A Note of Gratitude - This Past Memorial Day

This is a very brief note of appreciation to the OROGs, and others who passed through yesterday to see the "Three personalities" and to render homage to the departed veterans.  El Zorro, who narrowly missed on various occasions, and El Gringo Viejo who never came close, to having been one of those memorialised yesterday appreciate your comments, and urge your continued return visits and comments

     We especially appreciate that there was not one negative response about our inclusion of the Confederate generals.   The portion we showed was only one-fifth of all generals of the Confederacy who lost their lives  in that War.  I determined to use the generals because they would represent their men, and although, in Texas, Confederate Memorial Day is 26 April and is officially know now as Confederate Heroes Day, combining various old observations of Lee's, Jackson's, and Davis's birthdays  and the Memorial Day.  Various States of the Confederacy have different protocols and dates, and there has been a bit more interest in the last few years, especially with the attention to the Cemeteries and the personalities therein interred.

Wheelwrights in Washington, D.C. - 1862

    El Zorro noted the youth of many of the brigadiers.   The South stupidly lost in a cause that could never have been won, over 450,000 such people in combat or from wounds of combat or disease at the front, or in the pitiful POW camps, especially like Camp Chase, Ohio.   In excess of 20% of all the military aged males in the Confederacy died in the War effort.

     The Union side stupidly lost an equal number it seems.   The total combat losses of 620,000, both sides, has begun to erode, essentially because it is an undependable estimate.   It cannot be defended.  Rumours, lore, and Southern wistfulness cannot fully discount the notion that many Negroes, free and slave, who worked as trenchers, cannon coolers, musicians, cooks, valets, teamsters, and tradesmen in the Confederate effort were summarily executed for being "enemy combatants out of uniform".   It is known that there was considerable, perhaps at times overewhelming, resentment by the Union troops against what they would perceive to be "ungrateful" Negroes who seemed unimpressed at "liberation" at times.  Southerners may have"over-estimated"  this military abuse for obvious propaganda and self-justification reasons...and Northerners may have done the same in minimising the ill-effects of such dispatching of men deigned to have been criminals when they were actually patriots.   Records were not kept accurately about these...probably numerous....incident.s

    El Gringo Viejo's great-great grandfather adopted through indenture two "negro boys approximately 5 and 7 years of age, to indenture and care, to raise and assume responsibility of parentage for,,,,"   This was in 1866, and the thinking is that the boys had lost their father while serving as a shoer and wheelwright  for Hood's Brigade.  The mother apparently had died and the children were being cared for by elderly grandparents.  Their father may be included in the above picture, taken on the edge of Winchester, Tennessee.


     So that none will be taken aback about the Southerners continuing "indenture" even after the War, El Gringo Viejo's grandfather was "indentured" to a family in Montrose, Pennsylvania due to EGV's great-grandfather's debilitation and early death at the age of 57, due to emotional collapse from the deaths of two sons in the War.   And they were all White.


     The smoke never clears.  Thank you all from facebook...we never knew that many reviewed our place here.
El Gringo Veijo.