Posted on 08/27/2006 9:13:18 AM PDT by smug
UDC marks another black Confederate grave By Clayta Richards / Chronicle staffwriter
On Sunday afternoon at Old Union Cemetery in southern White County, over 180 people gathered to pay a debt owed nearly 80 years. The group included members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Sons of Confederate Veterans, family and friends, all there to memorialize the service of Pvt. Henry Henderson, a black Confederate soldier.
Henderson was born in 1849 in Davidson County, NC. He was 11 years old when he entered service with the Confederate States of America as a cook and servant to Colonel William F. Henderson, a medical doctor. Records show Henry was wounded during his service, but he continued to serve until the war's end in 1865. He was discharged in Salem, NC, age 16.
After the war, Henry married Miranda Shockley, of White County, TN. The couple raised five children.
"We're here to honor him," said his great-grandson, Oscar Fingers, of Evansville, IN. "I think he would be proud his family has come this far and to know all we have done." Several other family members made the trip with Fingers from Indiana for Sunday's ceremony.
Sons Dalton and Lee received Henderson's first and last Tennessee Colored Confederate pension check upon their father's death in September 1926. The check provided enough funds to bury their father, but not enough to buy a headstone for his grave.
The 60,000-90,000 black Confederate soldiers are often called "the forgotten Confederates," but through the concerted efforts of the Capt. Sally Tompkins Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy along with the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, several graves have been found in the Upper Cumberland and have been or will be marked.
Pvt. Henry Henderson's service was finally recognized and his grave officially marked on Sunday, all to the snap of salutes from the grandsons of fellow Confederates, volleys of gunfire and cannons shot toward the distant hillsides of his final resting place.
Official U.S. government grave markers are available to all Confederate veterans. For additional information, contact Barbara Parsons, 484-5501.
UNsupported opinion is your BEST effort. but your problem is that like "Mr SPIN", you are an EMBARRASSMENT to the other unionists.
free dixie,sw
No, Heyworth got it wrong. It was on my page 615 of Stephens book. "Let 'em root!" was how it read in Stevens' book. Perhaps the following link will get you there: Let 'em root!
Why would that young man be any different than a white 11 yr. old who plays the drums for the march, or who works as a personal valet to an officer? There were plenty of those young men, too, and if I'm not mistaken, I've seen pictures of them in Confederate uniforms. There were white cooks, as well, wearing the uniform, who likely never fired a shot at a Yankee, but they were considered part of the Confederate Army.
PING! God rest your soul soldier.
That's a simple enough question for you to answer, isn't it?
fwiw, i note that only "Mr SPIN" & i will respond to your posts. does that tell you anything about how the other unionists feel about you??
lol AT you.
free dixie,sw
Thank you for the correction. Stephens' book is in two volumes, and I assumed that the online source I looked at represented both volumes. Interesting thing about the link you provide, though; it STILL doesn't say what DiLorenzo says it does. Stephens never puts the words "Root, hog, or die" in Lincoln's mouth.
Try looking in volume TWO.
That he's got it pretty well covered on his own.
My apologies, you have been alerted to the fact that their are two volumes.
Because what you refuse to answer say more about you then what you do answer. It would have been just as easy for you to say "Of not I love the United States" but you can't admit that for one simple reason, you want a reborn Confederacy.
As I child I loved to wear the uniform of a confederate soldier, as an adult I became a United States Marine, the difference is one was play acting and the other was deadly serious. Your love of the confederacy is play acting, pretending that you are a member of a rebellion that failed before you could do anything to save it, instead of trying to fix this nation you've wrapped yourself in the history of the confederacy, but only as you see it,though the eyes of a man child that never matured enough to see the wrongs the confederacy wanted to legalize.
The "root, hog, or die" line is among the most misquoted of Lincoln's stories. Here is an account that gives the context. From "Lincoln's Yarns and Stories", by Colonel Alexander K. McClure.
"Among the stories told by Lincoln, which is freshest in my mind, one which he related to me shortly after its occurrence, belongs to the history of the famous interview on board the River Queen, at Hampton Roads, between himself and Secretary Seward and the rebel Peace Commissioners. It was reported at the time that the President told a "little story" on that occasion, and the inquiry went around among the newspapers, "What was it?"
The New York Herald published what purported to be a version of it, but the "point" was entirely lost, and it attracted no attention. Being in Washington a few days subsequent to the interview with the Commissioners (my previous sojourn there having terminated about the first of last August), I asked Mr. Lincoln one day if it was true that he told Stephens, Hunter and Campbell a story.
"Why, yes," he replied, manifesting some surprise, "but has it leaked out? I was in hopes nothing would be said about it, lest some over-sensitive people should imagine there was a degree of levity in the intercourse between us." He then went on to relate the circumstances which called it out.
"You see," said he, "we had reached and were discussing the slavery question. Mr. Hunter said, substantially, that the slaves, always accustomed to an overseer, and to work upon compulsion, suddenly freed, as they would be if the South should consent to peace on the basis of the 'Emancipation Proclamation,' would precipitate not only themselves, but the entire Southern society, into irremediable ruin. No work would be done, nothing would be cultivated, and both blacks and whites would starve!"
Said the President: "I waited for Seward to answer that argument, but as he was silent, I at length said: 'Mr. Hunter, you ought to know a great deal better about this argument than I, for you have always lived under the slave system. I can only say, in reply to your statement of the case, that it reminds me of a man out in Illinois, by the name of Case, who undertook, a few years ago, to raise a very large herd of hogs. It was a great trouble to feed them, and how to get around this was a puzzle to him. At length he hit on the plan of planting an immense field of potatoes, and, when they were sufficiently grown, he turned the whole herd into the field, and let them have full swing, thus saving not only the labor of feeding the hogs, but also that of digging the potatoes. Charmed with his sagacity, he stood one day leaning against the fence, counting his hogs, when a neighbor came along.
"'Well, well,' said he, 'Mr. Case, this is all very fine. Your hogs are doing very well just now, but you know out here in Illinois the frost comes early, and the ground freezes for a foot deep. Then what you going to do?'
"This was a view of the matter which Mr. Case had not taken into account. Butchering time for hogs was 'way on in December or January! He scratched his head, and at length stammered: 'Well, it may come pretty hard on their snouts, but I don't see but that it will be "root, hog, or die."'"
Lincoln was addressing Mr. Hunter's fears, and it's obvious that Hunter's fears were for the white population and what would happen to them with no more slaves to do the work, cultivate the fields, bring in the harverst, and doing the myriad of other things that the white population was not used to doing for themselves. It was they that Lincoln was addressing. It was the white population, not the former slaves, who would have to "root, hog, or die."
Context is a wonderful thing, is it not?
Here is another version of the story as related by an editor who said he heard it directly from Lincoln shortly after the Hampton Roads conference. "Root, hog, or die" version
I am sure his Service was "Voluntary."
fwiw, there are a LOT of people on FR who know me personally (rather than solely on this forum) and they think your "flailing around" at me is HILARIOUS! every post you make makes you look even more foolish to them.
but PLEASE rant on. like "Mr SPIN" you make "the unionist lunatic coven" look DUMB!
free dixie,sw
Context is a wonderful thing, is it not?
Yes, it is. Particularly since the "root, hog, or die" version of the story said that both blacks and whites would starve, not just whites. Stephens' version talked about the old and infirm and women and children as not being able to take care of themselves.
And did anyone starve to death?
Among the records, for example, are registers, lists, and applications of individual freedmen and families who received rations through the Freedmen's Bureau field offices. The records provide not only the names of people who received relief, but also their places of residence, the names of former owners, the reasons for their condition, and the extent to which the federal government attempted to prevent wholesale starvation and destitution in the aftermath of the Civil War.
It looks like rations were supplied to the former slaves to prevent "wholesale starvation." Had the government gone the way suggested by Lincoln's anecdote, a good many former slaves might have starved.
Funny how none of them have ever dropped me so much as a line saying so in a PM or have told me so on any of these threads.
Let me guess they are too shy to post here?
Tell me STAND, do you agree with this statement?
"That if any one man chooses to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object."
Bwahahahahahaha! Yes, context is a wonderful thing:
Mr. Hunter said something about the inhumanity of leaving so many poor old negroes and young children destitute by encouraging the able-bodied negroes to run away, and asked, what are they-the helpless-to do? Mr. Lincoln said that reminded him of an old friend in Illinois, who had a crop of potatoes, and did not want to dig them. So he told a neighbor that he would turn in his hogs, and let them dig them for themselves. "' But," said the neighbor " the frost will soon be in the ground, and when the soil is hard frozen, what will they do then?" To which the worthy farmer replied, " Let'em root!" Mr. Stephens said he supposed that was the original of' Root Hog, or Die," and a fair indication of the future of the negroes.'
Joseph H. Barrett, Life of Abraham Lincoln, Cincinnati, OH: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1865, p. 827.
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