My friend Walt Grayson started this.
Walt is a character if Mississippi ever had one. Living in the Jackson area, he does features on people and places all over the Magnolia State for a television station. He writes books on the people he has met, places he has found, pictures he has taken. (Find his impressive work on amazon.com.)
I was the Grayson family’s pastor in my first church following seminary, in Greenville, Mississippi, in the late 1960s. Walt was a teenager, his father was a deacon, and his mom a mainstay in the church. Precious people.
“Joe,” Walt messaged me last night, “you need to get to know Gordon Cotton, retired curator of the Old Capitol Museum, Vicksburg.”
Walt knows of my interest in Civil War stuff. I had just told of my son Neil giving me “Seen the Glory” by Hough, a novel on Gettysburg.
The Old Capitol Museum is in Jackson, so I assume he means Mr. Cotton has retired to Vicksburg. Which is not a bad place for anyone interested in the War Between the States to dwell.
“You remember Daniel Pearl? Reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was killed in Pakistan following 9/11.” I do indeed.
“Pearl was researching something and he and Gordon spent a lot of time talking on the phone. They talked about everything, not just history. Including religion. And one day, Daniel Pearl told Gordon he did not believe in hell.”
“Gordon Cotton said, ‘If you don’t believe in hell, then where is Sherman?'”
Walt said, “That became the headline for Pearl’s article in the Wall Street Journal the next day.”
That is a reference to General William Tecumseh Sherman whose “March to the Sea” helped to bring the war to a close by killing untold numbers of southerners. When he said, “War is hell,” Sherman spoke as a practitioner of the art.
If there is no hell, then Sherman got off scot-free, seems to be Cotton’s point. Debatable, I suppose, since it was war-time and God alone can sort out who is responsible for what during those times of mass killings and pandemic cruelties.
If there is no hell, then a lot of people have worked the system.