Which roots from the word confederate

An associate in an unlawful act or plot; accomplice. A supporter of the Confederate States of America. Of or having to do with the Confederate States of America. To form into or become part of a confederacy.

United in a confederacy or league. Of the Confederacy. Any Southern supporter of the Confederacy. To unite in a confederacy; ally. A member of a confederacy. An accomplice in a plot. Of, relating to, or united in a confederacy.

Banded together ; allied. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. We shook hands, and I made my way out the door. Before getting back in my car, I walked across the street, to another burial ground, this one much smaller. There are far fewer tombstones than at Blandford. There are no flags on the graves. And there are no hourly tours for people to remember the dead.

There is history, but also silence. After my visit to Blandford, I kept thinking about the way Martha had flipped over the Memorial Day flyer, the way her face had turned red. But my interest had been piqued. I wanted to find out what Martha was so ashamed of. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me. The entrance to the cemetery was marked by a large stone archway with the words our confederate heroes on it.

Maybe a couple hundred people were sitting in folding chairs around a large white gazebo. Children played tag among the trees; people hugged and slapped one another on the back. Dixie flags bloomed from the soil like milkweeds. There were baseball caps emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag, biker vests ornamented with the seals of seceding states, and lawn chairs bearing the letters UDC , for the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

William and I stood in the back and watched. The event began with an honor guard—a dozen men dressed in Confederate regalia, carrying rifles with long bayonets. Their uniforms were the color of smoke; their caps looked as if they had been bathed in ash.

Everyone in the crowd stood up as they marched by. Look away! Dixie Land. I glanced around as everyone sang in tribute to a fallen ancestral home. A home never meant for me. Speakers came to the podium, each praising the soldiers buried under our feet. More than a few people turned around in their seat and looked with puzzlement, and likely suspicion, at the Black man they had never seen before standing in the back of a Sons of Confederate Veterans crowd.

A man to my right took out his phone and began recording me. The stares began to crawl over my skin. I had been taking notes; now I slowly closed my notebook and stuck it under my arm, doing my best to act unfazed. Without moving my head, I scanned the crowd again. The man in front of me had a gun in a holster.

A man in a tan suit and a straw boater approached the podium. His dark-blond hair fell to his shoulders, and a thick mustache and goatee covered his lips. I recognized him as Paul C. He began by sharing a story about the origins of Memorial Day. We should embrace our heritage as Americans, North and South, Black and white, rich and poor. Our American heritage is the one thing we have in common. I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed.

And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented. Another speech was given.

Another song was sung. Wreaths were laid. The honor guard then lifted its rifles and fired into the sky three times. The first shot took me by surprise, and my knees buckled.

I shut my eyes for the second shot, and again for the third. That comment was revealing. Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina , in May , when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.

The conditions were so terrible that nearly men died and were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. After the Confederates retreated, Black men reburied the dead in proper graves and erected an archway bearing the words martyrs of the race course.

The first Memorial Day, as Blight describes it, received significant press coverage. But it faded from public consciousness after the defeat of Reconstruction. It was then, in the late s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold.

The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all. Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Confederate cause in the words of its leaders. We know this is a lie, because the people who fought in the Civil War told us so. The Lost Cause asks us to ignore this evidence.

The early s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.

That myth tried to rewrite U. Read: Five books to make you less stupid about the Civil War. After the speeches, I began talking with a man named Jeff, who had a long salt-and-pepper ponytail and wore a denim vest adorned with Confederate badges. The Confederate government had considered the action a hostile act and had acted accordingly. When he saw the Confederate flag in the hands of the Federal officer, he shot him in the breast.

While the winter passed, the Union forces kept receiving enforcements while the Confederate forces had no reenforcements. A descriptive term for the institutions and people of the Confederacy.

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