THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 13, 1995 TAG: 9504130413
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: APPOMATTOX LENGTH: Long : 121 lines
Four generations of white Southern youngsters were brought up to treat the Civil War as a continuing conflict, an attitude nursed by family tales of underdog valor in ``the War of Northern Aggression.''
On playgrounds, pupils picking teams split into Yanks and Rebels. In classrooms, Robert E. Lee, the Confederate commander, received at least equal billing with George Washington. Many Confederate shrines were built with the generals facing north, as if ready to return to battle.
But this spring, 130 years after the April 16 surrender, even Dixie's diehards began accepting their defeat. Virginia's newest tourist attraction is Lee's Retreat - a 105-mile automobile trail that opened on April 1, competing for attention with the monument in Richmond depicting the defiant hero, astride his horse Traveller.
And last weekend, 150 rifle-toting men dressed as Union soldiers marched on Richmond, in the first re-creation of the fall of the Confederate capital.
``Now I know how Parisians felt when the Nazis went through the Arc de Triomphe,'' said Wayne Lineberry, 48, of Midlothian, Va., an insurance manager and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Nearby, black spectators wept, and a few hummed ``The Battle Hymn of the Republic.'' White women in hoop skirts cried, too. But they seemed to be saying goodbye.
Though the pool of possible members increases with each generation, enrollment has declined at the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group for descendants of Confederate soldiers. Membership, 35,000 in 1950, is 24,500 today.
``Portraits of Lee are still treasured, but they may not be on the mantel, anymore,'' said the group's president general, Margaret S. Price.
Historians said the mythology surrounding what wistful Southerners call ``the Lost Cause'' had served a psychological need that no longer exists. Southerners, who until Vietnam were the only Americans who had lost a war, took a century to recover from the toll in blood, property and pride.
Until World War II, historians said, the South functioned as an economic colony, supplying raw materials for the industrialization of the North.
Nostalgia seemed to be a leading Southern export. A cartoon that was featured everywhere from cafe walls to cigarette lighters showed a grizzled Rebel soldier clutching a sword and snarling, ``Forget? Hell!''
Others found escape by romanticizing what many in these parts call ``the Late Unpleasantness.'' Laying flowers on Confederate graves remained a Sunday ritual for many women well into the 1950s.
``Losers have long memories,'' said Dr. James I. Robertson, 64, a history professor at Virginia Tech. ``But in my own lifetime, I've seen the bitterness dissipate.''
Dr. Ronald L. Heinemann, a history professor at Hampden-Sydney College, in Farmville, Va. - a town that is a stop on Lee's Retreat - added, ``Recent scholarship of Lee, while reaffirming his brilliance as a general and as a gentleman, has challenged the notion of him as a god incarnate.''
The re-enactment of the fall of Richmond seemed to symbolize the cooling of Confederate passion. The ceremony drew 850 people, while one mile away, 1,500 jammed Broad Street for a walk for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
On the lawn of the Capitol, belles wore black as a fife-and-drum corps led the Northern charge.
Cookie Atkinson, 44, who lives in Varina, which was named for the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, used a mildew-marred Confederate battle flag for a shawl as she watched. ``I thought there would be more of a to-do - they are taking the city,'' she said. ``Maybe we're getting so far past it.''
Kenneth Brown, 36, a science teacher who organized the mock seizure of the capital, said the shift in focus was a landmark. ``We need to think about telling the whole story - not just one part of the story,'' he said. ``For many African Americans, their story has not been told fully.''
Another neglected chapter unfolds along Lee's Retreat, a 20-stop driving tour promoted by the National Park Service and by economic development agencies. Signs featuring red, white and blue bugles point the way across the lush, increasingly hilly terrain from Petersburg to Appomattox Court House, where the surrender took place.
The evacuation took eight days for Lee, 58,000 hungry men, their 5,000 horses and a 30-mile wagon train. Often trudging at night, they burned bridges behind them. By the surrender, Lee was down to 30,000 soldiers. Today, tourists can retrace the route in four or five hours.
Lee's great-grandson, Robert E. Lee IV, 70, who lives in Northern Virginia, said he was not offended by the effort to capitalize on his ancestor's capitulation.
``You have to keep a sense of humor about it,'' said Lee, the chairman of board of A. Smith Bowman Distillery, which makes Virginia Gentleman bourbon. ``All heroes - if you consider Lee a hero, or a public figure - we eventually trash them.''
Indeed, the designers of the tour said they had received none of the criticism they had expected. ``This is a nonpartisan story,'' said Chris M. Calkins, the historian at Petersburg National Battlefield. ``If we called it Grant's Advance, no one would know what we were talking about.''
Of course, some remain holdouts from the changing South. So Robin Edward Reed, the executive director of the Museum of the Confederacy, in Richmond, recommends a regional variation on the military's policy of ``don't ask, don't tell.''
``There's a rule of thumb that a good guest doesn't bring up politics or religion,'' Reed said. ``You can add the Confederacy to that short list.'' ILLUSTRATION: Robert E. Lee and 58,000 men marched to Appomattox, then
surrendered on April 16, 1865. A sign of Virginia's acceptance: On
April 1, the opening of a 105-mile automobile trail along that path.
KEYWORDS: CIVIL WAR REENACTMENT by CNB