Thanks for sharing, Bob. I knew nothing of this.
As for feeling anguish, I feel anguish for Patroclus, Hector, and Achilles.
When I discovered that I had three greatx6 uncles who fought in the
War of Independence and two of them died in 1777, I had a pretty good
notion of how they died, mostly likely on a British bayonet, perhaps
on the same day. I wept for them like it was yesterday. The third
served eight years and perhaps ended his service at Yorktown and died
an old man. I should be glad one of them at least saw victory, but
I'm really just glad he had a life.
Joel W.
On 4/6/07, Bob Whitmire <bwhitmire@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Well, as a native Tar Heel, I suppose I shouldn't confess, but I feel
> no anguish at all over Gettysburg or any other aspect of the American
> Civil War. It was long before my time. Though I do know a lot of
> folks who are still fighting it to this day. One friend has his great-
> great-grandaddy's service revolver mounted on his wall.
>
> Personally, I am quite comfortable with the crushing of the
> Confederate States, because the lost cause also was a sordid cause,
> the gentlemen who commanded on the battlefield notwithstanding.
>
> I recall with some degree of wonder the education that came later,
> and informally, about western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee
> during what my Maine neighbors refer to as the War of the Rebellion.
> That is, that many of my folk in the mountain country did not embrace
> the Confederate cause because to them the leaders of the Rebellion
> were not of their ilk. The flatland aristocrats arguing so
> passionately for war did so, these mountain folk thought, out of
> avaricious self-interest. More than a few hard-scrabble farmers back
> in the hills and hollers had no cause to rebel, and no desire to do
> so. And so the war where I lived was a nasty, brutish affair of
> neighbor against neighbor. It was brutality, murder and mayhem with
> little recourse to law or justice. One poor woman in neighboring
> Madison County watched as all three of her sons (it might have been
> five) were gunned down in her dooryard. (No, I don't recall which
> side did the dying and which the killing.)
>
> It was a moment of personal illumination for me when some of the
> citizens of Henderson County, NC, raised money for and erected a
> monument to local Union sympathizers who labored to preserve and then
> to restore the Union. The history I was taught in school made no
> mention of these people. If you sift through the mountain folk of
> western NC and eastern Tennessee and find what we used to call Ridge
> Republicans, that is, Republicans indigenous to the region, you will
> see before you the flesh and blood of those mountaineers who held
> true to the Union. Or, if not holding true to the Union, at least
> didn't buy that swill being sold by silk-tongued snake-oil salesmen
> of the flatlands.
>
> I suspect more than a few of them would gladly have sworn a pox on
> both their houses.
>
> --Bob Whitmire
> www.bobwhitmire.com
>
>
>
> On Apr 6, 2007, at 7:27 PM, Joel Wilcox wrote:
>
> > The same anguish you feel over Gettysburg I feel
> > about Fredricksburg, Chancelorsville, Chickamauga, and Coal Harbor
> > (not even Grant escaped humiliation).
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