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To: TexConfederate1861
Hopefully you won't have to experience the humiliation this man went through.

Well boo freakin' hoo. Let me ask you this. If men like Innes Randolph, who chose to stoke their festering hatred for the North and for the entire history of this country for years after the war in reaction to losing, are worthy of your respect then are men like Robert Lee and Nathan Forrest, who advocated acceptance of the defeat and reunification of the country, worthy of your contempt?

703 posted on 07/20/2005 5:34:09 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
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To: Non-Sequitur

You miss the point. Robert E. Lee didn't experience the same degradation that this man went thru. It was a lot easier for him to be noble. (Though he would have been in similar circumstances, due to his nature.) As I said earlier, I don't think he literally hated the Declaration or the Constitution, rather focuses on those as elements of the "Glorious Union" I am reading BETWEEN the lines.

You haven't walked a mile in this man's moccasin's, so you might show just a shred of compassion. His words are insulting, but look at the emotion behind the words.


707 posted on 07/20/2005 5:43:12 AM PDT by TexConfederate1861 (General Robert E. Lee , an AMERICAN example of honor & courage!)
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To: Non-Sequitur
If men like Innes Randolph, who chose to stoke their festering hatred for the North and for the entire history of this country for years after the war in reaction to losing, are worthy of your respect then are men like Robert Lee and Nathan Forrest, who advocated acceptance of the defeat and reunification of the country, worthy of your contempt?

Fallacy of false dilemma. Con job 101, freshman logic (or illogic).

Not everyone served under the same circumstances of duress. Lee survived the war; Pat Cleburne and Leonidas Polk did not. Their service was measurably more severe than General Lee's, even if his services to the South were greater.

It doesn't mean that men who were slow to reconcile, or completely proof against its charms (perhaps they'd met a carpetbagger?), were better or worse than men who, like Lee and Longstreet, tried their best to reconcile themselves to having lost the war despite their best efforts, and accepted like gentlemen the terms of their paroles. They were, after all, conquered men and no longer equals or citizens. They had to accept what Congress handed out, and they'd agreed to accept it, in order in the first place to spare their men, and in the second place in order to try to lead them as civic exemplars as best they knew how in the bitterly unequal and exploitive peace that followed.

Far from taunting TexConfederate with the rebuke that Lee was a collaborator (that's what you meant, wasn't it?), you ought to be on your knees thanking God that Lee and Davis didn't decide on a course of guerrilla warfare before the Petersburg defenses broke down.

If Lee, Longstreet, and A.P. Hill could have got away with the Richmond commissary and rolling stock, and effected a junction with Johnston, Forrest, and Bragg, they could have put together a hell of a guerrilla war. And if they'd held together, the war might have gone on another year, who knows?

So think before you sneer and jeer.

775 posted on 07/20/2005 3:25:35 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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