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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

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Putting the Community Back Into the Newspaper

Now through March 30, new annual subscribers to “The Freeman’s Journal” and AllOtsego.com (or subscribers who have lapsed for two or more years) have an opportunity to help their choice of one of four Otsego County charitable organizations.

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