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Lee a villain: 'He may have fought out of love for his homeland but he also fought to keep slaves in the fields it's hard for me to see how he, or really anyone who leads others to fight and kill, is heroic. In an earlier letter, I also argued that it's hard not to consider Robert E. My own counsel to him at that time, having heard his reports of a hostile early reaction but not seen the book, was that white people like us don't get to say that slavery was not all bad. As he remarked when my wife, Linda, and I visited Wendell and his wife, Tanya, on their Kentucky farm last fall, 'It's too late for it to ruin my entire life.' He gave Tanya credit for this witticism. (To wit: Lincoln's 1862 admission: 'My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.') He posits that the term 'slavery' is equally applicable to the life circumstance of some people today, including 'highly paid professionals who cannot escape work they consider demeaning or destructive.'īerry stakes out these positions defiantly and with conviction, shrugging off the possibility of a hostile, maybe even legacy-damaging response. Berry decries slavery while arguing that the motivations of the South were not all malevolent, just as those of the North were not all noble. 4, as opposed to the blowback he got from early readers, has actually been mostly positive, the book is decidedly not an exercise in public relations. While Berry says the reaction so far to The Need to Be Whole, out Oct. They are asking me to lay aside my old effort to tell the truth, as it is given to me by my own knowledge and judgment, in order to take up another art, which is that of public relations.'

They are not asking me for my most careful thoughts about what I have learned or experienced. 'But I wonder,' Berry continues in response to his friends' concerns, 'if they have considered well enough what they have asked of me, which amounts to a radical revision of my calling. affirmed, obeyed, and suffered the need to defend his homeland and his people.' He's also noted that General 'Stonewall' Jackson 'thought slavery immoral never owned a slave.' And he is just about to delve deeper into the complexity of the Confederate cause. Lee as 'one of the great tragic figures of our history,' who 'more prominently than anyone else. By this point in the book, Berry has described Confederate General Robert E. He says that 'now that I am old'-Berry turned 88 on August 5-his friends feel 'that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor, and they would like me not to stir up trouble for myself.' 'In conversations with friends peripheral to the making of this book over several years, I have received a number of warnings of the retribution that will surely follow any interest that I may show in understanding the Confederate soldiers, or any revelation of any sympathy that I may feel for any of them, for any reason,' he writes just shy of the book's halfway point. 'People of some experience and self-knowledge know that the contest between right and wrong is perennial in the soul of every human, and that right and wrong cannot be geographically divided.'

He recounts the collective advice in the pages of the new book that prompted it, The Need to Be Made Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, about race relations, the Civil War, and a whole bunch of other things that Berry has been writing about for decades.

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