When the opponents have this level of intelligence, how can freedom not survive?It’s sad that California Senator Kevin de León (Democrat naturally) probably believes what he’s saying. He’s so naive that he blindly accepts the stuff the anti-gun groups…

  Beautiful country oasis!   Home Photos Local Schools   Just Listed     Jeff Edmisten & Ruthie Buck Coldwell Banker Elite 540-538-7222 Questions?Schedule a Showing!     157 Haden Ln Bumpass, VA 23024 Bedrooms: 3 Bathrooms : 2 ( 2 full ) List Price: $161,000 Living Area Approx : 1456     Beautiful country […]

In Virginia’s General District Court if you’re sentenced to jail time for a misdemeanor charge (such as Virginia DUI, reckless driving or possession of marijuana) we have some options to delay the jail time. One option is delayed reporting. Delayed reporting is essentially a request to the judge to order that you report for your […]

Stafford opened this park in 2013, and we finally got a chance to visit today. The park is a small piece of the land used by the Union Army in their winter encampment after the defeat at Fredericksburg in December 1862. Stafford was decimated by the Union occupation. Some would argue the landscape never recovered.

This first picture shows the site of several huts. It’s kind of hard to tell from the photo but the indentations in the ground where they dug down to take advantage of earth’s natural insulative properties are still clearly visible 150 years later.

This appears to be a communal fire pit? The ID placard is not present.

Civil war era road leading up from site of a bridge across the creek. The picture is taken from an artillery battery that 150 years later still towers over the road by 6-10 feet.

Looking back up the road from the creek.

The artillery battery at the high point in camp. Imagine that hillside cleared of trees and you can understand why they put the big guns here.

The backside of battery 3. I find it amazing that these earthen structures have survived 150 years.

More Pictures, including a few from nearby Government Island.

If you are looking for quite and solitude avoid Government Island. It is very popular among parents with young children, people with dogs, and parents with young children and dogs. By comparison, we only saw one person at the Civil War Park.

Tags
Fredericksburg History

Inspired by this Metafilter post I watched a PBS documentary on post 13th Amendment slavery in the South last night. It was a real eye opener. I knew about chain gangs and prison labor, but the extent to which slavery existed in the US right up until WWII was a revelation to me.

The wording of 13th amendment leaves a loophole for slavery to be legal if it’s punishment for a crime. That made the solution to white southerners obvious. Just round up all the blacks and convict them of trumped up BS charges, and then rent them to corporations as slave labor. It was a win – win solution. That state got the money from renting people, and the corporations padded their profits with slave labor. It was not a win for black Americans, but who cared about them?

They also expanded peonage, which was essentially debt labor. It was illegal, but that didn’t seem to bother anybody (white) in the post Civil War South. Tack on a ridiculous interest rate and you made sure that a black person would be in your debt, and thus your slave, until they were no longer useful to you. Sharecroppers too, were basically slaves by another name. They had no practical freedom to leave the farm.

The justice system was essentially off limits to blacks in the 80 years between the Civil War and WWII. Plantation owner John S Williams was convicted of multiple counts of first degree murder for killing 11 slaves he held in peonage, because the Federal Govt. was looking into him and he was afraid they would rat him out. His first degree conviction in 1921 was the first time a white person in the South had been convicted of murdering a black since 1877. It was that case that started the actual end of slavery in the South. The final peonage case was prosecuted in 1942. That is really when slavery ended in the US.

Not that African Americans had it great after that. But that is a subject for another day.

Tags
History

Inspired by this Metafilter post I watched a PBS documentary on post 13th Amendment slavery in the South last night. It was a real eye opener. I knew about chain gangs and prison labor, but the extent to which slavery existed in the US right up until WWII was a revelation to me.

The wording of 13th amendment leaves a loophole for slavery to be legal if it’s punishment for a crime. That made the solution to white southerners obvious. Just round up all the blacks and convict them of trumped up BS charges, and then rent them to corporations as slave labor. It was a win – win solution. That state got the money from renting people, and the corporations padded their profits with slave labor. It was not a win for black Americans, but who cared about them?

They also expanded peonage, which was essentially debt labor. It was illegal, but that didn’t seem to bother anybody (white) in the post Civil War South. Tack on a ridiculous interest rate and you made sure that a black person would be in your debt, and thus your slave, until they were no longer useful to you. Sharecroppers too, were basically slaves by another name. They had no practical freedom to leave the farm.

The justice system was essentially off limits to blacks in the 80 years between the Civil War and WWII. Plantation owner John S Williams was convicted of multiple counts of first degree murder for killing 11 slaves he held in peonage, because the Federal Govt. was looking into him and he was afraid they would rat him out. His first degree conviction in 1921 was the first time a white person in the South had been convicted of murdering a black since 1877. It was that case that started the actual end of slavery in the South. The final peonage case was prosecuted in 1942. That is really when slavery ended in the US.

Not that African Americans had it great after that. But that is a subject for another day.

Stafford opened this park in 2013, and we finally got a chance to visit today. The park is a small piece of the land used by the Union Army in their winter encampment after the defeat at Fredericksburg in December 1862. Stafford was decimated by the Union occupation. Some would argue the landscape never recovered.

This first picture shows the site of several huts. It’s kind of hard to tell from the photo but the indentations in the ground where they dug down to take advantage of earth’s natural insulative properties are still clearly visible 150 years later.

This appears to be a communal fire pit? The ID placard is not present.

Civil war era road leading up from site of a bridge across the creek. The picture is taken from an artillery battery that 150 years later still towers over the road by 6-10 feet.

Looking back up the road from the creek.

The artillery battery at the high point in camp. Imagine that hillside cleared of trees and you can understand why they put the big guns here.

The backside of battery 3. I find it amazing that these earthen structures have survived 150 years.

More Pictures, including a few from nearby Government Island.

If you are looking for quite and solitude avoid Government Island. It is very popular among parents with young children, people with dogs, and parents with young children and dogs. By comparison, we only saw one person at the Civil War Park.

Just to set the record straight I did NOT chase last Saturday’s (1/11) setup as everything happened east of the I-85 corridor. So now I’m relegated to hoping for one or two March chases as the longest cold air invasion of this winter is due into the ea…