CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

Slavery_Building Blocks of the Confederacy_April 15 465wc

A few days ago I praised Virginia Governor Bob McDowell for restoring to the State Budget nearly $800,000 for mine safety that had earlier been cut. Governor McDonnell's actions followed in the aftermath of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia recently, with its tragic loss of lives.





Yet now I must call attention to a serious omission by this same Governor, who declared April “Confederate History Month” and managed not to mention once the foundation of the Confederacy:

Slavery

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/125338.html


I read yesterday in the “Breaking News” alert email from History News Network of President Obama's rebuke to the Virginia Governor for declaring “Confederate History Month” without including the topic of slavery. I wholeheartedly applaud the President's comments.


Gentle Readers, any study of the era will plainly show us all that were it not for the “evil institution,” there would have been no Confederacy, and there would have been no immensely tragic loss of life, of property, of homes, no dissolution of families, no kin pitted one against the other over what was purported to be a “politicial issue.”


The very institution against which reformers and abolitionists such as John Brown of Harper's Ferry, Virginia fame, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Julia Ward Howe battled is an ugly, graphic, horrifying component of U.S. History which must not be forgotten, overlooked, nor omitted in our rush to glorify the antebellum past.


The Confederacy was not all about pretty antebellum architecture, rolling meadows, fine gardens, and hoop skirts, Gentle Readers. Slavery made possible the creation of an unmerited upper class in the Southland, just as did serfdom and later servanthood in England (remember “Upstairs, Downstairs”). The Confederacy was built on the backs of downtrodden, whipped, beaten, raped immigrants whose emigration to the New World was involuntary and compelled.


Let us pledge to never forget that.


I wrote a poem some time back entitled “The Confederacy Never Died,” and I pray and hope that if “The South rises again,” it will not be in order to become the American South of the 18th, 19th, and first half of the 20th centuries. Saints preserve us from that.





George Santayana reminded us a century ago that

”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Not only do I agree, I believe that oftentimes we who do remember still manage to repeat


Historian Santayana also reminded us:

"A country without a memory is a country of madmen."

Compare that to this statement from Virginia Governor McDonnell in the original Proclamation:





"there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia."


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