150 Years Ago

One hundred and fifty years ago the War Between the States started at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. It was one of the bloodiest wars ever fought. It was fought to protect a way of life: but the way of life was Northern and industrial, or Southern and agricultural, and based on slave labor to bolster the economy.

When I met Lisenby, I was a Catholic and a Northerner. Granny Merriman still talked about the War of Northern Aggression as if it had happened last year.

I had no idea how emotional people in the South were about the war.  The pain and anguish lived on.  I had not seen anything like it in the North.

This is a sad part of our history.  But it did not end there. And it did not start there.  Slavery was part of this country at its founding, and was a blight on our country then.  Racism was a blight on our country for another 100 plus years and is still a blight, subtly, on this country.

But, we did the right thing. The cost, the time, the pain to accomplish what is right is untold.  I am sorry my country was founded on such inhumanity, and not just to the Negro Slave, but to the First Americans, and repeatedly, at times to others who are different: Japanese, Germans, Muslims.

150 years ago, this country engaged in a war to affirm the rights of all humanity.  It was the right thing to do.  It is unconscionable that so many died.  War is hell.