APPOMATTOX, Va.
(AP) -- A Civil War cannonball that ripped through Hannah
Reynolds’ master’s cabin made her a footnote of misfortune, the lone
civilian death at the Battle of Appomattox Court House. She died a slave at
60, hours before the war to end slavery unofficially came to a close.
A century and a
half later, Reynolds’ story is being rewritten: Newly discovered records
show that she lingered for several days Ñ long enough to have died a free
woman.
This new historical
narrative has made Reynolds, along with Confederate General Robert E. Lee
and Union Gen. Ulysses Grant, one of the central figures in commemorative
activities marking Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, starting
Wednesday. Friday night, a eulogy in period language will be delivered over
a plain wooden coffin representing Reynolds’ remains, a 100-member gospel
choir will sing spirituals and 4,600 candles will be lit to represent the
slaves in Appomattox County who were emancipated by Lee’s surrender to
Grant, his Union counterpart.
The Reynolds story
has also inspired some soul searching in this rural county in Virginia’s
tobacco belt where black and white students were taught in separate schools
more than a century after Lee’s farmhouse surrender and where discussions of
race are approached delicately, if not at all.
“It’s hard to bring
up. It’s even harder to get an honest and open discussion of it,” said
Joseph Servis, an advanced placement U.S. history teacher at Appomattox High
School. His students wrote essays drawing on their own experiences, black
and white, with race.
“To me, this is
what history should be,” Servis said. “To challenge yourself and be a little
uncomfortable and ask yourself questions you might not like the answers to.”
For some students,
their experiences were all too familiar.
Melody Burke, 16,
wrote of how another teacher questioned whether she was up to the class
work. She was the only black student in the class and the only one who was
questioned, she said.
It only
strengthened her resolve, she said, to “prove to her you really don’t know
me and you can’t judge a book by its cover.”
Students also
visited the school-turned-museum where black students were educated,
attended a panel discussion featuring students who attended classes there to
learn of their experiences, and discussed the era of segregation with their
elders.
Pastor Alfred L.
Jones III remembers student unease about race issues when he taught history
at Appomattox High. Now retired, he’s a genealogist who brought the Reynolds
story to life and has worked with others in this county of 15,000 to make
the legacy of the Civil War relevant through the Civil Rights movement and
beyond.
The Reynolds story,
he says, was “hidden in plain sight.”
Reynolds was left
by her masters, Dr. Samuel Coleman and his wife, Amanda Abbitt Coleman, in
their home as Union and Confederate armies headed to the fateful Battle of
Appomattox Court House. It would be the final battle before Lee’s Army of
Northern Virginia surrendered on April 9, 1865, effectively ending the war.
During the
fighting, a Union cannonball blasted through the Coleman house, striking
Reynolds and leaving a horrific wound. Two white men, a Union doctor and
chaplain from Maine, looked over her in her final hours.
“I think the Park
Service always assumed, you took an artillery shell on April 9, you probably
died that day,” said Ernie Price, the director of education and visitors
services at Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. He has worked
closely with local organizers on the Reynolds funeral.
Jones worked for
months seeking out the thin paper trail left by Reynolds. The breakthrough
was finding Reynolds listed on a death registry in a public library in
Lynchburg with a genealogical center. In a rare gesture by a slaveholder,
Reynolds’ death was reported by Dr. Coleman, who listed himself as “former
owner.”
“I think he
realized the historical significance of that,” Jones said. “Obviously it
meant something to him.”
Jones would like to
believe Reynolds regained consciousness over those final days to realize she
would die a free person.
“I just imagine, in
my mind, somebody whispering, ‘You’re free, you’re free, you’re free.’”