Richmond, VIRGINA – The woman at the Confederate museum gift shop eyes the $50 bill I try to hand over.
“No one told you?” Her expression is deadpan serious. “We don’t take Yankee money here.”
As I fumble in my wallet looking for a different denomination than one that has Ulysses S Grant on it, I pull out a $5 bill. “Lincoln money?” She rolls her eyes and then laughs.
One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War started, the people of Richmond, Virginia once the Confederate state capital remain surrounded by memorials and monuments of the bloodiest war in American history.
Virginians take their history seriously, as the woman at the gift shop tells me, but in a state that has a history dating back to the 1600s with the Jamestown settlement, the Civil War was just one part of the past.
“We still like to make fun of Yankees though,” she smiles. “We even take Lincoln and Grant money here.”
There were more battles fought in Virginia than anywhere else during the Civil War and many of those sites, like the Shenandoah Valley have been preserved to this day as a reminder to future generations of the war known by many names.
In the south, there are some people like Ray Rackley, a volunteer at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia who still call it “the war of northern aggression.”
“My people weren’t wealthy, they didn’t own plantations or have slaves. But we have numerous relatives killed in the war. My family, 150 years ago, was crushed by the war and it took generations to get over it,” he says.
The state seceded formally in April 1861 but there were never doubts that Virginia was a southern state. Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi senator and Secretary of War before the war, served as president of the Confederate States in what is now called the Other White House, a stately mansion in Richmond’s historic district.
Almost four years later to the day, after seceding, Virginia was the place where Robert E. Lee, commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia finally had to admit defeat. Visitors to the historic village of Appomattox, which is now protected parkland, can tour the courthouse where Lee formally surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant as civilians and solders waited outside to hear the news that the war was ending.
