Rebel Yell

It was just a little old harmless gathering--until the professor gave the rebel yell. A few dozen United Daughters of the Confederacy, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Children of the Confederacy and Mississippi's Representative John Rankin had assembled in the National Capitol's high-domed Statuary Hall to commemorate the 139th birthday of the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. With routine reverence, the ladies placed a wreath before the eight-foot bronze statue of Jefferson Davis (which stared gloomily north). Then they sat back to listen to a eulogy by sallow, hawk-nosed Dr. Charles C. Tansill, Texas-born history professor at Washington's Georgetown University.

The ladies coughed politely when Dr. Tansill called Abraham Lincoln a "do-nothing" soldier, "invincible in peace and invisible in war." They looked alarmed when he began to contrast the Davis and Lincoln military careers. Suddenly his audience realized that the professor was leading them on a historical Pickett's charge.

The "Sphinx of Springfield," cried Dr. Tansill, wagging a lean finger in the general direction of a bust of Lincoln (which stared sadly south), played "fast and loose" with Southerners "in order to trick them into a bombardment of that famous Fort [Sumter]." He had blocked all Southern conciliation attempts, had succeeded in starting the War Between the States and then laying the blame on the South. But, sputtered Dr. Tansill, the South should not even now think of its "struggle for freedom" as a "lost cause." "The glorious Confederate flag . . . Belleau Wood . . . Patton's crusaders . . , never be furled. . . ."

When Dr. Tansill had run down, Representative Rankin, who had a prominent place up front, attempted a discreet getaway, ran into a nosey hanger-on, declared testily that the speaker had gone "too far," and that "the time has come to draw the mantle of charity over all that." The ladies were reduced to angry bewilderment. But unreconstructed Dr. Tansill was still snapping like a terrapin. Said he: "You can see how badly the South was beaten that the defeatist attitude should last so long."

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