Posted on 04/01/2018 9:05:49 AM PDT by Simon Green
Over the decades, this quiet coastal hamlet has earned a reputation as one of the most liberal places in the nation. Arcata was the first U.S. city to ban the sale of genetically modified foods, the first to elect a majority Green Party city council and one of the first to tacitly allow marijuana farming before pot was legal.
Now it's on the verge of another first.
No other city has taken down a monument to a president for his misdeeds. But Arcata is poised to do just that. The target is an 8½-foot bronze likeness of William McKinley, who was president at the turn of the last century and stands accused of directing the slaughter of Native peoples in the U.S. and abroad.
"Put a rope around its neck and pull it down," Chris Peters shouted at a recent rally held at the statue, which has adorned the central square for more than a century.
Peters, who heads the Arcata-based Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous People, called McKinley a proponent of "settler colonialism" that "savaged, raped and killed."
A presidential statue would be the most significant casualty in an emerging movement to remove monuments honoring people who helped lead what Native groups describe as a centuries-long war against their very existence.
The push follows the rapid fall of Confederate memorials across the South in a victory for activists who view them as celebrating slavery. In the nearly eight months since white supremacists marched in central Virginia to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, cities across the country have yanked dozens of Confederate monuments. Black politicians and activists have been among the strongest supporters of the removals.
This time, it's tribal activists taking charge, and it's the West and California in particular leading the way.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Well, hello there Doodle. Why am I so completely unsurprised and unimpressed to find you here regurgitating?
Why did the United States go to war against the seceding states of the south? You want to go all girly and get emotional, I want to pin down the facts of the matter. The north went to war over secession, period.
Grant was a drunk but a wiley one, that is also a factual assertion. You know this, but just had to embellish. Why is that? Emotion again.
This is an incredibly stupid assertion.
Unlike the tale of the virtuous South, which was enforced in practically every school and university in the South. Those schools were indoctrinating people in those pro-south assertions and tenets. Have known to many Southerners, over 50 years or so, educated in Southern schools in the 50s and 60s. Almost every one of them firmly believe every word of what I said in my last post. Who indoctrinates who?
Seems pretty evident now, just who is doing the indoctrination. The myth of the Great White Hope in the north riding on their white horses to save the poor slaves. Myth. Four Union states were slave states, Lincoln himself states that slavery was fine if it meant keeping the union. Slaves were not freed at the conclusion of the Civil War in Union states. The Constitution of the United States had to be amended in order to do that. The Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime proclamation with no force of law outside of states in rebellion, which no longer recognized US law in the first place. So, that wartime ploy to foment slave rebellion in the Confederacy was enshrined for what reason? It fed the myth.
If you wish to believe that, be my guest.
Of course you would since they are unsourced and bear little resemblance to the truth.
Prisoner exchanged actually began in August 1861 with a prisoner exchange in Missouri. In December 1861 Congress authorized exchanges and initial discussions began in February 1862 and not July 1862. Discussion continued in fits and starts until July when the agreement was reached.
The agreement almost immediately broke down when Jefferson Davis General told Robert E. Lee to inform the Federals that Union general John Pope, and certain of his subordinates, would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war should they be captured. A few weeks later the Davis government announced that Union general David Hunter and other officers would be held for execution as felons instead of as prisoners of war. Their crime, for which they were subject to execution, was raising regiments of former slaves for the Union service. In December Davis issued the same orders for Benjamin Butler should he be captured. While prisoner paroles had continued during this period with Union armies and Confederate armies paroling over 20,000 prisoners from various battles, formal exchanges were on hold. Hard to exchange prisoners when the other side says they are going to selectively kill your own officers. I noticed that Spartacus overlooked that in his treatise.
Exchanges were reauthorized in March 1863 and were almost immediately halted again. The reason? The Confederate Congress passed a law stating that the officers of black troops in the Union army would be tried under Confederate law for inciting servile insurrection. When convicted they would be executed. The black troops themselves would be "delivered to the authorities of the State or States in which they shall be captured to be dealt with according to the present or future law of such State or States." E. Kirby Smith himself instructed one of his subordinates, Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor: "I have been unofficially informed that some of your troops have captured negroes in arms. I hope this may not be so, and that your subordinates who may have been in command of capturing parties may have recognized the propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers. In this way we may be relieved from a disagreeable dilemma." A year later Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon wrote to Maj. Gen. Howell Cobb, commanding the Georgia militia: "As to the white officers serving with negro troops, we ought never to be inconvenienced with such prisoners." Spartacus overlooked that little item as well in his haste to blame everything on the North.
Now as to the question of the Grant quote. I agree to its accuracy but Spartacus, like you, cares little for context. The quote is from the last line of a letter Grant wrote to Stanton concerning the quality of recent recruits. The paragraph in it's entirety goes like this:
"Of this class of recruits we do not get one, for every eight bounties paid, to do good service. My provost-marshal-general is preparing a statement on this subject, which will show the reinforcements received from this class of recruits. Take the other side, the desertions from the enemy to us. Not a day passes but men come into our lines, and men, too, who have been fighting for the South for more than three years. Not infrequently a commissioned officer comes with them. Only a few days ago I sent a regiment numbering 1,000 men for duty to General Pope's department, composed wholly of deserters from the rebel army and of prisoners who took the oath of allegiance and joined it. There is no doubt but many prisoners of war have taken the oath of allegiance and enlisted as substitutes to get the bounty and to effect their return to the South. These men are paraded abroad as deserters who want to join the South and fight her battles, and it is through our leniency that the South expects to reap great advantages. We ought not to make a single exchange or release s prisoner on any pretext until the war closes. We have got to fight until the military power of the South is exhausted, and if we release or exchange prisoners captured it simply becomes a war of extermination."
So there is the truth of the matter. Prisoner exchanges most often broke down due to rebel duplicity and refusal to follow the rules of war, the Lieber Code if you will. Executing prisoners, something the rebels did on some frequency. Refusing to recognize black soldiers as prisoners. Threatening captured officers with death for commanding Union troops. The Confederacies attitudes towards prisoners were far harsher and cruel than anything the Union came up with.
Spartacus' and your opinions to the contrary notwithstanding.
Why do you keep propping up all those strawmen? No one here is making those claims - except you.
Where there are posts of darkness crying out for the truth, I'll be there.
Why did the United States go to war against the seceding states of the south?
I am going to go out on a limb and say it was because the South started it by bombarding Sumter. I think I read that somewhere.
Now the question is why did the South secede in the first place? The reason for that is to defend their institution of slavery from what they saw as a threat from the Republican administration. I read that somewhere too.
Grant was a drunk but a wiley one, that is also a factual assertion. You know this, but just had to embellish. Why is that? Emotion again.
Not emotion, curiosity. If Grant was such a slobbering drunk then how did he manage to defeat every general the Confederacy sent against him. How did he manage to capture three whole armies in the field? How did he maneuver his armies in the West in ways that still amaze military historians? What with him being a drunk and all.
Even the “Grant was a drunk” crap is more leftist lost cause drivel.
So, the north did not go to war to end slavery. Say it.
I’m just observing the truth, Grant was a drunk. Obviously a high-functioning one, but still a drunk. So was Winston Churchill. Does that factual observation send you into a tizzy of defensive rationalization? If not, why not?
Lost Cause drivel from HistoryNet:
http://www.historynet.com/ulysses-s-grants-lifelong-struggle-with-alcohol.htm
He doesn't need to say it. I don't need to say it. Lincoln said it. No rational person who has ever seriously studied the Southern rebellion believes that the North fought to end slavery.
The only side whose cause was motivated by slavery was the Southern side.
Probably because it's wrong. Grant was no more of a drunk than Churchill was. As anyone who has read up on either man knows. Both men drank. Both occasionally drank to excess. But alcohol did not keep either man from functioning at a high level. In Grant's case, a higher level than his Southern opponents.
Do you have an original (primary) source for this imaginary quote?
I never made the claim. Stuff it.
He was nearly court-martialed for drunkenness, his commanders had a major problem with Grant’s drinking throughout his career and it didn’t stop during the Civil War. Grant was a drunk. You have difficulty with that because you’re afraid it’s some sort of admission of inferiority. The Union won the Civil War under the command of a drunk. I have no problem with the unvarnished truth.
Even the “Grant was a drunk” crap is more leftist lost cause drivel.
Seems to me it was you.
You have two threads twisted up there irregular. Why don’t you take a moment to unwind them before you make more of a fool of yourself.
Apparently you do.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.