In the winter of '65
We were hungry, just barely alive
By May the 10th, Richmond had fell
It's a time I remember, oh so well
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the people were singing
They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"
Back with my wife in Tennessee
When one day she called to me
"Virgil, quick, come see,
There goes Robert E. Lee!"
Now ah don't mind choppin' wood
And ah don't care if the money's no good!
Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest
But they should NEVER have taken the VERY BEEEEEESSSSSSST!
This was my grandfather's (yes, the same one who stormed Normandy on D-Day) favorite song by the way. HIS grandfather fought for the Confederacy as a rural Appalachian North Carolina man who probably never saw a black person in person his entire life, let alone owned a slave or approved of such a thing.
Turns out people and massive wars are complicated and not as black and white as commonly portrayed! Who would have thought???
And before anyone takes this as a defense of slavery or the Confederacy, no it absolutely is not. The plantation system of chattel slavery was abhorrent, reprehensible, one of the greatest moral evils of all-time. It and the rebellion ABSOLUTELY deserved to be put down.
HOWEVER... My point, and the point of the song, is that the people who suffered and died in the name of the Confederacy were in 99%+ cases NOT slave owners. These people were barely literate if at all. Many didn't own f--king shoes. They literally had no access to any information about the outside world besides what they were spoonfed by their state governments (ESPECIALLY in particularly isolated places like Western North Carolina). And they certainly didn't own slaves, and couldn't afford to even if they wanted to. THEY were nonetheless the ones used as cannon fodder in the Confederacy's "lost cause." Blame the plantation class, not my ancestors. And while it is true Robert E. Lee was part of that plantation class, and in most cases I agree his likeness has no business on the streets of modern America... To deny just how powerful an influence the image (if not the reality) of this man was on generations of Southerners is just to deny reality and history. And if it's going to be preserved anywhere, it absolutely should be Richmond, Virginia.
It doesn’t matter if they were poor, slave owners, rich, or what information that they had… Your “ancestors” fought for genocide. And that is what it is… genocide and enslavement. There is no ambiguity about what that southern soldiers fought for. There is no reason what so ever to preserve any of this history or the history of Robert E. Lee. Germany doesn’t have statues to hitler and the US shouldn’t have statues celebrating or memorializing the greatest traitors and war criminals of our own history. And to be honest, if one man who was on the losing side of history can be so powerful to a generation of southerners… more powerful than the founding fathers, more powerful than FDR, more powerful than mother Teresa, more powerful than Pope John Paul… maybe it’s time for them to reassess southern priorities and values.
