The End of Crossroads

It is with a heavy heart that I announce that Crossroads is suspending operations for the infinite future. I’ve done so because, after all these years, I have changed my mind about my understanding of American history … specifically, Confederate history. For all of the yelling and ranting of ill-tempered Confederate heritage advocates, it’s now obvious that the Confederacy was on the white side of history.

I have a dream that someday we’ll understand that at Gettysburg black Confederates led the July 3 assault on Cemetery Ridge bearing flags that bore the slogan “No Morrill Tariff!”

Someday we’ll understand that while very few descendants of Confederate soldiers were descended from slaveholders, all who were descended from slaveholding Confederates know that their ancestors were kind masters and the slaves were happy, and that emancipation was the worst thing that could have ever happened to them (meaning, of course, the slaves). Freedom is clearly reserved for those who wore gray uniforms over their white flesh.

Someday we’ll understand that slavery was a dying institution, and that Abraham Lincoln could have avoided a war for which he alone was responsible had he bought all the slaves. He would have been even a greater man had he advocated their relocation elsewhere.

Someday we’ll understand that we should honor white southerners for what they said (state rights and a limited central government) rather than for what they did (the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, conscription, impressment).

Someday we’ll realize that the only reason the Confederacy lost was because of superior Yankee numbers made possible by the growth of an immigrant population and led by a bloodthirsty butcher and drunkard who overpowered the greatest gentleman in human history, a man whose commitment to duty and honor was always uppermost, because he never broke an oath or uttered one.

Someday we’ll understand that many Confederate heritage advocates’ motives are as pure as white cloth that doubles as eveningwear.

As part of my new career, I intend to start writing a series of southern romance novels that I will call the John W. DeForest collection, starting with Miss Ravenel Unreconstructed. These will be e-books available to all, with beautiful covers selected from clipart in the public domain. What do y’all (see, I went there) think of this?

I understand that many of you are shocked by my decision. To all of my loyal readers, I thank you for all you’ve done to make this blog such a rich source of ultimately misguided discussion that will serve to remind us of the vile distortions perpetrated by that foul practice of revisionist history, especially that which relies upon documentation. We all know that the records proving that hundreds of thousands of African Americans were personally destroyed by that arsonist William T. Sherman. That we today have to scramble to discover what’s left suggests what we have not been able to discover: the lack of evidence is proof enough that such evidence exists, and in abundance, or would have had Sherman not burned the records.

History teaches us to hope.

Until we meet again … farewell.