Posted on 07/27/2008 7:52:45 AM PDT by cowboyway
MONROE – At first glance, it’s an unlikely combination. A black family seated under a tent facing a line of Civil War re-enactors, proudly holding Confederate flags and gripping their weapons.
But what lies between these two groups is what brought them together: An unmarked grave about to get its due, belonging to a slave who fought for the Confederacy.
Weary Clyburn was best friends with his master’s son, Frank. When Frank left the plantation to fight in the Civil War, Clyburn followed him.
He fought alongside Frank and even saved his life on two occasions.
On July 18, the city of Monroe proclaimed Weary Clyburn Day; an event that coincided with the Sons of Confederate Veterans convention in Concord.
The N.C. Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans (James Miller Camp 2116) honored Clyburn, who died March 30, 1930, with a memorial program at Hillcrest Cemetery in Monroe and unveiled a new headstone for his unmarked grave.
“It’s an honor to find out we have a gentleman who served ... with loyalty and devotion to his friend,” said Commander Michael Chapman of the local SCV chapter.
“I’m happy to be here. It’s a glorious day,” said Mary Elizabeth Clyburn Hooks of New Jersey. “I just think it’s beautiful these people chose to celebrate my grandfather’s bravery and courage. It’s just overwhelming.”
Missing from the event was the woman who helped bring the pieces together, Mattie Clyburn Rice of High Point, who remembered the stories her father shared with her as a child.
Rice was hospitalized the morning of the ceremony.
Rice remembered being at her father’s funeral, said Earl Ijames, a curator at the N.C. Office of Archives and History. “He told her stories, and being able to verify those stories brought this event together,” he said.
Ijames met Rice when she was at the state Archives Office looking for her birth certificate in August 2005. She was in the wrong department and he struck up a conversation with her. Ijames asked Rice her name and upon hearing Clyburn, asked if she had ever heard of Weary Clyburn.
“She looked straight at me and said, ‘That’s my daddy,’“ he said.
Ijames has been researching “colored Confederates” for the past 14 years. According to Rice, he said, Clyburn’s father sharecropped and painted after the war. He moved from Lancaster County, S.C., and eventually settled in Union County. Rice moved away but relocated to North Carolina three years ago to take care of her nephew.
An impressive crowd gathered at the gravesite to pay tribute to Weary Clyburn. Civil War re-enactors, dressed in full regalia, came from overseas and states as far away as California and Pennsylvania to the program.
“We’re here to honor Weary Clyburn, but really, the honor is ours,” said N.C. SCV Commander Tom Smith. “The Sons of Confederate Veterans honors our own and he’s one of our own. We need to do more of what we’re doing now."
Weary Clyburn was one of thousands of slaves who served in the Confederate Army, Ijames said. There’s no way to quantify the number of slaves who served. “But it’s in the thousands, easy.”
People today often wonder why slaves fought for the Confederacy. Ijames said the only course they had to freedom was through the Confederate Army. “Why not go and defend what they know versus running away and going to the unknown,” Ijames said. “A lot of us automatically assume the war started to free slaves. That’s not true. It was a war to preserve the Union as the way it was.”
Slaves were not allowed to fight in the federal army, Ijames said. Those that made their way behind Union lines were still considered slaves.
Clyburn escaped the plantation and made his way to Columbia, S.C., where he met up with Frank in boot camp. “They were best friends,” Ijames said.
Felicia Bryant, Clyburn’s great-granddaughter, agreed. “They were really good friends and that trumped everything else.”
They may have to. You crack me up every time you post something. Each one is funnier than the one before, and I’m at the point now where I can’t tell if your being deliberately funny or completely dense. Either way, don’t stop now. Certainly not on my account.
Anything that I can do to push you over the edge is my pleasure.
After all, you already live in a world that is a complete construct of your mind..........but you probably hear that all the time.
BTW, I think that its great that they let you have unlimited access to the interweb. You must be in a private institution.
You tend to be neither.
You are so very correct, my friend. :)
All we can do is try!
Deo Vindice!
Not legally, but they DID serve.....
So it's been claimed.
Thanks for your explanation. I don’t disagree with most of it.
I would think it is at least as likely that Weary was just told to go along. In any case, he had no legal or practical right to make hiw own decision either way, so could be definition not be a real volunteer.
Lincoln refused to recognize that a regional minority had the right to destroy the Union established by the “people of the United States,” not by the States, or even by the people of the states. The “people of the United States” was the only group with the legitimate power of dissolving the Union.
Lincoln denied human freedoms to nobody. The seceding states could have returned to the Union at any time. Prior to the full implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation they could have returned and kept their slaves (although Congress would have had some input on this).
During Lincoln’s conference with Stephens in 1865 he said that states could return to the Union as long as they accepted the freeing of the slaves and the national authority as it had existed before the war. What human freedoms or civil rights was such a position denying the people of those states?
No of that changes the contradiction between your tagline and Lincoln’s statement. He was willing to allow slavery. Period.
As far as “Lincoln refused to recognize that a regional minority had the right to destroy the Union established by the “people of the United States,”...that’s stupid on its face. The “Union” could not be established by the “people of the United States” because they did not belong to the “United States” when it was the people of the INDEPENDENT STATES established the Union. Your statement makes absolutely no sense.
Ahh, I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying the Lincoln was denying freedom to southerners who wished to secede.
Instead, you are claiming that his recognition of the constitutional right of slavery to exist where it was established constituted him “denying freedom to others.”
I would disagree. Lincoln created no new slaves, he merely adopted the position of most of the Founders that slavery should not be permitted to spread farther so that in the long run it would stew in its own juices and eventually fall apart. He allowed others their legal right to deny freedom, he did not practice the denial himself.
Ronald Reagan recognized that the people of eastern Europe and USSR were enslaved. He called publicly for their freeing and worked towards that eventual happy day. He did not, however, invade those countries to free the people.
Did his recognition that he had not legal or practical way to free those slaves mean that he was personally denying them their freedom?
The states were not Independent States when the Constitution and its Union was established. They were part of a previous Union, which was closed down in order to “establish a more perfect Union.”
LOL! And which union was that again... the Imperfect Union? Just stop. You are embarrassing yourself.
The states formed a Union under the Articles of Confederation in 1777. It continued in effect until 1789 when the government established under the Constitution started operations.
The Constitutional Convention was quite explicitly established to suggest modifications to the Articles that would help its government function more effectively. So at the time the Constitutional Convention was held, the states had not been independent for 10 years.
Uh... that wasn’t a union. It was a confederation. Words have meaning. And the way you used them in your previous posts to me do not apply to the last one. You can just make stuff up as you go along. Go to a liberal web site for that.
You tend to be only one; politically correct.
How are the Obama signs in your front yard holding up?
Ah how typical. The second to last refuge of the Southron scoundrel is accusing his opponent of being liberal. The fact that you have no evidence to support your claim is irrelevant. You never have evidence to support your claims.
The last refuge of the Southron scoundrel is accusing his opponent of being black. I expect that at any moment.
A lot of free white boys were probably just told to go along, also.
And using NS's logic concerning the Confederacy, since slavery was ruled illegal in the South after the war, then Weary never was slave.
(NS claims the South never seceded and the Confederacy never existed because a SCOTUS decision in 1869 ruled that secession was illegal. It's easy to understand why he's in a mental institute.)
Well at least now you know who has been vandalizing your yard...;’}
Let me point out that statements like this one are a big reason why the words 'logic' and 'cowboyway' don't often collide in the same sentence.
Lincoln was a centralist dictator wannabe and if he hadn't got shot he probably would have made himself king.
Lincoln set our once representative republic on the course to centralization. Are you happy with that? 545 people tell the other 300 million what to do all from their power base in DC. This is not what the Founders had in mind. They wrote extensively about the corruption that would exist under the type of government that we are subjected to today and they were right. The Federalists of that period built the notion of mixed government into the U.S. Constitution. In many details, they strove for a balance between the one president, the few Senators and the Representatives of the many. Something that is, unfortunately, lost and forgotten today is the pivotal role of the States in all this and you can blame Lincoln directly for that. The power and independent authority of the states were essential elements in the mixed, balanced government formed in 1787. The yankees destroyed that balance by rendering the states impotent and leaving them begging for the scrappings that the Great White Fathers in DC would dole out to them, based on their performing like circus animals.
BTW, your statement above isn't accurate. Virginia and New York made the right to withdraw from the union explicit in their acceptance of the Constitution. And in such an agreement between parties as is represented by the Constitution, a right claimed by one is allowed to all.
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