Working for Mount Vernon this summer is one of the experiences whose pivotal importance I recognized from the outset. I remember receiving the first email with the formal introduction and a very brief description of the projects I would be tackling: transcription & research. I had done both tasks before but I was aware they took on a different connotation since I would be working for the first time in a major institution such as Mount Vernon.

Before Major General William T. Sherman made his name as “Burnin’ Sherman,” the patriotic pyromaniac and terror of Georgia, he took out his over-the-top hostility on a smaller target: a newspaper reporter named Thomas Knox. Sherman was notoriously antagonistic towards the traveling correspondents that newspapers dispatched to the army.

After the Civil War, the University of Virginia and its alumni played a leading role in propagating the mythology of the Lost Cause. Determined to “vindicate the character of the South,” they defended secession, valorized Confederate soldiers, and declared the postwar experiment in biracial democracy a failure. Few alumni challenged this culture of Confederate orthodoxy, and even fewer openly defended Reconstruction. Among those who did, however, was Alexander Rives, an eccentric but fiercely principled Charlottesville jurist.

Like most nineteenth-century Americans, UVA’s Unionists were mainly political moderates who hoped to restore rather than radically alter the Union. Many, for example, supported emancipation as a military necessity but hoped to keep southern society essentially unchanged. For a few alumni, however, the war and its aftermath were radicalizing experiences that forced them to cast off old convictions. For men like Benjamin F. Dowell, the only way to permanently preserve the Union was to punish Confederate leaders, empower African Americans, and dramatically reconstruct the southern states.