Ignorance And The
Ongoing
War Between The States
As
I sat through the Ron Maxwell film "Gods and Generals" I realized that
those unsympathetic to the Confederacy would never be convinced that the South
fought for a noble cause. They will forever believe that the South got what it
deserved.
In many respects the War
Between the States will never be over. Some contribute this to the talk of
reparations for slavery and the ridiculous belief that any symbol of Southern
heritage is a symbol of bigotry and hatred. While those things may be symptoms,
they are not the root cause. The reason for this ongoing conflict is a profound
ignorance of Southern culture and the complete lack of understanding for the
brave men and women who fought to defend their homeland against an invader.
Take, for instance, the
way each side named various battles. It was not uncommon for a battle to have
two entirely different names. The North typically named a battle for the nearest
body of water, and the South tended to name a battle after the nearest town or
landmark. For example, the first major battle of the war was called Bull Run by
the Union, after Bull Run Creek. The Confederacy named it after the nearby town
of Manassas. Same battle, different names — and a different understanding of
what that battle signified.
The naming of battles may
seem trivial, but it demonstrates the impact the war had on the people of the
South. They believed they were fighting for their history, their honor, their
way of life. The battles that took the lives of their husbands, sons and
brothers were fought to defend all that they held sacred, and not to preserve
some meaningless piece of real estate. Maxwell's film makes that point quite
clear.
In a very poignant scene
Robert E. Lee gazes down upon the town of Fredericksburg from a nearby hilltop.
"That is where I met my wife," he explains to his adjutant. "It's
something these Yankees do not understand, will never understand. Rivers, hills,
valleys, fields, even towns — to those people they're just markings on a map
from the war office in Washington. To us, they´re birthplaces and burial
grounds, they're battlefields where our ancestors fought. They're places where
we learned to walk, to talk, to pray. They're places where we made friendships
and fell in love. They´re the incarnation of all our memories and all that we
love."
A deep respect for
history, culture and heritage — at least as those living in the South
understood it — was something about which the invaders of the North knew very
little. The men in gray were fighting to defend their homes and families, not
some abstract ideal of an indivisible Union.
It was this love and
devotion to their homeland that inspired Southerners to meet the Yankee armies
with such instinctive ferocity. Many in the North were surprised that the
"rebellion" was not crushed within a matter of weeks. Then again, many
in the North did not realize what was at stake for the people of the South.
"Gods and
Generals" is one of the few movies to actually take an honest look at the
Confederate cause. Director Ron Maxwell, in an essay entitled "Beyond the
Myths," wrote:
"In this film,
'patriotism' metamorphoses from a philosophical abstraction to an organic life
force. For many nineteenth-century Southern whites, patriotism expressed a love
of state and locality that seems strange if not incomprehensible to inhabitants
of the new global community."
A scene illustrating this is one in which a Confederate
soldier tries to come to grips with the fact that many of his Irish countrymen
are among the Union ranks. "Don't they know we're fighting for our
independence?" he exclaims amid a hail of bullets. "Haven't they
learned anything at the hands of the British?"
I suppose we could ask ourselves the same question: haven't
we learned anything at the hands of the British? The South's fight for
independence was similar to that of the American colonists who seceded from
England's empire.
Not
surprisingly, it is politically incorrect to say such things. In this era of
"tolerance" and "diversity" even the suggestion that the
South may have been right makes one a harbinger of racism and hate. And that is
unfortunate, for as long as there are those who cannot — or will not — take
an objective look at why the South fought we may never live to see the end of
that bitter war.