CHARGE THOUGH THE PEACH ORCHARD
Shiloh, Tennessee
April 6, 1862
Excerpt
In that moment, they personified the Confederate South at a level of its experience and commitment which talk of constitutional punctilio and the rights of secession do not begin to explain—at a level where it could not be defeated unless or until it willingly agreed to its own ruin and distortion. When and whether that happened is a question for our time, not for the men who sang their way to death that spring afternoon in Tennessee in the woods, where the dogwood bloomed."
***********************************
At the very deepest level there is a central truth about the War Between
the States which is now, even by the best of Southerners, almost never
mentioned, although their forefathers had once spoken of its importance
continuously. Indeed, they put emphasis upon it long after the War was
over. From 1850 until 1912, this explanatory assumption was a
commonplace component of one understanding of the meaning of that great
conflict. And to most Southerners, it seemed almost as self-evident as
did the equivalent formulations to their Northern
counterparts—especially in the years of Antebellum dispute over the
morality of slaveholding and other distinctions of “character”
separating the two original versions of American civilization. When
Confederate Southerners stood ready to face death in the place where the
battle was joined or when they came to write apologia for their
conduct, they saw themselves as part of a struggle between “powers and
principalities,” alternative conceptions of the human enterprise—not
merely as adjuncts to competing schemes for gathering political power.
Southerners, of course, fought to defend themselves and their view of
the Constitution. They fought out of a loyalty to “hearth and rooftree,”
and to what had been achieved by Americans in general between 1774 and
1791. Further, they were animated by a sense of personal honor and were
therefore unwilling to continue association with their detractors within
the federal bond once condemned by their erstwhile countrymen to live
under the insufferable burden of high-handedness and effrontery. But
that is not all of the story concerning their reasons for secession—not
even the most interesting part.
More @ The Abbeville Institute
