Of Guilt and the Late Confederacy

Townhall.com ^ | August 14, 2018 | Bill Murchison

[Kaslin]

Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can't get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can't go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley.

The supposed "nationalist" rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was anything else significant. No one showed up but cops, journalists and anti-nationalist protesters.

Ho-hum. We're back approximately where we were before the Charlottesville, Virginia, disaster the Washington march was meant to commemorate -- a foul-tempered shouting match that ended in death for a bystander hit by a "nationalist"-driven car.

A vocal coterie continues to think all vestiges of the late Confederacy -- especially, statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee -- should be removed from the public gaze. A far larger number, it seems to me, posit the futility, and harm, that flow from keeping alive the animosities of the past.

The latter constituency rejects the contention that, look, the past is the present: requiring a huge, 16th-century-style auto da fe at which present generations confess and bewail the sins of generations long gone. The technique for repenting of sins one never committed in the first place is unknown to human experience. Nevertheless, it's what we're supposed to do. Small wonder we haven't done it, apart from removing the odd Lee statue, as at Dallas' Lee Park. To the enrichment of human understanding? If so, no one is making that claim.

Looks as though we're moving on to larger goals, like maybe -- I kid you not -- committing "The Eyes of Texas" to the purgative flames, now that the venerable school song of the University of Texas, and unofficial anthem of the whole state, has been found culpable.

Culpable, yes. I said I wasn't kidding. The university's vice provost for "diversity" has informed student government members who possibly hadn't known the brutal truth that "The Eyes" dates from the Jim Crow era. "This is definitely about minstrelsy and past racism," said the provost. "It's also about school pride. One question is whether it can be both those things."

Maybe it can't be anything. Maybe nothing can be, given our culture's susceptibility to calls for moral reformation involving less the change of heart than the wiping away of memory, like bad words on a blackboard. Gone! Forgotten! Except that nothing is ever forgotten, save at the margins of history. We are who we are because of who we have been; we are where we are because of the places we have dwelt and those to which we have journeyed.

A sign of cultural weakness at the knees is the disposition to appease the clamorous by acceding to their demands: as the Dallas City Council did when, erratically, and solely because a relative handful were demanding such an action, it sent its Lee statute away to repose in an airplane hanger. I am not kidding -- an airplane hanger.

Civilization demands that its genuine friends -- not the kibitzers and showmen on the fringe -- when taking the measure of present and future needs, will consider and reflect on the good and the less than good in life, not to mention the truly awful and the merely preposterous. To remember isn't to excuse; it's to learn and thus to grow in wisdom and understanding.

In freeing the slaves, Yankee soldiers shot and blew up and starved many a Confederate. Was that nice? Should we be happy that so many bayonets ripped apart so many intestines? No. Nor should we be happy that so many Africans came in innocence to a land of which they knew nothing to work all their days as the bought-and-paid-for property of others.

History is far more complex, far more multisided than today's self-anointed cleansers of the record can be induced to admit. I think the rest of us are going to have to work around them. In the end, I think, and insofar as it can be achieved, we're going to have to ignore them.

[jmacusa]

It would do Mr. Diogenes well to remember the adage “One is entitled to one’s opinion. But not to one’s own facts’’.

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "Once again, WEEKS later, you desperately try to draw me back in to one of these threads.
Get a hobby."

Well... this tread began on the 14th, you posted on the 15th, my response was the 21st, less than a week.

As for "desperately", nothing desperate about it, simply correcting the many Lost Causer lies posted here, which included some of yours.
Please feel free to repeat your lies, or not, as the spirit moves you.

As for hobbies, history is my hobby and correcting liars like yourself one of my greatest joys.

[BroJoeK]

jmacusa: " Maryland’s population for the most part wanted to secede but it’s legislature didn’t.
When Lincoln learned of this he sent troops to make sure they stayed in the building till the mobs who wanted to storm the place could be dispersed."

The 1861 Maryland situation is often confused, and I think deliberately to grind whatever ax is wielded.
But the basics are not that complicated:

1. By 1860 Maryland had the highest number of freed-slaves of any state, North or South, and the fewest percent of slaveholding families of any slave-state except Delaware.

2. In 1860 Marylanders voted for Breckenridge over John Bell's Constitutional Union party by less than 1% margin.
   However, if we consider the other parties as pro-Union, then the total pro-Union vote was 54% versus 46% Breckenridge.

3. On April 19, 1861 a mob of pro-Confederates attacked Union troops in Baltimore, four soldiers died & 12 civilians.

4. On April 29 Maryland's legislature voted 53-13 against secession, four to one.
   Note this was after Fort Sumter but before Confederates formally declared war on the United States.

5. On May 6, Confederates formally declared war on the United States thus satisfying the Constitution's definition of Treason, making it illegal for Marylanders to give aid & comfort to Confederates.

6. In May numerous Maryland officials were arrested & held without trial, including militia captain John Merryman.
   Merryman's case was heard by Marylander Roger Taney then acting as a Federal circuit court judge.
   Taney ruled Lincoln could not on his own deny habeas corpus.
   Lincoln ignored Taney's ruling and Congress eventually granted Lincoln authority -- as did the Confederate Congress for Jefferson Davis.

7. On September 17, 1861, the first day of the Maryland legislature's new session, fully one third of the members of the Maryland General Assembly were arrested, due to federal concerns that the Assembly "would aid the anticipated rebel invasion and would attempt to take the state out of the Union."[36]
   Please note here, the number arrested was 1/3, not 1/2 or 2/3, meaning pro-Confederates were the minority.

8. Overall estimates are that Maryland provided two Union troops for every one Confederate, suggesting that, like other Border States (West Virginia, Kentucky & Missouri) Unionists far outnumbered secessionists.

9. On April 14, 1865 Marylander John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln.

[FLT-bird]

You can obsessively lie on a thread like this all you like. Its not going to change anything. You’re still just an obsessed liar pissing into the wind.

[jmacusa]

Thanks for the clarification.

[jmacusa]

And all you have is ad hominemns. So you lose. Just like the South lost. Nothing is going to change that fact.

[FLT-bird]

All you have is lies, BS, and your constant obsession with me.

Note how you keep trying to draw me back into these discussions weeks and months afterwards. You obviously must not have much going on in your life to want to waste time like this.

[John S Mosby]

They have no life— pretty obvious. Other than the cabal, lol.

Here is Maryland and Lincoln (exhaustive, as well as Lincoln with any other State, or group):

http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-state-by-state/abraham-lincoln-and-maryland/

[jmacusa]

Obsession? Dude I've got about as much an obsession with you as I do with a case of crotch rash. Don't flatter yourself bub. You can go piss up a rope for I care and all the rest of you Johnny Reb wannabes.

[FLT-bird]

Yes obsession. Notice how it’s always your little PC Revisionist cabal that cannot let it go and tries to tag me and others back into these threads weeks and months after the fact? Notice how it’s never the reverse?

[jmacusa]

You have issues dude. Serious ones.

[FLT-bird]

Nope! The one with issues here is you. You after all, are the one who keeps trying to drag me back into this thread. I let it go weeks ago.

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "Notice how it’s always your little PC Revisionist cabal that cannot let it go and tries to tag me and others back into these threads weeks and months after the fact?
Notice how it’s never the reverse?"

I do notice things like that.
I also notice it's always, always our pro-Confederates who start it.
You guys come on a thread big & strong, often in pretty good numbers, you post your accusations again & again, while nobody is here to challenge you.

Then when challengers show up you quickly begin flying off, like flies before a swatter, until there's only one or two of you left to defend your previous lies.

Finally, what began as a great assault on the hated "Ape" Lincoln & his "Black Republicans" ends with a whimper like yours here, complaining about "obsession" and "waste of time".

So, just as in the real Civil War, pro-Confederates always start it, Union defenders end it.
Sadly, unlike the real Civil War, none of you Johnny-wannabe-Rebels has the honor or dignity of a RE Lee to surrender & go home.

You're all more like Jefferson Davis, fleeing to avoid capture in his wife's dress:

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird to jmacusa: "Note how you keep trying to draw me back into these discussions weeks and months afterwards"

John S Mosby: "They have no life — pretty obvious.
Other than the cabal, lol."

Actually, I do still have a life in semi-retirement -- of service, hard work and some risk, and it explains why I'm sometimes gone from a thread for "weeks and months afterwards".

But posters like FLT-bird flatter themselves to think I am focused ("obsessed") on just them.
Instead, I merely review CW threads looking for unanswered pro-Confederate lies, and when I find one I answer it.
So FLT-bird at one point challenged me to see if he could tell more lies than I can correct.
Turns out he couldn't, but it did take me "weeks and months" between other "life" activities, to answer all of his many, many Civil War lies.

And that's what he's still complaining about to this day!

As I've posted now several times: you guys can get rid of us today, all you have to do is stop lying about the Civil War.
Why is that too much to ask?

[BroJoeK]

John S Mosby: "Here is Maryland and Lincoln (exhaustive, as well as Lincoln with any other State, or group):"

I noticed your link says Bell beat out Breckenridge in Maryland by a small margin.
This link says Breckenridge came out on top by less than 1%.

But if we think of the votes for Bell, Douglas & Lincoln as pro-Union votes, then Unionists defeated Breckenridge voters in Maryland 54% to 46%.

Regardless, when push came to shove the votes were much more lopsided -- Maryland's legislature voted four-to-one against secession and Marylanders served the Union army two-to-one over the Confederate army.
When Lee's army invaded Maryland in 1862 they expected to rally large numbers of Marylanders to their side, but it didn't happen.

As in other border states, the solid majority of Marylanders were Unionists.

[rockrr]

And yet here you are...

[FLT-bird]

Only because you are. You stop, I stop. See how simple that is?

[FLT-bird]

As I said, its obvious you don’t have much going on in your life to go miles out of your way over and over again, to try to drag me back into a thread that has been off the board for weeks or months. No self flattery is required to make that observation. Its quite obvious.

[FLT-bird]

uhhh. no, I’ didn’t start it. This thread had been dormant for weeks. Then you and your little cabal tried once again to drag me back into the tired old discussion by tagging me over and over and over again weeks after I had ignored your previous attempts.

Really man, get a life.

[rockrr]

You're a liar. I had stopped. I've been pinged several times back to this thread but my last post here was on the 18th.

You're just a sore loser who insists on having the last word.