Posted on 01/07/2004 7:12:30 AM PST by Aurelius
"Thou shalt nevereverwhatsoever attempt to insert logic into a discussion of the War Between the States."
For your penance, you must sit through "Cold Mountain" three times, or "Gone with the Wind" twice. Go now and sin no more.
That's a good one - for a pet!
And that would include, apparently, Mary Anna Jackson, the general's widow? You don't seem to think much of the woman, do you?
I suppose a chief could write it. And? What exactly would that mean? We still are not talking Crazy Horse.
I detest the sentimentalization of the American Indian. I find it highly demeaning.
Jackson did own slaves... It is not a pack of lies... and when I write that he did, it does not make me a hater of the South.
I have great admiration for all the men who fought on both sides of this war. But, Jackson is my favorite. But, I like Hancock and Chamberlain, as well as JEB Stuart and Lee.
You're posting to people who've been 300 heavyweight rounds with one another over these issues in other threads.
You and I might think that whether General Thomas M. Jackson owned slaves a small matter, but elsewhere the point will have been fought over in the course of a contest over the proposition that "Jackson owned slaves; therefore, he was/is moral scum, and barks in hell today for it", or something equally charming, that the Marxist-inspired revisionist historians and their Southern counter-revisionist historiopolemicists will have been waging war over as the Marxists try to "prove" that the South was/is evil, and that Midwesterners of good conscience can't be caught dead shaking hands with "those people". It's the old divide-and-conquer strategy being prosecuted by the Marxists at an intellectual level, with the White House the putative prize.
You don't understand stand watie. I'm not sure any of us do.
Hyperbole aside, who are the 'revisionist historians', Marxist or otherwise? Those of us who state Jackson owned slaves or those who claim he didn't, in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
Or maybe Thomas Jackson was a tax cheat on top of everything else?
Throughout history, I believe that many great, decent, moral, and honest men owned slaves.
Jackson didn't fight in the war because he wanted to secure the right to own slaves. He fought because he believed that Virginia had absolute right to his allegiance. When Virginia was "invaded" (his words), he had a responsibility to bring all his talent and industry to bear on the invaders. I find no fault with that... I might have done the same thing.
And Northern Armies rued the day Jackson made that decision every time he outflanked them, outmarched them, and outfought them... which was everytime except for Kernstown (yet... even though Kernstown was a tactical defeat... it was a great strategic victory)
It's not the romance in the Hollywoodization that I deplore (I actually loved Last of the Mohicans, and found that it rang truer than most film efforts; it had a dignity and beauty that was completely lacking in the clownish Little Big Man) but the pitying and condescension and attempt to fictionalize history to avoid hurt feelings--next we'll be saying that Cleopatra was Cherokee.
Geronimo and Crazy Horse were the great generals. I don't see anything comparable among the Cherokee--and see no point in trying to create one to avoid hurt feelings.
And DiLorenzo and the Lew Rockwell crowd on the other side.
Oh I'd just classify DiLorenzo as nuts, not Marxist.
The Marxists keep insisting it was "all about slavery" so that they can assign a moral burden to Jackson and all the Confederate leaders. The burden extends to all the old Virginia planters, too, who produced the Founders.
The idea is to play up the greater morality of Lincoln, because he imposed a new paradigm on America in a top-down fashion -- which is what the Marxists want to do.
I don't know what to make of him; I've only seen his stuff in excerpt, and what I saw didn't make me want to buy a copy.
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