Well, as a native Tar Heel, I suppose I shouldn't confess, but I feel
no anguish at all over Gettysburg or any other aspect of the American
Civil War. It was long before my time. Though I do know a lot of
folks who are still fighting it to this day. One friend has his great-
great-grandaddy's service revolver mounted on his wall.
Personally, I am quite comfortable with the crushing of the
Confederate States, because the lost cause also was a sordid cause,
the gentlemen who commanded on the battlefield notwithstanding.
I recall with some degree of wonder the education that came later,
and informally, about western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee
during what my Maine neighbors refer to as the War of the Rebellion.
That is, that many of my folk in the mountain country did not embrace
the Confederate cause because to them the leaders of the Rebellion
were not of their ilk. The flatland aristocrats arguing so
passionately for war did so, these mountain folk thought, out of
avaricious self-interest. More than a few hard-scrabble farmers back
in the hills and hollers had no cause to rebel, and no desire to do
so. And so the war where I lived was a nasty, brutish affair of
neighbor against neighbor. It was brutality, murder and mayhem with
little recourse to law or justice. One poor woman in neighboring
Madison County watched as all three of her sons (it might have been
five) were gunned down in her dooryard. (No, I don't recall which
side did the dying and which the killing.)
It was a moment of personal illumination for me when some of the
citizens of Henderson County, NC, raised money for and erected a
monument to local Union sympathizers who labored to preserve and then
to restore the Union. The history I was taught in school made no
mention of these people. If you sift through the mountain folk of
western NC and eastern Tennessee and find what we used to call Ridge
Republicans, that is, Republicans indigenous to the region, you will
see before you the flesh and blood of those mountaineers who held
true to the Union. Or, if not holding true to the Union, at least
didn't buy that swill being sold by silk-tongued snake-oil salesmen
of the flatlands.
I suspect more than a few of them would gladly have sworn a pox on
both their houses.
--Bob Whitmire
www.bobwhitmire.com
On Apr 6, 2007, at 7:27 PM, Joel Wilcox wrote:
> The same anguish you feel over Gettysburg I feel
> about Fredricksburg, Chancelorsville, Chickamauga, and Coal Harbor
> (not even Grant escaped humiliation).
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