Civil War to Civil Rights, nothing much civil about it.

I was juggling my coffee cup from hand to hand trying not to burn myself. The paper walls of the cup were too thin and the coffee was too hot. Still; as we were in the shade and it was just nine o’clock the warmth felt good as Lina and I walked across the parking lot of a Jonesboro Arkansas McDonald’s. The tour bus doors were still closed, meaning the driver hadn’t gotten there yet. It was still fifteen minutes before our morning coffee break was over anyways. A small knot of men, mostly retired prairie farmers stood in a semi circle around a white shield shaped plaque. It stood on a strip of grass that ran to a few trees under which were clustered three or four white tombstones. They were slightly tilted their inscriptions faded with age.
"Was that the Civil War?" asked one of the men. I glanced at the plaque. "Soldiers of the War for Southern Independence" it read. I stopped and glanced at the headstones again. I took a pull on the coffee cup. "Yep." I said putting on my historian hat. "But don’t use the C word too loudly." "Aw c’mon. They are still worried about that after all these years?" Said one of the men. "Then why is that grass cut and this plaque still has the look of fresh paint? Don’t look too forgotten to me." "I was hoping to see a Civil War battlefield." Said another guy. "Look around." I said taking yet another sip of coffee and making a sweeping motion with my arm. "Here? In a fast food parking lot?" "Yes, here in Jonesboro Arkansas. You think they carried those boys here to bury them?" I deliberately dragged the sound of the word bury out. Burry like the word hurry. Like they might say it here. "They may as well have forgotten them. They died for nothing." Said an older man on the edge of the group. He kicked at the leaves lying on the pavement as he said it. "They were fighting for slavery." I walked a ways closer to the graves. I studied the names on the stones. After a few seconds I turned and walked back toward the group. "I guarantee you one thing," I said breaking the silence. "None of those boys owned any slaves. They were privates 18 to 20 years old. I’d be very surprised if any of them ever got farther from home than the county seat, before the war anyways. I guess you could argue they died for nothing. But, I think what they fought for was to preserve what they knew. Isn’t that what most men fight for?" "You said this was a battlefield?" said the guy who’d brought the subject up earlier. "Uh huh, battle of Jonesboro. Late in the war I think. Around the time Sherman burned Atlanta. The date on the stone says August 31 1864, I guess that was it. I really don’t remember the exact date. I know the Union won." My four years of history in University and a lifelong fascination with the Civil War were paying off. Well sort of, no one was actually paying me. "Then they really died for nothing, the war was virtually over." It was the older guy again. He half turned towards me his hands in his pockets his jacket open. "Well I guess you could say that about everyone who died in the whole war. It has, after all been called The Lost Cause." My head swiveled as another voice asked "Why was it called that?" "I guess you have to consider the odds. When the war started the north had more than twenty million people, the confederacy less than 9 million and four million of those were slaves and there was no way Jeff Davis was going to arm them. As well the entire Confederacy produced only one quarter of the manufactured goods that was produced in New York State alone." "Whoa, then why do it? Why go to war." Said another guy. "Well these are proud people. Just look around you. You see nearly as many stars and bars as stars and stripes. Check out the flags of Tennessee and Arkansas. They look familiar. They look like the confederate flag. Before the war began a guy by the name of John Brown took over the town of Harper’s Ferry he was going to free the slaves and start a war to end slavery. It the end he wound up being hung for treason. He didn’t say a thing from the gallows but he left a note that said something like this (paraphrasing) The sins of this guilty nation will never be cleansed but with blood. I think he knew then that the only way to make so great a change was to inflict this big a defeat."
"You think the South still hasn’t forgiven the North for Sherman’s drive to the sea?" "Forgiven, yes. Forgotten no. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg the survivors of both sides met on the battlefield. They camped there several days renewing old acquaintances and visiting fallen comrades. The veterans were old men. The fallen were forever frozen in time. The last day the veterans of both sides reenacted Pickett’s charge where thousands of young Confederates lost their lives. On that day fifty years earlier the Southern troops let out a moan as the Union boys opened up on them. A half century later the Union veterans let out a moan as their aging foes crested the hill. The Union men broke their line that day and rushed their one time enemies. When the two sides met it was not blood that flowed but tears as the two sides embraced. These men knew just what the other side had endured, the disease that killed more men than shot. The starvation and loneliness. The silent tombstones that had once been friends and brothers. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, I suspect there are damned few politicians too. I suspect that the survivors buried their ideology with their fallen comrades."
"What do you think these rebel boys would have thought of a Black President?" asked one of the farmers. Farmers are a philosophical bunch, I guess it comes from many long hours hunched over the wheel of a tractor with nothing to do but think. I like that about farmers I enjoy their company. "I suspect that the Union boys wouldn’t have differed much in that regard. An African American historian said once that the only thing the Slaves won was freedom. They had nothing and couldn’t even vote. They traded a Civil War for a much slower fight for Civil rights and there wasn’t much civility in either." "Huh." Said the older gentleman. "I guess we did see a battlefield. Do you think the war’s really over?" The driver had returned and opened the door of the bus we began to file aboard. I took another drink of coffee. As we passed the crooked fading stones I touched my hat brim. There really was a long ways left to go. "Only for them." I said softly. "Only for them."