Time for this battle to be over

With the sesquicentennial of the election of Abraham Lincoln last month, a five-year commemoration of the Civil War has been set in motion.
And already, the revisionists are hard at work.
Over the next several months and years, you can expect to hear argument after argument attempting to justify Confederate secession from the Union.
You’ll be told that it was really about states’ rights. Or that it was really about property rights.
But what tends to get lost in the revisionist mix is the cold, hard fact that when you get to the bottom of things, it was really about slavery.
Those states’ rights they’re talking about? That would be the right to own slaves.
And those same folks are strangely silent about the rights of northern states when it came to harboring runaway slaves.
Those property rights they’re talking about? That would be the right to own another human being. Think about that, and re-read the preceding sentence. The right to own another human being as property?
We can understand filial nostalgia about our ancestors.
But gauzy nostalgia shouldn’t blind anyone to the truth.
And the truth is a southern aristocracy built its fortunes on a morally indefensible foundation of human bondage.
And when the time came to choose between that abhorrent practice and the United States of America, the secessionists chose slavery over country.
It’s become fashionable in certain circles to wave the flag of the Confederacy. That’s fine. It’s a free country.
But those who do so need to understand what that banner represents: Treason and moral bankruptcy.
It’s going to be an interesting five years.
Our hope is that — finally — this country can face up to what the Civil War meant, can recognize the flaws in the original drafting of the Constitution that made the war inevitable, and can put this behind us.
Lord knows, it’s time.
A good friend remarked the other day, “You know, the Civil War isn’t really over.”
Maybe he’s right. But it ought to be. — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]