Battle of New Market Monuments

I'm on the road on a research trip now and passed by New Market, Virginia, recently on I-81.  So I thought that I'd stop and learn a little bit more about the battle.  The battlefield is now a Virginia state historic park (run, apparently, by VMI) and it's well worth the $10 admissions fee.  There is a house at the center of the park, which was built in 1825, along with some well-preserved other buildings -- like a barn and blacksmith shop.  No slave quarters that I saw, though there were three enslaved people on the farm around 1860, apparently.

Anyway, despite the fact that it was sweltering, I set off on the walking tour.  And this will not suriprise you: I went right for the two monuments on the map -- the Missouri monument (a very humble pile of stones held together with concrete and a small granite marker on top) and the Pennsylvania monument.  The Pennsylvania monument is actually a far piece from the main part of the park -- you have to walk through a tunnel under I-81 and then through a field.  This trip has the virtue that it gives a sense of the proportions.  But since military history is something I know next to nothing about (I treat military history the way a lot of historians treat legal history -- something important happened, but I don't know the details, only the outcome!), I will not comment further on the battle.  

The Pennsylvania monument was placed in the early 20th century.  Looks quite grand out there in the field by itself, amidst the cedars and the grass.  But what really interested me is a plaque placed at the base of the monument back in 1984 -- when Pennsylvania transferred ownership of the land where the monument is located to the Virginia park.  Pretty interesting that someone thought it important enough to commemorate with a plaque; I would otherwise have just assumed that the monument was put on the state of Virginia's property -- or maybe even private property in 1905  and preserved through an easment or maybe even a covenant.

The park was created when a VMI alumnus donated the property and money for a perpetual care fund around 1960.  Why a VMI alumnus?  The VMI corps played an important role in the battle -- which Francis H. Smith (I'll be talking more about him shortly here -- and also will have a picture of his cemetery monument) of VMI spoke about when the school re-opened in Richmond in December 1864.

Anyway, never ceases to surprise me where you'll see talk of monument law.  Or monuments that talk about monument law for that matter!

Still, maybe the biggest surprise, however, of the visit was the plaque that I saw at the end.  Get this -- it has talk of reparations for the era of Civil War. One of the key figures on the US side was Captain Henry DuPont.  He served some decades later as a United States Senator from Delaware and he apparently introduced a bill to provide compensation to VMI for the destruction of the campus during the war.

(I'll talk about my visit to VMI soon -- it was a very enjoyable visit and I left it with some of the richest sense of tradition of any school I have ever seen.)  And I always enjoy hearing about reparations for the era of slavery.   However, I must admit that I was a little surprised to see discussion of reparations (not called that, of course) at the state's battlefield.  It says a great deal about the changes in the United States and about reconciliation that the Senate majority leader when DuPont introduced the legislation to compensate VMI, Thomas Staples Martin, was a VMI almnus who had fought that day at New Market.  

My final image is of the monument at VMI, "Virginia Mourning Her Dead."  It is a monument to the VMI cadets who served at New Market; several of the VMI men who died at New Market are buried there as well.

Comments

[Bill Reynolds]

I seem to remember a scene in a movie where the Cadets charged the zunion forces; is that right?

[Jen Kreder]

Is the reparations request perhaps tied to the Lieber Code?

[Alfred Brophy]

Bill--that's my understanding. And Jen, I don't know think so. But I'd be interested in hearing more about your question.

[Joe]

The first time I went to VA, my in-laws took me and my husband to breakfast at America's oldest continuously working inn, the name of which escapes me. But I remember being shocked that the tour included slaves' quarters. Having grown up in Southern California, we didn't even have basements, let alone slaves' quarters. Reading about slavery in textbooks was very different from being confronted with actual evidence.