Posted on 05/19/2003 7:29:55 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
The campaign against one of the greatest Americans ever continues. The Richmond-area Boy Scouts have stripped Robert E. Lee's name from their uniforms, title, and logo.
How sad, given that Lee's life, and the maxims by which he lived, are exactly what the growing generation of boys in this country needs.
Everyone knows why the Scouts dropped the name, but the reason is unimportant. The important thing is the example of manhood of which the Scouts are deprived.
Lee's Life
Many have used superlatives to describe Lee. Lee was "the most perfect man I have ever met ... made of different and finer metal than other men," one admirer said. "He is an epistle," said another, "written of God."
Lee lived by the code of honor and chivalry. He embodied dignity, manly bearing, and valor. A pious Christian, his principal object was doing God's will.
Lee's code can be found in a small volume called The Maxims of Robert E. Lee for Young Gentlemen, published by Virginia Gentlemen Books and the source of the quote used here.
A humble man, Lee once said, "I know of nothing good I could tell you of myself." Indeed, he would likely say the Scouts should have taken a different man's name.
As president of Washington College, he shaped the lives of many young men. "You cannot be a true man," he told his students, "unless you learn to obey."
"Study hard," he told them, "be always a gentleman, live cleanly and remember God." And he once told Stonewall Jackson's minister, "I dread the thought of any student going away from the college without becoming a sincere Christian."
"Do your duty," he wrote to son Custis. "That is all the pleasure, all the comfort, all the glory we can enjoy in this world."
"We must all try to be good Christians," he said to a 5-year-old boy, "that is the most important thing."
The stories that demonstrate Lee's character are legion and cannot be repeated here.
Whom Would They Revere?
Boy Scouts should be clamoring to adopt Lee's name.
But no. They erased it.
And to be replaced by whom? Arthur Ashe, a tennis player? There's a statue of him in Richmond. How about Abe Lincoln, the American man-god, whom we are supposed to worship with sacrilegious veneration, and whose effigy recently arose amid the streets of Richmond?
Perhaps the Scouts can learn to emulate him.
Perhaps they will learn to regale their friends with jokes so filthy the women and children must leave the room, or to laugh at the misfortune of others, as Lincoln laughed when Gen. Sherman told him about burning Georgia. Perhaps they will learn to lie and exhibit false piety.
What A Boy Scout Should Be
Modern Scouts likely never learned much about Lee, but removing his name certainly won't help matters. Lee's example is sorely, desperately needed in a society that produces video games in which men maim women, and music videos in which singers gleefully advocate rape and murder.
What kind of boy was Lee?
"He was a most exemplary student," a teacher said. "He was never behind-time in his studies; never failed a single recitation; was perfectly observant of the rules and regulations of the institution; was gentle, manly, unobtrusive, and respectful in all his deportment to this teachers and his fellow students."
Sounds like what a Boy Scout should be.
He fought to protect a way of life.
As did most who had any dealings with him.
I think there is a cult of personality in the South that believes Lee walked on water. I'm less sycophantic about his military abilities. But his honor throughout the Civil War was unimpeachable and the Union was better for having had him as its enemy.
There were generals on both sides who exhibited far less sense of decency than Robert E. Lee.
To better understand the anti-Southern gambit in America, today, see Creating Hate In America Today. This is not just something that Southerners need to rally against. The ultimate target is everything traditionally American. You folk are but the scapegoaats for the rallying of malice, discontent and thuggery.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Keep your powder dry....
With a heavy heart, no love for slavery and no hate for the Union, Robert E. Lee fought to defend Virginia.
In 1856, Lee had written that, in his opinion, slavery was both a moral and political evil.
After the Seven Days battles, the Union Commander of the Army of the Potomac, General George MacClellan, wrote to Lincoln urging him to refrain from ever making the emancipation of the slaves a Union war aim.
Yes, slavery was a part of the Confederacy just as slavery was a part of the United States during the Revolutionary War.
Few American history books bother to go into the details about how the besieged British forces at Yorktown had given refuge to hundreds of slaves that had escaped their American masters. After George Washington's victory at Yorktown the slaves were returned to slavery.
George Washington's defeat by the British would have freed America's slaves in August, 1838 when Great Britain emancipated the slaves in it's remaining New World colonies.
Today, however, nobody claims that George Washington was "fighting to uphold slavery".
Today, our own America has a legal practice that is extremely repugnant: Abortion.
If, say, anti-abortion Muslims from Detroit were invading your home State to enforce Muslim law in your State by the force of arms and you took up arms in defense of your State, would you be fighting for your right to self-determination or would we be fighting to uphold partial birth abortion?
With a heavy heart, no love for slavery and no hate for the Union, Robert E. Lee fought to defend Virginia.
He could either be with us or against us. He chose to be against us.
George Washington's defeat by the British would have freed America's slaves in August, 1838 when Great Britain emancipated the slaves in it's remaining New World colonies.
Today, however, nobody claims that George Washington was "fighting to uphold slavery".
Sorry Charlie, but it was the southern states themselves that declared in their articles of secession that they were fighting to uphold slavery. We say it now because they said it then.
None of those "responses" change the fact that Lee fought to uphold slavery.
And I'm still here. And the southern secessionist states were fighting to uphold slavery. They said so. Are you calling them liars?
No great loss. He drove everyone on the AOL Civil War message boards crazy for years with his obsessive, hate-filled diatribes, so it's not surprising he moved on to us. As for Grand Old Partisan, I would actually have been interested in him--right age, right location, right politics, good looks--if it wasn't for his OCD issues with hating the South. Why can't they just GET OVER IT?
Most wars are fought and most soldiers fight to "protect a way of life." Any war can be justified in those terms, but what produced this particular war?
It may look oversimplified to say that Lee "fought to defend slavery," but a lot is left out if one says that he fought to defend a "way of life" and leaves it at that. What was that way of life? What was it based on? What threatened it? We can agree that not every rebel fought to defend slavery, but it would be dishonest to deny to importance of slavery in sparking the rebellion.
Travellers who came to America inevitably noticed the difference between Maine and Mississippi or Michigan and Alabama. Slavery was an undeniable fact in the America of 1860, however much we've forgotten or denied it. It was defended or condoned by many as the basis of the "way of life" the Confederates were fighting to defend.
Lee's conscience is a matter for himself and God, but if we're looking for the broader or deeper meaning of what he did, can we really leave slavery out of our answer? "He fought to protect a way of life" may be an acceptable first guess, but it's not a real or final answer to question about why the Civil War was fought or what Lee's significance was.
It looks true that slavery wasn't Lee's personal motivation for fighting, but your answer still looks like an evasion or a very incomplete answer. If he'd been an abolitionist would he still have felt as comfortable about his actions?
So how do you define "us"? The people in your own State of Minnesota or the people in the State of California?
New Englanders at the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812 believed that they had a right to seccession and that question was never codified, one way or the other, into the United States Constitution. To New Englanders in New England, weren't New England and other New Englanders "us"?
Sorry Charlie, but it was the southern states themselves that declared in their articles of secession that they were fighting to uphold slavery. We say it now because they said it then.
By the same token, we today declare that we fight to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court, by the authority vested in it by the U.S. Constitution has decreed in Roe v. Wade that it is perfectly legal to have an abortion.
Again I ask you, if anti-bortion Muslims from Detroit were invading Minnessotta to establish Islamic Law, would you be defending Minnessotta to protect your home and family and self-determination or would you be fighting to protect partial birth abortion?
The secessionist states defined themselves as "them" and defined the non-secessionist states as "us." There was no ambiguity.
The southern states started to seceed before Lincoln was even sworn into office. There was no "invasion" from the north that triggered the secession. In fact, it was the southern secessionists who attacked federal fort first.
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