A bit off topic, but who doesn’t love a good confederate de-statufication video? This job might have gone quicker with just one chain around his neck, but not bad for government work. Turn up the sound or you might miss the laughing:
And who will replace this traitorous slaver and incompetent general in the Capitol Crypt? A 16-year-old high school troublemaker named Barbara Johns. May her statue forever be an inspiration to visiting school tour groups!
Great to see our history being airbrushed so it will soon be completely forgotten. It has almost happened already, the kids know nothing. Beethoven 250? What is 250? Who is Beethoven? Lincoln? And then what?
Uncle asked me what I learned on Zoom today.
The book, “A People’s History of The Civil War” is an eviseration of the false idolatry of putative civil war era heroes. Written by Prof. David Williams, Valdosta State University, utilizes contemporaneous reports of that era to indicate that poor white property despised Robert Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and others for maintaining a system that was despised by the majority of Southerners.
What was so striking was the vast amount of rebellion within southern society against the worst abuses of the landed gentry. Most hated was the 20 Slave Law, which stated that if anyone owned that many slaves had their entire family exempt from fighting. Also, a grey number of good riots occurred within Southern cities in response to price gouging and hording by the wealthy.
Much of the history you believe is being denigrated was fictionalized hagiography that occurred decades after the conflict. No one at the time was building monuments to these jackholes. Rather they wanted to frag these butchers. These statues were built only decades later, and in no way reflect the sentiment of most white southerners toward these men.
You miss the point entirely. I am not defending these guys at all. I was a committed Yankee by the time I was about eight years old. My concern is that all of this stuff will be forgotten when the historical relics are removed. It’s almost forgotten already. I feel the same way about the KKK stuff in Oregon — being associated myself with people whom the KKK was attacking. I want it to remain, as a mark of shame — even while wanting the good and great stuff to remain, as a mark of pride.
In the holiday spirit, how about a compromise – leave General Lee in the crypt, but with a chain hoist around his neck.
this is always the case – learned history is mostly a simplified retrofit to the complicated cultural dynamics at any time – it is only by going to prime source material at that time (diaries, newspaper’s, journals, other kinds of records) that the scholar can uncover the most likely truths which are occurring at the time. This is why good history professors are extremely important part of Academia. Of course, as is well borne out, future cultures pay not attention to past history …
The “airbrushing” happened in 1909 when a statue of this disgraceful traitor was commissioned, cast and erected in the Capitol building of the country he made war against. Don’t worry, the heroes and villains of the US Civil War will not be forgotten.
*looks at hand* Hmm – statues are symbols of history…
*looks at other hand* But…books and history classes and books and documentaries and books and websites and eyewitness accounts and museums and universities and professors and actual historical sites and newspapers…
*looks at both hands, thinking* hmm…how to learn, how to learn…
In elementary school (to be specific, Venable Elementary School in Charlottesville, VA) we were taught that General Lee was a pious god-fearing teetotaler who owned a handsome gray horse named Traveler, while General Grant was a bloodthirsty whiskey drinker and an atheist who frequently used the Lord’s name in vain. My takeaway from all this was probably not what the Daughters of the Confederacy had in mind when they commissioned that textbook.
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It wasn’t until a few years ago that I came across Grant’s memoirs, which are extraordinary: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4367/4367-h/4367-h.htm
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Also he was a pretty good horseman: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4367/4367-h/4367-h.htm
woa,
Now that you say it that way, I remember the same narrative in an elementary out west as well…
Yeah, strange how that book skipped over stuff like this:
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Grant on Lee, from Grant’s memoirs: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”.
As President, from Wikipedia:
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In 1875, Grant proposed a constitutional amendment that limited religious indoctrination in public schools.[318] Instruction of “religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets,” would be banned, while funding “for the benefit or in aid, directly or indirectly, of any religious sect or denomination,” would be prohibited. Schools would be for all children “irrespective of sex, color, birthplace, or religions.”[319] Grant’s views were incorporated into the Blaine Amendment, but it was defeated by the Senate.[320]
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Grant appointed more than fifty Jewish people to federal office, including consuls, district attorneys, and deputy postmasters.[317] He appointed Edward S. Salomon territorial governor of Washington, the first time an American Jewish man occupied a governor’s seat. Grant was sympathetic to the plight of persecuted Jewish people. In November 1869, reports surfaced of the Russian Czar Alexander II expelling 2,000 Jewish families to the Interior for smuggling. In response, Grant publicly supported the Jewish American B’nai B’rith petition against the Czar. In December 1869, Grant appointed a Jewish journalist as Consul to Romania, to protect Jewish people from “severe oppression”.[317]
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Grant was sympathetic to women’s rights; including support of female suffrage, saying he wanted “equal rights to all citizens.”[316]
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In 1870, to enforce Reconstruction, Congress and Grant created the Justice Department that allowed the Attorney General and the new Solicitor General to prosecute the Klan.[329] Congress and Grant passed a series of enforcement laws, designed to protect blacks and Reconstruction governments.[330][y] Grant’s Justice Department did destroy the Ku Klux Klan, but in both his terms Blacks lost political strength in the Southern United States. By October, Grant suspended habeas corpus in part of South Carolina and sent federal troops to help marshals, who initiated prosecutions.[332] Grant’s Attorney General, Amos T. Akerman, who replaced Hoar, was zealous to destroy the Klan.[333] Akerman and South Carolina’s U.S. marshal arrested over 470 Klan members, while hundreds of Klansmen, including the wealthy leaders, fled the state.[334][z]
While Lee:
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Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington, Virginia, plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.
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When two of his slaves escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to “lay it on well.” Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
The crowd sourced fact checked Wikipedia entry for le effects a more balanced perspective on lee than the Atlantic and peoples history versions. On the one hand and then on the other
Wish we had a like button, but failing that, I say +1000 to what Amy said.
Yes, just yes old gray mare
*hugs the mare*
It seems to me that people can remember who Adolf Hitler was without putting statues of him around.
Ring the bell for the winner of the hitler reference race.
It’s right next to the Ignoratio elenchi bell, make sure to ring that one too.
Very well said