Comments on: Dana Shoaf on the Confederate Soldier http://bullrunnings.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/dana-shoaf-on-the-confederate-soldier/ A Journal of the Digitization of a Civil War Battle Tue, 14 May 2013 19:21:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Susan Evelyn McDowell Cole http://bullrunnings.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/dana-shoaf-on-the-confederate-soldier/#comment-17699 Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:51:36 +0000 http://bullrunnings.wordpress.com/?p=7934#comment-17699 Perhaps. I have just discovered that I am a direct descendant of Ephraim McDowell M.D., who was the doctor who removed the first ovarian tumor and practiced medicine in Kentucky, which was a slave state. Ephraim McDowell died in 1830 before the Civil War but his grandson General Irvin McDowell served as a Union general.

I grew up in New Jersey. My grandsons are half Navajo. My grandmother’s second husband on my mother’s side was a Sioux Indian. So I never got the whole race thing. But I did just finish reading April 1865 by Jay Winik and I loved the part where a homeless Robert E. Lee takes communion with a black church member at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in a very burned out Richmond, VA.

We are all people. We all count.

Susan Evelyn McDowell Cole

]]> By: Dick Stanley http://bullrunnings.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/dana-shoaf-on-the-confederate-soldier/#comment-17690 Mon, 03 Jan 2011 03:06:00 +0000 http://bullrunnings.wordpress.com/?p=7934#comment-17690 The notion that someone might be ashamed of being descended from a Confederate soldier is jarring, to say the least.

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