Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Small stories that don’t warrant larger posts all their own.

• The City of Lexington, Virginia has filed a petition to dismiss the Virginia SCV’s lawsuit against the city, which seeks to overturn a 2011 ordinance that bars all non-governmental flags from city property, including light poles. (The ordinance does not prohibit the flag on private property, nor parades or other displays of the Confederate flag, as is sometimes claimed.) This latest filing is a standard motion that doesn’t add much significant to the case. My earlier thoughts on the plaintiff’s likelihood of prevailing in court are here.
• The long-running lawsuit of Candice Hardwick (above, with Confederate activist/performance artist H. K. Edgerton in 2006) appears to have come to an end, with the dismissal of her federal lawsuit against the administration of Latta High School, in Latta, South Carolina. In 2006, then-fifteen-year-old Hardwick was suspended twice from school for wearing a Confederate flag shirt. She sued, and her case became a cause celebré among heritage groups.
• Near Raleigh, North Carolina, volunteers spent six hours digging up the graves of two brothers, Joseph and Joel Holleman, to move the remains to a nearby cemetery to be reburied alongside other Civil War veterans. This story is the most ghoulish thing I’ve read in a long time; it reeks of necro-voyeurism. The original graves were marked, identified, and not threatened by development or erosion. Nor, as far as I know, was there any wish on the part of these men’s descendants to have this done. So they dug them up anyway, because (in the words of the event’s organizer), ““my heart says this is the right thing.” The folks who scream “GRAVE DESECRATION!” and “SPITTING ON THE GRAVES OF AND DISHONORING AMERICAN VETERANS!” when a cemetery owner removes Confederate stick flags ought to be up in arms about this foolishness. But they ain’t gonna say boo about it.
• Speaking of disturbing graves. . . .
• It looks like Kentucky will finally shut down its Confederate Soldiers Pension Fund, a mere fifty years after anyone was eligible to receive benefits from it. Don’t do anything precipitous, y’all.
• Union County, North Carolina, is moving one step closer to putting up a monument to local African American men who went into the field with the Confederate army as personal servants of soldiers. The description of the men in question by historians interviewed is reasonably accurate, but it’s still all very muddled. Earl Ijames doesn’t help by observing that “history has attempted to negate what they did. . . .They would die for their freedom before freedom was available for their own people. . .  .For Union County, Jesse Helms’ (home) county, this makes a big statement that we are a society that has evolved into a more integrated society.” I have no idea what he’s saying, but it sure sounds good.
• Fed up with Waite Rawls, John Coski and the Museum of the Confederacy, the SCV is soliciting money to build and operate the Confederate Museum at Elm Springs in Columbia, Tennessee to counter the “forces of political correctness,” who are attempting “to ban any and all things Confederate through their ideological fascism.” The first 20 camps or divisions to contribute $1,000 or more will each receive a commemorative gavel, “made from wood taken from the damn [sic.] at Fredricksburg [sic.] during the War.“

Finally, I’d like to remind folks that I’ll be speaking on Civil War blockade runners in Texas at the Wortham MAX Theater at the Houston Museum of Natural Science on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. It should be fun.