A Better View of July 4th....

[redcliffsw]

From 1864

SOUTHERN VIEW OF JULY 4TH, INDEPENDENCE DAY

We have no inclination to deprive that day of its just honors on which was, for the first time, effectively and solemnly enunciated - "the right of the people to alter and abolish a form of Government, deriving it's just powers from the consent of the governed." This is the principle for which we are even now contending, and which we have never violated; and, therefore, whatever associations are connected with that mid-summer day in the year of our Lord 1776, ought to be peculiarly and perpetually cherished by the citizens and citizen-soldiers of these Confederate States.

When the time and our means permit, we shall be glad to see renewed, with every return of the occasion, the bonfires and rejoicings with which it used to be celebrated, and we shall read, with hardly less pleasure than in the season of our boyhood, the familiar but ever fresh truths appropriate to the day written by the art of the pyrotechnist in letters of emerald and crimson against the dusk evening sky.

Yet while we advocate the celebration of the 4th by ourselves, we don't know what right the Yankees have to regard it with like respect. It is one of the most remarkable proofs of their effrontery as a nation that they would dare to take the name of that day in vain. The impudence of the thing almost surpasses belief. But it is a piece of the bold hypocrisy of a people who represent themselves as the philanthropists of the world while they are engaged in a crusade of extermination against another.

July, 1864
Henry Timrod, Southern Poet