Wrapping-up Ben Stein's Article

Here's Ben Stein's concluding remarks:

"The Civil War was our bloodiest conflict, but also the densest concentration of courage ever shown on this continent. And nowhere is this most precious American quality-courage-more fittingly memorialized than on our Civil War Battlefields. Shiloh and Gettysburg, and – saddest of them all - Franklin and Lookout Mountain, and Vicksburg and Upperville and a thousand other battlefields I have never seen make us think more about the courage and sacrifice of Americans on both sides than any other monument or memorial.


The preservation of these battlefields is partly because of their beauty. Partly it is because they are a respite from the relentless strip-malling and subdividing of America. But mostly the battlefields tell us something we need to know about us, and about our nation, and this is something we need to know now more than ever, as we are under attack by anew enemy who believes we are weak and cowardly.

The Civil War battlefields tell us that we are a nation of heroes and that no matter what the struggle, no matter how difficult or long, if we truly believe in the cause, we will fight it out until the end. Our battlefields inspired us to fight the Nazis, to fight the Japanese, to win the Cold War, and now they will inspire us to fight and win the war of the terrorists against all decent people.

In a real sense, the battlefields we preserve pay us back by preserving us and this great country that God has blessed so abundantly. As I say, courage is the primary, indispensable element of a people and a nation. America’s Civil War battlefields are where that courage is best memorialized. Let’s keep them, and keep them glorious and beautiful, keep them above commerce. And let us always remember that the courage that Americans have is a gift from God, and that when we preserve memorials to it, we are thanking God. The battlefields we seek to save are reminders of gifts from God that will save us if we invoke them, even now, one hundred and forty years after Pickett’s Charge.

That’s it. That’s my speech to the Civil War Preservation Trust. And now I have to leave."

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, and economist in Beverly Hill and Malibu.

I'll resume posting my Great Grandfather's Civil War journal entries on my next several posts.