Conservatives: Blood, Soil, and Sense.

One of the particulars in the Left's bill of indictment against John Ashcroft is that he once gave an interview to Southern Partisan, a magazine of that region's history and culture, praising it for defending the memories of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.

Living in a world of barbarians, in which Madonna is a kind of Queen Victoria and the Beatles are ancient history, we impose on the past, when we notice it at all, our own priorities. This is a sin academic historians call "presentism," and it is practiced by many academic historians themselves. The present we transpose backwards is usually liberal, which results in such grotesqueries as Gov. George Pataki saying that the Holocaust might have been averted by hate-crimes laws.

In such an environment, the Confederacy makes an inevitable target. Dead slaveowning white men: What worse villains could there be?

Yet the resistance to the nullification of memory itself often goes overboard, in a fashion that is both unhistorical and politically obtuse. The South gives all Americans numerous instances of military brilliance and patient devotion. Many of its leading characters, beginning with Lee, were admirable figures. But the mind of the South had been corrupted, for thirty years before the guns went off, by a political theory that replaced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with an extreme states'-rights doctrine, elaborated by John C. Calhoun. This doctrine was put at the service of the institution of slavery, which the southern political class was determined to justify and extend. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, believed that blacks were descendants of Ham, doomed by Noah's curse to bondage. Alexander Stephens, his vice president, said that the inequality of races was a newly discovered scientific truth, like the circulation of the blood, and that it was the cornerstone of the new nation. No slaveowner of the Founding-not Washington, not Jefferson, not Madison-believed such things. All the virtues of the Confederacy were harnessed to pernicious, and un-American, innovations.

For accidental historical and political reasons, tolerance of pro-Confederatism has been the in-house political correctness and intellectual affirmative action of the conservative movement. It does us a disservice. The proper eulogy of the Confederacy was written by T. S. Eliot, of the losing royalists in the English Civil War. "We cannot revive old factions / We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum . . . / Whatever we inherit from the fortunate / We have taken from the defeated / What they had to leave us-a symbol: / A symbol perfected in death." The symbols we should honor today reflect not the Confederate cause, but the bravery of its mistaken adherents.