| Cruise Diary, Day 3 -- Charleston, Ft. Sumter | for everyone |
4/17/11 5:54 PM
I’m guessing this is more about me than anything, but I really struggle with the Deep South. So much of their history is at best a left-handed defense of the South and its role in the Civil War. Actually, according to our guide, who may have been kidding (or perhaps kidding about kidding, it was hard to tell), Southerners in general, and South Carolinians in particular, don’t like the term Civil War. They have a variety of euphemisms, although apparently “War of Northern Aggression” isn’t really one of them, except perhaps in select company.
I’m not a presentist in terms of history; I understand you can’t judge people’s actions out of context with the times in which they raised. While I’ve been known to refer to Thomas Jefferson as a rapist, it was more to provoke thought than to make a moral judgment. But those who continue to defend the “peculiar institution,” who revise history to discount the role of slavery in the Civil War, who create heroes out of men who split the country, who fly the Stars and Bars in almost perverse defiance of historical changes, those I just cannot respect.
If you like old houses and alleged Southern “charm,” then I’m sure you’d enjoy Charleston. Fort Sumter is certainly interesting from an historical point of view. But for me, I just can’t get past the past and the defense, with occasional glorification, of slavery and its inevitable outgrowth, racism. Carolyn, as usual, is more succinct: "It's creepy." In any case, I’m glad to move on tonight at midnight, head for Bermuda, and leave South Carolina to its own former Congressman, James L. Petigru’s observation: “Too small for a republic, too big for an insane asylum.”
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