The Chesterfield
How eavesdropping as a young adult gave me a crash course on those who sympathize with The Confederacy.
Daughters of the Confederacy, Virginia Chapter (above)
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate[1] hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, and the promotion of the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy
When I was in college, back in the dawn of time, namely the early 1980s, I went to a university in Richmond Virginia in the Fan District named Virginia Commonwealth University.
Near the campus was an old apartment building that was used for student housing, The Chesterfield, and in The Chesterfield was a tea room named the Chesterfield Tea Room.
It was a very lovely tea room, very high-end and old fashioned, with tablecloths and fancy china, and like the name states, they had tea, namely formal high tea, pinkies up and everything .
If you were to attend, you had to dress appropriately. No jeans, no wild unkempt hippy clothing, you had to hide your punk sensibilities, and your new wave pointy shoes, and dress like you were going to church on Sunday.
Yes, it was the tea room that time had forgotten.
Once a month, sometimes more often, the members of the Daughters of the Confederacy would meet there.
They were a hoot, and that's not a compliment.
Of course they were tastefully attired, as though they were Lady Bird Johnson or Patricia Nixon, with their white gloves and such, but what they prattled on about, if you were to eavesdrop as we did, was their pride in the Confederacy.
They talked about it as if it were an ongoing thing.
“My daddy's daddy was only 16 years old when he fought at the Battle of Bull Run. He returned as a hero.”
“Well, my daddy's daddy, may he rest in peace, he was at Chancellorsville with General Lee, and ..”
“Oh, well so was my daddy's daddy. What a coincidence! My daddy's daddy fought alongside YOUR daddy's daddy! Can you imagine?”
This went on for hours over an event that happened 120 years before, and yet for some reason, continued on with these women as if losing a treasonous war against your own country was something to be proud of.
Of course we were in our teens and early twenties watching all this, and we thought it was hilarious. My friends and I would leave and make fun of them for hours, all the grand gestures and puffery.
The Chesterfield Tea Room has been gone since 1988.
You may be wondering why I'm bringing this up.
Nikki Haley, that's why.
What Nikki Haley was saying the other day, you know the part about the Civil War being about states rights instead of slavery, that's exactly what the Daughters of Confederacy say about The Lost Cause. Bless her heart.
You see, people who are still Confederates at heart don't refer to the Civil war as the Civil War. Instead, they call it:
The Northern Aggression,
The Lost Cause,
The War for Southern Independence,
War Between The States,
and the War of Separation.
They never call it the Civil War.
They never call it what Frederick Douglass called it, the "Slaveholders' Rebellion".
Those people you see in the South who go marching and do Civil War reenactments on the weekends to honor their ancestors and “to teach history in a living way”, are not teaching it the way the history books do.
They are teaching it the way that the Daughters of Confederacy does: that it was not a treasonous act, and it was not about slavery.
The Confederate flag they call a battle flag.
The American Evangelical isChristian Church, to which many a UDC belongs, is a church that preaches that the South will rise again and that everyone should arm themselves.
They believe Jesus was a white man, not from the Middle East, but from the Midwest or South and that he went to the Middle East to educate the Jews.
They believe they have been wronged.
They believe in revenge.
And even though they waive and hide behind the American flag, their vision of America is an all white, Christian only, non-Catholic, non-Jewish, non-Islamic, non-pagan, non-scientific based country. They believe women don't deserve rights, and are property of their husbands.
They believe people of color don't deserve rights.
Donald Trump has picked up on this, and is using it to try to overthrow the United States government for his own benefits.
Donald Trump isn't the only one that realizes this in the Republican party, the party of Lincoln. If Lincoln were to see this, or if he's looking at our country from the great beyond, I am sure he'd be mad as hell to see what the Republican party has become.
So Nikki Haley, said out loud what the Daughters of the Confederacy have been saying amongst themselves quietly all these years.
They want revenge.
And they are co-opting the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, to do their dirty work for them.
I may have been born in the South in a Civil War hospital that was torn down 60 years ago, but the absolute last thing I want is a Second Civil War, and an all Caucasian, all Evangelical America.
The Republican Party is drawing a line in the sand, and they are daring us to cross over it.
We must stand up to them if we want to keep our country moving forward, or else we will lose everything.
We will lose the USA. Forever.