As reported in the Houston Chronicle:
Hundreds of Civil War [sic] re-enactors will parade up Montgomery’s main street to the state Capitol on Feb. 19 to recreate the swearing-in of Confederate President Jefferson Davis 150 years ago.
African-American leaders might protest nearby with a message that the Confederacy should be remembered with shame for trying to keep blacks enslaved rather than with celebration.
Organizers say they are not trying to create controversy.
“We are trying to present a historical account of what happened 150 years ago,” said Thomas Strain Jr. of Tanner, a member of the national board of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The national SCV is organizing the event, with more than 700 people already signed up to participate in the parade. Strain said it will look like the militia units and private citizens who marched up Dexter Avenue on Feb. 18, 1861, to see Davis take the oath of office at the top of the state Capitol steps. Several thousand people, including descendants of Davis, are expected to watch the parade and swearing-in ceremony.
Organizers will then fast-forward a month to recreate the raising of the first Confederate flag at the Capitol. But it will be done on a flagpole near the Capitol rather than using the main pole on the dome. In 1993, black legislators won a lawsuit that ended Alabama’s practice of flying the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol dome, and the SCV isn’t trying to buck that court ruling.
“I’d love to see it up there, but that’s not going to happen,” Strain said.
Alabama’s longest-serving black legislator, Democrat Alvin Holmes of Montgomery, was one of the lawmakers who won that lawsuit. Holmes said he plans to work with civil rights groups to organize a protest, much like occurred Monday night when a “Secession Ball” was held in Charleston, S.C. Members of the NAACP marched and held a vigil and one leader called that celebration “disgusting.”
“The Confederacy was to maintain the institution of slavery,” he said. “People can argue it was about states’ rights, but the states’ rights was to maintain slavery. They wanted slaves and they didn’t want the federal government to get involved.”
Various events are being planned to mark the Civil War Sesquicentennial, from those under the auspices of the National Park Service and states to privately organized events such as the swearing-in recreation in Alabama. Nearly 2 percent of the nation’s population, more than 600,000 people, died in the Civil War.
Robert Reames of Birmingham, state commander for the SCV, prefers to call the Civil War “the War Between the States.” He said the re-enactment Feb. 19 will have a simple message: “That our ancestors did what they did in a honorable fashion and we’re here to remember that honor.”
Holmes, a retired college history teacher, said groups such as the SCV present a glamorous view of the war and don’t talk about how it left the South economically depressed for decades.
“It wasn’t great. It was shameful,” he said.
God bless them, I wish I could be there to see it.
President Davis was truly a ‘great soldier and defender of the Constitution’. If only Lee didn’t go to Gettysburg, we might have a very different geopolitical map. We also should recognize great men like Judah Benjamin who while constantly by the President’s side represented the ‘brains behind the CSA’ and the one who President Davis trusted and relied upon for so much.
I dont see why everytime someone wants to remember something that happened in that time period someones got to protest. Just leave them alone and let them celebrate what they want. Im gonna be marching in that and I think its ridiculous that we do live in America now, yet we cant even celebrate what we wan without someone complaining. Wasnt that what America is about? Being able to voice your opinion? And sure theyre just voicing theres but for once must everything be about racisism? Cant they just respect my and their ancestors and keep their mouth closed?
As a lover of history, especially Civil War history, I can appreciate the value of remembering such a significant historical event in America’s history. Politics and passions aside, what happened in Montgomery, Alabama on that arguably chilly day in February, 1861 was far more momentous than even the participants and witnesses at that time perhaps fully understood or appreciated. With the hindsight of history we can do so now as many of those who are now going to participate will not be around when the bi-centennial of that even comes around in 2061. It is then, for those now taking part, to remember that moment with the respect, dignity, and sensitivity that it deserves, as this will also be recalled when it is again remembered 50 years hence.
The war that resulted from this event was terrible and the echoes of that conflict are still reverberating throughout the world even now. It shaped both America and the world afterwards, and will do so as long as there is history left for us to live, and a posterity in which it can be remembered also.
I pray, then, that the gravity of this memorial, and its significance, is not lost on this generation. I also pray that it is remembered with sensitivity by those who claim a heritage from those who fought for the Confederacy, those who fought against it, and the descendants of the slaves that this government was inaugurated to perpetuate.
I realise that many people claim that Southerners deny that slavery was the primary motivation for secession but that kind of revisionist history is not fair to the four millions of black people held in bondage. I also realize that most Confederate soldiers, including the famed General Robert E. Lee, were not slave holders themselves. Indeed, as much history will reveal, most Southern soldiers were simply fighting because they felt it was their duty to defend their homes and what they defined as their ‘country’ from an invasion by the North, whether they called their country Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, etc., or the Confederate States of America.
Indeed it is also true that many free blacks, especially from Louisiana and other parts of the South, were more than willing to take up arms to defend ‘their country’ and yet were denied that right up until the very last weeks of the war itself, when it was too late. This, too, must be remembered by the participants and by those who will gather to protest against them.
The Civil War, then, was not simply a ‘white man’s war’ fought between slave holders and non-slave holders, between ‘racists’ and non-racists. Both the North and the South were GUILTY of the sin of slavery and both paid a terrible price for its final eradication in the United States. As President Abraham Lincoln rightfully asked during his second inaugural address “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?”
By the living record of these immortal words, by the sacrifices of the soldiers, both North and South, by the lashes experienced by the slaves and the horrible wounds and interminable suffering this war brought upon the nation, it behooves us, Americans and non Americans, blacks, whites and whatever shade of colour in between, to remember and honour this event.
It also should give us pause to remember, as well, the man, Jefferson Davis, who bravely and heroically, bore upon his own person, the hatred and wrath of both his erstwhile countrymen and the (unfair) condemnation of generations, both blacks and whites to come, for leading the South during the war. He was not a Hitler, Mao, Stalin, or Pol Pot, and does NOT deserved to be remembered among such vile villains any more than does Lee, Stonewall Jackson or Joseph E. Johnston. That, too, is revisionist history, and is unbecoming of those who wish to protest against this solemn and historical re-enactment.
Davis was, by any measure, a Christian gentleman, a man of his time, and a patriot fighting for what he believed to be right and proper, as did countless others of his time and generation. If any fault can be accrued to him it’s that the Confederacy’s first and only president (and an unwilling one at that, according to his wife’s, Varina, memoirs), was on the wrong side of history. Had he succeeded in securing the South’s independence, history would look upon him far more favourably than it does now and those gathered to protest this event would perhaps remember how his slaves loved and cherished him as a fair and just master and, ultimately, the one who set events in place which led to their freedom some years after that conflict; which surely would have happened regardless of the result. This, too, must also be remembered, if only in the abstract.
What must, however, be remembered now, though, is the rich legacy of courage, honour, and sacrifice of those who fought in the conflict that resulted from this event. It must also be remembered that the America that emerged from it was a far far greater nation than the one that before it. The division between free and slave state might have disappeared , but the bitter harvest of racial politics and Jim Crow laws that resulted from the Northern occupation of the South, had only begun. This ‘second’ civil war, was not truly over until yet another Southerner, Martin Luther King Jr., 100 years later, stood up and called upon all men to behave as brothers, regardless of skin colour.
This, too, is a legacy of the Civil War and the inauguration being remembered in Montgomery, Alabama. In so far as it encompasses Americans of every stripe, political distinction, colour, and background, I earnestly pray, therefore, that it serves to remind Americans and the people of this world, of their joint heritage and join interest in this event. Rather than divide people, as it did in 1861, I hope that this inauguration reunites them in memory and in fondness of the price paid by Americans of every creed for the liberty which they, and the world, now enjoy.
Jefferson Davis, in his declining years, when asked by a reporter about how he wished to be remembered, said “tell them that I only loved America.” The America he fought for and against had changed fundamentally since the day he took the Oath of Office as President of the Confederate States of America in February, 1861, and would continue to change right until the present day. In 1978, almost 90 years since his death, US President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, a liberal, and a Southerner, signed into law a bill to posthumously restore Davis’s citizenship after it was revoked following the war. At that point it can be said, much as it was said upon Lincoln’s death in 1865, that he now “belongs to the ages.”
History, it is said, is written by the victors, but that’s not really true. History is written by us, their posterity, and how we remember it will mark us as surely as it marks those who participated in the events of that time. If it is done with bitterness, partisanship, and hatred, it will surely mark this generation with it and cast a dark shadow upon us when future generations recall this period. If it is remembered, however, with unity, with a spirit of compassion and respect for history, and a time of healing for divisions that no longer matter, then it will mark us as worthy successors and redeemers of those good and noble qualities that who fought and died for represented.
To quote Abraham Lincoln, “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
God bless you all.
In Christ,
I.M. Ulysses
Well, Those are some nice and kind words about our beloved President Jefferson Davis you said there. But I would disagree with Mr Lincoln that we are not enemies. He brought the bloody war on Kentucky’s soil and coerced this state and well, us here in Kentucky who are real southerners dont appreciate what he did and we dont care for a yankee ruling. While some citzens of Kentucky remained loyal to the U.S. they sure didnt care much for Lincoln if that tells you anything. Those brave Kentucky Confederates sure didnt like him at all either. So we are enemies.
Hi Chris,
wars make enemies of all kinds. The sad truth is that the only real enemy is war itself, whatever it is waged for or against. Indeed, both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were Kentuckians by birth, which perhaps better highlights the divisions in the USA as no other incident. But the real enemy is not Lincoln these days, it is the ignorance, the intolerance and the vile schemes of those who, in the pursuit of political correctness, would deny the right of people to express their views, and commemorate their history.
Jefferson Davis was an imperfect man but he was a man of his time and no American should be ashamed of him. After the war, he accepted the burden that history placed upon him and spent his remaining years unrepentant unbowed in the defence of those who died for him and for the cause he came to represent. For this Mr. Davis’s memory, like the memory of every Confederate soldier, should be honoured and their place in history remembered in the same way.
It is in the defence of these things that I write, Chris, and for no other reason. The first thing that the enemies of freedom always try to do is re-write history and abolish those things which are held in high esteem by others. This cannot be allowed, nor should they be. Whatever some people may think of the Confederacy and the South is not as important as what the truth of history says. As long as we hold that truth to be self-evident and not cave in to the lies and will of others, that cause will never be lost. Should it be, then, truly, it is not only the Southern soldier that would have died in vain, but also his Northern compatriot as well.
God bless.
In Christ,
I.M. Ulysses.
This (re-enactment)aka: redneck garbage on display- is the reason why the United States cannot be “united” .The reason: white bigots steeped in embracing the degredation enslavement and captivity of Black peoples.
This is a blight on the history of America that is a souce of shame and disgrace.. NOTHING to celebrate..
This garrish celebration is NO DIFFERENT than a group of lo rent German re enacting and glorifying the Nazi savagery against the Jews during the Holocaust..
Kwumey, I’m laughing at your ignorance, Black power bigotry and statism. That’s all I can do with people like yourself – laugh at y’all. You decry racism and then refer to Whites as “redneck garbage” and don’t seem to sense any irony at all in this. You refer to our history as “shame and disgrace.” You compare agrarian Christian decentralists with Nazis (who were industrialist, neo-pagan centralisers). I would remind you that you don’t have to hate White Southerners to embrace your own people, but obviously this hatred of us is what you base your own pride on.
I take back my initial remark about laughing at you. I pity a person like yourself full of ignorance and hatred.