Posted on 08/14/2018 5:54:38 PM PDT by Kaslin
Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can't get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can't go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley.
The supposed "nationalist" rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was anything else significant. No one showed up but cops, journalists and anti-nationalist protesters.
Ho-hum. We're back approximately where we were before the Charlottesville, Virginia, disaster the Washington march was meant to commemorate -- a foul-tempered shouting match that ended in death for a bystander hit by a "nationalist"-driven car.
A vocal coterie continues to think all vestiges of the late Confederacy -- especially, statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee -- should be removed from the public gaze. A far larger number, it seems to me, posit the futility, and harm, that flow from keeping alive the animosities of the past.
The latter constituency rejects the contention that, look, the past is the present: requiring a huge, 16th-century-style auto da fe at which present generations confess and bewail the sins of generations long gone. The technique for repenting of sins one never committed in the first place is unknown to human experience. Nevertheless, it's what we're supposed to do. Small wonder we haven't done it, apart from removing the odd Lee statue, as at Dallas' Lee Park. To the enrichment of human understanding? If so, no one is making that claim.
Looks as though we're moving on to larger goals, like maybe -- I kid you not -- committing "The Eyes of Texas" to the purgative flames, now that the venerable school song of the University of Texas, and unofficial anthem of the whole state, has been found culpable.
Culpable, yes. I said I wasn't kidding. The university's vice provost for "diversity" has informed student government members who possibly hadn't known the brutal truth that "The Eyes" dates from the Jim Crow era. "This is definitely about minstrelsy and past racism," said the provost. "It's also about school pride. One question is whether it can be both those things."
Maybe it can't be anything. Maybe nothing can be, given our culture's susceptibility to calls for moral reformation involving less the change of heart than the wiping away of memory, like bad words on a blackboard. Gone! Forgotten! Except that nothing is ever forgotten, save at the margins of history. We are who we are because of who we have been; we are where we are because of the places we have dwelt and those to which we have journeyed.
A sign of cultural weakness at the knees is the disposition to appease the clamorous by acceding to their demands: as the Dallas City Council did when, erratically, and solely because a relative handful were demanding such an action, it sent its Lee statute away to repose in an airplane hanger. I am not kidding -- an airplane hanger.
Civilization demands that its genuine friends -- not the kibitzers and showmen on the fringe -- when taking the measure of present and future needs, will consider and reflect on the good and the less than good in life, not to mention the truly awful and the merely preposterous. To remember isn't to excuse; it's to learn and thus to grow in wisdom and understanding.
In freeing the slaves, Yankee soldiers shot and blew up and starved many a Confederate. Was that nice? Should we be happy that so many bayonets ripped apart so many intestines? No. Nor should we be happy that so many Africans came in innocence to a land of which they knew nothing to work all their days as the bought-and-paid-for property of others.
History is far more complex, far more multisided than today's self-anointed cleansers of the record can be induced to admit. I think the rest of us are going to have to work around them. In the end, I think, and insofar as it can be achieved, we're going to have to ignore them.
I thought it was in New Mexico?
“Lincoln’s proclamation only freed SOUTHERN slaves.”
It did not do that at the time it was written, the war was still being fought, it had no more real effect than if Harry Truman, during WWII, had written a proclamation that Hitler’s soldiers could not eat black forest ham.
Slavery in New Mexico was legal from 1850 with the Compromise of 1850 through 1862, when Congress banned slavery in the territories.
Despite being illegal, it was widely and openly practiced under Spanish and Mexican rule, and under American rule until the Peonage Act of 1867.
Today, slavery exists in the form of human trafficking.
when are we going to get over it?
Irrespective of the issue of slavery, the natural rights of man include their right to voluntarily dissociate themselves from a government with which they disagree.
The conundrum has always been that Lincoln forced upon the South that which George III would have forced upon the colonies.
It is a profound and existential question-which the issue of the legitimate conflict over slavery is used to obscure
Oh for crying out loud the f**king war is over. Enough already. The South lost.
Of course Jeff Davis and his merry band of insurrectionists no more agreed with the right of certain southerners to dissociate themselves from the confederacy than Lincoln did with the secesh trying to split the union. Neither did southerners believe in the right to secede thirty years before during the Nullification Crises.
The present anti-American, anti-historic- commotion is a contrived attack on the American Future, and should be recognized as such: War On An American Future
As a matter of historic perspective, non-slave owners in the South supported the Confederate cause, because it was prompted not by a differing of opinions over a Biblical/Feudal type labor system, but by the collapse of mutual respect between the States. If you read the Constitution carefully, you will see that it leaves judgments on moral & philosophic issues almost entirely to the States & local communities. Clearly it was not appropriate, in the spirit of the Constitution for the people of the States to be passing insulting moral judgments on each other.
This is not to say there was anything wrong with a civil discussion of philosophic differences--but the discussion had become most uncivil, increasingly making a mockery out of a consensual Federal Union. For how the discussion could have remained civil, consider Daniel Webster's most memorable address: Webster Address
And Kentucky.
At the beginning of the war there were about 100 slaves in Delaware. When were they freed?
December 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
Lee would be outraged by these idiots pretensions to speak for anyone from the South.
He would (being a righteous and humble man) tell the cities to take his statues down and not give the Lunatics a target.
There is no shortage of information about the North’s racism.
NO ONE disputes this (except those looking for anything to justify “The Noble Cause.)
You cannot ignore the facts that all these states had made slavery illegal (except the Border States) and it cost the Union 600,000 lives in getting rid of it.
This washes away any guilt about prior slavery.
Todays’s Leftists have been complaining about Lincoln’s racism for decades.
bkmrk
There were examples of the soldiers acting as pall bears for a soldier from the other side.
To me this shows the mutual respect the opponents had for each other (also shown by the fraternization during the war when battles paused) and that they realized they had been a part of something of great historic importance.
I think I will re-read 1984.
It had a big effect and that was why the slavers were outraged. It covered all states then in rebellion as a MILITARY tool to cripple the Rebellion’s economy and cut down on it’s military power.
The exodus of slaves from the plantations sped up to the point that the crowds of escapees was so large that they were bogging down the Union army’s advance.
Except that they didn’t go to war to get rid of slavery. In fact they offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment. and yes Lincoln was a flaming racist in addition to being a tyrant.
The Left is mighty selective about their outrage and historical revisionism.
There was no Union if states could leave without a Constitutional amendment. Check the meaning of “union.”
Nor was there any “state rights” in question other than the preservation of slavery which isn’t a “right” at all.
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