"General, I would like very well to bury the whole lot of you.”

Via SHNV

At Catholic Cemetery on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, his gravesite is easy to spot. It is marked by a stark white marble cross and slab lying underneath a flying Christian flag.

But it was another flag – the flag of the Confederacy – that helped make a name for Father Abram Joseph Ryan, the “poet-priest of the South” who considered Mobile home enough to want to be buried here.

In a Tennessee rectory just after the South surrendered, the Catholic priest wrote an epitaph for a fallen nation called “The Conquered Banner.” At one point in time, it was required reading for schoolchildren.

In part, it says:

*“Furl that Banner, for ‘tis weary;

Round its staff ‘tis drooping dreary;

Furl it, fold it, it is best:

For there’s not a man to wave it,

And there’s not a sword to save it,

And there’s not one left to lave it

In the blood which heroes gave it;

And its foes now scorn and brave it;

Furl it, hide it – let it rest.”

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* One of the many poems I recited in front of the UDC at the Baptist Church in Marshall, Virginia as a child. "I'm A Good Old Rebel."