- The Charleston shooter had a Confederate flag, so it must be banned
- James Holmes thought he was the Joker, so Hollywood movies must be banned
- Charles Manson was inspired by the Beatles, so popular music must be banned
- The US cavalry killed native Americans, so the American flag must be banned
There is no limit to how far these psychopaths called “progressives” will take this. They won’t be satisfied until everybody are government slaves – and the GOP will assist them every step of the way.
Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace– but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
– Patrick Henry
The racist Democrat Party that held slaves, caused the Civil War, imposed Jim Crow should be forever banned just as the Nazis Party is banned in Germany.
In 2009, Nidal Hassan kills13 and wounds 30 at Ft. Hood, while shouting alluhu Akbar. It is declared workplace violence. Nothing happens other than a trial and a death sentence. It takes years for Purple Hearts.
In 2015, kills 9 and shouts racist things. Within a week the cultural cleansing as begun. The battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia is banned, license plates are banned, statues are moved, the National Parks Service has banned and removed anything with a confederate flag, board and electronic strategy games are removed because units are correctly identified with confederate flags. Dear Leader uses a eulogy to continue to push cultural cleansing. Symbols of a war that ended 150 years ago had nothing to do with this madman’s actions, yet it is being used to push a political agenda. I’m darn near waiting for reeducation camps and a little red book.
What would have happened had Roof yelled alluhu Akbar?
The oh so tolerant left.
BTW, as you imply, the stars & bars Infantry flag of the Army of Northern Virginia is of course the object of the rancor as is the 2nd Navy Jack because of it’s similarity. I would bet that almost all of those that claim to hate it would not recognize the many other battle flags carried by other Confederate units during the war. Couldn’t tell you that it was not the Stars & Bars that flew over Sumter first after it’s surrender and wouldn’t recognize the flag that did for what it was.
“What would have happened had Roof yelled alluhu Akbar??”
Oh man… hilarious..!!
Whenever a Muslim kills somebody… the Left minimizes religion and calls it an isolated incident… tries to find fault with Society… often mislabels a recent Muslim immigrant from … say Oman… as a “Wisconsin man”… Lol!!…
meanwhile Roof IS a rather isolated incident … yet somehow all conservatives are tied into… to blame for roof’s actions..
So typical that the left claims the US flag is just a piece of cloth when someone burns one but then all of a sudden gets wound up and wants a flag banned when ti suits their own purposes
I’m a Hoosier and thus from a state which very well may have provided more Union soldiers per Capita than even most of the Abolitionist states. Yet I respect the Stars & Bars. Probably the most iconic photo of all times was a picture of the second flag raising on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal. It is iconic for many reasons but one of the primary ones is because it shows Americans in mortal combat raising their symbol after a very tough conquest. (Not of the island by any means but of Mt. Suribachi.)
Flags during the Civil War were an equally if not even more powerful symbol than during WW II.
Every Regiment on both sides had their National Colors that led them into battle. On the smoky noisy and often confused battlefields they did not just serve as a symbol but also as a vital signal that denoted the center of the Regiment and the location where the Regimental commander could most likely be found and thus the location where commands to the regiment would usually originate from by bugle, drum, voice, or other means.
The archives are full of references to these colors and photographs of proud bearers with their bullet and shrapnel tattered standards. The single most dangerous job in a Civil War Infantry regiment on either side, was to be the Color Bearer. And if one reads the citations for the Medal of Honor from the Civil war they will find that taking the enemy’s colors is the most common act cited for it’s award.
On the battlefield at Gettysburg as I searched for a location near the Rose Farm where a considerable number Confederate dead were photographed by Matthew Brady I found a little Confederate Battle flag laying on the ground already marking the spot. I set that flag up before I left. So to this old soldier that flag means valor in combat. And I respect that! And I respect that the ancestors of those long dead men would mark the spot of their demise with the symbol they fought and died under.
Approximately 400,000 brave Confederate soldiers died from what were and still are American states. They are just so much trash? Southerners are not allow to celebrate their heritage and honor their heroic fallen ancestors like any other American group? Italians aren’t perfect, Irish aren’t pefect, Jews aren’t perfect, blacks aren’t perfect, but only white Southerners are demonized because of their imperfect heritage.
Andy where did you get that 400,000 from? That is high compared to what I have found in the most authoritative history literature. The official estimated total for those that died in the line of duty totaling BOTH sides is 620,000. And everyone seems to agree that Union KIA, Missing, and others lost to disease, exceeded those of Confederacy.
I personally do not agree with the official estimate. It think it’s probably too low by 80 to 100,000.
I also disagree with the way deaths due to war presented. There had to have been a high toll among the civilians of both sides, but particularly for the Confederacy where the battlefields lie. The deprivations of war are not limited to the soldiers alone by any means. Widows with families abounded and particularly in the south where the deprivation was the worst, a lot of children and women had to died from disease that would not have had there not been a war.
A thorough examination of the demograohics and the various mustering and casualty lists indicates over 700,000 dead. (Sorry, I don’t have the sourse.)
Beautifully said; tears in my eyes. Wiping out history should be a sin. When are we going to rise up and say, “No!”. I am tired of being bullied by every minority group around.
Beautifully said was in response to Rah’s Gettysburg experience.
Barbra,
Here are the images which drove me to find the spot:
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sonofthesouth.net%2Fleefoundation%2Fgettysburg%2Fgettysburg-battle-emmittsburg.jpg&f=1
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.theatlantic.com%2Fstatic%2Finfocus%2Fgettysburg070313%2Fg08_0000881u.jpg&f=1
I originally found those images in a great work titled: Gettysburg: A Journey in Time http://www.amazon.com/Gettysburg-Journey-Time-William-Frassanito/dp/0939631970/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435456864&sr=1-3&keywords=pictorial+history+of+gettysburg
William Frasanito is a college professor in Gettysburg that worked hard to find the locations of the period photographs taken at Gettysburg. I visited and found every spot he had located and diagrammed and found the location of one photo he and his students had not yet found. Frasnitos’ works help bring the battlefield to life on a human level and for anyone visiting the field I would highly recommend they buy his books and study them before going. It will enhance a visit immeasurably.
Those Americans were cut down on the 2nd day of battle as they attacked the Union line. They passed over the Emmitsburg Road just a little south of the Peach Orchard across the fields of the Rose Farm and were shot at from their left flank by Union Artillery lined up facing south along the Wheat Field Road. One Confederate survivor described the sound of the Canister (Each long range Canister shell for the smooth bore 12 pounder Napoleon field gun had 27 iron balls 1.47″ in diameter) slapping on the stone sides of the Rose Farm buildings.
Then they faced the front of the left flank of Dan Sickle’s 3rd Corp that were lined up in the trees. Those dead men had made it through that deadly artillery only to be cut down by the volleys of fire from Union Infantry. Those men shown in that photograph who were almost certainly South Carolinans from Kershaw’s Brigade most likely fell from the fire of the 2nd Delaware Volunteer Infantry Regiment.
I should correct something. Those men are the bodies of men most likely from Kershaw’s Brigade. However it is possible that they are from Semme’s Brigade made up of Regiments from Georgia. The two Brigades got mixed up a little during the attack after Semme’s was mortally wounded.
But the Democrat flag = Confederate flag.
Ban the name Democrat
As basic rights of civilians are taken away at an accelerating rate, your post is most appropriate of the famous quote by Patrick Henry, “give me liberty or give me death!”
This flag was the symbol of oppression around the globe, and caused a bloody revolution. And it was under this flag that slavery was established in America. Where is the outrage?
http://www.warstore.co.uk/ekmps/shops/marlina/images/kings-colours-pre-union-5-x-3-flag-1768-p.jpg
This flag allowed nearly a million blacks to be slaughtered just two decades ago, and is still the symbol of third world suffering and death. Where is the outrage?
http://ak2.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/1054600/preview/stock-footage-animated-flag-of-united-nations-seamless-loop.jpg
Maybe we shouldn’t be blaming flags for the failures of men.
Whop flies this these days ? I never see it in Britain…anywhere. Is it banned ?
http://www.warstore.co.uk/ekmps/shops/marlina/images/kings-colours-pre-union-5-x-3-flag-1768-p.jpg
Britain no longer exists so why would anyone fly that flag?
I have one in my office.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/03/13/article-0-0BC4B04300000578-619_468x313.jpg
Not the same! The above picture shows the post-1801 flag. The first one you showed is the 1606 version without the St Patrick’s Cross.
Do they represent different countries?
Yes, except for Wales which is not represented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom
So which of those is not British flag?
Yep, technically your first flag is the British flag (Great Britain 1707-1800), the second image shows the flag of the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ireland, post-1922, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)
So both are British flags. Same country.
You get my point, and the nitpicking niether adds or detracts from it.
But Gator,
Great Britian/the United Kingdom is no longer a country. It is just a vassal state of the EU.
http://europesworld.org/2010/02/01/global-governance-is-a-challenge-for-democracy-but-an-eu-opportunity/
Yes Gail. And the US is no longer a representative republic, but it is still the same country with the same flag.
What gives with the nits?
Only one flag soon,
There’s no denying,
That the UN flag
Will be the only flag flying!
https://youtu.be/5u1QARlCph0 ummmmmmmmmmmmm
“Officer Fired After Posting Photo Of Himself In Confederate Flag Boxer Shorts On Facebook
CHARLESTON, S.C. (CBS Atlanta)– A North Charleston police officer was fired from his position after posting a photo on Facebook featuring the Confederate flag.”
http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2015/06/25/charleston-officer-fired-after-posting-confederate-flag-photo-on-facebook/
Pretty soon this will be an issue…
http://www.nleomf.org/assets/images/themuseum/online-newsletter/2012/june/2012-17-10-flag-patch-detail.jpg
PS – Any tool that poses in his boxers on Facebook probably should be fired, regardless of the boxer design or his occupation.
Gator it already IS AN ISSUE!
School Official Tells Student He Can’t Fly U.S. Flag on His Truck
A Darn good reason NOT to use facebook.
Remember Facebook is also what ISIS uses for recruiting.
Correction , What the CIA and the Mossad uses for recruiting.
banning stuff works great …
alcohol
heroin
sex practices
‘Louie, Louie’ by the Kingsmen
the Bible in languages other than Latin
if you the like the Mafia and the drug gangs, wait for what you get when they ban guns
I’m Southern
I never knew I had relatives in the Civil War ’til I was 50
(forgotten in the family)
one went in the Confederate army as a private at age 37 (conscript) was captured at Petersburg and survived the horrible prison at Pt. Lookout MD
one hid from the conscriptors ’cause his two brothers had already been killed in the war
some buried in the same graveyard as my father, a WW2 combat vet with a military headstone
I grew up with a bit of shame about my redneck roots
never gave a wit about the stupid flag
no more
thanks to the liberal, culture cleansing fascists, I’m gonna celebrate my heritage often and loud
dangerous twits the lot of them
How about banning revisionist history. My family was from the South, and none of them owned slaves. In fact, two of my ancestors were slaves, near St Augustine Florida. Slavery is not a racial issue, just ask the one million plus whites enslaved by Arabs. The very first slave owner in America was a black man by the name of Anthony Johnson, in 1655.
In 1830, a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more.
According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states.
Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. Black Duke University professor John Hope Franklin recorded that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
In 1860 there were at least six Negroes in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves. The largest number, 152 slaves, were owned by the widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards, who owned a large sugar cane plantation.
Another Negro slave magnate in Louisiana, with over 100 slaves, was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was valued at (in 1860 dollars) $264,000.
In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings. In North Carolina 69 free Negroes were slave owners.
(Source: Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South, Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roak New York: Norton, 1984.)
Fact 5: In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the US census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.
The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves. Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).
The figures show conclusively that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters in pre-Civil War America. The statistics outlined above show that about 28 percent of free blacks owned slaves—as opposed to less than 4.8 percent of southern whites, and dramatically more than the 1.4 percent of all white Americans who owned slaves.
I’m sick of being blamed for the crimes of others, and watching others go blameless.
for the record …
no known Ben Affleck problems in my family
too poor and too Methodist
you mean history shows that purity might not be clearly divined according to race?
Imagine that
Reblogged this on Daily Browse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbvDRY0O30E
The ignorance of Americans and our history is truly breathtaking, and 100% the fault of the progressives who write our school’s textbooks. Whenever I hear talk about Lincoln being a hero to blacks, I have to shake my head. Sure he worked to free slaves, but he also endorsed shipping all blacks back to Africa, and believed that whites and blacks could never coexist. If blacks knew what Lincoln actually said and tought of them, they would descend on the Lincoln Memorial with dynamite, and demand that all references to him be removed from public places.
The ignorance of Obama is best displayed when he compares himself to our 16th President.
The President’s party dominates both the educational and media worlds. “Media” encompasses news, entertainment and history.
It’s a wonder that we know anything at all!
Though I agree with most of it I disagree with his claim that the Civil War was not about Slavery. It was. Bloody Kansas, which was IMO, where the first military actions by organized units occurred. Was about Slavery.
To say that it was about money or culture is making a distinction without a difference. Slavery was a major portion of the southern wealth and their culture. Plantation owners used slaves as collateral on loans to buy more land, which in turn produced more crops so they could buy more slaves, etc. The “Peculiar Institution” of slavery was the key economic component in the antebellum south that made US Cotton KING and thus made the southern landed gentry rich. That gentry controlled the politics of not only the south but of the whole nation through out the 1850’s through the democrat party.
The fact that most Confederate soldiers were not fighting for slavery or that most Union soldiers were not fighting to free the slaves is not the point. The point is that the divide over slavery and it’s expansion to the west and the possibility of succession was so absolute that it split the Democrat party which was the overwhelmingly dominant party in American politics of the time. That split is what allowed Lincoln to be elected. And Lincoln’s election was the straw the broke the camels back.
One other note. He mentions soldiers fighting for each other. This is a fact in all war it seems. But during our Civil war it was even more of a factor. The Companies of most Volunteer Regiments on both sides were recruited from specific geographical areas within their respective states. Thus Fathers served with sons, Uncles served with nephews, cousins served together, and life long family friends stood beside each other in the ranks of their Companies. This factor also had another effect. Any shirking or instances of soldiers failing to do their duty would be reported back to the town or area that the offender came from and was probably born at. I believe that this was a part of the reason the men to did things that seem incomprehensible to many today. To march in the rank and file in the attack and step over the dead or bleeding writhing bodies of the rank before them that had just received a devastating volley, knowing full well that they would probably suffer the same fate.
Rah, while you are in a way correct, in another you are not. We fought the British over “taxes”, but in actuality it was over freedoms, and that is the same thing that drove the South to war. The South had been pushed around by the North for decades, and Southern pride and independence came to a head with Lincoln’s election, and his pet crusade against slavery. If it had not been slavery, it would have been another issue that drove the secession, which was inevitable. Our founders scrambled to find compromises with southern states to form a union, and nearly failed from the start. Northern aggression was what drove the South to secede, just as British aggression drove our ancestors to revolt. It is never a singular issue.
Gator
You and I sir, will have to agree to disagree on that. The issue of Slavery nearly undid the Union before it was made. Why? Money! And we Americans can claim the Revolution was about freedom all we want, but the simple fact is it was equally about money! Fact is that wealth is a component of freedom. And I’m not just talking about the taxes that most people think of in the way they do when they think about the Revolution. All one has to do is study the histories of the some of the prominent founders which were involved early on in Boston, like Hancock, to see that there was a huge financial stake involved for many of them.
Fact is that slavery was was a festering sore which the founders could not do anything but put a bandaid on that eventually almost led to the disunion less than 75 years later. The very words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution rang hypocritically hollow because of the compromise that maintained the peculiar institution. And the reason why that sore existed in the first place was money! Slaves were the foundation of the wealth of the prominent founders of the southern colonies and hardly any of them were about to give up that wealth after having risked all and fought so long to preserve it from the British.
Personal wealth is freedom Rah. And as for the Constitution ringing hollw, you are wrong, and don’t take my word for it.
“Let me tell you something. Do you know that you have been deceived and cheated? You have been told that this government was intended from the beginning for white men, and for white men exclusively; that the men who formed the Union and framed the Constitution designed the permanent exclusion of the colored people from the benefits of those institutions. Davis, Taney and Yancey, traitors at the south, have propagated this statement, while their copperhead echoes at the north have repeated the same. There never was a bolder or more wicked perversion of the truth of history. So far from this purpose was the mind and heart of your fathers, that they desired and expected the abolition of slavery. They framed the Constitution plainly with a view to the speedy downfall of slavery. They carefully excluded from the Constitution any and every word which could lead to the belief that they meant it for persons of only one complexion.
The Constitution, in its language and in its spirit, welcomes the black man to all the rights which it was intended to guarantee to any class of the American people. Its preamble tells us for whom and for what it was made.”
-Frederick Douglass (June 1863)
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/l…p?document=777
Modern liberals and neocons use slavery to bash the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.
Let Frederick Douglass retort them in his own words. Douglass has great authority on the subject. He was a brilliant man, born a slave in 1818, but taught himself to read when he was 6 years old (without the benefit of the public schools). He was a man who valued liberty, and escaped from slavery when he was 20, in 1838.
Then he worked for the liberty of others, and at the same time, educated himself. He read the Founding documents of our nation, and commentaries on them, like the Federalist Papers. After 1840, he was able to get his hands on Madison’s Notes on the Federal Constitution. Hence his great statement of liberty, above, from 1863.
Douglass was there.
Fredrick was there but the events speak for themselves in the historical perspective. Besides Thomas Jefferson would not have agreed with him.
IF in fact the founders had agreed to an intention that slavery would be phased out, they would have said so and ended the importation of slaves right then. They did not nor did the 1st Congress when the Bill of Rights was written and passed for ratification. In fact it was not until the 1807 during the 10th Congress that the Federal Government passed the first law to prevent the importation of slaves.
Thomas Jefferson was president by then and signed it into law. He would have disagreed with Douglass’s claim though it was what he wanted.
“1786 “…we must await with patience the workings of an overruling providence, & hope that that is preparing the deliverance of these, our suffering brethren. When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light & liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality.” – Thomas Jefferson, Observations on Article on the United States in the Encyclopidie Methodique, June 22, 1786; “The Works of Thomas Jefferson,” Federal Edition, Editor: Paul Leicester Ford, (New York and London, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904-5) Vol. 5
Did you expect that all founders would agree 100%? Douglass was smarter than both of us combined, and read all of the founding documents, and came to the conclusion that our founders were working towards freedom for all men. Even from his perspective as a former slave under the rule of that same document. Think Rah.
Our founders knew there was no way in Hell that they could just free the slaves on July 5th 1776. If you read their deliberations, they knew it would take at least one generation to begin emancipation, and maybe more. They set the South up for failure with the Three Fifths Compromise, it was a very ingenious way of appeasing the South and assuring slavery would end.
You, as many others (myself included), have fallen for the progressive lie that our founders did not intend for all men to be free. Time to reeducate yourself.
Now, as much as I would like to continue this discussion I must go clean gutters and put on gutter guards. I have little maple tree sprouts in a portion of my 5″ wide gutters and I’m fixing it so my gutter cleaning days will be over for a long time to come.
Some light reading for you.
http://www.wallbuilders.com/libissuesarticles.asp?id=122
All of this is thoroughly footnoted, unlike the progressive lies we have been taught.
Thanks Gator,
More reading to do….
And yes, I agree that slavery was an excuse but not the reason for the Civil War.
Don’t forget that England And France were hoping to grab the USA dismember it and anex it as colonies after the Civil war had weakened the USA and the Russian Czar stepped in and came down on the side of the USA.
Foreign involvement in the Civil War:
http://www.rense.com/general52/over54.htm
Slavery would not have lasted much longer anyway because machines were in the process of taking over. The North was ahead of the South in that respect and therefore had no problem with abolishing slavery.
At this point I don’t believe any of the swill the US schools served up as ‘History’ Not after reading The Great Thanksgiving Hoax
I have no idea if this is true but I sure wonder.
This information dovetails quite nicely with the information on John Dewey (and the Rockefellers) and with the information on George Count, Not to mention all the information Robin has dug up and posted at The Invisible Serfs Collar.
Hey Gail! Progressives have been trying to get rid of that pesky Constitution for well over a century, and first rewrote our history texts around the turn of last century. They did this by inventing out of whole cloth new histories, the texts they replaced were well researched, documented and footnoted. The “new” history tomes had zero documentation, and were meant to discredit our Founders, thus discrediting our founding documents. As Douglass pointed out in his 1863 speech, it is a “wicked perversion of the truth of history”. And I once bought into it, as I had no other resource material at the time, and no reason to believe I was being lied to.
Got problems with mechanization. First, the unions oppose increasing mechanization because it “robs” union members of jobs. Second, Big Business doesn’t have an incentive to mechanize when a ready supply of really cheap labor is imported. It’s a win-win situation for the President’s party to oppose mechanization–and the “Industrial Revolution” is the cause of Global Warming–just ask the President’s party mouthpieces.
Mechanization requires a smaller–but well-educated–work force to keep the machines humming. The President’s party has trouble teaching school children that “two plus two equals FIVE because the Party says so!”
Things we need to ban and things we need to reinforce…
At the heart of our division lies the natural history of man, going all the way back to our roots.
Mankind, like all creatures have a deeply rooted built in awareness to protect the species by forever looking out for danger and potential dangers posed from things/creatures they do not understand and fear.
We have not changed physiologically for well over 35,000 years and in geophysical time-scales, we as a species are young, with only 122ish biological configurations among us.
A persons mental state cannot undo his animal roots, but only squelch the Neanderthal within us!
The Alpha’s have become less alpha and the followers are less following…
Urges to force others into your world only results in war and death, and this will continue forever.
Nations that enforce their laws and fight to survive do just that, and those that are lead by followers with idealistic world views do not!
The history of man can only change to a more utopian state if all of mankind become followers, and that is not a reality.
IMO, the BEST single volume history work that delves into the causes of the the Civil war and the war it’s self in all aspects is James M. McPhersons’ Pulitzer Prize winning ‘Battle Cry of Freedom’.
com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/0195038630/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435530026&sr=1-1&keywords=battle+cry+of+freedom+by+james+mcpherson
It was written for the Civil War Portion of the comprehensive Oxford University History of the United States. I have read about the war in all it’s aspects starting before I was a teenager and and my opinions are founded on what I have read. This work, more than any other single volume brings it home. Politics, sociology, demographics, economics, and pertinent previous history is covered in the book.
Oxford University???? (Think Cecil Rhodes)
That is a homebase for the Progressives just like the London School of Economics is.
I would be very careful of anything coming out of that school especially about US history.
The Labour Party is the Fabian Party.
Don’t forget that John Dewey was a founding member of the American Fabian Society.
Pulitzer himself was mentored by Thomas Davidson, a charter member of the Fabian Society. When I see “Pulitzer Prize”, I smell a rat.
Your both are barking up the wrong tree and if you had read that book, highly acclaimed by many Civil War Historians, then you would know it.
Sorry Rah, but I learned a long time ago that appeals to authority mean nothing, and “raw data” means everything.
The problem is many of the Historians are trained by progressive universities.
Here is one instance of ‘altered data’
Ignoring Elites, Historians Are Missing a Major Factor in Politics and History: Steve Fraser, Gary Gerstel (2005)
And here is another:
http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/06/02/10-facts-about-the-arab-enslavement-of-black-people-not-taught-in-schools/5/
Turtles all the way down.
I also figured out decades ago that leftists create “prizes” that they give each other in order to pad resumes. The Pulitzer is just one of those shiny objects used to distract, just like the Nobel. It isn’t hard to figure out, if you just pay attention, and do not let yourself get dazzled by the baubles.
gator69 says:
June 30, 2015 at 2:14 am
Sorry Rah, but I learned a long time ago that appeals to authority mean nothing, and “raw data” means everything.
And your bashing a book you never read so you have no “data”.
I don’t need to read a book about fairies to know that it is fantasy.
Not sure why this poted incorrectly the first time.
About the author James M. McPherson…
Along with several other historians, McPherson signed a May 2009 petition asking U.S. President Barack Obama not to lay a wreath at the Confederate Monument Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The petition stated:
The Arlington Confederate Monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument’s denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes. This implies that the humanity of Africans and African Americans is of no significance.
Today, the monument gives encouragement to the modern neo-Confederate movement and provides a rallying point for them. The modern neo-Confederate movement interprets it as vindicating the Confederacy and the principles and ideas of the Confederacy and their neo-Confederate ideas. The presidential wreath enhances the prestige of these neo-Confederate events.
Does it sound like this is a man who would write a fair and balanced account of the War of Northern Aggression, AKA the Civil War?
Try the link again: http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/0195038630/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435530026&sr=1-1&keywords=battle+cry+of+freedom+by+james+mcpherson
Gator though I would totally agree with you about historical revisionism and the failure to properly teach history. I hope your not implying that my opinions are a product of that revisionism. I’m a 60 year old man that has been reading about this stuff since well before I was in Jr. HS. I balked at the BS I saw being presented at the couple of History courses I took at IU.
Rah, the history books have been BS for over a century. You are not that old! Read at the link I provided, and you will learn that Douglass was indeed correct.
And I’ve read histories over 100 years old and quite a few personal accounts from the actors of the time. And NOT ALL history books written since the 1800s are revisionist. In fact many are not in my judgment. And some history written more than a century ago, and in particular many personal accounts by actors in the events, are self serving and thus revisionist. Many older histories are just plain wrong on many counts. Hell, the import of Picketts Charge at Gettysburg was not even recognized for what it was until early in the 1900s. Dan Sickles writing under the pseudonym “Historicus” continued to try and clear his name by justifying moving his III Corp forward without orders long after the battle. It is only by reading a plethora of writings, choosing the sources carefully, that one can get a feel for what the truth was/is.
Read at link I provided, it is thoroughly documented and footnoted. You are falling for progressive propaganda.
Added to what Gator said.
Remember Britian and the rest of Europe wanted the USA DEAD and BURIED.. The USA was a very big threat to the aristocracy and the status quo. From the time the country was formed, England and the Banksters were trying to undermine this country. (Think war of 1812)
Although England was Officially Neutral ….
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/civil_war-england.htm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1330735/Thousands-British-volunteers-gave-lives-Americas-civil-war.html
Gator, History books are written by the winners. They are ALL B.S.! Some are just less B.S. than others.
(Think Richard the III)
History books are written by the winners.
Gail, I was about to comment on that. It was the Protestant Church who smeared the Catholics with the Spanish Inquisition, which was politically driven by the Spanish Royals who depended upon “Divine Right” to rule. It was only after the Catholic Church intervened that attrocities ceased. All of my relatives are southerners, and they always referred to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression”, and hated Sherman for his war crimes. My relations were all poor, and fought for the right to not be lorded over by those who lived hundreds of miles away.
There is always truth to both sides of any story, and to deny this is to buy into the propaganda of the victor.
Gator,
As the Daily Mail story mentioned, the US Civil War was one of the most vicious wars. The history books HAD to show it was about a ‘Noble Cause’ and not money and politics and federal control of the states.
So, has the “Confederate Flag Ban” raised the income levels of the black population? Ended oppression of Black Americans? Expunged their felony convictions (blacks have a higher felony conviction rate than whites–for whatever reason–and ridding them of felony convictions will put them on a more-level playing field with non-felon whites). How about reduced our “militarized police” from gunning down “unarmed black children?” You know, like these:
http://www.nola.com/175years/index.ssf/2011/12/1973_mark_essex_the_howard_joh.html
http://abcnews.go.com/US/federal-marshals-shot-las-vegas-federal-building/story?id=9473808
http://www.baltimoresun.com/topic/crime-law-justice/crime/shootings/washington-navy-yard-shooting-EVCAL00043-topic.html
Of course, when the DNC picks its martyrs, it could be more selective–or is that the point?
It is more divide and conquer technique. They want the Blacks at the throats of the whites. This is to hid the actual divide which is between the ‘Political Class’ and the ‘Productive Class’ they are sucking the blood from. The Poltical Class steals from the ‘Productive Class’ and uses that wealth to buy power and votes using the Parasitic Class.
George Bernard Shaw, a founding member of Fabian Socialism said:
“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
And how do these Fabian socialists plan to use that power?
…………
The Communists are more in your face. One who observed and understood was the future dean of Teachers College, William R. Russell. He was in Russia soon after the Bolsheviks seized power and spent considerable time there, working on Creel propaganda against the Germans, for the Bolsheviks, and later against the Bolsheviks. Russell described how he saw the communist tradecraft:
Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness and Destroyed America by Kent Clizbe
Another thing banned is truth in Atlanta. Atlanta now has these billboards plastered all over;
http://media.breitbart.com/media/2015/06/M-signs-screen-640×480.jpg
by the Muslim Brotherhood group ICNA. However the same company refuses to allow:
http://media.breitbart.com/media/2015/06/Screen-Shot-2015-06-19-at-8.42.04-AM.png
or
http://media.breitbart.com/media/2015/06/Screen-Shot-2015-06-19-at-8.44.24-AM.png
Contact info for Clear Channel (phone and e-mail) is listed at that site if you want to make a comment directly to Clear Channel about their censorship policy.
It’s like Hans Solo said about Wookies and Droids:
Star Wars (1977)
[R2-D2 and Chewbacca are playing the holographic game aboard the Millennium Falcon]
Chewbacca: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh!
C-3PO: He made a fair move. Screaming about it can’t help you.
Han Solo: Let him have it. It’s not wise to upset a Wookiee.
C-3PO: But sir, nobody worries about upsetting a droid.
Han Solo: That’s ’cause droids don’t pull people’s arms out of their sockets when they lose. Wookiees are known to do that.
Chewbacca: Grrf.
C-3PO: I see your point, sir. I suggest a new strategy, R2: let the Wookiee win.
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000033/quotes
It is also why you do not hear the LGBT’s going after Muslims for murdering gays as part of their Islamic daily chores, but then see gays spit on Christians who want to keep a sacred ritual holy.
Hypocritical opportunistic cowards.
The Women’s Libbers are just as bad. Not a peep out of them about the Muslims. Delingpole wrote that some of them in the UK are backing the Muslims. That tells you womens rights and gay rights, like animal rights are just ploys for bashing the middle class and have ZERO to do with injustice or actual rights.
They are actually gangs run by leftists, intent on destroying family values, and the Judeo-Christian based civilization that built this country. They will gladly join with anyone who shares their goal of destroying America.
In Ontario we are starting to see some cracks. Premier Winn, the lesbian with her obscene sex ed curriculum, which was designed by a child porn convict Benjamin Levin.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/ontarios-sex-ed-architect-admits-he-asked-someone-to-sexually-assault-a-chi
Is being protested by many parents. And wonder of wonders, a lot of them are Muslim. The leftwing media was very confused how to spin this unexpected (by them ) fact. Muslims are not going to stand for this LBGT crap being force fed to their children, like the rest of us have.
Popcorn Futures soar…
amirlach, that is great news.
Nothing like watching a ‘lets you and he fight’.
gator69 says: “Turtles all the way down.
I also figured out decades ago that leftists create “prizes” that they give each other in order to pad resumes…..”
Thanks to what I have read here and what Kent Clizbe wrote in Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness and Destroyed America, I finally figured out that ‘Modern Art’ wasn’t actually art. Not only is it a way to control/reward other Progressives, it is also used to undermine the confidence of the general population.
Anyone can look at a Michelangelo or a Leonardo da Vinci and know they are looking at great art. When you look at a Jackson Pollock you can’t tell if the paint is his or a painting by congo the chimpanzee. We need an ‘Expert’ to tell us, unwashed redneck slobs that we are, what we are seeing. This undermines confidence in our own intelligence and judgment.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Chimpanzee_congo_painting.jpg
http://www.artbusiness.com/2pol.jpg
An old friend of my mother’s is a borderline lefty as a result of being an artist in the company of many lefty arists for decades. We were having lunch one day a few years ago, and I let slip that I do not think “modern art” is artistic, and that I view it as crap. I was surprised to hear her agree, and my mother just about fell out of her chair (Mom said later that she never dared say as much for fear of losing a friend). It is the emperor with no clothes, and artists do not dare say so, for fear of losing their “cool kid” status.
The new McCarthyism, Soviet style…
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259184/gina-mccarthy-and-obamas-totalitarians-jamie-glazov
gator, I just ran across this old note I had on John Dewey, Father of American Education.
Some interesting comments on John Dewey. Dewey was a charter member of the American Fabian Society. Seems Lenin had Dewey’s books translated and his teaching methods implemented. “He ordered the schools to adopt Dewey’s educational philosophies, and the test scores at the end of the semester were so abysmal, that he instituted the strictest form of European standards education, kind of a mix between the German and French forms. Rigid classrooms.” linkSo the USSR rejected the teachings of John Dewey while the USA uses them to this day.
The Dewey Pessimal System.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a masterful and pragmatic diplomatic, political, and military stroke.
Lincoln held it in in his desk until after the Battle of Antietam because he feared that to have presented it earlier, before the North had what could be claimed to be a significant military victory, would be perceived as an act of desperation.
Diplomatically
The emancipation proclamation made it almost impossible for Great Britain to recognize or to even overtly help the Confederacy. In GB at the time despite the diminished imports of cotton from the US they were not desperate for cotton for their looms because they had warehouses stocked full of it, and they were developing cotton farms in India which in the end came through so that their textile industry felt relatively little pain from it all in the end. Thus cotton turned out to be not quite the King that the Confederacy had counted on.
However the leaders of GB did wish to do anything they could to weaken the US and some of the major industrialists and financiers really wanted to sell arms to the Confederacy. The pot came to a boil due to the Trent Affair in August 1861 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trent_Affair.
Wiki way understates how great the fervor was in GB. The political Leadership wanted war. The Industrialists wanted it too. The people however, though angry at the US, abhorred the slavery of the Confederacy and were less than enthusiastic about allying with a nation that had slavery as a central key in it’s formation and thus were divided. Plus the Crimean war was only five years behind them and the pensioners with amputations were still in evidence all around them.
In the end, Price Albert, husband of Victoria, who the Queen listened to about foreign affairs, had a lot to do with stopping it all. Besides that Russia was hungry for revenge after the Crimean war was making all the moves that indicated it would ally with the US if GB went to war. Fact is that the Trent Affair very nearly started what probably would have been the First World War. It really is revisionism that so little attention is paid to that event.
The Emancipation ended any chance of GB allying with the Confederacy and in fact even covert help such as supplying ships and arms though never eliminated altogether, declined after the proclamation.
Politically
Lincoln was under constant pressure from the abolitionists. Obviously the proclamation did much to appease them without any affront to the majority from the border or northern states which had slavery or which did not but who’s citizen soldiers were not fighting to free the slaves.
Militarily.
From that time on every time a Union Army got within 20 miles of a plantation the slaves would leave their masters and run to what they thought would be the protection of that Army. Most became contrabands. Living by being paid to do chores for the Union soldiers. Some were spent to special Schools. Others eventually ended up in the Union Army as soldiers.
There is some truth on both sides of the disagreement. The average Southerner didn’t much care whether slavery was allowed or not, but he cared very much indeed about being made politically equal with a very large minority of Black individuals. (As many White Southerners still do today, whether they’ll admit it or not. And most who hold this feeling will admit it if you know what to say to make them feel comfortable talking to you about it.)
That was the main reason why the average Southerner felt so strongly about it. And, in fairness, the North was intensely hypocritical in their reasoning, because their feelings about Blacks were hardly different, and the primary reason they weren’t more sympathetic to Southern feelings was because most of the North lacked a Black population at that time. So in their minds, the “problem” of political equality was a moot point because, in their view, it ‘didn’t affect’ them, or at least so much that they couldn’t live with it. And they probably couldn’t have imagined that the consequence of their action would a large non-White community in nearly every corner of the North. Had they had some way to know that that would be the inevitable outcome of their opposition to slavery, I think a large majority would have opposed the effort to forcibly end slavery in the South. In that event, there would have been no war to speak of.
All wars involve money, and many wars are principally about money. Involvement of profit motives in the development of the Civil War does not mean that there was no other reason for the war to happen. It may have been a dark reason on one side (opposition to integration), and an intensely hypocritical and tyrannical reason on the other (i.e. apathy about integration, because ‘it only affects the South, and who gives a whit about what’s best for the South?’) But these beliefs (pro-and anti-integration) were real, widespread, and very intensely held on their respective sides.
RTF
As a footnote, a lot of Northerners (I’m principally thinking of the “radical” faction that founded the Republican Party) probably also felt that the South had “made its bed” by bringing in Blacks, and now they had to lie in it, because those Northerners would have felt that it was the height of folly and greed-borne self-destruction to bring them in. They would have felt that the South’s decision to have Blacks present in the country was not only threatening the future of the South, but of the North as well. So it’s like two neighbors, and one is mad at the other the because the second has taken some action that threatens the property of the first, and when the first neighbor says, “Hey wait a minute, you can’t just do that, you need to ask me for permission,” the other neighbor just laughs or gives him a rude gesture. I think that quite a lot of Northerners must have felt that way, and felt that the fundamental rules of decent, civilized conduct toward one’s neighbors (as they defined those things) were being flagrantly violated through the use and continued importation of slaves, and not for some matter of basic survival, but simply out of a desire to become rich like the North and be accepted as an equal by the high society of the North. So many upper-crust Northerners would see that as a totally unacceptable violation of the unwritten rules of conduct by their counterparts in the South, and something that if not corrected by the South would need to made an example of.
Mainly because of the war, Lincoln was hated in the North almost as much as he was in the South, and he was considerd an incompetent boob. What saved Lincoln’s legacy was his assassination.
I understand that Lincoln was very unpopular because of the unexpected difficulty of the
Northern war effort, and the fact that the war he had promoted and then started was very nearly lost during his administration.
If you ask me, the greatest boost to his legacy was the fact that the war was ultimately won under his leadership, and that the cause of ending slavery was still supported by most Northerners during and after the war. These facts enabled people to overlook the many mistakes that were made (including the decision to provoke secession in the first place by making clear that all the stops would be pulled out to end slavery using any legal excuse necessary).
The Civil War was indeed triggered by a usurpation of federal power. But at the same time, the usurpation was for the purpose of reserving the question of race relations to the federal level, a controversy which was the greatest hot-button issue of that entire era.
Actually this whole question of the cause of the Civil War has major parallels with the issue of homosexual unions today. The same federal-vs.-states-rights issues are being tossed around, the same level of anger and passion are being expressed on both sides, the Bible is being invoked (and attacked) respectively as a defense of each position. The point is being made, now just as then, that the issue cannot be federal because it’s tied up in morality and home issues, which the Constitution is silent about. And there is the same insistence that the losing side in the federal-vs.-states debate will (and should) ignore the decision and continue to do what they want, and that there will be no compliance with any federal effort to assert control over private matters. Furthermore, the federal side in both cases is asserting that to acknowledge fundamental civil rights that supposedly exist under natural law, the Constitution must be re-interpreted to find implicit “rights” that are not explicitly recognized.
And then, as now, the locus of the “change” position is Northern states, and of the conservative position, Southern states. Also then, as now, both sides assert not only that they are morally on the right side, but that the people face spiritual and physical ruin if the other side prevails.
The parallels are strikingly congruent.
Sorry for italics failure.
One of Lincoln’s lasting achievements was ending American slavery. Yet Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the famous abolitionist, called Lincoln “Dishonest Abe” in a letter she wrote to Wendell Phillips in 1864, a year after Lincoln had freed the slaves in rebel states and only months before he would engineer the Thirteenth Amendment. She bemoaned the “incapacity and rottenness” of his administration to Susan B. Anthony, worked to deny him renomination, and swore to Phillips that if he “is reelected I shall immediately leave the country for the Fijee Islands.” Stanton eventually had a change of heart and lamented her efforts against Lincoln, but not all prominent abolitionists did, even after his victory over slavery was complete, even after he was killed. In the days after Lincoln’s assassination, William Lloyd Garrison Jr. called the murder “providential” because it meant Vice President Andrew Johnson would assume leadership.
Lincoln masterfully led the North through the Civil War. He held firm in his refusal to acknowledge secession, maneuvered Confederate President Jefferson Davis into starting the war, played a delicate political game to keep border states from joining the rebellion, and drew up a grand military strategy that, once he found the right generals, won the war. Yet he was denounced for his leadership throughout. In a monumental and meticulous two-volume study of the 16th president, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008), Michael Burlingame, the professor of Lincoln studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield, presents Lincoln’s actions and speeches not as they have come to be remembered, through the fine lens of our gratitude and admiration, but as they were received in his day. (All of the examples in this essay are drawn from Burlingame’s book, which should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in Lincoln.) Early in the war, after a series of setbacks for Union troops and the mulish inaction of General McClellan, members of Lincoln’s own Republican party reviled him as, in the words of Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, “timid vacillating & inefficient.” A Republican newspaper editor in Wisconsin wrote, “The President and the Cabinet,—as a whole,—are not equal to the occasion.” The Ohio Republican William M. Dickson wrote in 1861 that Lincoln “is universally an admitted failure, has no will, no courage, no executive capacity … and his spirit necessarily infuses itself downwards through all departments.”
Charles Sumner, a Republican senator from Massachusetts, to whom Lincoln often turned for advice, opposed the president’s renomination in 1864: “There is a strong feeling among those who have seen Mr. Lincoln, in the way of business, that he lacks practical talent for his important place. It is thought that there should be more readiness, and also more capacity, for government.” William P. Fessenden, the Maine Republican, called Lincoln “weak as water.”
For anyone who struggles to do well; to be honest, wise, eloquent, and kind; to be dignified without being aloof; to be humble without being a pushover, who affords a better example than Lincoln? And yet, as he saw how his efforts were received, how could even he not have despaired?
His wife said that the constant attacks caused him “great pain.” At times, after reading salvos like Henry Ward Beecher’s, Lincoln reportedly would exclaim, “I would rather be dead than, as President, thus abused in the house of my friends.” Lincoln would often respond to the flood of nay-saying with a weary wave of his hand and say, “Let us speak no more of these things.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/abraham-lincoln-is-an-idiot/309304/
After Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, a New York Republican had predicted, “No man was ever elected to an important office who will get so many unwilling and indifferent votes as L[incoln]. The cause takes the man along.” Even after his reelection, plenty of Republicans were skeptical of Lincoln’s contribution to the victory. According to Ohio Rep. Lewis D. Campbell, “Nothing but the undying attachment of our people to the Union has saved us from terrible disaster. Mr. Lincoln’s popularity had nothing to do with it.” Rep. Henry Winter Davis insisted that people had voted for Lincoln only “to keep out worse people — keeping their hands on the pit of the stomach the while!” He called Lincoln’s reelection “the subordination of disgust to the necessities of a crisis.” Of the seven presidential elections he had participated in, said Rep. George Julian, “I remember none in which the element of personal enthusiasm had a smaller share.”
And now hatred of Lincoln developed a new, deadlier character, as dissenting Northerners and ground-under-heel Southerners woke to the awful dawn of four more years of Lincoln’s “abuses.” This short period culminated in Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865. It was only with his death that Lincoln’s popularity soared. Lincoln was slain on Good Friday, and pastors who had for four years criticized Lincoln from their pulpits rewrote their Easter Sunday sermons to remember him as an American Moses who brought his people out of slavery but was not allowed to cross over into the Promised Land. Secretary of War Stanton arranged a funeral procession for Lincoln’s body on a continental scale, with the slain president now a Republican martyr to freedom, traversing in reverse his train journey from Springfield to the nation’s capital four years earlier. Seeing Lincoln’s body in his casket, with soldiers in blue standing guard, hundreds of thousands of Northerners forgot their earlier distrust and took away instead an indelible sentimental image of patriotic sacrifice, one that cemented the dominance of the Republican Party for the rest of their lives and their children’s.
http://www.civilwar.org/hallowed-ground-magazine/unpopular-mr-lincoln.html?referrer=http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/01/02/abraham-lincoln-was-actually-hated-when-president/
The “few appropriate remarks” President Abraham Lincoln was invited to deliver at the dedication of a national cemetery in Gettysburg are remembered today as a masterpiece of political oratory. But that’s not how Oramel viewed them back in 1863.
“We pass over the silly remarks of the President,” he wrote in his newspaper. “For the credit of the nation, we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.”
Here’s the Chicago Times, a leading Democratic paper: “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly flat dishwatery utterances of a man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”
Here’s the Times of London: “The ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln.”
In the South, naturally, Lincoln was vilified as a bloodthirsty tyrant. But his opponents in the North could be almost as harsh. For years, much of the Democratic press had portrayed him as an inept, awkward, nearly illiterate bumpkin who surrounded himself with sycophants and responded to crises with pointless, long-winded jokes. My ancestor’s newspaper routinely referred to Lincoln as “the jester.”
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/files/2013/11/past-imperfect-gettysburg-lincoln-caricature-big.jpg
Like Oramel Barrett, those who loathed Lincoln the most belonged to the radical wing of the Democratic Party. Its stronghold was Pennsylvania and the Midwest. The radical Democrats were not necessarily sympathetic to the Confederacy, nor did they typically oppose the war—most viewed secession as an act of treason, after all. Horrified by the war’s gruesome slaughter, however, they urged conciliation with the South, the sooner the better.
To the Lincoln-bashers, the president was using Gettysburg to kick off his re-election campaign—and showing the poor taste to do so at a memorial service. According to my bilious great-great-grandfather, he was performing “in a panorama that was gotten up more for the benefit of his party than for the glory of the Nation and the honor of the dead.”
Worse, for Lincoln’s opponents, was a blatant flaw in the speech itself. In just 10 sentences, it advanced a new justification for the war. Indeed, its first six words—”Four score and seven years ago”—were enough to arouse the fury of Democratic critics.
A little subtraction shows that Lincoln was referring not to 1787, when the Constitution, with its careful outlining of federal rights and obligations (and tacit acceptance of slavery), was drawn up, but to 1776, when the signers of the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that “all men are created equal.”
The Union war effort had always been aimed at defeating Southern states that had rebelled against the United States government. If white Southerners wanted to own black slaves, many in the North felt, that was not an issue for white Northern boys to die for.
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/files/2013/11/past-imperfect-bright-goings-on-gettysburg-big.jpg
Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation at the start of 1863. Now, at Gettysburg, he was following through, declaring the war a mighty test of whether a nation dedicated to the idea of personal liberty “shall have a new birth of freedom.” This, he declared, was the cause for which the thousands of Union soldiers slain here in July “gave the last full measure of devotion.” He was suggesting, in other words, that the troops had died to ensure that the slaves were freed.
To radical Northern Democratics, Dishonest Abe was pulling a bait-and-switch. His speech was “an insult” to the memories of the dead, the Chicago Times fumed: “In its misstatement of the cause for which they died, it was a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful.” Worse, invoking the Founding Fathers in his cause was nothing short of libelous. “They were men possessing too much self-respect,” the Times assured its readers, “to declare that negroes were their equals.”
Histories have generally played down the prevalence of white racism north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The reality was that Northerners, even Union soldiers battling the Confederacy, had mixed feelings about blacks and slavery. Many, especially in the Midwest, abhorred abolitionism, which they associated with sanctimonious New Englanders. Northern newspaper editors warned that truly freeing the South’s slaves and, worse, arming them would lead to an all-out race war.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/my-great-great-grandfather-hated-the-gettysburg-address-150-years-later-hes-famous-for-it-180947746/#xAQbkdGwjqj6IWRD.99
All I’m saying is that Lincoln’s popularity post-mortem was a result of the fact that he supported and advanced the policies concerning race that were and are supported by the majority in subsequent generations. If the people of the North had turned against Lincoln’s position on slavery (or had never been with it in the first place), there is no way they would have ever made Lincoln what they have, neither before nor after his death. Their strong support is not just because he was assassinated, but because they believed he had been right to take the positions and actions that he did. He may have used the wrong methods, but he was on the right side of the question of the legitimacy of slavery, and unlike some of the Founders, he did not arrive at that position late in life.
Was Lincoln evil? I guess each person has to make up their own mind about that. Certainly he was extremely flawed in his understanding of law and justice. But like anyone else, he was used by God for God’s (and not Lincoln’s own) purposes.
The people who followed him into war with enthusiasm have just as much to answer for, if not more. As do those from the South who met the U.S. Army in battle based on so absurd a reason as they had in their minds.
It is often argued that Lincoln’s abiding reputation is the result of his martyrdom. And certainly the assassination, occurring as it did on Good Friday, propelled him into reverential heights. Speaking at a commemoration at the Athenaeum Club in New York City on April 18, 1865, three days after Lincoln died, Parke Godwin, editor of the Evening Post, summed up the prevailing mood. “No loss has been comparable to his,” Godwin said. “Never in human history has there been so universal, so spontaneous, so profound an expression of a nation’s bereavement.” He was the first American president to be assassinated, and waves of grief touched every type of neighborhood and every class—at least in the North. But the shock at the murder explains only part of the tidal wave of mourning. It is hard to imagine that the assassination of James Buchanan or Franklin Pierce would have had the same impact on the national psyche. The level of grief reflected who Lincoln was and what he had come to represent. “Through all his public function,” Godwin said, “there shone the fact that he was a wise and good man…. [He was] our supremest leader—our safest counsellor—our wisest friend—our dear father.”
Not everyone agreed. Northern Democrats had been deeply opposed to Lincoln’s wartime suspension of habeas corpus, which led to the imprisonment without trial of thousands of suspected traitors and war protesters. Though Lincoln had taken care to proceed constitutionally and with restraint, his opponents decried his “tyrannical” rule. But in the wake of the assassination even his critics were silent.
Across much of the South, of course, Lincoln was hated, even in death. Though Robert E. Lee and many Southerners expressed regret over the murder, others saw it as an act of Providence, and cast John Wilkes Booth as the bold slayer of an American tyrant. “All honor to J. Wilkes Booth,” wrote Southern diarist Kate Stone (referring as well to the simultaneous, though not fatal, attack on Secretary of State William Seward): “What torrents of blood Lincoln has caused to flow, and how Seward has aided him in his bloody work. I cannot be sorry for their fate. They deserve it. They have reaped their just reward.”
Four years after Lincoln’s death, Massachusetts journalist Russell Conwell found widespread, lingering bitterness toward Lincoln in the ten former Confederate states that Conwell visited. “Portraits of Jeff Davis and Lee hang in all their parlors, decorated with Confederate flags,” he wrote. “Photographs of Wilkes Booth, with the last words of great martyrs printed upon its borders; effigies of Abraham Lincoln hanging by the neck…adorn their drawing rooms.” The Rebellion here “seems not to be dead yet,” Conwell concluded.
For their part, African-Americans’ pangs of loss were tinged with fear for their future. Few promoted Lincoln’s legacy more passionately than critic-turned-admirer Frederick Douglass, whose frustration at the presidency of Andrew Johnson kept growing. Lincoln was “a progressive man, a human man, an honorable man, and at heart an antislavery man,” Douglass wrote in December 1865. “I assume…had Abraham Lincoln been spared to see this day, the negro of the South would have had more hope of enfranchisement.” Ten years later, at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., Douglass seemed to recant these words, calling Lincoln “preeminently the white man’s President” and American blacks “at best only his step-children.” But Douglass’ purpose that day was to puncture the sentimentality of the occasion and to criticize the government’s abandonment of Reconstruction. And in the final decades of his long life Douglass repeatedly invoked Lincoln as having embodied the spirit of racial progress.
Douglass’ worries about America proved prophetic. By the 1890s, with the failure of Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow, Lincoln’s legacy of emancipation lay in ruins. Regional reconciliation—the healing of the rift between North and South—had supplanted the nation’s commitment to civil rights. In 1895, at a gathering of Union and Confederate soldiers in Chicago, the topics of slavery and race were set aside in favor of a focus on North-South reconciliation. As the 1909 centennial of Lincoln’s birth approached, race relations in the country were reaching a nadir.
In August 1908, riots broke out in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, after a white woman, Mabel Hallam, claimed she had been raped by a local black man, George Richardson. (She later admitted to making up the story.) On Friday, August 14, two thousand white men and boys began to attack African-Americans and set fire to black businesses. “Lincoln freed you,” rioters were heard to yell. “We’ll show you where you belong.” The next night, the mob approached the shop of William Donnegan, a 79-year-old African-American shoemaker who had made boots for Lincoln and at whose brother’s barbershop Lincoln used to mingle with African-Americans. Setting fire to Donnegan’s shop, the mob dragged the old man outside and pelted him with bricks, then slashed his throat. Still alive, he was dragged across the street into a school courtyard. There, not far from a statue of Abraham Lincoln, he was hoisted up a tree and left to die.
Horrified by the reports of such ugly violence, a group of New York City activists formed the National Negro Committee, soon to be renamed the NAACP, with a young scholar named W.E.B. Du Bois to serve as director of publicity and research. From its beginning, the organization’s mission was intertwined with Lincoln’s, as one of its early statements made clear: “Abraham Lincoln began the emancipation of the Negro American. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People proposes to complete it.”
The centennial of Lincoln’s birth marked the largest commemoration of any person in American history. The Lincoln penny was minted, the first coin bearing the image of an American president, and talks took place in Washington about a grand Lincoln monument to be erected in the nation’s capital. All across the country, and in many nations around the world, America’s 16th president was extolled. An editorial in the London Times declared, “Together with Washington, Lincoln occupies a pinnacle to which no third person is likely to attain.” The commander of the Brazilian Navy ordered a 21-gun salute “in homage to the memory of that noble martyr of moral and of neighborly love.” The former states of the Confederacy, which less than 50 years earlier had rejoiced at Lincoln’s death, now paid tribute to the leader who had reunified the nation. W. C. Calland, a state official in Missouri—which, during the Civil War, had been a border state that contributed 40,000 troops to the Confederate cause—barely contained his astonishment in a memorandum reporting on the festivities: “Perhaps no event could have gathered around it so much of patriotic sentiment in the South as the birthday of Abraham Lincoln….Confederate veterans held public services and gave public expression to the sentiment, that had ‘Lincoln lived’ the days of reconstruction might have been softened and the era of good feeling ushered in earlier.”
In most of America the celebrations were thoroughly segregated, including in Springfield, where blacks (with the exception of a declined invitation to Booker T. Washington) were excluded from a dazzling gala dinner. As the Chicago Tribune reported, it “is to be a lily white affair from start to finish.” Across town, inside one of Springfield’s most prominent black churches, African-Americans met for their own celebration. “We colored people love and revere the memory of Lincoln,” said the Rev. L. H. Magee. “His name is a synonym for the freedom of wife, husband and children, and a chance to live in a free country, fearless of the slave-catcher and his bloodhounds.” Referring to the “sacred dust of the great emancipator” lying in Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery, Magee called upon black people across America to make pilgrimages to Lincoln’s tomb. And he cast his gaze forward a hundred years—to the bicentennial of 2009—and envisioned a Lincoln celebration “by the great-grandchildren of those who celebrate this centenary.” In that far-off year, Magee predicted, “prejudice shall have been banished as a myth and relegated to the dark days of ‘Salem witchcraft.’ ”
A notable exception to the rule of segregated commemorations took place in Kentucky, where President Theodore Roosevelt, a longtime Lincoln admirer, presided over a dramatic ceremony at the old Lincoln homestead. Lincoln’s birth cabin, of dubious provenance, had been purchased from promoters who had been displaying it around the country. Now the state, with Congressional support, planned to rebuild it on its original site, on a knoll above the Sinking Spring that had originally attracted Thomas Lincoln, the president’s father, to the property. The 110-acre farmstead would become the “nation’s commons,” it was declared—a crossroads linking the entire country.
Seven thousand people showed up for the dedication, including a number of African-Americans, who mixed in among the others with no thought of separation. When Roosevelt began his speech he hopped onto a chair and was greeted by cheers. “As the years [roll] by,” he said in his crisp, excitable voice, “…this whole Nation will grow to feel a peculiar sense of pride in the mightiest of the mighty men who mastered the mighty days; the lover of his country and of all mankind; the man whose blood was shed for the union of his people and for the freedom of a race: Abraham Lincoln.” The ceremony in Kentucky heralded the possibility of national reconciliation and racial justice proceeding hand in hand. But that was not to be, as the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 13 years later would make all too clear.
Members of the Lincoln Memorial commission—created by Congress in 1911—saw the monument not only as a tribute to the 16th president but also as a symbol of a reunified nation. With Northerners and Southerners having fought side by side in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and again in World War I, it was time, they felt, to put aside sectional differences once and for all. This meant that the Lincoln honored on the National Mall must not be the man who had broken the South militarily or had crushed the institution of slavery but the preserver of the Union. “By emphasizing his saving the Union you appeal to both sections,” wrote Royal Cortissoz, author of the inscription that would be etched inside the finished building behind Daniel Chester French’s nearly 20-foot-tall sculpture of the seated Lincoln. “By saying nothing about slavery you avoid the rubbing of old sores.”
In the nearly half century since, Lincoln’s reputation has been under assault from various quarters. Malcolm X broke with the long tradition of African-American admiration for Lincoln, saying in 1964 that he had done “more to trick Negroes than any other man in history.” In 1968, pointing to clear examples of Lincoln’s racial prejudice, Lerone Bennett Jr. asked in Ebony magazine, “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” (His answer: yes.) The 1960s and ’70s were a period in which icons of all kinds—especially great leaders of the past—were being smashed, and Lincoln was no exception. Old arguments surfaced that he had never really cared about emancipation, that he was at heart a political opportunist. States’ rights libertarians criticized his aggressive handling of the Civil War, his assaults on civil liberties and his aggrandizing of federal government.
In particular, the Nixon administration’s perceived abuse of executive power during the Vietnam War prompted unflattering comparisons with Lincoln’s wartime measures. Some scholars, however, rejected such comparisons, noting that Lincoln reluctantly did what he thought necessary to preserve the Constitution and the nation. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for one, wrote in 1973 that since the Vietnam War didn’t rise to the same level of national crisis, Nixon “has sought to establish as a normal Presidential power what previous Presidents had regarded as power justified only by extreme emergencies. . . . He does not, like Lincoln, confess to doubt about the legality of his course.”
And yet, as Bennett and others have rightly insisted, the Lincoln of earlier generations of blacks was also in part a mythic figure—his own racial prejudices passed over too lightly, even as African-Americans’ roles in emancipation were underemphasized. In a series of 1922 editorials for the NAACP journal the Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois stressed the importance of taking Lincoln off his pedestal in order to place attention on the need for ongoing progress. But Du Bois refused to reject Lincoln in the process. “The scars and foibles and contradictions of the Great do not diminish but enhance the worth and meaning of their upward struggle,” he wrote. Of all the great figures of the 19th century, “Lincoln is to me the most human and lovable. And I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed.” In a 2005 essay in Time magazine, Obama said much the same thing: “I am fully aware of his limited views on race. But…[in] the midst of slavery’s dark storm and the complexities of governing a house divided, he somehow kept his moral compass pointed firm and true.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lincolns-contested-legacy-44978351/#XcX8KR5LToakiJRY.99
It becomes evident that Lincoln’s legacy was saved by his martyrdom. Had Lincoln lived a full life, he would not have received near the reverance he does today, and likely people would know about his tyrannical and racist ways. He was far from a saint, and blacks should view him much the way they view any bigot.
I don’t need to read a book about fairies to know that it is fantasy.
This is an unforgivable slap in the face of the Marines who fought to give freedoms to all, including gays. 7000 Marines died and 20,000 were wounded taking this tiny island, and their only reward at the end of this horrific and unimaginable battle was to raise the Stars and Stripes in honor of our country, and those who sacrificed all. Apparently the LGBT community holds nothing as sacred, not even those who died for their right to make complete asses of themselves.
http://www.religiousfreedomcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/GayIwoJimaFlag.jpg
If we are now going to ban flags, I have a suggestion.