This just goes to show that the planter class and the Confederate leadership were treated far too leniently by the victorious Union. The planters should have been dispossessed, the leaders hanged, and the South should have been occupied militarily until its submission was beyond redemption. That none of this happened is due to the power of the morbidly rich in the north who wanted Southern cotton and markets, and the racism pervasive in white peoples everywhere then, and in too many still. We cannot undo the past. We can try to prevent its triumph by voting blue in November. We must. Because the South need not “rise again”. It never left, biding its time. We must assure that time never comes again.

I write this as a descendant if Southerners on both sides, including ancestors who fought for the Confederacy and owned slaves. It is a heritage I abhor and have spent my life in part feebly trying to rectify, as my parents did at great personal and professional cost. But if we are being honest, our country as a whole bears the taint of slavery, on which our economy was built and on which in part it continues to rest in our prisons. Ghastly, disgusting—and American. Remember, remember, vote blue in November.