Posted on 10/11/2007 2:41:12 PM PDT by Lorianne
Nelson Winbush is intent on defending the flag of his grandfather. It's just surprising which flag that is. ___
KISSIMMEE -- Nelson Winbush rotates a miniature flag holder he keeps on his mantel, imagining how the banners would appear in a Civil War battle.
The Stars and Bars, he explains, looked too much like the Union flag to prevent friendly fire. The Confederacy responded by fashioning the distinctive Southern Cross -- better known as the rebel flag.
Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's stories about serving the South in the "War Between the States."
His grandfather's casket was draped with a Confederate flag. His mother pounded out her Confederate heritage on a typewriter. He wears a rebel flag pinned to the collar of his polo shirt.
Winbush is also black.
"You've never seen nothing like me, have you?"
* * *
Winbush's nondescript white brick house near Kissimmee's quaint downtown is cluttered with the mess of a life spent hoarding history.
Under the glass of his coffee table lie family photos, all of smiling black people. On top sits Ebony magazine.
Winbush is retired and a widower who keeps a strict schedule of household chores, family visits and Confederate events. He often eats at Fat Boy's Barbecue, where his Sons of Confederate Veterans camp meets.
Winbush's words could come from the mouth of any white son of a Confederate veteran. They subscribe to a sort of religion about the war, a different version than mainstream America.
The tenets, repeated endlessly by loyalists:
The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history.
But Winbush has a conceptual canyon to bridge: How can a black man defend a movement that sought to keep his people enslaved?
* * *
Winbush is one of at most a handful of black members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in the country. He knows skeptics question his story and his sanity.
To win them over, he pulls out his grandfather's pension papers, reunion photos and obituary. He also gives speeches, mostly before white audiences.
Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states' rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority.
"It was an exercise in rhetoric, that's all," Winbush says.
His views run counter to many historical accounts. Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III, the field operations chief for the NAACP, called Winbush's arguments illogical. Rivers spoke with Winbush by telephone a few years ago, intrigued by his position. Rivers remembers him being loud and sincere, holding fast to his convictions.
"I was courteous and respectful and respectfully disagreed with him," Rivers said. "This is America. He has a right to believe what he wants to."
At one speech, Winbush stood in front of the square battle flag that draped his grandfather's coffin, retelling the stories he has told so many times that the words emerge in identical iterations.
At the end of his talk, he held the microphone to a stereo and played a song by the Rebelaires, with a sorrowful, bluesy rhythm: "You may not believe me, but things was just that way. Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray."
Once other Confederates recognize that his story is real, they love him. Opponents often attack white Confederates as ignorant or racist. Winbush is harder to dismiss. If nothing else, the naysayers are more willing to listen.
"It kinda wipes out the whole segregation and hate and racism issue," said Christopher Hall, 29, commander of Winbush's SCV camp. "Coming from him, that really can't be an argument."
* * *
Winbush's views were once more widespread, even in the land of theme parks and turnpikes.
Florida was the third state to secede. Its Civil War governor, John Milton, shot himself rather than rejoin the North, telling the Legislature, "Death would be preferable to reunion." Former Gov. Lawton Chiles defended the Confederate flag in 1996 when black lawmakers asked for its removal from the Capitol.
"You can't erase history," Chiles said at the time.
But now neo-Confederates are losing this second war of culture and memory.
Confederate flags are coming down, especially from the tops of Southern statehouses, including Florida's in 2001.
The agrarian Bible Belt has become the Sun Belt, full of northerners with few deep roots in the area. Identification with the South as a region has declined since the World War II era, which united the country with patriotism and the interstate system. Areas of South Florida, for instance, are known better as the sixth borough of New York than part of the Deep South.
High school teachers don't preach the righteousness of the South. And historians, for the most part, agree that the Civil War was about slavery, undermining the standard neo-Confederate argument.
But Confederate loyalists are digging in. Winbush considers the South his homeland. And his family history, because it's rarer than that of white Confederates, is in danger of extinction.
* * *
Slowly, in his deep, rough voice, Winbush tells the story of a young slave from a Tennessee plantation named Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to war as a teenager with the sons of his master.
"They grew up together," Winbush says.
At first his grandfather cooked and looked out for the others, but later he saw action, fighting with a rifle under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and plantation owner.
At Shiloh, a two-day battle in 1862 in which more than 23,000 American men were killed or wounded, the Confederate Army needed a chaplain. Louis Nelson couldn't read or write, but he had memorized the King James Bible.
He stayed on as chaplain for the next four campaigns, leading services for both Confederate and Union soldiers, before they headed back to the battlefield.
He also foraged for food. One time, he killed a mule, cut out a quarter and hauled it back to his comrades.
"When you don't have anything else, mule meat tastes pretty good," he would tell his grandson.
Some topics even the loquacious grandfather considered off limits. He wouldn't talk about the Union siege of Vicksburg, a bloody battle that captured an important Mississippi River port and effectively split the South.
After the war, he lived as a free man on the James Oldham plantation for 12 more years. Then he became a plasterer, traveling the South to work on houses.
Over the years, he went to 39 Confederate reunions, wearing a woolly gray uniform that Winbush still has.In photos, he stands next to two white men who accompanied him to soldiers' reunions until they were old men. Through the sepia gleams a dignity earned on the battlefield.
"When he came back, that was storytelling time," Winbush says.
His grandfather died in 1934 at the age of 88. The local paper ran an obituary that called him a "darky." Winbush is proud that his grandfather's death was marked at all.
* * *
Winbush grew up in the house his grandfather built in 1908, a two-story yellow structure with a wraparound porch in Ripley, Tenn. The Oldham plantation, where his grandfather was a slave, provided the wood in recognition of his loyalty to the family.
Winbush and his siblings lived in a family of educators. His grandmother and mother were teachers. He says he first went to school as a baby in a basket.
All three children went to college. Winbush studied biology in hopes of becoming a doctor but didn't have enough money for medical school. He switched to studying physical education.
Winbush moved to Florida in 1955, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandated school desegregation. Like many around the country, Osceola County schools remained segregated for several more years.
He didn't mind the divide because he felt both black and white students got a better education by not being able to use racial conflict as an excuse. When the superintendent, a friend of his, decided it was time to integrate in the late 1960s, Winbush agreed. The time had come, he thought, when people could accept the change.
Winbush thinks that people will get along if they know each other. He says he never suffered any blatant racism. The small Southern towns he lived in were familiar and accepting.
He remembers the "I Have A Dream" speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He respects King but disagrees with his reverence for Lincoln.
Winbush wasn't moved by the speech. King was just speaking the truth, he says, but it didn't change the daily reality of blacks.
* * *
Winbush's convictions about the war lay dormant until 1991, when the NAACP began an all-out campaign against the Confederate flag, saying it was a symbol of hatred. It vowed to have it removed from public places by the end of the decade.
Winbush saw it differently, and he was retiring. He no longer worried about what some "Yankee boss" would think.
"I got fed up about all this politically correct mess," he says.
He joined the Sons and started speaking at their events. He twice appeared before the Virginia Legislature to dissuade them from taking down the flag. He collects clippings of newspaper stories written about his speeches. One shows him posing in front of a statute of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Winbush acknowledges that misuse of the Confederate flag has made it a symbol of hate in some people's eyes. But he says the American flag is just as racist. Troops of color are sent to die disproportionately in American wars, he says, and the Stars and Stripes flew above slave ships.
Rivers, the NAACP official, said people like Winbush need to let go of their family history and admit that all people, even those now dead, are imperfect.
"Just because your grandfather was wrong does not mean you can't break the generational curse and not be wrong too," he says.
* * *
Winbush is the last direct link to his grandfather, someone who heard the stories firsthand and felt the passion.
He feels the legacy of Confederate soldiers like his grandfather won't survive unless the history is passed within families, from one generation to the next.
But it's not easy. Even Winbush's son, a Naval Academy graduate who works for IBM, once suggested Winbush donate his Confederate collection to a museum.
"This is the only way some people will find out what did happen," he said. "The history books leave it out."
Winbush knows he won't be around forever. He only hopes that someone will continue to tell the stories.
Times researchers Carolyn Edds and John Martin contributed to this report. Stephanie Garry can be reached at sgarry@sptimes.com.
tell us, N-S, do you approve (YES or NO) of Roe v. Wade, Plessy V Ferguson, etc.???
either the "9 crows" are right or NOT.
free dixie,sw
after all, LOTS of INNOCENT civilians were so arrested and/or "disappeared" by the lincoln thugs, without even the PRETENSE of an indictment, charges or a trial.
but then, that's why we southrons call him : THE TYRANT.
free dixie,sw
Where did I state that I didn't have an MBA? And I did buy the kids a horse.
In the first case, the narrative makes it clear that Taney expected to be arrested before he issued his Ex Parte Merryman decision.
Calhoun's analysis, not Lamon's.
Now look at the Lamon account. Chuckie Adams has written columns on it and according to him:
Chuckie? Jealous? Again, citing Calhoun, not Lamon.
That makes it clear that according to Lamon discussions on arresting Taney took place after the Merryman decision was made.
No, not according to Lamon. Not according to Taney. Not according to Mayor Brown.
And the final fact that counts against this whole Taney arrest fairytale is the fact that not a single biographer of Taney has ever found enough evidence to include it in any of their books on the man. Not one.
Try Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D.: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of The United States by Samuel Tyler.
Well, no. Not if you read what you post. Your quote from Tyler: "But the chief Justice, with the weight of eighty-four years upon him, as he left the house of his son-in-law, Mr. Campbell, remarked that it was likely he should be imprisoned in Fort McHenry before night; but that he was going to court to do his duty." That makes it clear that Taney told his fears to his son-in-law the morning before he issued the ruling so his paranoia had kicked in prior to Lincoln knowing what he was going to do and apparently continued after he issued his ruling. Now unless Calhoun's account is totally bogus, Lamon is saying that the discussion to arrest Taney occured after the decision and with other people present, not just Lamon and Lincoln. So there doesn't seem to have been anyone who could have given Taney a heads up on something that wasn't even discussed until after Taney first said he was going to be arrested. Kind of a disconnect there.
Try Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D.: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of The United States by Samuel Tyler.
Yes let's try that. Can you point out where in the book Tyler relates Lamon's story about the arrest warrant? And while you're at it, can you do the same for Lewis's biography or Steiner's biography or Allen's most recent biography? None of them have anything on Lamon's tale in them as well. And while I can't speak for Lewis and Steiner, I did email Dr. Allen after reading his "Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Seccession, and the President's War Powers" and asked him that very question. Did he find any evidence supporting Lamon's story of the arrest warrant? He actually took the time to answer and his response was that no, he had found nothing to support the claim. So if not a single reputable biographer of Chief Justice Taney has found enough evidence supporting Lamon's claim to include it in their biography's then what do you know that they do not? Other than the product of your imagination, I mean?
Duh, that Taney knew of his possible arrest BEFORE the ruling is not the issue.
... so his paranoia had kicked in prior to Lincoln knowing what he was going to do and apparently continued after he issued his ruling.
Why wouldn't Taney be fearful of being arrested? The dictator and his minions arrested anyone that interfered with Lincoln's power grab. They arrested editors, journalists, politicians, governors, federal and state judges, little girls singing Confederate/Southern songs, little girls playing such songs, even priests that refused to pray to for Lincoln. Lincoln arrested federal judge William Matthew Merrick, judge James L. Bartol, threatened to deport Pennsylvania Chief Justice Walter Hoge Lowrie, and his goons arrested Maryland Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael in the middle of a trial, beating him senseless.
The administration also jailed Judges John H. Mulkey and Andrew D. Duff, just to name some more. Why would Lincoln do this? Possibly because he was a megalomaniac, stating that he 'had sometime thought that perhaps he might be an instrument in God's hands of accomplishing a great work.'
Hail Caesar! </sarcasm>
Now unless Calhoun's account is totally bogus, Lamon is saying that the discussion to arrest Taney occured after the decision and with other people present, not just Lamon and Lincoln.
Calhoun is the one stating that it was after the decision. This is a quote --->"<---, and so is this --->'<---. Calhoun places LAMON's words in quotes, everything else is Calhoun's. To help the visually (and mentally) impaired, Lamon's words are bolded and blue: Taney’s opinion exacerbated the delicate situation in Maryland, a border state yet undecided in its commitment to the Union. According to Marshal Lamon, “after due consideration the administration determined upon the arrest of the Chief Justice.” Lincoln issued a presidential arrest warrant for Taney, but “then arose the question of service.” Who should make the arrest, and where should Taney be imprisoned? "It was finally determined," Lamon remembered, "to place the order of arrest in the hands of the United States Marshal for the District of Columbia.” Lincoln himself handed the warrant to his friend, instructing the marshal to “use his own discretion about making the arrest unless he should receive further orders.” Lamon, availing himself of this discretionary power, decided not to arrest Chief Justice Taney. Taney’s opinion seriously embarrassed Lincoln and his advisers. Southern sympathizers and Northern opponents of the war praised Taney as a partisan of civil liberties standing alone against military tyranny.
Lamon stated that 'Chief Justice Taney was the greatest and best man I ever saw', not Lincoln. He had his orders, but was commanded to use his own discretion. He could have easily let Taney know that his arrest was under consideration. Why would Lincoln trust Lamon? 5 Jun 1861 Lincoln said of his friend, 'Lamon, is entirely reliable, and trustworthy'.
So if not a single reputable biographer of Chief Justice Taney has found enough evidence supporting Lamon's claim to include it in their biography's then what do you know that they do not? Other than the product of your imagination, I mean?
What next noni? The same old cat-and-mouse game - you guys are always the same and Walt was a master of it. Ask for a source, one was provided. Then it must be two sources. If those are provided, that it becomes three. Can you understand why I ridicule your Bizzaro MBA? Here we have Lincoln's closest friend and confidant, a man Lincoln trusted with his life (and whom threatened to resign when Lincoln overruled him regarding Lincoln's lax security measures) stating that Lincoln personally handed him the warrant. What judge had the administration arrested prior to Taney's decision?
Secondly we have the highest judicial officer of the land, Chief Justice Taney indicating his knowledge of the same. We have Taney stating it publicly on his way to the court, and again to Baltimore Chief Judge and Mayor Brown, who himself was arrested by the Lincoln's gestapo.
Sen. Trusten Polk commended Taney for his courage issuing the decision(not for playing tiddlywinks), Sen. Thomas Semmes documented the threats against Taney (who else would threaten Taney?), and former Supreme Court justice Curtis - no friend of Taney's - writes that the administration 'came near to the commission of a great crime', and clears up any doubts as to who the guilty party was when he wrote that 'if the President shall be of opinion that the arrest and incarceration, and trial before a military commission, of a judge of the United States, for some judicial decision', he lacked the power. What judicial decision could Curtis be referring to? What Judge?
No the issue is if he had any evidence to support his paranoid fears.
Why wouldn't Taney be fearful of being arrested? The dictator and his minions arrested anyone that interfered with Lincoln's power grab. They arrested editors, journalists, politicians, governors, federal and state judges, little girls singing Confederate/Southern songs, little girls playing such songs, even priests that refused to pray to for Lincoln. Lincoln arrested federal judge William Matthew Merrick, judge James L. Bartol, threatened to deport Pennsylvania Chief Justice Walter Hoge Lowrie, and his goons arrested Maryland Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael in the middle of a trial, beating him senseless.
In other words you have no evidence to support your claim that Taney had any information ahead of time that he was in danger of being arrested. Why not just say so?
Why would Lincoln trust Lamon? 5 Jun 1861 Lincoln said of his friend, 'Lamon, is entirely reliable, and trustworthy'.
Historians have been less kind of Ward Lamon. In his book "Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War", Maury Klein compared Lamon's account of what happened in Charleston during his trip there with Stephen A. Hurlburt's account of the same mission. Klein's conclusion was that "Lamon's own account in his Recollections, [pp.] 69-79, is so inflated in his own favor and contradictory to Hurlbut's contemporary account to Lincoln as to be virtually useless as a source for his mission." Ward was a bit of a blowhard.
Ask for a source, one was provided. Then it must be two sources. If those are provided, that it becomes three. Can you understand why I ridicule your Bizzaro MBA?
It's easy to see why dealing with you leaves me shaking my head. Lame attempts at insult aside, you lie. I've asked for one Taney biographer who found Lamon's tale substantive enough to include it in their biography of the man. Just one biographer. You haven't been able to provide a single one. You've repeated that many have described Taney as saying he expected to be arrested, but no proof that such fears were grounded. You repeat Lamon's story as if it came from a burning bush, and continue to ignore the fact that not one single solitary biographer of Taney that I've come across thought it worth including in their work. Why not? Why, if there was any shred of evidence that Lamon was being factual, did every biographer fail to detail this plot of Lincoln's in their book? The answer is clear; not a single reputable historian believes the story to be true because there is not a single shred of evidence to support it. So please spare us your nonsense about how you've provided what I requested, you haven't. You have taken one and added one to it and come up with an apple. It's impossible to tell who's paranoia is greater in this, Taney's or your's.
Personally, I like Allan Pinkerton's assessment of Lamon as a "brainless, egotistical fool."
we all note that you haven't had the GUTS to tell everyone:
WHO you were before being PERMANENTLY banned from FR,
WHAT you did to get yourself banned &
WHEN you are LEAVING the forum forever.
be sure to provide PROOF of everything as your "word of honor" is known by all here to be an oxymoron.
laughing AT you, BIGOT.
free dixie,sw
Speaking of brainless, egotistical fools...
"William Clarke Quantrell was born in New York City"--Stand Watie, 6.29.00
You know, the other thing that’s interesting about this whole “St. John’s rector” being the source of your belief that Quantrill (how he spelled his name) was born in NYC is that in one post you identify your CWRT’s trip to NYC as being in 2001, but you were already making that claim in 2000.
Attorney General Edward Bates under date of 21 Apr 1862 writes, '[t]he Prest [Lincoln] was a good deal stirred up, last friday, and talked about arresting the attornies.' [Beale, Howard K., ed., The Diary of Edward Bates 1859 – 1866, Washington DC: Government Printing Office (1933), p. 252]
Oh the humanity!
Yet Bate's diary is missing entries from 30 Apr 1861 through 5 Jul 1861. No mention of the Merryman case, no mention of Chief Justice Taney, no mention of Lincoln's request to Bates to prepare a response regarding the legality of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Gee, it's as if someone purged the contents. The diaries, consisting of 5 volumes, were delivered to the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress by Helen Nicolay. The daughter of John G. Nicolay that admitted suppressing anything detrimental to Lincoln.
therefore, you are just a sick JOKE to most everyone here OR a "source of nausea" to the rest of us.
why not just admit that you are a LIAR, apologize & LEAVE the forum forever???
we all note that you haven't told us WHO you were before being PERMANENTLY banned, WHAT you DID to get yourself banned & WHEN you are LEAVING the forum. (be sure to provide PROOF, as your "word of honor" is an oxymoron.)
laughing AT you.
free dixie,sw
given that you are NOT a BIGOT, what i can't understand is WHY you would "suffer him to remain" in your team, as he damages the unionist cause with every post he spews out onto the forum, like so much liquid sewage.
but PLEASE don't "kick him out", as we "good ' ole rebs" want your team to look RACIST, stupid,MEAN-spirited, illiterate, filled with HATE & terminally ignorant.
free dixie,sw
whenever i can, i'll drop by, post & try to catch up on what's going on.
my family, of course, comes first & everyone (except my teenaged niece & nephew) is over 80YO and/or sick.
PRAY for them, please.
free dixie,sw
You know, medication helps with schizophrenia.
Prayers for your family my friend.
That's a role you fill for the Southron side.
the FACTS are that you are 100% correct, if that's what you're saying. "bubba" is a CREEP. (it is also considered a REALLY weak defense of ANY subject to say that something/someone else is just as bad, as you are ADMITTING that that whatever/whoever you are "defending" is in itself, BAD.)
note to all: you will note that "bubba, the LIAR" has NOT got the GUTS to admit WHO he used to be before he was banned FOREVER from FR, WHAT he did to get himself banned & WHY anyone should believe ANYTHING he spews out onto this forum.
free dixie,sw
Prayers up.
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