Letters to the Editor — January 2019

Originally published January 2019 · p. 2

TO THE EDITOR: I have just visited, in company of my host Michael Harrington, President of the Houston Civil War Round Table, the Museum of Southern History in Houston. An exhibit that caught my eye was a Confederate soldier’s pocket diary inscribed by a “Parson Baldwin,” writing in February 1864. I was struck by what was added under his name: “during Civil War Between States Over Freedom of States Rights.” If there is importance to what combatants call their conflicts, this one deserves contemplation. On another note. Re: “ongoing cultural conversation” Recently I attended a Civil War symposium in Nashville. One speaker made a point of stating that Confederate monuments were raised in the South during the late 19th Century as reminders to Blacks that Jim Crow was supreme. I raised my hand, countering that scholarship demonstrated that the heyday of monument building, roughly 1880-1910, occurred when the graying war generation had statues built to remind later Southerners of why and how they had fought. I added that many Northern statues to Union veterans were erected in the same era. The professor replied: “Check the evidence. It is not on your side.” He declared that the next period of Confederate monument building occurred in the mid1960s, when white Southerners opposed federal civil rights acts. I reminded him that 1961-65 were the years of the Centennial, when Americans memorialized the war further. By this time, I was standing in the front row. The speaker approached me: “Your face is red! Sit down!” My response: “I am not your student, sir!” Of course, at the end of the session we shook hands, laughed and parted as friends. But it goes to show—here I quote the great Donald Davidson (1893-1968)—that after 150-plus years, we’re “still Rebels, still Yankees.” Stephen Davis Cumming, Ga.