THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And make no mistake, any and all efforts to "honor" the Confederacy are trying to glorify treason against the United States.

More than 150 years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, local officials across the Deep South are removing contentious Confederate monuments from prominent perches in busy town squares and government buildings. In August, violence at a rally of white nationalists seeking to preserve a statue of Lee in Charlottesville, Va. — and comments by President Trump opposing its removal — brought renewed national attention to the issue.

Less publicized has been the quiet rise of a new generation of Confederate markers — on private land, in cemeteries, on historic battlefields.

In South Carolina last month, a granite monument dedicated to the “immortal spirit of the Confederate cause” was unveiled on a spot where Civil War enthusiasts gather each year to reenact the Battle of Aiken. In Alabama in August, a gray stone memorial was dedicated in a private Crenshaw County park to unknown Confederate soldiers. In Georgia last year, a black marble obelisk was erected on public land in the mountain town of Dahlonega in memory of the county’s nearly 1,200 Confederate veterans.

In all, more than 30 monuments and symbols to the Confederacy have been dedicated or rededicated since 2000, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. A historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, conducted an inventory of his own state and found that 20 monuments had gone up there over that time — the most since the early 20th century.

The people funding the monuments — often the great-great grandchildren of Confederate soldiers — say they simply want to remember their loved ones and ensure their legacies live on. More controversially, many also promote a revisionist history in which slavery was not a major cause of the war.

“We just want to honor our ancestors,” said Hank Van Slyke, a 62-year-old engineering specialist and commander of a local Sons of Confederate Veterans brigade that put up the monument in Orange. The group is an association of male descendants of Confederate soldiers, and was formed in 1896 to hail the “hallowed memories of brave men” and “record of the services of every Southern Soldier.”

“Throughout history, whoever wins the war and conquers the nation, they get to write the history books,” he said. "We've always studied that we had a good cause and our ancestors fought for what they thought was right.”

Thinking they were right is no justification of treason and they did not fight the good fight so many seem to think. And because they were not crushed and extirpated from thesoil of the United States, like venomous snakes their descendents keep rearing their ugly heads.