The Confederate Cause in the 21st Century
By Robert Stacy McCain
(Excerpts of an address given May 18, 2003, to the Frank Stringfellow Camp #822, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Fairfax, Virginia.)
Some people desire to wish away the past, or to revise history to fit the passions and politics of the present. Forgetting seems to be the most popular course; surveys show that mere fractions of Americans today know even the most basic facts about the war, or about any history at all, for that matter. If Americans are intent upon a general amnesia, I suppose we must be regarded as spoilsports for insisting that they remember at least part of our past. An America that knows nothing of Saratoga or Brandywine or Yorktown will be annoyed that we scold them for forgetting Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville and Franklin.
If our fellow citizens are content to know anything about the war — and most know next to nothing — yet we must demand that what little Americans do know about the war must be true. This is the duty imparted to us nearly 100 years ago by General Stephen D. Lee: “To you, Sons of Confederate Veterans, we submit the vindication of the cause for which we fought… Remember it is your duty to see that the true history of the South is presented to future generations.” Previous generations of Confederate descendants have done their duty in preserving that true history, and we can do no less.
Alas, the truth is not popular in our current climate of political correctness, and many find it convenient to acquiesce to old lies dressed up in newfangled clothes. The radicals of today say little more than what was said by the radicals of long ago.
Go read any modern account of life in the antebellum South or the politics of secession, and you will observe this simple trick: Any claim that impugns the South is cited as if it were the very Gospel; any defense of the South is dismissed as self-interested. The guilt of the South is the starting point of the argument, not the conclusion; the ordinary process of weighing the evidence and considering alternatives is discarded, if the evidence and alternatives might tend to vindicate the Southern cause. Among all the hundreds of historians in our colleges in universities, scarcely a handful dare speak a favorable word for the Confederacy, and similar things might be said for the film and television industries, our book publishers and magazines and, yes, our newspapers. It is against such a powerful tide of dishonesty and lies that we fight today.
In Southern communities where Confederate heritage has been proudly celebrated for a century or more — with street names, monuments, flags and other symbols — in the past decade we have seen the sudden onslaught of ignorant hostility to that heritage. I could name a dozen of these incidents that we call heritage violations, but I’m sure you know them all: Flags stripped from state capitols and banned from schools; streets and schools renamed; monuments moved or vandalized. One that really got my attention was when they tried to have the Confederate memorial removed from the square in Franklin, Tennessee. Five Confederate generals were killed in the Battle of Franklin. If the Confederate dead cannot be remembered in Franklin, Tennessee, where can they be remembered?
However much we lament these assaults upon our heritage, we should welcome them as the surest evidence of the continued relevance of the cause for which our ancestors fought. After all, if the Confederacy were irrelevant, why would it be so controversial? Your children could wear a T-shirt to school with almost any foreign flag — India or Ireland or Israel or Iraq — and nobody would say a word. But let them show up wearing the Confederate flag and the commissars of political correctness are standing in the schoolhouse door.
The Confederate cause irrelevant? Never! Is honor irrelevant? Is courage irrelevant? Can the principles of the Founding Fathers ever be irrelevant to their descendants?
One of the more shocking claims of our radical adversaries is that, in commemorating our Confederate ancestors, we are somehow “un-American.” But this is nothing new. The Union cause attracted to itself numerous German revolutionaries who had fled to America after collapse of the European uprisings of 1848. Though they had left the Fatherland behind, these Germans had not abandoned their radicalism, and so were among the most militant of Yankees. Professor Clyde Wilson reminds us of an encounter between one of these German radicals and Confederate General Richard Taylor. In his elegant memoir, “Destruction and Reconstruction,” General Taylor recalled the occasion in 1865 when the duty fell to him to surrender the last Confederate army east of the Mississippi River. At Union headquarters, a German, wearing the uniform of a Yankee general and speaking in heavily accented English, lectured General Taylor that now that the war was over, Southerners would be taught “the true American principles.” To which General Taylor — the son of Zachary Taylor — replied that he regretted that his grandfather, an officer in the Revolution, and his father, President of the United States, had not passed on to him these “true American principles.”
Ironic, yes? Just as ironic that those of us who today remember General Taylor and his fellow Confederates are denounced as un-American by people whose ideas of “true American principles” are derived not from the Founders, but from radical intellectuals and foreign philosophers whose ideologies were unknown to Washington, Jefferson and Madison. They accuse us of “hate,” when in fact we are motivated by love, love for our ancestors, and love for the America they created. Worse still, when provoked, these radicals will even compare our ancestors to Nazis. My father was wounded within an inch of his life while fighting the Nazis in France. Who are these people to tell such insulting lies about my ancestors?
This is how we know that the Confederate cause remains relevant in the 21st century. The cause for which our ancestors fought must be pretty important, to be the object of such vicious attacks by so many powerful groups. And that cause, lest anyone misunderstand, is a question of the fundamental nature of American government. The question can be expressed quite simply: Did the states create the Union, or did the Union create the states? Are we a mass democracy, ruled by whatever party can command a bare majority in Washington, or are we a federal union, in which the separate states have delegated specific powers to their common government, while reserving the remainder of powers to themselves? This is a vital question, no less so in the 21st century than in 1860, and relevant to all the many issues that vex Americans today.
This we know: Our ancestors’ cause was just and their conduct was honorable. Anyone who says otherwise is insulting the memory of heroes. Robert E. Lee said: “We could have pursued no other course without dishonor. And sad as the results have been, if it had all to be done again, we should be compelled to act in precisely the same manner.” And Jefferson Davis said essentially the same thing: “Nothing fills me with deeper sadness than to see a Southern man apologizing for the defense we made of our inheritance. Our cause was so just, so sacred, that had I known all that has come to pass, had I known what was to be inflicted upon me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I would do it all over again.”
If the Confederate cause was a matter of honor for our ancestors, then it is a matter of honor for us, their descendants. It is our duty to defend the honor of our ancestors, and to preserve their memory for our own descendants. Our children and grandchildren deserve to know the courage of their ancestors, to know of their honor and sacrifice, for as Winston Churchill said, “A nation that forgets its past has no future.”
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Val
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