Reconstruction & Personal Liberties
From: cscitizen@alltel.net
Chuck, the following is a story about how the rules of personal liberties, especially free speech changed in the South during Reconstruction & have remained in effect since then.
A Confederate veteran whose town was occupied by a Union garrison would sit on his front porch everyday & watch the yankees drill. From time to time he would repeat the phrase, “We sure beat those yankees at Chickamauga!”
After awhile the yankees became very annoyed at the old man for repeating this phrase everyday & made him take an oath to the Union with the promise that he would stop saying this to them during their daily drills. Of course, under the circumstances he had not choice but to comply or suffer their wrath further.
So the very next day after having been made a new citizen of the Union the old man was sitting on his front porch again watching the yankee troops going through their routine daily drills to which he exclaimed, “Them Rebels sure beat us yankees at Chickamauga!"
To me the moral of this story is, there is more than one way to tell the truth. Which brings me to this, since the modern-day yankees want to paint everything Confederate with a broad brush as being inherently evil perhaps there are times that instead of pointing out how good we are as Southerners, since this annoys them so badly & they are still in charge of government we should instead just point out how bad they actually are.
A for instance, instead of putting up Confederate flags & plaques honoring us, put up historical markers pointing out yankee war crimes at every location the South where they happened, lets see if they like this approach better.
When they complain about flying Confederate flags or Confederate decals etc, etc. fly the American flag upside down instead. As a veteran myself this would not bother me as this is a sign of distress & if this is not a country in distress then there has never been one.
At any rate, this is just a thought & I’m sure you get the idea & could improve on pointing out the yankees follies by using such methods which in around about way still leaves us as the good guys.
Billy E. Price
Ashville Alabama