6 § InsIde Hanover § July 2016 July 2016 § InsIde Hanover § 7

In a heavy dark wooden frame above my fireplace is a faded photograph of my three times great-grandfather. His name was Ezekiel Priddy and he was a confederate soldier. Along with his portrait, the generations have passed down stories of Ezekiel. I will let his obituary, which appeared in the Herald-Progress in 1910, tell one of the family favorites, “He received four wounds in the war — one of the bullets still remains in his body and one is in possession of his family, who prize it for his true patriotism.”

I had heard the story of the bullet that absorbed into Ezekiel’s flesh countless times, but had always chalked it up to family lore until his obituary was found a few years ago.

My grandmother was proud of her Hanover an-cestry. I grew up listening to stories set on the tracks of Ashland, the pews of Slash Church, and the lanes of Peakes Road. I was raised to be proud of the long history my family had in Virginia. Pick a period of American history, and I probably have a family story to accompany it. Plenty of those stories surround the darkest point in American history — the Civil War.

I had heard growing up that Ezekiel was a great man who loved his family and was a devout Christian, but

I always had some reservations. Sure he may have been an admired man, but he fought for the side that wanted to keep slavery, the side that bought and sold people like they were livestock. Ezekiel, like most of my ancestry, was not a wealthy slave owner, but the right for rich southerners to own slaves was what he was fighting for, right?

I let that question float around in my head later that day as I went to pick up my aunt, another one of Ezekiel’s descendants, so that we could travel east to Cold Harbor Battlefield. We were going to observe the canon firing demonstration they were having that day. Men dressed in both grey and blue walked around looking as though they stepped out of the pages of a history textbook. With extreme precision a group of southerners modeled how a canon was fired during the Civil War. The assembly of people that were there to watch spanned from elderly couples studiously ex-amining equipment to young boys eagerly awaiting the big boom.

After several deafening examples of the canon’s power, the boys in blue came marching over. The Yankees came to tell us about their firearms, and how they were more advanced than any you would find

Home and historyStory by HILTON FARMER

Photographs by NICK LIBERANTE

south of the Mason-Dixon. The Hanover locals that were listening seemed to be less enthusiastic about these soldiers from Pennsylvania than they were for the “good-ole-boys” from Virginia. I wondered, 150 years later are we still supposed to be picking sides?

Once all the demonstrations concluded, I went to speak with Mike Powell, a reenactor that had ad-dressed the crowd earlier. I asked him why he chose to volunteer his time for these kind of activities. He said that it all came for his love of history. He expressed a need to inform people of what actually happened during the Civil War.

“I hate revisionist history” he said passionately. Powell believes that factual information takes precedent over emotion when discussing his-torical events. I asked him about recent events surrounding confeder-ate history, specifi-cally the vandalism on Monument Avenue in Richmond, to which he responded, “Would it be okay to deface the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial?” For Powell, the confederate generals were just as patriotic and virtuous as any other American hero.

This is an argument I have become well accus-tomed to: the confederates were fighting to protect their homes and families. Men like Ezekiel who had no real ties to slavery were off to war so that their families may be safe. This oft-repeated argument is easy for me to relate to because I too love where I live.

The connection to a place can be just as strong as a connection to another person. I would fight for the

fields that my ancestors plowed, or the house where my dad spent his summers, or the woods where I would sneak off to read a book. These places may only be land, but they collectively embody all of those memories, lessons and feelings that I treasure. I am sure similar places that held that same value for Ezekiel is what he was thinking of while off at war.

Issues of race are deeply woven into the narrative of the war, as they should be. The institution of slavery is a stain on American history that cannot be ignored. I can acknowledge and appreciate the bravery it took for men on both sides to fight, but the right side won. Had the north not won and the union not been restored, slavery would have persisted.

I see reminders of Ezekiel every day. His portrait hangs in my home, his name is etched on the con-federate memorial at the courthouse, and he is buried at Lebanon

Methodist Church. His legacy has very much im-pacted my life. I will not deny that I have ancestors that fought for the confederacy, but I will not endorse what the confederacy stood for.

It should come as no surprise that one of the most complicated events in American history is full of nuance and complexities. What I have come to terms with is that it is possible to acknowledge and study the history without endorsing the behavior. Reenact-ments and memorials remind us of the painful past and urge us to not let that past be pushed in the back of our collective memory. What those things do not do is make us glorify or return to the past.

“It should come as no surprise that one of the most complicated events in American

history is full of nuance and complexities.”