Posted on 07/02/2002 3:37:44 AM PDT by WhiskeyPapa
The Osceola Sentinel SUNDAY, JULY 5, 1998 -- An Edition of The Orlando Sentinel
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Historian: Civil War tales are pure bunk
History doesn't lie. Right? Well, the winners want history to make them look good. Sometimes the losers get their say, too.
Perspectives can change. Villains can be made to look like heroes. Interpreting the past can lead to lively debates. And because it is history, often the only confirmation comes from what was written down or told orally through generations.
Even so, care must be taken.
When talk turns to the Civil War and blacks' role with the Confederacy, there is no room for revisionist theories for Asa R Gordon.
For instance:
The Confederate states were interested in white supremacy.
The war between North and South was not about states' rights or a War of Southern independence. States' rights and independence are WHATS of the Civil War. The WHY of it was to preserve slavery, Gordon told a small group at St. James AME Zion church in Kissimmee last week.
Simply put, there should be no memorials honoring men like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. They and others resigned from the Union Army and fought against their country.
They were rebels, and they are traitors to the United States. Nations normally don't honor traitors, Gordon, a retired astrophysicist, said to a crowd that included a group from the Osceola Children's Home.
People normally don' t build memorials for traitors, racists or those who practice genocide.
There are no memorials to the Nazis.
In the United States, Confederate memorials dot the countryside. The flag is flown with pride. The Nazi flag - and Nazi leaders - inspire hatred.
It should he no different for Lee and others who fought for the South. The real heroes, Gordon said, are those Southerners who fought for the North.
As for those who try to promote the idea that blacks were willing soldiers for the South, Gordon's research disproves it.
In a lecture that was close to three hours long, the founder and executive director of the Washington, D.C. -based Douglass Institute of Government left no doubt about the fantasies and historical myths of Afro-Confederates.
"The South won in peace what it lost on the battlefield," Gordon said.
The commitment to the neo-Confederate movement is often emotional rather than intellectual, he said. It cannot stand the scrutiny of scholarship. The belief that blacks willingly served in the Confederate Army is ludicrous and harmful, he said.
"A slave didn't have a choice. If his master said he was going, the slave couldn't say no. He was a slave."
Those who say blacks fought for the South should look at Confederate documents, which ban blacks serving as regular members of the Army. They also need to look at records showing that those who did serve deserted when they got the chance.
Propagation of the present-day theories make it hard for people to realize that blacks were unhappy about their condition, Gordon said.
"How can you owe a people anything, if in fact they were so satisfied with the state that suppressed them?" he asked. "How can you correct that legacy if you are in denial about the true reasons?"
Gordon's visit was sponsored by Ann Tyler and Evan McKissic. McKissic, a retired Osceola teacher, has been critical of the theories of another retired local teacher, Nelson Winbush.
Winbush travels the country recounting the stories of his grandfather, who he said willingly and proudly served with Southern forces.
"I try to get the truth out. I talked with my grandfather, and I know what he said," Winbush said.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Pino welcomes comments. He can be reached at (407) 931-5935, by e- mail at OSOpino1@aol.com, by fax at (407)931-5959 or by mail at The Osceola Sentinel, 804 W. Emmett St., Kissimmee, 34741.
Reconstruction and its aftermath created some serious battle lines. Sadly, at that time there was no way a group of white Southerner ex-Confederates was going to "officially", on paper, give any credence to black assistance of any kind during the war. Not after carpetbaggers and scalawags had used black democratic votes (and vote fraud on a massive scale) to vote themselves money and power, while disenfranchising the Confederate veterans.
That's why contemporary documents are of greater value than the backward glances of the Old Boys after the colors fade.
But, as usual, the official rhetoric was belied by the actual conduct of folks on the ground in their relations with people that they knew. In addition to the story of gg grandfather's former slave, some of my cousins' family were Confederate Veterans over in Rome, GA, and I know from reading a history of the city that there was at least one black member of their organization. He raised fighting chickens, I think, and he frequently brought his prize roosters to the reunions. (That oughta get the PETA maniacs riled up, huh?)
I don't. He is in the company of the likes of the that Second Amendment foe, the awful Gary Wills, and the Roosevelt admiring faux historian Arthur Shitslinger.
Well read the article mom. The author clearly stated that the CSA could have saved itself if in 1862 or 63 it had allowed freedom for service. By eliminating 35% of its adult male population from active service while gradually watching that same population move into service for the enemy, the CSA doomed it's chances. The author is lamenting the fact that blacks couldn't serve the CSA. He wished they could have.
As to you saying that “reconstruction” poisoned race relations, I would suggest that the Black Codes enacted by Southern legislatures that attempted to circumvent the 13th Amendment and re-establish slavery poisoned relations and lead directly to reconstruction. When reconstruction ended, those same legislatures wasted no time enacting new codes in the form of Jim Crow laws. The southern power structure simply refused to allow even the hint of equality under the law.
Much unlike the northern powers before, during, and after the war you know. I'm truly suprised with all the fawning over abe, we haven't heard stories of him working on the Underground Railroad(not the railroad that went broke under his internal improvement plans 4 years after his death. That's another story altogether). Maybe we could all email Asa and get him to rewrite us some history about abe and the Railroad. Naaaahh, then he would have to explain away abe's actual quotes on race and his opinion of the abolitionists
The whole mess began when Lincoln was assassinated. At that time the writing was on the wall: the South was going to be ground into the dust in revenge by the Radical Republicans. Instead of sensible men like W.T. ("Total War and Total Peace") Sherman, the Radicals like Sen. Wade sent corrupt goons like "Spoons" Butler, and they came with the idea of punishing, not reconstructing. As Woodrow Wilson (for whom I certainly hold no brief) said in an article for the Atlantic Monthly in Jan. 1901, "Had Mr. Lincoln lived, perhaps the whole of the delicate business might have been carried through with dignity, good temper, and simplicity of method." Didn't happen. J. Wilkes Booth, the illegitimate son of an Englishman who had another family back home in Clerkenwell, didn't do the South any favors.
A more plausible source of North-South antagonism is suggested in an 1831 speech by South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun where he said, "Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence and force must ultimately prevail." A significant source of Southern discontent was tariffs Congress enacted to protect Northern manufacturing interests. Referring to those tariffs, Calhoun said, "The North has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North." Among other Southern grievances were Northern actions similar to King George III's Navigation Acts, which drove our Founders to the 1776 War of Independence. Dr. Walter Williams, George Mason University
Lincoln's intentions, as well as that of many northern politicians, were summarized by Stephen Douglas during the presidential debates. Douglas accused Lincoln of wanting to "impose on the nation a uniformity of local laws and institutions and a moral homogeneity dictated by the central government" that "place at defiance the intentions of the republic's founders." Douglas was right, and Lincoln's vision for our nation has now been accomplished beyond anything he could have possibly dreamed.A precursor for a War Between the States came in 1832, when South Carolina called a convention to nullify tariff acts of 1828 and 1832, referred to as the "Tariffs of Abominations." A compromise lowering the tariff was reached, averting secession and possibly war. The North favored protective tariffs for their manufacturing industry. The South, which exported agricultural products to and imported manufactured goods from Europe, favored free trade and was hurt by the tariffs. Plus, a northern-dominated Congress enacted laws similar to Britain's Navigation Acts to protect northern shipping interests. Dr. Walter Williams, George Mason University
Guys like billbears and stand watie think Booth was a hero.
Well make up your mind bill. In a post above you are all over Lincoln's case because he was not an abolitionist and not 20th century PC on equality and then you turn around and damn the only politicians of the day who were abolitionists and who did support full equality. That is where the term "Radical" Republicans came from. Believing in full equality for blacks and the willingness to use Federal power to protect that equality was a very radical idea in the 1860s.
So was Lincoln, the Civil Rights moderate a bad guy, or were the Radical Republicans the bad guys, or were your slaveocrat ancestors who went to war to protect slavery and who after the war organized lynch mobs to punish ‘uppity’ blacks the bad guys?
NOBODY in the 19th century qualifies for PC status. NOBODY. Not Garrison, not DuBois, nobody.
Lincoln was, to put it mildly, kinda hard on the Constitution. Most presidents are in wartime. That doesn't make him a bugbear or a saint. Again, it's that shades of gray stuff.
Lincoln would STILL have been better for the South than the Radicals that succeeded him.
No. It's just the rantings of another revisionist political heir of Karl Marx not unlike yourself, Walt.
In response to the frequent unsubstantiated accusations of "Soviet style misinformation" made by Walt against anybody and everybody who happens to disagree with him, presented in the spirit of the famous "Who Said It: Al Gore or the Unabomber?" quotation quiz, and to add a little humor to the often bitterly divisive FR debates on Lincoln...
The "Who Said It: Walt or Karl Marx?" Quiz
DIRECTIONS: The following quotations are statements made either by Karl Marx, the father of communism and big government thuggery, or by Walt in his pro-Lincoln postings on Free Republic. Without consulting outside sources, identify who you believe to be the author of each quote by indicating so. Each correct answer will be worth 1 point.. Answers will be displayed shortly after ample time has been allowed for response. Yankees are welcome to give it a try as well.
1. "Part of Lincoln's genius was in knowing what the country would accept, and another part was helping to guide it where it needed to go."
2. "[Abraham Lincoln was] one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr."
3. "In accordance with the principle that any further extension of slave territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was...bound to lead to open struggle between North and South."
4. "[Lincoln] was firm "as with a chain of steel" on there being no expansion of slavery from where it already existed. That alone was enough to cause the war, because the slave owners knew that their "futures" in slaves and slave breeding would be compromised unless slavery were allowed to expand."
5. "This geographical barrier [containing slavery] was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill...[which] placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference"
6. " Lincoln was alarmed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act into becoming more politically active -- because he had a personal abhorance of slavery...he had a solution to at least begin the ending of slavery. And that is what the secessionists found so repugnant."
7. "Lincoln was a very pracical man. He did discover a way to begin to end slavery in the United States. If slavery were confined to areas in which it already existed, it would die"
8. "The whole movement was...based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of...slaveholders; whether the vast territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery...whether the national policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device."
9. "[Lincoln] knew that if slavery was limited to areas where it was currently legal, it would die. The slave holders knew it too. That is why slave holders were continually trying to expand territory favorable to gang-labor slavery. That was why the Mexican War was fought and that is why the federal government tried to buy Cuba and that is why slave holders sent expeditions to disrupt Nicaraugua and other Central American locations."
10. "Lincoln bent over backwards to avoid war in his first inaugural. But Jeffeson Davis couldn't allow secession fever to cool. So he fired on Fort Sumter."
11. "It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the North, but with the South...For months [the North] had quietly looked on while the secessionists appropriated the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston."
12. "[F]rom 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed...Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress"
13. "[We are fortunate] that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln...to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world."
14. "Lincoln's words show what a great and good man he was, and his actions show [his critics] for a fool or poltroon."
BONUS QUESTION:
Identify the author of this quote denying the sovereignty of the states and advocating the union just like Lincoln did. It could be Walt. It could be Marx. Or it could be somebody else. Take a guess!
"[In America] it is impossible to speak of original sovereignty in regard to the majority of the states. Many of them were not included in the federal complex until long after it had been established. The states that make up the American Union are mostly in the nature of territories, more or less, formed for technical administrative purposes, their boundaries having in many cases been fixed in the mapping office. Originally these states did not and could not possess sovereign rights of their own. Because it was the Union that created most of the so-called states."
Scroll down for answers
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ANSWERS:
1. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/703308/posts?page=2#2
2. Karl Marx, Address of the International Working Men's Association to President Johnson, 1865
3. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
4. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/700651/posts?page=88#88
5. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
6. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/688238/posts?page=62#62
7. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/688238/posts?page=42#42
8. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
9. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/688238/posts?page=42#42
10. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/662922/posts?page=85#85
11. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
12. Karl Marx, On the North American Civil War, October 20, 1861
13. Karl Marx, letter to Abraham Lincoln congratulating him on reelection as President of the United States, January 28, 1865
14. Walt, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/664750/posts?page=51#51
BONUS: Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf volume II, 1926
Where is the ad hominen? The neo-confederate revisionists regularly attack Lincoln as a racist because he was not an abolitionist (even quoting Garrison on that). But in the same breath they attack the "Radical” Republicans who were abolitionists who favored an immediate end to slavery and full equality, including voting rights, by any means possible. That is why they were called Radical!
Before he was elected and in the early years of the war, Lincoln favored a gradual end to slavery to avoid what he saw (correctly) as inevitable social chaos that immediate emancipation would entail. Whatever his true feeling were on equality of the races (I think they were much more advanced than his public words revealed) Lincoln never let his public position get too far ahead of average public opinion. He freely admitted that events drove his actions, but he understood that you could not cause old and deeply held prejudices to disappear with a stroke of a pen. That is why he was in favor of some sort of colonization plan. He understood that blacks would not be accepted as equals and he was correct.
As to what ‘reconstruction” would have been like if Lincoln had lived, I must say probably not much different than it turned out. Regardless of who was in office at the end of the war, the Southern aristocracy would have still attempted to reclaim their strangle hold on power, the same black codes would have been enacted to re-establish a de-facto slave system, the Klan would have still enforced vigilante rule, and the occupant of the White House would have been forced by events, and by Congress, to take action. Perhaps with executive leadership, which the drunk Johnson did not provide, it would have been less draconian, but it would have happened none-the-less. Just like secession, the southern aristocrats again forced the issue and again the poor whites and blacks of the south suffered the consequences.
So much of what goes on in these threads is about guilt or innocence, purity and impurity. These are a reflection of our own attitudes and weren't questions at the time. The debate at the time wasn't about political correctness or purity or innocence, but about practical measures. By our own standards, virtually everybody was wrong about race, but some were more wrong than others and some courses or options were better or worse than others.
Our own concerns about racial equality shouldn't be simplistically projected back on the 1850s and 1860s. At that time the issue was above all slavery, and the question for Whites wasn't whether or not to love or respect Blacks, but whether or not to free the slaves.
You can have all you want of him, and his boyfriend Hawthorne for that matter.
and Ernest Hemingway
Decent writer, too bad he went nuts and blew his brains out.
and John Steinbeck.
Take him as yours all you want. Steinbeck was an ultra left wing New Deal apologist and propagandist, so I guess he fits in perfectly with yankee culture!
James Fennemore Cooper A decent writer, but himself significantly prewar
Nathaniel Hawthorn
See melville.
Washington Irving
A decent writer with a knack for underhanded mockery of new englanders and other yankees (what do you think Ichabod Crane was?)
and Henry David Throreau.
Unitarian transcendentalist eco-nuts...the perfect embodiment of yankee culture!
Ambrose Bierce
I'll have to admit he is a brilliant writer, but all in all a cynic about everything including his own region of the country just as much as anything else.
Julia Ward Howe
More unitarian transcendentalist kooks...fits in perfect with yankee culture!
Louisa Mae Alcott
Feminist...fits in perfect with yankee culture!
Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Westerner and western writer.
Emily Dickinson
Boring poet who slowly went nuts...perfect for yankeeland.
Walt Whitman
I believe it was Lincoln himself who remarked about him, "at least he looks like a man." Throw him in with the melville-hawthorne category.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost.
Poets and unitarian transcendentalist nuts. The only one I ever had much of a liking for was Frost, but that kinda gets tainted itself when you throw in the kennedy connection.
And then there's Horatio Alger
A reasonably deserving author who has been all but forgotten in history, perhaps because of his "rags to riches" pull yourself up, life with moral virtues messages. You know - the same stuff that is so often at odds with modern culture.
Anyway, I think you get the picture. The greater portion of your list consists of liberal unitarian nutcases, socialist new deal apologists, left wing bohemian freaks, homosexual perverts, and people who went crazy and committed suicide. True, the realm of authors and especially poets tends to attract these kind, but let's just say that yankee culture has more than its fair share of them among is literary leaders. Similarly, among your list those who actually have redeeming characteristics about them are almost always neglected beyond a brief footnote to the likes of leftist wackos like Steinbeck. So if that's the culture you are proud of, by all means you can have it!
Don't forget ZZ Top
The idea that, just because Lincoln is disliked by many, that there can't be anybody worse than Lincoln, is not borne out by the facts. I would like to know on what you base your conclusion that Reconstruction under Lincoln in essence would have been no different. I don't think there are very many historians who would agree with THAT assessment. Woodrow Wilson certainly didn't, and he was a whole lot closer to the issue than you or I.
No. It's just the rantings of another revisionist political heir of Karl Marx not unlike yourself, Walt.
It's not revision to quote Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Howell Cobb and the minutes of the congress of the so-called CSA.
It's Soviet style disinformation to suggest otherwise.
Walt
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Still can and still do.
I can't agree with you about Hawthorne & Melville (as it happens, I studied them and their writings extensively in college.) Melville was indeed an odd bird, but there was a lot of insanity in his family -- his father and one of his sons died insane, and another son had some sort of neurological illness . . . I don't think his relationship with Hawthorne was as you suggest. Hawthorne I think recognized Melville's genius, but there was a severing of their relationship that MAY have been due to Hawthorne recoiling from Melville's intensity . . . but I think that's probably as far as it went. I don't know much about Melville's wife, although they lived with her family. Hawthorne was deeply in love with Sophia Peabody, and their marriage was a very happy one. So I don't really see it.
But I don't think any of the Transcendentalists had much of a connection with reality. New England was a hothouse of the sort of ethereal, scholarly folks who skated along on family largesse and do-nothing government posts. The outrageous Brook Farm experiment was just typical of their lack of ability to deal with the "real world." Hawthorne at least had the sense to get out, and wrote a very amusing roman a clef about it, in which all the leading Brook Farmites are easily recognizable. I agree by and large with Rudyard Kipling's assessment of New England in "Something of Myself." Pretty scathing indictment (fortunately he didn't spend any time in the South! :-) )
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