Sesquicentennial Update: Marking Jefferson Davis’s Confederate Inauguration

Source: NYT, 2-20-11

One hundred and fifty years and one day later, the South did it again.

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Jeff Haller for The New York Times

People gathered for the Confederate Heritage Rally in front of the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., on Saturday.

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Before a cheering crowd of several hundred men and women, some in period costume and others in crisp suits, an amateur actor playing Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy on the steps of the Alabama Capitol on Saturday, an event framed by the firing of artillery, the delivery of defiant speeches and the singing of “Dixie.”

The participants far outnumbered the spectators, but it was to be the largest event of the year organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and one in a series of commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Confederacy and the War for Southern Independence. (Referring to the Civil War as anything other than an act of unwarranted Northern aggression upon a sovereign republic was rather frowned upon.)

The Sons’ principal message was that the Confederacy was a just exercise in self-determination that had been maligned by “the politically correct crowd” through years of historical distortions. It is the right of secession that they emphasize, not the cause, which they often describe as a complicated mix of tariff and tax disputes and Northern attempts to politically subjugate the South…READ MORE

Posted by bonniekgoodman on February 20, 2011

https://historymusings.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/sesquicentennial-update-marking-jefferson-davis-confederate-inauguration/