How I Learned to Hate Robert E. Lee (Compares Tea Party to pro-slavery expansion CSA fire-eaters)

Yahoo! News / The Daily Beast ^ | January 21, 2014 | Christopher Dickey

[2ndDivisionVet]

All the time I was growing up in Atlanta, the face of Robert E. Lee was taking shape on the side of an enormous granite mountain just outside town. He loomed like a god above us, as much a presence as any deity, and God knows he was accepted as such. It was only much later that I began to question his sanctity, and then to hate what he stood for.

When I was in elementary school, the face of Lee on Stone Mountain was a rough-cut thing, weathering and wasting as the generation that began it in 1912—a generation that still included veterans of the Civil War 50 years before—gave way to generations with other wars to focus their attention.

Then the carving began again in 1964 in a centennial haze of romantic memories about the Old South and frenzy of fear and defiance provoked by the civil-rights movement. As Martin Luther King Jr. was marching on Washington, Confederate battle flags floated above state houses and sculptors using torches began again to carve the granite features of Lee, along with Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, taking up three vertical acres on the mountain’s face.

It is this sort of image—the bas-relief nobility of memorial sculpture—that Michael Korda chisels through in his massive and highly readable new one-volume biography: Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee. But, as Korda clearly recognizes, Lee himself could be almost as impenetrable as stone.

He was not cold. He was very loving with his wife and many children. He enjoyed flirting (harmlessly, it seems) with young women. He had the self-assurance of a Virginia aristocrat, albeit an impecunious one, and the bearing of a man born not only to be a soldier, but to command....

[Hulka]

Not at all.

No conflict between that act and the Congressional Record.

The Congressional Record talks about the president communicating with the states and that process acknowledges separation between the states and the federal government. No mention of ambassadors as none were necessary, as the Sec State was the conduit of communication between the president and the states.

Cheers.