Chapter Two
Lost Cause
The Civil War was fought over slavery, but the decisive battle was fought over shoes. There began a tale of American victimhood that’s still told today.
Instead of looking to America’s original founding for the origins of our present-day obsessions, whether 1619 or 1776, this particular story revolves around modern America’s founding—the Reconstruction era. The war tore us apart, and as we tried to rebuild ourselves, we fought a cultural battle over the cause of the conflict. The process helped forge us into the nation we are today, establishing our nation’s memory and articulating core principles of its identity.
Through this lens, the seeds of modern American victimhood were sown on the fields of Gettysburg, where the South lost the Civil War.
The Confederacy needed to secure the shoe factory in the small Pennsylvanian town to outfit its army to march deeper into Union territory, threatening Philadelphia. The morning of the third day of battle, the South’s two best generals were locked in bitter argument. On one side was the great strategist Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. On the other, his second-in-command, James Longstreet, the Confederacy’s top tactician and the leader of Lee’s elite First Corps.
Longstreet’s subordinate John Bell Hood called him the Confederacy’s hardest hitter.1 Lee chose which battles to fight, but it was Longstreet’s job to win them. And win he did. Most of the Confederacy’s major victories had Longstreet’s fingerprints all over them. He would scout and wait for the perfect moment, test the enemy’s strength, then attack the point of greatest vulnerability with tactics designed for the terrain. He’d made a name for himself in the Second Battle of Bull Run by executing the largest flanking maneuver of the war, wheeling with almost thirty thousand men and routing the Union army. It avoided total destruction by the skin of its teeth, escaping encirclement through a narrow gap in Longstreet’s lines. He then displayed his trademark calm under fire when his force repelled one twice its size at Antietam, he and his staff personally manning a cannon at the peak of the battle. Later Longstreet distinguished himself with perhaps the best defensive stand of the war, turning Marye’s Heights into a killing field at Fredericksburg.
It was partly the memory of his own defense of Fredericksburg that compelled Longstreet to object to the charge Lee ordered at Gettysburg. The two were the preeminent heroes of the Confederacy at the time. Lee had no idea that his order would lead to the Confederacy’s demise; Longstreet had no idea that he would take the fall for it, becoming the central villain in the narrative of victimhood the South would concoct to explain its loss of the war.
Lee had grown impatient, made reckless by his successes, believing that the bravery of his troops would allow them to overcome George Meade’s large force in a strong defensive position at the top of a ridge. But Longstreet knew that the invention of long-range artillery and rifles had tipped warfare decisively toward the defender. “Conditions were different from those in the days of Napoleon,” he later wrote in his memoir.2
Longstreet was one of the first to understand that one could now take the strategic offensive by employing the tactical defensive—he agreed with Lee about the necessity of taking the war to the North but advocated fighting the battles by occupying defensible positions and mowing down Union soldiers at long range as they attacked. He often favored maneuvering to threaten Washington, DC, so the Union would be forced to attack him, a tactic he tried to convince Lee to use at Gettysburg. Longstreet’s defensive approach didn’t stir the popular imagination as much as Stonewall Jackson’s bold frontal assaults had, but it was, he calculated, the only way for the South to overcome its numerical disadvantage. At Fredericksburg he’d had his men shelter behind a fortified wall, having the back rows reload rifles and pass them forward, turning his entire front line into an impromptu machine gun. No Union soldier made it within fifty yards of the wall; almost eight thousand were killed or wounded trying.
Now Longstreet feared the same fate befalling his own men as Lee ordered him to have George Pickett lead an assault on Cemetery Ridge, the center of the Union line. Longstreet told Lee such a brazen attack would require at least thirty thousand men; Lee said he’d have half that number. Longstreet replied, “General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.”3
Lee ordered the assault anyway, the rare time he overruled his top lieutenant. Longstreet waited as long as he could before complying, searching for a way to get out of the order without disobeying but finding none. When Pickett finally asked if it was time to attack, unable to speak, Longstreet could only nod grimly. As the Confederate soldiers marched toward Cemetery Ridge under withering artillery fire, Union troops chanted “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” to let them know what awaited them in rifle range.
Pickett’s Charge has become synonymous with a brave but doomed attack. Confederate troops evaporated under fire. More than half were killed, wounded, or captured. A couple hundred momentarily broke through the Union line before falling. As the assault’s survivors fled in disarray, Lee rode out to meet them. “This is all my fault,” he told them over and over. “It’s all my fault.”
History didn’t see it that way. That’s because, common wisdom notwithstanding, the history of the Battle of Gettysburg was written by its losers. As the war wound down, the cultural battle over American history was about to begin, and victimhood would take center stage.
The Army of Northern Virginia slowly bled out after Gettysburg, too many men lost, too many of its best officers. Ulysses S. Grant took the fortress city of Vicksburg by siege shortly after, sealing the Confederacy’s fate in the Western Theater by controlling the Mississippi, cutting the South in two. Then he took command in the East and waged a bloody war of attrition against the outnumbered Lee, who surrendered at Appomattox two years later. The small patch of Cemetery Ridge that Southern troops briefly occupied is now known as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
Pickett’s Charge came to stand for a valiant but hopeless attack largely because embittered Southerners made it the centerpiece of the Lost Cause narrative, making the charge not just the proximate cause of the Confederacy’s defeat but a microcosm of the entire war. Many still remember the Lost Cause today, associating it with the claim that the war was fought not over slavery, but states’ rights—mainly the right to secede from the Union and the right to decide the legality of slavery. On this telling, which some still believe, the South began the war as the plucky underdog standing up to the overbearing North. Lost Cause disciples dubbed the Civil War “the war of Northern aggression” to make clear that the South was fighting not for slavery, but freedom.
Pickett’s Charge fit perfectly as a symbol of the tenacious underdog fighting an uphill battle against overwhelming odds. There came to be a certain romanticism about the ill-fated assault, captured well by William Faulkner:
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen year old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.4
The South had always known the odds were against it, but so what? The deck is always stacked against an underdog; they must overcome them with bravery and skill. The South knew it had both, with legendary generals and valiant soldiers fighting to defend their homes and their liberty. It not only hoped for victory; it thought it deserved it.
But when an underdog is defeated and their hopes fail, the narrative must shift and become one of victimhood to explain why the protagonist was unable to complete their hero’s journey. The new story required a villain—while an underdog story simply requires a favorite to oppose the hero, a tale of victimhood requires a culprit. The story could not simply be that the Union had won because it had a larger population with more industry; it had to be that someone had actively undermined the Confederacy’s deserved victory.
To achieve this transition from plucky underdog to cheated victim, Lost Cause mythology turned James Longstreet into the South’s abuser. It became gospel that Gettysburg had been lost not because Lee’s orders were wrong, but because Longstreet sulked over being overruled and delayed too long in implementing them. But Lee’s orders were wrong. Dwight Eisenhower once visited the site of Pickett’s Charge and, at a loss to explain Lee’s tactics, told British general Bernard Montgomery, “The man must have got so mad that he wanted to hit that guy with a brick.”5
Though some contemporary Americans still remember the Lost Cause story’s central claims, they have forgotten the means it used to prove them. Every time someone knows Stonewall Jackson’s name but not James Longstreet’s, that’s the Lost Cause narrative still telling itself. It’s elevating the daring, cruel, devout Christian above the proud, deliberate master of tactics. Even remembering Jackson by his Confederate nickname instead of his given name, Thomas, is the Lost Cause mythology still at work. By valorizing Jackson’s skill as a lieutenant, it could avoid giving Longstreet any credit for the Confederacy’s major victories. But there’s a reason Lee promoted Longstreet to lieutenant general one day before Jackson and gave him the First Corps and Jackson the Second Corps—he wanted to make it clear that Longstreet was his right-hand man. But history cannot remember. “My old war horse,” Lee had called Longstreet ever since his stand at Antietam.6
Lee himself never uttered a harsh word about Longstreet’s performance at Gettysburg, but he died five years after the war, allowing the Lost Cause a head start on making him a legend. Jackson, too, was dead, lost to friendly fire in the dark before Gettysburg, and so he too was slated for martyrdom instead of villainy. It had to be Longstreet.
He did himself no favors when he became a Republican after the war, supporting Reconstruction and rekindling his friendship with Grant. They’d attended West Point together, and Grant had married one of Longstreet’s cousins; most accounts agree Longstreet was either his best man or a groomsman. On the way toward Appomattox Court House, Longstreet told Lee that Grant would offer generous terms of surrender, and that if not, they ought to fight it out. Once they arrived, Grant proved him right, greeting Longstreet like the old friends they were and inviting him to play cards.7
Grant urged President Andrew Johnson to grant his friend a pardon, but Johnson refused, telling Longstreet, “There are three persons of the South who can never receive amnesty: Mr. Davis, General Lee, and yourself. You have given the Union cause too much trouble.”
“You know, Mr. President, that those who are forgiven most love the most,” replied Longstreet, appealing to his Christian nature.
“Yes,” said Johnson, “you have very high authority for that, but you can’t have amnesty.”8
Congress re-granted Longstreet full citizenship a few years later, and once Grant was president, he gave him a series of government jobs. Longstreet was, in the parlance of the times, a scalawag, a fact that earned him little love in his community. Nor did he win many friends when he led an outnumbered mostly black state militia to defend New Orleans from the White League, a paramilitary army of five thousand white supremacists who marched on the state capitol in revolt over the disputed 1872 gubernatorial election. Unlike its more secretive rival, the Ku Klux Klan, the White League did its violence openly. Longstreet was shot with a spent bullet and captured in the Battle of Liberty Place as the terrorists seized control of Louisiana’s government, inflicting a hundred casualties. They melted away a few days later once President Grant’s federal troops arrived, deciding the KKK’s furtive approach was better. It had been founded by another gifted Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Surprisingly, in the eyes of the defeated South, fraternization with the enemy was not even Longstreet’s greatest sin. No, his unforgivable sin was resisting the Lost Cause narrative. For that, the narrative first made him the whipping boy for the Confederacy’s loss, then erased him from American history.
First, Longstreet flatly rejected the noble story that the South had been fighting for states’ rights: “I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery,” he said.9 But second, and worst of all Longstreet’s offenses, he laid the blame for Gettysburg squarely at Lee’s feet.
The Lost Cause’s argument was easy: Lee was an unimpeachable hero. Longstreet blamed him for the loss at Gettysburg, and therefore implicitly for the loss of the war. To do so was to impeach the unimpeachable, therefore Longstreet was wrong, and simply trying to blame a dead hero for his own failings. Jubal Early and other senior Confederate officers who’d fought at Gettysburg eagerly spread the story that jealousy and resentment had made Longstreet insubordinate, ruining Lee’s battle plan as he pouted about being overruled.10
Historians perpetuated the story for decades. In particular, Douglas Southall Freeman, who wrote what stood for a long time as the definitive biography of Lee, portrayed Longstreet as a talentless, insubordinate, cowardly general.11 He and his disciples entrenched Longstreet as the villain in the Lost Cause narrative, the one who had deprived the underdog of their hero’s journey and turned them into a victim. They portrayed him as a general who always deliberated too long, squandering the opportunities Lee’s brilliance created.
But in fact, Longstreet’s methodical style of waiting, scouting, and striking served the South well on many occasions, like the Battle of Chickamauga, the Confederacy’s greatest victory in the West, where one of Longstreet’s signature counterattacks once again broke a Union army. After he returned east, he extended the Confederacy’s life for a year in the Battle of the Wilderness when his flanking maneuver down an unfinished railroad he’d reconnoitered rescued Lee’s army from Grant’s in the nick of time. As one of Lee’s soldiers put it, “Like a fine lady at a party, Longstreet was often late in arrival at the ball. But he always made a sensation when he got in, with the grand old First Corps sweeping behind him as his train.”12 Before he could complete his rout of Grant’s army, he was severely wounded by friendly fire as he led a scouting party on the front lines, just miles from where Jackson had fallen.
Far from being a coward, Longstreet was a superior tactician who recognized the way new technology had changed warfare and valued the lives of his men highly, spending them to maximum effect on both defense and offense. It was that desire that made him resist Lee’s fatal orders at Gettysburg, not cowardice or jealousy. Cadets at West Point could learn from his example today.
Though baseless and self-serving, the strategy of blaming Longstreet’s generalship for the Confederate loss in the Civil War worked like a charm. It was the shared fiction that made the Lost Cause plausible. Longstreet was widely reviled throughout the South for the rest of his life, spending much of it fruitlessly trying to defend his military record.13
And then he was forgotten. No forts were named after Longstreet, though two were named after his subordinates Hood and Pickett. Others were named after incompetents like Braxton Bragg, who lost almost every battle he fought with the exception of Chickamauga, which Longstreet won for him. Although some modern historians now believe James Longstreet was the best tactician on either side of the war,14 only two statues of him exist today—one in his hometown of Gainesville, and a recently created one in an out-of-the-way spot at Gettysburg.
Unlike Longstreet, the Lost Cause narrative was never forgotten. It is America’s past and present. This mythology of Confederate victimhood was given a prominent voice as recently as 2003 in the film Gods and Generals, a celebration of Stonewall Jackson that portrayed slaves as happy with their lot and rebel soldiers as defenders of freedom. Historian Stephen E. Woodworth wrote that “The result is the most pro-Confederate film since Birth of a Nation, a veritable celluloid celebration of slavery and treason.”15
Perhaps in part because of Longstreet’s defense of New Orleans from the White League, it was Lee, who had no particular connection to the city, who had a statue built in his honor there. After Lee, too, eventually became controversial, his statue was moved to an undisclosed location in 2017.16 But as America tries to forget the Confederacy’s greatest champion, it fails to remember its greatest villain. Both great generals are now, in the words of one beloved Lost Cause story, gone with the wind.
Lost Memories
As you know, something important happened in 1776: Hume died.
David Hume is often considered the greatest philosopher to have written in English. Though still an important figure in academic circles, he’s not quite as well known as he used to be. It turns out he’s in the process of being canceled just as Longstreet was, which is one reason he’s been on my mind lately. More on that in a bit.
Hume’s quietly becoming a your-favorite-player’s-favorite-player kind of philosopher. Immanuel Kant said Hume’s skepticism “awakened me from my dogmatic slumber.” Hume often grasped at a theory of evolution by natural selection but didn’t quite get there;17 fortunately, he was one of Darwin’s favorite writers.18 Albert Einstein said that without reading Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, he might’ve never arrived at the theory of relativity, since Hume’s skepticism about all things extended to doubting the existence of an objectively correct, universal time. He argued that time was an illusion created by subjective impressions.19
Hume was also one of the first intellectuals to attempt to rigorously define the mental processes that govern the direction of thought; we call the field that descended from his principles of association cognitive science. As part of that, he gave what still stands today as one of the best accounts of causation, saying that cause and effect are illusions our minds create from the constant conjunction of one event and another. This theory also led Hume to raise the problem of induction, pointing out that inductive reasoning, which presumes that unknown information resembles known information, is hopelessly circular: the only reason we think induction will work well in the future is that it’s worked well in the past. The first sentence of this section is actually a little joke about the pitfalls of induction: obviously, 1776 wasn’t just the year that Hume died. It was, of course, also the year that his friend Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.
I respect Hume’s contributions to human thought. That’s why I was surprised and disappointed to find out that he got caught up in the cancellation craze that swept the Western world after George Floyd’s death. Outraged Black Lives Matter protesters got the University of Edinburgh to change the name of its David Hume Tower to 40 George Square.20 Why did valuing black lives end up demanding the cancellation of a long-dead Scottish empiricist? The problem came down to a footnote.
In 1753 Hume revised his essay “Of National Characters” with a footnote saying he suspected that nonwhite races were naturally inferior to white people because white civilizations had produced greater achievements. In another revision published a year after his death, he changed the footnote to limit his criticisms to black people. Because of Hume’s towering stature as an intellectual, racists in later generations would sometimes appeal to this footnote. A century after Hume wrote it, some of Longstreet’s fellow Confederates would cite it to defend slavery.21
Though Hume was expressing the conventional view of mid-1700s British society, some scholars pointed out its flaws even at the time. I winced when I read the end of the footnote, where Hume references a respected black thinker in Jamaica and argues that it’s “likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”22 It’s jarring to hear those words come from one of your intellectual idols, the man who inspired entire fields of modern science even as he questioned its foundations. The great skeptic, the great empiricist, seems to have drawn strong conclusions about race from very little evidence.
There’s actually a lesson there: even the most critical thinkers have their blind spots, and race can easily be one of them. If only Hume had been as skeptical of his thoughts on race as he was of his belief in induction. As some defenders of David Hume Tower noted, although Hume had racist beliefs, they stood in isolated opposition to his own theories and methods rather than being entailed by them. If Hume had been able to follow his own commitments far enough, his philosophy would’ve allowed him to escape his own racism as surely as it freed him from his preconceived notions of time and causation. It could help people escape their biases today.
Should David Hume Tower have been renamed 40 George Square over that footnote? Ironically, the first time the University of Edinburgh canceled Hume was in 1744, when because of his religious skepticism it denied his application to become a professor of moral philosophy. He was a famous atheist at a time when no one was open about their atheism. That’s why he only allowed his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to be published posthumously. It’s why Adam Smith was risking his reputation and career when he published a defense of Hume’s character after his death, endangering the success of his recently published The Wealth of Nations.23 Because of his reputation as an atheist, David Hume, the greatest philosopher to write in English and possibly any language, was never allowed to become a professor anywhere.
So Hume was canceled during his life for his atheism, a view ahead of its time, and is being canceled today for his racism, a view that was a product of his times. That’s why he reminds me of Longstreet: a traitor to the Confederacy because he opposed the Lost Cause narrative, a traitor today because he’s just another Confederate. Freethinkers tend to be canceled in every time, just for different reasons; the only way to avoid that trap is to avoid canceling people at all.
Postwar Longstreet was no storybook redemption on the subject of race either, by the way, even if he did advocate equal rights for black people. He argued that if white people didn’t join Southern black people in the Republican party, they’d simply be handing them unchecked political power.24 That argument earned him the scorn of racists in his time, but antiracists would be the ones to despise him for it today.
Should we have statues of neither Longstreet nor Hume, then? Before the most recent wave of partisan division, liberal media outlets like CNN and the Washington Post actually published articles supporting creating statues of Longstreet.25 I wonder if their readers would allow them to express that view today. If David Hume cannot have a tower named after him, it’s hard to imagine anyone building statues of any Confederate general. The University of Edinburgh renamed Hume’s tower; should it take down its statue of him, too? Should there be no more statues of Hume or buildings named for him anywhere? Philosophers are debating that very question, with some saying yes.26
Of course, everyone will argue, as the University of Edinburgh does, that one can refuse to honor Hume while still teaching his influential ideas. That’s certainly logically possible, but I suspect that as Hume becomes controversial, professors will quietly decide not to teach his views unless necessary. He will go from a figure who’s casually mentioned in many classes to one who’s discussed mostly in Hume courses. Those will become fewer as interest in him lessens, and teachers who fear their students will ask whether it’s worth risking mentioning Hume himself when they could simply find other thinkers who had similar ideas, people of color or women if possible…
We are witnessing the beginnings of the erasure of a great thinker from human thought. The next Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein may have to come up with their revolutionary theory without the benefit of being inspired by Hume’s skepticism. The next Immanuel Kant may have to sleep in his dogmatism for a while longer, waiting for someone less problematic to wake him. David Hume. Your favorite thinker’s favorite thinker, but not yours.
I started thinking of Hume’s connection to modern America at first because the BLM protests of him forced me to. He seemed so disconnected, someone from a completely different part of my life, yet American victimhood somehow ended up reaching even him. American grievance has become like a black hole dragging the rest of the world into its maw, warping time and space to capture everything that offends it. James Longstreet is stuck deep in that singularity, so far gone that no light from him can escape. Now I see David Hume beginning the same journey, slowly being dragged to the event horizon, the point where the gravitational pull of American victimhood is too strong for even his great ideas to break free.
That’s one reason I go into some depth about figures like Hume and Longstreet in this book. I don’t want to just argue that we ought to remember our history; I want to remember it. We’re a nation that’s losing its memory, rewriting and sanitizing its own history to fit preapproved victimhood narratives. We suffer from our own version of Alzheimer’s. As we lose our memory, we lose our national identity. Instead of arguing in the abstract that we shouldn’t cancel people, I’ve told you about a great general we’ve canceled and a great philosopher we’re in the process of canceling. You can judge for yourself whether they’re worth remembering.
In this chapter I presented an account of one strand of American victimhood, one that focuses on the way it arose as America fought over the memory of the Civil War during the Reconstruction era. But my story was never just about our nation’s history. Once again, William Faulkner put it well, so well that Barack Obama quoted him in his celebrated speech “A More Perfect Union”: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”27
The Lost Cause narrative is not past, nor is the Civil War. A 2021 Harvard poll found that the majority of young Americans believe American democracy is either in trouble or failing; only 7 percent described it as healthy.28 Thirty-five percent expected to see a full-scale civil war within their lifetimes. That was one of the more optimistic polls. A different 2021 survey found that 46 percent of Americans felt civil war was likely, with 43 percent thinking it unlikely and the remainder unsure.29
Lee’s statue was removed from New Orleans just a few years ago, in 2017. That same year, Charlottesville’s city council narrowly voted to remove statues of him and Stonewall Jackson, prompting a white supremacist protest that culminated in violence, with one man ramming his car into a crowd of counter protesters, killing one and wounding thirty-five.30 The statue was finally removed in 2021.31 Meanwhile, the question of whether forts should be named after Confederate generals has surged to the forefront of the national consciousness, with President Trump arguing in favor of keeping the names, claiming that attempts to rename them were part of cancel culture. He even advocated maintaining the name of Fort Bragg, saying “Fort Bragg is a big deal. We won two world wars, nobody even knows General Bragg.”32 Well, those who do know about Braxton Bragg know he was a hapless general who lost almost every battle and had to endure the embarrassing spectacle of watching all his top subordinates implore Jefferson Davis to remove him for incompetence.
Personally, I think Fort Longstreet would be a much better name, one that would remind American officers to update their tactics to respond to new technology and to value the lives of the soldiers under their command. As I finish this book, the congressionally appointed Naming Commission has proposed renaming Fort Bragg and others after a variety of figures, including Dwight Eisenhower and Harriet Tubman.33 Unsurprisingly, James Longstreet’s name is not on the list.
If Fort Bragg is to be renamed, name it after the true winner of the Battle of Chickamauga. Remember the Confederate general the ghost of the Confederacy made America forget. It would be a step toward unity. It would also remind American citizens that humans are complex beings, capable of change, who seek atonement and sometimes deserve forgiveness. As Longstreet would tell us if he were here today, those who are forgiven the most love the most. If we allow history to erase those nuanced men and women who struggled to do the right thing, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, we will fail to look for the nuances that exist within each other. If we divide the world into black and white, virtuous victims and evil oppressors with no shades of gray, we will create the nation that we see.
We remind me of the dystopia predicted in the young adult novel The Giver, where a community achieves an artificial tranquility through a philosophy called Sameness.34 The false utopia makes everyone equal by eliminating all the features of life that could make them different: color, memory, individuality, and even family are all sacrificed to guarantee that everyone has the same experiences, to remove the possibility of pain. Only one member of the community, the Giver, is allowed to remember the world as it really was, so that he can share those memories with the rest of the community when disaster threatens.
Disaster is at the doorstep. It’s opening the front door. I think every American who remembers the way things used to be has a duty to share those memories. Otherwise, we too may find ourselves lost by history, following Longstreet and Hume into the dark.