"It took 22 million Northerners four years of the
bloodiest warfare in American history to conquer 5 million Southerners.
We mobilized
90 per cent of our men and lost nearly a fourth. I hope you will join us in the counter-attack."
*****************************
13th Annual Gettysburg Banquet of the J.E.B. Stuart Camp, SCV, Philadelphia 03 November 2007
How Should 21st Century Americans Think about the War for Southern Independence?
We human beings are peculiar creatures, half angel and half animal,
as someone has said. Alone among creatures we have a consciousness of
ourselves, of our situation, and of our movement through time.We have
language, and by symbols can communicate knowledge to one another and
across generations.
We can learn something about humans from the Divine Revelations in
the Bible. We can also learn something by scientific examination of our
physical selves. Most of what we know about human beings is in our
knowledge of the past. As a philosopher puts it: we must live forward
but we can only think backward. I am, of course, making a plea for the
importance of history, or to be more exact, historical memory, something
that is undergoing catastrophic destruction today in the United States.
People without knowledge of their past would be scarcely human. What
makes us human is the culture we inherit. It has been truly said that we
are what we remember. Let me emphasise: What we remember determines
what we are. What we take from the past is crucial to our identity. And
it follows, as Dr. Samuel Johnson said, that there is hardly any worse
crime against humanity than to falsify its records.
Every society of any worth has revered those who preceded. Romans, in
their period of greatest freedom and achievement, kept their ancestors
by the fireside as minor gods. The Greeks at their highest point thrived
in a belief in a Golden Age of Heroes that preceded their own lesser
times. It is right that we of the Sons of Confederate Veterans honour
our forebears because they are ours—but not only because they are ours.
We sons of Confederate soldiers are especially fortunate in our
forefathers. They not only won a place in the hearts of us, their
descendants. They also won the lasting admiration of every one in the
civilized world who values courage, skill, sacrifice, and an indomitable
spirit in defense of freedom. That is why our battle-flag, which is
being suppressed in these United States, appeared spontaneously at the
fall of the Berlin Wall and among peoples celebrating their liberation
from the Soviet Empire.
Our forefathers are admired by the world to a degree seldom granted
to lost causes. I find that thoughtful Europeans speak respectfully of
the Confederacy, as did Winston Churchill. Foreigners have a great
advantage in judging the right and wrong of the War between the States.
They do not start out with the automatic assumption that all the good is
on one side and all the bad on the other.
