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.
Thats when you get the following:
Cheap vinyl dashes that split and start that sticky chemical breakdown after 2 years.
Cheap thin vinyl and/or velour seats that wear out split in 3 years.
Cheap feeling and chintzy looking knobs and switches with that fake silver crap that started chipping after a year, if it hadn't fallen off already.
Lousy regulating computers that were grotesquely expensive to replace - which happened too frequently.
Using that same cheap silver crap to cover exterior plastic decoration, none of which could take a good washing.
Can anybody forget that feeling of the power of accelerating from 0-40 in 18.7 seconds?
Sterring that was excessively tight - where a slight twist would swerve the car excessively. I suppose that was supposed to make the car appear "responsive".
Engines that were impossibly crammed into compartments - and which so resembled something cobbled together by kids at a middle school science fair, you were afraid to touch anything for fear of wrecking the whole thing.
Catalytic converters that reeked.
All these features were finally rolled into one model by Chrysler, infamous maker of the K car.....
VOLUNTARY. Willingly; done with one's consent. FREE. Not bound to servitude; at liberty to act as one pleases. Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Rev. 6th ed. (1856). Which ones were brought in at gunpoint? Which states were forced to join the union? Before 1861 that is.
Thank God for men like Jim Lewis! And for 14 year old Louis Nelson who volunteered to join & fight for the CSA with his master, one E. Oldham. Nelson served under Gen. Nathan B. Forrest.
In Gods and Generals, I really liked Jackson, so after reading the trilogy, I am reading a biography of Jackson. I like him... eccentricities and all... (though I don't find him that eccentric)
What I think gets overlooked on these threads is the simple fact that once the South decided to leave the Union, the South was "invaded." If I lived in Virginia at the time, and even if I did not agree with the politics of secession, I would have fought to protect my home.
There was the issue of Fort Sumter and other federal property (including what probably would have been an inevitable conflict over ownership of the Western territories). Also bear in mind that it was the Federal government that purchased the Louisiana Territory and the secured other territorial land that was part of some of the states that seceded.
I beg to differ. The difference at that time is that while a tragedy at the loss of 600,000+ souls had occurred, for the years immediately following and I would say up until the early 20th century, these men were respected. However after 50+ years of dragging their names through the mud as some sort of evil men, I would hope they would at least want to defend their honor and set the record straight.
I think the shift in attitude is much more recent. That the Dukes of Hazard drove around in a car called the "General Lee" with a big battle flag on the roof in one of the most populat television series of the 1980s should tell you something. And even Ken Burns Civil War, despite slamming home the issue of slavery, was hardly disrespectful of those who fought for the Confederacy.
And I think you need to look at why many people are now thinking of them as evil men and if you look closely enough, you'll see that may Southerners are feeding the problem. The associating of the Confederate Battle Flag with the segregationalists and the Klan is not helpful, nor is downplaying or ignoring the role of slavery in the war. And by dragging these soldiers into a modern ideological conflict, it makes those soldiers and sailors ideological in a way that they may never have been. In the context of a "Civil War", it is possible to honor these people as Americans who died fighting other Americans over a difference of opinion. In the context of an eternal War Between the States that is still not over, these men were not Americans and were fighting to destroy America. If you want all Americans to honor these men as brave Americans, you need to let them be Americans again.
As long as these continuous acts of hatred come against the brave soldiers of the South, and as long as our heritage is made the laughing stock in every form of media unjustly while the praise of anti-Semites, thugs, and criminals continues, there will be anger
Quite a bit of the anger is justified but misdirected, I think. And I do not think it is helpful to wrap modern ideological battles in the bodies of these men who died, probably for a variety of reasons. Again, I point out, would the men who died on the Hunley, had the lived to see the end of the war and a Union victory, been offended by being burried with military honors by the United States Navy under a United States flag? Perhaps. Perhaps not. We don't know. But assuming that every soldier and sailor of the CSA shared the ideology of modern secession supporters brands those soldiers and sailors with an ideology that many associate with racism. This makes it more difficult to view them as brave soldiers and sailors fighting for their state and home and easier to view them as racists who were fighting for slavery. Is that the impression that Sotherners want to send?
Do you really believe that if one of the territories that were part of the Louisiana Purchase or some later acquisition had tried to secede from the Union and become an independent state or join another country that the United States would have let it go? That no other state or territory was forced to stay in the Union at gunpoint was due, in large part, to the fact that no state or territory had tried to leave before 1861. And you might want to notice that upon failing to buy territory from Mexico, we eventually took it from them, as did the settlers of Texas and California, before joining the United States. Taking and holding territory at gunpoint was hardly a new thing for the United States in 1861. And do you think that if enough Mexicans can slip into California and vote for secession that the United States should just let it go?
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