Civil War Enthusiasm

Why is it the case that a large percentage of people who claim to have had an alien abduction experience live in the West? At the same time, why is it that family stories passed down by a Confederate ancestor tend to involve some kind of meeting with Robert E. Lee? From the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star:

THE FIRST TIME I heard Brooke Snead talk about her father’s days with Robert E. Lee, I felt as if my high school history book had come to life. Mrs. Snead, who died in Fredericksburg last year after 98 robust years on this Earth, was a real daughter of the Confederacy. Her father remembered Gen. Lee, born 199 years ago tomorrow, not as a misty figure from the past, but as the gray-clad commander who asked him to store some drums in April of 1865, just before surrendering his army to Ulysses S. Grant. Next to God speaking to him, Mrs. Snead’s father once said, meeting Gen. Lee was the grandest thing that could ever happen to him. For me, and for a significant but shrinking percentage of Free Lance-Star readers, such generation-jumping tales of “The War” resonate deeply. Born-and-bred Southerners of my age and older have grown up amid the controversy and pride of our Civil War history.

That’s right, of all the things that Lee had to worry about in the days before his surrender at Appomattox Court House, hiding the drums was of the highest priority.

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