Posted on 01/17/2013 2:16:28 AM PST by Kaslin
They introduce themselves politely in restaurants or diners, in a movie lobby or at some civic event, even in front of the Little Rock gate in Atlanta, which has become a kind of Arkansas crossroads. ("You don't know me, but . . .") Then they thank me for remembering Robert E. Lee every January 19th with a column on his birthday.
They don't tarry, and I may never see them again. Then they fade away, much like the Army of Northern Virginia (R.E. Lee, General). They have a look about them, or rather a manner. They come in different shapes and sizes, but they all have the same, diffident way about them -- as if they were used to dealing with people as persons, rather than en masse as customers or readers or voters or some other impersonal category. They know how to visit with others. It's a Southern thing, no matter where it happens.
Let's just say they have a shared understanding. They may be older, genteel white ladies or young military cadets. Sometimes they're aging black men, usually with roots in the Deep South, who mention that they had a grandfather or great-uncle named Robert E. Lee Johnson or Robert E. Lee Wilson, much like their white counterparts. Whatever the differences in their appearance, they share a distinctive quality that is never imposing but very much there.
Sometimes they'll let you know they don't make a habit of this sort of thing, that they're not interested in reliving the past or anything like that. They're the furthest thing from the bane of such discussions in these latitudes, the professional Southerner. ("I'm no Civil War buff or big Confederate or anything -- I do well to tell Gettysburg from Vicksburg -- but I just wanted to say . . .")
They're never intrusive. Indeed, they are concise almost to the point of being curt for Southerners, a voluble breed. It's clear they wish to make no display. It's as if they just wanted to . . . enroll. To go on record, that's all, and leave it at that. They know The War is over and, like Lee, they would let it be over.
The quality they have in common may be deference -- not only to others, and certainly not to the general himself, for deference would not in any way approach their feeling on that subject, but a deference to the human experience, with all its defeats and losses. Maybe that is why so many of them are middle-aged or older, as if they had encountered some defeats and losses of their own -- losses and defeats that can never be erased, that will always be a part of them, but that they carry almost with grace. The pain will always be there, but now it is covered by forbearance. They have learned that there are certain hurts that, in order to be overcome, must be gone through. Continually. Till it is part of their ongoing character.
The name for the kind of deference they exude, unmistakable for anything else, a deference to fact and to sacrifice, is maturity. They have discovered that duty is not only burden and obligation but deliverance. They would never claim to understand Lee, and they certainly would not presume to praise him overtly. They just want to indicate how they feel about the General, to let us know the bond is shared, and go on. For where Lee is concerned, there is a silence, a diffidence, that says more than words can. Or as Aristotle said of Plato, there are some men "whom it is blasphemy even to praise."
Ever hear a couple of Southerners just passing the time, perhaps in some petty political quarrel, for we can be a quarrelsome lot, when the name Lee is injected into the argument? The air is stilled. Suddenly both feel ashamed of themselves. For there are some names that shame rhetoric, and when we use them for effect, the cheapness of it, the tinniness of it, can be heard at once, like tinkling brass. And we fall silent, rightly rebuked by our better selves.
To invoke such a presence, to feel it like old music always new, invariably gives pause. The young officer in Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body" pauses before he enters Lee's tent to deliver his dispatch. Looking at the shadow of the figure within bent over his papers, knowing that The War is inevitably winding down, the messenger can only wonder:
What keeps us going on? I wish I knew. Perhaps you see a man like that go on. And then you have to follow.
The Lost Cause still has its shrines and rituals, dogmas and debates. For four exhilarating, excruciating, terrible years, it had a flag of its own -- several, in fact -- and an army and even something of a government. But in the end all those proved only transient reflections of what endures: the South, the ever-fecund South.
What held that disparate, desperate concept called the South together, and holds it together still from generation to generation, from heartland to diaspora? After all our defeats and limitations, why do we yet endure, and, in Faulkner's words, even prevail? What keeps us going on? I wish I knew. Perhaps you see a man like that go on. And then you have to follow. If there is a single name, a single syllable for that shared bond and depth and grief and aspiration, it is: Lee.
. .
No brief outline of the general's career can explain the effect of that name still: After a shining start at West Point, our young officer spends 12 years of tedium on the Army treadmill, followed by brief renown in the Mexican War, then a two-year leave to attend to matters at home. Returning to the service to put down a fateful little insurrection at Harper's Ferry that cast a great shadow, he declines a field command in the U.S. Army as a far greater insurrection looms, one he will lead. He accepts command of the military of his native country -- Virginia. Then there comes a series of brilliant campaigns that defy all the odds, at the end of which he surrenders. Whereupon he applies for a pardon, becomes a teacher, and makes peace.
What is missing from such an abrupt summary of the general, his life and career, is everything -- everything inward that made the man Robert E. Lee. His wholeness. His integrity. His unbroken peace within. There was about him nothing abrupt but everything respectfully direct -- in his manners, in his leadership, in his life and, when he finally struck the tent, in his death.
Yes, he would fight what has been called the most nearly perfect battle executed by an American commander at Chancellorsville, defeating an army two and a half times the size of his own and better equipped in every respect.
Even in retreat, he remained victorious. One single, terrible tally may say it better than all the ornate speeches ever delivered on all the dim Confederate Memorial Days that have passed since: In one single, terrible month, from May 12th to June 12th of 1864, from after The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, Grant's casualties on the other side would total 60,000 -- the same size as Lee's whole, remaining Army of Northern Virginia, poor devils.
In the end, it is not the Lee of Chancellorsville or of Appomattox who speaks to us, who quiets and assures us. It is not even the Lee of Fredericksburg and his passionate dispassion atop Marye's Heights as he watches the trapped federals below, poor devils, being destroyed. He was no stranger to pity. ("It is well that war is so terrible," he murmured, looking down at the carnage he had engineered, "or we should grow too fond of it.")
It is not even the Lee of Gettysburg who speaks to us, the Lee who would meet Pickett after it was over -- all over -- and say only: "All this has been my fault." And then submit his resignation as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Jefferson Davis may not have had much sense, but he had more sense than to accept that resignation.
In the end, it is the Lee who saw through all victory as clearly as he did all defeat who elevates and releases us, like one of the old Greek plays. It is the Lee who, for all his legend, could not command events but who was always in command of his response to them. Just to think on him now is catharsis. That is why his undying presence, just the mention of his name, was enough to lift men's gaze and send them forth again and again. It still does.
“At least we should consider that there are two sides to the controversy. I’m not saying the Civil War is still going on, but we’re not quite at the point where the English — who can look back on Cavaliers and Roundheads and bless them both equally and without distinction — are with their Civil War.”
The composition of differences that began in the 1890’s and continued up to about 1960 was criticized, and then overthrown, by liberal and Prog pols interested in splitting the conservative middle in this country and driving Midwestern and Western conservatives away from Southern conservatives, as a way to destroy the GOP and introduce a single-party, “one-armed democracy” that would be the vanguard dictatorship that Fabians and Communists have been laboring to achieve for 100 years.
Rush discusses the political aspect of the steady demonization of the South by the Alinskyites around Clinton and Obama that began in 1991 with Ray Garganus’s scalawaggy article in The New York Times, advocating public banishment of the Confederate Battle Flag, in this recent transcript posted to FR:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2978139/posts
He was unsuccessful - every court that reviewed his indictment upheld it. It was through the magnanimity of his former foes - Ulysses Grant and Salmon P. Chase - that the charges were dropped. Grant did not want to open old wounds.
It was only after he was assured of his freedom, and when he began holding court at Beauvoir with his admirers, that he started claiming that he had wanted to go to trial.
This was an obvious falsehood - he had fought his indictment in court for years rather than face trial. He did one thing, but said another.
I invite any disinterested observer to compare our respective posts on this thread and then judge for themselves.
You can believe any fairly tale you want. Civil War “History” as it is POPULARLY understood is so much reconstructed BS to make an unjust war waged by Northern Industrial forces against a tariff hating South palpable to the masses. I cant blame you - for the truth is hard to take.
Nolu chan hasn’t posted in years...wish he still did.
man...he destroyed the Klowns at Posse once they turned on him...their mistake
i bet some of these south bashers were klowns...that was our first refuge from here for those sorts and their race card antics
Nolu chan hasn’t posted in years...wish he still did.
man...he destroyed the Klowns at Posse once they turned on him...their mistake
i bet some of these south bashers were klowns...that was our first refuge from here for those sorts and their race card antics
William Barksdale was my wife’s great great uncle.
His sister Virginia Barksdale Wade was her great great gandma and the wife of State Senator Levi Wade who owned a large cotton plantation southeast of Nashville between Smyrna and Murfreesboro called Bellevue...not to be confused with another Bellevue home in West Nashville which still stands.
My wife’s family home was razed by the Federals during the Stones River and Tullahoma etc campaigns that ran up and down the Old Nashville Highway where it was located.
Levi had voted for Secession at the last moment as a state senator and was a colonel in the CSA away in Virginia and the Yankees pillaged the home and foraged the crops and appropriated all the male field slaves for labor. The family (women and children) with the house slaves and women and girls and younger boy slaves fled to kinfolks in the hills to the east in Smith county near what is now Center Hill lake. Virginia Barksdale wrote quite a bit on this in her journal which my wife’s aunt has to this day.
Ironically...all of the descendents I know today are Republicans...it would be hard to explain to them if you could today how the parties have sorta switched as to who is now the progressive.
But we still have the same pickle whereby a transformational progressive time and again gets elected President of the USA without a majority of the vote,
Though Obama got 10 points more than Lincoln.
* all that stands of the old homeplace is the graveyard which some of us try to keep up...their family never recovered economically...they did keep the land and sharecropped out to the older slaves who stayed and they even built a small farm house in 1868...which burned down in the 1970s under new owners...the foundation of the original plantation still exists
We are not discussing fairy tales, but hard facts.
Fact 1: Davis was indicted for treason.
Fact 2: Davis publicly claimed that he wanted to stand trial.
Fact 3: Despite his public claims that he wanted to stand trial, he fought the indictment in court to prevent a trial.
All three facts are a matter of public record, and I even specifically cited case law for you.
Civil War “History” as it is POPULARLY understood is so much reconstructed BS
There are three main popular versions of Civil War history, all of them specifically partisan. I avoid all three.
an unjust war waged by Northern Industrial forces
The war was initiated by the Confederacy. That also is a historical fact.
The Constitution also gives the Federal government supremacy of legal jurisdiction over all states that adopted the Constitution. That's another fact.
You are working with a definition of "unjust war" that is simply contradictory to the entire tradition of Western public law.
against a tariff hating South
The North was far more agricultural than it was industrial. It only seemed industrial compared to the South. And the war was not about tariffs. If it were, it would be a war unjustly waged by the South on that account alone. But tariffs had almost nothing to do with the statements and motivations of the secession movement.
The nullification crisis was about tariffs. If the Civil War was about any legislation, it was about the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
palpable to the masses
I assume you mean "palatable."
I cant blame you - for the truth is hard to take.
Your comments on this thread indicate that you have done very little independent investigation of the matters under discussion.
You have completely bought into the "Lost Cause" version of events. This is not about truth for you, in my opinion. It is about confirming yourself in your unexamined personal convictions.
I know I don't have all the answers. But I try to ask the right questions.
In today's program, Rush noted that although 65% of Americans think that the 2nd Amendment is intended to protect their freedom, the current liberal meme seems to be that only whites and only Southerners support the 2nd Amendment. Thus, it must be racist and Southern and anti-civil rights like what happened in the 60s to support the 2nd Amendment.
Projecting again, ain’t you Reb? Funny thing is Lincoln didn’t have Lee hung, isn’t it?
General Sherman ‘’raped women and children’’? Really? I suppose you have proof that William Tecumseh Sherman did exactly that?
I suppose you should read all of the posts and replies before you comment.
I’m looking at yours. You said General Sherman ‘’raped children and women’’. All I’m doing is asking you for proof of that.
“Projecting again, ain’t you Reb? Funny thing is Lincoln didn’t have Lee hung, isn’t it?”
He might have had a problem accomplishing that in the brief time he was still alive. Although I doubt that he even considered such an idea.
April 9th Lee surrenders at Appomattox Court House
April 15th, Lincoln assassinated by John Wilkes Boothe
Hanging Lee and Jeff Davis is a fantasy cherished only by modern loonies who spend more energy hating the South than they do celebrating whatever virtues they imagine that they possess.
Neo-yankee chauvinism is something new that grew up post 1960s and it now flourishes like some parasitical mold, spreading its hateful poison wherever it lodges. I can understand it coming out of Hollywood but it is curious to see it at conservative forums. Must be a sign of the times.
There is no "Neo-yankee chauvinism". Certainly not on these boards. However, there is southron bigotry writ large here and it is thick~n~chewy. The difference is that we just consider the source and shrug it off.
You should try it some time.
I didn’t catch today’s show but I heard him mention something along those lines yesterday or the day before. It had to do with the left attempting to isolate the southern states in their continuing agenda of divide and conquer.
And of course the reason why they are doing so is because the south is more unified in its opposition to Øbongo’s agenda than any other geographic area.
Perhaps it is becoming a reoccurring theme on his show?
Your myths and delusions are even harder to take.
I never thought I would meet a crazier loon than Stand Watie on this forum, but I think you are right in his league and about ready to pass him up.
Rather, Lee should have been tried for having southern soldiers murdered when they wouldn’t continue in treason.
Actually, the revisionists are the lost cause losers.
They pretended for years that Lee never owned slaves.
Eventually his will was found, and it was revealed that he did. he was another slave owner, fighting to further the institution of slavery.
Except that Lee was a slave owner, and a person who served as slave overseer for a slave plantation.
A shameful thing that. One that the worshipers at the alter of Lee pretend didn’t happen, or worse yet, pretend it didn’t matter.
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