What William Mahone did
Wednesday August 23rd 2017, 10:58 pm
Filed under: History

Courtesy of my cousin, here’s a link to a story I’d never heard of. A man whose name and face will not be found among all those Confederate statues all over the South, even though he had been a Major General fighting for the Confederacy and Lee had considered him one of the best.

Because after the Civil War was over, William Mahone set up a political party in Virginia that abolished a poll tax, empowered freed slaves, got them educations, gave them political power and treated them as equals for four years, as long as he could–until political and physical violence stole it from them again.

There is, according to the article, a single monument to him, raised, as so many others were, by the Daughters of the Confederacy: with descriptions of a battle he’d won.

Not a word was to be spoken about the far larger one he later fought and, for a time and for the sake of every one of us then and now, won.


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