Confederate

Eight days before it is scheduled to open in movie theaters, the Civil War epic Cold Mountain already is generating Oscar hype. Set in North Carolina and Virginia, the movie tells the story of Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier who takes a long journey on foot through the Blue Ridge mountains to return to the woman he loves. He dodges Yankee soldiers and his own troops, who are shooting deserters. The film, which is based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Charles Frazier, stars Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger.

Maryland's Gov. Warfield made the pages of the Times that week because he wanted to honor "young men who espoused the Southern cause in the Civil War" with a monument and stated so in a letter to the Ellicott City Times . "The Times has received the letter published below from Gov. Warfield, who has started the very proper movement to honor the brave young men of the county who left their homes and fortunes in the early sixties to...

ELLENTON, Fla. -- Being foreign-born and married to a French Catholic wife woman could be enough to get a Southerner ostracized from polite society in the years before the Civil War. Being a Jew seemingly would be a kiss of death in politics or business.Yet Judah Benjamin survived and thrived, arguably becoming an the second most important political figure of the Confederacy. during the waning days of the war.After the Union victory, while others like Jefferson Davis were captured and jailed, Benjamin escaped to the Caribbean and then to England, where he made carved out a second illustrious career for himself.

Standing behind the old brick Worthington House, visitors can look down the gently sloping hillside and picture the Civil War battle that likely saved the nation's capital from capture. Much of the farmland where Union soldiers fought that hot summer day in 1864 to delay a Confederate attack on Washington has been preserved as Monocacy National Battlefield. But the view from the Worthington farm, where the fighting began, appears fated to become less historic. A huge waste-to-energy plant is planned just across the Monocacy River from the 1,650-acre park — a project that has sparked criticism as the nation marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the war. One hundred fifty feet tall, with a 270-foot smokestack, the facility will loom over the trees that hide areas where Confederate cavalry forded the river to assault Union infantry.

I DON'T PLAN TO APPLY for a Howard Stern license plate from the Motor Vehicle Administration. But the hype surrounding the shock-jock and his new movie, ''Private Parts,'' afforded me an unsettling appreciation of the emotions felt by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Maryland.The Sons were scorned after someone realized they were driving around with special license plates bearing the Confederate flag. African-American legislators and others were offended by state-sanctioned use of a banner under which slavery was defended.

WHILE Marylanders fought and killed each other throughout the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg stands out in popular memory at least as a particularly harsh reminder of the animosities that made this state to an extraordinary degree "a house divided." Anyone whose roots in Baltimore and Maryland go back into the 19th century has surely become well versed in family lore related to the terrible blood-letting, 136 years ago this month, just up the road in Pennsylvania. In our family, my grandmother, Mary Coleman (Herbert)

RICHMOND, Va. -- Driving along Monument Avenue, past the massive stone statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate warriors, Charles Chambliss said in disgust, "Somehow the Confederacy made the losers look honorable." In recent weeks, a downtown mural of Lee has been set on fire and his reputation defended in a dispute over how history should be marked here in the capital of the Old Confederacy. It's a fight that heritage groups say embodies a resolve by civil rights leaders to rid the South of Confederate symbols.

"The Confederate War," by Gary W. Gallagher. 288 pages. Harvard University Press. $24.95A month after Abraham Lincoln became president in March of 1861, a young North Carolina military officer who had just quit the U.S. Army sent home a newly minted Confederate banner.William Dorsey Pender, 27, the West Point-trained former dragoon, wrote his wife, Fanny. "It is yours as much as mine and by it you must stick."It was still a week before Fort Sumter and almost two months before his state would join the fledgling Confederacy.

His friends dreamed of the Shadow and the Lone Ranger, but young David Sawyer had only one hero: Stonewall Jackson."Back then, there were people like Tom Mix, Tex Ritter, Buck Jones," Mr. Sawyer, 66, says of his boyhood in Depression-era North Carolina. "These were white cowboy heroes. Their deeds of daring were nothing in my mind compared to the legendary Stonewall Jackson."Friends, relatives and teachers were confounded by this young black boy who idolized a Confederate general. But to Mr. Sawyer, Jackson was not only an idol and a role model, he was a relative.

NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST:A BIOGRAPHYJack HurstKnopf434 pages; $30"War means fightin,' " Nathan Bedford Forrest remarked memorably, "and fightin' means killin.' " Commanding the Seventh Tennessee Cavalry in the western theater during the Civil War, Forrest was wounded several times and captured about 31,000 prisoners. He estimated that he killed 30 men himself. A fellow Confederate likened Forrest to a "panther springing upon its prey," and many Yankees feared him as the devil incarnate. "Get 'em skeered," was how he explained his strategy, in characteristically homespun English, "and then keep the skeer on 'em."

An 89-year-old Arizona man worried that no one showed interest in a U.S. flag hand-stitched by his grandmother and her mother 150 years ago. By chance, his concerns found their way to the Maryland Historical Society, where a curator said her eyes filled with tears as she gently unwrapped the rare, homemade 34-star flag that flew above a West Baltimore street during the Civil War. "I had this feeling this was something special, extraordinary," said...

One hundred fifty years ago this week, the first shots were fired in the Civil War, the bloody conflict that pitted North against South for four long years and forged our identity as a nation. Though the guns have long since been silenced, they echo down through the years, in countless ways large and small, in our politics, our pastimes, even in some of our popular sayings. For me, the Civil War is personal. Growing up in West Virginia, I recall vague talk among my family about how one or more of our forebears fought for the South, but only years later did the stories become more concrete.

You get two battles for the price of one at Manassas National Battlefield Park, about 25 miles southwest of Washington. These rolling fields and woodlots in northern Virginia were the scene of the first major clash between Union and Confederate armies. And the railroad junction here was of such strategic importance that the two armies staged a rematch a little over a year later. Many Americans on both sides had thought that this feud over slavery and states' rights would be quickly resolved.

These days, the term "political correctness" is used most commonly by the political right to rage against allegedly misguided efforts to minimize public offense, particularly on the subjects of race and sex. There's a better term for the decision by Johns Hopkins University officials not to host on campus - just days before the inauguration of the nation's first African-American president - 200 sons and daughters of the Confederacy, some of whom would...

Every January, descendants of Confederate soldiers gather in Wyman Park to march under the banner of the Confederacy, sing "Dixie" and lay wreaths at the monument to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, legendary generals of the Confederate States of America. And afterward, for 20 years now, everyone has gone across the street to the Johns Hopkins University for coffee and refreshments, with some of the 200 descendants and observers still wearing the uniforms of Confederate re-enactors and carrying the flag.

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- For Kitty Green, the NAACP's call for an economic boycott of the state seven years ago was a "slap in the face." While the teacher-turned-entrepreneur supports the civil rights organization's effort to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds, the sanctions hit her business hard. Now some members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are questioning whether it's good policy to continue the boycott. In 2000, the flag was moved from atop the State House dome to a monument in front of the capitol, and there's no plan to move it again.

Confederate soldiers descended on Westminster for the last time on July 9, 1864. Confederate General Bradley T. Johnson, who was from Maryland, ordered Colonel Harry Gilmor to cut all lines that enabled Washington to communicate with Baltimore, Philadelphia and other northern points. Along this path were the telegraph lines in Westminster. On the evening of July 9, Col. Gilmor and his troops galloped into Westminster, seized the telegraph and cut the lines in less than fifteen minutes. Gen. Johnson and the rest of the brigade arrived a few hours later.

In the hometown of Anne Arundel County Executive Janet S. Owens, where residents have roots that stretch back three centuries, the Civil War still feels recent enough that there's room to honor its heroes with monuments.So next week in Lothian, in a private ceremony next to a small white-clapboard church, a group of her friends and closest advisers will do just that. But the sentimental gesture won't be enjoyed by all, because the life-sized bronze sculpture they will unveil along Route 408 honors a Confederate soldier.