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Brian O'Neill: Before donning Confederate regalia, understand the battle

Matt Rourke/Associated Press

Brian O'Neill: Before donning Confederate regalia, understand the battle

If you heard a rumbling in the hills this month, that may have been the sound of Western Pennsylvania’s Civil War veterans turning over in their graves.

A couple of students at Plum High School, rebels without a clue, were sent home Dec. 9 after refusing to remove Confederate regalia.

We live in a nation blessed with broad rights to free expression so I’m not sure booting these kids was the best move — though I understand the reasoning. In a letter to parents, Superintendent Timothy S. Glasspool said the attire was disrupting the normal school routine and that there’d be no toleration of racially charged symbols that profess hatred or oppression.

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Clearly, some teens don’t appreciate where they come from. The ultimate sacrifice was made by Western Pennsylvanians not much older than them in the 1860s. In what remains America’s bloodiest war, nearly 26,000 men from Allegheny County alone took up arms against secessionists intent to defend a way of life inextricably tied to the enslavement of their fellow Americans. A tenth of our county’s soldiers never came home. 

The war may have begun only to restore the Union, but those living this side of the Mason-Dixon Line, in a commonwealth then bordering on three slave states, saw the more righteous cause early on.

Judge William Wilkins, addressed “one of the largest and most imposing demonstrations ever witnessed in Allegheny county,” according to the July 25, 1862, Pittsburgh Gazette. The gathering in what was then Allegheny City and is now the North Side’s West Park had “every avenue leading to the Common ground thronged with persons of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Judge Wilkins noted that the loyalty of “Western Virginia” — the Virginia counties that stayed true to the U.S.A. and would become the state of West Virginia June 1863 — had lessened the peril of PIttsburghers living at the strategic head of the Ohio River. But the enemy was unconquered.

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“If the Union is broken up,” Judge Wilkins told the crowd, “you would have over you a reckless, despotic rule of perpetual hatred and hostility, resting on the malign basis of slavery, and repugnant to all the feelings and pursuits of the free race of Pennsylvania.”

Fired-up county men enlisted by the thousands. Among them was Alexander McCandless George. He was born in Plum and enlisted in Company D of the 139th Pennsylvania Volunteers in August 1862, following his older brother John into the fight. Alexander George would not live to see his 22nd birthday.

I spent an enjoyable decade of my working life in southern Virginia, so be assured none of this is meant to reignite a horrific regional war. But it’s curious that young Pennsylvanians aren’t as steeped in the heroism of common soldiers as Southerners are. We won.

Much of what I’ve shared here is gleaned from a book by Christopher George, a fourth-grade teacher at Upper St. Clair’s Eisenhower Elementary School. He’s the great-great-grandson of the Plum-born Pvt. John George and great-great-grand nephew of Alexander George. His book is an account of the 123rd Pennsylvania Volunteers, with whom his ancestor served.

“When I was in Gettysburg this summer for my nephew’s wedding,” Mr. George said in an email response to my inquiry, “I noticed someone flying a rather large Confederate flag right on the main road leading to town.

“I guess that’s the beauty and burden of the freedom of expression.”

More than a third of the 123rd Pennsylvania Volunteers, who fought for that freedom among so many others, were teenagers in the summer of 1862. The average age was less than 23.

Pvt. Alexander McCandless George died little more than three months after his enlistment, succumbing to typhoid in a Washington, D.C., hospital. He’d contracted it burying the dead after the three-day Second Battle of Bull Run in late August 1862. Some 14,000 Union and 1,000 Confederate soldiers were killed.

“I’ve always wondered,” Mr. George wrote, “what it must have been like for John Armstrong George, knowing that his mother had died in 1858 and his brother had just died ... as he watched in horror and waited for his regiment to be ordered forward into the killing fields at the Battle of Fredericksburg.”

Wear such heroism if you dare, kids.

Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or on Twitter @brotheroneill

First Published: December 18, 2016, 3:33 p.m.

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