Jacob Wegelin

Regarding recent events in Morehead, Ky., and court clerk Kim Davis who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, a New York Times article mentions “the old politesse and grace,” which supposedly helped people in that town get along in spite of ideological differences. But in the former slave states, what passes for “grace” is often syrup poured over venom.

Since I moved to Richmond from the West Coast eight years ago, upper-middle class white people frequently have told me, “We all get along.” Curiously, I’ve never heard that exact phrase from a black person.

In the lobby of the building where I live are portraits of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson; a print titled “The Romantic South,” which depicts Richmond in 1861; and a Confederate battle flag, laid flat and partially obscured by battlefield artifacts — corroded bullets, tarnished buckles. I would not want any of this changed. It is a private museum, local color, one of the benefits of living in this building, where the management is stellar. I am certain that all tenants here — and potential tenants — are treated equally, regardless of race, ethnicity, creed or sexual preference.

And yet, when I taped a portrait of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to my door, I stepped into a hornet’s nest. Immediately, a neighbor told me that Gen. Sherman was “a terrorist and a war criminal.” Next, a self-described Southern lady told me that Gen. Sherman was “a wicked man.” She added that his portrait is an “image of hate,” and by displaying it, I had transformed myself into “a lightning-rod” for that hate.

This frightened me. Could I expect my tires slashed? Rocks through my window? She reassured me that things would not go that far.

Still, she insisted, Gen. Sherman’s portrait is an image of hate.

In this situation, who hates? And who, or what, is on the receiving end of that hate?

I suggest that the haters are gracious white Southerners, reared from infancy on a narrative that perpetuates their ancestors’ resentment at having been caught in the wrong and defeated. This is the Bible belt, but the Judeo-Christian lesson of repentance — Psalm 51 — has not been taken to heart.

Compare this with Germany, where no one ever displays a Nazi flag and where teaching about the Holocaust is compulsory in all types of schools and at all levels of education.

Today, both the German government and its private citizens are reaching out to welcome 8,000 Muslims in the space of 24 hours.

The refugees are escaping fundamentalist violence in Syria and state-sponsored religious hatred in Hungary.

Repentance from a racist past: In the 70 years since its defeat, Germany has repented more thoroughly and more sincerely than the South has ever repented in the century and a half since its own defeat.

My neighbor told me that Gen. Sherman’s march through Georgia was a disaster for black people as well as white people. In that case, one wonders what the thousands of black men were thinking who risked their lives to serve in his army.

Gen. Sherman was smarter than many of his contemporaries, North and South, including his mentor Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. He was smart enough to refuse the presidency.

In the portrait on my door, his creased face is racked with grief and he sports a black armband in mourning for President Lincoln. Simply as a work of portraiture, it is more interesting than the bland faces framed in the lobby.

Wicked? A terrorist?

Gen. Sherman burst into tears when he learned that South Carolina had seceded from the Union. He understood the devastation that secession would lead to. At the time, he was professor of engineering at Louisiana Seminary of Learning & Military Academy, near Pineville, La.

The moment is documented by David F. Boyd, who taught ancient languages at the same seminary and would serve as an officer in the Confederate army. Mr. Boyd does not seem to have regarded his then colleague and later adversary as wicked. He wrote that Gen. Sherman “cried like a little child” when the news arrived and that he proclaimed, “My God, you Southern people don’t know what you are doing.”

Several white contemporaries who grew up in Virginia have told me they learned nothing about the Civil War in high school. For them, “grace and politesse” meant silence and ignorance.

Until American children are taught better, the narrative of white Southern victimhood will persist and “we all get along” will be a mirage.