Writing in the Ashes by Douglas Southall Freeman

 

Writing in the Ashes 

by Douglas Southall Freeman

Chapter II of his book,

The South to Posterity
An Introduction to the Writing of
Confederate History

(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939. The spelling
and citation are Douglas Southall Freeman's.)

 Sherman marched to the sea; the forts of Mobile fell one by one after a defense worthy of Troy; and, on Palm Sunday, 1865, when the first touch of green was coming to the forests of Midland Virginia, Lee surrendered. It is impossible fully to realize now what the death of the Confederacy meant to the South. For four years the two had been synonymous. A common cause never had unified the South completely, even when it was the Confederacy; but the blows delivered on the anvil of war from Sabine Pass to Harpers Ferry had brought the Southern States nearer a welding than ever they had been. Then, suddenly, the South found itself eleven conquered States---each one of which felt itself in a strange manner the guardian of a disembodied Confederacy and the defender of its history. Neither the Poland for which Sienkiewicz wrote nor the Czecho-Slovakia of our own time affords more than a crude analogy. Even while the ashes still smoldered, Southerners began to write in them "vindications of Southern rights," memorials of the fallen, personal narratives and military and political apologia.

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