Posted on 09/30/2003 12:19:22 PM PDT by sheltonmac
The South's unconditional surrender in 1865 apparently was unacceptable to today's Neo-Confederates.
They'd like to rewrite history, demonizing Abraham Lincoln and the federal government that forced them to remain in the awful United States against their will.
On top of that, now they are opposing the U.S. Navy's plan to bury the crew of the CSS H.L. Hunley under the American flag next year.
The Hunley was the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. In 1863, it rammed and fatally damaged the Union warship USS Housatonic with a fixed torpedo, but then the manually driven sub sank on its way home, killing its eight-man crew.
It might have been a lucky shot from the Housatonic, leaks caused by the torpedo explosion, an accidental strike by another Union ship, malfunction of its snorkel valves, damage to its steering planes or getting stuck in the mud.
In any case, the Navy found and raised its remains and plans a full-dress military funeral and burial service on April 17, 2004, in Charleston, S.C. The four-mile funeral procession is expected to draw 10,000 to 20,000 people, many in period costume or Confederate battle dress.
But the Sons of Confederate Veterans, generally a moderate group that works diligently to preserve Southern history and heritage, has a radical wing that is salivating with anger.
One Texas Confederate has drawn 1,600 signatures on a petition saying "the flag of their eternal enemy, the United States of America," must not fly over the Hunley crew's funeral.
To their credit, the funeral's organizers will leave the U.S. flag flying.
After all, the search and preservation of the Hunley artifacts, as well as the funeral itself, were paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
Also, the Hunley crew was born under the Stars and Stripes. The Confederacy was never an internationally recognized nation, so the crewmen also died as citizens of the United States.
They were in rebellion, but they were still Americans.
This whole issue is an insult to all Southerners who fought under the U.S. flag before and since the Civil War.
But it isn't the only outrage by rabid secessionists.
They are also opposing the placement of a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Richmond, Va., the Confederate capital.
According to an article by Bob Moser and published in the Southern Poverty Law Center's magazine "Intelligence Report," which monitors right-wing and hate groups, the U.S. Historical Society announced it was donating a statue of Lincoln to Richmond.
Lincoln visited that city in April 1865 to begin healing the wounds caused by the war.
The proposed life-sized statue has Lincoln resting on a bench, looking sad, his arm around his 12-year-old son, Tad. The base of the statue has a quote from his second inaugural address.
However, the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised a stink, calling Lincoln a tyrant and war criminal. Neo-Confederates are trying to make Lincoln "a figure few history students would recognize: a racist dictator who trashed the Constitution and turned the USA into an imperialist welfare state," Moser's article says.
White supremacist groups have jumped onto the bandwagon. Their motto is "Taking America back starts with taking Lincoln down."
Actually, if it weren't for the forgiving nature of Lincoln, Richmond would be a smoking hole in the ground and hundreds of Confederate leaders -- including Jefferson Davis -- would be hanging from trees from Fredericksburg, Va., to Atlanta.
Robert E. Lee said, "I surrendered as much to Lincoln's goodness as I did to Grant's armies."
Revisionist history to suit a political agenda is as intellectually abhorrent as whitewashing slavery itself. It's racism under a different flag. While it's not a criminal offense, it is a crime against truth and history.
I'm not talking about re-enactors here. These folks just want to live history. But the Neo-Confederate movement is a disguised attempt to change history.
In the end, the Confederacy was out-fought, out-lasted, eventually out-generaled and totally over-matched. It was a criminal idea to start with, and its success would have changed the course of modern history for the worse.
Coming to that realization cost this nation half a million lives.
So I hope that all Neo-Confederates -- 140 years after the fact -- can finally get out of their racist, twisted, angry time machine and join us here in 2003.
Forrest murdered at least one person in cold blood. Hard to make a hero out of that, but some will still try.
The neo-rebs deny that a massacre occured at Fort Pillow, but there is no doubt one took place.
"He [Gen. Forrest] then swung down toward Memphis, assaulted and carried Fort Pillow, massacring part of its garrison, composed wholly of negro troops. At first I discredited the story of the massacre, because in preparing for the Meridian campaign, I had ordered Fort Pillow to be evacuated, but it transpired afterword that General Hurlbut had retained a small garrison at Fort Pillow to encourage the enlistment of the blacks as soldiers, which was a favorite political policy at that day. The massacre at Fort Pillow occurred April 12, 1864, and has been the subject of congressional inquiry. No doubt Forrest's men acted like a set of barbarians, shooting down the helpless negro garrison after the fort was in their possession; but I am told that Forrest personally disclaims any active participation in the assault in person, and consequently that he was to the rear, out of sight if not hearing at the time, and I was told by hundreds of our men, who were at various times prisoners in Forrest's possession, that he was usually very kind to them. He had a desperate set of fellows under him, and at that very time there is no doubt the feeling of the Southern people was fearfully savage on this very point of our making soldiers out of their late slaves, and Forrest may have shared the feeling."
_Memoirs of W.T. Sherman, 1990 LOA edition, page 470.
From a letter to his family by Sgt. Achilles V. Clark of Forrest's command, written a few days after the massacre. The original is in the Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville:
"The slaughter was awful--words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negros would run up to our men, fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but then were ordered to their feet and shot down. The white men fared but little better." Incidentally, Clark wrote that he and others tried to stop the butchery, only to find that "Gen. Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued."
However, another Confederate soldier, Samuel H. Caldwell, wrote to his wife a few days after the massacre "If General Forrest had not run between our men & the Yanks with his pistol and sabre drawn not a man would have been spared." To support this, Brigadier General James R. Chalmers, CSA, who was Forrest's second-in-command "similarly claimed to a Federal officer on April 13 that he and Forrest had `stopped the massacre as soon as [we] were able to do so'. He further explained that their men `had such a hatred toward the armed negro that they could not be restrained from killing the negroes after they had captured them.'"
Walt
Myth.
The rebel armies had no major success outside Virginia excepting Chickamauga.
And the great Lee had as little success outside Virginia as Pope, Hooker and Burnside had within it.
The main western Union army pretty much drove the rebels before it throughout the whole war.
Don't forget that the insurgent area was 10% larger than the loyal area. Even in 1865, observers in Europe were saying that the north could not conquer the south.
Walt
Which ones joined without consent of the other states? Which ones were granted dispensation from abiding with the Constitution?
Supporting evidence is usually more effective than disgruntled opinions. I'll take that to mean that you have no evidence to support your claim.
And in the same letter he said that if he could keep the Union by freeing all the slaves, he would.
Put the southern states didn't even try. They walked out without discussion, without negotiation.
Thus there are no enumerated powers to the government concerning secession...
And nothing in the Constitution supporting the idea of unilateral secession.
"We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Law in nature tells us to recognize him - our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude. Freedom only injures the slave. The innate stamp of inferiority is beyond the reach of change. You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables him to be." -- Jefferson Davis, March 1861
Source "Look Away: A History of the Confederate States of America" by William C. Davis, page 137
Where?
So you're saying that Texas wasn't a state prior to the Civil War?
What President Lincoln said was that his purpose in the war was to save the Union. But let him speak for himself.
Executive Mansion
Washington, D.C.
August 22, 1862.
Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.
I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.
As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.
Yours,
A. Lincoln.
And as usual, you are clinging to fals information in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
There are others here that do that, trying somehow to claim that the U.S. flag is the official flag of the Klan. I'm merely pointing out that they seem to use, or rather, misuse the confederate flag as well.
Crap.
That makes no sense, plus it is loaded with inaccuracies.
Where?
I read your statement out of context. I retract my previous comment
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