An old professor’s epigram, tested against the monuments, the forts, the flag, a Supreme Court ruling from this spring, and the counterfeit history of emancipation now spreading online. An old history professor of mine once offered a sentence that has outlasted most of what I learned in his classroom. The South lost the battle, he said, and won the war. He meant that the Confederacy was more alive in the present than it had been on the April morning when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. The claim sounded like provocation at the time. It reads now like a weather report. Army forts carry the names of men who took up arms against the United States. The Supreme Court has just rewritten the rules that protected Black voters in the states most determined to suppress them. A battle flag the rebel armies never managed to carry into Washington was paraded through the Capitol in 2021. My professor’s epigram deserves a hearing, and it deserves a harder examination than its admirers usually give it, because one half of it is true in a way that should alarm anyone who wants a working democracy, and the other half is false in a way that can disarm the people who would defend one.

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