So many odd things with the news that Waynesboro is considering getting rid of the monument honoring a city native who lost his life in a battle fought here in the final days of the Civil War.
Starting with, how many of y’all even knew that there was a Civil War monument downtown?
I’ve written about the Civil War battle, ran by the monument a million times, almost literally, in Constitution Park, and as the rest of the New South raced against time to take down statues and monuments to the Confederacy, it never occurred to me that, oh, yeah, there’s a Civil War monument here.
I’ll also concede that, having written about the battle, I’d never paid attention to who the monument honored.
William Harman was a Confederate Army colonel who died in the March 2, 1865 Battle of Waynesboro.
A former Augusta County Commonwealth’s attorney, Harman was one of the commanders of forces that seized the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1861, a day after the Commonwealth voted to secede from the Union.
A Waynesboro native, Harman had also served in Mexican-American War, before being elected Commonwealth’s attorney in 1851.
He served as Commonwealth’s attorney until the beginning of the Civil War.
So, at least the guy was from here. So many statues and monuments went up in locales to honor leaders of the Confederacy who had little or nothing to do with the place.
This guy was something of a prominent guy at the time.
But also, yeah, he took up arms against the federal government, like others in the Confederacy.
The cause was far from noble, and has never been worthy of being celebrated.
Give me what you want about defending his homeland and the rest, we’re Americans first.
Southern states seceded from the Union because the Union was threatening the end to the institution of slavery, keeping people in bondage to take advantage of their labor for material benefit.
The monuments that went up across the South were not to remember anything valorous; the aim was to remind the descendants of former slaves of their place, which for generations, enforced by Jim Crow laws, was not far beyond where African-Americans were in the slavery era.
The Harman monument isn’t easy to find, to the point that I couldn’t find it yesterday when I made a trip to Constitution Park to snap a photo.
We’re not talking Lee statue on Monument Avenue here, is the point.
But, this is Waynesboro, the rare city in Virginia, nationally, that still votes Republican. Waynesboro went for Glenn Youngkin; it went for Donald Trump, twice.
There was no local clamor to get rid of the Harman monument, maybe in part because of the city’s political leanings, in part because, people don’t clamor to get rid of something they don’t know exists.
Now that there’s a public hearing set for next month about the monument, you can guess that it’s going to get attention.
And in our divided society of the 2020s, where even public health puts us into opposing camps, this one is guaranteed to have us at each other’s throats.
It’ll be somewhat amusing when that happens over this monument.
A few weeks hence, we’re going to be divided over something that we didn’t even know was there.
Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
