Wednesday, September 25, 2019

The South’s Gifts to Posterity

 

What does the South have to offer that is valuable to humanity, to civilization?

In 1939, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman proposed an answer to this question in his book The South to Posterity. He subtitled it An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History, but it was something more than that. In presenting the works of Confederate literature that had the most sincerity, human appeal, and enduring interest, Freeman was also making “a petition to the court of time.” 

He maintained that these works of historical literature would always stand as solid evidence that the South had “fought its fight gallantly, and, so far as war ever permits, with fairness and decency; that it endured its hardships with fortitude; that it wrought its hard recovery through uncomplaining toil, and that it gave to the nation the inspiration of personalities, humble and exalted, who met a supreme test and did not falter.”

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