Footenotes on the Sesquicentennial

I've never been all that impressed with celebrities--like to see them in movies or on television or hear them on the radio or record player (dating myself), but as far as seeing them live and in person, I just never cared. But, there are exceptions to every rule, and I just had to fetch myself off to the main Tulsa City-County Library downtown one day in early December 2003 to see that year's recipient of the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award.

Like most, I'm sure, I became truly aware of him from his appearance in from Ken Burns' "The Civil War", and captivated by him as well. If nothing else (and he was so much else), he was a blessed exception to Jeff Foxworthy's funny-but-unfortunate truism that "...as a group, we Southerners are as intelligent and well-educated as any other segment of the population--we just have a fatal inability to keep the most ignorant among us from appearing on TV." (Feel free to make what you will of Mr. Foxworthy's appearances on TV--or mine on Flickr, for that matter).

That quote of Foote's seems to me to sum up the paradox of the thinking Southerner. Nathan Bedford Forrest--an all-but-illerate plantation owner and slave trader who after the war would founded the Ku Klux Klan, and during the war was probably by far the most daring and dangerous of the Confederate cavalry leaders. Abraham Lincoln--the Great Emancipator and (more importantly, since he couldn't have been the former without being the latter) the savior of The Union. Yes, we're aware of the irony in admiring them both, considering both heroes, thinking both men of authentic genius. But we can. And do.

I've always had a bit of mixed emotions about my own Southern roots. Maybe it was being from Texas, where the greatest Texan of them all, Sam Houston, vehemently opposed secession and resigned the governorship rather than preside over the state's departure from the Union he had worked so hard to get it into. Maybe it was my northeast Texas Scots-Irish heritage being leavened with a large infusion of the blood of German south Texas, which tended to be pro-Union during The War, and where the racism wasn't quite as pronounced during my childhood. Maybe it was having a Civil Rights-championing Roosevelt Democrat (and Eleanor wannabe) great grandmother from Battle Creek, Michigan, and maybe even more importantly having a Roosevelt Democrat great grandfather who was born in Gettysburg in 1880, whose Civil War library I inherited and whose stories I heard of his listening as a child to the adults talking about The War not as history but as a recent event in their own lives, the same way I was even then as a kid sitting around listening to the adults talk about WW I, WW II and Korea the same way. And maybe it was about hearing about how we'd whipped the Germans in one war, whipped the Germans AND the Japanese in another, stopped the Communists in Korea and were even now being the Free World's only defense against Soviet domination, had conquered polio, built atomic submarines, routinely manufactured more automobiles than the rest of the world combined, were the world's leader in commercial aviation, and were getting ready to put a man into space and before the decade was out on the moon--and somehow instinctively (I couldn't have put it into words then) knowing that we'd done it all as a nation united, and would have had only a piss-poor chance at best of doing any of it as two nations divided. Foote also noted in the Burns' documentary that before the war it was common to say 'The United States are..", and after The War it became common to say "The United States is..." Maybe I was just simply a product of my times, with the Centennial evoking at least as much nostalgia as it did memory of bitter sectional strife, of the Civil Rights movement proving too slowly but still inexorably that Jim Crow had to go, and of instinctively understanding that I was part of an Is, not an Are.

Whatever the reason, I'm a Southern Unionist. I would have been with "Old Slow Trot" Thomas, not just in being slow and deliberate (and limping), but in remaining loyal to The Union and serving in her Army. At least, I like to believe I would have been. Maybe if I'd been a man of Robert E. Lee's time, I would have suffered his (and the others') dilemma and possibly even reached the same decision they did, but as a child of my own times, and having had my own commission in the United States Army, I just can't imagine I could have resigned it to fire on the American flag and all it stands for, and certainly not on the troops maneuvering beneath it.

But...I'm still a Southerner and I still love the South. I'll visit the the purple mountains majesty and the amber waves of grain and the shining seas on vacation, but I want to come home to the pines and the scrub oaks and the cedar brakes, the sand and the Woodbine limestone. I want to come home to the shaded sloughs covered with green pond scum and the sluggish rivers that dry to puddles in August, home to where, in answer to a Yankee fellow lieutenant who questioned it, catfish IS properly considered seafood, and where on sultry nights in those Augusts the sidewalks of the town square are black and abuzz with a living carpet of crickets. I like to hear Bing sing about them, but I really don't mind not having white Christmases, and when we do get the rare one I'm less inclined to coo, "Ah, how lovely..." than I am to whine, "Aw, what the hell...?!!" I'm a life-long fan of Brother Dave Gardner, racist overtones and all, and always will be, and both "Dixie" and Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis" can strike a chord in me. I can get a sexy little thrill hearing NPR essayist Diane Roberts saying in that cultured Southern lady's voice of hers--with that unavoidable cultured Southern lady's hint of distaste--the words "naked ladies" when describing mudflap decorations on 18-wheelers. Paradoxically, as a Southern Unionist, I still have Faulkner's Southern boy's ability to have in my reach a time when it is not quite one in the afternoon on July 3, 1863, and the guns are layed and the troops are in formation and The Colors are uncased, but Old Pete has not yet reluctantly given the order, and The South has not yet irretrievably lost The War--I have it in my reach to see the humor in the old joke, "How many regiments took part in Pickett's Charge? Not enough!" And, yes, Mr. President, I do still cling to my God and my guns, even if I can and do makes jokes about them both, and can depict Robert E. Lee doing his world-famous impersonation of Fred Sanford (don't know how Freeman missed THAT in his otherwise comprehensive biography).

All of which is to say, I may make fun of my fellow Southerners and I have precious little patience with those of them who still take that states rights and secessionism nonsense seriously, and I did, in fact, aside from the more obvious reasons, take up drawing bosomy bimbos in their scandalous scanties (or even their 18-wheeler mudflap suits) in part for the sheer pleasure of outraging Southern Baptist sensibilities, but they're still my people and this is still my place.

Since the quote in the 'toon involves both of them, I could (and maybe I should) have incorporated Lincoln and Forrest, but somehow I couldn't resist using The South's most iconic figure instead.

For one thing, there is a hometown connection with Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Armistead, and the others at Gettysburg, aside from a grandfather having been born there and Hood's Texans fighting there. The limitations of MS Paint and the girlie cartoonist's craft do not allow for the kind of details that would make it obvious to anyone else, but I know that my little Confederate Cutie is clinging to her God and her Tucker, Sherrard & Co. (or Sherrard, Taylor & Co., or Clark, Sherrard & Co.--take your pick) copy of Colt's .44 caliber 3rd Model Dragoon.

There is a granite State of Texas historical marker on the grounds of the Veterans Memorial Library in the old hometown noting that this was the site of that particular Confederate arms factory, something that has long been a source of pride among the members of the local historical society. Of course, there was always some snickering among dad, Judge Fitzhugh, and the other gun buffs/amateur historians/jaded veterans of WW II and Korea over the fact that, as far as they could tell, the factory never produced a single weapon but instead, in the time-honored tradition of defense contractors, merely served as a conduit to transfer government monies to the pockets of the owners, to finance their extended post-war vacation South of the Border, Down No Extradition Treaty Way.

But at least one Tucker, Sherrard & Co. (or whatever) knock-off Dragoon, serial number 81, was found on the field at Gettysburg, and depending on which website you want to believe, there may (or may not) have been others here and there as well. In defense of dad and his fellow cynics, however, it must also be said that under whatever combination of names they used, the company never provided guns for the Confederacy in the numbers the little old ladies of the Lancaster Chapter of the Daughters of the Cause would have you believe. The New Orleans, Opelousas & Great Western just didn't have enough boxcars to haul that many of 'em back east, and the boxcars they did have damned sure weren't the 86-foot Hi-Cubes it would have taken to cram 'em all aboard.

And, for another thing, I felt the need to use General Lee just because it gives me an excuse to repeat a couple of my favorite stories about him.

I was listening to NPR some ten or fifteen years back, and one of the Virginia cousins of the little old ladies of the Lancaster Chapter was showing the NPR reporter the points of interest in Lexington, Virginia. One of them was the Robert E. Memorial Episcopal Church. She said that to the best of her knowledge, that in all the United States there were only two Episcopal churches that were not named after saints. "This," she added, "is NOT one of them." After a rather pregnant silence, she felt the need to chuckle politely and explain, "That was a joke."

The second story lends some credence to the idea that the first might not be entirely a joke. One Sunday not long after The War, a former slave came into St. Paul's Episcopal Church, and, to the horror and outrage of the congregation, was the first to go forward to receive communion. Sensing the hostility, Robert E. Lee, with all the dignity for which he was and is justly famous, quietly rose, walked to the communion rail, knelt beside the freedman, and took communion with him. With that for an example, the rest of the crowd had little choice but to follow suit.

Makes you wonder what might have been if his heart condition hadn't taken him so soon. Maybe if we'd had Marse Robert to follow in peace as well as in war, things would have turned out differently.