Despite cries of tyranny, America today is better off

APRIL 26, 2016 10:26 AM
BY CHARLES HAMMER
Special to The Star

My mother ... had a soft spot for the Confederacy, which she imagined as a Gone with the Wind dreamscape of noble cavaliers and beautiful young women. She told stories she had heard about her ancestors being forced to part from their weeping slaves, the slaves themselves eager to remain those ancestors’ property.

My ancestors rich enough to own slaves? It’s tough to believe, given the hardscrabble photo of my mother’s family on our bedroom wall in Shawnee. In that 1908 picture, my mom appears as the tiniest of her clan of two parents and six siblings photographed before a rickety farmhouse (half of it the original homestead of logs covered by clapboards) ...

Some Americans today whose ancestors gallantly fought for the Confederacy (perhaps including my great grandfather) understandably say it was not for slavery. It was for the South’s honor and liberty, to defend states rights and oppose an intrusive central government. But Southern leaders in 1861 — those who ordered the cannons fired — spoke more bluntly ...

My little mother in a plain cotton shift, her blonde hair cut like a boy’s, glances half sideways out of that 108-year-old photograph on our bedroom wall. That little girl was lucky enough to miss the worst tyranny America ever knew: slavery. She saw American women gain the right to vote in 1920 — one more tyranny down. More cruelties would go as she lived out her 79 years ...

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