By Katherine Ann Horne / guest columnist
May 18, 2008 12:49 am
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STAND FAST, MISSISSIPPIANS! Those were the words ordered by Colonel Jefferson Davis, commanding the First Mississippi Rifles at Buena Vista during the 1847 Mexican War. West Point graduate Davis had placed his regiment in an unorthodox V-formation, silently immobile around a ravine through which Mexican troops advanced to attack. Upon Davis’s signal his men opened fire, devastating the enemy. Though wounded, Davis remained on the field, emerging as the battle’s nationally acclaimed hero. Mississippians had saved the day.
We may do well to heed his directive today.
The invaded Confederate States of America ceased to exist nearly a century and a half ago. What compels vitriolic detractors to attack continuously for no rational reason observance of Confederate Memorial Day, display of the battle flag, or any auspicious remnant of a nation burned, starved, its young men killed or crippled, its economy - - which did not depend on slavery — destroyed?
Racism is not the issue in such harangues. Thousands of African-Americans, slave and free, who loved their homeland and their people of both colors, fought bravely in the Confederate army, a fact concealed by Orwellian revisionists. Mississippians Holt Collier, Willis Edmund Dixon, Julia Mason, and Anse Wade represent a heroic multitude of valiant black Confederates who could have easily gone over to the other side. They as well as white comrades in arms are honored on Confederate Memorial Day. Anyone, naturalized citizen, first generation American, foreign visitor, is welcome to observe or join in honoring them.
Recently, replacing Confederate Memorial with Southern Heritage Day was acerbically urged. Since Southern heritage is annually commemorated by Delta Blues, Faulkner, Elvis, Jimmie Rodgers, and Southern Literary Festivals, Walter Anderson and other art exhibits, Martin Luther King Day, Natchez and Columbus pilgrimages, reenactments of the Vicksburg siege, etc., a Southern Heritage Day would be both redundant and inadequate.
The Confederacy poses no menace; yet its history is deliberately suppressed or distorted. Virtually no current elementary and secondary students know of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. For several generations even history majors’ perception of the War for Southern Independence’s complex causes is at best flawed, at worst wholly erroneous. Through spurious presentation of the erroneously designated “Civil War,” revisionists have brainwashed a majority into believing that conflict a noble crusade on the part of the north to end slavery. As honest investigation reveals, no more blatant falsehood exists than that propagated by calculated slanting, proclaiming that war fought over slavery.
Misrepresenting history is dangerous, for in so doing, we sacrifice truth. In George Santanya’s words, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Let us contrast politically correct cant with historical fact.
“My paramount object in this struggle,” wrote Lincoln, “is to save the Union…not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; if I could do it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.” Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri - - slave states remaining in the Union. West Virginia was admitted to the Union as a slave state three months after the Proclamation.
According to the 1860 census, of the 5.3 million Southern whites, only 383, 637, approximately 7 percent were slave owners. Ninety three percent of those who lived in or fought for the South were non-slave holders. Most prominent was Robert E. Lee, who freed his slaves years before the war. Others include Confederate Generals Joseph Johnston, J.E.B. Stuart, A.P. Hill, and Fitzhugh Lee.
“In this enlightened age,” declared General Lee, “there are few, I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.”
Venerated internationally, by African-Americans of his time, other Southerners, and Yankees foes. Lee was, Theodore Roosevelt observed, “without exception the very greatest of all the great captains the English-speaking peoples have brought forth.”
Without Confederate Memorial Day, this devoutly Christian military genius would be forgotten, as would those he led. Did Lee fight for a system he believed evil, the overwhelming numbers of non-slave owners for a small minority to hold other humans in bondage?
Jefferson Davis, a gradualist, stated long before the war, “The slave must be made fit for his freedom by education and discipline and thus be made unfit for slavery.” Proceeding toward this goal, Davis, his plantation managed by black overseer James Pemberton, encouraged his slaves to become self-supporting by selling products they crafted and produce from their gardens. Instituting a jury system whereby offenders were tried, sentenced, or exonerated by their peers, Davis prepared his people for citizenship, reserving the right to mitigate a sentence he considered too harsh, although he could not increase it. Shortly after inauguration Confederate President Davis wrote to his wife that regardless of the oncoming conflict’s result, slavery “will eventually be lost.”
Slavery in the South was dying. Typical Southerners were small farmers without slaves.
Why, then, did 11states secede? An agricultural region, the South exported cotton and could afford to buy manufactured products more cheaply from abroad than from the industrial north, whose congressman imposed exorbitant import and export tariffs. Just prior to the war the cotton states paid a disproportionate 87 percent of the nation’s tariffs. When questioned, Lincoln replied, “Let the South go?! Where then shall we get our revenues!”
Encompassing all controversies, the crucial concept hinged on the constitutionality of an all-powerful centralized government as opposed to states rights — too much power vested in a small controlling group. In essence the war stemmed from the same causes as the American Revolution — excessive taxation and encroaching government — issues paramount today
Regardless of our race, it’s time we regained pride in Southern tradition’s many fine attributes — family, filial respect, gentility, religion, good manners -— instead of allowing false presenters of history and slanted propaganda to create divisiveness and guilt.
Suppose we allow poisonous political correctness to continue suppressing everything suggesting Southern legacy, thus offending someone.
The results are awful to contemplate. Visualize a society in which we’re sent to Newspeak classes eliminating drawl; “y’all” has become a shocking cussword like “mother” and “father” in Huxley’s Brave New World, replaced by “youse guys,” “ma’am” and “sir,” dirty words, construed as child abuse; addressing the opposite sex as “honey” — same sex excepted — is sexual harassment. Females must be brash, domineering, not ladies (another obscenity). We’re trained to avert our eyes if we encounter a stranger rather than smiling and saying “Hey,” be arrogantly opinionated, disregarding facts contrary to indoctrination.
Will we be brainwashed into eating unseasoned half-raw string beans instead of turnip greens with ham hock, covering rice with sugar and milk instead of fried chicken gravy, shamed into forsaking hot buttered scratch biscuits and cornbread for bagels? Will our Whistle Stop Cafes serving fried green tomatoes be replaced by fern bistros with raw fish and quiche made of something like silly putty and boiled grass, washed down by bottled water? Will catfish and hushpuppies be regarded as offensive symbols of the old South, going the way of “Dixie” and the Stars and Bars? Will the liberal media run the slogan ”Grits Begone”?
No, ma’am, and no, sir. They may malign my accent, but they may not tamper with my taste buds. Forfeit the flag, and fulmination over fried okra looms.
The question remains: why the acrimonious compulsion to attack relentlessly the ideals of that non-existent star-crossed nation?
Perhaps the values and spirit with which our forebears fought endure, threatening moral relativism and big government. Perhaps, as Faulkner’s novel indicates, Southerners are The Unvanquished.
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