Posted on 07/12/2007 6:04:07 AM PDT by RDTF
Two old steamer trunks sit in the rare-book room at the Virginia Historical Society, looking worn and forlorn. The smaller one was once red but the paint has faded to a dull rust. The larger one is brown with a piece of tin patching a hole in the top. On one side, a name is stenciled: "M. LEE."
That's Mary Custis Lee, Gen. Robert E. Lee's adventurous eldest daughter. In 1917, she stored these wooden trunks in the "silver vault" in the basement of Burke & Herbert Bank & Trust in Alexandria. A year later, she died at the age of 83. Her trunks sat in a dusty corner of the vault for 84 years, unclaimed, until E. Hunt Burke, the bank's vice chairman, discovered them in 2002.
Burke called his high school classmate Rob E.L. deButts Jr., who is Robert E. Lee's great-great-grandson. Together, the two men descended into the vault. Burke carried a basket of old keys.
"The first one I pulled out was a perfect fit," he says.
The trunks were stuffed with Lee family papers -- a priceless cache of 4,000 letters, photographs and documents. DeButts carted them to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, which houses the world's largest collection of Lee papers. He spent a week there, sitting at a desk in the research library, reaching into Mary Custis Lee's trunks and picking out treasures and trash.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
As I remember the governor accepted their services. They were later disbanded and never called into the Confederate Army itself, but I've read somewhere that they were called up again to help defend New Orleans when the Feds came. Unfortunately, I don't think they made much of a defense of New Orleans at all.
Their main service across the state was to provide local safety and order during the first year or so of the war when many of the local white men were off at war. They were a home guard. How long they continued to be so so outside of the area controlled by Federals, I do not know.
I'd check it, but I'm not sure what old Louisiana newspapers my local library has outside of the Picayune, which published under the eyes of people like Beast Butler after the Feds took New Orleans.
There was a mass resignation of the Federal Native Guards when they were given the choice of returning to their plantations or staying in the Federal army.
Of course I knew that. I'm not aware of any documentation of any kind by any Southern commander indicating the presence of black confederate soldiers until the last month or so of the rebellion. That's the point, there is no documentation that I'm aware of from the confederate side indicating the use of black soldiers. Which would indicate that claims of whole regiments of black confederate soldiers made earlier by other Southron supporters are most likely fantasy.
Everything I've read indicates that they banded together as private citizens and offered themselves in service to the confederate military and their offer was turned down flat. In fact many later joined the Union army.
B4L8r
Next up....Al Sharpton calls for the papers to be burned.
I probably should have said "you all" or, perhaps, "y'all" to make it clear I'm talking about Southron supporters in general. Stainless says there were whole regiments. Williams repeats the claims of tens of thousands. How many black confederate soldiers do you claim?
Perhaps this is what I'm remembering (Source):
1,500 men signed up to defend Louisiana on April 21, 1860 (sic, 1861), and the Daily Picayune asked "What will the Northerners have to say to this?" On May 29 Governor Thomas O. Moore appointed a colonel and lieutenant colonel of the Regiment of Free Men of Color. All the officers were free Blacks. They were called the Native Guards (See picture 6 above.), and their job was to defend New Orleans. When New Orleans fell some of them became members of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards (Union).
And from the Memphis Daily Appeal, April 23, 1861:
New Orleans, April 22 – The free colored population of the city have held a meeting, and resolved to tender their services to the governor in defense of the State.
And from the Philadephia Public Ledger, May 1, 1861:
COLORED TROOPS IN THE SOUTH -- Fifteen hundred free colored men in New Orleans, at a meeting last Monday night, enrolled themselves for military duty in defense of the Confederate States.
That's not my intention. All wars are promoted through patriotic or religious themes, some very elaborately and effectively, surviving 140 years later.
Wasn’t King Charles II something of a libertine?
“Course you would believe Hamilton’s ilk was the original ‘conservatism’.”
I saw that and didn’t even see the point to replying. Hamilton was the origin of the word damnyankee. He’s in the same ring of Hell with Judas, as sure as I post this.
All the "Cavaliers" were. I maintain (contrary to our modern day professional neo-Confederates) that the Bible Belt South we know today has much more in common with Cromwell and Puritan New England than with the loose-living bourbon-swilling high churchmen who made up the original Southern aristocracy. And thank G-d!
Just ask the folks at Bob Jones University.
So where is General Washington? Or for that matter, what about Pat Buchanan, whose book The Great Betrayal takes a consistently Hamiltonian, anti-Jeffersonian, anti-Confederate position? In that book Buchanan actually claims that Washington said that if the North and South were ever to split that he would go with the North.
Your free-thinking, Bible-lacerating, Jacobin "hero" Thomas Jefferson is much more likely to be in Hell than Alexander Hamilton.
Buchanan will join Hamilton as a traitor to men’s freedom, when all is said and done. He’s done more to harm the conservative cause with his crony and family-supporting faux-populism than probably any one man in the last forty years...except perhaps the current and last Republican presidents, of course.
As for Washington, he certainly had his flaws, as any human does, but he has a lot more standing in his favor than does the man who invented the national debt and the national bank. Washington reportedly refused a throne. I doubt Hamilton would have turned down even a knighthood.
Your supposition is only correct in regards to yourself, as the threads demonstrate conclusively.
“But your point of view seems to be based on every single soldier in the CSA was a planation owner.”
That’s not my intention.
Fair enough.
And we're to take your opinions as if they came directly from a burning bush in your backyard? Hardly.
Your supposition is only correct in regards to yourself, as the threads demonstrate conclusively.
What a wonderful statement.
Super article. During the war, Robert E Lee was liked as much by the North as he was in the South. He had even been offered command of the Union Army at the start of the war.
A true gentleman whose grace, kindness and honor is lost on many today.
And we're to take your opinions as if they came directly from a burning bush in your backyard? Hardly.
See, I can repeat things too.
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