Confederate Great-Great-Grandfathers

David Bragdon
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

August 26th, 2017

Great-great-grandchildren of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson spoke out last week, in favor of removing statues of their Confederate ancestors from places of honor. Heirs of Generals and a President, their renunciation apparently carried powerful symbolism, as if the venerated status of commander somehow carries through four generations of DNA. But just as the feigned postwar gentility of the Southern aristocracy obscured the violent brutality of post-Reconstruction Jim Crow, our national reconciliation won’t happen until the sentiments extend down through the ranks, and through the generations, to all Americans.

Two of my Virginian great-great-grandfathers served in the Confederate Army. No bronze statues exist of the two of them. In fact, they were too obscure to be worthy of being photographed, so we don’t even know what they looked like.

Joseph John (“J.J.”) Watkins came out of the Appalachian hollows of impoverished far southwestern Virginia, a mountainous region of subsistence farming, low education levels and short lives. Possibly he joined the Confederate military as a way up the economic ladder, but he had enthusiasm for it, rising from Sargent to First Lieutenant. He felt so strongly about his identity as a Confederate veteran that his rank and unit was etched on his tombstone when he died at the age of 47, more than twenty years after the end of the war. His status as an officer was so important that it is the only fact, other than dates of birth and death, on the stone, which doesn’t mention his peacetime occupation of farmer, or his role as a husband and father like many gravestones do. (His widow is buried nearby, and her stone identifies her as his wife, even though his stone does not refer to her. Family legend is that they eloped during a short leave as the war wound down in early 1865, their rendezvous reportedly aided by an enslaved individual who was euphemistically referred to as a “loyal servant” in family lore.)

Another of my great-great-grandfathers, William Harvey Heyl, had a long Virginia pedigree, as a descendant of English merchants who had settled in Jamestown in the 1630s. Before the Civil War, William and my great-great-grandmother, a Protestant Scots-Irish immigrant who had fled sectarian conflict on the edge of Ulster, were Episcopal missionaries teaching school in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Virginia. He also volunteered in the state militia, perhaps based on a sense of duty inherited from his father, a career U.S. Army officer. William later testified that when he had joined the state militia in the 1850s, he had not imagined it would ever take up arms against that very U.S. Army in which his father had served.

Unfortunately, as President Lincoln would later say, “the war came.” Unlike J.J., who left the backwoods to go find the war, William had the war come to him. The Heyl schoolhouse was near Bull Run and Manassas, and public pressure was on all males to fight. In a district overwhelmingly dominated by secesh, William’s post in the state militia converted him into a private in the Confederate Army, unwillingly, he later wrote. The Confederate archives record him mustering at camp for several months in 1862–63, then report him absent without leave. His documentation trail suddenly resumes in the Union archives, which report that in August 1863, he and two compatriots evaded Confederate re-conscription agents near Leesburg, Virginia, lashed together a raft, and paddled across the Potomac River to Maryland. Refugees in their own country, they walked up to Union soldiers and asked to swear an oath of loyalty to the United States.

William made his way to Washington D.C., where he had studied for his orders as a rector before the war, and where his mother lived. A friend vouched for his patriotism in a testimonial to the Union command, William swore his oath, and he moved in with his mother. While he originally told the authorities that he wanted to send for his wife and children left behind rebel lines, the war and possibly alcoholism caused a permanent rupture. His wife became essentially a single parent in war-ravaged and Reconstruction Virginia, and he spent most of the rest of his life in Washington D.C., living with his mother and working as a house painter. In 1881, near his fiftieth birthday, he died and was buried near his mother in Washington D.C. (His abandoned wife is buried in Virginia, near the old mission site.)

My two Confederate Army great-great-grandfathers: one a proud Lieutenant and one a deserter Private. The two paths they took lead directly to today’s field of battle: in November 2016, Scott County, where J.J. is buried, gave 82% of its votes to Donald Trump, while the District of Columbia, where William is buried, gave 4.1% of its votes to Donald Trump.

Several decades after their deaths, William’s granddaughter Jane and J.J.’s grandson Bayard met, in Charlottesville. Coincidentally, their marriage took place there two years before the city installed the infamous Robert E. Lee statue, a reminder that the statue is not a relic of the Civil War, but a selective vision of it from over two generations after the armistice. Jane and Bayard were my grandparents, and are buried on a hill in Charlottesville, not far from where Heather Heyer became the most recent casualty of the Civil War, 157 years after the armistice.

As J.J. and William’s great-great-grandson, I can’t excuse J.J.’s fight for slavery or take credit for William coming over to the right side — nor explain if his sense of duty to the Union justified his lack of duty to his wife and children. I’m as shaped by J.J. and William only to the extent I am shaped by my other fourteen great-great-grandparents, who spent the Civil War years peddling fish and toiling in pulp mills in Maine, growing oats in Quebec, working in a butcher shop in Massachusetts, and staying as far away from the war in Virginia as possible. (Do the math: the great-great-grandchildren of Lee, Davis and Jackson also have fifteen other great-great-grandparents who were not Confederate officials!)

Nobody built statues of any of my great-great-grandparents, so there are no statues to tear down, but there is work we can all do. Whatever our familial legacies, whether we’re descendants of the enslaved or the enslavers, the Yankees or the rebels — or, like many of us, descendants of all of the above — or whether we’re among today’s Americans whose ancestors in 1865 lived in Sicily, Punjab or Chengdu — now is our collective opportunity to become the generation of Americans who are finally open to receive the touch of “the better angels of our nature,” as President Lincoln hopefully prophesied about us, “as surely they will be.”

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David Bragdon

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Ships, railroads, transit and urban life in New York City and the Pacific Northwest.

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