The education board for a rural Virginia county voted early on Friday to restore the names of Confederate generals stripped from two schools in 2020, making the mostly white, Republican district the first in the U.S. to take such an action.
By a 5-1 vote, the Shenandoah County board overturned its 2020 decision that stripped a public high school and elementary school of their original names honoring three military leaders of the pro-slavery South in the Civil War.
Under the board’s action, Mountain View High School will again become known as Stonewall Jackson High, while Honey Run Elementary School will revert to the name Ashby Lee Elementary.
The names belong to some of the most well-known military leaders of the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee was commander of the Army of Northern Virginia; Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson was a Confederate infantry general, and Turner Ashby was a rebel cavalry commander. All of them were Virginians.
I’m reading Erik Larsen’s new book on the start of the civil war, and he’s pointing our some interesting things. Like in letters and dispatches, the southerners rarely used the word ‘slaves’, preferring to use ‘hands’ or ‘Negroes’. They thought of themselves as a kind of nobility, even going so far as to have competitions where they’d try to lance rings from horseback, or decapitate a dummy from horseback - medieval knight stuff. They came up with all kinds of justifications as to why slavery was okay - they were a superior race, the negroes were used to it and didn’t mind, they were saving the slaves from the economic uncertainty of the job market, etc. One guy had a section in his handbook on how to whip his slaves so that they were still able to work afterward.
They were taught to be proud of all this. After defeat, they immediately came up with the Lost Cause hypothesis and started teaching that, because they were honorable, noble men and the northerners just didn’t understand Southern people or their culture. They’ve never truly understood or admitted they were wrong, and they keep pressing that mindset into each of the next generations as they arrive.