Confederate Memorial Day

In Georgia today is a state holiday, a hold-over from earlier years when a Democratic legislature more aligned to the old Confederacy than the modern day, could issue a proclamation commemerating the end of hostilities between the northern states and their southern sisters.

Back toward the beginning of this month, in 1865, in a modest white, clapboard farmhouse in central Virginia, Robert E. Lee had surrendered to General Grant, thus terminating the powerful Army of Northern Virginia. Lee returned to wife and children in Richmond, to later take a position as President of Washington College in Lexington. Grant returned to Washington DC and later, the presidency of the United States. Not soon thereafter, he would sit on his front porch and write his account of his life and the war he had just finished, providing a source of support for his wife and children after his death from throat cancer.

Meanwhile, the remnants of the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Tennessee continued to dance their slow death waltz until today's date, when Joe Johnston surrendered his army to Uncle Billy Sherman at Bennett's farm near Durham, North Carolina.

That, oddly, is what we celebrate today in Georgia. We join our celebration with a few of the other states in the Old South. Other southern states will celebrate the holiday on Jefferson Davis' birthday in June. Of course, the Georgia state employees actually celebrated the holiday yesterday in order to give themselves a three day weekend, and some a four day weekend, if they celebrated Good Friday. I'm sure little thought was given to what they were actually celebrating.

Of course, we are more politic than that. We don't refer to Friday as Good Friday, lest we upset our non-Christian brothers and sisters and we don't refer to yesterday or today as Confederate Memorial Day. No, this is just a day like any other. Despite the significant actions which took place in central North Carolina, back in 1865.

In just a few months from now, one hundred and fifty some odd years ago, Uncle Billy would be out west exterminating the plains tribes of Native Americans more efficiently than Andrew Jackson and his federal troops and their marching orders. Little Big Horn and General Custer, notwithstanding. History is written by the victors, you know.