I must say that I find a real irony in discussions like this one.  I too am
Southern bred, with a lineage which traces back to 17th century immigrants
to Virginia, and ultimately back to the Filmer's of Restoration England.
And of course heritage is a good thing, and something rightfully to be
celebrated.  Nonetheless, we live in the present, not the past, and we use
our memories and our understanding of our past in order to inform our
orientation to, and ultimately our actions regarding, the messy realities
of contemporary America.  And here I think there is a real disjuncture
which occurs in the way we remember the Civil War, because at a deep level
just about all Americans have accepted the ideals for which the North
fought the Civil War, and agree that the civic results of that conflict
were essentially good.

Earlier this summer a memorial to the veterans of D-Day was established at
Bedford, Virginia--an altogether appropriate site, given the number of
soldiers from that small town who died on the Normandy beachs and in the
surf 57 years ago.  I suspect that they fought for values which are still
widely shared by many southern men and women today. I suspect that they
understood American freedom to mean that hard work and good character would
be rewarded, that economic independence was a desirable thing and
dependence debilitating, that private tyranny led to civic incapacity, and
that a society which denied economic opportunity and access to independence
to persons who worked hard and possessed a virtuous character was an unjust
one.  I suspect too that they rejected any notion of aristocratic
privilege, but rather asserted the equality of all citizens, especially
before the law, and especially with regard to the ownership of productive
property.

It may be that some, perhaps all, of the Boys of Bedford, in their hearts,
hankered back to the Herrenvolk democracy of ante-bellum Virginia, which
justified white equality on the basis of racist assumptions about the
inherent suitability of persons of African descent to be no more than
laboring beasts.  But regardless of the attitudes of white rural Virginians
in the 1930s and 1940s, I would submit that very few Virginians today
subscribe to such assumptions.  That kind of blunt racism, and the civic
thinking it spawned, is very much subterrenean today.

Or, to put it more bluntly, the values for which Northerners fought the
Civil War--the values summed up in the slogan "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free
Men"--have their most ardent defenders today in the South.  These
values--the values of Sherman and the cause for which he fought--are now
resurgent in precisely those places which most actively remember the kind
of war he fought.  Its something to think about next time you see a bumper
sticker with the words "Heritage, not Hate."

All my best,
Kevin Hardwick

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