Frederick Douglass still resonates
Frederick Douglass still has something to say for the current moment. Although these words were written after Lee's death, the bombast is all to present again today.
Although these words were written in The New National Era on 10 November 1870 on the occasion of Robert E. Lee's death, much of what he describes is sadly rearing its head again. To quote a bit of Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."
I've quoted his column in full below:
Bombast
“How sleep the brave who sink to rest, by all their country's wishes blest,” occurs in four fifths of the newspaper obituaries of Gen. Lee. —Exchange.
Is it not about time that this bombastic laudation of the rebel chief should cease? We can scarcely take up a paper that comes to us from the South, that is not tilled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee; and many Northern journals also join in these undeserved tributes to his memory.
We give the following extract as a specimen which comes to us in an extra Galveston News. The writer says:
“Lee is dead! The soldier rests. When the loved Apostle, grown venerable with the winters of a century, lay entrancedon the Isle of Patmos, he heard a voice saying, 'Write from henceforth blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labors.” When the clouds of night hung like a funeral pall over the bloody held of Chancellorvsille—when the shrieks of the wounded and dying rose like a mad tumult—when the plunging horses, the screeching shell, the rattling musketr and the sullen boom of the cannon joined in terror and destruction to the advancing hosts, the dying general murmured from between his quivering lips the invitation 'Let us cress the river and rest beneath the shade of the trees." He crossed then and rested on the green banks and beneath the waving trees that grow on the other side of that dark river. Thither Lee has gone to join him who was on earth always first in the advance."
It would seem from this that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in Heaven. It may be so! If Lee has gone to Heaven we are sincerelyglad of it. ''Barkis is willing."
We are beginning to get at the cause of General Lee's death. Jeff Davis says that ''he died of a broken heart;” and one journal has declared, that he died being sadly depressed at condition of the country, that he could stand it no longer. From which we are to infer, that the liberation of four millions of slaves and their elevation to manhood, anil to the enjoyment of their civil and political rights, was more than he could stand, and so he died!
Remind of you the current climate much?
Non in cautus futuri.
