Sir, – With reference to the above, I commend to you the words of Frederick Douglass, former slave, social reformer, inspiration and friend of Abraham Lincoln in For Something Beyond The Battlefield: Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War (1894).
“Fellow Citizens, I am not indifferent to the claims of a genuine forgetfulness But whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.” – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Donal Kennedy (August 23rd) makes the point that Michael Collins was killed in an ambush by someone no less principled than Collins himself, and therefore his death should not be used for partisan political purposes. Yet it is a measure of the loyalty Collins could inspire that one woman I spoke to about the death of Collins, and who had been active in the 1916-23 period and had taken the Republican side in the Civil War, simply could not believe that one of theirs had been responsible for Collins’s death; it had been the act of a Scottish soldier fighting on the Republican side.
That an Irish Republican could have killed Collins was unthinkable. – Yours, etc,