% majority of the County population, though of course that number came with the Constitution’s fractional means of representing the peculiar institution’s enslaved people for electoral and non-representational purposes.

The Times tells me it was a  “harmonious place,” though I have my doubts about that.

The presidential election of 1860 was as emotional as this one, if not more so. The campaign produced four candidates: Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose platform included unity and limitations on the expansion of slavery, Democrat Stephen Douglas, who was of the opinion that the new western territories should be allowed to decide the slavery issue for themselves, ‘Southern’ Democrat John C. Breckinridge, an unabashed proponent of slavery, and finally Constitutional Unity Party candidate John Bell, who wished for unity above all other issues.

Fractured along a multi-party contest, the result of the election that long-gone November was that Abraham Lincoln won the White House with less than 40 percent of the popular vote nationwide.

The vote in Culpeper was not that close. Bell took 526 votes; Breckenridge 525; Douglass 19; and Lincoln tallied 0.

It is a curious thing to place the politics of the generations alongside one another. The Republicans of that era presented a change that the County did not believe in. That election led inevitably to the greatest conflict in this nation’s history, and more directly to Culpeper’s deadliest day. The anniversary of the 1862 Battle of Cedar Mountain was this week, and some stories are so big that they resonate over the centuries. They certainly do from this little farm- the point of conflict is just off Rt. 15, about five miles away, and the troops would have swept over whoever was there then.

Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson had 22,000 Rebels in the field opposing 12,000 Union troops under the command of Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia. These Yankees were in their first battle, and they acquitted themselves well. It is said this was the only time “Stonewall” Jackson ever had to draw his sword. The fight was intense, and resulted a narrow victory for the Confederates who had the home-field advantage.

Three thousand men were killed or wounded right here. In the five hours of the battle, the casualties surpassed US combat losses in a decade in Afghanistan.

This was Clara Barton’s first trip to ‘See the Elephant,’ as the troops called it then. She said later the fight at Cedar Mountain was where she “broke the shackles and went to the field.” She stayed there through the rest of the Second Bull Run (Manassas) campaigns and on to the end of the war. She went from battle to battle, always bringing in needed supplies and nursing the wounded soldiers of both sides.

She several times barely escaped injury or death from shells landing on the battlefields or the hospitals, but she never stopped her work. She founded the American Red Cross, among other good works, and I throw them some money when something awful happens.

I toss some to the Civil War Preservation Trust, too. The collapse of the housing bubble has made some of the disappearing rural property affordable, and the Trust is pretty good about scooping up land on which the blood was spilled in the interest of future generations, who might contemplate how swiftly things can lurch out of control and into chaos.

I sent the Trust a donation to help preserve several historically important features of the battlefield where Clara served: the Gate, the wheat field, and the monument erected during the war on the spot where Rebel General Charles Sidney Winders was killed.

(Confederate Brigadier Winders, late of the U.S. Army. Photo Wikipedia).

The site also affords views over large portions of the battlefield under private ownership and is reportedly a terrific site for birding, too. On my way back North, I am going to drive the Panzermobile over there and feel what the weather might have been like in August of a summer long ago.

I will not be wearing itchy woolen clothes, nor humping a pack with sweat born of stark fear rolling down between my shoulder blades.

But it is pretty country, and one that remembers.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com