OPINION:
This country owes as much of its martial heritage to its Southern soldiers as it does its Northern ones.
But to enable a newly popular morality, we must banish the Confederate battle flag and those who served under it.
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s response to this derangement would likely remember Appomattox. As Grant said later: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”
When Joshua Chamberlain received the Confederate surrender he said, “Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond — was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?”
The bloodiest conflict this country endured resolved the issues of states’ rights, secession and slavery through force, not reason. Great men like Grant, Sherman, Lee and Johnston and their soldiers fought this terrible war, which fire eaters of both persuasions refused to settle.
Today, similar moral, intellectual dwarfs would rewrite this history.
NOLAN NELSON
Redmond, Oregon
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