1. Last weekend Phoenix had a massive used book sale. I got in on Sunday (when everything was half-price) and got out with at least ten or twelve books for under forty dollars, including a three-quarters complete set of Douglas Southhall Freeman’s definitive biography of Robert E. Lee (it’s missing volume one, but I figured I could find that elsewhere). I realized as I was paying that I had underestimated just how affordable everything was and that I should have bought more. Oh, well.

2. One of the books I discovered was The Prison Life of Jefferson Davis, a first-hand account from the Union army doctor who attended the ex-President of the Confederacy during his imprisonment in Fort Monroe following the war. Here is a rare treasure indeed; a contemporary account of the actual man’s words and actions during a set period of his life.

My conclusion from the book is that, for all the criticisms that can justly be leveled against him, Jefferson Davis was so far above the rank of our present politicians – both as a statesman and as a human being – that he’s practically a different species.

Lincoln was as well, of course, and Mr. Davis has some very complimentary things to say of his late adversary: describing him a honorable Christian gentleman who was only doing what he thought was right. One of Mr. Davis’s biggest points of complaint is the infamous suggestion that he was somehow involved in the plot to assassinate Lincoln.

3. I’m becoming a bit of a fan of Mr. Davis, though partly that’s because I consider him to be a tragic figure. As I think I’ve said here before, he was in a position that maybe one man in a million could have pulled off, and Davis simply wasn’t that man.

He also had the misfortune to be overshadowed by not one but two untouchable giants: his opposite number across the Potomac, who was a certifiable genius and one of the best orators the nation has produced (who also had the historical benefit of dying a martyr’s death before he had to contend with the treacherous waters of reconstruction), and his own chief officer, who was both a legendary commander and one of the most remarkable men in American history

Davis can’t help but suffer from the comparisons, even though he was an impressive man in his own right. Flawed, of course, and he made many mistakes (chief among them his failure to realize just how impossible the southern position really was), but with much to recommend him to our admiration.

4. Reading this has also helped me clarify something in my own mind. I consider the successful reconciliation achieved between North and South following the Civil War to be one of the finest and noblest achievements in our Nation’s history. Men who had been slaughtering one another by the tens of thousands turned around in a remarkably short span of time and embraced one another as brothers, honored one another’s courage, and granted respect to one another’s heroes.

I therefore consider the popular demonization of the Confederacy and the unravelling of this reconciliation that has taken place in the past decade or so to be utterly disgusting. It is the undoing of one of America’s greatest deeds.

There is, to my mind, no excuse for slandering, scorning, and silencing men long dead – men who already lost everything they fought for and who by and large accepted that defeat with grace – in order to compensate for our own failures as a society.

5. Almost any government system can be made functional and just given the right kind of men. The real difference between systems is what kind of men they incentivize.

6. Part of my Lenten sacrifice is removing all YouTube, except if school related. I’ve wasted far too much time in front of internet videos and need to step back to try to regain focus in my life.

7. I recently found a set of math books from the 1870s available for free online. Perusing them, I am impressed by how clearly and logically they present the material. Following the example of Euclid (which the geometry text heavily draws from), they start off by laying out the definitions of the terms being used before explaining step-by-step how to use those concepts. Subject Grammar to Subject Logic, as is proper.

It is a great mystery to me how and why education has declined so far in the intervening decades. Reading these books or the McGuffy Readers, I find a clear progression from basics to advanced, with a clear goal of conveying practical knowledge and mastery. Reading modern textbooks, I find a lot of waste and confusion tending to nothing.

But the strangest and most absurd part is that we, we who can barely read, who cannot do math, and who think of history after the manner of a cartoon, we fancy ourselves the most educated and enlightened generation that ever lived.

Perhaps that is the goal. After all, if we imagine we are educated, we will not seek to learn what might be dangerous for us to know.