Twilight of the Firebrand

The past has made an impression on Montgomery. The city's air reverberates with dead glories and brags, old rhetoric, old songs gusting out of the tribal ^ memory. The state capitol amounts to a sort of truculent shrine. A memorial to the Confederate dead stands on its grounds. "When this historic shaft shall crumbling lie," begins a grandiloquent inscription carved in the stone, "In ages hence, in woman's heart will be/ A folded flag, a thrilling page unrolled,/ A deathless song of southern chivalry."

Jefferson Davis stood on the west portico to take his oath as President of the Confederacy in...