June, 2020
Washington – Should Confederate leaders continue to be honored with statues and Army base names? I wonder what my ancestors in the Confederate army would think of the question.
Dear Sampson Zicafoose,
You have not heard from me before, because I have not sought your perspective across generations. You are my second great grandfather and a veteran of the Confederate army.
Your granddaughter Mae Zicafoose Oberg is my grandmother. You didn't get to know her, because your son, her father William Clark Zicafoose, was only about six years old when you died in 1863. Perhaps you had a few words for him before you passed away at your home in Pendleton County, West Virginia, but if so they have not come down to me.
Your son and his wife Susan Wimer left West Virginia for Nebraska in the early 1890s, with their daughter Mae and son Otto. I have a picture of your son hanging in my home in Nebraska, with his family, which in Nebraska added four more boys: Earl, Ray, Ralph, and Bryan.
Mae's son Howard Oberg, my father, did not know a great deal about the history of the Zicafoose family. He said his mother's family referred to themselves as originally "Pennsylvania Dutch" and that's about all. Mae and her husband Ben Oberg (a Nebraskan born in Sweden) went back to West Virginia in 1930 to visit her remaining family. I inherited her diary from that trip and learned much about the family from reading it. She may have visited your grave, but I can't be sure.
Now (it is 2020) there is a great controversy about whether statues of Confederate leaders should be taken down from honored places in the old Confederate states.
There is somehow an expectation that the descendants of Confederate veterans, like me, will object to the removal of Confederate symbols, but I certainly don't see it that way. The war cost you your life.
You were in the 46th Virginia militia, an infantry sergeant in Company C, from 1861-63. Your battles were costly losses. You returned home in June of 1863 and died in August. There is no record of your cause of death.
The war also cost your half-brother, Elias, his life, fighting on the Union side. Elias C. Zicafoose died in 1865. He served in the Ohio Infantry and died of dysentery in Louisiana, where he is buried.
I wonder if your views of the war changed in the two years you served. Likely you joined up because it was expected of you, by your community in the southern part of Pendleton County. You did not own slaves, but your wife's family did. Your wife Sarah Etta Simmons' father, William George Simmons, owned three slaves; his father Captain Henry Simmons had owned ten slaves.
Slave-owning in the county was not prevalent but accepted. I'd like to know what you thought of it, of the idea that a war should be fought over it, and how the Confederate military leadership conducted the war from your standpoint. Because it certainly did not work out well for you.
After your death, your wife Sarah Etta married Samuel Mullenax, who together raised your five children. You never got to see them grow up.
My own father-in-law was required to fight in the German Wehrmacht in WWII. He hated the war as the worst thing that ever happened to him. I served in the Navy in the Vietnam war. That was a war to regret. I understand that you could be bitter about the Civil War, and shake your head at the very idea that statues were ever erected to honor anyone who perpetrated it.
That's the lesson I learn from your life: take down the statues to remember you and every other person who suffered because of the war, the sooner the better. I'd rather remember you for something you did in your life more positive.
Did you know Peter B. Wimer? He was your neighbor and in the Confederate army as well. His daughter Susan married your son. So he is also a second great grandfather to me. But he lived until 1895 so he got to know his granddaughter Mae. I will also look to him for his perspective.
Your descendant,
Jon Oberg
Dear Peter B. Wimer,
It is now the year 2020 and I'd like to learn from your life, even though we never met, of course, as you died in 1895. I am the grandson of your granddaughter Mae Zicafoose Oberg, and therefore your direct descendant.
I'd like to know what you might think about the current controversy over statues of Confederate army generals, and the use of their names for Army bases. You were in the Confederate army, the 48th Virginia militia, for a considerable time. Your father Philip Wimer owned slaves although you did not. Your wife, Sarah Strother, came from an old aristocratic Virginia family with slaves, but her great grandparents Anthony Strother and Frances Eastham Strother gave them up and supported their family from their own labor.
After the Civil War, and after your wife Sarah passed away in 1880, you married Catherine Kile and moved to Nebraska for several years, along with others in the greater Wimer family, including two of your sisters. Your daughter Susan Wimer Zicafoose and her family, including Mae, moved onto your Lancaster County farm after which you moved to Barton County, Missouri. Susan apparently traveled to Missouri to tend to you in your last year, 1895 (her son Ralph was born there), before she returned to Nebraska.
There is not much family history that explains your move from West Virginia to Nebraska. A lot of people went west when the railroads were built. Your land in the Appalachians was surely not as productive as the soil of the Nebraska prairie. Perhaps you also wanted to get away from the aftermath of the war and start anew.
You must not have had hard feelings about the outcome of the war, as you settled amid many Union veterans only a few miles from a city named Lincoln. The 1890 census of veterans shows you to be the sole Confederate veteran among many who fought on the other side, several of whom carried their war wounds with them.
Your brothers Ephraim, Aaron, and Jacob Wimer were also in the Confederate army and in the thick of many battles. But they stayed close to where they were born well into the 20th century, so they would have known about the statues and probably approved of them. Pendleton County, West Virginia, and adjacent Highland County, Virginia, where they lived, were sites of Confederate army reunions for decades after the war.
Earlier this year I was at the Nebraska grave of your sister Sidney's granddaughter Daisy Lambert, who died in infancy in 1882. The abandoned cemetery is just beyond your old place on the Agnew Road. Very likely you were at the burial back then.
So our paths meet there 138 years apart, but I don't have a good sense of what you would say now about Confederate statues. I hope you would say you were glad to pass along your Nebraska place to your daughter Susan and her husband, son of Sampson Zicafoose, and out of respect for the dead foreswear any celebration of Confederate symbols for all time.
But I don't know that, so I'll just conclude on my own that I am one descendant of two Confederate army veterans who has no reluctance whatsoever to relegate all Confederate symbols to history's dustbin, and the sooner the better. If we had a chance to talk, I think you'd agree that in our family, the Strothers, through their acts of manumission long before the war, are the people whom we should be honoring.
Your descendant,
Jon Oberg
P.S. Both of my children (your 3rd great-grandchildren), are Virginians, born there in 1979 and 1983.
