November 14
Looks like Squatter’s Log will be more sporadic than usual for this leg of the trip. I usually only write when I’m alone and I’m stopping to stay with folks most of these nights. I spent the evening of the 12th with Kimi, a friend of mine from Vanderbilt who transferred to UVA, and didn’t write that night. Last night I slept in Washington DC in the house Lily (another friend from Vandy) shares with nine roommates and did not have time to write. I will sleep here again tonight. I’m starting to worry that Squatter will feel neglected.
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Chap and I stood on the low embankment of an unfinished railroad line from the mid-nineteenth century. I tossed his tennis ball into the underbrush and he went to find it. We were at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, the gentle green farmland that fed Virginia. We looked east where the Yankees had come from. During the Battle of the Second Manassas, Ulysses S. Grant’s troops charged across the field against the left flank of the Confederate line. Wave after wave of blue-coated Yankees attacked the ill-provisioned Confederates until the Rebels ran out of ammunition. Standing on this embankment, General Thomas’s Georgians threw rocks. Stones clattered against Yankee armament. The Union troops reached the railroad. The fighting was hand-to-hand. Thomas’s Georgians, my ancestors among them, repulsed the attack and then Longsteet’s Confederates, charging from the right, swept the Yankees from the field.
The Confederates won the Battle of the Second Manassas but in the end Grant got the Shenandoah Valley, its rolling grainfields and quiet cows. When he finished, the alcoholic Grant proclaimed, “a crow will have to pack his lunch when he flies over the Shenandoah Valley.” It was so. Grant destroyed the valley, burned its barns, slaughtered its cows. The outnumbered, outprovisioned Rebels could do nothing. They were fighting for their homes but losing. The war was all but over. They fought on. As Rhett Butler observed, “Southerners can never resist a losing cause.”
Ulysses S. Grant, his army and his bottle swept past Virginia. Grant sent General Sherman through Georgia where Sherman razed all he encountered. He turned widows out of homes, requisitioned their houses and appropriated their foodstuffs. He left them hungry. Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground. Grant continued to drink. As Doc Holliday, who hailed from Macon, Georgia said of gunslinger Johnny Ringo in the movie Tombstone, “a man like Ringo has a hole right down to the middle of him, and he can never kill enough or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.” Grant could never fill his hole. Even after he had heard the South’s dying gasp at Appomattox, even after he was acclaimed as a hero, even after the exaltation of the North catapulted him to the presidency, Grant continued to drink. He died a penniless, broken man.
Holes are not filled with blood or conquest but by an unassuming faith in the worthiness of one’s own goals. It is better to lose a fight you believe in than to wrest victory fighting for the sake of something you doubt. Chap was still looking for his ball, and I walked down the embankment to join him.
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Chap and I stood on the low embankment of an unfinished railroad line from the mid-nineteenth century. I tossed his tennis ball into the underbrush and he went to find it. We were at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, the gentle green farmland that fed Virginia. We looked east where the Yankees had come from. During the Battle of the Second Manassas, Ulysses S. Grant’s troops charged across the field against the left flank of the Confederate line. Wave after wave of blue-coated Yankees attacked the ill-provisioned Confederates until the Rebels ran out of ammunition. Standing on this embankment, General Thomas’s Georgians threw rocks. Stones clattered against Yankee armament. The Union troops reached the railroad. The fighting was hand-to-hand. Thomas’s Georgians, my ancestors among them, repulsed the attack and then Longsteet’s Confederates, charging from the right, swept the Yankees from the field.
The Confederates won the Battle of the Second Manassas but in the end Grant got the Shenandoah Valley, its rolling grainfields and quiet cows. When he finished, the alcoholic Grant proclaimed, “a crow will have to pack his lunch when he flies over the Shenandoah Valley.” It was so. Grant destroyed the valley, burned its barns, slaughtered its cows. The outnumbered, outprovisioned Rebels could do nothing. They were fighting for their homes but losing. The war was all but over. They fought on. As Rhett Butler observed, “Southerners can never resist a losing cause.”
Ulysses S. Grant, his army and his bottle swept past Virginia. Grant sent General Sherman through Georgia where Sherman razed all he encountered. He turned widows out of homes, requisitioned their houses and appropriated their foodstuffs. He left them hungry. Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground. Grant continued to drink. As Doc Holliday, who hailed from Macon, Georgia said of gunslinger Johnny Ringo in the movie Tombstone, “a man like Ringo has a hole right down to the middle of him, and he can never kill enough or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.” Grant could never fill his hole. Even after he had heard the South’s dying gasp at Appomattox, even after he was acclaimed as a hero, even after the exaltation of the North catapulted him to the presidency, Grant continued to drink. He died a penniless, broken man.
Holes are not filled with blood or conquest but by an unassuming faith in the worthiness of one’s own goals. It is better to lose a fight you believe in than to wrest victory fighting for the sake of something you doubt. Chap was still looking for his ball, and I walked down the embankment to join him.
posted by Jeb Butler at 9:45 AM
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