Into the PC Mist With the Confederate Dead

On a quiet hillside in Eastern Oklahoma, in an ancient graveyard that is no longer open to the public, a strikingly white, marble, military tombstone stands out. It reads “Edward Kumpe, born June 1843 Co. A, 6 Ark. Infantry, CSA.” His name also appears on another more public memorial in Little Rock, Arkansas which reads:

To the Memory of the Capital Guards
Company A
Sixth Arkansas Infantry Cleburne's Division 1861 - 1865"
When his Division defended, no odds could break its lines, when it attacked, no numbers resisted it's onslaught."
General William J. Hardee

Edward Kumpe was my great grandfather. He was a Confederate soldier. I refuse to be ashamed of that fact. My great grandfather served his state and his neighbors honorably during a difficult time in American history. It would be serious mistake to assume that he was a racist because he served under the Stars and Bars. After he was captured and released, he voluntarily moved to the Indian Territory and became a full citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He married a Cherokee woman.

The modern assumption that all Confederates were racist is not historically accurate. While there is no doubt that some perhaps many Confederates were racist, the best and brightest minds of the CSA saw slavery in a different light. For example, in 1856, Robert E. Lee wrote to a friend: “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race.” The deeply devout Stonewall Jackson committed civil disobedience before the South seceded by teaching blacks to read and write and by establishing regular Sunday Schools for blacks in Virginia near VMI where he was a professor. The “Stonewall of the West,” Arkansas General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, shortly before his tragic death proposed “that in order to reinforce the Confederate armies slavery would have to be abolished in a “reasonable time” and blacks be recruited for military service on the promise of their freedom.”

Many Confederates were Christian gentlemen in a culture that suffered from a terrible social problem with no good solutions. It takes incredible historical naivete’ to believe that the Civil War was fought over slavery. It was fought over markets and raw materials. Then, as now, blacks were simply pawns in a much larger game motivated by the political self interest of others.

I fear that in the next few months and years the last vestiges of Southern culture will be consigned to the dark, bottomless pool of political correctness and the noble flag that so many of my wife and I’s ancestors served under will be remembered solely for its association with the modern criminal scum who have defiled it. Our nation will be far worse for it.