Despite the common image of a ¿Solid South,¿ many southerners stayed loyal to the Union during the Civil War and coexisted uneasily with their Confederate neighbors. In Virginia¿s Shenandoah Valley, Samuel Hance Lewis¿s family remained convinced of the Founding Fathers¿ wisdom in establishing a single nation. A vast majority of Rockingham County neighbors disagreed. The Lewises adapted pragmatically and sought to give ¿no cause of offence by overt act or anything of the sort.¿ But neither did they hide their convictions, made clear even to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson as he made their home his headquarters. In 1862, the family fled across the Shenandoah and watched the Battle of Port Republic swirl around their homes. Afterward, as their neighbors treated wounded Confederates, the Lewises tended to wounded Union soldiers. Halfway up the Blue Ridge, John F. Lewis, a Secession Convention delegate who refused to sign Virginia¿s Ordinance of Secession, was running an iron furnace that kept dozens of Union Loyalists out of the Confederate army. After the war, the Lewises joined neither radical Republicans bent on revenge nor conservative former Confederates seeking to reestablish the old order. They backed compromises that ended Reconstruction and restored Virginia to its old place in the Union, and rose to positions of high leadership. The era¿s last family member¿s efforts for compromise came to an end in 1905, with Lunsford Lewis¿s defeat as Republican candidate for governor. Conservatives thereafter were little challenged, and governed uninterrupted until Republicans to returned to the statehouse in 1970.