Today, I would like to pause and remember the passing of one of my library patrons, an octogenarian who resided at the assisted living facility here in town where I make monthly library book deliveries as part of my job. Unfortunately, I learned earlier today that he died since my last visit, and tomorrow I will be picking up his books to check in for the last time.
"Alfred," as I shall call him here, was confined to a wheelchair, and his memory was fading, but his eyesight was good until the end, so he didn't require large print books. That made feeding his voracious literary appetite much easier.
He loved westerns, both old and new. Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, and C. J. Box were among his favorite authors. I tried to add some extra options for his monthly fiction selection, and occasionally I hit on something good, but for the most part, he knew what he liked and he wanted just that. He enjoyed Patrick O'Brian's naval adventures and Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series, for example. Someone else had recommended Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series of romantic time travel historical fiction to him, so he asked to try them. I promptly brought the first few. When I returned a month later, he declined the rest and said he didn't know what the other person could have been thinking in recommending them to him. I haven't read them myself, but based on the synopses online, I can see how he would have found it too heavy on the romance and too light on the adventure.
He liked history, and wanted a lot about war, especially the US Civil War and World War II, but I once made the mistake of bringing him a Lincoln biography. He gestured to the Confederate battle flag hung in a corner of his room, and indicated his distaste for the 16th president in no uncertain terms. I suspect he had studied enough history to be properly suspicious of the mythology surrounding "Honest Abe, " and had immersed himself in the confederate revisionism of the noble South fighting the tyrannical Northern political despots and their business cronies. There is some truth to that, and a lot of overlooked inconvenient facts about the Confederate cause, but there is little to be gained from arguing such matters with an old man, so I just noted the need to avoid overt Union sympathies in the books I delivered.
"Alfred" was also a Navy veteran and member of the local VFW hall. I find it a bit odd that he was simultaneously patriotic and a Confederate sympathizer, and I don't recall any indication of latent racism in our discussions. He liked a lot of subjects besides military history, so I would like to think I had a decent gauge of his personality. I brought him many books about sailing and treasure hunting. He also liked local history about the natives, fur trappers, miners, and cowboys of real life.
I don't know whether he had any close family still living. He had friends who sent him lots of paperbacks from thrift stores. I know he will be remembered by others in the world. But it still seems odd to know that nothing of him remains except an overburdened bookshelf of ratty novels likely destined for a dumpster, and this blockchain blog where he is anonymized so only those who knew him already could have a chance of recognizing him here at all.
In any case, rest in peace.
Very interesting. Seeing that I share a birthday with Abe, as a youngin' I was always proud of this fact. As I grew older and researched more, I'm not so proud of it anymore. I can see his pov w/o holding any racist connotations myself.
Sounds like a good dude. Rip.
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I edited out a fair bit I intended initially to include on my views. I of course grew up with a fairly mainstream superficial education about the Civil War, and how Lincoln fought to free the slaves and all that jazz. I eventually learned more about his abuse of power and corrupt connections to industry. Of course, I still thought wars had to have a good guy side and a bad guy side, and I read a lot of the confederate revisionist stuff. But the fact remained that slavery was a significant reason for the secession, and slavery was very explicitly enshrined in the Confederate constitution. The political class of the South was built on slavery just as the political class of the North was built on corrupt industrial connections. None of them were good guys, and they send millions of innocent poor folk to kill and die for them.
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I won't argue any of those points, as they are valid. However I would argue that slavery was already on the way out all over the world, with the US being the last real stronghold, on par with your South political class being built upon it. But the minds were changing in that it was not moral to own another human being. I feel many lives would have been saved if not for the civil war. Would slavery existed much longer than it did, I cannot say. But there were more than just slavery as reasons for doing what Lincoln did. He was a slave owner himself I'm sure you know ;)
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Conscription for Lincoln's war was slavery of the worst kind. The bloodshed was appalling. Lincoln should have allowed a peaceful secession instead of trying to maintain a military stronghold to tax confederate trade in the middle of a major port.
Unfortunately, abolitionists were a minority even in the North, and it wasn't until Lincoln turned the rhetoric toward a moralistic crusade against slavery in his bid for reelection that people started to see it as a patriotic duty to oppose chattel slavery. I think that infection of statism did a lot of harm, and of course, Jim Crow demonstrated the State's opposition to free blacks for decades after.
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Lots of truth there, for sure. Like most political wars, we could play the game all day and night of things we would have done differently. And talk about all the different hopeful outcomes. I would skip all that and go back to 1776, or maybe even a few years earlier and go from there :)
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You wrote an excellent description of "Alfred." He told me some interesting stories over the 8 years I knew him. I believe he was in the Navy for a while, and he also used to ride a motorcycle. And he loved horses. Between his increasing deafness and the loss of his false teeth, conversations with him became extremely difficult over the past year or two (as I'm sure you noticed), so I didn't visit with him as much as I used to. He was a great fan of country music and, oddly enough, he also enjoyed listening to George Beverly Shea recordings.
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