[napscoordinator]

I think that getting rid of the statues will allow students to concentrate on studies instead of a bunch of old guys who died years ago. I know many still love the Confederate on here, but it is time to move on. I have discussed this at length with many FRiends here and I still don't get what the use of praising people who lost a war is about. People born in the South cannot possible be jealous of the North winning still can they????? I don't see us shoving it in your faces ever.

[packrat35]

Then lets get rid of all staues of northern heroes also, starting with the Lincoln Memorial.

[capt. norm]

I think that getting rid of the statues will allow students to concentrate on studies instead of a bunch of old guys who died years ago. I know many still love the Confederate on here, but it is time to move on.

The "bunch of old guys that died years ago" is what history is all about, for cryin' out loud.

Much as the liberals would like to change history, it happened and the South has a rich history that doesn't need to be ignored.

History is just what it is and the good, the bad, and the ugly are all part of it. You can't go through life requiring that everything you see that doesn't agree with you be removed from sight.

That is a very "spoiled child" view of the world, symbolic of liberalism.

[Ben Mugged]

I think that getting rid of the statues will allow students to concentrate on studies instead of a bunch of old guys who died years ago.

Those "old guys" were my great-grandfather, uncles, nephews and cousins. They died for what they believed was states rights.

What would you die for?

[dsc]

"I think that getting rid of the statues will allow students to concentrate on studies instead of a bunch of old guys who died years ago."

History is a very important field of study. Without it, you don't know where you are, how you got there, or where you're going.

"I still don't get what the use of praising people who lost a war is about."

H. L. Mencken wrote, "The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."

"People born in the South cannot possible be jealous of the North winning still can they?"

Jealousy never entered into it.

"I don't see us shoving it in your faces ever."

I see people insisting that the war was about slavery only and nothing else, that all Southerners were the moral equivalent of Nazi death camp guards, and that all other reasons for the war are merely lying attempts to justify slavery.

It's untrue as well as insulting.

I might suggest that you study up on Lee some time. If a father were asked by his son what a man should be, he couldn't do better than pointing at Lee.

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

It's hard to know where to begin with your statements.

General Robert E. Lee is widely considered, throughout North and South, to be the finest general in the history of the United States.

Your "hero," Abraham Lincoln, suspended constitutionally guaranteed rights, including the right of habeas corpus, in his zeal to usurp the rights of southerners. Further his "Emancipation Proclamation" freed only slaves held in the South. Slave owners in the north were not affected.

General Sherman's Union troops were ordered to burn a wide swath across Georgia. They burned everything, including churches, and ransacked houses as common thieves and pillagers. This has been documented, even by southern children of the time, who witnessed and wrote down the criminal acts of Union soldiers.

Blacks in my rural community near Nashville were FORCED to build a railroad bridge across the Harpeth River (a mile from my house) by the Union Army who was supposedly busy freeing those blacks from slavery.

If you knew the true history of the Civil War, and the honor of Southerners who died fighting it... and the carpetbagging aftermath, you'd better understand the hatred that still exists toward northern aggression into the South.

[B4Ranch]

This is the kind of factual information that they don't like.

Citing the official US Census of 1830, there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves. Furthermore, the story outlines the history of slavery here, and the first slave owner, the Father of American slavery, was Mr Anthony Johnson, of Northampton, Virginia. His slave was John Casor, the first slave for life. Both were black Africans. The story is very readable, and outlines cases of free black women owning their husbands, free black parents selling their children into slavery to white owners, and absentee free black slave owners, who leased their slaves to plantation owners. -"Selling Poor Steven", American Heritage Magazine, Feb/Mar 1993 (Vol. 441) p 90


Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People," (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:

"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.

"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.

"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.

"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader." (End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)

[albie]

"I think that getting rid of the statues will allow students to concentrate on studies instead of a bunch of old guys who died years ago. I know many still love the Confederate on here, but it is time to move on. I have discussed this at length with many FRiends here and I still don't get what the use of praising people who lost a war is about. People born in the South cannot possible be jealous of the North winning still can they????? I don't see us shoving it in your faces ever".

...You! Are! An! Idiot! It's called history you moron! That should be a part of the curriculum. Or are you too busy taking "The Art of Dic$ Sucki$$" and other "progressive" classes?

[FreedomCalls]

I still don't get what the use of praising people who lost a war is about.

We still praise King Leonidas don't we? How about Queen Boudica? Or William Wallace? Or the defenders of the Alamo? Or even General Custer?

[ohioman]

You don't understand at all. Folks have every right to be as proud of their ancestors who fought for the Confederacy as their relatives who are fighting in Iraq. You have no idea how this is a spit in the face of all true Southerners.

All those opposed can kiss my Rebel ass.

[CodeMasterPhilzar]

I think that getting rid of the statues will allow students to concentrate on studies instead of a bunch of old guys who died years ago.

Guess they should just fire the entire history department then too? Who was it that said "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it?"

Right or wrong - however the looking glass of history portrays them - these men were leaders and I believe statues and remembrances of such people serve remind us of that. Not who was right/wrong, but that many men and women have toiled, sacrificed, led and bled to get us to where we are now. We can not and should not pretend it didn't happen, we should not forget it, minimize it, or attempt to recast it into something else. In a lot of ways we, as in "we the people" lost that war. It was not just about slavery (some say that was a side issue or a symptom of a bigger issue), but was also about states rights, and limiting the power of the federal government. I for one, a firm believer in smaller government, believe we lost on that issue.

[RFEngineer]

"I don't see us shoving it in your faces ever."

Um, we southerners are Americans too. Don't you consider yourselves Americans up north anymore?

Point being, shoving it in MY face is shoving it in YOUR face, assuming you are an American.

It's your history too, and you'll just have to live with the fact that the south is home to Americans, in many ways better Americans on a per-capita basis, when you look at the prevalence of things like military service, than you folks up North.

Oh, and about praising people....Robert E. Lee was a better American than most, before, during, and after the Civil War. You'd do well to emulate him in your own life.

[vaudine]

The students do not have to concentrate on a bunch of old dead guys instead of
their studies. The fact is that Jefferson Davis was MUCH more than the leader of the Confederacy and Robert E. Lee was MUCH more than the leader of the Confederate army. A lot could be learned about human nature, integrity, love of country, statesmanship and more by studying the lives and times of these men.

Jefferson Davis was a US rep., Senator, and as Secretary of War a few years before the Civil War, he modernized the US Army--enabling them to be superior in equipment to the South. Robert E. Lee was NOT a rich slave owner--his father "Light Horse Harry Lee" went through the wealth of his two wives and managed to die penniless, leaving his widow and Robert poor and in debt. Lee was asked to lead the US Army but declined because of his ties to Virginia, not because of his love of slavery.

Modern students have NO concept of the belief and devotion to states' rights the people of that time had. The loss of historical truthes and traditions has left a vacuum into which is being sucked a load of PC nothingness, lack of respect for anything and anyone that doesn't look/feel like the PCers think it should, and a rootless hysteria equal to the bookburners of yesteryear.

Really, it is about victimhood and the right to whine until everything that has gone before, historically, is wiped out in the sacred name of PC.

vaudine

[Polybius]

I have discussed this at length with many FRiends here and I still don't get what the use of praising people who lost a war is about.

Some people do get it.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, ...... and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." ......... Theodore Roosevelt

USS Tecumseh (SSBN-628)

USS Geronimo (ATR-135)

USS Osceola, Union ironclad

Vietnam Vet