I love this particular story about him perhaps because it is at once so remarkable and also so familiar. So modern.

Anyway, turns out that this future political boss enrolled at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington in 1864, during the Civil War. On May 15 of that year, VMI cadets were called on to fight in the Battle of New Market, and fifty-seven of them were killed or wounded, some of them as young as fifteen years old. Martin, sixteen at the time, missed the action due to ill health. He is said to have suffered from a cold, but it’s hard to tell if that’s true. Regardless, he did see some fighting in the war.

Now fast forward to 1893. Martin is a political unknown, a behind-the-scenes power broker in the Democratic Party who ingeniously trades on his tight relations with the railroads. (He’s district counsel to the Chesapeake and Ohio.) When he decides to put himself up for a suddenly vacant U.S. Senate seat, everyone’s surprised. After all, the shoo-in is Fitzhugh Lee, the former Confederate cavalryman, former Virginia governor, and nephew of Robert E. Lee.

Lee, however, is overconfident. He declines to openly lobby assemblymen for their votes and acts more concerned about participating in Lost Cause arguments over his uncle’s legacy than he does about his own political career. Martin, meanwhile, quietly lines up the votes and, it seems likely, passes on a few bribes as well. While the people of Virginia seem to support Lee and the symbolism that is so heavily invested in his family name, in the end, the election is not in their hands but in the hands of the General Assembly—which, on December 7, 1893, gives the nod to Martin on the sixth ballot, 66 votes to 55.

It is one of the greatest upsets in Virginia political history.

In the end, in the words of historian Harry Warren Readnour, Lee “could not fathom the possibility that a former VMI cadet,” especially one who had allegedly sniffled his way out of New Market, “might be the victor over an ex-Confederate general named Lee.”

Life’s funny that way sometimes.

UPDATE: An alert reader makes a helpful correction.

This is apropos only of the difficulty but also, let’s face it, the extreme coolness of sitting down and editing an encyclopedia entry about Thomas Staples Martin. Who is Thomas Staples Martin? you ask.

Exactly.

Martin was a longtime U.S. Senator (1895–1919) and the Democratic Party poo-bah in Virginia before the legendary Harry F. Byrd came along. Before the Byrd Organization, there was the Martin Organization. And this quiet, unassuming Charlottesville-based railroad lawyer happens to occupy this rather out-of-the-way little corner of political history in which he interacts with all kinds of people and issues that are, for non-historians, completely obscure today—free silver, for instance, or Little Billy Mahone and the Readjusters. (Sounds like a band name, doesn’t it? As I’ve noted before, Mahone by himself is one of the most interesting figures in Virginia history.)

Anyway, these politics have always been pretty confusing to me until I figured out that the Democrats were split into factions—conservative and progressive—and the progressives, contra to how we might think of them today, were often unrepentant racists (Woodrow Wilson, take a bow). The Populists were something else altogether. And the Martin Organization existed as a central power base, designed to maintain conservative Democratic control in Virginia. Of course, Martin had to be a pragmatist, as our learned contributor points out in his entry, because there were so many different groups running around.

But by the 1920s, when Harry F. Byrd took over, politics in Virginia had simplified somewhat. I don’t mean that the issues had simplified. But there were basically just the Democrats and the Republicans. And the Byrd Organization tightly controlled everything and Martin-style pragmatism, I think, was less important. If you were to be governor or senator or maybe even dogcatcher, you had to get the nod from Byrd. And they literally called it that—getting the nod. If you were a Democrat and you opposed the Organization, you were dismissed as an “anti” and frozen out. Your career was finished. It was like a nonviolent political mob.

The problem with Byrd, in the end, was that the national Democratic Party swung far to the left with Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. And Byrd and his Virginians ended up being in the role of antis themselves. They didn’t stand for anything so much as they stood against everything: against the New Deal, against the New Frontier, against the New Society, and more than anything else, against desegregation.

Perhaps that’s a bit unfair. For starters, they stood for fiscal conservatism (Byrd’s famous pay-as-you-go approach to government), and it was hardly their fault that such a philosophy was in deep eclipse in those days. But sometimes the judgment of history isn’t fair.

Anyway, this is my still somewhat tentative understanding of the big picture, and for me, it started with Thomas Staples Martin.

When one considers the term massive–or “collective”–resistance, we might try and channel Thoreauian idealism and think of a movement by a downtrodden people to subvert or protest a tyrannical status quo. In the case of Virginia history, however,  “Massive Resistance” was anything but a subversive movement for high moral principles. Massive Resistance was the political–and social–policy set forth by Senator Harry Byrd to effectively block the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education which ruled that racial segregation in public education was “inherently unequal.” The Brown decision set off a firestorm of fear-mongering. Whites were terrified that the desegregation of public education would lead to “race-mixing,” “intermarriage,” and “the destruction of [white] culture” (whatever that is).

Today marks an unfortunate occasion in remembrance of this movement and its effect on Virginia’s mixed record of race relations.  On September 19, 1958, in an act of “Massive Resistence” to prevent the desegregation of public schools, Governor James Lindsay Almond Jr. ordered the immediate closure of Lane High School and Venable Elementary School in Charlottesville. Charlottesville, however, was not the only locality to encounter such measures; in fact, it was neither the first nor last.

On September 8, 1958, at federal judge John Paul’s order to “desegregate” Warren County High School in Front Royal, Almond was compelled to close the school down and then on September 27 he was also compelled to shut down several schools in Norfolk. In all, Almond effectively locked out more than 13,000 students. Fearing that public education would be left in shambles, however, more moderate voices took up the charge to pressure Almond to shed the policy of Massive Resistance. On January 19, 1959–Robert E. Lee’s 152nd birthday–the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals overruled the school closings and declared them to be in violation of section 129 of the state constitution that required the state to maintain free schools.  While Almond admitted defeat, the lackluster solution to desegregate public schools fell as a burden on black parents who would have the “Freedom to Choose” where they would send their children.

Despite the death of Massive Resistance, whites in Prince Edward County found a loophole to ensure segregated education (and to actually keep the African American community entirely uneducated) for the next five years.  In his entry on “Massive Resistance” for Encyclopedia Virginia, James Hershman writes:

Prince Edward County’s school board chose to close all its public schools rather than desegregate in September 1959. Using state tuition grants, whites established a segregated private school, while black students lacked any educational facility in the county … Massive Resistance and its aftermath left a deep and lasting negative imprint on Virginia’s system of public education and race relations in the second half of the twentieth century. By delaying effective desegregation until late in the 1960s, during which a decade and a half of extensive, racially segregated suburban development had occurred, it permitted the perpetuation of mostly segregated schools in the state’s major metropolitan areas. In several rural counties, it provided time for substantial numbers of white students to withdraw to private, usually all-white, academies. The commitment to integrated public schooling was delayed and, in many cases, undercut.

I know kids in Charlottesville’s public schools. Even here, even now, I hear about and see first hand the present-day effects of the unfortunate legacy that Massive Resistance helped create. Even though whites and blacks now intermingle with others under the same school roof, it is now in the hallways and classrooms where the lines of racial and class segregation are drawn and the paths of learning are preordained. And when I think about the generation of African Americans from Prince Edward County who were wholly denied their education, I wonder what amends were made to them?

of Encyclopedia Virginia there was Andrew Chancey [pronounced 'An-drëw Chän-see'; aka VFH Director of Planning and Management and Executive Editor of Encyclopedia Virginia]. Andrew–known as “Andy” to his friends outside the office–came to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities over eight years ago. He rose in the VFH ranks quickly, going from a half-time employee to the high-powered administrative position mysteriously called “Director of Planning and Management.” This Andrew achieved because of his incredible organizational and managerial prowess and, perhaps, because nobody else wanted the position.

While managing the daily operations of VFH, Andrew was also busy making this idea of Encyclopedia Virginia a reality. He wrote the initial grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities that provided over $50,000 to investigate the feasibility of creating an online resource to explore Virginia history and culture. And the rest is–well–the rest is history.

When I came to VFH and to Encyclopedia Virginia in 2005, Andrew was there to shepherd me through the subtle intricacies that make up this organization. He was there to play my devil’s advocate when I needed him (and when I didn’t need him) to play that role. While EV may have existed without Andrew, that existence would have been much farther down the road of the future if it had not been for his insistence and passion for the project.

So, why does this sound like an obituary–or perhaps a prologue to a presidential acceptance speech? Well, Andrew’s last day at VFH is today, and on Tuesday (unless they make him work on Labor Day) he will be walking into UVa’s Miller Center of Public Affairs as some as-of-yet untitled big wig. While the strength and success of an organization such as VFH are based on the sum of its parts, there are times when one person can make the difference between good and great. I think I can speak for everyone at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities when I say that Andrew is such a person. We’ll certainly miss you.

The name of the publication is Encyclopedia Virginia, which assumes that the subjects of our articles are connected to the state in some way. Which is a safe assumption, of course, but those connections are more tenuous for some than for others. Take Martin R. Delany. Here’s an early draft of the introduction to our entry:

“Martin R. Delany was an African American abolitionist, writer, editor, doctor, and politician. Born in Charles Town, Virginia, he lived in Pittsburgh for years, very briefly attended medical school at Harvard University, and spent his later life in Charleston, South Carolina. Delany was the first black field officer in the U.S. Army, serving as a major during and after the American Civil War (1861-1865), and among the first black nationalists. A fiercely independent thinker and a wide-ranging writer, he coedited with Frederick Douglass the abolitionist newspaper North Star, which encouraged pride and community awareness among freed blacks. Later, however, he penned a manifesto calling for black emigration to Central America and authored Blake: Or the Huts of America (1862), a novel about a fugitive slave who, in the tradition of Nat Turner, organizes insurrection. Delany explored West Africa, dabbled in the politics of Liberia, served as a trial justice in South Carolina (a scandal landed him in prison), and, in 1874, lost election for lieutenant governor of South Carolina. Despite all this, Delany remains relatively unknown. ‘His was a magnificent life,’ W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1936, ‘and yet, how many of us have heard of him?’ His contributions have also tended to be pigeon-holed, with an emphasis on his more radical views (celebrated in the 1970s) and less attention paid to the extraordinary, almost whiplash complexity of his career.”

Wow. This guy was amazing, and one could write thousands of words. In the end, though, Delany’s only real connection to Virginia was having been born in a town that is no longer even within the state’s borders. So, a little grudgingly, we pared down both the introduction and the entry. Still, ours is longer than the encyclopedia entries for both South Carolina and West Virginia. Delany deserves it, regardless of our name.

For more on Delany check out the following:

• To Be More Than Equal: The Many Lives of Martin R. Delany
• Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (Robert S. Levine, Editor)
• Martin R. Delany and Abraham Lincoln

One of the more remarkable figures in Virginia history made a surprise appearance this weekend in the letters section of the New York Times Book Review. Writing about the legacy of Reconstruction (in response to an earlier review about the Colfax massacre), Stanford professor Carl Degler cites William Mahone and the case of Virginia. In particular, he notes “the spirit of revolutionary Reconstruction” as exhibited by “the establishment, from 1880 to 1883, of the black and white Readjuster government” in the state.

The Readjusters, led by William Mahone, a Confederate major general who had accepted Appomattox, transformed Virginia both politically and socially. They developed mental hospitals separately for blacks and whites, as well as public schools. They abolished whipping posts and the poll tax, lowered taxes for farmers of both races and enabled blacks as well as whites to serve on juries, work in state offices and serve as policemen and prison guards. As happened in Reconstruction, the Readjusters were defeated by vicious and fraudulent appeals to white superemacy [this one time the typo belongs to the Times –Ed.], ending in the Danville riot in 1883.

Mahone is certainly one of the more fascinating figures of the Civil War and Reconstruction period in Virginia, and it’s outrageous that there’s no biography of him. Kevin Levin, who is working on Encyclopedia Virginia’s Mahone entry, insists that he would write one, but for one, rather high hurdle.

Belle Boyd was one of the Confederacy’s most notorious spies. And her 1865 memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, is full of so many outrageous stories that historians have long had difficulty knowing what to believe. Still, I find this paragraph from our entry to be extraordinary:

“Boyd was released [from prison] in December 1863, and six months later she volunteered to carry Confederate papers to England aboard the blockade runner Greyhound. The ship was stopped on May 10, 1864, but Boyd managed to escape, first to Canada, then to London, and on August 25, 1864, she married one of the Union naval officers who had seized the Greyhound, Samuel W. Hardinge. When Hardinge returned to the United States to answer charges that he had aided and abetted an enemy spy, he was jailed and, soon after his release, he apparently died. ‘The end of the Hardinge marriage and, indeed, the end of Hardinge himself are shrouded in mystery,’ [historian Drew Gilpin] Faust has noted, ‘and some have doubted Boyd’s assertion that he never rejoined her abroad.’ Others, like Roger Austen, biographer of the gay writer Charles Warren Stoddard, argue that he neither died nor returned to England. Austen has written that Hardinge instead traveled to San Francisco, where the ’swarthily handsome’ New Yorker had an affair with Stoddard that was immortalized in the writer’s autobiographical novel, For the Pleasure of His Company (1903).”

By the way, the Hardinge character in For the Pleasure of His Company is named Foxlair. How perfect is that?

In light of that gruesome photograph of a dead Confederate at Petersburg, here is something I wrote for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire at the very beginning of the Iraq War, when newspaper editors were furiously debating how graphic their coverage of the war could be . . .

The Associated Press recently moved a photo on its wire showing American soldiers lying dead on the battlefield. The dateline was not Iraq, however; it was Maryland, one day after the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. It was attributed to Matthew Brady, the famous Civil War photographer.

The copy editor in me immediately noticed that Brady’s first name was misspelled (it should have been spelled Mathew). And the history buff in me remembered that he didn’t even take the photograph. Credit should go instead to a Brady associate named Alexander Gardner, who, with help from his assistant, John F. Gibson, composed ninety-five photographs in the days following that horrifically bloody battle.

They were the first photos ever taken of American war dead.

The story of Gardner and Gibson, their struggle with Brady to receive full credit for their work, and the effect these images had on the American public is told in William A. Frassanito’s Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day. Published twenty-five years ago, the book has been on my shelf ever since I was a gun-toting Civil War reenactor, back in high school. Its images—many of them gruesome, even by today’s standards—nudged me toward the realization that the bloodless business of reenacting is absurd. Imagine the impact they had, displayed in Brady’s New York City gallery, just one month after Antietam, a battle in which more than 26,000 were killed or wounded.

A reporter covered the exhibit for the New York Times (Oct. 20, 1862). According to Frassanito, he was “a sensitive man, (who) could not help but admit to himself and his readers that these photographs were morbidly captivating, for the views that attracted the greatest attention depicted clusters of bloated corpses stiffened in grotesque positions.” The man’s article, writes Frassanito, “is one of the most pensive commentaries ever written concerning a series of war photographs.”

To read it is to wonder if such an exhibit would find a home in today’s America during wartime:

The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement. There would be a gathering of skirts and a careful picking of way; conversation would be less lively, and the general air of pedestrians more subdued. As it is, the dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type. The roll we read is being called over in Eternity, and pale, trembling lips are answering to it. Shadowy figures point from the page to a field where even imagination is loth to follow. Each of these little names that the printer struck off so lightly last night, whistling over his work, and that we speak with a clip of the tongue, represents a bleeding, mangled corpse. It is a thunderbolt that will crash into some brain—a dull, dead remorseless weight that will fall upon some heart, straining it to the breaking. There is nothing very terrible to us, however, in the list, though our sensations might be different if the newspaper carrier left the names on the battle-field and the bodies at our doors instead.

We recognize the battle-field as a reality, but it stands as a remote one. It is like a funeral next door. The crape on the bell-pull tells there is a death in the house, and in the close carriage that rolls away with muffled wheels you know there rides a woman to whom the world is very dark now. But you only see the mourners in the last of the long line of carriages—they ride very jollily and at their ease, smoking cigars in a furtive and discursive manner, perhaps, and were it not for the black gloves they wear, which the deceased was wise and liberal enough to furnish, it might be a wedding for all the world would know. It attracts your attention, but does not enlist your sympathy. But it is very different when the hearse stops at your own door, and the corpse is carried out over your own threshold—you know whether it is a wedding or a funeral then, without looking at the color of the gloves worn. Those who lose friends in battle know what battle-fields are . . .

Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it . . .

These pictures have a terrible distinctness . . . We should scarce choose to be in the gallery, when one of the women bending over them should recognize a husband, a son, or brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies, that lie ready for the taping trenches. For these trenches have a terror for a woman’s heart, that goes far to outweigh all others that hover over the battle-field. How can a mother bear to know that the boy whose slumbers she has cradles, and whose head her bosom pillowed until the rolling drums called him forth—whose poor, pale face, could she react it, should find the same pillow again . . . when, but for the privilege of touching that corpse, of kissing once more the lips through white and cold, of smoothing back the hair from the brow and cleansing it of blood, stains, she would give all the remaining years of life that Heaven has allotted her—how can this mother bear to know that in a shallow trench, hastily dug, rude hands have thrown him. She would have handled the poor corpse so tenderly, have prized the boon of caring for it so dearly—yet, even the imperative office of hiding the dead from sight has been done by those who thought it trouble, and were only glad when their work ended.

It’s worth noting that the dead in Gardner’s exposures are mostly Confederates, such as the anonymous boy curled up under a tree, almost peacefully, near a cornfield owned by a German farmer named Miller. The Union dead, by contrast, were buried quickly, saving them from the camera’s disrespect. All that’s left of a twenty-one-year-old infantry lieutenant from Michigan, John A. Clark, who must have fallen near the boy, is a simple wood marker. [Find the photograph here. You have to scroll down a bit.]

The Confederates were the enemy, and for that reason, it was less likely a woman in New York City “should recognize a husband, a son, or a brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies.” We can more easily distance ourselves from the enemy, after all, and perhaps that’s why we at the Monitor have seen on the AP wire and published images of Iraqi dead in the last few weeks, but none of Americans.

On the other hand, all the dead at Antietam were Americans. Whether you were from New York or Virginia, it would have taken real courage to look into those faces, to cut through the layer of politeness that covered all transactions then, and ask the obvious questions: Do I understand the cost? Is it worth it?

Today the trappings of our culture—television and the movies, mostly—are much more violent; our cameras, certainly, are much more numerous. Yet confronting our dead seems harder somehow. Is it that Gardner and Gibson’s photographs would no longer seem so shocking? Or are we less willing to be so honest with ourselves?

NOTE: I’m given to understand, by the way, that Frassanito lives in Virginia. Perhaps readers can correct me if I’m wrong.

UPDATE: Is it right or wrong to show our war dead? I don’t know, but I find the question interesting. Still, we’re a long way from Antietam when we still can’t even show our funerals.

STILL MORE COOL STUFF:

• Antietam on the Web
• Alexander Gardner’s photographs at the Library of Congress

A few weeks ago, in a blog post about race, the issue of eugenics came up. I promised some more on that and, well, here it is.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, affirmed the constitutionality of a 1924 law empowering Virginia to sterilize individuals it deemed genetically “unfit.” By itself, this amazed me (although sometimes I am too easily amazed), but what really got me was the claim, in the introduction to our entry on the case, that “in 1933, Nazi Germany modeled its eugenics laws after Virginia’s.”

Really? Our contributor is Gregory Michael Dorr, author of Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (2008), so I didn’t doubt the scholarship. I was just, as I might have mentioned, amazed.

The facts of the case go like this: Carrie Buck was the eighteen-year-old illegitimate daughter of a woman the state deemed a “low grade moron.” Carrie was said to have the mental age of nine, and when she herself gave birth to a daughter, the state pronounced the child to be “weak minded.” (Turns out she wasn’t. Oops.) Virginia thought it saw a genetic pattern and transferred Carrie to the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feeble-Minded in Lynchburg for sterilization.

This is when the lawsuits started, and they included the testimony of an Iowa-born geneticist named Harry H. Laughlin. Without ever having met Carrie Buck or her family, he testified that they were members of the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites,” and that the possibility of her “weak-mindedness” being non-hereditary was “exceptionally remote.” (See “oops” above.)

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court had its say, with Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes complaining, on behalf of the majority, that people like Carrie Buck “[sapped] the strength of the State.”

“It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,” he wrote, before famously summing up the frustration of the court: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The ruling was widely hailed in its day, but Holmes has taken a beating since. He has been called everything from “platitudinous” to a “monster,” with one critic saying (ironically, one hopes) that “it would have been better for the country had he never been born.”

For his part, Harry Laughlin of Oskaloosa, Iowa, was feted at the University of Heidelberg, which in 1936 awarded him an honorary doctorate and a pat on the back. Two years later, the Carnegie Endowment, which had underwritten some of his research, backed out. But the damage had been done. Carrie Buck’s tubes had been snipped, and the Nazis had taken due notice.

Writes Dorr: “Over the next fifty years, doctors at Virginia’s state hospitals sterilized another 8,300 Virginians. At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Nazi defendants testified that their eugenics laws were based on Virginia’s precedent. The Nazis sterilized more than 400,000 people—a prelude to the extermination of approximately 17 million ‘unfit’ people in the Holocaust, six million of whom were ‘inferior’ Jews.”

The novelist Marilynne Robinson, in Amherst Magazine, refers to a different place but speaks, I think, to the spirit behind Encyclopedia Virginia:

I’ve always felt that people somehow immortalize themselves in a landscape, that the mere fact of a specific human presence in a place leaves it changed. The earliest American poetry is haunted by the Indian soul so palpably present here. How many souls have passed through this slightly secluded valley since the glaciers receded? Walt Whitman was right about everything, never more so than when he celebrated the epic and melancholy beauty created in a place by all the transient multitudes and generations that passed through it. Anonymity is beautiful, and names are beautiful. The universal is beautiful, and so are the particulars. Certain vivid souls have made an impress on this valley in the course of their pilgrimage, as we all k now. The list of local saints is very long. And who they were and what they meant is inscribed in highly legible forms, which are preserved and enjoyed as the special charm and richness of this valley, without much thought to the intentions that set them here, the hopes they were meant to fulfill. The same is true in many places in America.