Across the Mason-Dixon Line.

Hello from Duncannon, PA!

I had hoped to write a post last weekend after arriving in Harper’s Ferry, but alas, too many good friends in Baltimore distracted me from the task. A very nice problem to have.

After two full days off, I pushed on into Union territory and eventually across the Mason-Dixon Line into my home state.

I make those references only half-jokingly—one reason it’s taken me so long to write a post is that the last few weeks of hiking have given me much to think about with regard to contested Civil War memory, Lost Cause ideology and it’s unavoidable reverberations through our current political and physical landscape.

As I hiked through the final few hundred miles of Virginia, through West Virginia and Maryland, then into Pennsylvania, I was listening to David Blight’s ‘Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory’—a fitting companion that opened my eyes to the quiet battle over the War’s meaning still unfolding throughout the valleys, ridge lines and gaps that the trail crosses.

Blight’s work feels very germane not only because he discusses people and places who are commemorated on the trail itself (I’ll get to them), but also because he asks a distressing question: can we have a liberal society—in the classical sense of the word—without having adequately processed the greatest trauma and moral crisis in our national history?

Commentators have done a lot of hand-wringing over the past several years about the rise of illiberalism around the world. Take Poland, for instance. The country’s right-wing Law and Justice Party has held power there since 2015. Their platform should be familiar to us: they’ve implemented very aggressive policies to stem immigration and have effectively banned abortion. On top of that, they’ve consolidated the state-owned media platforms and operate them with much stricter control than any previous Polish government.

But here’s where it gets interesting. In 2018, the Law and Justice Party successfully passed an amendment to the existing National Remembrance Act which criminalized certain forms of public speech which attributed blame for the Holocaust to Poland or Polish citizens. The phrase “Polish death camps,” in particular, was singled out for penalties if used in public.

Without getting into the very important details that make Poland unique and contribute to its sense of grievance (namely, being left hung out to dry by Western European allies before and after World War II),  Poland’s current “illiberalism” is inextricably linked to a failure to process its role in the Holocaust.

Germany, on the other hand, has taken a different path. You may remember Acorn and MadHatter (on the right), from last post:

They are Germans who live not far from Munich. As our conversation turned to German memory politics, we talked about a concept I had come across in college: “Vergangenheitsbewältigung.”

The word (yes, one word) translates to “working through the past.” It’s telling that the word exists to begin with—it clearly serves a social purpose in German culture. It emerged in the post-1945 era as a conceptual framework for how to make sense of and remember Nazism, the Holocaust and the destructive force of fascism.

Today, it broadly refers to the memory-work that happens every day in German schools, German parks and German institutions to remember the country’s role in the Holocaust and World War II.

Of course, German society is the site of its own contemporary memory wars over these topics. The Alternative für Deutchland (AfD) is a right-wing party that has gained seats in the past few parliamentary elections and has proposed remembrance legislation that would change the national education curriculum to de-emphasize Germany’s role in the Holocaust.

But the AfD is still a relatively powerless opposition party. In this age of autocracy and illiberal democracies, the general consensus is that Germany has remained strong and stable. Merkel won in 2017 and remained Chancellor and in 2021, Olaf Scholz of the center-left Social Democratic Party replaced her. It’s as if Dwight Eisenhower was succeeded by Sherrod Brown as President (okay, I’m totally talking out my ass here, I have no idea if that’s true but it seems more or less correct).

This is all to say, Germany has successfully cultivated and protected a liberal society; Poland has not. Germany has successfully processed its role as the perpetrator of the Holocaust and integrated that memory into its national self-conception. Poland has not.

I would argue this isn’t a coincidence. And if that’s the case, it really doesn’t bode well for the prospects of a liberal society here in the States.

We have no word, and perhaps no desire, for “working through the past.” I could qualify that “we” as a mostly white one, which is true. But look at the rhetorical contortions that Black political leaders have to pull off to be viable candidates in American politics. In 2008, then-primary candidate Obama gave his “A More Perfect Union” speech or “Race Speech” as it was called. I re-read it recently, it’s a brilliant and beautiful speech. But if we were choosing between the two, many of Jeremiah Wright’s fiery sermons are frankly a more accurate rendering of American history and certainly closer to the stuff of “working through the past,” than Obama’s speech.

To be clear, Wright’s sermons and comments also contain lots of horrible things (not the least of which was some pretty vicious anti-semitism). And I don’t begrudge Obama at all for crafting that speech (and his broader orientation towards racial politics as President) in the way that he did.

But the fact that he had to do so in order to be an effective politician indicates that mainstream (mostly white) American society simply cannot handle the brutal truths at the core of our national story. When you zoom out and look at the global landscape (again, note Germany) this is honestly pretty embarrassing. It is as if we are a society of adult children, babied by our inherited myths into an unwitting cowardice.

And look, my politics are pretty pragmatic. If you’ve gotta ease the fears of some white people to get elected President and give more people health care, so be it! I have no problem with that. National myths in service of forward-looking progress are probably essential to winning power.

But the national myth at hand, that slavery is incidental to the American story and that the Confederacy was a valiant chapter worth honoring, is a profoundly corrosive myth that has threatened and continues to threaten the very possibility that we can have a classically liberal society at all.

Primo Levi, a Jewish-Italian chemist and Auschwitz survivor, argued that “an extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression.” He referred to this suppressed guilt as a “fossilized lie.” I love this concept, but it terrifies me. In the context of the Confederacy and slavery, I fear that the myths at hand have been allowed to fester (and sometimes thrive) for so many generations, that they are now fossilized—solidified into the bedrock of our political culture whether we like it or not.

What are the consequences? Well, we never reached a national, historical consensus that the Confederacy committed treason, brought the country to its knees and caused an existential, constitutional crisis because the majority of American voters selected a President that promised moderate limitations on the spread of slavery. So should we really have been surprised last year when a right-wing political movement attempted to precipitate a constitutional crisis because the majority of American voters selected a moderate President of the opposite party? We never reached a national, historical consensus that legalized human bondage in the form of chattel slavery was an intergenerational trauma that destroyed Black families and rested upon, among other foundations, total slaveholder control over enslaved people’s reproduction and family planning. So should we really be surprised that in Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked opinion he argues that the protections guaranteed under Roe cannot fall under the 14th Amendment because its authors we’re concerned only with redressing the harms of slavery, which in his view had nothing to do with reproductive rights? We never reached a national, historical consensus that the thousands of extrajudicial lynchings of Black people were a complete rebuke of our sacred “rule of law,” we never reached a national consensus that white supremacy was not only a core part of our early political culture that led to mass violence against Black people, but also a fiction that caused tremendous psychic harm to white people generation after generation. So should we really be surprised that a young white man murdered 10 people in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo?

One of Jeremiah Wright’s lines that caused so much pearl-clutching in the mainstream media was how he described 9/11: “America’s chickens coming home to roost. As a 13-year-old in 2008, I found it obvious why this was such an offensive remark. Looking back, I’m not so sure—that kind of self-critical reflection, although bombastic, was closer to the truth than the lies we were peddled by the Bush administration that led to our forever wars.

Returning to the myths that fuel our racial politics, I think Wright’s line applies here too. Slavery and the mass treason staged to defend it are the illiberal chickens we brought into this world, but never really dealt with. Now they’re coming home to roost.

With that lengthy diatribe aside, here are some actual examples of this contested memory along the trail:

Back to the Waynesboro Heritage Museum which I mentioned in the last post. This is a display dedicated to General Jubal Early, the “prototypical unreconstructed rebel,” as Louisiana State University historian Gaines Foster described him. Early was raised on a large Virginia tobacco farm which was worked by enslaved people owned by his father. He would inherit these enslaved people as property before serving as a key Confederate Lieutenant General under Stonewall Jackson. After the war, he fled to Mexico, then Cuba and Canada to avoid arrest (in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, high-ranking Confederate officials were arrested for treason, a policy that shifted quickly under President Andrew Johnson, who moved to pardon most of these officials). Early returned to the United States and soon thereafter became a key architect of the Lost Cause. He eventually led the Southern Historical Society, the main intellectual and literary institution promoting Lost Cause history. He proudly referred to himself as an “unrepentant rebel.” The exhibit fails to mention that Early was a slaveholder and an avowed white supremacist to the end of his days. Indeed, the words “slavery” and “treason” are not on the panel. Instead, we are told that Early “became known as ‘Old Jube,’ earning a reputation as an aggressive and brave officer.”

This sign, right on the Appalachian Trail itself, marks the stretch of the trail defended by Confederate battalion commander John Singleton Mosby. Nicknamed “The Gray Ghost,” Mosby infamously executed several Union soldiers who had been captured as prisoners of war, violating the agreement both sides had made not to conduct prisoner executions. Although relatively neutral, this sign fails to mention Mosby’s most notable act during the war nor does it mention the one semi-redeeming aspect of his life—he became a scalawag Republican after the war. He was hated by men like Jubal Early because he campaigned for Ulysses S. Grant in the South and he rejected the notion of the Lost Cause—that the South had fought a noble cause to protect its liberty, not to defend slavery. He wasn’t repentant per se, but he was very explicit in his writings and public addresses that the Confederacy instigated the war to defend slavery. “I’ve always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I’ve never heard of any other cause than slavery,” he wrote. As you can see, none of this is on the sign.

But we do have a Virginia highway named after him.

The trail passes a different description of the story in Harper’s Ferry, WV. This plaque sits on the land that was once Storer College, the racially integrated and mixed-gender college formed in Harper’s Ferry in 1867. The Niagara Movement, the precursor to the NAACP formed by W.E.B Du Bois, held its second annual meeting at Storer College in 1906. Years later in 1932, after the Niagara Movement had transformed into the NAACP, the organization laid this plaque: 

“HERE JOHN BROWN AIMED AT HUMAN SLAVERY A BLOW THAT WOKE A GUILTY NATION. WITH HIM FOUGHT SEVEN SLAVES AND SONS OF SLAVES. OVER HIS CRUCIFIED CORPSE MARCHED 200,000 BLACK SOLDIERS AND 4,000,000 FREEDMEN SINGING JOHN BROWN’S BODY LIES A MOULDERING IN THE GRAVE, BUT HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON!”

Uhh, that’s more like it! 

A photo of the Black intellectuals, activists and clergymen who gathered for the second annual gathering of the Niagara Movement at Storer College, Harper’s Ferry, WV in 1906. Du Bois is seated in the center of the front row, fifth from the right.

The four key organizers of the 1906 meeting of the Niagara Movement with Du Bois seated.

The women members of the Niagara Movement at the 1906 meeting. Unsurprisingly, they had to fight for a place in the Movement and the gathering’s events. And sadly, the caption to this museum panel did not list the names of any of these women.

But even in Harper’s Ferry—the site of John Brown’s attempt to catalyze a mass revolt of enslaved peoples across the South—the memory wars rage. The trail passes right by this stone as well, erected in 1931 just one year before the NAACP plaque above. It’s a commemoration of Heyward Shepherd, a free Black man who worked near the Harper’s Ferry Armory and was killed—most likely unintentionally—by John Brown’s party at the outset of the raid. The second paragraph of the stone reads:

 “THIS BOULDER IS ERECTED BY THE UNITED DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY AND THE SONS OF THE CONFEDERATE VETERANS AS A MEMORIAL TO HEYWARD SHEPHERD, EXEMPLIFYING THE CHARACTER AND FAITHFULNESS OF THOUSANDS OF NEGROES WHO, UNDER MANY TEMPTATIONS THROUGHOUT THE SUBSEQUENT YEARS OF WAR, SO CONDUCTED THEMSELVES THAT NO STAIN WAS LEFT UPON THE RECORD WHICH IS THE PECULIAR HERITAGE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, AND AN EVERLASTING TRIBUTE TO THE BEST IN BOTH RACES.”

As I wrote in the last post, citing William Dean Howells, “What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.” This retelling of history is certainly one way of manufacturing that happy ending.

Of course, Black people contested this ridiculous narrative from the second it was put forth. At the dedication ceremony, Storer College Music Director Pearl Tatten interrupted the ceremony when she heard the praise of “faithful slaves.” She shouted: “I am the daughter of a Union soldier…who fought for the freedom of my people, for which John Brown struck the first blow…We are pushing forward to a large freedom.” According to reporter’s accounts of the day, the mostly white audience was shocked. “I just had to speak out,” she later told the Baltimore Afro-American.

Pearl Tatten, far right in glasses.

A plaque on a bench next to the original Washington Monument in Washington Monument State Park, MD. Just gonna go ahead and suggest that the next time someone wants to honor a cop on a bench, don’t pick the words of slaveholder and Confederate traitor Stonewall Jackson as the commemorative quote. You know, it might give off the wrong impression about the values of the Baltimore County Police Department…In all seriousness, once again, it’s telling that we don’t really blink at the idea of quoting Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson in contemporary, polite society. These people threatened to destroy their country to defend their right to enslave Black people. It is unthinkable that a bench plaque honoring a German cop or veteran could quote Reinhard Heydrich or Heinrich Himmler. We may intuitively feel that there is some significant difference between those two scenarios, but there really isn’t.

The “fossilized lie” on full display in Duncannon, PA at an AT hiker hostel—it pains me to say. This is what happens when a lie of such significance—the suppression of guilt for our worst national sin—is baked so deeply into the collective psyche. We arrive at almost Orwellian expressions. The Swastika is German heritage, not anti-semitism.

So what happens when you let a contested lie like the Lost Cause become a fossilized lie? Eventually, you get the Big Lie, the one that might actually bring down your liberal society for real this time. This lawn sign is just down the street from the Confederate flag, right in the center of town in Duncannon.

One final thought on all this before I move onto brighter notes. Obviously the Lost Cause has not been accepted by an overwhelming majority of Americans. The fact that in the past decade we’ve seen the removal of hundreds of Confederate flags, statues and honorary names clearly demonstrates that this history remains contested. The problem is not that the entire country believes the Confederacy fought a noble cause; rather, the problem is that we never hit the tipping point of real national consensus over the moral evil of the Confederacy and its cause. The tipping point at which it’s no longer seen as normal to quote admiringly from Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson or to name a highway, a town or a university after a Confederate slaveholder. When I try to understand why Germany reached this point and we didn’t, it’s tragic to consider that the answer might simply be the force of violence. The only window we ever had at ensuring historical justice was during the northern occupation of the former Confederate states, just as the Allied-occupation of Germany was the window in which the country was forced to reckon with its own sins. If indeed that’s the answer, it’s a disappointing one. But as Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in his book Faith and History, “The processes of historical justice are not exact enough to warrant the simple confidence in the moral character of history…moral judgments are executed in history, but never with precision…every execution of moral judgment in history is inexact because of its necessary relation to the morally irrelevant fact of power.” If indeed the “fact of power” is morally irrelevant, we sure as hell need to win more of it soon if we have any chance at holding our society together.

And now, back to the trail:

When I last posted, I was about to enter Shenandoah National Park. Unfortunately, my first three days in the park looked like this. A “condensing environment,” is the technical term, which really just means “in a cloud.” Very wet, cold air and fog everywhere.

One awesome aspect of Shenandoah was that there were more thru-hikers who happened to converge in the park at the same time. This is a photo of the last water source for 12 miles, which caused a big bottleneck of thru-hikers. It was a little jarring to turn the corner and see this, but people are fun and I’ve missed them out here. I have generally been ahead of “the bubble” which I was closer to last year.

My second morning in Shenandoah I woke up very wet and cold. So it was perfect timing to stumble upon trail magic a few miles into my day. The local trail club was out cooking pancakes, eggs, sausage and hot dogs and keeping a big fire going. Very much appreciated.

A very nice aspect of Shenandoah is that every 30 or so miles there’s a Wayside or Lodge where hikers can rest or resupply. This is a photo of Big Meadows Lodge, where I took a zero along with friends Traffic Cone, Grinder and KenAgain.

The Lodge was a New Deal creation and like any New Deal project, it was required by law to have an accompanying, dope-ass poster. Gotta love the days when the United States Federal Government was really good at selling its programs.

Waiting out the cold with a chess match at Big Meadows Lodge.

Seeing Shenandoah, finally. On my fourth day in the park, the clouds finally started to clear.

Overlooking the Shenandoah Valley.

Hiker friend Trillium headed down towards Skyline Drive, the scenic road through the center of the park. 

Day hikers from far-away lands! From left to right: Rom from France, Bernie and Connor from Ireland.

I was making my way down the trail when I passed them and heard someone say, “Are you a true hiker?” I turned and saw Connor who was smiling. I couldn’t tell if he was joking—am I a true hiker? “I’m not sure I understand,” I replied, expecting a punchline. “Are you a true hiker?” he repeated. This time I picked up his Irish accent. “Oh! Yes! Well…no, actually. It’s kind of a long story.” Ironically, a version of the original question that I thought I heard had been on my mind a fair amount lately. Whenever I’m asked if I’m a thru-hiker—which is pretty frequently—I have to qualify my answer with many details. By the letter of the law, I’m not a thru-hiker because I won’t complete the trail within 12 months of starting. Instead, I’m what’s known as a LASHer: a Long-Ass-Section-Hiker. But I like to consider myself a SLASHer: a Super-Long-Ass-Section Hiker. Or as another friend recently told me, I’m a “FLASHer: a Fucking-Long-Ass-Section Hiker.” Sadly, given the connotations of a bearded, sweaty, solo man who calls himself a “flasher,” I’m gonna have to pass on that one.

But I digress. Once Connor and I understood our mutual confusion, we were laughing and chatting about the trail, hiking and Ireland. I told him that with all the fog over the previous days, I had been listening to “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison. “Oh I love Van Morrison, but he’s a fucking prick.” 

Ah yes, I forgot about all of his recent anti-vax bullshit. “Oh no, he’s been a prick long before that. He’s been a prick his whole life.” The three of them proceeded to explain that yes, in fact, Van Morrison has been a prick for a long time. It’s a bummer because “Astral Weeks”

is one of my all-time favorite albums.

“But that’s the thing about the Irish. Whenever someone in Ireland becomes really successful, we all just call him a prick. In America, you celebrate successful people. In Ireland, we just call them pricks.”

The more you know! Not a bad national instinct to have. A healthy sense of collective humility strikes me as something we should learn from the Irish.

Taz and I standing on top of Mary’s Rock at the northern end of Shenandoah National Park.

A panorama from the top of Mary’s Rock.

A beautiful tree arching right over the trail.

A panorama from one of the last rock overlooks in Shenandoah. My friend Traffic Cone is on the right.

Traffic Cone got his name because he’s carrying a traffic cone to Maine. When you ask him why, he just says “Safety first!” Everything else he carries is ultralight and yet, he’s carrying a 3-pound traffic cone on the back of his pack. Gotta love the weirdness of the trail.

Me and the actual traffic cone, overlooking Shenandoah. Safety first!

The Shenandoah peaks in the distance behind me.

My final view of the park.

When we exited the park, this was the first thing we saw. Something about the juxtaposition of a sunset behind a barbed-wire fence made me take this photo.

I was listening to the aforementioned “Astral Weeks,” by Van Morrison when I crossed this stream. “If I ventured in the slip stream, between the viaducts of your dreams.” I couldn’t have picked a better description of how I felt standing here. I’ll have to give him a pass for being an anti-vax prick—that record is a masterpiece.

“The Rollercoaster” is a 13.5 mile section of the trail with rapid ascents and descents of 500-800 feet, over and over again. It wasn’t as bad as people said it was, but it was pretty brutal.

The 1,000 mile marker!

My final view of Virginia.

Crossing into West Virginia after having night-hiked the end of the Rollercoaster. As is evident, I was pretty spent.

The next day I hiked into Harper’s Ferry and was met by my friends Hannah and Miriam! They surprised me by hiking a few miles south on the trail so we ran into each other in the woods.

Mir captured the surprise encounter in real time.

After reaching Harper’s Ferry, I took two days off in Baltimore where I got to hang with my old trail friend Wheelz. Badass, incredible artist and hilarious humorist, Wheelz successfully completed her thru-hike last year.

And then, when I was ready to return to Harper’s Ferry, Wheelz very kindly drove me back. And we stopped for my food resupply on the way. Great diet, as you can see.

The trail cuts right through the town of Harper’s Ferry.

Right past the ruins of the original St. John’s Episcopal Church, which sustained heavy damage during the Civil War.

And right past the fort that John Brown and his party occupied during his raid.

And finally, past “The Point,” where the Potomac (on the left) and the Shenandoah (on the right) converge and become the Potomac River flowing towards DC. The hills on the right are Virginia, the hills on the left are Maryland and the photo was taken from West Virginia.

Before leaving Harper’s Ferry, I said goodbye to my friend Taz who is taking a planned week off at home in Barnstable. Taz was a true homie and it was a joy to get to hike with him.

After crossing the Potomac into Maryland, I was treated with a beautiful day. Here a Turkey Vulture is in mid-flight during sunset.

And although Maryland is far less mountainous than Virginia, it still offered some gorgeous views.

It also offered snakes like this one at Raven’s Rock.

But my time in Maryland was very short (just a 44 mile section) before I crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into my home state.

Speaking of my home state, I’ve learned quite a lot about parts of PA that I frankly didn’t know existed. Take these two photos for instance. Let’s play a game called “Central Pennsylvania College or Youth Prison?”

Turns out it’s a youth prison with a not particularly great reputation. It’s a half mile from the trail and I walked through the grounds to get to a restaurant for lunch.

It also deploys some pretty generous terminology for its facilities.

This is the back of the “Youth Development Center,” where a group of kids were playing basketball in the enclosed cage.

At the official halfway point! Mile-marker 1097.15 just outside of Pine Grove Furnace State Park.

A rainy morning leads to some unexpected beauty.

The north side of South Mountain, standing in the Cumberland Valley farmlands of PA.

The “Boiling Spring,” at the center of the town of Boiling Spring, PA. It’s a misnomer—it’s not a hot spring and it’s not boiling, but it does naturally bubble.

The Appalachian Trail along the side of the (bubbling) Boiling Spring, a town that I found to be really charming.

Crossing I-76, the highway of my youth. 

Relatively new friends Looseleaf and Lentil at a Mexican restaurant in Boiling Spring. Looseleaf is exfoliating with the steam of the fajitas. They met at Reed College, where Lentil helped run the only undergraduate-operated nuclear reactor in the world. Lentil now has a PhD in physics and is working with extremely high powered lasers, some of which are used for the process of fusion which has the potential to be a massive leap forward for energy creation and nuclear science more broadly (if I try to describe this any further, I know I’ll say something egregiously incorrect, so I’ll stop here). Looseleaf by total coincidence is very interested in urban planning and is likely going to apply to the masters program I’ll be starting in the fall. Very small world! They rock and I’m very grateful that I crossed paths with them.

A kid, who looked no more than 16 years old, working farmlands in central PA.

Beloved friends Skyler, Sydney and Jake visited from Baltimore to hike with me. It was an absolute blast.

The gang in the golden hour. 

I am very lucky to call these folks my friends and very lucky that they wanted to come hike with me in the middle of a heat wave.

Views of the Susquehanna River and the Appalachian Mountains of Central Pennsylvania.

No stray thoughts for this post, mercifully, for anyone who’s actually read this far. I do have much more I’d like to reflect on that isn’t related to Civil War memory and I hope to write on those topics in future posts.

For now, I am grateful to be healthy (my foot feels much better) and to be hitting my stride on the trail. I’m on to the Delaware Water Gap next weekend and then into New Jersey and New York.

Many thanks for reading and much love,

Andrew//Rebbe Mo’