LETTER from CHIP NORTHRUP
People Who Buy
Confederate Flags
Tell Us Something
To the Editor:
Five of my direct Northrup ancestors died in the Civil War, two at the Battle of Atlanta, two in a POW camp in Columbus, Ohio, and one riding with Morgan’s Cavalry on a raid into Indiana. One of the remaining brothers moved to Brazil, where slavery was still legal, the other moved to Texas.
The notion that anyone would fly a Confederate flag to symbolize anything other than the failed notion of enslaving someone based on their pigmentation is a modern fiction. Most of the Confederate monuments in the South were put up to affirm post-Reconstruction segregation, not to honor the war dead. Lee himself opposed the monument to Stonewall Jackson in Lexington, Va.
The right to buy and sell Confederate flags should by no means be curtailed, since it says someone about the person that displays them: “I am oblivious to history.”
Thanks for making that clear to the rest of us who take history a bit more seriously.
CHIP NORTHRUP
Cooperstown
nerd