For my entire life, a letter has hung on the wall at the bottom of the steps of the old, elegant--but not grand--farm house where my mother grew up. The house sits on the western shoulder of Clark's Mountain in the heart of Virginia's Piedmont. Sitting on the porch looking west over the rock wall, you see why they are called the Blue Ridge Mountains.
And you can see why, after the unthinkable carnage of Gettysburg, General Robert E. Lee marched his men south, through all the enemy territory he had gained, past the Mason-Dixon, around the federal city and on southward to this very mountain. His men crossed the Rapidan River and took ramparts on the high bluffs along the southern bank of the river. When General U.S. Grant finally caught up, he found himself taking cover some ways above the river, beyond the flat plains of the north bank that left his men little more than target practice for Lee's sharpshooters.Sometimes, watching smoky storm clouds slide across the purple background under a rolling barrage of thunder, I imagine that I am sitting in this exact spot 150 years ago, watching the fire and mortar blasts of a titanic battle and listening to distant cannon fire rumble along the valley and bounce off hillsides.
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"For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not
once but whenever he wants it is the instant when it is still not yet
two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position
behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the
furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with
his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand and his sword in the
other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and
it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun
yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to
begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men
than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's
going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at
stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen year old boy to think
this time.
Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much
to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of
Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the
desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago......"
William Faulkner
William Faulkner
