Perspective: Die-hard Confederates should be reconstructed

St. Augustine Record ^ | 09/27/2003 | Peter Guinta

[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.

[Phsstpok]

This guy should be educated as to what the first amendment means. I don't agree with the people he is criticizing, but he's a right psycho. These folks should be "reconstructed?" Is that anything like the "re-education" camps Pol-Pot ran?

After all, the search and preservation of the Hunley artifacts, as well as the funeral itself, were paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

sick, twisted, check book morality. The Nazi's paid for the concentration camps. Should the Jews be happy about Swastikas flying over their graves? I'm NOT comparing the US flag or the US to the Nazi's. I'm criticizing his reasoning. Again, I don't support the critics of having the Stars and Stripes fly over these graves. I would be distrubed if it didn't, but for different reasons than this writer puts forward.

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.

he almost gets it here. The first sentance comes close. We, today, are all Americans, despite what happened in the period 1860 to 1865. The geniuses who came up with the Hunley were Americans. Americans who were in rebellion, but Americans. Then he gets into "international recognition" crap. That disqualifies his opinion by itself.

They were in rebellion, but they were still Americans.

Yep. Not a problem with this sentance.

This whole issue is an insult to all Southerners who fought under the U.S. flag before and since the Civil War.

No. This whole article is. Those Southerners who were in rebellion were not all racists out to defend slavery. Some, like General Lee, were patriots, first, last and always, who felt that their loyalty was to their "country" (in his case, Virginia) and not the federal government.

I have relatives who fought on both sides of the civil war. Some great, some small. I am proud of them all, though I believe that some of them were wrong. I also believe that the US federal government was right to suppress John Browns abolitionist terrorists, though I believe that their cause may have been just, though their methods misguided.

Attempts by modern "confederates" to deny the results and lessons of the civil war are misguided and wrong. Equally misguided are the attempts by the "enlightened" to demonize and "re-educate" those who disagree with them. Northerners (who I'm descnded from) are guilty of having aided an abeted the slave trade by profiting from it. Southerners (who I'm descnded from) are guilty of having proited from the slave trade that propped up their economy. Americans are to be proud of having fought a war whose effect, if not intent, was to put an end to legalized slavery in the United States. We taught the world that it was wrong. We Americans, north and south, set the stage for the abolition of slavery in the civilized world.

Of course, we still have the islamic world to deal with.

[Maelstrom]

My error.

However, Lincoln and Lee were on that same bandwagon.

[archy]

What is so noble about turning one's sword on the government and country that gave him the sword?

Others who swear an oath before God to first, support the Constitution of the United States have sometimes also faced that choice.

Some kept their Oath and did their duty as their conscience directed; some did not.

Depends on your priorities, I guess. Would you break your word given in such a pledge for a pretty sword, or would you require a substantial cash payment as well? I understand the going rate is Thirty Pieces of Silver.

-archy-/-

[Maelstrom]

"Since they owed their admission in the first place to the approval of the other states then why shouldn't that permission also be necessary to walk away from the agreement?"


Welcome to the Hotel California.

The answer of course is simple: When a government becomes destructive to the means for which it was established, they refuse to allow you to walk away. Thus there are no enumerated powers to the government concerning secession AND several of the Founding Fathers often demonstrated this understanding by using the threat of secession as a means of pressuring the government.

[Badray]

Look what we have to look forward to if Toomey doesn't win the primary. You are considered traitors by this poster (rw).

[wardaddy]

I crashed mine too while in a Carlos Castenada state of altered consciousness.....it was pure hell explaining to the Highway Patrol how that pole got in my way. Cops and tripping never mixed well.

I'd had mine about a year. It was yellow 1968 and I bought it in 72 for about 2K I think....my money too.

[Maelstrom]

The same problem exists today causing the same pressures.

It's a crying shame how one side considers any attempt to address this same exact problem, absent any historical connotations, as a call for the re-institution of slavery.

A bunch of good Nazis, they.

[XRdsRev]

I agree. I don't have anything but respect for the Confederate soldier who believed he was defending his home. I probably would have done the same thin if I were in their shoes.

That having been said however, the Southern Confederacy despite all the honor that goes along with it, does have the blemish that the rebellion was brought upon by a group of otherwise good men who let their passion for the institution slavery override their common sense.

Most Southernors never owned slaves but for good or bad, that rebellion was inseparably tied to the issue of slavery when those first seceeding states made it such a prime issue in their Articles of Secession.

[stainlessbanner]

Don't give up so quickly, Maelstrom. Follow the roots of the American Colonization Society and Henry Clay. Lincoln's protege was Clay, the statesman and one-time president of the ACS. Clearly Lincoln followed Clay's ideals of the American System of centralization, banking, and internal economic improvements. Why would Lincoln not follow Clay's lead on deportization?

[carton253]

I don't know enough about the causes of the Civil War to comment effectively. I do know that slavery wasn't the lone or sole cause. It played a part... but there were other parts. So I don't think it is accurate to say that "otherwise good men who let their passion for the institution of slavery override their common sense."

[Texas Federalist]

Your arguments are typical Hobbesian crap. Your interpretations of Constitutional language are colored by one assumption "That the government is the keeper of rights and determines which rights the people hold." The Framers did not hold this view when they wrote the same language you are misinterpreting. Rights are qualified in that if you interfere with the rights of another your life, liberty or property may be taken. For example, if you kill someone, you may be incarcerated. If you scream like a banshee at 3am on your front lawn you may not exercise your right to free speech because you are interfering with your neighbor's property rights. It does NOT mean that you own your property so long as the government lets you. The reason the civil war happened is because you secularist, leftist Yankees didn't understand that in 1865, and you don't understand that now.

[PhilipFreneau]

>>>>The Constitution doesn't recognize the right to secede whenever a state feels its right to enslave its citizens is being abridged.

>>Lemme guess. Public school student?

Naw. Public schools don't discuss the constitution (and they teach that rights come from the government). Since this character believes rights have to be recognized by the constitution to be "rights", I would speculate a liberal college graduate: maybe Berkeley, Penn, or Wisconsin.

[Maelstrom]

Ft. Sumpter was fired upon for a reason.

The commander was ordered to hold a defensible fortification while reinforcements arrived.

Had Ft. Sumpter *not* been fired upon, the war would have already been fought. The mobilization of troops such as those between Ft. Marcie and Ft. Sumpter is the act of war that *required* a response.

The provisioning of Ft. Sumpter via a merchant ship was the first shooting battle. The first act of war was an embargo. The mobilization to Ft. Sumpter was another act of war.

Unless you're only interested in propaganada, keeping the chronology of events is nice and all, but utterly meaningless without context.

[PhilipFreneau]

>> Now, some the most racist folks I ever met were WHITES in Boston when the public school busing issue came along. I was there... I saw it. It was UGLY!

For me it was whites in Pennsylvania. I couldn't wait to get back to the South, far away from those Yankee racists.

[Maelstrom]

States had seceded before Lincoln.

Union military footholds in the south had also been surrendered before Lincoln.

After Lincoln, the North invaded.

[PhilipFreneau]

>> For the most part the states didn't enter anything freely or voluntarily. They asked to be admitted. They gained statehood only with the approval of the majority of the other states. In fact, the Constitution does not require any input from a territory at all for Congress to make a state out of it. Since they owed their admission in the first place to the approval of the other states then why shouldn't that permission also be necessary to walk away from the agreement?

That makes no sense, plus it is loaded with inaccuracies.

[Maelstrom]

Gen. Butler used the military to prevent pro-southern votes...AND...

Lincoln jailed, exiled, or "disappeared" tens of thousands of northerners who opposed his invasion.

[Maelstrom]

The point is simply that the Union states had no claim nor moral basis for their war against the Confederacy.

Slavery wasn't the issue the Union decided to invade.

[XRdsRev]

I can understand your position. As a young man I felt much the same way as many here, that slavery wasn't "the" issue. However, after having the opportunity to work in the field of history and being able to view thousands of primary documents from Government records to personal letters, I now can only come to the conclusion that slavery was the primary catalyst that vaulted the country into the Civil War.

That doesn't infer that everyone in the South loved slavery or everyone in the north hated it. What it means is that the politically influential forces on both sides were primarily seperated by this one issue. In the years before the war, the most politically charged issue wasn't the tariffs on cotton....it was the issue of slave versus free states.

The articles of Secession for the states of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina & Texas all clearly state that slavery is the main reason they are seceeding. those are their words, not mine.

If you want to read these documents, here is the link

http://americanhistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fsunsite.utk.edu%2Fcivil-war%2Freasons.html

[carton253]

Thanks for the link... I will look into. What I don't want to do is refight the war. I admire Jackson, Lee, Longstreet... but I admire Chamberlain, Grant, and Sherman as well.

When I watch a movie like Gettysburg, I feel the valor of Pickett's charge just as strongly as I feel the valor of Chamberlain's charge down Little Round Top.