On
Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at
Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman’s
troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to
Savannah.
Captured
in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of
Okolona, Mississippi, who was transferred by rail to the Union POW stockade at
Camp Douglas, Illinois.
By
the standards of modernity, my great-grandfather, fighting to prevent the
torching of Georgia’s capital, was engaged in a criminal and immoral cause. And
“Uncle Billy” Sherman was a liberator.
Under
President Grant, Sherman took command of the Union army and ordered Gen. Philip
Sheridan, who had burned the Shenandoah Valley to starve Virginia into
submission, to corral the Plains Indians on reservations.
It
is in dispute as to whether Sheridan said, “The only good Indian is a dead
Indian.” There is no dispute as to the contempt Sheridan had for the Indians,
killing their buffalo to deprive them of food.
Today,
great statues stand in the nation’s capital, along with a Sherman and a
Sheridan circle, to honor these most ruthless of generals in that bloodiest of
wars that cost 620,000 American lives.
Yet,
across the South and even in border states like Kentucky, Maryland and
Missouri, one may find statues of Confederate soldiers in town squares to honor
the valor and sacrifices of the Southern men and boys who fought and fell in
the Lost Cause.
When
the Spanish-American War broke out, President McKinley, who as a teenage
soldier had fought against “Stonewall” Jackson in the Shenandoah and been at
Antietam, bloodiest single-day battle of the Civil War, removed his hat and
stood for the singing of “Dixie,” as Southern volunteers and former Confederate
soldiers paraded through Atlanta to fight for their united country. My
grandfather was in that army.
For
a century, Americans lived comfortably with the honoring, North and South, of
the men who fought on both sides.
But
today’s America is not the magnanimous country we grew up in.
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Since
the ’60s, there has arisen an ideology that holds that the Confederacy was the
moral equivalent of Nazi Germany and those who fought under its battle flag
should be regarded as traitors or worse.
Thus,
in New Orleans, statues of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States
of America, and General Robert E. Lee were just pulled down. And a drive is
underway to take down the statue of Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New
Orleans and president of the United States, which stands in Jackson Square.
Why?
Old Hickory was a slave owner and Indian fighter who used his presidential
power to transfer the Indians of Georgia out to the Oklahoma Territory in a
tragedy known as the Trail of Tears.
But
if Jackson, and James K. Polk, who added the Southwest and California to the
United States after the Mexican-American War, were slave owners, so, too, were
four of our first five presidents.
The
list includes the father of our country, George Washington, the author of the
Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, and the author of our
Constitution, James Madison.
Not
only are the likenesses of Washington and Jefferson carved on Mount Rushmore,
the two Virginians are honored with two of the most magnificent monuments and
memorials in Washington, D.C.
Behind
this remorseless drive to blast the greatest names from America’s past off
public buildings, and to tear down their statues and monuments, is an
egalitarian extremism rooted in envy and hate.
Among
its core convictions is that spreading Christianity was a cover story for
rapacious Europeans who, after discovering America, came in masses to
dispossess and exterminate native peoples. “The white race,” wrote Susan
Sontag, “is the cancer of human history.”
Today,
the men we were taught to revere as the great captains, explorers, missionaries
and nation-builders are seen by many as part of a racist, imperialist,
genocidal enterprise, wicked men who betrayed and eradicated the peace-loving
natives who had welcomed them.
What
they blindly refuse to see is that while its sins are scarlet, as are those of
all civilizations, it is the achievements of the West that are unrivaled. The
West ended slavery. Christianity and the West gave birth to the idea of inalienable
human rights.
As
scholar Charles Murray has written, 97 percent of the world’s most significant
figures and 97 percent of the world’s greatest achievements in the arts,
architecture, literature, astrology, biology, earth sciences, physics, medicine,
mathematics and technology came from the West.
What
is disheartening is not that there are haters of our civilization out there,
but that there seem to be fewer defenders.
Of
these icon-smashers it may be said: Like ISIS and Boko Haram, they can tear down
statues, but these people could never build a country.
What
happens, one wonders, when these Philistines discover that the seated figure in
the statue, right in front of D.C.’s Union Station, is the High Admiral of the
Ocean Sea, Christopher Columbus?
Happy
Memorial Day!