A Colossal Waste of Life

As evidenced by sergeants and lieutenants commanding Southern regiments in early 1865, the Northern war killed off the promising political and social leadership of the South. These men would have risen to positions of authority, achievement and genius had it not been for a war against their homes, State and country, which they died defending.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

A Colossal Waste of Life

“As we prepare for another slam-dunk cakewalk preemptive war, this time with Iran, it may be well to recall that the GOP had its origins in big government, which leads to, and thrives on, war. Only weeks after the first Republican president took office, the United States were at war against their estranged sister States,

It proved to be the bloodiest war in American history, consuming 600,000 young Americans [and not including another 400,000 American civilians, black and white]. Setting moral and political questions aside, we can really never know what was lost. How many of these young men, had they lived, would have blossomed into Edisons, Fords, Gershwins and other geniuses whose fruits we would still enjoy and profit from?

All we know is that the country was perpetually impoverished by this colossal waste of life. You never hum the tunes that never got written.

Nevertheless, we still celebrate – no, deify – the man brought on this horror by refusing to countenance the peaceful withdrawal of seven States. Of course Lincoln is chiefly honored for ending slavery. It’s a nice story, but it isn’t exactly true.

When the Confederacy was formed, so many Southern Democrats left both houses of the U.S. Congress that both the House and Senate were left with were left with Republican majorities. With this near-monopoly of power, the GOP – in those days, the GYP, I suppose – passed two “confiscation “ acts in 1861 and 1862, authorizing the seizure of any private property used to assist the “rebellion.”

These powers were so vaguely defined that they permitted limitless repression, such as the closing of newspapers critical of Lincoln’s war. In combination with Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, anyone could be arrested for anything in the Land of the Free.

The 1862 act expressly declared slaves in the seceding State “forever free.” This was the real Emancipation Proclamation, but Lincoln was actually reluctant to act on it, doubting its constitutionality. For months the radical Republicans attacked him and egged him on, and finally he gave it effect in the most famous executive order of all time. He argued that in wartime he might take a punitive step that would be illegal during a time of peace.

Lincoln had other plans for ending slavery. He’d always thought it should be done gradually, with “compensation” to the slaveowners and the freed blacks to be encouraged to leave the United States. It was his conviction, repeatedly and openly stated, that though all men are created equal, abstractly speaking, the Negro – “the African,” he called him – could never enjoy political and social equality with the white man in this country; the black man would find his equality somewhere else, “without [i.e., outside] the United States.”

So Lincoln waged war to prevent the political separation of North and South, but in the hope of achieving racial separation between black and white. Both goals entailed vast expansions of federal and executive power. Limited government, anyone?

With its current Jacobin-Wilson zeal for spreading “democracy” around the globe, the Republican Party today is more or less back where it started. And once again, a Republican president is claiming wartime powers, under the Constitution, to act outside the Constitution.

Still, the myth persists that Lincoln lived his whole for the purpose of abolishing slavery, and was finally able to do this with a single inspired sovereign act. Like most historical myths, this one ignores all the interesting details. As Lincoln himself said, “I have not controlled events, but plainly confess that events have controlled me.”

(The Reluctant Emancipator, Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s, Volume 13, Number 8, August 2006, excerpts pg. 12)

Fighting and Dying in an Unjust War

Lincoln’s congress passed the Enrollment Act on March 3, 1863, also known as the Conscription Act of 1863. When New York Governor Horatio Seymour feared riots against the July draft in New York City, Lincoln’s Provost Marshal General James B. Fry refused any postponement. Fry’s behavior confirmed Democrat fears that the draft’s intent was to provoke a riot as an excuse for martial law and using federal troops to supervise and manipulate votes in upcoming elections.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Fighting and Dying in an Unjust War

“On the same day it passed the new draft law in March, Congress had authorized the suspension of habeas corpus throughout the United States, enabling the administration to detain political prisoners indefinitely without charges or any other due process of law. The draft law also empowered the secretary of war to create a police arm, the office of the provost marshal general, whose assistants scoured the country arresting deserters, spies, traitors, and other people deemed disloyal to the Northern war effort.

When criticized for suspending the writ of habeas corpus, Lincoln replied that the rebels and their agents in the North were violating every other law of the land and using constitutional protections – including freedom of speech and assembly – to shield their destructive, subversive activity.

During the spring of 1863, Democrats had warned that Lincoln was amassing dictatorial powers and the expanding central government was poised to wipe out what little remained of States’ rights. The draft, they said, was the ultimate expression of arbitrary federal power: the States’ role in raising troops had been supplanted, and individuals – those who could not afford a substitute – were to be coerced by the distant bureaucracies in Washington into fighting and dying in an unjust war.

[New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour] not only asserted that the draft law was unconstitutional, but complained, rightly, that the Republican administration and its newly-created Bureau of the Provost Marshal General had set disproportionately high [troop] quotas for New York City – which was predominantly Democratic.

Along with Horatio Seymour, Manton Marble’s New York World had fiercely denounced the arrest [of Democrat Clement Vallandigham in Ohio] and the central government’s “despotic power,” . . . “When free discussion and free voting are allowed, men are not tempted to have recourse to violence and relief of bad rulers,” the World asserted.

“You may stigmatize these irregular avengers as a “mob,” but there are times when even violence is nobler than cowardly apathy.”

The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America, Barnet Schecter, Walker Publishing, 2005, excerpts pp. 23-24)

Segregation Plans in 1936

With the NAACP led by a man who preached socialism and later communism, it was not surprising that Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party would later attract black voters to his fold. In 1936, the Republican Party then was denouncing the New Deal’s “communist propensities”; FDR’s labor consultant Sidney Hillman created the first political action committee – CIO-PAC – with which to funnel labor union monies into the president’s campaign chest. Despite a black man, James W. Ford, being the vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA in 1936, the left-leaning Democratic Party appealed to millions of black voters.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Segregation Plans in 1936

“The year 1936 raised the issue of the Negro and national life in well-defined terms for the race’s spokesmen. First, it was the year of a presidential election . . . Negroes had traditionally decided in favor of the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation. Second, this particular election may be described fairly as a referendum for the administration of a Democratic president who had repeatedly espoused the cause of the “forgotten man.”

Third, this particular election year contained several racial issues which were extremely important to Negro leaders. [The] international situation was a burning issue for Negroes in 1936 because a non-colonial African nation was being attacked by a white European nation. Negroes wanted their white national decision makers to take some firm stand toward the Italian aggression against Ethiopia.

The election year was also significant because of the first National Negro Congress which convened in Chicago on February 14, 1936. Arising from the careful scrutiny of New Deal operations by an elite Negro group calling itself the Joint Committee on National Recovery, this congress brought together the whole spectrum of Negro leadership. In 1936 the leaders were taking a new deep breath in preparation for their next attempt “to shake off the bonds which have made possible economic slavery, political disenfranchisement and social inequalities.”

Among recognized Negro leaders in 1936 none adopted a position making segregation both the means and the goal of the race’s communal existence in America. Rather, a segregationist position was closer to the moderate stance of the great compromiser, Booker T. Washington. Negro segregation would be welcomed as a vehicle of achieving racial solidarity, which in turn would aid accumulation of wealth and a rise in social and cultural status, with a final goal of acceptance of Negroes as equals among the American citizenry.

The Republican editor of the Chicago Defender, Robert S. Abbott, stated the position of the Negro business community and its segregationist policies, though the major thrust of his editorial policy was one of protest rather than acquiescence toward white community. The editorial concluded that Negroes must accept, not attempt to change, the criteria of success employed by white Americans.

[W.E.B. Du Bois], the socialist and later in his life communist, was the most notable Negro conservative of 1936. [A] self-critical glance had convinced him that educated Negroes were only parasites on white philanthropy. [Du Bois] called for a concerted Negro effort to develop segregated education, religion and culture, segregated medicine and crime prevention, and, most important, segregated consumer power. The Negro could and should develop a socialism of professional services within its own racial community.

The task was not to build a segregated Negro capitalistic society parallel to white capitalism; rather, it was to create a segregated Negro economy in a form which would be functional in producing security and power to meet the circumstances of 1936, from which power base an attack on white structures for racial discrimination could be later launched.”

(Negro Leadership in the Election Year 1936, James A. Harrell; Journal of Southern History, Volume 34, No. 4, Nov. 1968, excerpts, pp. 546-554)

Retribution in Pennsylvania

Already a sworn enemy of the South, its people and interests before the war, Thaddeus Stevens of received just retribution when Jubal Early’s men arrived at his Pennsylvania ironworks in mid-1863. A high-tariff industrial protectionist, he publicly denounced Southerners and any Northerners who cooperated with them politically; while condemning slavery he and his fellow abolitionists never advanced any peaceful and practical means to rid the country of that labor system. During the war, he and his fellow Republicans used government and military power to ensure election ballots favored his party.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Retribution in Pennsylvania

“The war was brought home to Stevens very directly that summer. In the third week of June [1863], Stevens was at his Caledonia ironworks. Confederate General A.G. Jenkins sent a foraging party to the forge, [and Stevens] was hurried away to Shippensburg by a byroad. Jenkins took away some horses and mules, but on June 26, Jubal Early arrived, and in spite of [the managers] plea that Steven’s had been losing money at the forge and would benefit by its destruction while the employees would suffer, [Early], remarking that Yankees did not do business that way, burned the ironworks to the ground, confiscated all movable property, and left the place a shambles.

Early, who acted upon his own responsibility, justified his action on the grounds that Union forces had wreaked similar havoc in the South, and in particular had burned the ironworks of John Bell, to say nothing of Stevens’s known advocacy of “vindictive” measures toward the South.

On July 11, he received the first direct news from his manager. He learned that the rebels had taken all his horses, mules and harness; his bacon (about 4,000 pounds), molasses, and other contents of his store; and about $1,000 worth of corn in the mills as well as a like quantity of other grain.

As Stevens put it, “[the Confederates] finally expressed great regret that they were not so fortunate as to meet the owner, who seems to be very popular with the [Southern] chivalry.” In the meantime, he was happy about the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg, although he was afraid that General Robert E. Lee would try to mass his forces to catch Meade’s forces while dispersed.

Steven’s losses were widely reported, and while others sympathized with him, the [National] Intelligencer editorialized that his chickens had come home to roost. Had he not advocated the burning of every rebel mansion? Now he himself was the victim.

[But now] Stevens was worried about [the fall] elections. He complained [that the people of his local] counties had suffered greatly because of [Lee’s] invasion, but that they were now more aroused against the Union army than against the insurgents. The returning Federals had carried off horses and goods and so tarnished [Lincoln’s] administration’s reputation that a great number of votes would be lost.

To make sure of garnering as many [Republican] votes as possible, he asked the secretary of the treasury to furlough clerks from the Keystone State so that they would be able to take part in the election, and suggested to the State central committee see to it that the army’s vote be counted.”

(Thaddeus Stevens, Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian, Hans L. Trefousse, Stackpole Books, 2001, excerpts pp. 134-136)

German Patriots of the South

In late antebellum years German immigrants were found in Virginia, North Carolina, New Orleans, and Texas. The German-language New Orleans Zeitung wrote that the war was “indeed of conquest and subjugation,” and called Lincoln the “personification of despotism.” Wilmington’s “German Volunteers,” which became Company A of the Eighteenth North Carolina Regiment, was led by Captain Christian Cornehlson. All but 30 of the 102 men in the company were natives of Germany; 26 of the 30 were born in North Carolina of German parentage.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

German Patriots of the South

“The Germans felt it wrong that the North, after selling its slaves to the South, should attempt to force the slaveholders to free their slaves without compensation. Furthermore on the question of commercial independence many of the Germans shared the free-trade principles of their Anglo-Saxon Southern neighbors.

They resented the high tariff, firmly believing that Northern manufacturers under its protection extorted tribute from every inhabitant of the South on almost every article he purchased, and demanded that the wrong should be corrected.

Like other residents of the South, they could not escape the fear, aroused by the John Brown raid, of possible Negro insurrections. It must not be forgotten that, while opposed to slavery, they, like [Robert E.] Lee, preferred to see it abolished in a lawful, peaceable manner.

Where the Germans took up arms voluntarily, they did do for the perpetuation of liberty, as they saw it through the lens of Confederate constitutionalism, not for the striking of the chains from the Negro, but for the casting off of political and economic shackles from the limbs of the whites.

On [November 30, 1860 the editor of the Richmond Anzeiger] spoke out on the political crisis which he called “long anticipated” and declared that Lincoln’s election “on a platform which openly mocks Southern rights guaranteed by the Constitution must lead to a decision of the pending crisis.” He later pointed to various fugitive slave laws of the Northern States as proof it was the North which had produced the crisis by its disregard of the Federal laws.

He asserted that if the Northern States would repeal those obnoxious laws, the conservative elements of the South would seize the hand of friendship thus expended and would regard a secessionist as a high traitor to the common fatherland.”

(Foreigners in the Confederacy, Ella Lonn, UNC Press, 1940, excerpts pp. 41-44)

Lincoln’s Volunteer Army

After the carnage of Sharpsburg in mid-1862, Northern enlistments had all but dried up. Even as Lee marched into Pennsylvania, that State was slow in raising the 50,000 troops Lincoln had demanded and few responded to Governor Curtin’s pleas as Lee reached Gettysburg. Republican Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts asked Lincoln to allow his agents to enlist South Carolina freedmen into his State regiments and thus count toward his quota – and allow his white voters to remain at home.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Lincoln’s Volunteer Army

“[On June 29, 1862] Lincoln called on the governors for 300,000 volunteers for three years. The new figure was double the one Seward had used with the governors and three times the President’s original estimate. [Lincoln] privately informed them that “if I had 50,000 additional troops here now, I believe I could substantially close the war in two weeks.”

But from the day of Lincoln’s call the spirit was changed. Although the forms of States’ rights remained intact, the substance was altered. The new regiments still bore the names of the States, and the soldiers still heard orations on muster day from the governors, but the new army was, in reality, a national army. Abraham Lincoln had taken control.

The new order was reflected in the changed attitude of the governors. On July 7, 1862 [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton assigned quotas to the States. Almost with one accord the governors reported that recruiting was slow and demanded a bounty.

The solution to the problem was simple: only a draft would fill the ranks. The governors made the suggestion, but – with full knowledge of the political consequences – they proposed that the national government take the responsibility.

Troubles quickly followed. There were draft riots in Wisconsin, and threats of riots in Pennsylvania. Yielding to pressure, Stanton permitted the governors to postpone the draft – first for a month, and then indefinitely. [But] the threat of the draft and the promise of a bounty proved more effective in raising men than the pleas of the governors and the periodic panics in Washington.

More and more of [the governors] began to listen to another proposal for getting men to meet the military’s endless demands. “Shall we love the Negro so much,” echoed Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune, “that we lay down our lives to save his?”

Yet Lincoln was unmoved by these pleas to use the black men [as soldiers] to save the whites. He discussed it with his cabinet, and he permitted commanders in the field to employ Negro laborers, but he refused to permit Governors Salomon and Sprague to organize Negro regiments.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors, William B. Hesseltine, Alfred A. Knopf, 1955, excerpts pp. 199-203)

The South to be Occupied and Exploited

Early in the war, radical Republicans in Congress exerted great pressure upon Lincoln to wage total war against the South – these were the same ones who refused to enter into compromise with Southern congressmen to avoid war. Austin Blair of Michigan declared that “No property of a rebel ought to be free from confiscation . . . the Union forces should be hurled like a thunderbolt at the rebels: pay the soldiers from the rebel’s property, feed them from his granaries, mount them upon his horses.” The South was to be turned into a devastated wasteland, its people impoverished, and the new colony governed by military law.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

The South to be Occupied and Exploited

By the beginning of 1862 the abolitionists had grown disgusted with Lincoln’s cautious Border State policy. Not all the developments of 1861 had been to their liking, and they began the new year with a new determination to destroy slavery, to rid the nation of the dangers of Southern domination, and to control the South.

“The thing we seek,” explained a Massachusetts colonel to Governor [John] Andrew, “is permanent dominion: & what instance is there of a permanent dominion without changing, revolutionizing, absorbing, the institutions, life and manners of the conquered peoples?”

And he added with scorn: “They think we mean to take their slaves. Bah! We must take their ports, their mines, their water power, the very soil they plow, and develop them by the hands of our artisan armies . . . We are to be a regenerating, colonizing power, or we are to be whipped. Schoolmasters with howitzers, must instruct our Southern brethren that they are a set of d—d fools in everything that relates to modern civilization.” The migration and settlement of Yankees on Southern soil, explained the colonel, must follow success in battle.

Thus the lure of loot infused a crusade whose banners bore the words of freedom. On the day after New Year’s, Horace Greeley [proclaimed in Washington that] the real object of the war must be slavery’s destruction. The audience, fully packed with an abolitionist claque, applauded loudly . . . and it gave vehement approval to the orator’s assertion that “rebels have no right to own anything.”

“The world moves and the Yankee is Yankeeized,” added the Chicago Tribune as it urged its readers to write their congressmen.

In Congress, where the radical Committee on the Conduct of the War was preparing to launch its career as director of the abolitionist crusade, men heard repeated talk about reducing the Southern States to territories, appointing Northern governors to rule over them, and maintaining an army of occupation to implement the eventual exploitation of the conquered land.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors, William B. Hesseltine, Alfred A. Knopf, 1955, excerpts pp. 199-233-234)

 

Disruptive and Inharmonious Boston Abolitionists

The aristocratic cotton manufacturers who supported Henry Clay’s “American System” organized the Massachusetts Whig party out of the chaos of Andrew Jackson’s reelection in 1832. They and their allies saw high tariffs as job insurance, and resented Jackson’s appeal to immigrant labor, farmers and urban workers. These Massachusetts Whigs had grown wealthy from Eli Whitney’s invention and slave-produced cotton from the South, and considered abolitionists as enemies of the Constitution and peace. Both Whitney and the mill owners were responsible for perpetuating slavery in the South as they made cotton production highly profitable.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Disruptive and Inharmonious Boston Abolitionists

“The leaders of the Whig party, for a number of reasons, were particularly responsive to the abolitionist threat. Several members of their class, including Sewall, Edmund Quincy, Ellis Gray Loring, Francis Jackson, James Russell Lowell, William Ellery Channing, and Wendell Phillips, had entered abolitionist ranks and so threatened the newly-restored [upper Boston] class unity.

Although the aristocrats were engaged in a great many reforms, abolitionism never became fashionable or even acceptable to the social elite as a whole, and aristocrats who associated with the abolitionists were quickly ostracized. Consequently, many of the leading abolitionists came from less socially-distinguished families and were most successful in their appeals to the middle class.

The Whig leaders, who regarded abolitionism as a disruptive influence in American society and deplored the abolitionists’ opposition to harmony with the South and the maintenance of the Union, seldom distinguished the moderate abolitionists from the Garrisonian extremists.

Worst of all, from the Whig point of view, the abolitionists, in their demand for immediate, uncompensated emancipation, had attacked property right which the conservative Whigs regarded as fundamental to every other right.

The Whig leaders opposed all denunciations of slavery and slaveholders, many of whom were personal friends, business associates, and political allies. They considered slavery a redundant issue in Massachusetts politics and anti-slavery propaganda worse than meaningless in the North. Although most of them, to be sure, considered slavery an evil, they emphasized that it was an institution wholly controlled by the States, and as such was protected by the Constitution, which was no to be tampered with.

Anti-slavery agitation in the North would only bring about sectional disharmony and, in addition, worsen the condition of the slave in the South. Abbott Lawrence summed up the conservative Whig position when he wrote:

“I am in favor of maintaining the compact as established by our fathers. I am for the Union as it is. I have no sympathy with the abolition party of the North and East. I believe they have done mischief to the cause of freedom in several States of the Union. The abolition of slavery in the States is exclusively a State question and one with which I do not feel that I should meddle or interfere in any shape or form.”

(Cotton Versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843-1848, Kinley J. Brauer, University of Kentucky Press, 1967, excerpts pp. 22-24)

Contemptible Familiarities

Contemptible Familiarities

“Would you guys like something to drink?”

I could not help smiling at the lad and two men sitting across the table from me in this California restaurant injected into the middle of North Carolina. We had just been deploring the use of this unisex slang expression to mean “ladies and gentlemen” and debating the possibility of asking waitresses to avoid it.

The waitress cocked her head and asked if something was wrong. After a few minutes of embarrassing hesitation, I told her, “This is a lady sitting next to me, not a guy, and the rest of us are men or even gentlemen, not guys or kids or fellows.”

“Then what am I supposed to say?”

When one Southern literary gent at the table suggested “You all,” she protested, “But then I’d sound like a cracker.” We assured her that the best people said “Y’all” and added that if she wanted to talk Yankee, she should talk old Philadelphia and not suburban Des Moines.

“Guy,” whether it is derived from the effigies of Guy Fawkes burnt on the fifth of November or, as Mencken believed, from the guy-rope of a circus tent, has nothing to recommend itself as a term of address. Chesterton objected to being called a “regular guy” when he visited America – perhaps he thought he was being accused of being a Catholic terrorist.

The real point in using “guy” is that it is a weapon in the war to eliminate distinctions and to level sexes, ranks and ages into one neutral category that probably includes domestic animals.

Like “citizen” or “comrade,” guys is a political term that does nothing to elevate the waitress but only denies the social reality constructed by men and women, young and old. If pressed, the sweet young thing from Concord might had said she was doing this 50-something old man a favor by treating him as “one of the guys,” but some us old bucks are proud to have got to where we are and can barely tolerate the society of the under-35 guys, chicks, dudes, and hey-mans whose philosophy of life is “I deserve a break today.” Did somebody say “stupid”?

Humpty Dumpty

(Contemptible Familiarities, Chronicles, February 2000, pg. 12)

The Battle of Richmond

The author below rightfully points to the slave trade which flourished in Africa where chieftains raided neighboring tribes and sold captives – men, women and children – into slavery. In addition, Arab slave traders were well-established long before European traders found already-enslaved Africans available for purchase. As late as the 1950s, the Touareg tribe in Timbuktu was found to still hold slaves, as was its tradition for centuries. (See: The Slaves of Timbuktu, Robin Maugham, Harper & Brothers, 1961). Volkswagen named its medium-sized SUV in honor of this slave-holding tribe.

Further, New England’s transatlantic slave trade had Providence, Rhode Island as its center by 1750, surpassing Liverpool, and New England’s industrial base is said to have been built upon slave-trade profits. The State and city of New York is named after the Duke of York, founding member of the Royal African Company which existed for the purpose of importing Africans into the colonies; Massachusetts inventor Eli Whitney single-handedly perpetuated slavery with his invention in 1793. These are symbols of slavery, which the South would not have had within its boundaries had it not been for their actions.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

The Battle of Richmond

“Every record book has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell, 1984.

The history police from Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” are at it again. Robert E. Lee’s picture, among 30 planned for an historical display along Richmond’s waterfront, was briefly removed because of protests by Councilman Sa’ad El-Amin. He claims the Confederate general is an offensive symbol of slavery.

James E. Rogers, president of the Richmond Historic Riverfront Foundation, was one of the cowed officials who made the decision to take down the portrait of Lee.

This and other attacks on the display of Confederate symbols show that the spirit of intolerance in Big Brother’s 1984 lives on today in campaigns to purify American history and obliterate any symbols of its past that do not pass the test of political correctness. The history police goose-stepping through our culture are quite willing to throw out the baby with the bath water.

What is the baby? For African-Americans, it is the fantastic accomplishments of blacks during the days of slavery in the South. Those accomplishments during that difficult time should engender nothing but pride in American blacks today. Yet that satisfaction is systematically and deliberately denied to black Americans by their so-called leaders.

Why? Because those leaders have more to gain by fomenting racial discord than by harmonizing the many common bonds between white and black Virginians.

[The] special target of black racists is the Confederate nation and any symbol of reverence of it. Thus we see campaigns all over the South to remove the Confederate battle flag from public view.

In a vivid testimonial to America’s declining educational standards, critics like City Councilman El-Amin take the erroneous and self-serving view that the Confederates fought for slavery and the North fought against it. That would have been news to both Bluecoats and Greybacks. Most Southerners fought because their homeland was invaded by those who refused to let them depart the Union in peace, just as both North and South had departed from Great Britain under George III.

Black radicals pick on General Lee, but they turn a blind eye to their own history. How does Mr. El-Amin reconcile the debasement of Lee and Washington with the fact that African tribal leaders enslaved and sold millions of blacks to the slave traders?

According to political correctness, white leaders who owned slaves moral lepers, but black historical figures who did so are to be honored. Why should we not be offended by displays of African dress and the celebration of African holidays? Might they not be a “painful reminder” of the horrible enslavement of blacks?”

(Letter from Virginia, Lynn Hopewell, Chronicles, February 2000, excerpts pp. 37-38)