On July 4, 1865, George Michael Neese stood on the heights of Massanutten Mountain and looked out over the Shenandoah Valley. It was the final day of his long journey home to New Market, Virginia. The war was over, and the young Confederate artilleryman was reflecting on what the four years of conflict had meant.
Neese was 22 years old when the war came to Virginia. He was not particularly ambitious, not wealthy, and not poor. He never married and was described as a private, introspective man. Despite his personal opposition to war, he left home to fight.
He began his service in 1861 with a local militia battalion. He later served as an artilleryman in Chew’s Battery of Stuart’s Horse Artillery. Neese and his comrades fought in many of the decisive battles in Virginia’s Eastern Theater.
In October 1864, he was captured at Fisher Hill, Virginia. He signed an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and was released from Point Lookout Prison in Maryland. Throughout the war, he kept a dedicated diary, missing only a few days of entries.
In 1911, he published his memoirs under the title *Three Years in the Confederate Horse Artillery*. His diary entry for July 4, 1865, captures the thoughts of a soldier standing on Massanutten Mountain, looking across a valley scarred by battle.
As the first bright rays of sunlight washed over the mountain, Neese began his final day of walking. He stopped and looked with affection and admiration across the great Shenandoah Valley. He saw its beautiful fields, its tree-lined streams, and its green hills.
He noted that both man and nature had been busy erasing the ugly scars of war since the last sounds of battle had faded. The vast landscape, filled with thousands of harvested fields and varied by growing corn farms, was shaking off the ashes of war. It was spreading the treasures of summer under the golden sun.
Neese observed that the wastelands left by General Philip Sheridan’s campaigns were beginning to bloom again like a rose. Summer had laid a green covering over fields and hills where attacks had destroyed the finest works of nature. Campfires had left stains on the grassy carpet, but the land was healing.
He wrote directly to his brothers in the North, who had stood at the front lines and bravely faced Southern bullets. He asked them to remember that his words were only the honest thoughts of a simple soldier who had fought for his homeland.
Neese made clear that he had never bowed to any Southern shrine or learned at the feet of a vain politician. He had not worshipped at the door of any secessionist advocate. He had never welcomed the arguments of kings or rulers, nor applauded the sentiments of traitors who called the Constitution a covenant with hell.
He arrived home that evening and laid out the same blanket he had taken with him when the war began on July 19, 1861. Had fifteen more days passed, he would have completed four full years of service. During all that time, he never spent a single day in a hospital.
Neese closed his reflection with a hope for the future. He wrote that the common country had been watered with human blood. He hoped that this costly sacrifice would feed the tree of liberty, making it bloom brighter and bear sweeter fruit than before.
He hoped the nation would spread the fragrance of brotherly love, unity, and harmony. He prayed it would not be tainted by the poisonous breath of sectional hatred, which breeds arrogance and selfishness, claiming one is better and holier than another.
George Michael Neese lived until 1921. He left behind the words of a modest man who served in the Confederate artillery and kept a faithful record of his experience. His July 4, 1865, diary entry stands as a quiet meditation on the meaning of the war, written on the first Independence Day of the peace that followed.