Hysterical Journey to Historic Places

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DAY 25: MAY 16, 2013



I enjoyed a good night’s sleep on a comfy mattress and then had a leisurely breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, sliced oranges, and salad with Jim and Barbara Maysilles on their back porch. There was some pomegranate jelly for the toast and some cranberry balsamic dressing for the salad. I never had salad for breakfast before. I ended up having salad for lunch and then more salad with supper. This is probably my first three salad day ever. After breakfast Jim and I drove out to Bennett’s Place and then met Barbara for lunch at a Jap place in Bright Leaf Square in downtown Durham. Thankfully the Jap place had some Thai food on the menu as well so I didn’t have to eat any fish bait. The salad had a dressing on it that can best be described as being orange. It wasn’t made out of oranges though. Barbara had it too. She thinks it was mango. Bright Leaf Square is right next to that low overpass where dozens of trucks have crashed over the years. Every so often a new series of truck crashes comes out over the Internet. There were no crashes will we were having lunch. After lunch I bid fond adieu to Jim and Barbara, drove without mishap through that underpass, and after a drive of 155 miles have arrived at the Hampton Inn near Petersburg, Virginia. The third salad of the day came with a bowl of bad gumbo at Ruby Tuesday’s. Don’t go there. After all of that salad I expect to be crapping like one of those Outer Bank stallions tomorrow.



Bennett’s Place



Bennett farmed a few acres of pretty decent land a few miles west of Durham, NC. On April 17, 1865 the Confederate General Joe Johnson met with the Yankee General William Tecumseh Sherman to discuss terms of surrender for the ninety thousand man Confederate army remaining in North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. It was a strange situation for them both to be in. President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government were on the run and in disarray, but still intact. Davis did not want the army to surrender and ordered Johnson to continue fighting. Johnson knew that Confederacy had nothing more to continue the fight with and had no hope of victory. He disobeyed the order, surrendered the army and resigned. President Lincoln had just been assassinated and the new President of the Union was Andrew Johnson from Tennessee. President Johnson did not want Sherman to accept the Confederate surrender. He wanted them punished for the death of Abe Lincoln. The United States Congress had been clamoring for an end to the war ever since it started, but they felt that General Sherman had usurped their authority by negotiating a treaty with what they considered to be a foreign power. Both the President of the United States and the Congress wanted General Sherman to resign, but he accepted the surrender anyway on April 24, 1865. Those two generals acting in defiance of civil authority was the first step toward unity for a divided nation.

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Photos

BENNETT PLACE
The building on the left is the farm house where terms of the surrender were agreed upon. The building on the right is the cook house. The slaves who did the cooking often lived in the cook house.

SURRENDER
The farm house burned to the ground in 1921. There were several newspaper correspondents present during the surrender negotiations who made detailed drawings of what the place looked like. Those drawings were used to rebuild the Bennett Place as it originally stood.

UNITY MONUMENT
One column is for the Yankees, and the other column is for the Confederacy. They are united at the top. I prefer to think that one column is for General Sherman, and the other column is for General Johnson. Both men were united in defiance of civil authority.