For several decades the left has consistently and repeatedly said that Confederate Monuments belong in cemeteries and battlefields. When put up or shut up time came for these leftist liars, desecration was the order of the day. Taking down a monument in a national cemetery is the ultimate desecration. There should be something honoring these Confederates who put their lives on the line when their put up or shut up time came. Even if it means putting up no more than a 3x5 foot Confederate Flag on a flagpole and a commemorative plaque to describe the horrors of war these men endured, this MUST be done. Trump may not be able to change the base names back or even return the original Confederate Monument to Arlington. However, out of respect to these soldiers, some honor must be restored.
The vast majority of American soldiers buried at Arlington National Cemetery are not located in the shadow of a monument or memorial. Why Confederate soldiers deserve this in a cemetery intended to memorialize AMERICAN soldiers is beyond me. Most Confederate monuments are not located in cemeteries and have been removed legally and without destroying the monuments/statues themselves.
There is a great belief in a number of "commonly accepted" anecdotes and purported facts about the Confederacy and The Civil War which has been used for over 160 years to divide our nation.
The following books do a great job in calling into question these commonly accepted beliefs by digging into facts, not parroting the accepted narrative talking points:
Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe” by Thomas J. DiLorenzo.
This book presents a critical view of Lincoln, arguing that he was a political manipulator and opportunist who bears little resemblance to the heroic figure depicted in mainstream history. DiLorenzo claims that Lincoln was acutely interested in the accumulation of money and power, and that he stifled his opponents by suppressing their civil rights. He also suggests that Lincoln supported white supremacy and pledged not to interfere with slavery in the South.
Another book that offers an alternative perspective on Lincoln is “Abraham Lincoln: The Southern View” by Lochlainn Seabrook.
This book provides an in-depth look at Lincoln from the South’s perspective, challenging the narrative that has been presented by pro-North authors and publishers.
These books present a different view of Lincoln, suggesting that many of the commonly held beliefs about him are inaccurate or misrepresentative.
As far as Trump goes, he's from Queens, its a different kind of place.
Patrick Gleason, Donald Trump, Martin Scorsese, Rodney Dangerfield, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel all from Queens.
"This book provides an in-depth look at Lincoln from the South’s perspective, challenging the narrative that has been presented by pro-North authors and publishers."
From the WHITE South's perspective.
Typical Lost Cause sophistry: write and speak as if the 4 million enslaved weren't humans, weren't Americans, didn't matter. Invisible.
One of his top flunkies will hand him the Executive Orders on the subject, the pens, and say, "Now, Mr. President, sign this nice, nice, nice, Red MAGA Executive Order, here, on the dotted line."
And the Bloated Yam, demented as he is, will happily sign it.
The average southern soldier was fighting to stave off an invasion of the southern states by people from the northern states. I have never read a memoir by a Confederate soldier who stated he was willing to sacrifice his life to preserve slavery. Southern people were loyal to their state, not to the federal government. Only a fool, or a member of the planter class, would have fought to preserve slavery. The average northern soldier was fighting to preserve the Union. Racism existed on both sides.
Hmmm. Is that akin to saying that the war was over states' rights, when the reality was that it was over states' rights to perpetuate and expand crimes against humanity? As in: "America died when it destroyed states seeking independence so they could perpetuate and expand crimes against humanity"? (But maybe I'm misreading the comment.)
(And yes, the phrase "crimes against humanity" is probably not found in nineteenth century discourse--but even the most vicious torturer of captured slavery escapees would have immediately understood it.)
Cheers David! Yes one must actually read soldier accounts, which we have a fantastic record of to understand both the motivation and concerns.
Less than 3% of the Confederacy population held slaves, but a bigoted viewpoint was much entrenched in all of the United States due to wrong headed indoctrination (Cyrus Scofield Bible) and ignorance of world history as very few could read.
These men in the statuary were men of high character, battlefield leaders, logistical and millitary tacticians. Some, those who survived the war, would later assist in building out national infrastructure. They were West Point New York graduates.
Why would we tear down memorials of such great men?
I do not think amongst the leaders of today we can find men of such education, accomplishment and moral fibre (resiliancy and anti-fragility).
To judge men of the past with our current political viewpoints is quite wrong headed. I wonder, as masculinity has declined (along with birthrate) who will protect the weak and vulnerable?
Did the Egyptians or Persians villify their leaders later on in their empire? Did the Romans?
This is a highly misleading comment about slavery and Confederate soldiers. Joseph Glatthaar has shown in his book *Robert E. Lee's Army* that Confederate armies were overrepresented by men from slaveholding families. The Egyptians and Persians have nothing to do with the Civil War. This will be your last comment on this site. Good day.
Ty Seidule is an Army officer who changed his career after a decade. He got an Ohio State Ph.D. in history, and eventually chaired the West Point history department. Onlookers here might want to know, or to be reminded, that 3 million people have viewed his six-minute youtube on the cause of the Civil War. Best history lecture I ever saw.
Which Congress? On what date? Are you referring to the July 1861 declaration? The war lasted four years and its aims changed dramatically, especially after 1863.
You should have learned in middle school that the guy who makes the case has to bring the evidence.
All you're doing is the standard Internet troll tactic of acting like the eighth-grade teacher, facing a class of recalcitrant-students-who-show-signs-of-hope, trying to elicit the desired answer from them.
I see the same nonsense from Holocaust deniers...saying Hitler and his Nazis were the best friend Jews had, and then offering a web page from David Irving and telling the readers to tap that link.
Wrong answer. You have to prove your case.
And remember what little Acky Stephens said when founding the Confederacy.
Oh? I'm not giving you the quote? I'm hurling the pie back in your face, pally.
You might want to read the secession ordnances past by each of the states that made up the Confederacy. All specifically refer to slavery as the issues over which they are leaving the Union.
It's obvious you're one of those chaps who misses the good ol' days when you and your family were sittin' on the front porch, your wife in that bustle, still a virgin after three kids, mint julep on the table, with them "darkies" hoein' the cotton, overseers keeping them in their place, and thinking about when you would sneak out that night to slave row for another hour of fun and games with that girl who looked a lot like Jasmine Guy.
I must disagree on the cost of political capital starting January 20.
I am far more pessimistic on the damage #47 will do. My own Congresswoman, Nancy Emerita, has taken to saying "What's His Name" so I will use WHN after her example.
WHN has spewed racial invective since the Central Park Five and has not paid much of a price (if any) for any of this lifelong hate.
Occasionally, he gets caught: WHN University was declared a scam, and his WHN Foundation was judged a fraud.
Early on WHN was found to violate fair housing law and he settled. E Jean Carroll's judgments are a very rare exception to WHN's getting off as a predator...if they stand.
WHN finally lost on election fraud, illegally paying to suppress sex with a different woman than his wife, but just what did he lose or what punishment did WHN pay?
More centrally, WHN has reversed the definition of "political capital", by devaluing political discourse. Spewing lies in all directions without stop, if we refute them today tomorrow his mouth has re-sown another thousand crabgrass sprouts.
Each weed grows. Early in WHN's political career, he was only enlisting fringe racists and sons of John Birchers. He was just putting down markers, building his deplorable base.
Continuously weed re-seeding awakened the Charlottesville mob. More, and they attacked the US Capitol. Did WHN pay a price for fomenting the execution of his own Vice President? Not on this (still partially) green earth.
For stealing a truckload of federal documents to store in his palatial bathroom?
Did WHN pay a price for conducting an even more disgusting presidential race than in 2020 and 2016? No, WHN makes America pay the price.
It doesn't even seem ironic that in Georgia, WHN's defense of trying to suborn that state's election results ("Uh, just 11,780 votes") lucked out when prosecutors had their own sex scandal.
"Political Capital" is a different, snakey tool in his hands and out his mouth. I don't believe he will spend a dime of it to get the names of military bases renamed for racist traitors. All it will take - if it suits his purposes - will be to spew another mouthful of weed seed to his Deplorables. They will attack in their congressional districts and state houses; he will only need to threaten to "primary" any legislators who resist him.
The Religious Right believes we are in The End Times. Meanwhile, the southern end of my state is going up in wind-flames-smoke. WHN sends invective and insults our governor. We are in our own End Times, losing the drawn-out Civil War to a New York Plutocrat who found the Deep South more to his style.
Everybody with any common sense realizes that slavery and the Jim Crow laws that followed after the Civil War, were wrong. A crime against God and humanity. Most southeners did not own slaves and had no vested interest in preserving slavery. After Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion. That resulted in more states seceding and southern men to take up arms in what the saw as an invasion by a foreign power. There were Confederate leaders who were not vicious, cut throats. Robert E. Lee and other leaders should not be treated or looked upon as if they were Nazis. I believe that a slanted, leftist, revisionist view of the Civil War detracts from the historical accuracy of that war. Regardless of how odious slavery is, there were other issues at play that formed the basis of why many southeners fought what they saw as an invasion by northerners. It is too bad that there is not as much attention paid towards slavery that exists in many parts of the world today as there is about slavery that existed in the 19th Century.
But of course, it is impossible to ignore the fact that everyone who fought for the south was fighting to preserve slavery. Even if they didn't actually own slaves.
That’s right. During the Vietnam War it didn’t matter if you volunteered, were drafted, agreed or disagreed with the policy. Every American soldier was fighting for the containment of communism.
I've seen historians note that an important stake for those non-slaveholders--besides the desire to repel what they saw as invaders--was a gut-level desire to affirm Black racial inferiority by vindicating chattel slavery on the battlefield.
> too bad that there is not as much attention paid
> towards slavery that exists in many parts of the
> world today as there is about slavery that existed
> in the 19th Century.
Forgive me for intruding my own Substack, but my post "Modern slavery as red herring:
Lost Causers evading and denying American slavery history sometimes ask, "Why don't you slavery-obsessed people ever talk about modern slavery?"
It’s a red herring, an attempt to change the subject. But I think it also has unintended merit. In a world where slavery not only persists, but abounds, honest reckoning with U.S. slavery matters.
Modern slavery victimizes nearly 50 million souls worldwide, says Global Alms Incorporated, which calls itself “dedicated to the elimination of trafficking, sexual exploitation and the physical abuse of men, women and children.”
The idea that nonslaveholding Confederates had no interest in protecting slavery is ridiculous. A number of historians have addressed this subject. My first book on the massacre of Black soldiers at the Battle of the Crater explores this in great detail.
I appreciate you taking the time to comment, but this has nothing to do with my post. You worry about generalizations made concerning your understanding of history, but then proceed to make the very same type of claim. There is a rich scholarly literature that is focused on Civil War soldiers. Exactly what books do you believe are problematic?
Thanks for these thoughts, and for the video showing Donald Trump approving Confederate flag removal.
And thanks for citing "the Confederate heritage community" and the "kind to folks who still maintain that symbols of the Confederacy best represent their respective communities." I'm grateful for this chance say again: Many of us are southerners, gladly claiming southern heritage, but energetically rejecting Confederate heritage. (I'm confident that you, Kevin, would never perpetrate the conflation I'm condemning, but there are Americans who do.)
It appears to me that a lot of Trumps core MAGA supporters in southern states are also pro Lost Cause myth and Confederate Monuments. There are many facebook groups promoting the rebel flag and monuments...and there are a lot of racist comments. They are working on replacing monuments or erecting new ones. We will see where Trump lands as these projects move forward.
I'm just reflecting what I'm seeing out there and I find it very disturbing. It's not so much about whether the Arlington Monument goes back up, or others...or if new monuments are erected, there's also a lot of push to preserve the monuments still existing. What concerns me most is how "hard core" these people are and how large and widespread these groups are that believe the South was right and Lee sits at the right hand of God. I don't believe the average American has any idea how widespread these beliefs are and how much of a core MAGA element they are. That's my real concern. I'd like to see more of a spotlight on that.
Maybe there'd be this positive side effect associated with the ugliness of any Lost Cause monument-renewal campaign:
Some people call for opposing expected atrocities from a second Trump presidency with strong assertions of positive alternatives. This reminds me that in a 2020 Washington Post op-ed, Yale's David Blight, the Frederick Douglass biographer, called for an “epic process” of replacing Confederate symbols with “memorialization of emancipation.”
In the New York Times that year, he wrote that freedom “remains humanity’s most universal aspiration. How America reimagines its memorial landscape may matter to the whole world.”
Blight had been present at Norfolk State years before, when, on an eminent scholarly panel previewing the 2011-2015 Civil War sesquicentennial, former National Park Service chief historian Dwight T. Pitcaithley asked, “Where’s the national monument to emancipation?”
(In my view, it's not that well-intentioned but perplexing 1876 monument in Washington, the one with a proclamation-holding Lincoln standing with a newly unshackled, shirtless Black man kneeling before him. Frederick Douglass voiced the complaint: “The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude. What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.” Boston had a replica of the monument, but removed it a few years ago.)
Steven, thanks for your insight & reflection on Emancipation. One of the annual projects I have been documenting is the annual Illumination of 23,110 candles at Antietam, which represents all of the killed and wounded from the battle. Lincoln released the preliminary Emancipation days after the battle. I have come to believe that this event is in many ways a National Monument to Emancipation, since this sacrifice allowed Lincoln to issue what I believe was his most significant Executive Order. It's not marble or granite, but it is an artistic expression.
Thanks. I see what you mean. But I also see what historians mean who caution against total crediting of President Lincoln alone for the complex wartime political evolution of emancipation.
Sean Wilentz, W. E. B. Du Bois, James M. McPherson and other scholars have numbered hundreds of thousands of the slavery-escaping Americans that some historians call self-emancipators. Brent Leggs, African American heritage director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, says it was a full half million. That's one in every eight enslaved Americans.
Columbia's Eric Foner says that slavery escapees "forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda." Leggs sees in that the "unknown story" of a "catalyst for emancipation" and an example of "uplift" that positions Black Americans "not just as spectators in history," but as actors in it. Those freedom strivers were as American as you can get. So my view about national memory of emancipation is that we need a national emancipation memorial site.
And I think we actually already have one, hiding in plain sight: Point Comfort, where the first captive Africans arrived in 1619 and where--now containing Fort Monroe, the Union's mighty, and mighty symbolic, bastion in Confederate Virginia--slavery began to crumble in 1861, as soon as Union soldiers began to make way for that, and thanks also to enterprising self-emancipators. More on this from me:
I appreciate the follow up and I share your concerns about elements of the MAGA movement, but I don't worry too much about online groups. I find that many of these people are little more than keyboard warriors. Racism and white supremacy have always existed in this country and has been expressed in different ways at different times. The Virginia Flaggers, for example, have thousands of subscribers to their Facebook page, but they don't have much influence over anything in their respective communities.
From your lips to God’s ear. I grew up in Culpeper. If that blood-red county ever removes the rebel soldier from the courthouse lawn I’ll know my beloved Commonwealth has truly changed.
I am not certain but I don't believe he can order the return of the Arlington monument or restore the base names. These were changed pursuant to an act of Congress. I do think he might able to generate enough political pressure that a Congress, that seems be afraid of him, would feel compelled to act.
We will have to wait and see. I guess the question is whether Trump is going to want to spend the time twisting arms on this specific issue. Like I said, I have my doubts.
Dear Lord I hope not
For several decades the left has consistently and repeatedly said that Confederate Monuments belong in cemeteries and battlefields. When put up or shut up time came for these leftist liars, desecration was the order of the day. Taking down a monument in a national cemetery is the ultimate desecration. There should be something honoring these Confederates who put their lives on the line when their put up or shut up time came. Even if it means putting up no more than a 3x5 foot Confederate Flag on a flagpole and a commemorative plaque to describe the horrors of war these men endured, this MUST be done. Trump may not be able to change the base names back or even return the original Confederate Monument to Arlington. However, out of respect to these soldiers, some honor must be restored.
The vast majority of American soldiers buried at Arlington National Cemetery are not located in the shadow of a monument or memorial. Why Confederate soldiers deserve this in a cemetery intended to memorialize AMERICAN soldiers is beyond me. Most Confederate monuments are not located in cemeteries and have been removed legally and without destroying the monuments/statues themselves.
AMEN.
There is a great belief in a number of "commonly accepted" anecdotes and purported facts about the Confederacy and The Civil War which has been used for over 160 years to divide our nation.
The following books do a great job in calling into question these commonly accepted beliefs by digging into facts, not parroting the accepted narrative talking points:
Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe” by Thomas J. DiLorenzo.
This book presents a critical view of Lincoln, arguing that he was a political manipulator and opportunist who bears little resemblance to the heroic figure depicted in mainstream history. DiLorenzo claims that Lincoln was acutely interested in the accumulation of money and power, and that he stifled his opponents by suppressing their civil rights. He also suggests that Lincoln supported white supremacy and pledged not to interfere with slavery in the South.
Another book that offers an alternative perspective on Lincoln is “Abraham Lincoln: The Southern View” by Lochlainn Seabrook.
This book provides an in-depth look at Lincoln from the South’s perspective, challenging the narrative that has been presented by pro-North authors and publishers.
These books present a different view of Lincoln, suggesting that many of the commonly held beliefs about him are inaccurate or misrepresentative.
As far as Trump goes, he's from Queens, its a different kind of place.
Patrick Gleason, Donald Trump, Martin Scorsese, Rodney Dangerfield, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel all from Queens.
My family is Irish, we came to Brooklyn first.
"This book provides an in-depth look at Lincoln from the South’s perspective, challenging the narrative that has been presented by pro-North authors and publishers."
From the WHITE South's perspective.
Typical Lost Cause sophistry: write and speak as if the 4 million enslaved weren't humans, weren't Americans, didn't matter. Invisible.
Is this the same Lochlainn Seabrook who also writes books about UFO's and aliens?
The books you reference are complete nonsense and have no scholarly or educational value whatsoever.
Sure he will.
One of his top flunkies will hand him the Executive Orders on the subject, the pens, and say, "Now, Mr. President, sign this nice, nice, nice, Red MAGA Executive Order, here, on the dotted line."
And the Bloated Yam, demented as he is, will happily sign it.
Like all the other stuff he will do.
The average southern soldier was fighting to stave off an invasion of the southern states by people from the northern states. I have never read a memoir by a Confederate soldier who stated he was willing to sacrifice his life to preserve slavery. Southern people were loyal to their state, not to the federal government. Only a fool, or a member of the planter class, would have fought to preserve slavery. The average northern soldier was fighting to preserve the Union. Racism existed on both sides.
You really should do some reading. Your framing of soldier motivation is incredibly shallow. Historians have written extensively on this topic.
Am I the only one who sometimes thinks they should have hung Lee?
No. Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, would have certainly agreed with you.
Yikes, Stanton too? I don't want to be on his side for much of anything. Still, I just.... think about that sometimes. Thank you for the reply.
America died when it destroyed states seeking independence.
Hmmm. Is that akin to saying that the war was over states' rights, when the reality was that it was over states' rights to perpetuate and expand crimes against humanity? As in: "America died when it destroyed states seeking independence so they could perpetuate and expand crimes against humanity"? (But maybe I'm misreading the comment.)
(And yes, the phrase "crimes against humanity" is probably not found in nineteenth century discourse--but even the most vicious torturer of captured slavery escapees would have immediately understood it.)
Cheers David! Yes one must actually read soldier accounts, which we have a fantastic record of to understand both the motivation and concerns.
Less than 3% of the Confederacy population held slaves, but a bigoted viewpoint was much entrenched in all of the United States due to wrong headed indoctrination (Cyrus Scofield Bible) and ignorance of world history as very few could read.
These men in the statuary were men of high character, battlefield leaders, logistical and millitary tacticians. Some, those who survived the war, would later assist in building out national infrastructure. They were West Point New York graduates.
Why would we tear down memorials of such great men?
I do not think amongst the leaders of today we can find men of such education, accomplishment and moral fibre (resiliancy and anti-fragility).
To judge men of the past with our current political viewpoints is quite wrong headed. I wonder, as masculinity has declined (along with birthrate) who will protect the weak and vulnerable?
Did the Egyptians or Persians villify their leaders later on in their empire? Did the Romans?
“To judge men of the past with our current political viewpoints is quite wrong headed.”
Condemnation of Confederate leaders is not presentism. It’s application of timeless moral standards that were well understood in antebellum times.
This is a highly misleading comment about slavery and Confederate soldiers. Joseph Glatthaar has shown in his book *Robert E. Lee's Army* that Confederate armies were overrepresented by men from slaveholding families. The Egyptians and Persians have nothing to do with the Civil War. This will be your last comment on this site. Good day.
Congress declared it was NOT over slavery. Learn before speaking.
Each Confederate state’s secession declared they were leaving the Union to protect slavery. Not a debatable fact
Ty Seidule is an Army officer who changed his career after a decade. He got an Ohio State Ph.D. in history, and eventually chaired the West Point history department. Onlookers here might want to know, or to be reminded, that 3 million people have viewed his six-minute youtube on the cause of the Civil War. Best history lecture I ever saw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcy7qV-BGF4
Which Congress? On what date? Are you referring to the July 1861 declaration? The war lasted four years and its aims changed dramatically, especially after 1863.
Anyone can Google it.
That's not how it works, pal.
You should have learned in middle school that the guy who makes the case has to bring the evidence.
All you're doing is the standard Internet troll tactic of acting like the eighth-grade teacher, facing a class of recalcitrant-students-who-show-signs-of-hope, trying to elicit the desired answer from them.
I see the same nonsense from Holocaust deniers...saying Hitler and his Nazis were the best friend Jews had, and then offering a web page from David Irving and telling the readers to tap that link.
Wrong answer. You have to prove your case.
And remember what little Acky Stephens said when founding the Confederacy.
Oh? I'm not giving you the quote? I'm hurling the pie back in your face, pally.
LOL
LOL
Is that your argument?
You might want to read the secession ordnances past by each of the states that made up the Confederacy. All specifically refer to slavery as the issues over which they are leaving the Union.
Yes, when I am responding to nonsense.
Or when clueless?
It's obvious you're one of those chaps who misses the good ol' days when you and your family were sittin' on the front porch, your wife in that bustle, still a virgin after three kids, mint julep on the table, with them "darkies" hoein' the cotton, overseers keeping them in their place, and thinking about when you would sneak out that night to slave row for another hour of fun and games with that girl who looked a lot like Jasmine Guy.
I must disagree on the cost of political capital starting January 20.
I am far more pessimistic on the damage #47 will do. My own Congresswoman, Nancy Emerita, has taken to saying "What's His Name" so I will use WHN after her example.
WHN has spewed racial invective since the Central Park Five and has not paid much of a price (if any) for any of this lifelong hate.
Occasionally, he gets caught: WHN University was declared a scam, and his WHN Foundation was judged a fraud.
Early on WHN was found to violate fair housing law and he settled. E Jean Carroll's judgments are a very rare exception to WHN's getting off as a predator...if they stand.
WHN finally lost on election fraud, illegally paying to suppress sex with a different woman than his wife, but just what did he lose or what punishment did WHN pay?
More centrally, WHN has reversed the definition of "political capital", by devaluing political discourse. Spewing lies in all directions without stop, if we refute them today tomorrow his mouth has re-sown another thousand crabgrass sprouts.
Each weed grows. Early in WHN's political career, he was only enlisting fringe racists and sons of John Birchers. He was just putting down markers, building his deplorable base.
Continuously weed re-seeding awakened the Charlottesville mob. More, and they attacked the US Capitol. Did WHN pay a price for fomenting the execution of his own Vice President? Not on this (still partially) green earth.
For stealing a truckload of federal documents to store in his palatial bathroom?
Did WHN pay a price for conducting an even more disgusting presidential race than in 2020 and 2016? No, WHN makes America pay the price.
It doesn't even seem ironic that in Georgia, WHN's defense of trying to suborn that state's election results ("Uh, just 11,780 votes") lucked out when prosecutors had their own sex scandal.
"Political Capital" is a different, snakey tool in his hands and out his mouth. I don't believe he will spend a dime of it to get the names of military bases renamed for racist traitors. All it will take - if it suits his purposes - will be to spew another mouthful of weed seed to his Deplorables. They will attack in their congressional districts and state houses; he will only need to threaten to "primary" any legislators who resist him.
The Religious Right believes we are in The End Times. Meanwhile, the southern end of my state is going up in wind-flames-smoke. WHN sends invective and insults our governor. We are in our own End Times, losing the drawn-out Civil War to a New York Plutocrat who found the Deep South more to his style.
Everybody with any common sense realizes that slavery and the Jim Crow laws that followed after the Civil War, were wrong. A crime against God and humanity. Most southeners did not own slaves and had no vested interest in preserving slavery. After Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion. That resulted in more states seceding and southern men to take up arms in what the saw as an invasion by a foreign power. There were Confederate leaders who were not vicious, cut throats. Robert E. Lee and other leaders should not be treated or looked upon as if they were Nazis. I believe that a slanted, leftist, revisionist view of the Civil War detracts from the historical accuracy of that war. Regardless of how odious slavery is, there were other issues at play that formed the basis of why many southeners fought what they saw as an invasion by northerners. It is too bad that there is not as much attention paid towards slavery that exists in many parts of the world today as there is about slavery that existed in the 19th Century.
But of course, it is impossible to ignore the fact that everyone who fought for the south was fighting to preserve slavery. Even if they didn't actually own slaves.
That’s right. During the Vietnam War it didn’t matter if you volunteered, were drafted, agreed or disagreed with the policy. Every American soldier was fighting for the containment of communism.
> Most southerners did not own slaves and
> had no vested interest in preserving slavery.
I've seen historians note that an important stake for those non-slaveholders--besides the desire to repel what they saw as invaders--was a gut-level desire to affirm Black racial inferiority by vindicating chattel slavery on the battlefield.
> too bad that there is not as much attention paid
> towards slavery that exists in many parts of the
> world today as there is about slavery that existed
> in the 19th Century.
Forgive me for intruding my own Substack, but my post "Modern slavery as red herring:
To face new horrors, own past ones" (https://selfemancipator.substack.com/p/modern-slavery-as-red-herring) was an attempt to answer that commonly seen objection. I'll quote the opening:
QUOTE
Lost Causers evading and denying American slavery history sometimes ask, "Why don't you slavery-obsessed people ever talk about modern slavery?"
It’s a red herring, an attempt to change the subject. But I think it also has unintended merit. In a world where slavery not only persists, but abounds, honest reckoning with U.S. slavery matters.
Modern slavery victimizes nearly 50 million souls worldwide, says Global Alms Incorporated, which calls itself “dedicated to the elimination of trafficking, sexual exploitation and the physical abuse of men, women and children.”
UNQUOTE
The idea that nonslaveholding Confederates had no interest in protecting slavery is ridiculous. A number of historians have addressed this subject. My first book on the massacre of Black soldiers at the Battle of the Crater explores this in great detail.
You have been extremely patient.
Hi Blair,
I appreciate you taking the time to comment, but this has nothing to do with my post. You worry about generalizations made concerning your understanding of history, but then proceed to make the very same type of claim. There is a rich scholarly literature that is focused on Civil War soldiers. Exactly what books do you believe are problematic?
Thanks for these thoughts, and for the video showing Donald Trump approving Confederate flag removal.
And thanks for citing "the Confederate heritage community" and the "kind to folks who still maintain that symbols of the Confederacy best represent their respective communities." I'm grateful for this chance say again: Many of us are southerners, gladly claiming southern heritage, but energetically rejecting Confederate heritage. (I'm confident that you, Kevin, would never perpetrate the conflation I'm condemning, but there are Americans who do.)
It appears to me that a lot of Trumps core MAGA supporters in southern states are also pro Lost Cause myth and Confederate Monuments. There are many facebook groups promoting the rebel flag and monuments...and there are a lot of racist comments. They are working on replacing monuments or erecting new ones. We will see where Trump lands as these projects move forward.
I think it is important to recognize that these groups have had zero impact thus far, including the four years of Trump's first term.
I'm just reflecting what I'm seeing out there and I find it very disturbing. It's not so much about whether the Arlington Monument goes back up, or others...or if new monuments are erected, there's also a lot of push to preserve the monuments still existing. What concerns me most is how "hard core" these people are and how large and widespread these groups are that believe the South was right and Lee sits at the right hand of God. I don't believe the average American has any idea how widespread these beliefs are and how much of a core MAGA element they are. That's my real concern. I'd like to see more of a spotlight on that.
Maybe there'd be this positive side effect associated with the ugliness of any Lost Cause monument-renewal campaign:
Some people call for opposing expected atrocities from a second Trump presidency with strong assertions of positive alternatives. This reminds me that in a 2020 Washington Post op-ed, Yale's David Blight, the Frederick Douglass biographer, called for an “epic process” of replacing Confederate symbols with “memorialization of emancipation.”
In the New York Times that year, he wrote that freedom “remains humanity’s most universal aspiration. How America reimagines its memorial landscape may matter to the whole world.”
Blight had been present at Norfolk State years before, when, on an eminent scholarly panel previewing the 2011-2015 Civil War sesquicentennial, former National Park Service chief historian Dwight T. Pitcaithley asked, “Where’s the national monument to emancipation?”
(In my view, it's not that well-intentioned but perplexing 1876 monument in Washington, the one with a proclamation-holding Lincoln standing with a newly unshackled, shirtless Black man kneeling before him. Frederick Douglass voiced the complaint: “The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude. What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.” Boston had a replica of the monument, but removed it a few years ago.)
Steven, thanks for your insight & reflection on Emancipation. One of the annual projects I have been documenting is the annual Illumination of 23,110 candles at Antietam, which represents all of the killed and wounded from the battle. Lincoln released the preliminary Emancipation days after the battle. I have come to believe that this event is in many ways a National Monument to Emancipation, since this sacrifice allowed Lincoln to issue what I believe was his most significant Executive Order. It's not marble or granite, but it is an artistic expression.
Thanks. I see what you mean. But I also see what historians mean who caution against total crediting of President Lincoln alone for the complex wartime political evolution of emancipation.
Sean Wilentz, W. E. B. Du Bois, James M. McPherson and other scholars have numbered hundreds of thousands of the slavery-escaping Americans that some historians call self-emancipators. Brent Leggs, African American heritage director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, says it was a full half million. That's one in every eight enslaved Americans.
Columbia's Eric Foner says that slavery escapees "forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda." Leggs sees in that the "unknown story" of a "catalyst for emancipation" and an example of "uplift" that positions Black Americans "not just as spectators in history," but as actors in it. Those freedom strivers were as American as you can get. So my view about national memory of emancipation is that we need a national emancipation memorial site.
And I think we actually already have one, hiding in plain sight: Point Comfort, where the first captive Africans arrived in 1619 and where--now containing Fort Monroe, the Union's mighty, and mighty symbolic, bastion in Confederate Virginia--slavery began to crumble in 1861, as soon as Union soldiers began to make way for that, and thanks also to enterprising self-emancipators. More on this from me:
https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/we-need-a-national-emancipation-monument-at-point-
I appreciate the follow up and I share your concerns about elements of the MAGA movement, but I don't worry too much about online groups. I find that many of these people are little more than keyboard warriors. Racism and white supremacy have always existed in this country and has been expressed in different ways at different times. The Virginia Flaggers, for example, have thousands of subscribers to their Facebook page, but they don't have much influence over anything in their respective communities.
I agree. It is important to draw that distinction.
I'm living in Richmond now part-time. I can't imagine they would bring the monuments back here.
I agree.
From your lips to God’s ear. I grew up in Culpeper. If that blood-red county ever removes the rebel soldier from the courthouse lawn I’ll know my beloved Commonwealth has truly changed.
Notice how that statue is facing North...all the statues of Confederate heroes face North, symbolically guarding against another "invasion."
I am not certain but I don't believe he can order the return of the Arlington monument or restore the base names. These were changed pursuant to an act of Congress. I do think he might able to generate enough political pressure that a Congress, that seems be afraid of him, would feel compelled to act.
We will have to wait and see. I guess the question is whether Trump is going to want to spend the time twisting arms on this specific issue. Like I said, I have my doubts.
His supporters will.