Posted on 04/30/2017 9:49:31 PM PDT by pboyington
The War against the Confederacy is a War against America.
The War against the Confederacy is a war on American history.
The War against the Confederacy is a war against all of us and a war on America’s institutions.
The War against the Confederacy is being waged by militant leftists, big government lackeys, aggrieved snowflakes and the hate America crowd.
Since a psychotic young man, who owned a Confederate flag, killed nine parishioners at a black church in South Carolina in June of 2015, the radical left, big government crowd in this country is doing something they’ve wanted to do since 1861, completely eradicate the Confederacy and every last vestige of its history.
For two years, the nation has watched as Confederate flags have been ripped down from city halls and state capitol buildings and have been banned from selling on Amazon, although one may freely purchase a Nazi, Soviet, Italian Fascist or a North Korean flag on the website. The harmless TV show, the Dukes of Hazzard was permanently cancelled by TV Land, even though it is one of the most popular shows in TV history. The reason being that the main characters drove a car named the General Lee that had a Rebel flag on the roof.
Yeah, those Duke Boys were some real racists.
It would be laughable if it wasn’t true. But, this is America in 2017, where cultural Marxists are running wild.
In every corner of the New South, the history of the Old South is being destroyed to placate the wishes of people who are motivated by the 21st Century version of fascism known as political correctness.
There is not a week that goes by now without seeing a news report concerning a Confederate monument that has been vandalized or is being torn down, in scenes that mimic the actions of ISIS in the Middle East or the SA in Nazi Germany. Statues of General Robert E. Lee are being carted off feet first, from Virginia to Texas, as if he was a deposed despot, instead of the most beloved general in American history.
In fact, last week in New Orleans, city officials began removing Confederate monuments that include statues of Lee, General P.T. Beauregard and Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
There is a dangerous trend infesting this country like malignant cancer cells. Anyone on the left who feels triggered or psychologically injured by a book, a speaker, a statue, a monument, a flag or a song, can claim some kind of special candyass status and demand that the speaker or in the case of the Confederacy, the flags, the statues and the monuments are destroyed.
You can’t eradicate history simply by removing statues, but that won’t stop the radical left.
Of course the most common argument for removing symbols of the Confederacy is that the symbols represent racism.
Is the Confederate flag racist? If it is in the hands of members of the KKK who are waving it, yes.
But, what about the person from North Carolina, for example, whose great, great grandfather served in the Army of Northern Virginia? Do they see that flag as a symbol of racism, or as the symbol of military history, or American history? I would assume the latter.
And, who has the right to tell them how to interpret history? When others order you to remove symbols of history, or to think a certain way that is simply fascism; nothing more and nothing less.
Still others would say that Robert E. Lee was a racist because he fought for the Confederacy. But, Lee himself never purchased or owned any slaves. He did inherit slaves from his father in law, George Custis. Some of the slaves were freed in 1857 and the rest in 1862. In fact if you had asked him, he would have told you he was opposed to slavery and that he fought the Civil War because his home state, Virginia, had been invaded by the Yankees.
What many of the wailing little fascists in America don’t know is that General Ulysses S. Grant, the man who prosecuted the war against Lee, the man whom Lee surrendered to in 1865, owned a slave named William Jones, whom he freed in 1859. In fact, Grant’s wife, Julia had four slaves, although they may have officially belonged to her father.
One would think the snowflakes and the liberal whining mayors would be demanding a removal of all Grant statues across the nation.
But, logic has never been a factor in the liberal thought process.
Do the liberal mayors, the PC governors and the little vandals of America know that only six percent of the soldiers fighting for the Confederacy actually owned any slaves?
If asked, Confederate soldiers would have said they were fighting because the North had invaded their land, or they were fighting against big government and the right to be left alone. Big government vs. small government; sounds familiar doesn’t it? It’s almost like it never really got resolved. Very few men were fighting to protect slavery, or the profits of King Cotton.
If asked, most soldiers in the Union Army would have said they were fighting to save the union. Except for abolitionists wearing blue, a majority weren’t fighting to free the slaves.
Sounds a little racist to me…
And, what about President Lincoln?
In 1861, Lincoln supported the original 13th Amendment or the Corwin Amendment. The Corwin Amendment was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that would shield “domestic institutions” of the states (which in 1861 included slavery) from the constitutional amendment process and from abolition or interference by Congress. It was passed by the 36th Congress on March 2, 1861, and submitted to the state legislatures for ratification. Senator William H. Seward of New York introduced the amendment in the Senate and Representative Thomas Corwin of Ohio introduced it in the House of Representatives. It was one of several measures considered by Congress in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to attract the seceding states back into the Union and in an attempt to entice border slave states to stay.
The official text of the amendment reads: No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
President Lincoln, in his first inaugural address on March 4, said of the Corwin Amendment:
I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service … holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.
Hmm…Sounds a little racist to me. Strangely, Steven Spielberg deleted any mention of the Corwin Amendment in his film, Lincoln. What a surprise.
Before the amendment could be ratified by all states, war broke out. But, the following states did ratify it: Kentucky, Ohio, Rhode Island, Illinois and Maryland.
Lincoln was a realist who would have done just about anything to save the Union, including tossing the constitution out the window, which he frequently did. Emancipation was a political legerdemain, to distract the nation from the series of Union Army defeats in the Eastern Theater and a litany of incompetent Union Army commanders. Lincoln needed the abolitionists behind him and something to rally the North; hence, the Emancipation Proclamation. Two years after emancipation, Lincoln was concocting ways for the black population to be relocated to British Colonies in the Caribbean before he was assassinated.
Whoaa…
Dirty little secret lefties, what if Lincoln was more of a racist than Lee?
Oh my God!
I bet your Marxist professor didn’t tell you that.
The victors wrote the history and sold the snake oil that they were the holy saviors defeating those evil slaver holders, even though almost all of the men they fought never owned a slave in their whole lives.
To compensate for their incompetence on the battlefield, the North developed the ‘holier than thou’ attitude. Lee may have run rings around the Army of the Potomac, but so what, he was evil and so was Jackson, Stuart, Longstreet, the entire Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederacy. Also included in the group of white nationalist racists were George Patton’s Confederate grandfather who was killed in 1864, Chesty Puller’s Confederate grandfather who was killed in 1863 and Woodrow Wilson’s father who was a CSA chaplain.
Combine a 150 year arrogant attitude with modern day political correctness and you have the current War against the Confederacy.
Don’t think for a moment that it will stop with Lee and Davis. There is no end to the militant fascism raging among left wing snowflakes.
Those who come for Lee today, will come for Lincoln tomorrow.
Soon, they will be demanding that statues of Jefferson, Washington and Andrew Jackson are destroyed. In fact Jackson has been run off the $20 bill to be replaced by Harriet Tubman.
After they are finished with them, they will go after Custer, Grant, Wyatt Earp, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR; after all he imprisoned the Japanese during WWII. When they’re done with FDR, they’ll come for Ike and Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Don’t think it will just be flags and statues. Next, there will be book burnings and destruction of private property belonging to people deemed enemies of the state.
It won’t stop until Americans put their feet down and say enough is enough. Frankly these people who try and tell us how to interpret our own history are nothing more than tyrants.
The War against the Confederacy is a war on freedom itself.
N.B. I’m not a Southerner. I’m from Northern Illinois and my relatives fought for the Union. In fact, my great, great, great uncle who served in the 2nd Indiana Cavalry, was captured during McCook’s Raid on Atlanta on July 30, 1864 and spent the rest of the war in Andersonville Prison.
He survived. But, it looks like American history won’t.
I noticed that. Didn’t figure it was worth a response, except maybe the old Lincoln quote, “Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
That is one of my favorite Lincoln quotes. The man had a way with words.
” Check out post #97 - a FReeper defending the Peculiar Institution. “
Not going to touch that one today.
Your parcel of sanctimonious hate spewers might not understand; but your intention to pass judgment on earlier generations of American leaders violates the spirit of the heritage you pretend to honor.
Whatever gets you through the night, eh?
We have our own anti-south bigots right here on FR; people who hate anything and everything about the south. Some of them are retreads that were once banned for their anti-southern bigotry.
” And saying it all has nothing to do with racism and all, doesn’t work either.”
Claiming what you did is nothing but racism by claiming it is racism.
Whatever you have to say about American History, obviously contemporary American public education is a disaster. But you, apparently, could care less. If you are motivated by anything but pure hatred, it does not show.
Keep up the Lincoln fantasy worship. The man who condemned us all to big government forever.
Ohioans: ** “You focus on the motives of the South haters; but I have a hard time getting past their abysmal demonstration of a total lack of any rational perspective. “ **
Just so we’re clear on this: nobody but nobody posting on Free Republic hates “the South”.
Most of us have family & friends there, have lived there ourselves and often travel in the South.
Even in the North here you see Confederate flags on homes & pickups, we love our rebels.
Further, the “lack of rational perspective” we see comes 100% from our Lost Cause mythologizers.
In thread after thread over many years Lost Causers post their myths & venom against “Northerners” who you then equate to anybody that responds to defend simple facts & reason.
Ohioan: ** “1. In all the places in the world, where people were being held in involuntary servitude in 1860... —can anyone name any place where the “bondage” was more humanely administered than in much of the Old South? “ **
No, but neither can anyone name another country where slaveholders fought so fiercely to protect their “property rights”.
Ohioan: ** “How about in non-bondage States, here or in Europe, were there many low paying, industrial jobs, where the laboring men & women were as humanely treated by their employers, as the bonds men & women in the Old South? “ **
One reason Southern slaves were often treated like family is because many literally were family — half brothers & sisters, cousins, nephews & nieces, etc.
Especially those in Marse’s Big House were well treated, fed & dressed.
Some were even taught to read, the Bible especially.
That did not however prevent them from being “sold down the river” when necessity or opportunity dictated, breaking up families regardless of how close they may have felt.
Field hands on big plantations were generally not treated so well.
They were worked harder and given fewer privileges than house servants.
Often they were not even allowed to grow their own food.
And so we’re clear on this, by standards of their own times US factory workers were well paid and housed.
That’s precisely why so many were willing to leave their farms & villages for a big city factory.
Yes, today we see their plight as miserable, especially during economic slumps.
Then they had very few outside of family & church willing or able to help them.
But at least they were never arbitrary “sold down the river” breaking up families which didn’t want to be broken.
Ohioan: ** “2. Why do not those who feign inveterate horror at the idea of anyone held in bondage ever consider how much of any worker’s time, in an alternative “free” system, is really his or her own; and how much absolutely dictated by the complex context of circumstances linked to the needs of survival, in any system?
And how much actual free time was allowed to the “slaves” of compassionate Southern Christian Plantation owners? “ **
First, let’s be clear, African slaves were never “slaves”, such quotation marks are absurd.
What is certainly appropriate is to put the word slave “owner” in quotes, since by our definition nobody ever “owns” another person.
Second, every Northern factory worker, regardless of how poorly paid or badly treated possessed the one essential freedom no African slave ever had: the freedom to pick up, leave and find a better life elsewhere.
And, indeed, most in America did exactly that, until they found just the circumstances that best suited them, whether their own farm out west, or as a skilled tradesman in town.
Ohioan: ** “ Just why were ex-slaves behaving in the manner Booker T. Washington describes, if their lives had been the hellish experience that the rabid Abolitionists claimed? (Booker T. Washington Address) “ **
No freed African slave, to my knowledge, ever voluntarily returned to slavery.
Ohioan: ** “3. ...Who, in Biblical times, or in Medieval times, with kindly intent, ever felt the need to go into an endless hissing fit over the fact that some people were for a time in a position to direct the lives of other people, unless there were other factors involved. “ **
Ah, but the key fact slavery apologists have to ignore is that throughout history there have been various categories & classes of slaves, each treated differently.
For example, most early immigrants to America arrived as young indentured servants, a category of slave, except that, first & foremost they had volunteered and second, the time was limited (i.e., seven years) after which they were free to do as they pleased.
Basically they were enslaved to pay off debts.
By stark contrast, African slaves were enslaved for life, and the lives of their descendants just as with livestock, not for debts, but because of their race.
Indeed some Southern states passed laws re-enslaving freed blacks, for no reason except their race.
So that was a far more unjust form of slavery than any recognized or “tolerated” in the Bible.
Ohioan: ** “4. A great many Southerners wanted to see the slaves emancipated—Jefferson for one.
But they recognized that there had to be careful preparation for the change in status.
The fact is that that preparation was never made... “ **
And therein lie the real facts of this matter.
Jefferson’s proposal for the Federal government to purchase freedom and return ex-slaves to Africa or elsewhere, those ideas and all similar ones went nowhere because slaveholders would have none of it.
Even in 1776, when many Southerners recognized slavery as wicked, others more strongly believed slavery was not only necessary, it was also in their minds moral.
That’s why such Jeffersonian abolition ideas went nowhere.
But another point needs to be added here: regarding “preparation for freedom” slaveholders had a big problem.
Since the Bible forbids enslaving God’s people, once slaves had learned to read and accept Christianity, they could no longer be kept as permanent slaves.
The Bible says they must be freed, and slaveholders knew it, which is why they wanted their slaves kept as ignorant as possible.
Ohioan: ** “...South haters in the 1865 era, promised the new freemen what they could not deliver; and should never have promised.
But those promises ushered in an age of dependency, since refurbished by new generations of demagogues, intent on preserving that dependency. “ **
Actually, **Republicans** after 1865 did deliver what they promised: freedom for all slaves, enfranchisement and justice.
And for years afterwards Southern Republicans elected blacks to political offices and other civic responsibilities.
But it didn’t last because in time **Democrats** were again allowed to vote in the South and THEY created all the conditions you Ohioan here decry.
Ohioan: ** “I would suggest that instead of treating the Confederate leaders as somehow abhorrent, we look at the skills developed on those great plantations, under the tutelage of Christian employers, and study how contemporary schools can achieve a similar result, before another generation of Black youth are misled to their own destruction by the Pied Pipers of the Left. “ **
Ohioan, you began by making a legitimate contrast between the treatment of Southern US slaves versus those in other countries, fine.
But now you suggest that treatment was in any way admirable by TODAY’S standards, and that is simply absurd.
By our standards most slaves were treated horribly, very few taught to read & write, or learn Christianity and for good reason from slaveholders’ perspectives.
Final words: I do no remember seeing a full throated defense of Southern slavery posted on FR before, and was a bit taken aback by it.
But if anyone seriously wishes, we can certainly discuss it at more length.
Buckley's purges helped create politically correct, multicultural "Conservatism Inc" (recalling Eric Hoffer's remark that what starts as a movement turns into a racket). It really came to fruition under George W. Bush and his ideological hangers-on, i.e. the takeover of National Review by people like Goldberg, Lowry, Ponnuru, etc. They say a few conservative-sounding things on social issues and taxes, but on immigration and the national question they're aligned with the Left. They do the same with symbolic cultural issues like removing Confederate monuments.
Notice that in op-eds about the French elections, NRO talking heads are supporting Macron, which aligns them with Obama and Hillary.
CodeToad: ** “We have our own anti-south bigots right here on FR; people who hate anything and everything about the south.
Some of them are retreads that were once banned for their anti-southern bigotry.” **
Totally false, nobody posting on Free Republic hates “the South” except perhaps for heat & chiggers.
But now that we have Lyme’s up north, even chiggers don’t seem so terrible any more.
What we certainly dislike are the false myths, lies & venom against “Northerners” you people constantly post.
So we’re not here to hate you, but we are hoping to school you and maybe even church you a little bit.
;-)
Slavery would have gone out on its own for economic and cultural reasons, but the radical abolitionist wing of the Republican Party had to have its way and turn the civil war into a war "about" ending slavery rather than preserving the union. This created resentment.
Once the slaves were free, Reconstruction sowed the seeds that created (understandable) resentments among white southerners and a sense of entitlement and revenge among blacks. This was exacerbated still further by forced integration in the 1960's.
Just as slavery would have faded on its own, blacks and whites would have learned to peacefully coexist in the South - in separate communities, but with normal business and interpersonal relationships. Instead, forcing them to coexist was a form of shock therapy that just created hostilities on both sides.
And you keep clinging to your Lost Cause myths. I'm sure they will continue to make you very happy.
Reconstruction hurt blacks worse than slavery.
Some things you can’t force people to do.
It led the way to the KKK. There was no protection for whites so the KKK
Was formed. Similar to the American Indian wars and problems.
That said, we are missing some of each other's points, because of very diverse priorities.
For example, you maintain that no one posting on Free Republic "hates 'the South.'" While perhaps your protest is genuine from your prospective, it certainly ignores posters on various of the historic debate threads who have viciously denounced Robert E. Lee and other Confederate heroes. Of course some of those denounced were heroes to all traditional Americans. Lee certainly was. Growing up in the Ohio County next to that of General Grant, in the World War II era (long before I became a Conservative in High School), I knew how revered Lee was both by Grant and virtually all students of history, of all generations, and of all shades of opinion on current 1940s issues.
It is not a feigned reaction, in any sense. I was really startled, the first time I encountered a verbal assault on Robert E. Lee on Free Republic. Having gone to Oberlin to study the far Left in its own lair, I was certainly acquainted with Abolitionist venom--just not used to seeing it in Conservative circles.
Then there is your criticism of my putting "slaves" with reference to American slavery in quotations. As much of my commentary goes to the many manifestations of forced or involuntary labor systems in human history, the quotation marks were in recognition of the fact that American slavery did not involve Slavic people; and, as such might have been as well or better referenced by different terms for bondage.
Another example of our misconnection was in your comment suggesting that the Booker T. Washington address was about freed slaves voluntarily returning to slavery. The linked address--that at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895--cited those freed slaves going to the cemeteries, to mourn the passing of their former masters & mistresses, and citing their loyalty as a reason to hire them rather than the new immigrants pouring into the States.
You also miss the real point on education & preparation for freedom. Granting ex-slaves the suffrage, letting them be exploited as voters by those preaching a form of dependence on big government, was hardly a useful education, for those not seeking political office. The point of the skills learned on the plantation, is that they were with in the competence of those who were taught those skills. The present disaster in inner city high school education is too obvious for anyone to try to defend.
Everyone has a different complex of aptitudes, weaknesses, motivations, inhibitions, and a considerable array of personality traits. Many of those inner city youth have developable skills, which were better served on the great plantations, than they are today by the NEA affiliates, working in public education.
And no; of course, I am not suggesting replacing the schools with a return to Plantation life. The best remedy is to get the Federal bureaucrats, trying to prove a point, out of a position to stifle creative methodology in the schools.
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