Defend the Valley: A Shenandoah Family in the Civil War Book

Having just spent a week in the neighborhood of Winchester, a town I came to know well through my interest in Defend the Valley and by proximity, I can see clearly how wrong the concept of secession was. A part of Virginia that has been given over to suburban sprawl where the land use is not horse farming, the classism of this book has carried down over a century and a half intact. To read over and over about the Barton family's innumerable cousins, cousins-german, kin and namesakes, their interventions on the Barton boys' behalf, and how noble the narrators were by association is to realize how painful losing that war must have been for them. Nowhere does anything like doubt in the sacred Cause or in the preachments of conventional religion appear. Instead innumerable exhortations expressed by the women deprived of their loved ones to consider the victims of that brutal conflict as merely having been translated to Heaven where they exchanged military garb for raiment are strewn like raisins throughout the dough of the story. When the youngest Barton boy hesitates to express his enthusiasm to testify for religion, the exhortations are unremitting from all correspondents. One wonders if they had sufficient honesty and candor to see that the Confederates' ultimate defeat was a judgment on themselves and their way of life. But to see people who were then as they are now divided by social class as well as by race, including those who consider the horseflesh they own and breed on large acreage to be far more important and to elevate them to greatness beyond other humans of the "lesser orders," is to be reminded of how very little has changed in society since the 1860s.