Our daughter--in-law lent us book a while ago, and I've slowly been working my way through it. It really is a fascinating read. It's written by Pulitzer-prize winning author Tony Horowitz. The book is titled, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil
War.
As a student of history, there were many things in the book that I already knew. It still is an astoundingly sobering fact to me that more Americans were killed in the War Between the States than in the totals put together from all of the other wars in which we have been involved! But Horowitz wrote many things that were new to me.
He wrote that many southerners feel that the Civil War amounted to little more than a continuation of the long-standing conflicts between the English and the Celtic peoples; the north was settled predominantly by English immigrants, the south by Scots and Irish.
He wrote that the War is still so vivid to so many people in the south because of casualties and immigration patterns. To quote:
"Roughly half of modern-day white Southerners descended from Confederates, and one in four Southern men of military age died in the War. For Yankee men, the death rate was about one in ten, and waves of post-War immigration left a far lower ratio of Northerners with blood ties to the conflict."
Those were new things to me, and I'm still pondering those ideas. But Horowitz also wrote about one particular town that he came across in the sojourn - really, in the pilgrimage - he took through the South. He told the story about the small town of Fitzgerald, Georgia. It is the county seat of Ben Hill County in south-central Georgia, and in 2012 had a population of 9,048. Some of the streets in this village are named Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, and others are named Lee, Jackson, Longstreet, and Bragg. In other words, many of the streets are named after both Union and Confederate generals. The town was developed by a Midwestern newspaper editor, Philander Fitzgerald, in 1895. He had been a drummer boy for the Union army, and, in the midst of a severe drought in the early 1890's in the Midwest, concocted the idea of starting "a soldier's colony in the Southland and get all those old boys away from the bitter winters and drought." He approached the governor of Georgia at the time, a Confederate veteran, and the two began to share the dream of a town that could be a place of refuge from the bitterness that still existed about the War. Cautiously, the town planned its first veterans' parades, scheduling two of them: one for Union vets, the other for Confederates. But when the band started playing, veterans of both armies "spontaneously joined and marched through the town together. Thereafter, they merged to form Battalion One of the Blue and Gray, and celebrated their reconciliation annually."
Just imagine... After the tremendous bitterness and the losses inflicted during that dreadful time in our nation's history, people in this little village in southern Georgia, located less than 15 miles from the spot where President Jefferson Davis was captured on May 10, 1865, simply decided to put it all behind them, and to march - together - into a new future!
Wouldn't it be refreshing if even a small group of Republicans and Democrats simply decided to move beyond partisan politics and join together to forge a new way forward? Wouldn't it be redeeming if even a small group of anti-abortion and pro-choice individuals could move beyond their impassioned rhetoric and see how they might work together in a new direction? Wouldn't it be a sign of hope if some of the Shiite and Sunni Muslims throughout the Middle East could move forward in peace, holding on to the many things about their faith that unite them rather than going to war over the things that divide them? Wouldn't it be a sign to the world if the Christian Church could stop our bickering over... fill-in-the-blank... marriage, ordination, property, denominational loyalty or denominational desertion, etc., etc., and instead find ways to forge partnerships in mission and service, in compassion and peace, in justice and grace that would be a fulfillment of Jesus' prayer that his followers be united?
I think that when I get discouraged about the many signs of division and hurt, of conflicts and fights in our world and in our society, I'll remember the folks in Fitzgerald, Georgia, who one day, long ago, simply decided that, in that place deep in the heart of Dixie, they would move forward together.
