Dalton

Leaving Andersonville National Historical Park in central Georgia mid-afternoon on the Fourth, I drove west across Georgia on Highway 26 before turning north on Interstate 85/75 to drive to the Tennessee border so I could tour the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Civil War battle sites the next day.  At Ellaville on the highway to the west I came across a Rebel sentry guarding a raft of Amrrican flags planted in the city square for the Fourth.

A few miles further west I stopped at the town hall square in Buena Vista to read the myriad monuments on its grounds. One ballyhooed the "Poet and Confederate Hero, author of the Great Poem 'All Quiet on The Potomac Tonight'"Thaddeus Oliver, who died in 1864 during the war at age 38, and another was proudly dedicated by the Marion County High School class of 1971, the first "intergrated" class as mandated by federal legislation.

Far north in Dalton I encountered a statue of Confederate General Joseph Johnston downtown, who harassed Sherman's army on its drive from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and then again after Sherman's March to the Sea that made Georgia howl and, basically, made the morally bankrupt Confederacy lose the war as the Union eastern armies manned the trenches outside of Richmond and Petersburg.

On the top of a hill just west of downtown Dalton was a cemetery with a small, lonely part enclosed as the Confederate Cemetery, with a Rebel sentinel watching over 425 graves of Confederate soldiers and four unknown Union soldiers, victims of nearby battles.  Meanwhile at the Whitaker County Courthouse, acres of American flags were planted on its lawn and along the main avenue, with no tanks in evidence as the proud banners waved gently in the cooling breeze.