10-16-17
Civil War’s legacy hangs over a plaque honoring Confederate soldiers
Breaking Newstags: Civil War, Confederacy, West Virginia, Confederate Monuments
The last significant Civil War battle in Jefferson County took place in August 1864 at Smithfield Crossing, a five-day slog between Union and Confederate forces that left some 300 casualties and neither side able to claim victory.
But now a new skirmish with ties to the Civil War is brewing in the county seat, a picturesque town of 5,200 founded in 1786 by George Washington’s youngest brother, Charles, that sits just 63 miles from the nation’s capital. It is being waged not with bullets and bayonets, but with letters, public hearings and angry Facebook posts that serve as another reminder that the country has never fully erased the deepest lines of division and distrust of a war that ended 152 years ago.
The focus of this new dispute is the fate of a plaque no larger than a cookie sheet that hangs next to the entrance of the Jefferson County Courthouse.
It reads: 1861-1865 In honor and memory of the Confederate soldiers of Jefferson County, who served in the War Between the States. Erected by the Leetown Chapter #231 United Daughters of the Confederacy.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel