Posted on 01/31/2002 4:17:10 AM PST by shuckmaster
The South has risen to challenge a Snohomish lawmaker.
In hundreds of e-mails and phone calls, Southerners and history buffs across the country reacted to a proposal last week by state Rep. Hans Dunshee to remove a road marker at the Peace Arch border crossing honoring Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president.
"My resolve has only increased," Dunshee said Wednesday.
The controversy surrounds a monument in Blaine designating old Highway 99, which runs through Snohomish County, as part of the transcontinental Jefferson Davis Highway. The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected the marker in 1940 with the support of state and Canadian officials.
Dunshee wants to pass a bill to rename the highway after William Stewart, a black man who fought for the North in the Civil War before moving to Snohomish. He also wants to get rid of the marker honoring Davis, whom he called "a guy who led the insurgency to perpetuate slavery and killed half a million Americans."
That comment is what most infuriated Southerners who heard about or saw The Herald's article about Dunshee's proposal.
"Amazing! Your Mr. Dunshee's ignorance of history is certainly letting itself be known," wrote John Salley of Belton, S.C., before launching into a history lesson.
"While I'm a believer in the traditional Southern view of states' rights, and believe that Mr. Dunshee has a right to move to change the name of the highway in his state," wrote Jeff Adams from Houston, "I don't think he should be so angry, intolerant and bigoted about it."
Some talked of boycotting Washington state if the marker is taken down.
Others said that if state officials change the highway's name, they should also change the state's name, because George Washington was one of the biggest slave owners of his time.
And still others accused Dunshee of trying to revise history, George Orwell-style.
Dunshee's reaction seems "outrageous" to Southerners because Davis is widely revered in the South, said Dave Gass, an art director for a magazine in Atlanta.
"Jefferson Davis' birthday is a legal holiday in seven Southern states," Gass said. "That's why I was so shocked to read this fellow (Dunshee) going on about how horrible he was, when Jefferson Davis was really a great man.
"Mr. Davis had a whole career before the war started and did things that benefited the entire country from coast to coast," Gass added. "He definitely deserves to be memorialized."
Suzanne Silek, president general of the 20,000-member United Daughters of the Confederacy, said there was good reason to erect the marker here. Davis built forts in Washington and helped get roads and railways built to reach them when he served as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce, Silek said from the group's headquarters in Richmond, Va., where Davis is buried.
"The members who were active then did the historical research and found out that Mr. Davis was instrumental in developing the roads and highways in Washington state," Silek said. "And that's why they felt that Washington needed a highway named after Jefferson Davis."
The organization used to have six Washington chapters, although there's only one left now, with 32 members.
United Daughters of the Confederacy, which originated the highway naming in 1913, placed the markers for the patchwork road, which started in Virginia at the Potomac River and goes all the way to California, then up the coast, Silek said. The Blaine marker is the last one.
The local United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter plans to fight to keep the memorial standing, Silek said. She also said she'll ask Vancouver city officials to put back their marker in a city park marking the other end of the highway in Washington. It was quietly removed four years ago by a city council members who expressed concerns similar to Dunshee's.
The Daughters of the Confederacy can expect help from the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, said Ken Richmond of Sequim, leader of the group's state chapter. He said his group would support them in their quest to keep the markers up "because of the heritage issues involved."
A Western Washington University history professor said he isn't opposed to taking down the memorial, as long as it's not done solely over the slavery issue.
"If we take away memorials to people who owned slaves, we'd have to change the name of the state of Washington," said Alan Gallay, who teaches Southern history. Gallay used to teach history in Davis' home state of Mississippi, and his third book about the South is due out next week.
The proposal has stirred debate over the causes of the Civil War.
Dunshee is a history buff who can quote Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and insists that slavery was the real reason the war was fought. Others loudly disagree.
"To say that the war between the states was fought over slavery is like saying the American Revolution was fought over tea," Gass said.
The plan also highlights the deep North-South divide that still separates this country.
"It just seems that more often than not, Southerners are maligned for no particular reason," said William Wells of New Orleans, where Davis died in 1889.
Wells and others threatened -- some in jest -- to boycott Washington if Dunshee's bill gets through the Legislature.
"If Dunshee and his cohorts attempt to remove the marker, another will go up in its place," wrote Steven Moshlak of Longmont, Colo. And if the Legislature changes the name of the highway, "it will be a dark day before I, or others, will ever visit Washington state."
Hero or villain?
Dead for 113 years, Jefferson Davis still inspires Civil War-era feelings of reverence in the South and hatred in the North.
He was the first and only president of the Confederate United States. But he's often wrongly held up as a symbol of a pro-slavery resistance that led to war.
A U.S. senator from Mississippi, Davis tried to keep the Union together. He joined the Confederacy only when his state seceded. He sent a peace commission to Washington, D.C., after his inauguration, but Abraham Lincoln refused it.
Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808, just eight months before Lincoln and 100 miles away.
Davis was captured by federal troops in 1865 and jailed for two years. He was indicted for treason, but his case was dropped.
--Sam Houston
Walt
Bump, BUMP, BUMP! and BUMP!
You neo-confeds look like blithering idiots when you minimize the fact that the secessionists opened hostilities.
But they were warned:
"I therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken; and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it so far as practicable, unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative manner direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it WILL Constitutionally defend and maintain itself."
A. Lincoln 3/4/61
Walt
He sent a peace commission to Washington, D.C., after his inauguration, but Abraham Lincoln refused it.It was Lincoln who put the "War" in "Civil".
Garbage. Lincoln specifically had only non-military supplies sent to Ft Sumter, but the rebels (Gen Beauregard? I forget who was in charge) decided to take it as a provocation anyway and opened fire.
I'm as conservative as the next guy around here, but good riddance to the Confederacy. Owning human beings, and the brutality necessary to enforce that ownership, distorted the souls of an entire culture. In my not-so-humble opinion, the nasty subculture we see in American inner cities is an echo of the nasty subculture that existed in the American South, even after their military defeat.
It's a pity we gave up on Reconstruction so quickly. The occupation of Germany and Japan after WWII was more effective at eradicating their evils.
Gee Wally, if someone breaks thru my window, former best friend or not, I can defend my property. Especially since we had already attempted negotionations which Caeser Lincoln refused.
What's worse is you neo-yankees that bounce from thread to thread to disrupt us. We seek nothing other than to honor, and preserve the honor, of men who did nothing illegal, men who fought to defend the Constitution from those would would pervert it and destroy it.
But they were warned:
Who opened hostilities? Lincoln did, by blockading sea ports. This itself an act of war.
Who shot a gun first? Yes, the secessionists shot first at Ft. Sumter. Whoop de freakin' do -- the total death toll was one poor horse.
Who drew the first human blood? It was a Massachusetss regiment marching through Baltimore on April 19, 1861, firing on civilians and killing twelve. (Sheesh, what is it about that April 19th date?!)
You are correct -- the Confederates were warned. It was a member of Jefferson Davis' own cabinet, Robert Toombs, who sounded the alarm. He was ardently opposed to firing on Ft. Sumter. He correctly saw it as falling for Lincoln's bait to draw them into war:
The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has ever seen, Mr. President. It is suicide, it is murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountains to ocean; and legions, now quiet, will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary, it puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.
For all those around the world who would secede from a tyrannical government, please heed the words of Robert Toombs. Do not fall into the trap of war. Secede firmly, quietly, and peacefully.
The American secession from Britain in 1776 was bloody, yes, and it was one of those rare successes. At least in that secession the British fired first.
Too bad Robert Toombs had not been president of the Confederacy in 1861.
That would be tragic if one considers the memory of the 31,000 Tennesseans who fought under the old flag.
Walt
The blockade was instigated -after- the firing on Fort Sumter. Or could you please provide a source for this? If you think about it, it's a little nutty on it's face. Would Lincoln impose a blackade and THEN re-supply Sumter?
"As he hears his own lips parroting the sad cliches of 1850 does the Southerner sometimes wonder if the words are his own? Does he ever, for a moment, feel the desperation of being caught in some great time machine, like a tread mill, and doomed to eternal effort without progress? Or feel, like Sisyphus, the doom of pushing a great stone up a hill only to have the weight, like guilt, roll back over him, over and over again? When he lifts his arms to silence protest, does he ever feel, even fleetingly, that he is lifting it against some voice deep in himself?"
--Robert Penn Warren, "The legacy of the Civil War", p.56-57
Walt
They fired on Old Glory.
They sowed the wind and they reaped the whirlwind.
Walt
That's about all we can say about it unless a bunch of us moved to Washington.
Not quite. Those of us elsewhere, particularly those of us in the South, can also urge our legislators to vote against the funding of any project that requires tax dollars collected in our states to be spent in one that trashes history for the sake of political correctness and expediency. Not one cent should go to Washington state for museums, historical preservation or the arts if the Davis Highway markwer is removed or vandalized, and some strong thoughts might be made toward cutting their education funding as well.
If they don't care to be a part of recalling the history of the rest of the country, they should fund their own efforts to promote their own on their own.
-archy-/-
Better to heed the words of Thomas Jefferson:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Perhaps you can lay out a the long train of abuses before 1860 that would parallel the one that Jefferson refers to.
Walt
"No state shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops, or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay."
I post this for the constitutional argument only (for the record - you can honor whomever you choose in whatever way you choose) I have no interest in getting into the argument these threads typically devolve into
They fired on Old Glory.
As did the forces that included U.S. federal troops under Macarthur, Eisenhower and Patton who in 1932 attacked the *Bonus Army* of veterans of the First World War and gassed them, killing children and former soldiers who still believed they'd be safe beneath Old Glory.
As the government takes greater and greater steps to legitimize its claim that it is the rightful inheritor of the US flag, it becomes more and more meaningless to more and more Americans, particularly the young, whose senses are less dulled by age and overexposure and who can smell such bovine output before they step in it. And, of course, are ever the ones called upon to die in adventures to salvage a politician's reputation or a nation's economy.
-archy-/-
Amusing.....not that I care a whole lot about what they do out in tree hugger land....they outta give Spokane and all the lands east of the Casacades to Idaho anyhow. Eastern Washington State should secede and now!!!!!!
The entire state of Washington, in particular, the western side of the state in which Dunshee resides, is a politically correct socialist state controlled by leftist wackos. And the amazing thing is, the people just keep electing more of 'em! The result? Washington has the 4th highest taxes in the nation - and the governor and politicians are clamnoring for more. And, they'll get what they want. The voters in the western part of the state - "Bougeois Bolshevik" yuppie liberals - have the votes to force the citizens in the rest of the state to go along with their socialist utopia vision. I am afraid the state is doomed.
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