The Cultural Cleansing of VMI

Author’s Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this piece are strictly my own. I do not presume in any fashion to speak for the Abbeville Institute or VMI. I severed all of my connections with VMI (except for the Class of 1967) when she removed “Stonewall” Jackson’s statue from the parade ground.

Just before unleashing his thunderbolt on Hooker’s flank at Chancellorsville, Lt. Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson sat astride Little Sorrel watching Rodes’ division getting into position. Seeing among the officers many men who had been his Cadet students at VMI before the war, he remarked, “The VMI will be heard from today!” Then, looking at his watch, he said “Are you ready, General Rodes?”

“Yes, sir!”

“You can go forward, sir!”

The bugles sounded as the men leapt to the assault, with the Rebel Yell keening like a banshee over the tangled thickets of the Wilderness, never stopping until they had rolled up the flank of the Union Army.

VMI has been heard from again, as the Board of Visitors voted to not renew the contract of Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins, the first Black superintendent of the Institute. With Governor Glenn Youngkin’s order to terminate the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in Virginia, Gen. Wins merely changed the name of the program at VMI to “DOI” – Diversity, Opportunity and Inclusion. Perhaps this splitting of hairs might have had something to do with the Board’s decision, but by law they are not permitted to say one way or another. State Senator Jennifer Carroll Foy, a Black female graduate of VMI, has threatened to withhold State funds to VMI if General Wins is not reinstated. A number of graduates have signed a letter posted on the website In Alma Mater’s Name supporting transparency. One alumnus said he approved of Wins’ “efforts to remove some of the college’s Civil War-era culture and ideology” (or, in plain words, removing VMI’s heritage.)

Cultural Cleansing historically has been practiced by regimes with totalitarian aspirations and genocidal overtones. The Cultural Cleansing of VMI is based upon a lie known as “The Myth of the Righteous Cause,” which states that the “Civil War” (which it was not) was “about” slavery (which it was not) and that the “Righteous” North went to war against the “Evil” South to free the slaves (which it did not). A civil war, by definition, is a war among factions struggling for control of the government in question. The Southern States were not fighting for control of the United States government. They merely wanted to peacefully withdraw from the Union and form their own, as the Declaration of Independence claims is anyone’s moral right, but Abraham Lincoln went to war to prevent it. Slavery was just one among the many issues that some of the Southern States stated were the causes of their secession, but secession itself is what the war was “about.” Lincoln said so himself. In his First Inaugural he said he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed. His intention was to “save the Union and collect the revenue” – in other words, to save the Union for the North’s benefit at the expense of the South. Cotton was “King” at the time, and with the South’s “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union and free trading with Europe and no longer paying extortionate tariffs to subsidize the crony capitalists at the North, the North’s nascent “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse into financial ruin and social anarchy. So Lincoln sent an armada to Charleston to provoke the South into firing the first shot, and got the war he wanted. South Carolina responded to Lincoln’s provocation in 1861 just as Massachusetts, the self-anointed “Patriot State,” had responded to the provocation of George III at Lexington and Concord in 1775, when the thirteen (slaveholding) Colonies seceded from the British Empire. Lincoln then called for troops to drive the “Cotton Kingdom” back into the Union at the point of the bayonet.

Virginia, “The Mother of States and Statesmen,” stood firmly for the Union she had sacrificed so much to create, but when Governor John Letcher received Lincoln’s call for troops, he refused, and told Lincoln “You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited towards the South.” Virginia then seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy, and four other States (including occupied Missouri) followed her out.

By 1862 the Confederacy was winning her independence and Europe was about to recognize her. In a desperate war measure to prevent this, Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation. It only claimed to free slaves behind Confederate lines, but as for the rest, it revealed that slavery was just fine with “The Great Emancipator” as long as one were loyal to his government, proven six months later when West Virginia, a so-called “slave State,” was admitted to the Union, and further proven by the fact that slavery was Constitutional in the United States throughout the war. So the United States did not go to war to free any slaves, for they did not even free their own until after it was over. Lincoln and the North waged a war of invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance against the South to conquer the “Cotton Kingdom,” and, with Reconstruction, to transform the Jeffersonian Republic of sovereign States into an Empire pinned together by bayonets under Northern control. The incidental slavery issue was merely the smelly “red herring” to cover their tracks. Follow the dollar and know the Truth.

In May of 1864, with the Army of Northern Virginia locked in a death grapple with General Grant in the Wilderness, General Robert E. Lee perceived a threat to his left flank by a Union army of German mercenaries moving up the Shenandoah Valley under General Franz Sigel. He ordered General John Breckinridge to gather troops from the western part of the State to meet the threat, and here the VMI Cadet Corps was called into action. Marching down the Valley with Breckinridge’s army, they met the Federals in battle at New Market. As fortune wavered for the Confederates, Breckinridge said “Put the boys in, and God forgive me the order.” The Cadets made their immortal charge, captured a Union battery, and helped to put the Union soldiers to flight, but with ten boys killed and nearly fifty wounded.

A month later another Union army, under General David Hunter, marched up the Valley. At Lexington they shelled and burned the Institute, plundered Washington College, stole the statue of Washington, and burned down the home of Governor Letcher. Lt. Gen. Jubal Early, who met Hunter’s army at Lynchburg and sent him packing through West Virginia, reported the vandalism and the burnings and lootings of private dwellings of people both Black and White along the track of Hunter’s advance up the Valley, and reported that Hunter’s army had hanged a citizen of Rockbridge County for defending the women of his family from US soldiers who were “in the act of insulting and outraging” them.

General Hunter’s army was not an anomaly. It was merely a microcosm of the behavior of the United States Army from western Missouri to the Shenandoah Valley, from Mississippi to Georgia and South Carolina, and from the Potomac to the Rio Grande throughout the war. But many years afterwards a feeling of reconciliation began to set in. The South agreed that it was best that the North had brought the Union back together, and the North agreed that the South had fought nobly for the cause she believed in. The South and the North agreed to let bygones be bygones, and the United States invited the South to clinch the deal with a Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. Sir Moses Ezekiel, who had fought with the Cadets at New Market, created the monument, and the reconciliation lasted almost a century.

The political struggle ending de jure segregation in the South eventually ended reconciliation in order to divert attention from the de facto segregation in the North. The truth of history was cast down the Orwellian “memory hole” and replaced by “Presentism,” which is history twisted to conform to present day politics. Lincoln’s War against the South’s Secession was made to be the North’s righteous war to free the slaves, the conveniently long-dead Confederacy and her heroes were made to be the evil Scapegoats blamed for all the racial ills of the North and their festering Black ghettos, and White Southerners were made to be the racist Apostates in America’s Puritan “Citty upon a Hill.” When George Floyd (a black criminal with clogged arteries and enough fentanyl in his system to kill a horse) died under the restraint of Minneapolis police, it naturally followed that all Confederate monuments had to be vandalized and torn down by ANTIFA fascists, Black Lives Matter Marxists, and other “Red Guard” rent-a-thugs in the 2020 “Summer of Love.” Finally even the Reconciliation Monument itself at Arlington was taken down by the US government, clearly breaking the unwritten contract. The South is now free once again to indict the North for the war she once waged against her, and for the Cultural Cleansing she is waging against her today. This brings us to the Cultural Cleansing of VMI.

When I was a Cadet, I marched in the Centennial New Market Day Parade with the band playing “Dixie” and the Confederate Battle Flag waving proudly at the head of the column. As we marched past their graves, we saluted the ten Cadets who had been killed at the Battle of New Market, and who rest under Sir Moses Ezekiel’s statue of “Virginia Mourning Her Dead.” New Market Day was the most sacred day in the VMI calendar, and the parade was held on May 15th of every year come rain, shine, earthquake or volcano. But now, with the Cultural Cleansing of VMI, it has been transformed into a generic “Memorial Day Parade” to be held on whatever day might be convenient. The band no longer plays “Dixie” and the Battle Flag no longer waves. Rats no longer salute General Jackson as they exit Jackson Arch, for Jackson’s statue has been removed and his name has been sandblasted from his arch. Jackson Memorial Hall has been renamed Memorial Hall, and the cast iron stars in the walls of Old Barracks, marking where Yankee cannon balls struck it when Hunter shelled and burned the Institute, have been removed and the spots painted over.

Why?

In the late ‘60s, VMI was perhaps the last school in Virginia to integrate. Righteous Progressives, with their hair on fire, have been excoriating VMI for being racist ever since. This is a false perception. VMI was opened to Black matriculation but, as with Whites, there have not been many who wanted to apply. It is a rigorous four-year system, where it is said that “at VMI they take away all of your inalienable rights and dole them back to you one by one as class privileges.” Upon entering barracks on matriculation day, “Mr. Personality” from high school is shocked to find that his sexy hair cut has been shorn from his shaved head, upper class cadre are in his face and yelling at him to get that chin in, suck up that gut, rack those shoulders back, and drop down for ten. Then he finds himself in the Rat Line with his chin tucked in and his gut sucked up, squaring the corners and driving the stairs up to his Spartan room on the fourth stoop, where he might find some refuge with his “Brother Rats” – but subjected all the way to the whims of any upper classman to lord it over him. Any intimation of insubordination will get him “sent up” to the dreaded Rat Disciplinary Committee (RDC) in the middle of the night, and when that ordeal is over, the Rat will find himself on barracks confinement and marching penalty tours with the “Wednesday and Saturday Afternoon Hiking and Gun Club.” Despite all this, our new Rat must do his studies and make decent grades without anyone grading them “on the curve,” keep his shoes and his brass polished, and stand inspections. Any demerits received also carry with them barracks confinement and penalty tours. (This applies to all Cadets, not just Rats.) The Rats must endure “The Rat Line” until “breakout” in the spring, at which time they are still merely lowly “Fourth Classmen” with no class privileges other than no longer being Rats, but that is exhilaration enough! It is a system that breaks down the individual and welds him into a class unit with a “Brother Rat” bond that is legendary. But it is not for everyone – especially anyone with a chip on his shoulder. There are no “sacred cows” at VMI.

Here, I think, is the root of the problem. Blacks have been steeped in the political legacy of “affirmative action” and the sense of special privilege based on their race that it has continuously instilled in them, but VMI is (was?) the purist of meritocracies. There was no “affirmative action” at VMI until the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies were implemented, which are rotting the whole merit-based foundation of VMI, and any attempts to maintain that foundation are charged as being “systemically racist” by any Blacks who can’t make it on merit – seconded by their lawyers, the race-hustling media and politicians, and the Federal Government.

When I served on the VMI Board, (just after women were admitted in the “transgendering” of the Institute – another case of VMI selling her birthright for a mess of Federal pottage), I learned that in order to attract enough Blacks to keep the Federal Government off of our necks, VMI was recruiting them with NCAA athletic scholarships and promises that they would not have to worry too much about all that military business. It is true that athletes eat at the training table in the mess hall and are exempt from some of the military aspects of Cadetship, but it sets them apart from the rest of the Corps and gives rise to resentments. In the case of Black athletes – especially Rats on athletic scholarship who miss some of the rigors of “The Rat Line” – they might naturally misinterpret this resentment as racism.

At some point, it was reported that a number of Black Cadets had boycotted the New Market Day Parade. Boycotted?! Nowadays it seems like the primary purpose of higher education is to join a mob and protest something, but when I was in the Old Corps such a thing would have gotten you kicked out so fast it would have given you whiplash. But these Black Cadets boycotted the New Market Day Parade under the specious lies of “The Myth of the Righteous Cause.” This is where VMI made its fatal mistake. She should have “stood like a stone wall” on the Truth, told these Cadets that if the heritage of VMI offended them, they had come to the wrong place, kicked them out in spite of the “woke” calumnies that were sure to come down on her head, and then been done with it. But she didn’t. Instead, she changed the parade to a generic Memorial Day Parade in an act of appeasement, and she has been “caving like a mud wall” to the Marxist mob, the race hustlers, and Federal funding ever since.

Another notorious case arose about four years ago under Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration. VMI has (had?) the simplest and strictest Honor Code on the planet: “A VMI Cadet neither lies, cheats, steals, nor tolerates those who do.” The only penalty for violation is getting drummed out of the Corps. In this case, two Black Cadets got drummed out for lying to the Guard Team. Afterwards, they went to the Washington Post and claimed they were victims of “VMI’s systemic racism.” Governor Northam, a VMI graduate who once had been the President of the Honor Court but now a Democrat loving his office more than his honor, took the word of these two lying Black former Cadets and pronounced VMI guilty as charged. He asked for the resignation of General Peay, the superintendent, and had a leftist outside investigation launched to bolster the claims. The Washington Post roundly condemned VMI and demanded that she repudiate her Confederate heritage. Again, VMI caved.

The tally by then included the appointment of Maj. Gen. Wins as the first Black superintendent of VMI, the implementation of an office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the redaction of the New Market ceremony, the removal of “Stonewall” Jackson’s statue, his name sandblasted off of his arch and removed from Jackson Memorial Hall, and the removal of the stars marking where Abraham Lincoln’s cannonballs struck VMI for defending Virginia, “The Mother of States and Statesmen,” from his war of invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance.

At that time I took out a full page ad in the Richmond Times-Dispatch which read:

VMI’s removal of any of her monuments for the sake of an ignoble appeasement is embracing a politically correct lie in violation of her Honor Code and a repudiation of her Cadets who died on the Field of Honor.

The Cultural Cleansing of VMI is merely one among the myriad attempts by Lincoln’s America to bury all Confederate reminders that “The Myth of the Righteous Cause” is a lie. The attempts are futile, for the Truth cannot be killed. You may bury it alive, but it will not die.

H.V. Traywick, Jr.

A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, the author graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1967 with a degree in Civil Engineering and a Regular Commission in the US Army. His service included qualification as an Airborne Ranger, and command of an Engineer company in Vietnam, where he received the Bronze Star. After his return, he resigned his Commission and ended by making a career as a tugboat captain. During this time he was able to earn a Master of Liberal Arts from the University of Richmond, with an international focus on war and cultural revolution. He is a member of the Jamestowne Society, the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Virginia, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Society of Independent Southern Historians. He currently lives in Richmond, where he writes, studies history, literature and cultural revolution, and occasionally commutes to Norfolk to serve as a tugboat pilot.

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