June 30, 2003

Thoughts About Longstreet, Arnall and Barnes: Don't Trash The South
Gordon Sawyer 6/30/03

I've been doing a great deal of research lately on Confederate General James Longstreet, who is buried in Gainesville, so I couldn't help but think about the ironic parallel between Longstreet and our recent governor, Roy Barnes, when Barnes went to Boston and accepted a Profiles In Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Foundation.

I won't try to cover the entire Longstreet saga, but let's say he was a Southern hero at the end of the Civil War ... one of the top-ranking Confederate generals, right up there next to Robert E. Lee. But after that war, in New Orleans, Longstreet got involved with Northern politics and Northern politicians. He accepted speaking engagements in the North, where he talked favorably of some Union generals and unfavorably about some Southern. He accepted government jobs from Northern politicians. General James Longstreet has been dead for 100 years now, and only in recent years has he received a monument at Gettysburg ... or outside the cemetery in Gainesville, for that matter.

And then, right after World War II, Ellis Arnall, as a young Georgia governor, got high marks from the Northern press. He was a close political associate with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and was talked about as a possible Vice Presidential nominee. Georgia voters came to view him as "uppity" and using Northern political beliefs to talk down to the South. And he was never elected again, to anything.

It is fair to say that, today, no Southerner will support slavery. Practically none will support the Ku Klux Klan; we're embarassed by those folks. But at the same time, the symbolism goes much deeper than the Georgia flag. Southerners aren't fond of people they perceive to be trashing the South, and especially not fond of those who are trashing
our ancestors. This applies to a lot of adopted Southerners, as well as those born here. It's a little history lesson I think Roy Barnes and the liberal media have missed.

This is Gordon Sawyer from a window on historic Green Street.