In the previous issue, our focus turned to the Virginia State Memorial and Robert E. Lee’s postwar image. In this issue, the focus turns to some of the other important iconography on the Virginia State Memorial.

The memorial’s lower section honors all the Virginians who fought at Gettysburg. Statues of seven of Virginia’s soldiers are posed in fighting positions. They represent various ages, occupations and social classes, suggesting widespread support for the Confederacy.

Its central figure is a young cavalry officer mounted on his horse carrying the Virginia state flag. Adopted in 1861 with some changes from its Revolutionary-era seal, the Virginia state flag depicts an Amazonian warrior—carrying a spear, wearing a Liberty Cap and a blue military kilt­—crushing a tyrant, underscored with the Latin inscription Sic Semper Tyrannis—“Thus to All Tyrants.” Historian David Hackett Fischer writes in Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas that the Civil War-era Virginia state flag embodied the “militant idea of liberty, linked to retributive justice, a primary tenet of the Southern code of honor. The motto Sic Semper Tyrannis means that the stain of tyranny must always be expiated by the destruction of the tyrant. This ancient rule was called by the Romans lex talionis, the law of retaliation. In the American South, it was more than a rhetorical flourish.” Here is the notion of besmirched Southern honor to be avenged against the perceived insults of the North. In this spirit of vengeance, John Wilkes Booth dramatically called out “Sic Semper Tyrannis” or the “South is avenged” at Ford’s Theater after assassinating President Abraham Lincoln. Virginia’s Civil War-era state flag remains its official flag.

The young cavalry officer carrying the Virginia flag is “possessor of a saddle horse” suggesting “refinement” and the “well-to-do” landed gentry. He reflects the young bold cavalier imagery appearing so often in Southern literature after the Civil War. In his 1940 groundbreaking study, The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash said the bold cavalier was the postwar Southern “hero-ideal” that “found its summation in the dragoon and lancer. Every boy growing up in this land now had continually before his eyes the vision, and heard always in his ears the clamorous hoof beats, of the glorious swashbuckler, compounded of Jeb Stuart, the golden-locked Pickett, and the sudden and terrible Forrest forever charging the cannon’s mouth with the Southern battle flag.” The young cavalry officer’s front and center position symbolizes the centrality of the bold cavalier image in the Southern memory of the war.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Southern romantic fiction established the cavalier image in magazines and books published in the North. As C. Vann Woodward noted in the Origins of the New South: 1877-1913, the white South “developed a cult of archaism, a nostalgic vision of the past. One of the most significant inventions was the “Old South”—a new idea in the eighties and a legend of incalculable potentialities.”

Particularly popular were writings of John Esten Cooke, George Cary Eggleston and Thomas Nelson Page of the “moonlight and magnolia” genre. Their writings gained wide acceptance with Northern readers experiencing a rapid growth in literacy and a curiosity about the South. Books and magazine articles waxing nostalgic about the Old South inundated the North. These writers looked longingly back to the romantic antebellum era and a heroic Civil War era. They wrote of an antebellum South as a land of prosperous plantations, romance, chivalric men, virtuous women and happy, loyal slaves. Portraying a society whose environment nurtured great men like Robert E. Lee, these Southern romantics inferred its superiority to the pragmatic and materialistic Northern society. Writing in 1907, the great American novelist Henry James described this romantic literary outpouring as a reversion to an earlier age and a definite soothing balm after years of poverty and social turbulence in the wake of the Civil War. The bold cavalier remains very popular even in the 21st century. Civil War art galleries in Gettysburg are replete with dozens of paintings of the bold Confederate horsemen and the romantic cavalier imagery circa 1900.

Jim Martin serves as a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg. These guides are independent contractors licensed and supervised by the National Park Service as historical interpreters of the Battle of Gettysburg. To book a battlefield tour, call the Gettysburg Foundation at 877-874-2478 or 717-334-2436.

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