What Was the Confederacy After All?

 

In all the recent fuss over symbols of the Confederacy, whether to honor them or get rid of the lot, not much attention has been paid to what that Confederacy was, after all, and why it might  be something that anyone would want to commemorate.

Of course one side doesn’t care.  It is sufficient for them that among the attributes of that government was a devotion to the defense of slavery, and about that there is no possibility of rational discussion or gradations of judgment.  What difference do any other attributes make?

And the other side is not very articulate about why the Confederacy matters any more, except to say that their ancestors fought nobly for it back then and they should still be remembered today.  And getting excited about a lot of people dying a century-and-a-half ago, no matter how honorably, doesn’t seem all that important to many people today.

But I have just come back from a conference sponsored by the Abbeville Institute at Stone Mountain Park in Georgia, devoted to discussing what one speaker called “the cultural genocide being waged against the South,”  during which a number of speakers made very clear what the Confederacy represents and why it is still important for us—all of us, regardless of region or color—to  remember today.

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