Well golly-gee, NS. How could we ever forget our racist past with ya'll preaching from your mighty pulpit and sitting atop your high horses...
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.
In 1862, Lincoln invited some free black men to his "Address on Colonization to a Committee of Colored Men, Washington, D.C."
In an effort to get them to "lead by example", he informed them that, at his request, a sum of money had been appropriated by Congress "for the purpose of aiding the colonization in some country of the people, or portion of them, of African descent . . ."
Abolitionist Garrison and Fred Douglas came out against the proposal and the idea was dropped.
Even the Claremont guys agree Lincoln supported this plan for a while, though the rationalize it by saying "his heart was in the right place" and that others such as Clay supported similar plans.
I found an interesting link to the African American Mosiac, but it conveniently excludes any reference to Lincoln, though Clay, Liberia, Haiti, and the ACS are mentioned.
They were self equipped because the south was poverty stricken and couldn't afford decent uniforms and equipment. They were often unpaid, but they were supposed to be paid as their families back home often had no other source of income.
All the southern states had extensive slave patrol systems in place. These functioned essentially as militia of one sort or another, and southerners who didn't own slaves were required to serve in them. Especially after John Brown, all these units were in constant serve, but for the most part they were all through the 1850's and often long before. Essentially the anti-bellum south ran non-stop under martial law. The only real exceptions were in some of the hill areas where there were very few if any Americans of African heritage.
These units were all called under state orders well in advance of Sumter, and they were pretty consistantly used to control and influence the secession votes. The system had allotments for each county based on the number of men of military age in each county, and if you ever bothered to read the military records of the Army of Virginia, you will find it filled with requests by local magistrates to have the percentage of men taken by the Confederate National draft altered so that the state drafted militia's could be used at harvests etc. Naturally, the discussion always goes back to the percentages of Americans of African heritage in the given areas, and whether the local called militia's had enough strength to maintain the safety of the area in case of slave revolts etc.
It's interesting reading for someone who can tolerate the truth.
Not surprisingly, the links between handling large numbers of slaves, the local militias, the slave patrolling and Robert E Lee who in his day managed more slaves for the Confederacy than any other man, and the slave marketing connections of Nathan Forrest put these two into the ideal position to create the reconstruction Klan and to control it's activities.
Well golly-gee, NS. How could we ever forget our racist past with ya'll preaching from your mighty pulpit and sitting atop your high horses...
My bad. ;-)
This FR crowd amazes me at times.
BTW: What was you previous FR handle?
Isn't life funny? Polar opposites having the same thought at the same time.
Indeed. Last time around, it got somewhat expensive when they were *riled up:*
Spring, 1864:
The Wilderness, May 5-7: 17,666 Union casualties
Spotsylvania, May 10 and 12: 10,920 Union casualties
Drewry's Bluff, May 12-16 4,160 Union casualties
Cold Harbor, June 1-3: 12,000 Union casualties
Petersburg, June 15-30 16,569 Union casualties
In addition to its dead and wounded from battle and disease, the Union listed:
Deaths in Prison: 24,866
Drowning: 4,944
Accidental deaths: 4,144
Murdered: 520
Suicides: 391
Sunstroke: 313
Military executions: 267
Killed after capture: 104
Executed by enemy: 64
Unclassified: 14,155
Damn NS...bad day? You are usually one of the more polite Yankees here.
Indeed. Let us do just that:
Of those engaged in the fight, the slaughter was by no means so great as it would have been had there been an order or a determination to exterminate the garrison, as is implied in the committee's report. About two-fifths of the garrison were killed, and another one-fifth wounded., It is impossible to know now how many had been killed before the mad rush away from the stormed parapet in an attempt to take up the fight from a new position, but from the testimony and reports it is apparent that there must have been heavy loss during the hours of fighting from the "unerring aim of the rebel sharpshooters," and probably still heavier loss as the assaulting waves came over the parapet, emptying 1,200 rifles into the crowded defenders at hand-to-hand range. It must be remembered too that there never was a surrender of the fort, nor an entire cessation of resistance until perhaps twenty minutes after the storming of the parapet. Had there been, the loss of life would have been less.-archy-/-
The third main charge, that the "atrocities committed at Fort Pillow" were the result of deliberate policy, does not stand up under examination of the Union record. Without doubt men were killed and wounded who should not have been, and the loss of life was greater than it would have been but for the attempt to prolong resistance beneath the bluff while the gunboat was supposed to be shelling the Confederates in the fort.
Undoubtedly, too, this was intensified by the bitter animosities, many of them personal, existing between the Tennessee white Unionist defenders of the fort and the assailants, and by the feeling of many Confederate soldiers toward those whom they looked upon as slaves in blue uniforms. In all the circumstances it would have been a strange and wonderful thing bad there been no cases of individual assault in the closing portions of a fight which came to a ragged, scattering and indefinite end.
The finding of the committee as to a deliberate policy of destruction of the garrison rests partly upon Forrest's note demanding surrender and partly upon testimony of wounded survivors that "officers," or "Chalmers" or "Forrest" had ordered a slaughter of the defenders. As to the note demanding surrender, Forrest was probably correct in saying that he could not be responsible for the consequences if the demand was refused, but this was by no means the same as saying that he was ordering a slaughter. As a matter of fact, it was no more than a repetition of the device which he had used before and was to use again with success in securing surrender of places with minimum loss of life to his own command and, for that matter, to the defenders.
The testimony of survivors on the point of the attitude of officers is mixed. The very first survivor examined-Elias, a colored soldier-said that the rebels "killed all the men after they surrendered, until orders were given to stop. . . ."
"Till who gave orders?"
"They told me his name was Forrest."
The same witness told of seeing a soldier shoot one of the wounded men in the hand, when "an officer told the secesh soldier if be did that again he would arrest him."115
Lieutenant Leaming testified that when there were shots outside the hut to which he had been carried after being wounded he heard an officer ride up and say: "Stop that firing; arrest that man," and that another officer-prisoner told him "that they had been shooting them, but the general had had it stopped."
Sigh. You had to ask....Fond memories of that first, beloved car.
-archy-/-
Assholes like you should be down on their knees thanking the countless descendants of those brave men who fought for the Confederacy. Were it not for the votes that today come from those descendants and the southern states, the entire country would be totally in the hands of the leftists who now control most of the rest of the country. The south represents the last bastion of freedom we have today, freedom originally guaranteed by the Constitution. One of my grandfathers (John Frost: 1756-1834) served throughout the Revolution as the American's fought the tyranny of the British crown. His grandson--a dirt-poor farmer who never owned a slave in his life-- fought against the Yankees throughout the entire war of the northern aggression as a member of the 29th VA Infantry. He wasn't drafted, he volunteered. I am truly proud of him and my other grandfathers who served the southern cause. No amount of revisionist history will change my view.
What do you base that claim on?
Especially when y'all hang on to it so tightly.
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