Confederate Heroes Day

     Today is a holiday in Texas to memorialize those who fought for the Confederacy and the Dallas Morning News is editorializing that we should trash it as a tribute to a shameful period in our nation’s history. I resent the implied dismissal of my great grandfathers’ patriotism as no more than racial bigotry. Henry Clay Roberts and Henry McSwain both served as private soldiers in the Confederate Army. Given the casualty rates it is a miracle they both survived. Neither of them ever owned a slave but they saw themselves as Alabamians and when their state needed them they did their duty as best they saw it. It is the editors of the Dallas Morning news who are the bigots. Slavery was and is an abomination but to see the Civil War as nothing more than a struggle to end it is simplistic racism.
     The war was about a lot more than that. To be sure there were advocates of slavery on one side and abolitionists on the other but precious few of the men in either Army cared much about that. What they did care about and were willing to put their lives on the line for were their families, their honor, what they saw as their nation, and their way of life. That my ancestors were on the wrong side doesn’t make me any less proud of them. It wasn’t the only time. Another of my ancestors was a Hessian conscript in the British Army during the Revolutionary War. The family wasn’t welcome in Virginia afterwards. That’s how we got to Alabama. I’m not ashamed of that either and I celebrate Independence Day with as much appreciation for my country as anyone else.
     Another thing, I can’t point to an example but at some point in my family history someone almost certainly owned slaves, and some of us almost certainly were slaves. There is no point in wallowing in it. We can celebrate what was good about the past without forgetting the bad. That Thomas Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings doesn’t diminish his status among the greatest of the founding fathers. That Martin Luther King was a womanizer and an apparent communist sympathizer doesn’t make him any less a hero of the American Civil Rights Movement. My personal heroine is Joan of Arc. That she acted in the service of the petty tyrant Charles VII doesn’t make her any less a saint. There is and never has been any person on earth without fault save Jesus Christ Himself.
     So can’t we get past this endless dwelling on the sins of slavery? That sad institution was an anachronism by 1861. It would have been abolished here with the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act by the British Parliament had we not revolted a half century earlier. Does that mean we shouldn’t celebrate George Washington’s birthday? The 4th of July? Christopher Columbus introduced slavery to the Americas. Should we change the name of the district that includes our nation’s capital? Can’t we finally stop incessantly apologizing to everyone who ever had an ancestor who was badly treated? Didn’t Bill Clinton do enough of that?
     Except for the Revolutionary War, the Civil War was unlike other wars in that it was an existential conflict and so rightly holds a special place in our memorials. Most states content themselves with celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes day because so many of her sons died for the South. There is nothing wrong with that. So I say to the editors of the Dallas Morning News, get a life.