It’s Confederate Memorial Day here in South Carolina. I’ve lived in the south my whole life, but I was unaware of the existence of this holiday until I moved here, though it is also celebrated, on different days, in several other southern states including Texas, where I was born. You might assume that such a holiday is a holdover from the days of Jim Crow. But, while its unofficial practice dates back to just after the Civil War, it was created here as a legal holiday relatively recently. It became law on May 1, 2000 as part of a compromise to allow for the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
To be fair, though, it’s not a holiday that many people here take seriously. On the campus where I work, it falls right in the middle of the break between spring and summer classes, a time when students are gone and faculty are on holiday. For staff, it’s considered an optional holiday. Most people, myself included, work through it in order to bank that eight hours as an additional day off during Christmas. Progressive locals I’ve talked to blush at the mention of it, and regard it as an embarrassment to the state.
William Faulkner’s observation that “the past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past” always reminds me that a bit of history goes a long way to understanding both the past and present. And while my knowledge of the US Civil War isn’t extensive, I do know that it started here, first with South Carolina’s succession from the union on December 20th, 1860, and then with the Confederacy’s attack on Ft. Sumter, here in the Charleston harbor, on April 12, 1861.
If anyone tries to tell you that the Civil War “wasn’t about slavery,” a claim I’ve often heard repeated, they obviously haven’t bothered to read South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession, which states the desire for its continuance quite clearly as the prime reason. That it was also a states’ rights issue is certainly true. But, in this case, it was about the use of those rights to maintain an abhorrent institution. All of which makes me wonder, what is it exactly that is to be remembered here? Sacrifice, I suppose. But the sadness should not be for the fact that that people gave their lives for something they believed in. The real sadness is that, in the full light of history, they gave their lives for such an unworthy cause.