A Few Thoughts on the Flag Lowering Ceremony in South Carolina

My people, to borrow the phraseology of our former thug of an Attorney General, didn't march under Lee's battle flag. They marched for the rectangular version of the Army of Tennessee, not the first time McBane marched to some version of St. Andrew's Cross. The Army of Tennessee died in 1864 on the bloody ground around Franklin, south of Nashville, for the vain glory of a fool.

My people didn't keep slaves; they were slaves….unwilling indentures, losers in the English pogram against the Scot Highlanders after the disastrous battle of Culloden Moor. Exiled to the Colonies, forbidden the wearing of the plaid and the possession of weapons upon pain of death. But they won their freedom with the gun and the knife, allied with the doomed Cherokee and fought their long, losing retreat across the Blue Ridge into the fertile soil of west Tennessee and northeast Mississippi.

And when their adopted home of Tennessee called, those plain dirt farmers answered that call. Ron Maxwell, the director of the movie Gettysburg, gave this talk years back in response to a call by academics (natch) for Obama to not lay a wreath, as tradition called for, on the grave of Confederate dead. It is worth your time to read the whole thing:

We cannot wish our ancestors away, nor should we. In the act of designing and erecting these monuments and statues they are telling us what was important to them in their time. By leaving for us, their progeny, a record in stone, they are expressly calling upon us, their grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to remember. 

Shall we do as the professors who signed the letter to our president asked him to do — shall we heap scorn upon these monuments and chastise those who will not? Should we do as their doctrinaire kin in Afghanistan did? Shall we, like the Taliban, destroy our statues with dynamite because they offend a prevailing dogma? Shall we disinter the bones of our ancestors like the radical Jacobins of the French Revolution did, scattering their unearthed remains to the winds — first to be reviled, then ever to be forgotten?

Once I had a writing contract that allowed me to stay in a home near the Franklin battlefield. I got up right about dawn and went for a long walk along a two-land country road. The sun was just peaking up when I started, but a fog rolled up from the hollers, and pretty soon everything was grey and cold. I stood for a long time in that fog, listening, I guess, for gunfire and shouting and the mayhem of battle. But there was nothing but the muffled quiet.

The great songwriter Rodney Crowell once wrote this:

The Civil War hit Franklin

Harder than the rest of Tennessee

But a 100 years ain’t nothing

The South will rise again and set them free

The winds of old blow lightly

Over the valley with a neverending dream

While the rusty tinroof barnyards

Crumble at the old grey farmer's feet

But it’s gone like the life of a childWhen he turns his back on your mind

And tomorrow has no home sweet homes

Look what they've done to mine

It's faded into time