We spent the past few days in Yorktown, Virginia, which you may recall from history class is where General Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington, prompting the eventual U.S. victory in the American Revolution. Today the town is surrounded by a National Historical Park. It’s a lovely area for biking, with lightly trafficked roads winding through fields and forests past various historical markers noting where defensive walls, encampments, hospitals and more once stood. Reading these markers, we were reminded that French forces were essential to the American victory, including a naval fleet normally based in the West Indies whose sailors arrived in their linen uniforms and found the Chesapeake October quite chilly.
Other markers informed us that after the war ended, several French military officers returned home only to be guillotined a few years later. It’s easy to find yourself on the wrong side of revolution.
There’s an impressively tall (98 feet) monument in town to commemorate the victory at Yorktown. The monument was authorized by the Continental Congress right after the battle ended in 1781, but wasn’t actually built until 100 years later. To understand why construction finally began then, it helps to know that the area around Yorktown was also a major Civil War battleground, where Union forces staged for attacks on nearby Richmond. Just outside of town there’s a National Cemetery where more than 2,000 Union (and some Confederate) soldiers who died nearby are buried. Hauntingly, two-thirds of the bodies remain unidentified.
By 1881, Reconstruction had been abandoned and the Gilded Age was in full swing. The U.S.faced vast social and economic inequalities and cultural and regional divides. The Yorktown Victory Monument was intended to help knit us all back together. It’s etched right into the marble: One Country, One Constitution, One Destiny.
Today it doesn’t seem that we’re at all in agreement about what that destiny is. In Minneapolis and Louisville and Brunswick Georgia and Central Park and everywhere else, people are still being forced to struggle against the idea that black bodies are disposable. Meanwhile here in Yorktown the proprietor of a local gift shop informed us that if the governor decides to require face masks in public, he’ll be disobeying the order. “After all, this is Yorktown – the home of the revolution.” It’s scary to think about what happens when we agree there are things worth fighting for, but we disagree so profoundly on what those things are.