DEL.ICIO.USCheney remembers brave at Chickamauga
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, September 19, 2008
Chickamauga — Vice President Dick Cheney visited the Chickamauga Chattanooga National Military Park on Friday, returning to the site where his great-grandfather fought in one of the bloodiest battles of the War between the States.
It was the 145th anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga, and re-enactors in blue and butternut uniforms lined the nearby grassy hills and sat in the folding chairs in a field near the battlefield where organizers set up a temporary stage backed by a huge American flag.
Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com
Union infantry Civil War re-enactors march the grounds at a re-enactment during the 145th battle of Chickamauga.
Addressing a group that included Georgia’s two Republican senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, Cheney spent most of his address speaking of his ancestor Capt. Samuel Fletcher Cheney, of the 21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry.
As his granddaughter Elizabeth shared the podium, Cheney touched only briefly on contemporary issues, referring to the U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with the comment, “What ever it was about this land that produced such brave soldiers, we still have it.”
For Cheney, it was a chance to enjoy a thoroughly appreciative audience. He was heralded by much 19th century pomp and circumstance, with a color guard from The Citadel in South Carolina and period music from the 8th Georgia Regiment brass band. His hosts presented him with an oil painting by a local artist of Sam Cheney on horseback.
Schoolchildren stood and cheered as he took the stage, and women in antebellum outfits fanned themselves.
“This is the greatest day of my life,” said Anita Lauramore of Jacksonville, Fla., dressed in a pink and orange hoop skirt, a non-period digital camera clutched in her hand. Lauramore and her husband Dean are civilian re-enactors who accompany the soldiers and take care of cooking chores and ferrier’s anvils.
“I’m 50 years old, and I’ve never seen a vice president before,” she said excitedly. “I just respect the man for the hard job he’s had.”
For the Lauramores and perhaps 4,000 other re-enactors, the day was the beginning of a weekend of time travel.
With a few anachronistic exceptions – organizers buzzed about in golf carts and chatted on radios – they would spend the next three days eating fatback and beans, marching with muzzle-loaded firearms, and skirmishing on fields where 34,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded in a single 24-hour period.
Tennessee resident Lemuel Burnell Rogers, dressed in a linsy-woolsy shirt and a slouch hat, was almost as eager to hear the vice president speak as he was to participate in the weekend’s costume drama. The 62-year-old retired tool-and-die maker said he has relatives buried in the fields around Chickamauga who fought on both sides of the conflict.
But he was most concerned about conflict in the present, both military and economic.
“I wish he would talk about the present, not the past as so many do,” Rogers said. “I’d like to hear about where we’re headed as a nation, ‘cause we’re in turmoil.”
But the vice president spent most of his address discussing his great-grandfather, a man he clearly revered.
Samuel Fletcher Cheney, who sent one of the men on the daring incursion by Andrews’ Raiders that triggered the Great Locomotive Chase, served throughout the Civil War, was mustered out of the service, and left for Defiance, Ohio where he started a sawmill. Economic hard times caused the failure of the mill, and he moved to Nebraska to farm the land.
“Samuel Fletcher named his sons after two generals, Thomas and Sherman, and with that choice of names no one had to guess that they were on blue team,” Cheney said. “He lost four fingers on his left hand in a sawmill accident. He lived in a sod house in Nebraska, he farmed until he was in his eighties, he outlived two wives, and there had to be some iron in that fellow.”
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