Posted on 12/16/2023 9:27:14 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
1/ Within the next several days, barring intervention from Congress, the Biden Regime, in violation of the law, will remove the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, commissioned to celebrate the reconciliation of North and South.
@blueandgray1864 @oilfieldRando
2/ The memorial is considered the masterwork of the renowned Jewish-American sculptor Sir Moses Ezekiel (a former Confederate soldier who was described by his biographer as “adamantly opposed to slavery") who is buried at its base.
3/ Ezekiel, knighted by the King of Italy, was so dedicated to North-South reconciliation that he would later host commanding Union General Ulysses S. Grant at his studio.
4/ Yet in the wake of the George Floyd moral panic, this memorial was scheduled for removal, though its removal is being done in violation of several federal laws and the clear text of the legislation, which excludes graves.
5/ As former Democrat Senator and Navy Secretary Jim Webb said:
“What was it that Union Army veteran McKinley understood about the Confederate soldiers who opposed him on the battlefield that eludes today’s monument smashers and ad hominem destroyers of historical reputations?”
6/ In fact, at the time it was constructed, some major Confederate groups opposed it because they opposed the reconciliation it symbolized.
7/ Webb, a Vietnam Veteran, has spoken about taking groups of North and South Vietnamese to the monument to show how the U.S. reconciled successfully after a bitter civil war
8/ 44 House Republicans have signed a letter opposing the removal but every Republican should be on record as opposing this lawless action
9/ But of course, this is never *really* about the Confederacy or “Confederate Statues”. The same spirit animated the recent removal of the statue of Thomas Jefferson from the New York City Council, where it had stood for 187 years.
“The civil war was in my view an attempt at improvement.”
That is an interesting comment.
Unless you view southern secession as an improvement - which I don’t think you do - then you must mean you view the war against the South a northern attempt at improvement.
In what way was the destruction and killings an improvement that could not have been achieved through peaceful constitutional amendments?
I think Lincoln was pretty sure what he intended to do about Slavery. I think the South was pretty sure what he intended to do also. That’s why they left. The fact that he upheld (as you cite) Slavery laws of the land doesn’t tell us his personal views on Slavery. He hated Slavery. Even you know that. Don’t confuse his contemporary racial inequality views with his views on Slavery. Despite the early view, which he outgrew, that blacks were inferior to whites, he still hated the institution of Slavery. Does this ring a bell, “No man should earn his bread from the sweat of another man’s brow”? What Lincoln did was make the hollow words of the founding fathers stick. All men are created equal. The matter of whether or not all men were the same is a separate issue. It took Baptism by Blood for this country to grow up.
Perhaps you can enlighten us as to just what Lincoln was thinking at the moment the bullet ripped through his brain. As the story goes he had recently delivered a speech to the Nation (now reunited) in which he spoke about giving Blacks the right to vote. The demented coward who shot him from behind didn’t like that speech. The point is that neither you nor anyone else has the right to judge Lincoln, because his work was never finished. In fact, his assassination made things that much worse for the South. I like to think today’s world would be very different had Lincoln lived to complete the four years of his second term.
But after many years it was not achieved. Coulda, shoulda, woulda is not the sort of discussion I care to engage in ...However your comments are also interesting...LOL...I also avoid telling people what they "must mean"...Happy holidays and Good night
It sounds like you think Lincoln intended to end slavery one way or another. In his House Divided speech he said as much.
Lincoln knew, the South knew - and you know - Lincoln did not have the super majority of votes needed to abolish constitutional slavery using the peaceful, amendment process.
There was another way to abolish constitutional slavery: violent overthrow by military force.
But Lincoln would need a pretext for war. He found it with the skillful use of the U.S. Navy during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. I meant to say the Fort Sumter Incident.
If you are right, Lincoln deliberately intended to use the military to violently overthrow U.S. constitutional slavery.
Maybe you are right.
My view is based what I learned in school. We were told that the Yankees stole Arlington from General Lee and then polluted the ground around it with dead Yankees so no one in his family would ever want it back. YMMV. Perhaps that was not the intent of the cemetery?
What are they going to do? Say, “Don’t.” like they have on so many other issues?
Why isn’t the House of Representatives halting the removal of the monument?
----------------------------
Passed in Congress in 2021: "Section 370 of the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21 NDAA)".
See: https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/About/Confederate-Memorial-Removal
The monument not being "destroyed"...it is being moved to the "Virginia Museum of the Civil War" (at "VMI") by Glenn Youngkin (VA governor):
https://www.vmi.edu/museums-and-archives/virginia-museum-of-the-civil-war/
You kill 750,000 people allegedly over slavery, but you willingly accept another slave state into the Union?
Hypocrisy much?
The deaths were for money, specifically the wealth flowing into corrupt northern pockets controlling the government, *EXACTLY* like it is right now.
Ukraine is a money laundering scheme for these corrupt bastards, and Hunter Biden's "art" is also a money laundering scheme for this same corruption class controlling the nation right now.
Yeah, he was gonna leave it alone. He said so many times. He even called for the passage of an amendment to guarantee it forever, or until every last state gave it up voluntarily, whichever came first.
And why not? It was producing 72% of his revenue to finance the Federal government.
We may think he was principled, but he wasn't stupid.
Lest you balk and try to equivocate about that, had we stayed as British Colonies, slavery would have been "abolished peacefully" twenty five years before the Emancipation Proclamation during our bloody Civil War.
Don't try to deny that Northern States became wealthy on the slave trade or by exporting the products of slave labor in the Southern States.
You (jeffersondem) are speaking of Tennessee, which was re-admitted to the Union on Jan. 01, 1865 (while the Civil War still raged), after Tennessee had abolished slavery in its State Constitution.
jeffersondem: You are obfuscating!
Regards,
“People fought over the same things people always fight about - money. ie tariffs, trade policy, federal government spending on infrastructure, etc.”
Wrong. We’ve been having arguments and debates about those things ever since the founding. Only slavery got people impassioned enough to start shooting and killing each other. The States Rights argument was about the rights of the states to spread slavery into the western territories, Kansas-Nebraska and all that.
I don't agree with that because if that's your argument then everything that was done prior to passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 or even the Civil Rights movement in the 60s which ensured Blacks the right to vote was "hypocritical" since most people or a large minority could not vote.
That's a modern understanding....ie to be a "real" Democracy all adults must be able to vote. That is a standard no country on earth met in the late 18th century and hardly any did even in the late 19th century. So yes, even though the franchise was limited in ways nobody would believe legitimate today, the states were still far more democratic than most in the mid 19th century. So yes, consent of the governed - as understood at the time - was perfectly legitimate.
Sure they are but they were a tiny minority of Southerners - as were Northerners who fought for the Confederacy. Had I been a Northerner at the time, I would have fought for the Confederacy.
The US was a contract between 13 sovereign states from its founding. There is no "whole people" or "nation". The people's sovereignty is expressed through their states. Each state is its own sovereign community as the federalist papers make quite clear. Each state ratified the constitution. No state which had not ratified it was bound by it.
What Lincoln intended to do about slavery was pass a constitutional amendment that would have expressly protected slavery effectively forever.
He also intended to pass strengthened fugitive slave laws.
He just wanted to make sure no new states that allowed slavery would come in so that his section of the country and the special interests backing his party would dominate the US Senate and White House like they already dominated the US House of Representatives. He wanted to make sure the Southern States could no longer seriously oppose his massive tariffs and government gravy train which benefitted his region and the special interests who supported him.
And yet slavery was abolished via peaceful means everywhere else in the Western World during the 19th century. Most got rid of it via various compensated emancipation schemes. Say, who opposed compensated emancipation when it was proposed in the US? Hint: it was not Southerners.
No he’s not. He’s talking about West Virginia which was admitted as a state that still allowed slavery during the war.
Wrong. Only money got people impassioned enough to start shooting and killing each other. The North was perfectly willing to protect slavery effectively forever by express constitutional amendment. The Southern states refused.
IF states rights was only about the right to spread slavery, then why secede? In seceding the Southern states were giving up all claims to the Western territories and thus all chance to spread slavery there. Your arguments don't hold up.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.