Posted on 01/15/2011 2:24:43 PM PST by BigReb555
Young people will get a school holiday in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King whose birthday is January 15th. But, will anyone tell them that January 19th is also the birthday of Robert E. Lee?
(Excerpt) Read more at cumminghome.com ...
Keep it that way.
Thanks for the correction.
And, since you asked, yes, that is what I would teach to anyone, because it's true. When I speak of "treason," I mean treason as defined in article III of the U.S. Constitution. Military service isn't a required to commit treason. Levying war against the U.S., or in adhering to the enemies of the U.S., or giving them aid or comfort are the only three things that constitute 'treason' under the U.S. Constitution.
I'd note that the Constitution doesn't say treason only applies to members of the U.S. military, nor are those acts the types of acts that can only be performed by members of the U.S. military.
Actually the slave would have risen up at some point and damn near slaughtered all of their masters, that’s what I think. People eventually get tired of being slaves.
Not so fast. Texas raised a cluster of issues, two of which you've pointed to by quoting the document in part.
Among those issues were the complaint about bad faith among the Northern States, and a conspiracy to abolish slavery w/o compensation as a major issue (given the value of slaves in Texas in 1860 was greater than that of all the improved real estate in the state put together, this was no trivial or theoretical complaint), as well as repeated failures of the Congress either to provide adequate frontier defense against incursions by Mexican bandits and Comanches, or to help defray the cost of the Ranger companies the State had raised on her own, to supply the deficit, in violation of the Constitution.
There were other complaints related to the apprehension of Wideawake agitation in Texas aimed at starting a slave revolt (after the pattern of John Brown's insurrection), arson, and other maladies the Texans accused Republicans of fomenting (rightly or wrongly, but they weren't getting any satisfaction from the federal government), and various other complaints.
"It was all about slavery" is a Marxist slogan. Their analysis is actually not so much based on Marxist theories about the value of labor, as it is a tactical offensive against Republican and conservative resistance to the Marxist takeover of the federal government.
The South today is the cradle of resistance to socialism, as it has been since the New Deal. The agitation of racial issues has been the Marxist counter, from the Civil Rights Movement to today's bloody-shirt "cracker" invective and pious posturing against Confederate symbols, all of which is cynically instrumental politicking aimed at splitting off moderate conservatives in "battleground" states like Ohio, from conservative candidates in the GOP, and at inducing RiNO/RNC panjandrums to attack and marginalize conservatives within the GOP. The Marxists' aim is to prosper the soft, "Me-Too" Republicans the rolling and mugging of whom has been liberals' and Progressives' stock in trade above 60 years now, at the expense of real conservatives who will defend the United States, capitalism, and American history.
To say that Southerners, whether FReepers or not, are secretly Kluxerphiles bent on reintroducing chattel slavery is a libel and a canard, and it's been retailed here on FR for years by Marxist trolls like Non-Sequitur, justshutupandtakeit, and other hard-line "conservative-busters".
Go ahead and take their line if you want to: but I'm telling you what it is, and why it was propagated here, and in popular historiography by the "Red diaper" historians whom Bill Clinton commissioned to rewrite the American history presented to the public by the National Park Service at our military parks, to introduce this Marxist, inculpatory blame-game meme.
What in the world are you doing on Free Republic? The vile venom always dribbles out of the corners of the fascist mouth eventually.
PS:Did you know Gen. Longstreet got his US commission back after the war? Do you even know who General Longstreet is?
BRAVO!
Well said LG! Well said indeed!
It was an inherent economic component of the Confederacy. Its abolition would have been economic suicide for all the Southern States. But you seriously think they'd have agreed to that? By what process of (never offered) reconciliation?
But it wasn't the real issue. It was a hot button, used in a very rational and utilitarian -- but cynical -- way by the Northern politicians whose great political adventure the war was.
I will give you this: An honest attempt at fully-compensated emancipation would have wrecked the entire Union. The values involved would have been fantastic. So naturally Northern pols, when talking about abolition, generously proposed that the cost of any emancipation should be born by the slaveholders alone .... as "punishment" condign, even though they'd broken no law.
After all, when we do good works, we needn't actually pay for them ourselves, need we? </ sarc>
Youah suhvunt.
Your analysis overlooks the fact -- the fact -- that the minute Virginia seceded from the United States, Robert E. Lee and all his fellow Virginians were no longer citizens of the United States, and therefore no longer under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, one, and two, no longer required by the Supremacy Clause to honor the U.S. Constitution or bear fealty to it or to the Union.
Fact, Jack.
Robert E. Lee was released from his duties as a United States Army officer when he resigned. From the moment he took a Virginia Militia commission, his duty was to his People, that is, to his State.
Further fact.
I think the scoutmaster of lies has had enough.
I'd like to see more about this whole business of pardons and amnesties. The claims that Lee "admitted treason" are suspicious to me, but they're out there and demand documentation. Too, as I indicated above, there's the question of duress, one, and two, Lee's statement (quoted in another recent thread) in 1870 to the former Confederate governor of Texas, that he, Lee, was not a citizen and not entitled to vote in elections. Which suggests he was neither amnestied nor pardoned, but rather simply exchanged as per the surrender protocol at Appomattox.
Longstreet discusses the question of impairment of ex-Confederates in his memoirs, but I don't know whether he addresses Lee's case in particular. Then there was Davis, another unique case, in that he was imprisoned for years without formal charges, warrants, or damn-all.
"Governor, if I had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no, sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in this right hand."
You’re right. My error and apologies to stand_watie and any others that may have been mislead.
I think a lot of freeper’s “cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” and we don’t know what happens to them. They just disappear. If Stand Watie is one of them I hope somehow he knows his arch enemy has been zotted.
“As for the question of Robert E. Lee having committed treason, even he acknowledged his own treason beyond any shadow of a doubt when he applied for the amnesty and pardon for committing those acts of treason.”
Very well.
You have your version of history. So be it.
But others have theirs, as well.
Time alone will judge whose version is the more accurate.
“The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form”
— Jefferson Davis, President CSA
Deo Vindice!
Aside: did you support the “Kelo decision”?
Sorry I popped off...
Feeling too defensive on these threads lately...
Tired of trying to second-guess FReepers with hidden agendas...
My apologies.
“Out of curiosity, do Texans with Mexican roots revere the memory of General Santa Anna (of Alamo fame) and celebrate his birthday?”
Not openly! :>)
Fact, Jack.
That's not a fact, that's an opinion. Whether or not a state could secede from the union, and the effect of an announced secession, isn't addressed in the U.S. Constitution. Before Virginia seceded, Robert E. Lee wrote his son to the effect that there was no right to secession. Scholars and historians continue to argue the point. I believe there was no agreement on the point at the time the Constitution was ratified.
In 1793, had you asked one hundred statesmen from Virginia if a state could secede from the union formed by the Constitution, I believe you would have had a range of opinions. I say "I believe" because there is nothing to prove what all Virginia statesmen thought in 1793, only what a later generation believed in 1861.
If everyone in Virginia was no longer a citizen of the United States upon secession, then everyone residing in Virginia would have lost their citizenship. How did they regain it? Not everyone took a loyalty oath; there was no legislation to make them citizens again.
So it's not a 'Fact, Jack'; it's opinion.
I'm somewhat offended that you would slander Robert E. Lee by suggesting that, If he signed anything admitting treason, he would have done so because of threat of arrest. Robert E. Lee is known by his contemporaries to be a gentleman, an honest man of his word, steadfast in his convictions. He no doubt agonized at length before resigning his commission, and agonized over secession (as evidenced by the letter he wrote to his son, Fitzhugh). I can only imagine how he agonized over committing men to battle as the war reached its conclusion, or agonized over surrender.
THAT Robert E. Lee, a man who was willing to face death in battle over his beliefs, and who could send men to die in battle for his beliefs, and who no doubt agonized over the effect of war on the people of his home state, would never have signed any false statement to avoid arrest.
You slander him to suggest that he would.
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