Not a villain!!
Posted on 04/25/2007 10:11:37 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
Winston Churchill called him "one of the noblest Americans who ever lived," and Theodore Roosevelt called him "the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth." But has political correctness turned Robert E. Lee into a villain? That will be the question explored by six historians this weekend at a symposium commemorating the bicentennial of the Confederate commander's birth. "We were afraid that Lee would not receive the honors he should get because of the prevailing political correctness," says Brag Bowling, a Richmond resident who helped organize Saturday's event at the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel in Arlington. The symposium will be the largest event of its kind this year honoring Lee, who was born Jan. 19, 1807.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Get to bed and have a good night. We can take it up later.
Not all of the black soldiers in the Union army were entirely volunteers. Some were from slaves states that remained in the Union or occupied areas before the Emancipation and were offerred their freedom proclamation and were offered their freedom if they enlisted. Also, many slaves ran away to the Union lines and enlisted.
Early in the war, not all blacks, free or slave were strongly Unionist. However, it would be silly to argue that blacks were not enthusiastic about the Union cause after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Apparently the legitimacy of that letter was questioned in the 1880s. On the web, U found this letter from a Union officer to a southern historical society.
DEAR SIR,--In the number of the SOUTHERN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PAPERS for March, 1884, under the heading, "How they made South Carolina 'Howl'--Letter from one of Sherman's Bummers," you publish what purports to be "a letter found in the streets of Columbia after the army of General Sherman had left." The contents of the letter are enough to satisfy any unprejudiced mind that it could not have been written by any officer of General Sherman's command--except, possibly, as the broadest kind of a hoax. But conceding, for the moment, that such a letter might have been written by "one of 'Sherman's Bummers,'" it is demonstrable that the letter under consideration is not genuine. If any such letter exists, it is a forgery.
The statement is that it was "found in the streets of Columbia after the army of General Sherman had left." The last of that army left Columbia on or before February 21. This letter purports to be dated "Camp near Camden, S.C., February 26, 1865." Camden is at least thirty miles east of Columbia, and on the opposite side of the Catawba river. By the roundabout course pursued by the army, it is double that distance. The crossing of the river occupied several days, and was effected twenty or thirty miles north of Camden. The waters were very high, and once across, there was no such thing as returning. Everybody and everything was moving away from Columbia as rapidly as possible. Only a small part of Sherman's army marched through or near Camden. The knowledge or consideration of these facts shows how improbable, if not absolutely impossible, it was, under the circumstances, that any letter written by one of "Sherman's Bummers," near Camden, South Carolina, could afterwards have found its way to the streets of Columbia.
It so happens, also, that no officer named Thomas J. Myers--the name purporting to be signed to the document you have reprinted--belonged to General Sherman's army. The records show that, throughout the war, there was but one officer in the military service of the United States with that name, and he was not in Sherman's army, and did not--as is implied in the direction, Boston, Mass., and the reference in the letter to the "Old Bay State"--belong to any Massachusetts regiment. "Alas," cries the weeping Thomas, "it (the captured jewelry) will be scattered all over the North and Middle States." It so happens, also, that of the ninety regiments of Sherman's army which might have passed on the march near Camden, South Carolina, but a single one--a New Jersey regiment--was from the Middle States. All the rest were from the West--never called the North, in the local idiom of Western people. A letter from the only Thomas J. Myers ever in the army would never contain such a phrase.
To crown all, Thomas J. Myers resigned from the military service on the 18th of February, 1865--eight days before the date of the pretended letter--while his regiment was in Northern Alabama.
I should not have taken pains to look up and analyze these facts if I did not think it matter for profound regret that a periodical, presumably published in the interest of historical truth, should give currency to this document. No possible good can come of its publication, if genuine, but much harm. It throws no light on one single fact or method by which the war was conducted. As to General Sherman's procedure, on his famous march, history will judge it on acknowledged and recorded facts--which are ample and accessible--not on any such irritating and preposterous assertions as are contained in the document under consideration. General Sherman has never shrunk from any responsibility for his actions. The genuine recollections and experiences of men and women in that exciting and passionate time are legitimate and useful matters for publication, even when they reveal things which, in the cooler days of reason and law, everyone must regret, if not condemn--Inter arma, silent leges. Till men become perfect, war will be full, always, of cruelest outrages. When they do become perfect, there will be no war. So far as it may hello to restrain men's passions or ambitions, and lead to the adoption of better methods for redressing wrongs, real or fancied, than killing and robbery--which all war is, in its last analysis--every tale of suffering, privation, injury, spoliation, may prove useful, and so its publication justifiable. But when, as certainly seems the case in this instance, nothing but the provocation and perpetuation of ill-feeling and bitterness can result, I submit that a periodical of the character of the SOUTHERN HISTORICAL PAPERS might--as I am happy to see it does, in most instances--find better material than reprinting from obscure newspapers, matter which throws no real light on any single act or motive during the whole of the great contest. Your periodical is taken by a society of which I am a member, but I did not happen to see the March number earlier, or I should have earlier written you. I do not write now for publication--though to that I have no objection--but simply to give you the facts, and let your own sense of justice decide what you will do.
Very respectfully yours,
HENRY STONE, Late Brevet-Colonel U. S. Volunteers, and A. A. G. Army of the Cumberland.
Given Sherman's humiliation of the Confederacy, it's not hard to suspect that the "Yankee letter" was a forgery. Wounded pride has often led partisans of the Confederate cause to subordinate facts to feelings and emotion.
I have never run across any texts that claimed that. I know there were black units before the EP (Kansas volunteers and some "contraband" units on the Sea Islands in Georgia enlisted by General Hunter I believe and against War Dept. policy) but I have never seen anything that offered freedom for enlistment. Do you have a source?
The 1880s is when the Lost Cause revisionists began their campaign to rewrite history.
I read about it in a history of the war in Maryland from the Confederate point of view. It could be the claim was false that slaves were offered their freedom to enlist.
The Southern Historical Society followed up with this in 1901:
“This letter (Myers) was published in the Southern Historical Society Papers, in March, 1884. About a year thereafter, one Colonel Henry Stone, styling himself ‘Late Brevet-Colonel U. S. Volunteers, A. A. G. Army of the Cumberland,’ realizing the gravity of the statements contained in this letter, and the disgrace these, if uncontradicted, would bring on General Sherman and his army, and especially on the staff, of which he (Colonel Stone) was a member, wrote a letter to the Rev. J. William Jones, D. D., the then editor of the Historical Society Papers, in which he undertook to show that the Myers letter was not written by any officer in General Sherman’s army. (This letter can be found in Vol. 13, S. H. S. Papers, page 439.)
"The reasons assigned by Colonel Stone were plausibly set forth, and Dr. Jones, in his anxiety to do justice even to Sherman’s “bummers,” after publishing Colonel Stone’s letter, said editorially, he was “frank to admit that Colonel Stone seems to have made out his case against the authenticity of this letter.”
"The Myers’ letter was first published on October 29, 1883. On the 31st of July, 1865, Captain E. J. Hale, Jr., of Fayetteville, N. C., who had been on General James H. Lane’s staff, and who is vouched for by General Lane as “an elegant educated gentleman,” wrote to General Lane, telling him of the destruction and devastation at his home, and in that letter he makes this statement:
“You have doubtless heard of Sherman’s ‘bummers.’ The Yankees would have you believe that they were only the straggling pillagers usually found in all armies. Several letters written by officers of Sherman’s army, intercepted near this town, give this the lie.
“In some of these letters were descriptions of the whole bumming process, and from them it appears that it was a regularly organized system, under the authority of General Sherman himself; that one-fifth o£ the proceeds fell to General Sherman, another fifth to the other general officers, another fifth to the line officers, and the remaining two-fifths to the enlisted men.”
“Now, compare this division of the spoils with that set forth in the Myers’ letter, published,...eighteen years later, and it will be seen that they are almost identical, and this statement was taken, as Captain Hale states, from “several letters written by officers of Sherman’s army,” intercepted near Fayetteville, N. C., and...they confirm the statements of the Myers’ letter, and its consequent genuineness, to a remarkable degree.
"It is proper, also, to state, that we have recently received a letter from Dr. Jones, in which he states that after carefully considering this whole matter again, he is now satisfied that he was mistaken in his editorial comments on Colonel Stone’s letter, that he is now satisfied of the genuineness of the Myers’ letter, and that in his opinion we could use it in this report “with perfect propriety and safety.”
How many do you want?
Up to you. Post as many as you want.
From the Official Records:
... the major- general commanding ([Union] General Foster) ordered an indiscriminate conscription of every able-bodied colored man in the department. As the special representative of the Government in its relation to them, I had given them earnest and repeated assurances that no force would be used in recruiting the black regiments. I say nothing of this order, in reference to my special duties and jurisdiction and the authority of the major-general commanding to issue it; but as an apparent violation of faith pledged to the freedmen, it could not but shake their confidence in our just intentions, and make them the more unwilling to serve the Government.
The order spread universal confusion and terror. The negroes fled to the woods and swamps, visiting their cabins only by stealth and in darkness. They were hunted to their hiding places by armed parties of their own people, and, if found, compelled to enlist. This conscription order is still in force. Men have been seized and forced to enlist who had large families of young children dependent upon them for support and fine crops of cotton and corn nearly ready for harvest, without an opportunity of making provision for the one or securing the other.
Three boys, one only fourteen years of age, were seized in a field where they were at work and sent to a regiment serving in a distant part of the department without the knowledge or consent of their parents.
Here is the Union conscription order referred to above:
I. All able-bodied colored men between the ages of eighteen and fifty, within the military lines of the Department of the South, who have had an opportunity to enlist voluntarily and refused to do so, shall be drafted into the military service of the United States, to serve as non-commissioned officers and soldiers in the various regiments and batteries now being organized in the department.
Not a villain!!
As somebody who's read of what the rebs inflicted on the good Unionist people of East Tennessee, Western NC, Northern Alabama and elsewhere, it's hard for me to muster undue sympathy for those in Sherman's path. And as Sherman's actions helped end such abuse, I think he was well justified in his harsh waging of war.
You mean bridge burners and collaborators with the enemy, like the miscreant, Parson Brownlow? He was the Jose Padilla of his time.
I look at it another way. I see Brownlow, the bridge burners and Union soldiers of the South as the true patriots fighting against the usurping alien slave empire. The Taliban would be proud of the jackbooted way reb armed force attacked peaceful loyal communities for merely flying the Stars and Stripes. How would we like it today if an outside force called the "Confederate States of America" attacked those loyal to Old Glory?
And it was the slave governor Isham Harris, not Brownlow, who abandoned Tennessee when things got rough for his side. Which one of the two governors were the loyal man?
But the people of Tennessee didn't vote themselves out of the Union. The February election produced a strong majority against even calling a convention and an ever larger majority for Unionist delegates in case a convention was approved. But that didn't long deter the slavery loving politicians in Nashville The governor and legislature took the state of the Union in May in violation of the state constitution and the expressed will of the people. The politicians took it upon themselves to invite the alien Confederate army to overrun the state. They later held a rubber stamp election in June, the validity of which was very doubtful with the state in the iron grip of the reb army and Confederate state.
If you you like the political class thinking for and making decisions for the people, you'll love the Confederate States of America.
As for me, I favor our Union of Washington and Lincoln over the government for the pro-slavery politicians , for the pro-slavery politicians and by the pro-slavery politicians.
Lee was loved by both the North and the South. At the end of the war he was instrumental in stopping several plots to continue the war. He simply appealed to the honor of the men and they followed his lead. Lee did not believe in slavery and owned no slaves. Grant, on the other hand, owned 2 female slaves, acquired before the war, to tend his ailing wife.
Lee was, at best, mildly opposed to slavery and owned slaves much of his adult life. He was a supporter of emigration of freed slaves to Africa and paid passage for some of his own slaves that he freed. As executor of his father-in-law's will he was emancipating slaves as late as 1862. As late as 1865 he was still describing slavery as the best condition for blacks in the South.
Grant, on the other hand, owned 2 female slaves, acquired before the war, to tend his ailing wife.
Grant owned a single slave outright for a brief period in 1858-59. He emancipated the man when he moved to Illinois. His very healty wife had the use of as many as 5 slaves during the course of their married life but most evidence indicates that they remained the property of her father. In any event they were freed early in 1863 along with the rest of the Dent family property. Grant, on the other hand, owned 2 female slaves, acquired before the war, to tend his ailing wife.
Which house? Arlington or his childhood home in...Fredricksburg?
I’ve been to the restaurant Travellers in Richmond - which is the house Lee returned to after the war and where he was photographed by Brady on the back porch. The back porch is still there along with the large iron-like door that can clearly be seen in the photo.
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