Dear Cousins, I must apologize to you for the messages over the last several days. Today I have settled with my landlord, and my brain is working better. I feel that folkart, folklore, and follkways are intimately connected to our historical pursuits. I love Wendell Berry's poetry, and as I said, admire him for his convictions. His words soothe my soul, and I believe that fostering community requires passing on American writers, (and artists) their connection to their own particular landscape, and their connection to our ancestors' homelands and landscapes. I had hoped that you too might find connection in this type of exchance, and in turn perhaps pass on your own favorites and their particular insights and contributions about our homelands. I had hoped these exchanges would stimulate discussion and communication and connection. I still hope so. I found "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways," disappointing in the ways I mentioned, but I feel, especially for those who were not with us, it is one of those works which certainly bears discussion again, as we did little more than simply mention it's implications for the ancestral paths we are pursuing on the website. We still have not thoroughly pursued discussion of that book's thesis about the other British folkways. However, I do not intend for supplementary discussions via our list to become wrangling over rights and wrongs committed over the four hundred years of our history, and most particularly I do not intend to participate in a continual wrangling over and re-waging of the Civil War. There is simply no right and wrong over the Civil War. It was an American war. It cost over 600,000 American lives, more than all the casualities of all other wars combined, and is the single most devastating event in our national history. What was wrong in our country was Slavery. Slavery is the most shameful sin of our national history. There is no "side" in it. There is nothing "right" in it. It is a blight on the American soul, and there will never be anything that can be argued over that. Nothing. In fact, that blight is evident in the messages that have evolved from this. The Civil War is a part of our National History. Our ancestors fought and died, North and South. Their blood was red, whether they wore blue or gray uniforms. The great PBS program Ric Burns created several years ago was historically accurate, and was an excellent summary of the devastating toll it has taken on our National spirit. And, in the South, as William Faulkner put it so well, "The past is not dead. It's not even past ... " Faulkner, like other regional artists, renders a historically accurate view of the South via in his personal medium (fiction) of what I feel are the most valuable insights, nuances and interpretations of the South, and the ongoing turmoil and racial problems that still exist 150 years after the fateful confrontations of North and South. One website states: "For Faulkner, every moment of existence is pressured almost to suffocation by all that has come before; the past is not past--it's present. 'There is no such thing as was,' Faulkner once said, '--only is.'" My scholarly pursuit is American Studies, which I have chosen to interpret through genealogy and history. We cannot come to an interpretation of our genealogy and history without understanding the nuances of the lives of our people, and art and literature are a huge part of this. We form, and take away our own opinion and interpretion through all of these things. The better we understand, the better our means of finding resources needed. These are not always contained in expected places. The key to my Grandpa Smith's lost patrimony lay in his father's relatives with other names, and even more distant locales than any of us could have envisioned. It is necessary to understand their motivations. Nothing is debated, however, let alone anything resolved or resources gained, by rendering our personal opinions of let's say, Andrew Jackson vis a vis Abraham Lincoln. I said I found Jackson less than admirable because he defied the Supreme Court's ruling on Indian rights to their land. The Supreme Court found for the Indians; Jackson had them collected like animals and marched off along the Trail of Tears. His disregard of the Supreme Court's ruling was stated: "They've made their ruling, now let them try and enforce it." I believe Jackson's (and his land grabbing cohorts) treatment of the Indians is yet another stain on our National soul. I don't see any logical or debatable comparison between his character or his presidency with Abraham Lincoln's. However, there is a great deal to be learned about the migrations of our ancestors by understanding what was churning in the background prior to those migrations. I am a great believer in stimulating interesting historical discussion. I apologize that this has not happened within this circumstance, and I am especially sorry that I have been unable to direct that discussion better. I hope we can get back on track with helping one another toward better understanding of our ancestors and their times, in order to track and find our missing links. With love, Your Cousin, Carolyn Carolyn McDaniel cmacdee@teleport.com ========================================= --- Visit American Crossroads --- http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads