Posted on 05/22/2016 6:17:11 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Congress passed a proposal on Thursday that essentially bans Confederate flags from national cemeteries. With a 265-159 vote, the proposal makes it illegal to display the Confederate flag in Department of Veteran Affairs cemeteries – even on individual grave sites that honor soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, except on Memorial Day and Confederate Memorial Day.
Introduced by Rep. Jared Huffman (D) of California, the proposal received support from 84 Republicans and all but two Democrats. Rep. Sanford Bishop (D) of Georgia, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, voted against the amendment, while Representative Betty McCollum (D) of Minnesota voted "present."
Huffman's proposal was added as an amendment to the Veteran Affairs spending bill, and it remains uncertain whether it will become law....
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Irony lost on me? Not when it’s done right.
Nelly is right (about that at at least) - she is entitled to her beliefs. I’ve always puzzled over how someone could cling to fantasy over reality but whatever floats her boat...
Oh, it’s lost on you alright Madame. You don’t see it in yourself. It exudes from you.
Nelly and every other Reb want us “Yankees’’ to undertand and accept the fact the CSA flag is worth every bit of veneration that The Stars And Stripes are(and some of them more so) and it’s here to stay and tough poop if we don’t like it. I’m sorry but I’ll never accept that thing other than what it is, a flag of treason.
War crimes? What kind, particularly?.
Why did the South go to war to preserve slavery?
Could you answer the question I asked you Madame, if you would please? What did the Northern states do to ‘’rid themselves of most of their black populations”’? I’ve never heard that indictment.
Nellie Wilkerson to jmacusa: "I know how the Constitution defines treason.
Secession is not treason, not even close.
Confederates didn’t divide the nation.
They LEFT it — the states that remained in the union were still united.
Secession was partly over slavery, but secession is not war so the Constitutional definition of treason does not apply to secession."
In early 1861, Unionists like outgoing President Buchanan and incoming President-elect Lincoln did not consider Deep South declarations of secession themselves as acts of treason.
They were unconstitutional & unlawful, but not, of themselves, treasonous.
Nor was the formation of an independent Confederacy.
In March 1861, President Lincoln imagined a coexistence of Union & Confederacy, where the Federal Government would continue it's basic functions, such as mail and duties while the Confederacy otherwise governed the Deep South.
Of course, Confederates would have none of that, but point is: Lincoln did not declare secession treason.
However, the word "treason" quickly came into play -- whenever secessionists committed acts of war against the United States.
And those did begin immediately, often even before states made formal declarations of secession, with forceful seizures of dozens of major Federal properties -- forts, ships, arsenals, mints, etc. -- threats against Federal officials and firings on US ships.
They culminated in the Confederacy's military assault on Fort Sumter (April 12, 1861) soon followed by a declaration of war against the United States (May 6, 1861).
At that point, regardless of the Deep South's status, any pro-Confederate in a Union state (which still included Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee & Arkansas) met the Constitution's definition of treason.
So, it might still be argued whether treason became "not-treason" once those Upper South states declared their own secession, however, Border States like Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky & Missouri never did declare secession and so any pro-Confederates in those states certainly did meet the Constitution's definition of treason.
Further, there were large numbers in most Confederate states who supported the Union and so suffered from Confederate persecution for "treason" to the Confederacy.
Many were paid reparations by Congress after the war for their losses.
Bottom line: by the end of Andrew Johnson's administration (1868), the Federal Government had pardoned every Confederate of any charges related to treason, in an effort to help heal the war's wounds and reunite the Union.
Lee's ANV was certainly brilliant in defense.
On offense, such as Antietam & Gettysburg, not so much.
I would compare Lee as roughly equivalent to that other great Virginia general: George H. Thomas.
Sorry, but the US has never been the "America that we once knew."
For examples, my grandparents grew up before automobiles, much less airplanes, but lived long enough to see men walking on the moon.
Thank God, they died long before men walked into women's restrooms, but that's a different matter.
Point is: the US has constantly changed, throughout our history, never the same, never "the America that we once knew".
Granted, not every change has been for the better.
Here in central Pennsylvania I often see Confederate flags on homes and pickups in small towns, usually flying beside US flags.
There's no shame in comparing or contrasting average citizens of the Confederacy to those of Germany or Japan.
There are no statistics to support such claims.
Here's what we do know:
Nellie Wilkerson: "If the north had really wanted to end slavery, they didn't have to send an army to kill Southerners.
All they had to do was quit buying the cotton.
They didn't."
In 1860 "the North" didn't want to end slavery, regardless of what Fire Eater secessionists claimed.
What Northerners did want was to prevent slavery's expansion into Western territories and even (via Dred-Scott) into their own states.
That's why they voted for "Ape" Lincoln's "Black Republicans".
But it was enough to convince Deep South slave-holders to declare secession, form a confederacy and start Civil War against the United States.
Nellie Wilkerson: "The war didn't become "about" slavery until well into the fighting."
For slave-holding secessionists it was always and only about protecting slavery.
But for Unionists, North and South, it was primarily about preserving the Union.
In that effort, freeing the Confederacy's slaves had an obvious strategic benefit.
Yes, there were some Northern abolitionists for whom slavery was always the major evil.
But they were a minority.
What the majority cared about was preserving the Union against a Confederacy which provoked, started and formally declared war on the United States, while supporting military actions in Union states like Maryland and Missouri.
Nellie Wilkerson: "In fact, the South is where America began, and I don't expect you'll like that much."
Actually, the moment of creation of the United States can well be said to be in the Continental Congress, in Philadelphia in 1775, when Massachusetts's leader John Adams nominated and recommended Virginian George Washington to be Commander in Chief of the Continental Army.
Nellie Wilkerson: "Here's a partial list of Southern towns destroyed by the army from the north, most of them by burning..."
What serious historians say is that there was some destruction by both sides, but very few war crimes of the type seen in, for example, the Second World War.
They also say there was great exaggeration of damages in the South after the war, claims which are not supported by contemporary reports.
But we should also mention, there was one crime committed consistently by Confederates, whenever in Northern states or territories, which has no Norther equivalent in the South: Confederates rounded up and sent back for sale in the South any Northern freed-blacks they could grab.
Nellie Wilkerson: "Whatever "sins" the South committed, the same and worse are racked up under the StarznStripes... "
My best judgment is that the sins of one side roughly equated to sins of the other, and that by comparison with any other war you'd care to mention, both sides were quite civilized, gentlemanly and Christian soldiers.
Nellie Wilkerson: "The USA was born in treason and rebellion."
No, not really.
The United States was born from the effort to extend normal rights of Englishmen to those Englishmen who happened to live in North America.
The fact that the English king & parliament reacted poorly, first rejecting colonists, then declaring them "in rebellion" and launching war against them -- that does not negate the fact that what Americans wanted was better union, not separation, from Great Britain.
Nellie Wilkerson: "Under the US flag -- slavery for 89 years... "
It's extremely important to understand that in 1787 slavery was a precondition for Union, that had our Founders rejected slavery in their Constitution, there would have been no United States, period.
Instead, there would have been at least two separate countries, North & South, and more likely, several including the independent nations of Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, etc.
Only by accepting slavery could the essential compromise be reached creating a United States of America.
Nellie Wilkerson: "Remove all items that honor the US government because of its official policy of killing off the buffalo to genocide red people -- the Plains Indians -- by starvation and take their land for white settlers..."
Today's US Indian population, full blooded plus partial (not including Senator Pocahontas) is about five million.
Estimates of North America's Indian populations before Columbus in 1492 range in the low millions.
Of those huge numbers died from European diseases, and the numbers killed in combat with the United States are estimated as:
Nellie Wilkerson: "This is my bottom line, and I don't care what you think of it:
...Nothing -- not secession, not "preserving the union," not ending slavery, not anything -- justified the union's barbaric war on the South."
You've forgotten, haven't you?
Then the Union had no choice except to defeat the military power which represented an existential threat to the United States.
Joe, when my wife’s uncle, a Korean War vet and Depression era kid , a real upbeat, hail fellow well-met kind of guy once said to me in a moment of candor about a year after Obama was in office “I’ve never seen anything as bad as this’’ I said to myself’’ Nobody’s flying the plane. We’re in trouble’’.
Thanks for the reply, no matter the timing.
Poor Nellie - the lies she must tell herself to stay warm at night. It would seem to me that the amount of anger she displays would be unhealthy.
The southern states has successfully left the union with out a shot being fired. Secession was legal, how however Lincoln claimed that all federal properties in the CSA still belonged to the federal government. The south could have easily avoided war had the hot heads in S.C. not fired on Fort Sumter.
Bump!
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