Posted on 09/30/2003 12:19:22 PM PDT by sheltonmac
The South's unconditional surrender in 1865 apparently was unacceptable to today's Neo-Confederates.
They'd like to rewrite history, demonizing Abraham Lincoln and the federal government that forced them to remain in the awful United States against their will.
On top of that, now they are opposing the U.S. Navy's plan to bury the crew of the CSS H.L. Hunley under the American flag next year.
The Hunley was the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. In 1863, it rammed and fatally damaged the Union warship USS Housatonic with a fixed torpedo, but then the manually driven sub sank on its way home, killing its eight-man crew.
It might have been a lucky shot from the Housatonic, leaks caused by the torpedo explosion, an accidental strike by another Union ship, malfunction of its snorkel valves, damage to its steering planes or getting stuck in the mud.
In any case, the Navy found and raised its remains and plans a full-dress military funeral and burial service on April 17, 2004, in Charleston, S.C. The four-mile funeral procession is expected to draw 10,000 to 20,000 people, many in period costume or Confederate battle dress.
But the Sons of Confederate Veterans, generally a moderate group that works diligently to preserve Southern history and heritage, has a radical wing that is salivating with anger.
One Texas Confederate has drawn 1,600 signatures on a petition saying "the flag of their eternal enemy, the United States of America," must not fly over the Hunley crew's funeral.
To their credit, the funeral's organizers will leave the U.S. flag flying.
After all, the search and preservation of the Hunley artifacts, as well as the funeral itself, were paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
Also, the Hunley crew was born under the Stars and Stripes. The Confederacy was never an internationally recognized nation, so the crewmen also died as citizens of the United States.
They were in rebellion, but they were still Americans.
This whole issue is an insult to all Southerners who fought under the U.S. flag before and since the Civil War.
But it isn't the only outrage by rabid secessionists.
They are also opposing the placement of a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Richmond, Va., the Confederate capital.
According to an article by Bob Moser and published in the Southern Poverty Law Center's magazine "Intelligence Report," which monitors right-wing and hate groups, the U.S. Historical Society announced it was donating a statue of Lincoln to Richmond.
Lincoln visited that city in April 1865 to begin healing the wounds caused by the war.
The proposed life-sized statue has Lincoln resting on a bench, looking sad, his arm around his 12-year-old son, Tad. The base of the statue has a quote from his second inaugural address.
However, the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised a stink, calling Lincoln a tyrant and war criminal. Neo-Confederates are trying to make Lincoln "a figure few history students would recognize: a racist dictator who trashed the Constitution and turned the USA into an imperialist welfare state," Moser's article says.
White supremacist groups have jumped onto the bandwagon. Their motto is "Taking America back starts with taking Lincoln down."
Actually, if it weren't for the forgiving nature of Lincoln, Richmond would be a smoking hole in the ground and hundreds of Confederate leaders -- including Jefferson Davis -- would be hanging from trees from Fredericksburg, Va., to Atlanta.
Robert E. Lee said, "I surrendered as much to Lincoln's goodness as I did to Grant's armies."
Revisionist history to suit a political agenda is as intellectually abhorrent as whitewashing slavery itself. It's racism under a different flag. While it's not a criminal offense, it is a crime against truth and history.
I'm not talking about re-enactors here. These folks just want to live history. But the Neo-Confederate movement is a disguised attempt to change history.
In the end, the Confederacy was out-fought, out-lasted, eventually out-generaled and totally over-matched. It was a criminal idea to start with, and its success would have changed the course of modern history for the worse.
Coming to that realization cost this nation half a million lives.
So I hope that all Neo-Confederates -- 140 years after the fact -- can finally get out of their racist, twisted, angry time machine and join us here in 2003.
(And kill its crew in the process.) You should see some of the "ingenuity" of the Japanese and Germans during WW2. They showed more "ingenuity" the more desperate they go ("kamikazes", anyone?).
But it's better to curse the names of brave men who served their state well than to look at the beliefs of anti-Semites we're supposed to honor as good 'Americans'
Being burried under an American flag with military honors is generally not considered "cursing" someone except in the bizarro world of those who seem to despise America and the American flag. I used to think that such people were concentrated on the Left. Alas, I was wrong.
In Springfield, Illinois, during August 1908, a three-day riot took place, initiated by a white woman,s claim of violation by a Negro. Inflamed by newspapers’ sensationalism, crowds of whites gathered around the jail demanding that the Negro, who had been arrested and imprisoned, be lynched. When the sheriff transferred the accused and another Negro to a jail in a nearby town, white mobs headed for the Negro section and attacked homes and businesses. Two Blacks were lynched, others were dragged from their houses and streetcars and beaten. By the time the National Guardsmen reached the scene, six persons were dead—four whites and two Negroes. This riot, in the home town of Abraham Lincoln, shocked white liberals, who met the following year in New York City, with several prominent Blacks, to form the NAACP “to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice...”
The East St. Louis, Illinois riot in 1917 was touched off by the fear of white working men that Negro advances in economic, political and social status were threatening their own status. When the labor force of an aluminum plant went on strike in April, the company hired Negro workers. Although the strike was crushed by a combination of militia, injunctions, and both Black and white strike breakers, the union blamed its defeat on the Blacks. A union meeting in May demanded that “East St. Louis must remain a white man’s town.” A riot followed, sparked by a white man, during which mobs demolished buildings and Blacks were attacked and beaten. Policemen did little more than take the injured to hospitals and disarm Negroes. Harassments and beatings continued through June.
The worst of the post-War race riots took place in Chicago, Illinois. It began late in July 1919 when a young Black “encroached” upon a swimming area that the whites had marked off for themselves, and was stoned until he drowned. By the time the riot ended, thirteen days later, thousands of both races had been involved in a series of frays, fifteen whites and twenty-three Negroes were killed, and 178 whites and 342 Blacks were injured. More than one thousand families, mostly Blacks, were left homeless due to the burnings and general destruction of property.
there are so many un-truths in those few lines that i don't know where to start correcting.
NOT only were the VAST majority of southern soldiers VOLUNTEERS, but mostly our lads were self-equipped & UNPAID.
do you REALLY believe ANY of the tripe you posted?
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
The difference between those other cultures and the Confederacy are so numerous it would take a whole thread to lay them out. Suffice it to say one serious reason is they were fighting for their homes and not military supremacy over another nation. They just wanted to be left alone.
Being burried under an American flag with military honors is generally not considered "cursing" someone except in the bizarro world of those who seem to despise America and the American flag
To me it is when they fought with their last breath against the oppressive government of the north. I think someone should buy a plot of land for these brave men and proudly fly the National flag of the Confederacy over their graves
are you intelligent enough to be on the forum? or are you just a disruptor?
free dixie,sw
Wrong. Since you brought it up, you ought to know the facts.
"Charleston County charges more blacks with lynching than any other - 271 in the past five years. That county is 34 percent black; blacks accounted for 69 percent of those charged."
There was no draft here.
There are Bexar county records which show the rest.
Are you Michael Moore or something?
But it was and has recently been by the United States. When French divers began excavating the wreck of the raider CSS Alabama they claimed the wreck was that of a private vessel and up for dibs under international salvage law. The United States, on the other hand, claimed the vessel was a warship of a sovereign nation and as such could not be salvaged by any entity but the owning nation. In addition, U.S. maritime lawyers argued, the United States was the successor nation to the original sovereign nation, the Confederate States, and as such had sole rights to the salvage of the Alabama.
For starters, some of those nations did not enter into the Soviet Union willingly. And I notice that you didn't mention the secession disasters such as Yugoslavia, nor the old Soviet Republics that have seceeded and then gone bad. Secession is not something to be done quickly or lightly, even when it can be justified. And when you do not have the cooperation of all of the parties involved, you invariably wind up with a situation similar to the Civil War (see Chechnya).
The broader question revolves around the scale at which you think a people has the right to seceed. Obviously, you think that a state can seceed from a country and you seem to agree that a county can seceed from a state and join another country. What about a town? Should Niagra Falls, NY be allowed to seceed from New York State and the United States to join Canada? What about a large farm? Should a farmer in Montana have the right to seceed from his town, county, and state and join Canada? I'm trying to understand your limits, if you have any.
I wholeheartedly agree, and feel that the efforts of the Navy are intended with the utmost of respect.
Unfortunately, that same respect is conspicuously absent from the general public. From banning battle flags in public view to doggedly insulting anyone who might claim that their ancestors fought for honor, not for an institution of slavery which they disagreed with and worked to dismantle.
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