Good bit on how murderous and violent pro-Confederates were to Texas Unionists, including the wanton slaughter of Germans trying to escape Texas into Mexico. I'm half-surprised they allowed Sam Houston to die peacefully.
Farley on attempts to get Confederate soldier license plates in Kentucky, a Union state.
Let's make a deal--Kentucky can have their Confederate plates if we mandate that Georgians be forced to drive around with William Tecumseh Sherman plates. I could live with that.
In probably my favorite Disunion piece so far, Elizabeth Brown Pryor takes to task the myth of Robert E. Lee taking the natural stand to defend his state against Union tyranny. Like much about Civil War mythology, this has little to no truth.
Lee was not brave nor honorable in refusing to serve his country. We've long known that many southerners fought for the Union, including George Thomas.
But as Pryor points out, a recently discovered letter from Lee's daughter shows that Lee actually countered the wishes of most of his own family in committing treason. Two of his own cousins served the Union, including Admiral Samuel Phillips Lee!!!
So I have even less respect for Lee than I did yesterday. Here is a man who refused an order to protect Washington, D.C., outraging his fellow Virginian Winfield Scott, who basically kicked him out of the army. Here is a man who turned his back not only on his nation, but on the military tradition of his own family and the desires of his own wife and children in order to protect slavery.
And while I don't want to trivialize Lee's decision, because it was a hard one for him to make, he was also completely wrong.
Robert E. Lee is not a hero. He was not a good man. He was a traitor to his country. And he should be remembered as such.
Glad Gainesville State College feels the Confederate flag is too sacred to desecrate in art:
Gainesville State College’s president ordered a painting depicting the confederate flag be removed from a “Faculty Biennial” Art Exhibit after they received letters of protest. The flag included superimposed images of a black man with a noose around his neck and a hooded Ku Klux Clansman [sic].
The protest came from a website called “Southern Heritage Alerts” and encouraged people to write to college President Martha Nesbitt demanding the painting be taken down. Nesbitt immediately ordered the painting be removed on June 25, only two weeks after it went on display.
“In school (in Venezuela) we learned about the United States’ Civil War and slavery. I learned to have a negative view of the flag — I basically associated the image of the flag with slavery, racism and the KKK,” the artist Stanley Bermudez explained to the Gainesville Times.
“This is very much what I feel and think about when I see that flag. It’s just my personal feelings about it. It’s an accumulation of the things I’ve seen, studied and read over the years,” Bermudez continued. He went on to say he’s been frightened by the confederate flags on KKK-run websites and in public meetings near his home.
The Museum of the Confederacy, which serves as the temple of Neo-Confederates and unreconstructed old school Confederates, is branching out to open a museum at Appomattox. Personally, I look forward to seeing their skewed view of Confederate surrender, i.e., the crushing of their treasonous rebellion in order to own, sell, rape, and kill black people. But what killed me is the link assuring the people of Richmond and Confederate wannabees more generally that "As We Create a System--We Will Not Abandon Richmond."
I love this language--the Museum is simply opening a new flank in the war against reasonable historical interpretation! They refuse to abandon Richmond to the idea that slavery caused the war and that people like Arthur Ashe and Martin Luther King deserve statues alongside Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson! That would be blasphemy!!!!
150 years ago today, South Carolina declared treason to defend slavery, seceding from the Union in order to preserve its ability to own, sell, rape, and murder black people. 4 1/2 years later and 500,000 dead Americans later, this treason was crushed.
But of course, the South has contested the meanings of this event ever since they lost the war. Beginning in 1866, they reshaped the meanings of the war to be a noble cause in defense of an idealized agrarian past with contented slaves working in the fields and eating watermelon to the sound of banjos at the end of the day. The civil rights movement challenged that narrative, but hardly defeated it.
Doug Mataconis lays the hammer down on those who claim the Confederacy was about anything other than slavery. See, all you have to do in order to debunk these arguments in go to the sources and see what the architects of treason said about slavery. Here's Confederate Vice-President (and southern moderate) Alexander Stephens:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.
Less encouraging than the Times articles I mentioned in the last post is the Southern attempt to remember secession as something other than committing treason to defend slavery. As Bob McDonnell found out recently, public figures today can't completely ignore the fact rich plantation owners caused the death of over 500,000 Americans in order to keep more than 3 million black people in slavery. But on the local level in many southern communities away from the spotlight, large numbers of powerful white people in the present aren't going to mind celebrating their "heritage" while conveniently forgetting why their ancestors fought the war in the first place.
Jeff Antley, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate Heritage Trust, is organizing the secession ball in Charleston and a 10-day re-enactment of the Confederate encampment at Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the war were fired on April 12, 1861. He said these events were not about modern politics but were meant to honor those South Carolinians who signed the state’s ordinance of secession on Dec. 20, 1860, when it became the first state to dissolve its union with the United States.
“We’re celebrating that those 170 people risked their lives and fortunes to stand for what they believed in, which is self-government,” Mr. Antley said. “Many people in the South still believe that is a just and honorable cause. Do I believe they were right in what they did? Absolutely,” he said, noting that he spoke for himself and not any organization. “There’s no shame or regret over the action those men took.”
When I go to the CNN homepage and I see plastered on the front page a picture of Confederate soldiers with a headline reading, "Were Confederate Soldiers Terrorists?", I am a happy man. Not only is Roland Martin launching a crusade against romanticizing the Confederacy, CNN is giving him prime space to do so. The overwhelming response against Bob McDonnell's trivializing of slavery has put neo-Confederates on the defensive. The old romantic view of the Confederacy is increasingly being pushed to the edges of acceptable discourse. Not only that, but the last week has arguably seen the most serious discussion of the Civil War's impact since the Civil Rights Movement.
While directly defending the Confederacy has become harder in the past few decades, low-level Confederate romanticization has exploded. We can particularly see this with the rise of Civil War reenactors. As Tony Horwitz points out in his excellent book, Confederates in the Attic, most of these reenactors want to "fight" for the Confederates. Many of those men directly connect the Confederacy with the anti-government and veiled racist rhetoric of the conservative movement and the present-day Republican Party. Bob McDonnell responded to that with his pro-Confederate declaration. But a lot of Americans will no longer put up with these ideas as part of respectable political discourse, including Roland Martin and myself.
Martin refers to Confederate soldiers as terrorists. He particularly attacks those who responded negatively to an earlier article attacking McDonnell, comparing their rhetoric to apologists for Islamic terrorism:
Well, maybe. I actually don't overly care for this line of argument. Were Confederate soldiers terrorists? Not really. There were terrorist raids and such, but in general, I don't think Confederates qualify under a realistic definition of terrorism. That's hardly placing me on the side of those committed treason to defend slavery. But I like careful definition of words--and Martin is using terrorism very loosely.
If you take all of these comments, don't they sound eerily similar to what we hear today from Muslim extremists who have pledged their lives to defend the honor of Allah and to defeat the infidels in the West?
When you make the argument that the South was angry with the North for "invading" its "homeland," Osama bin Laden has said the same about U.S. soldiers being on Arab soil. He has objected to our bases in Saudi Arabia, and that's one of the reasons he has launched his jihad against us. Is there really that much of a difference between him and the Confederates? Same language; same cause; same effect.
If a Confederate soldier was merely doing his job in defending his homeland, honor and heritage, what are we to say about young Muslim radicals who say the exact same thing as their rationale for strapping bombs on their bodies and blowing up cafes and buildings?
If the Sons of Confederate Veterans use as a talking point the vicious manner in which people in the South were treated by the North, doesn't that sound exactly like the Taliban saying they want to kill Americans for the slaughter of innocent people in Afghanistan?
Defenders of the Confederacy say that innocent people were killed in the Civil War; hasn't the same argument been presented by Muslim radicals in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places where the U.S. has tangled with terrorists?
Being so busy, I've been a little late to the game of slamming Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell openly supporting Treason in Defense of Slavery by restarting the state's Confederate History month in April. I've always thought we should talk about April as Treason in Defense of Slavery Month. No one has furthered this more than McDonnell. The flack he's taken has been outstanding. And somewhat surprising I guess. But he's taken heat from everywhere, making an embarrassment of himself and his state.
Regardless of what McDonnell actually thinks about these issues, and actually he probably does believe this but whatever, it's clearly a cynical political maneuver. His Attorney General, who puts the "nut" in wingnut, has been getting ton of love on conservative circuits for leading the lawsuits against the health care bill. So McDonnell wanted to get attention of his own.
This is really pretty stupid because it alienates Virginia moderates. Virginia is such a swing state now that this kind of racist culture war stuff might play to the base, but it's going to be a disaster in general elections. I don't think the suburban Washington voters went for McDonnell because they love the Confederacy. Rather, it's this kind of foolishness that will help Obama win Virginia in 2012 and help doom Republicans in the state as demographics keep changing. I'm sure this will always be popular in the rural southwestern area of the state. In Alexandria, not so much.
The responses have been fantastic. Dave Noon, my long time compadre in Treason in Defense of Slavery discussions, quoted the South Carolina fireeater John Preston's speech at the Virginia secession convention in 1861, reminding us all what secession was about:
You may, as you are at this moment doing, centralize a coercive power at Washington stronger than the Praetorian bands when the Roman eagles shadowed the earth “from Lusitania to the Caucasus,” but you cannot come nearer coalescing the people of Virginia and the people of Vermont, the people of the St Lawrence and the people of the Gulf, than did Rome to make one of the Gaul and the Dacian, the Briton and the Ionian. No community of origin, no community of language, law or religion, can amalgamate a people whose severance is proclaimed by the rigid requisitions of material necessity. Nature forbids African slavery at the North. Southern civilization cannot exist without African slavery. None but an equal race can labor at the South. Destroy involuntary labor and Anglo Saxon civilization must be remitted to the latitudes whence it sprung.
As James McPherson, dean of Civil War scholars, commented on learning of Mr. McDonnell's proclamation: "I find it obnoxious, but it's extremely typical. The people that emphasize Confederate heritage and the legacy, and the importance of understanding Confederate history, want to deny that Confederate history was ultimately bound up with slavery. But that was the principal reason for secession -- that an anti-slavery party was elected to the White House. . . . And without secession, there wouldn't have been a war."
"there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia."
Quite the day in American insanity today.
First, we gave the neo-Confederates who want to list their national origin in the census as "Confederate Southern Americans."
I actually like this idea. It would give us a very precise figure on how many Americans are both morons and racist. I would find this incredibly useful.
Second, you have the California anti-immigration activist Barbara Coe saying that the supposed Mexican "Reconquista" is mandated in the Koran.
"Is there any argument that OBAMA is a Communist trained, devout Islamic Muslim whose ultimate goal is to comply with Koran mandates to a) torture/kill all 'infidels' and b) destroy America via his anti-American 'healthcare, illegal alien Amnesty, etc'?"
"So, if you wish to send a message that Pelosi and her party [that they] cannot fail to hear, break their windows," Vanderboegh wrote on the blog, Sipsey Street Irregulars. "Break them NOW. Break them and run to break again. Break them under cover of night. Break them in broad daylight. Break them and await arrest in willful, principled civil disobedience. Break them with rocks. Break them with slingshots. Break them with baseball bats. But BREAK THEM."I would usually use this time to talk about this within the context of right-wing terrorism. But I'll let that go today. Because how does Vanderboegh make his living?
Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension. He has private health insurance through his wife, who works for a company that sells forklift products.
Singer Phil Collins said his life now revolves around the Alamo.
Collins is in town, set to appear at local events commemorating the anniversary of the siege and battle of the Alamo. Though he's mulling the idea of recording a tribute cover album of 1960s songs, he said he's making the Alamo “my main thing” as a collector, history buff and possible author.
“Basically, now I've stopped being Phil Collins the singer. This has become what I do,” he said Monday, standing beside a 13-foot-by-15-foot model of the 1836 Alamo compound that will open to the public this week.
Collins, who is British, said he has “hundreds” of cannonballs, documents and other artifacts from the Alamo, possibly the largest private collection anywhere, in the basement of his home in Switzerland. He said he's collaborating with artist Gary Zaboly on a book about his collection.
His most prized item is a receipt signed by Alamo commander William Barret Travis for 32 head of cattle used to feed the Alamo defenders.
His latest involvement in Alamo history is narrating the introduction of a 13-minute “Alamo diorama light and sound show” at the History Shop at 713 E. Houston St., by the Alamo. Invited guests at a preview tonight will also see a battle site excavation covered with a window on the floor of the shop, which is near the Alamo's north wall, where much of the heaviest fighting occurred.
Ed Sebesta's tireless work in fighting neo-Confederate movements in the U.S. has no end. He is currently working to get Obama to stop the federal government from sending a yearly wreath to honor the Confederate dead at their monument in the Arlington National Cemetery. Obama of course ignored his letter. In fact, this is precisely the kind of cultural issue Obama avoids at all costs, even though it honors people who fought to keep his people in slavery.
This is a worthy cause and I highly recommend informing yourself about it.
Edward Sebesta does really wonderful work on his blog "Anti Neo-Confederate." This is the kind of writer that is really undervalued. Working in relative obscurity on incredibly important but rarely discussed issues, he does an invaluable service blowing up neo-Confederate myths.
Today he takes on the myth that in 1928 Congress declared the Civil War, "The War between the States." Even if true, I don't see how this bolsters the neo-Confederate case since dismissing ideas about the Civil War from the 1920s does not seem hard to do. Yet they use this anyway. From Sebesta's characterization of the argument:
"On March 2, 1928, Senate Joint Resolution NO. 41 was adopted by Congress and entered in the Congressional Record. It reads as follows: A war was waged between 1861-1865 between two organized governments: the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. These were the official titles of the contending parties. It was not a "Civil War" as it was not fought between two parties within the same government. It was not a War of Secession, for the Southern States seceded without a thought of war. The right of a state to secede had never been questioned. It was not a War of Rebellion, for sovereign, independent states, co-equal, cannot rebel against each other. It was the War Between the States, because 22 non seceding states made war upon 11 seceding states to force them back into the Union of States"
One thing about the Joe Wilson outburst is that it's bringing race and the racism Obama facies into the sunlight for all to examine. I don't know that the outcome of this will turn out positive, but it's real interesting in any case.
Certainly, it's giving Republicans every chance they want to defend the Confederate flag and other symbols of treason. We know now that Joe Wilson is a neo-Confederate. He is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, one of the most racist organizations in the country. He was one of only seven legislators in South Carolina to vow to keep the Confederate flag over the state capitol of that state, a venerable tradition that goes all the way back to 1962.
Attacks on Wilson for his boorish behavior have upset fellow wingnuts. Increasingly, his defenders are also upset that his history as a supporter of treason in defense of slavery have come attack. Take Iowa congressman Steve King. King is really upset because, you know, Obama hates white men. As a white male, I should feel oppressed let me tell you... But anyway, here's King's own words on the matter:
“Instead of marching forward and following the principles of Martin Luther King Jr., [Obama] has set up a political system of delivering political favoritism to minority-serving groups. It divides Americans, and it insults us,” King said.
“There’s been legislation that’s been brought through this House that sets aside benefits for women and minorities. The only people that it excludes are white men,” he added. “Pretty soon, white men are going to notice they are the ones being excluded.”
“He is an officer and a gentleman and everyone who knows him knows that…being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line. So I think Maureen Dowd is trying to whip this up and I also know she’s trying to put race into it. I didn’t know what race she was talking about when I first read her line on that.”
I just found out that there is a monument to the Confederacy in Seattle. Apparently, it has a history of being vandalized. I knew I liked Seattle for a reason.
