The Renegade's Return: A Confederate Exile's Seattle Confession
Decades after the Civil War, an expatriate recounts his painful realization of displacement while watching the American flag from across a border.
Years after the war, a group of men sat in a room in Seattle, the talk drifting to the condition of the country. Growing excited, the men denounced the Government at Washington. One after another gave expression to his feelings. The speaker, turned to one of the men and asked, 'What do you say about it, John?'
The person addressed had sat for some minutes with bowed head. Lifting his head, he replied, 'I have this to say: Let the Republican party do the worst it can; let the Republicans do fifty times worse than they are doing, and then we shall have the best government any people in the world ever had. We went through the war together, but when it ended our ways parted. You remained and took up the burdens and duties of peaceful life in your old homes. I took a different course. When all was over, I reached Cuba, and then went to London. I took a notion to travel, and for four years I wandered over Europe. When one morning I was at Alexandria, and, rising early, I strolled down toward the quays, and looking out over the bay, I saw floating in the sunshine the handsomest thing that ever floated, the old Stars and Stripes. And I felt in a way that I never before felt: there is my flag. I had followed it up the heights of Chapultepec; it had waved over my home. In the momentary rush of feelings it was again my flag, and the dearest and most beautiful thing upon the earth. But all was gone as soon as it came, and for the first time I realized, in all its terrible force, the fact that I had no flag, no country, but was an outcast and a wanderer over the earth. I came back over the sea. I had no part in this broad domain, no right to set my foot on any part of the United States, but I said the rest of my life shall be lived in sight of it, even if I may never more have right in it. So I came to Clifton, just over the border. At last—but oh, how long in coming to me!—came the amnesty act, and I got over the river and took it, begrudging even the minutes that intervened before I could again say, 'It is my flag and my country.'
He ended, and for some minutes not a person present ventured a word, but moistened eyes and labored breaths silently attested that more than one present could, in heart at least, find warrant for the longings of John C. Breckinridge; for be it was of whom I have written.'
“For the first time I realized, in all its terrible force, the fact that I had no flag, no country, but was an outcast and a wanderer over the earth.”
This reflection on political polarization and the deep, often irrational, psychological need for a 'home' captures a uniquely American strain of nostalgia. Even in 1888 Seattle, amidst a booming frontier economy, the shadow of the Civil War’s bitter division loomed large, reminding us that civic unity is rarely permanent.
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