Ah, how's that for a title of a blog post? I've been thinking about Confederate Memorial Hall of late -- and so that got me to wondering what was the most recently placed Confederate memorial? Initially I thought it might be the granite monument put up around 2002 in Courtland, Virginia. But is there something more recent? Well, there's Confederate Memorial Park, Inc. in Maryland. And then there's a monument at the site of the Bloody Angle near Chancellorsville. What hell that place was. When I visited it last April -- probably not worth the detour over from 95 if you're thinking about it -- they'd just burned a bunch of the grass nearby. So there was a haunting smell, which set the stage nicely for thinking about the gruesome history that took place there. A lot of battlefields are now peaceful places, so it's sometimes hard to call to mind what they must have been like. I didn't have that some sense of peace with the Bloody Angle. I had the sense that the violence still haunts the place.
One other thing about the Chancellorsville park -- they have some kind of rubber ground cover there, which is pretty cool. I'm guessing they're shredded tires that are then died red-brown. Makes for a nice trail.
The author refers to Chancellorsville (1863) in discussing the site of the new monument, which is actually at the nearby battlefield of Spotsylvania Courthouse (1864).
http://www.civilwarnews.com/archive/articles/09/may/mcgowan_050903.html
The Bloody Angle site is indeed one of the most evocative settings in which to experience the Civil War; one can still follow the route of the early morning Union attackers through the swale that hid them from the Confederate defenders.
Posted by: David Porter | June 04, 2010 at 10:28 PM