Confederate Memorial Day in North and South Carolina and the Lesson to be Learned.

As I scribbled this commentary, last night, it occurred to me that there is a lesson to be learned from what happened in, and to, the United States in the two decades, or so, which led up to what is erroneously called the "Civil War" in America.

Contrary to what you have probably been taught, slavery was NOT, I repeat, NOT the cause of the War Between the States (The WBTS is the name for that conflict that the US Congress finally settled on.) The primary reasons for the bloodest war ever to be fought by Americans was... taxes/tarriffs, an overbearing federal government, a government that simply refused to obey the US Constitution, a government that crushed "states rights" as set forth in the US Constitution. Sound familiar? It ought to!

It is said that those who do not pay heed to history are doomed to repeat it. And that brings me to the commentary below.

The US government is making many of the same kinds of mistakes the US government made in the 1840's and 1850's. Americans are chaffing under the heavy yoke Washington has placed, and continues to place, around our necks. That is why many Americans are focusing on the creation of a third political party in America... because... they are convinced the Republican and the Democratic parties, together, are not doing nearly enough to see to it that the government hews to the lines created by the original constitution.

In the commentary below, I share some thoughts and some experiences I had yesterday, as I stood in that old cemetery surrounded by the graves of men who felt much the same as so many Americans feel today.

I invite you to read the comments below, and if you feel so moved, leave some of your own in the section provided for your comments.

May God Bless and Save the South!

JDL
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Confederate Memorial Day
J. D. Longstreet
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Today, May 10th, in North Carolina and South Carolina, is Confederate Memorial Day.

Yesterday, I attended the local “Sons of Confederate Veterans” Confederate Memorial Day celebration as I do every year, and, as I have done for several years, I presented a few remarks concerning the Confederate Soldier, or as I sometimes refer to them, the “Southern Knights.”

As this was a celebration of the southern warrior, I spoke on the attributes of the Confederate soldier… who he was, what he was like, what he did, what he felt, why he did what he did, and why he felt he MUST do what he did, and so on and so forth.

When one studies the Confederate soldier, one quickly comes to understand that there has never been, before or after, the American “War Between the States”, a warrior quite like that “Southern Knight”. As a combat soldier, he was more akin to the various “special forces” of numerous militaries around the world than he was to the “regular” soldiers we are acquainted with today. He was a killing machine… with good manners. It is impossible to overlook the fact that 800,000 badly equipped, badly clothed, badly fed, but wonderfully led Confederate soldiers managed to hold at bay 2-1/2 million federal troops of the US military for four of the longest, bloodiest, years in American history. They were masterful at the art of war.

It is absolutely shameful that political correctness has driven its talons so deeply into American consciousness that to speak of the Confederate soldier in anyway other than a defender of slavery is totally unacceptable. Modern day ancestors of the Confederate soldier are taught that their great, great, great, great grandfathers were traitors! There is no other way to address that accusation but to say it is a bald-faced lie. The Confederate soldier was a citizen of another country. He was a citizen of the Confederate States of America, not the United States of America. One cannot betray a country of which one is not a citizen. Plus, there is this fact: Something like 97% of the citizens of the Confederacy owned NO slaves. Common sense says men do not put their lives on the line, in a war, to preserve another man’s right to hold another human being in bondage!

As I spoke to the gathering in one of our oldest, and most beautiful, cemeteries yesterday an article I had recently read persistently nagged at me. It was an article by Paul Gottfried entitled: “ On Loving To Hate The South.”

Referring to my cohorts in the “Sons of Confederate Veterans” Mr. Gottfried said: “You may take pride in those whom you honor as your linear ancestors but equally in the anger of those who would begrudge you the right to honor them. What your critics find inexcusable is that you are celebrating your people’s past, which was a profoundly conservative one based on family and community, and those who created and defended it. For your conspicuous indiscretions, I salute you; and I trust that generations to come will take note of your willingness to defy the spirit of what is both a cowardly and tyrannical age.” Mr. Gottfried nailed it! You can read Mr. Gottfried’s entire article HERE.

Mr. Gottfried had said earlier in his article that we “Southern traditionalists are still celebrating a pre-bourgeois, agrarian, and communally structured world. It appealed to hierarchy, place, and family; and its members displayed no special interest in reaching out to alien cultures. Such ideals and attitudes and the landed, manorial society out of which they came, point back to a nineteenth century conservative configuration.”

It is here we find the root cause of the virulent hatred for the ensign of the South, the Confederate Battle Flag, and for the hatred of the people of the Southern region of the United States. It is our conservatism. It is our unyielding determination to hold on to the conservative values of our Southern ancestors.

I watched my fellow Southerners stand in silent reverence as the troops bearing the US flag passed and I watched as we all stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the US flag, and then the NC state flag, and to the Confederate flag. I saw no contradiction. This was a gathering of conservative people who love and honor their country, the USA, just as their Southern Ancestors loved and honored THEIR country, the Confederate States of America. We were remembering THEM and honoring THEM and the commonality of our conservative philosophy which is STILL alive and well in their off-spring today.

Many of us in the South today worry that we see many of the same causes of the conflict of the 1860’s reflected in the political conflicts between liberal and conservative Americans today. Having yet not fully recovered from the so-called “reconstruction” of the South after that bitter war, we are concerned that as remote as it may seem, to those not versed in the history of this country, we may be headed for another conflict in which Americans will square-off with fellow Americans.

These are dangerous times for America. Standing in silence and watching those two red, white, and blue flags that once flew over the two nations that briefly occupied this land was a sobering moment. To realize that only the people living below those flags can prevent a repetition of history was equally as sobering. It was a jolting moment for this scribe and for the others who approached me after the ceremony to express their similar fears.

Never has America been as divided since the War Between the States. We are, today, two countries living beneath a single flag, as a gentleman from South Carolina reminded me. As he spoke his eyes were gazing at the sacred soil of that old cemetery and his head was slowly shaking from side to side as if to say “NO” to the unthinkable. But, I could not escape the thought that it obviously wasn’t unthinkable as we stood just six feet, or so, above the evidence screaming in silence a warning that history says will go unheeded.

J.D. Longstreet
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