Posted on 05/09/2006 8:33:28 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
WASHINGTON -- Back in the 2004 presidential primaries, when Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, suggested that Democrats should be competing for the votes of young men with Confederate flags on their pickups, politicians from both parties rushed to accuse him of repeating a vile Southern stereotype: the redneck with antiquated views on race. < SNIP >
''Howard Dean knows about as much about the South as a hog knows about Sunday," quipped Georgia Senator Zell Miller, the conservative Democrat who supported President Bush. ''Sure, we drive pickups, but on the back of those pickups, you see a lot of American flags. It's the most patriotic region in the country. And you see hard-working individuals that want to instill values in their children, and you see a very, very strong work ethic in the South. He doesn't understand the South." < SNIP >
Many Southerners express outrage at Northern depictions of Confederate-loving Southerners, even as they accede to the idea that the flag has a place in their regional heritage. Only those inside the Southern family circle can truly understand the region's complicated relationship with its own history.< SNIP >
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
A lot of the discontent with Reconstruction had to do with the destruction and poverty that the war brought, with the indignities that Whites percieved in Black empowerment, and with opposition to the sort of measures that one would expect to follow a war. If Washington had bent over backwards to satisfy Southern demands it's not likely that the results would have beem pleasing to the freedmen. To some degree Reconstruction, carpetbaggers and corruption were scapegoats for post-Reconstruction governments that did what ex-Confederates had intended since 1865.
With hindsight things could very well have been differently. We both agree that we learned things from the Civil War and WWI. Civil wars, though, are more emotional and divisive than other wars. And with really emotional and destructive wars between nations, when one nation or coalition defeats another after years of war, the result has more often been like 1919 than 1945. The exhaustion of the Germans after two wars, the generosity and magnanimity of the Americans, whose cities hadn't been bombed, and the necessity of uniting against the Soviet threat, made the aftermath of WWII untypical among great, destructive wars.
Given the racial attitudes of the time, it's hard to see that anything could have worked to both put the country back together and guarantee the rights of the ex-slaves. I'm not sure that we disagree that much, though. It was a real tragedy. The alternatives that we've had in rebuilding after other wars weren't there.
I think what most of us would look for are small-scale resolutions -- local settlements that went against the big trends. The real disenfranchisement didn't come until the 1890s, and so there were particular local conditions -- stray straws in the wind -- that indicated how things in isolated states or counties were or could have been different.
It might make a good topic for study to investigate when cross-racial coalitions develop and when they don't. My guess is that the grand-scale coalition of poor blacks and poor whites isn't a good bet. The left expects too much from large-scale class conflict. It may be more likely that coalitions work when people are less driven by political passions and divisions -- when representatives of up-country Whites and down-country blacks work together without being too aware or militant about their alliance. So the trick may have been to make such cooperation look natural, rather than a rarity.
As you probably know, we here in Ga. can tell a yankee just by the way he/she pronounces "Albany". A yankee will say, "ALLbany, N.Y." If he/she says "ALLbany, Ga.", then we know right off the bat his/her yankeeness. In Georgia, it's pronounced "All-BIN-ny". We also have a rural town named "Cairo", but here it's pronounced "KAYro". HehHehHehHehHeh ;-)
Actually, they could, beginning with Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion.
Jackson also made arrangement to invade South Carolina, in response to their ordinance of Nullification.
Jefferson enforced an embargo of US bottoms on the high seas.
Lincoln and Grant acted under that precedent.
So, you have attacked the Presidents on the 1 dollar bill, the 5 dollar bill, the 20 dollar bill and the 50 dollar bill.
The Southern states had control over their state laws, until they rebelled. That was why, in response to the Taney written "Dred Scott Decision", the Republicans sought to limit slavery to the states where it existed. Legally, by constitutional amendment.
Once the "fire-eaters" rebelled, they gave Lincoln the chance to intervene in what had been state affairs.
The southern fire eaters must have had an IQ of about 3. First, they ran not 2, but 3 Democrat candidates against Lincoln. Second, they didn't even try a legal effort, after they had won a great victory in Dred Scott vs...
Third, if Army officers owed their allegience to their home state, they shouldn't have permitted gypsy officers like Pemberton from PA, or Forrest from KY to serve until their home states had passed some kind of seccession ordinance.
Messed up on all counts. What a bunch of maroons.
Your continuing and ferverent protest against the term "Neo-Confederate" marks you as particularly suitable to wear that badge of dishonor.
Too bad for you!
I submit that Douglas was ingenuous and wrong. That was why southern democrats felt the need to run two candidates against him, as well as against Lincoln.
During the Convention, many agreed that slavery was wrong, but hesitated to push through a ban against it, because it wouldn't pass. On the other hand, they also didn't want to write a permanent injustice into what they hoped would become the Constitution. Instead, they tried to limit slavery where they could. Many members of the Constitutional Convention voted for the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery from the Old Northwest.
That was the precedent that Chief Justice Taney overrulled with Dred Scott. The correction for that error was the amendment that the Republicans supported in their 1860 platform.
Lee supervised the torture of slaves freed by the will of his father in law. Lee wanted to keep the slaves captive for the longest period that he could.
Lee's overseer refused to punish the slaves. Lee hired a magistrate to whip them properly, and then has their wounds covered with brine.
Psychopath pretty much describes it.
At Fort Pillow, some 300 Union soldiers were murdered after surrender by southern soldiers under the command of Bedford Forrest.
Murders.
Your statement that loyalty to home is the highest form of loyalty is ridiculous, and worse.
If that statement of yours was true, the brave young man who supported law, morality, justice, humanity, and culture against the murdering Nazis was wrong to do so.
That is where your statement leads. I don't wonder that you are offended that you would be capable of such evil. I would hope that you wouldn't be.
appears to describe you
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/About%20the%20General.htm
One of the enduring myths that members of the neo-Confederate movement rely on is that Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was a moral and admirable person. This book is part of that hagiography. However, in reality, Lee was a typical slave owning Southern aristocrat of his time. He owned at least a half-dozen slaves in his own name, a woman and her children. (Many slave owners fathered children with slave women, though it is not known if Lee was the father of Nancy's children.) In addition, Lee controlled sixty-three of his father-in-law's slaves as the executor of his will for five years. The slaves had been promised their freedom on the death of their master. During that time Lee had control of the estate he hired them out and used the profits to pay his debts. When a few of the slaves ran away, he had them recaptured. As punishment, Lee had the escapees whipped and salt rubbed into their wounds. In addition to hands-on support of slavery, Lee drafted the part of the Confederate Constitution that guarantees slavery into perpetuity.
Mainstream historians have rejected the myth of Lee the Christian gentleman and role model, opting for realism in portrayals of him. However, some members of the neo-Confederate movement, including the authors of this book,
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1589803108/104-4875558-9869528?v=glance&n=283155
continue to promote claims about the general that are based more in fantasy than reality. It seems apparent that only people who are willing to ignore Lee's support of and participation in America's greatest wrong -- chattel slavery -- can believe that he was a person worthy of admiration.
To the editor of the N. Y. Tribune.
Sir It is known that the venerable George Washington Parke Custis died some two years ago; and the same papers that announced his death announced also the fact that on his deathbed he liberated his slaves. The will, for some reason, was never p391 allowed any publicity, and the slaves themselves were cajoled along with the idea that some slight necessary arrangements were to be made, when they would all have their free papers. Finally they were told five years must elapse before they could go. Meantime they have been deprived of all means of making a little now and then for themselves, as they were allowed to do during Mr. Custis's life, have been kept harder at work than ever, and part of the time have been cut down to half a peck of unsifted meal a week for each person, without even their fish allowance. Three old women, who have seen nearly their century each, are kept sewing, making clothes for the field hands, from daylight till dark, with nothing but the half-peck of meal to eat; no tea or coffee — nothing that old people crave — and no time given them to earn these little rarities, as formerly. One old man, eighty years old, bent with age, and whom Mr. Custis had long since told "had done enough," and might go home and "smoke his pipe in peace," is now turned out as a regular field hand. A year ago, for some trifling offense, three were sent to hail, and a few months later three more, for simply going down to the river to get themselves some fish, when they were literally starved.
Some three or four weeks ago, three, more courageous than the rest, thinking their five years would never come to an end, came to the conclusion to leave for the North. They were most valuable servants, but they were never advertised, and there was no effort made to regain them which looks exceedingly as though Mr. Lee, the present proprietor, knew he had no lawful claim to them. They had not proceeded far before their progress was intercepted by some brute in human form, who suspected them to be fugitives, and probably wished a reward. They were lodged in jail, and frightened into telling where they had started from. Mr. Lee was forthwith acquainted with their whereabouts, when they were transported back, taken into a barn, stripped, and the men received thirty and nine lashes each, from the hands of the slave-whipper, when he refused to whip the girl, and Mr. Lee himself administered the thirty and nine lashes to her. They were then sent to Richmond jail, where they are now lodged.
It was not positively known that he had held any slaves at all under his own name until the rediscovery of his 1846 will in the records of Rockbridge County, Virginia, which referred to an enslaved woman named Nancy and her children, and provided for their manumission in case of his death.
It is not known if the children were his by the slave Nancy, or if they had a different father.
Lee was a complex man, neither more, nor less than a man of his times.
http://fair-use.org/wesley-norris/testimony-of-wesley-norris
Testimony of Wesley Norris (1866)
National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 14, 1866 Wesley Norris It has frequently been represented by the friends and admirers of Robert E. Lee, late an officer in the rebel army, that, although a slaveholder, his treatment of his chattels was invariably kind and humane. The subjoined statement, taken from the lips of one of his former slaves, indicates the real character of the man: (¶1)
My name is Wesley Norris; I was born a slave on the plantation of George Parke Custis; after the death of Mr. Custis, Gen. Lee, who had been made executor of the estate, assumed control of the slaves, in number about seventy; it was the general impression among the slaves of Mr. Custis that on his death they should be forever free; in fact this statement had been made to them by Mr. C. years before; at his death we were informed by Gen. Lee that by the conditions of the will we must remain slaves for five years; I remained with Gen. Lee for about seventeen months, when my sister Mary, a cousin of ours, and I determined to run away, which we did in the year 1859; we had already reached Westminster, in Maryland, on our way to the North, when we were apprehended and thrown into prison, and Gen. Lee notified of our arrest; we remained in prison fifteen days, when we were sent back to Arlington; we were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done. After this my cousin and myself were sent to Hanover Court-House jail, my sister being sent to Richmond to an agent to be hired; we remained in jail about a week, when we were sent to Nelson county, where we were hired out by Gen. Lee’s agent to work on the Orange and Alexander railroad; we remained thus employed for about seven months, and were then sent to Alabama, and put to work on what is known as the Northeastern railroad; in January, 1863, we were sent to Richmond, from which place I finally made my escape through the rebel lines to freedom; I have nothing further to say; what I have stated is true in every particular, and I can at any time bring at least a dozen witnesses, both white and black, to substantiate my statements: I am at present employed by the Government; and am at work in the National Cemetary on Arlington Heights, where I can be found by those who desire further particulars; my sister referred to is at present employed by the French Minister at Washington, and will confirm my statement.
Well first he said this....
MY FELLOW-CITIZENS: When a man hears himself somewhat misrepresented, it provokes him-at least, I find it so with myself; but when misrepresentation becomes very gross and palpable, it is more apt to amuse him.
He laughed off how Douglas had misrepresented what he said and then he went on....
I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.
As I have pointed out so did Lincoln that The founding fathers believe that all men are equal and have the same basic rights, But what did a southerner believe about what The founding fathers thought on slavery....
Brooks,(Congressman from South Carolina) the man who assaulted Senator Sumner(Republican) on the floor of the Senate, and who was complimented with dinners, and silver pitchers, and gold-headed canes, and a good many other things for that feat, in one of his speeches (Brooks) declared that when this Government was originally established, nobody expected that the institution of slavery would last until this day. That was but the opinion of one man, but it was such an opinion as we can never get from Judge Douglas or anybody in favor of slavery in the North at all. You can sometimes get it from a Southern man. He said at the same time that the framers of our Government did not have the knowledge that experience has taught us-that experience and the invention of the cotton-gin have taught us that the perpetuation of slavery is a necessity. He insisted, therefore, upon its being changed from the basis upon which the fathers of the Government left it to the basis of its perpetuation and nationalization.
A southerner believed that Slavery would have ended except for the invention of the cotton gin and that because of the Cotton gin slavery would have to be continued for all eternity, but that same Southerner also believed that the founding fathers expected that slavery would not last as long as it did. But what did Douglas himself think of the vision of the founding Fathers.....
"I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal-equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.
Even Douglas agrees with me that The founding Fathers meant for slaves to be free as fast as circumcstances should permit.
A nation of laws or a nation of men? Douglas himself believed that the men that wrote The Constitution The men that made the law of the nation believed that slavery would end...
And so did Lincoln....
That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles-right and wrong-throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. I was glad to express my gratitude at Quincy, and I re-express it here to Judge Douglas-that he looks to no end of the institution of slavery. That will help the people to see where the struggle really is. It will hereafter place with us all men who really do wish the wrong may have an end. And whenever we can get rid of the fog which obscures the real question-when we can get Judge Douglas and his friends to avow a policy looking to its perpetuation-we can get out from among that class of men and bring them to the side of those who treat it as a wrong. Then there will soon be an end of it, and that end will be its "ultimate extinction."
free dixie,sw
laughing AT you!
free dixie,sw
post your PROOF of this. (you CANNOT as it did NOT happen!)
it's just another LIE, posted by a victim of the LUNATIC extreme of the DAMNyankee LEFT.
are you REALLY dumb enough to believe that BILGE, or are you HOPING someone else will believe it???
free dixie,sw
that is FACT.
are you REALLY ignorant enough to believe this DAMNyankee outright LIE????
free dixie,sw
what he posts is mostly FICTION and/or PROPAGANDA, which is so extreme that it wouldn't fool a smart 3d grader. obviously, he either is a 1/2-wit OR he HOPES his readers are.
free dixie,sw
or do you hope someone else IS that ignorant????
free dixie,sw
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