We’ve given our Scalawag Award to groups before (such as the Ku Klux Klan), but never to any so large or so deserving of our contempt. Recently both the Virginia and North Carolina legislatures voted to apologize for slavery. The nation must regard these apologies as offered on behalf of the people the legislators represent, since as a body they can speak for no one else. Thus their resolutions, cowardly or self-righteous, constitute a cloddish mischaracterization of contemporary Virginians and North Carolinians, who have no cause to apologize to blacks or to the rest of the nation for an institution that was abolished more than 140 years ago.

New Englanders haven’t apologized for the dominant role their ancestors played in the slave trade or for the legalization of slavery in states like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Connecticut freed its slaves only 13 years before the outbreak of the War. Yet the Yankees have apparently set up a statute of limitations that shifts with each passing year, always excluding them from prosecution, never expiring for us.

Acting as both priest and penitent, they have absolved themselves of the sin of slavery, while demanding that Southerners come to confession every day.

Black agitators like the Rev. Jesse and the Rev. Al take advantage of this double standard to solicit contributions from their Northern patrons. They know that whenever they attack Southerners or the Confederate past, left-wing Yankees write fat checks. These so-called civil rights leaders are like the ghouls who creep around battlefields after sunset, stealing coins and watches from the corpses of dead heroes.

Yet such hustlers are not our chief enemies. Those who do us the greatest harm are the genteel fraggers who, when we attempt to defend our people, living and dead, fall behind us and shoot us in the back—folks like the Virginia and North Carolina legislators.

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