If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
[Calvin Coolidge] looks as though he's been weaned on a pickle.
[Thomas Dewey] is the little man on the wedding cake
Posted on 04/30/2019 4:06:09 PM PDT by NKP_Vet
President Trump sent certain segments of population into outraged spasms on Friday when he described Robert E. Lee as a "great general." Trying to lend context to his infamous "very fine people" remark about the 2017 Charlottesville protests, Trump said this:
“I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. Whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals. I have spoken to many generals here, right at the White House, and many people thought — of the generals, they think that he was maybe their favorite general.”
Trump is, of course, completely correct. Robert E. Lee has always been regarded as a military genius, and for good reason. This is not controversial to anyone with a sixth grade education in American history. But surveys show that many Americans don't even know when the Civil War took place, and a sizable number think Lincoln led the Allied Forces rather than the Union Army, so it's no surprise that basic statements of historical fact have become contentious in our age of aggressive stupidity.
I found myself in the crossfire of the controversy when I posted on Twitter in support of Trump's statement and provided my personal list of the best Civil War generals. I give Lee the top spot, followed by Jackson, Grant, Sherman, and then Nathan Bedford Forrest. You could certainly make an argument for Longstreet, Sheridan, Thomas, or Cleburne in any one of those spots. But you cannot make an argument for a list of top Civil War generals that completely excludes all Confederates. There aren't five Union generals better than Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. There isn't even one, in my view. In his Valley Campaign, Jackson marched his brigade of shoeless farm boys 600 miles through the mountains over the course of a month and a half, winning five pivotal battles against a combined force that outnumbered his 2:1. Grant never did anything quite like that, though he was impressive in his own right — and the victor, after all.
But I was informed by hundreds of people that I am a racist, just like Trump, for daring to give the Rebels any credit at all. We have reached a point where we cannot acknowledge any of the achievements of morally flawed historical figures. We must pretend they never existed. Driving this point home, a number of people insisted that ranking Confederates as great generals is like ranking Nazis as great generals. That's ridiculous, because of course some Nazi generals were great generals. Erwin Rommel was a great general, as anyone who has studied WW2 knows. The fact that he was fighting on the side of abject evil does not erase his military genius.
If we cannot acknowledge the greatness of morally compromised military commanders, then we cannot acknowledge the greatness of any military commander. Not a single one of them would pass muster by the standards of today's anachronizing blowhards. Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great — all must be removed from the history books. Even the Union commanders in the Civil War get thrown out with this bath water. Grant was an anti-Semite who tried to evict all the Jews from his military district. Sherman was a war criminal. Lincoln was a racist who publicly professed his bigotry during a debate with Stephen Douglas:
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
If we are not willing to see things in their historical context, and to accept that people in the past weren't as racially enlightened as we are today, then we will be left with no heroes, no great men at all. But if we are willing to forgive Lincoln his virulent racism, and Grant his predilection for ethnic cleansing, then we must extend a similar generosity to men like Robert E. Lee.
Nothing will make slavery anything less than a moral abomination. And it is true that slavery was a very significant motivating factor behind secession, as Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina all made abundantly clear in their Declaration of Causes of Seceding States. But it is equally true that many men who did the fighting on both sides did not perceive themselves to be fighting over slavery. There's a reason Lincoln waited two years to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He said early on that if he could keep the country together by keeping slavery, he would do it. To him, and to the Union soldiers on the ground, it was a fight to preserve the Union. The sad fact of the matter is that most Northerners were racist themselves and would not have charged into gunfire for the sake of liberating the slaves, no matter how distasteful they found the institution.
For their part, many southern soldiers thought they were fighting a war of defense against hostile invaders. There's a reason Jefferson Davis did not send his army to capture Washington, even though perhaps they could have done so after the stunning Confederate victory at Bull Run to start the war. This is the reality Robert E. Lee confronted. He was offered command of Union forces but declined because, as a loyal Virginian, he could not march against his home state. He saw it as a choice between defending his home or the Union. He chose his home.
Perhaps you would have chosen differently. Perhaps you would have taken up arms against your own family. Perhaps you would have been more enlightened than almost everyone else and seen the struggle in the same light that spectators in the future would see it. I congratulate this hypothetical version of yourself, in that case. It's true that Robert E. Lee lacked this sort of enlightenment. It's also true that when he was faced with a difficult dilemma, he made the choice he thought was right, and then proceeded to win battle after battle against a foe with superior numbers, superior weaponry, and superior resources. That's why he's a great general.
Well, it was not just his fighting abilities being recognized. Lee was the only living ‘descendant’ of George Washington. So there was a political angle as well.
http://www.reformation.org/washington-lee-connection.html
and a greater human being.
That is absolutely incorrect. I used to believe that, but I have since learned it is a lie we are taught.
Lincoln urged the passage of the Corwin amendment which would have made slavery permanent in the United States. This amendment did in fact pass both houses of congress, and was ratified by four or so Northern states.
Offering the South permanent protection for slavery if they would just remain in the Union demonstrates that the war wasn't fought over slavery, it was fought over the South becoming independent.
I think there is a statue of Longstreet at Gettysburg. There is certainly a beautiful one of Lee, mounted on Traveler, there. In fact, the largest monument at Gettysburg is the one for the State of Virginia. Every State that fought there, north or south, has a memorial.
“They say” that Pickett never forgave Lee for that. Although, they also report that, later in his life, when he was asked “why did that charge fail so miserably”, Pickett replied, “I think that the Yankees had a lot to do with it.
There is only one “Teddy Roosevelt”...President Roosevelt.
“He sure did. He let the Yankees get the high ground”
Baldy Ewell failed to take the high ground on the first day of fighting. Maybe if Jackson were still alive and commanding that same corps he would have seen the need to secure it.
Did you even read the article?
That is a ridiculous comment. Was that sarcasm?
You may have been taught lies about the Civil War, I was taught to keep an open mind and educate yourself from resources you choose yourself.
Otherwise, education becomes a punching bag process where one learns from agenda driven propaganda.
We have discussed this issue at great length, before, the causes of the Civil War, of which there were many.
I correct myself in that regard, to wit, slavery was not the “only” cause of the Civil War. It was the single greatest irritation and the Civil War would not have been fought without it.
Is it your position that, were there no slavery, there would still have been a Civil War?
Longstreet urged political cooperation with blacks.
He was highly critical of Lee’s decision to invade the North in 1863 and Lee’s tactics at the battle of Gettysburg.
Until the monument at Gettysburg went up less than 20 years ago, there was no monument to Longstreet anywhere.
His statue is not mounted on a pedestal and is almost hidden away behind a screen of trees, set in an out-of-the-way section of the 6,000-acre park, away from the more majestic memorials that honor Confederate — and Union — soldiers.
Correct. And every other "cause" resolves itself back to the practice of the "Peculiar Institution".
Sine qua non...
That is an excessively broad statement. While that statement is likely true, it misleads greatly as to the primary cause of the war.
What I have learned is that the South was producing 73-85% of all export value for the United States. The Northern states only produced 15-27% of the total export value to Europe, but strangely enough, 90% of all the money for the entire US export production funneled it's way back through New York and Boston.
The Northern Coalition had rigged the game so that virtually all the slave money flowed through their hands. They set the tariffs high because that boosted their profits for domestic manufactured goods, and the laws were rigged to give New York virtually total control on all shipping and imports. It is estimated from various sources that New York was getting 40% of the total profits from slave produced goods, and Washington DC collected their tax percentage on these same goods, and that absorbed another 20-30% of the entire value of all those slave produced goods.
New York and Washington DC were making a fortune off of Slavery, (More than the people actually running the plantations) and they didn't have to do much of anything to collect that money.
When the South decided to become independent, that flow of money (230 million per year in 1860 dollars) was going to stop. Worse, European goods would flow into the Southern states at greatly reduced prices, and there displace goods which were previously manufactured in the North, costing even further financial losses to the North.
Worse still, the Southern states would began supplying European manufactured goods all along the watershed of the Mississippi river, destroying the Midwestern market for goods manufactured in the North East.
Worse still, as the border states realized they could make more money off of the CSA system than they could off of the USA system, they would have eventually moved to join the Confederacy, causing even further losses of money and power to the then greatly weakened USA.
Where does slavery come into all of this? The slaves were producing the money. The fight was over the money, not over freedom for the slaves.
The reason Lincoln urged passage of the Corwin amendment was because they wanted those slaves to remain in the status quo of producing all that money which was flowing through New York and Washington DC hands!
The sticking point of the war was independence. There was no sticking point about keeping slaves in slavery. Both sides had intended to do that when the war began. The North continued keeping slaves for 8 more months after the war ended.
That's why I say that people have been misled about the cause of the war. Slavery is only indirectly involved. The real cause of the war was a fight over money.
For a view of the situation from the perspective of a British Abolitionist, Charles Dickens had this to say about the matter.
I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it, in any kind of association with any generous or chivalrous sentiment on the part of the North. But the North having gradually got to itself the making of the laws and the settlement of the tariffs, and having taxed South most abominably for its own advantage, began to see, as the country grew, that unless it advocated the laying down of a geographical line beyond which slavery should not extend, the South would necessarily to recover it's old political power, and be able to help itself a little in the adjustment of the commercial affairs.Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens."
Funny way of putting the usage of the government to screw other people out of money. That same peculiar institution is just business as usual in Washington DC nowadays.
Hardly sarcasm and not even remotely ridiculous.
He invaded the north twice and ok’d all sorts of raids in MD, PA, and even towards DC.
What’s your issue with it?
You are mistaking desperate attempts to avoid a war with the politicians actual positions.
Lincoln sought many compromises to save the Union. Acceptance of tis Democrat measure being one of them.
HOWEVER, that does not change his fundamental position, nor the fundamental positions of the treasonous Breckenridges position.
“Outgoing President James Buchanan endorsed the Corwin Amendment by taking the unprecedented step of signing it.[15] His signature on the Congressional joint resolution was unnecessary, as the President has no formal role in the constitutional amendment process.[16]
Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address on March 4, said of the Corwin Amendment:[17]
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.
Just weeks prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln sent a letter to each state’s governor transmitting the proposed amendment,[18] noting that Buchanan had approved it.[19]”
Why speculate gandaltfb?
The Virginia secession convention provides plenty of detail as to the cause of the secession and the resulting war.
The DEMOCRATS initiated the secession AND the war because they wanted to SPREAD slavery.
The REPUBLICAN party was formed in direct opposition to Douglas (D) “Kansas-Nebraska” act. This act violated the Missouri compromise of 30 years prior that sought to limit slavery. It allowed both Kansas and Nebraska tertitories to become slave states by majority votes.
This ill considered law gave us ten bloody years in Kansas before the civil war.
DEMOCRAT fireeaters - led by the treasonous vice president John C Breckenridge were not content to keep their slaves. THEY WERE SEEKING TO EXPAND SLAVERY. They wanted to take their ‘property’ to every location they could settle.
SO DEMOCRATS SECEEDED AND THEN INITIATED HOSTILE ACTION.
On the other hand,
REPUBLICANS were adamantly opposed to slavery but were seeking to remove the institution in a peaceful manner.
President Lincoln sought one compromise after another to avoid the bloody civil war - up to and including the Corwin amendment.
So the REPUBLICAN and LINCOLNS initial purpose for fighiting was to ‘PRESERVE THE UNION’.
However, after much bloodshed, Lincoln expanded his goals to ENDING SLAVERY. The horrible consequences having already been thrust upon the nation by toxic, treasonous DEMOCRATS.
At the Virginia Secession convention - a near thing - speakers from the Seceeding States spoke to the convention to give their reasoning for their actions. Here are the words of the Georgia delegate to Virginia. The cause of the Civil War between Republicans and Democrats does not get any clearer than this.
First paragraph:
“I have been appointed by the Convention of the State of Georgia, to present to this Convention (Virginia), the ordinance of secession of Georgia,
and further, to invite Virginia, thorough this Convention, to join Georgie and the other seceded States in the formation of a Southern Confederacy.
This, sir, is the whole extent of my mission….”
Second paragraph:
”What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession?
This reason may be summed up in one single proposition.
It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia,
that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery.
This conviction, sir, was the main cause.
It is true, sir, that the effect of this conviction was strengthened by a further conviction that such a separation would be the best remedy for the fugitive slave evil,
.... {Note: This ‘fugitive slave evil’
.... being the the refusal of some Republicans
.... in Northern States
.... to refuse to return escaped slaves}
and also the best, if not the only remedy, for the territorial evil.
.... {Note: This ‘territorial evil’
.... would be the Missouri compromise
.... from thirty or forty years prior
.... where the territories were declared free
.... and slaves were not allowed.
.... The democrats wished to take their slaves
.... with them.}
But, doubtless, if it had not been for the first conviction this step would never have been taken.
It therefore becomes important to inquire whether this conviction was well founded.”
………..Honorable Henry L. Benning, of Georgia
……………addressing the Virginia State Convention
……………on Monday, February 18, 1861
……………the Fifth day of the Convention
....
.... The second speaker from the other States after Mississippi.
Bingo. There’s just no getting around that. The North Offered the South slavery forever by express constitutional amendment. The South turned it down. Obviously secession and the war were not “about” slavery.
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