EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 HONOR

In the final assault at the Battle of Gettysburg, the extreme left of the rebel force comprised men of North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi who had been heavily engaged in the first day’s fighting. They made it to the farm and barn of a family named Brian. The image below features their house as it stands today. (For some reason, the sign features an alternative spelling of the family name.)

Abraham Brian, his wife Elizabeth, and their five children were not living in the house at the time of the battle. The family fled the Gettysburg area upon news of the Confederate invasion.

Why? Well, you see, they were members of the local African American community. Yes, as free as you or I are today. The trouble was that Robert E. Lee’s army, as it marched north into Maryland and Pennsylvania, captured free black American families and transported them south to be sold as slaves.

In most of my adult life, which I have spent in Arkansas, a statewide newspaper ran an editorial each year on Lee’s birthday (a state holiday) dedicated to the proposition that he was the embodiment of honor and decency, the most model American figure to emerge from the Civil War, save the one who removed the shackles of slavery from the families that Lee’s army captured.

Odd that the editorials never mentioned Abraham Brian or the collateral damage done to free Americans by the Confederate insurrectionist on their way to Gettysburg.