"For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim.”
― William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
Years ago, within a year of my entering the practice of law and a couple times thereafter, we'd gather at Moccasin Creek Farm up off Mashburn Road the third weekend of January for our annual Lee-Jackson Dinner. I bet you didn't know Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Martin Luther King had birthdays within a couple days of each other. So we'd take advantage of the holiday the federal government had generously provided, winking at the irony, and drink brown water to wash down fried chicken and quail, greens, okra, and lots and lots of cornbread. Two of the guys wore full Confederate uniforms. Southern marching songs played on the stereo.
At the end of the evening we'd solemnly gather in the living room, each pulling from his pocket a book or a photocopy of a quote about the Marble Man or Stonewall, and go around the room allowing all to share their most cherished bit of Southern writing. I shared the above Faulkner quote one year. Another I shared a passage from the end of Douglas Southall Freeman's towering, massive biography of Lee:
"Robert Lee was one of the small company of great men in whom there is no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved. What he seemed, he was--a wholly human gentleman, the essential elements of whose positive character were two and only two, simplicity and spirituality."
A decade later I dragged the boys and Brenna through the epic Mancation, driving the big green Excursion from Charleston to visit Williamsburg and then a chain of Civil War battlefields. We traveled to Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania Court House, Antietam, and finally Gettysburg. On that hot, dusty afternoon, we parked near where Lee gave the order to Longstreet, who then gave it to Pickett, to advance out of those woods and break the deadlock that had taken hold after nearly three days of fighting. We lined up and marched across that field and up that hill, past where poor Garnett was shot off his horse and the University Greys lost 100% of the young men in their unit, all Ole Miss students, until we finally reached and clambered over the stone wall. "Taking the field for the good guys!", I proclaimed.
Then we rolled out our flag to memorialize the occasion. I figured the stars and bars might prove too provocative, and went instead with the Bonnie Blue Flag:
Having grown up playing Tennessee Ernie Ford's Civil War Songs of the South until the grooves wore out (we had a companion Civil War Songs of the North as well, but never broke the shrink-wrap), I could sing the song that proclaimed that banner and the new country it represented.
"We are a band of brothers and native to the soil Fighting for the property we gained by honest toil And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star
Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, hurrah! Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star"
But wait. "The property we gained by honest toil"? Wouldn't that be . . . those be . . . black slaves?
That the question never occurred to me as a seven year old, singing those lines at the top of my little lungs there in Kennesaw, Georgia, says a great deal about how we were taught to view the war back then. Our ancestors fought back against an invading army to preserve their right of self-governance from the oppressive federal government. Or there was the whole Cavaliers versus Roundheads theme, gentility and elan crushed under wave after wave of Orcs wielding all the killing power unleashed by the industrial age.
So why does fifty-nine-year-old me see this as such nonsense now? One of the few attributes I've tried to cultivate, and that has served me well over the decades, is the ability to learn more and change my mind. Aside from how I feel about Peg, and maybe my unfortunate obsession with Georgia football, there's pretty much nothing immutable in my life, nothing that can't shift in my perception when cast in a different light or viewed from another angle.
The war was about slavery. Full stop. Perhaps not in a direct sense for my great-great grandfather who died at Shiloh, or my great grandfather's older brother who rode with Forrest at the end of the war--they were too poor to own another human being. But they also wouldn't have seceded from the Union or picked a fight that ruined their region for generations. The folks who thought that was a good idea, and who more often than not bought their way out of joining the actual fight, were the planter class whose financial health rested tenuously on human beings who were often leveraged to the hilt to fund their masters' extravagant lifestyles or real estate overreach.
How do I know that story, all these years later? Not the public schools, friend. I read it in the 1619 Project, whose authors had the temerity to lay out the economic roots of the war in granular detail. There's a reason the Wee Guv banned that book from Florida's schools by name.
Which I suppose leaves me viewing those four years as a mass act of treason to preserve ruling class wealth built on probably the most immoral basis in human history, unless you consider the Opium Wars. And for my childhood hero, Robert E. Lee, the perfect Southern gentleman and former superintendent at West Point, to have taken part in it seems indefensible now.
I feel a sense of loss at that, but the truth hurts sometimes.
So today at three in the afternoon marks exactly 160 years since Pickett's Division started up that hill, and poor Lo Armistead was mortally wounded climbing over that wall we all stood upon, hat perched atop his sword so what was left of his men could see him through the smoke. Heroism in defense of something not worth defending. But isn't that almost always the case?
Komentáře