“The ‘Milk and Water’ Policy…Is To Be Abandoned”: The Battle of Lewisburg, the Yankee, and Hard War in Western Virginia

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“The ‘Milk and Water’ Policy…Is To Be Abandoned”: The Battle of Lewisburg, the Yankee, and Hard War in Western Virginia

In late May 1862, United States soldiers of the 44th Ohio Infantry occupied the abandoned offices of the Greenbrier Weekly Era in Lewisburg, western Virginia. Having recently emerged victorious in the Battle of Lewisburg and perhaps faced with the boredom of occupation, the soldiers set about publishing a newspaper they christened the Yankee. Though the Federals only managed to print a single issue before evacuating the town, the Yankee’s four pages reveal the hardening attitudes of Federal soldiers and the arrival of “hard war” in 1862 western Virginia.

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Editorial: West Virginia Must Confront Its Confederate Monuments

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Editorial: West Virginia Must Confront Its Confederate Monuments

In the autumn of 1910, a crowd of thousands gathered on the capitol grounds in downtown Charleston, West Virginia. The women and men, many of whom were Confederate veterans adorned once again in gray, had come from all over West Virginia to witness the dedication of a monument to Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson…Among the crowd, civilians and veterans alike wore “Lily White” campaign buttons. In the early 1900s, the Lily White campaign called for the disfranchisement of African American voters.

The Jim Crow politics intertwined with the history of Charleston’s Stonewall Jackson statue speak to the complicated and racist legacies Confederate monuments often hold. In 1910, West Virginians who turned out to honor Stonewall Jackson’s legacy naturally linked that cause with the disfranchisement of black voters. They understood the relationship between racism and Confederate iconography

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