A letter to a Yankee newspaper

I was quite surprised to hear (via the Southern Heritage News & Views news list) that a columnist for a Connecticut newspaper reported that he was "shocked to see Confederate flags flying in many yards" in North Carolina. Apparently, this member of the fourth estate only expected such displays in the Deep South. This is an edited version of a letter I sent to the paper.

I fly not only the Confederate Battle Flag and the Bonnie Blue Flag, but also the Bennington Flag and the Stars and Stripes as the spirit moves me at my second home in SC. It is an important part of my heritage.

In my estimation, celebrating Southron heritage is an affirmation of the founding principles of the USA which were reiterated in the founding of the Confederacy. It certainly has nothing to do with slavery. In my direct paternal line in SC (my mother was from Indiana), there were no slaves in our households in any census from 1790 through 1860, yet all four of my great-grandfather's elder brothers went to Virginia to fight for the Cause and only two came home. They weren't fighting for slavery.

Lee freed his wife's slaves before the war while Grant's family owned slaves during the war. Which of them was fighting to perpetuate slavery?

Professor Thomas J. Jackson of VMI (later known as "Stonewall") broke the law every week to teach Black children, both slave and free, to read and write in Sunday school - he broke the civil law in obedience to God's command to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all men, regardless of color of legal status. Even during the war, Gen. Jackson continued to send money for Bible and other books for the Black children in his Sunday school class. Was he an enemy of the Black race?

Folks in the North need to take a serious look at that awful period in the history of the US (1860-77), its causes and its effects, and not rely on mere political slogans to understand it.

This is especially true for those in Connecticut. Remember that it was a convention of New Englanders meeting in Hartford which broached the topic of secession from the Union in disgust over the War of 1812. It was only British acceptance of the Treaty of Ghent that intervened to prevent the remonstrances of the Hartford Convention being debated in Congress in 1815.

Expressions of disunion sentiment were also heard in your part of the country in reaction to the Mexican War in the 1840s. And I won't even go into the profits of the slave trade, run from Rhode Island and Massachusetts, much of which found its way to Hartford through the insurance business.

It has been well said that, for many of the people of the South, the war not only isn't over ... it isn't even in the past. One of the reasons is the utter incomprehension in the rest of the country about what the war and its aftermath meant to our section. As Thomas Jefferson admonished the press of his day, "Give light, and the people will find their own way." I urge you and your writers to give more light and less heat, for all our sakes.