George Angell ’76

3 Months Ago

Questionable Definition of ‘Patriotism’

You’re being facetious, Mr. Ravitch, I take it. Otherwise, you're redefining “patriotism” as loyalty to a seditious armed insurgency that killed more Americans and caused more suffering and destruction than any other enemy in the nation's two and a half centuries of existence. (Al Qaida, for instance, was a milquetoast by comparison to the Confederacy and its barbarism.) And it was all done in the most despicable of causes, the preservation of human bondage, long after other nations had taken decisive steps to end slavery (e.g., Great Britain's Abolition Act of 1833). I say this as someone whose great grandfather and great great grandfather (Greenberry Angell and John Jefferson Angell, respectively) wore the gray uniform, sadly, as soldiers in an N.C. infantry unit of the Army to Destroy the United States and Keep Black Americans in Chains.

Join the conversation

Plain text

No HTML tags allowed.

Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.