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Article: Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865.
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- November 6, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.
CULPEPER, Virginia, is thirty miles west of Fredericksburg where I live. To get there you drive out toward Spotsylvania Mall and continue on past other burgeoning retail centers at Chancellorsville and Wilderness. As these once-hallowed names attest, you are on what some developer sooner or later will call the "Civil War Strip": shop till you drop in the midst of dead where they fell.
Unlike the other places along our route, Culpeper does not have "battle of" in front of its name. No battle was ever fought in Culpeper, and unlike Atlanta it was never burned. A single, unequivocal event would ...