The Virginia countryside is famously beautiful. But I didn't expect to be as moved by Appomattox as I was. The enormity of the Civil War, its dramatic ending (at least in the popular imagination), and what it signaled the end OF--a brutal war and an even more brutal system of human slavery. Then at the entrance/exit to the park (it's a "National Historical Park") there is a single US flag fluttering... and but for fortune, there could have a been two flags or just the Confederate flag fluttering. This could have happened; it was not foreordained that the Union would win and the country would then begin the long, tortuous, and yet unfinished struggle to erase the US's original sin. The tenuousness of the outcome was driven home by the confederate cemetery, just a few hundred yards down the highway, courtesy of the Daughters of the Confederacy, in honor of their fallen heroes.
