Today is Monday April 26, 2004. Those of you who are reading this are by and large either sitting in class, eating lunch or puffing on a cigarette in the quad.
We are first and foremost, alive in all that we do this day and, God willing, will be tomorrow.
The men who I write about today, however, are not. Every single one of them, be it from a mini ball to the chest in northern Virginia, spitting up their last bloody breath in a military hospital outside some thousand person county seat in western Tennessee, or gone in their sleep one night in their bed at an Atlanta rest home at the age of 92, is dead.
The men that I speak of made up the Confederate army.
Today is Confederate Memorial Day, or at least it is in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi (Louisiana’s is on the third day in June).
The celebrations and commemorations will be, as one must expect in these times, rather muted.
William Faulkner once wrote that “In the South, the past is never dead, it’s not even past.”
The trends of the past thirty years have set that idea on its head.
Nowhere else in the United States, and in very few other parts of the Western world, has any area done more to shed the image associated with its heritage than the southern part of this country.
Once again, I believe full disclosure is required. I have ancestors who fought for the south and one, that I know of, who gave his life (it happened outside of Atlanta on the 4th of July 1864) for his country.
Like H.L. Mencken, the great Baltimore newspaper man who decried the Jim Crow south but held up the Antebellum era as the pinnacle of American achievement, I believe that the south (all southerners, including African-Americans) would be better off with a Confederate victory (although the situation would have been still more improved had the war never happened).
With slavery dying a natural death around the same time it did in Brazil, the south would have had fewer problems along racial lines, as peaceful emancipation, a practice which had flourished everywhere else it was tried, would have provided an equitable settlement for all.
This being said, I feel I must address the issue of slavery completely before I move on. This should be a given to anyone who has read my columns in the past, but I figure I ought to bring it out just the same. Though the war wasn’t entirely fought over the issue of slavery (even Abraham Lincoln, a man whose goal after the war was to deport the country’s black population from the United States to Africa, stated that he had no intention to ending slavery in the south), I must say that I find the idea of human bondage to be rather distasteful.
That said, the presence of slavery in the south, as well as its role in secession has been a sticking point for a long time.
To those who have a problem with it: I merely wish to remind them that several border states, including Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky, remained in the Union, and that the vast majority of southerners either owned less than five or no slaves whatsoever.
Still, we have seen a gradual demonization of all things Confederate, and all things southern in general over the past few years.
It is not for nothing that the South, which, by the time Lincoln took office, had provided eight of the previous 15 presidents.
Indeed, the southern United States was the political, and some could argue literary, leader of the United States.
Before the Civil War, the south was arguably the most powerful section of the United States.
After, due to the depredations on the land and the injustices on both sides during Reconstruction, the South fell into a cultural and political morass that it only began to climb out of in the 1920s.
A people, however, will have their pride. Despite the general political incorrectness of the idea, many of you who read this will feel a tinge of pride in your ancestry.
This is absolutely fine. Our forbearers were not gods or saints.
They were merely men and women who tried to do what they believed was right, and preserve the revolutionary spirit of their own forbearers.
Over time, the Confederacy recedes further and further into the past, with the debates on slavery and state’s rights trumping the men who fought in the war.
But, I will say this for myself. Despite the comforts I have now, and the knowledge of where it would lead, I would gladly exchange my life with my ancestor who died almost 140 years ago outside of Atlanta.
At least he died for something, something he stood for. Most descendents of the Confederacy are too busy watching NASCAR or reading the results of the NFL draft to actually figure out that the man who won the south in 2000, and most likely will again this year, is about as bad a president as Lincoln was, with the same lack of regard for the rule of law.
But, I’ll be honest. My politics don’t really have a place here. This day is set aside for the men who gave their lives for their country.
Whatever you believe in, be you the most rabid Neo-Confederate to a Marxist extremist, take some time to honor brave men who were willing to put everything on the line for a cause.
And, to paraphrase Robert the Bruce, as long as 100 of us remember the Cause, it will never be truly lost.