Maggie's Farm

hi. I do not wish any ill feelings, but felt obligated to reply. I grew up in the centennial, the early 60s, reading "I Rode With Stonewall" and President Davis's "Rise and Fall" while in elementary school. My most loved birthday present was a large scale Revell model of the CSS Alabama. I lived on Stuart Ave, went to Robert E Lee High School, and had a large battle flag hung in my bedroom. At 14 I knew the rhetoric that the war was not a war for slavery, but was for the states rights bequeathed in the U.S. Constitution, and it was an inevetible clash of an agricultural society with the emerging industrial society, etc.--which is just rubbish. Every civil war buff has heard of "bleeding Kansas", and the fight wasn't to determine if Kansas would be an agricultural state or an industrial state. Even at the time, the war was recognized as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. No one has ever questioned the courage and valor of the Confederate soldiers who actually fought. The U.S. government, the Federal government, even minted a coin to recognize the valor of the southern soldier, and I know of no similar example throughout history. Grant in his memoirs recalls that at Appomatax he could feel no joy at the defeat of soldiers who had fought so long and hard, though the cause was one of the worst ever. which is what the southern apologists could not accept. Most civil war buffs stop at April 1865, but the fighting continued for another 100 years, and throughout this time the battle flag was used by the Klan and others as a symbol of racial oppression; segregation yesterday, segregation today, segregation forever. Reconstruction and the aftermath was violent and brutal; the Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation version is simply a lie. In New England, the battle flag may be just an ideosyncratic expression of individualism, like my Gadsden flag, which certainly does not mean I want to attack England. But in the south, to black people the battle flag is a symbol of racial oppression, even if not meant that way. Suggested reading, "God and General Longstreet" and "Crucible of Reconstruction", both by LSU Press, I believe, or "The Bloody Shirt", or for something easy to take in, the "Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" movie. My !968 edition of Bartlett's Quotations has a brief quote by Faulkner and one by James Baldwin which should be read. I love your site. tom g. hope this is not too long.