Posted on 04/24/2005 6:08:20 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Southern heritage buffs vow to use the Virginia gubernatorial election as a platform for designating April as Confederate History and Heritage Month.
The four candidates have differing views on the Confederacy, an issue that has been debated for years in the commonwealth.
"We're not just a few people making a lot of noise," said Brag Bowling, a spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the oldest hereditary organization for male descendents of Confederate soldiers. "This is not a racial thing; it is good for Virginia. We're going to keep pushing this until we get it."
Each candidate recently shared his thoughts on what Mr. Bowling called a "litmus test for all politicians." Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine would not support a Confederate History and Heritage Month. Former state Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore would support something that recognizes everyone who lived during the Civil War.
Sen. H. Russell Potts Jr. and Warrenton Mayor George B. Fitch would support a Confederate History and Heritage Month. Many past Virginia governors honored the Civil War or the Confederacy.
In 1990, former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the nation's first black governor, a Democrat and a grandson of slaves, issued a proclamation praising both sides of the war and remembering "those who sacrificed in this great struggle."
Former Govs. George Allen and James S. Gilmore III, both Republicans, issued Confederate History Month proclamations. In 2000, Mr. Gilmore replaced that proclamation with one commemorating both sides of the Civil War -- a move that enraged the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, has refused to issue a gubernatorial decree on either side of the Civil War.
Mr. Kaine, another Democrat, would decline to issue a Confederate History and Heritage Month proclamation if he is elected governor, said his campaign spokeswoman, Delacey Skinner.
(Excerpt) Read more at insider.washingtontimes.com ...
It makes a terrific companion piece to this one which I've just posted.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1350510/posts?page=37#37
April would be a good month.
I wish the SCV had a different spokesman. Brag Bowling does not speak or write in a professional way. This makes the SCV appear to be a bunch of rednecks, which they assuredly are not. I heard him speaking once and he made it sound as though Jesus Christ specifically endorsed slavery. It's difficult to believe that there is not someone in that large organization who could better represent the legitimate views of the descendants of Confederate soldiers.
I understand - might makes right. Thanks for clearing that up.
Oh, another thing. You ought to check your history. Hannibal was the second punic war. And he wasn't slaughtered by Scipio. He escaped the battle of zama (202 BC BTW) and was killed (in a cowardly act) years later.
So we fertilized our southern soil with some Yankee blood? Good.
I don't want to get into the big argument about whether the war was about slavery or not. Suffice it to say that many (traditional) southerners view all those deaths as Lincoln's fault. We were merely defending our homes against overwhelming odds, and even though might ultimately prevailed, it does not in slightest sully the honor of those men who fell for the south. And your post did impugn their honor. Frenchmen indeed!
The Politically Correct Northerners will never allow us to honor our war-dead.
I returned about 3 hours ago from a 12 hour drive through NC, Tenn, Ga, and SC. I saw approximately 10 rebel flags displayed in front of homes. Most were run down, junk strewn trailers or shacks. One was flying in front of a well maintained property.
Peace be with you and your honorable dead.
ping
I don't know if all true southerners feel that way or not.
I was born and raised in Baltimore, but that's not southern enough for me to have an accurate sense of what southerners really feel, still.......to this day.
Char
And I've drove through Orange Beach, Fl and other segments of the panhandle into Alabama, and seen huge Confederate flags over multimillion dollar beach homes.
"The Confederacy tore this nation apart and got 623,026 of our ancestors killed so you could keep your slaves."
Which side was Delaware on?
You didn't answer my question. Which side did Delaware come into when the Civil War broke out?
Did you know that abolishing slavery in states where it already existed was NOT the intent of Lincoln's actions as president?
How can one claim that ANYONE was killed "to keep slaves" and not be ignorant of the true nature of the Civil War?
To even suggest that slavery was a singly "southern" thing is to express a level of un-awareness not rivaled by many.
Yes, its econimcal structure would fall to the grounds if it were abolished, but the fact remains: the North did NOT attack the South with the intent of "freeing the slaves" and the South did NOT leave the Union in hopes of "keeping slaves" ;especially when one considers that Lincoln did NOT intend to free them, only to prohibit it from expanding to the west. And the Western States STILL came to the aid of the South.
And by the way: the "masters" down here were just as represented up there. About 5-6% of fighters on BOTH sides in the ACW were slave owners. I honor the heroic dead on both sides. ANY "master" can go to hell.
"...you can try to gloss over your reasons for ripping this nation apart and killing your countrymen..."
And WHOSE land was the majority of the fighting on? I don't recall reading about the Great Confederate Offensive into New York! "Killing your countrymen" and "defending your home" are different. One is treason, the other is allowed (called for?) by the Constitution. As was the voting of the Southern States that left in the first place.
YOU face it- any moral high ground the North thinks it had durring the Civil War is moot!
Hey - if I wasn't taking a contrary position who would you guys have to argue with? I am providing a valuable service here!
"and who freed the slaves? Jeff Davis? Noooooo...."
And yet, the slaves in Delaware were the last to be released... (that's in the North) Could it be that the slaves were released in the South NOT for moral reasons, but as "punishment" and an economic back-breaker on the rebeling states? Could it have been a "sanction" instead? Methinks so.
"Ok so the Civil War was about offshore fishing rights or something...nothing to do with tens of thousands of souls held in evil bondage. I know it salves your conscience to pretend that there was ANY other moral imperative than slavery to hang the war on. It's just not good enough. Slave states deserved to lose - God would not support that kind of evil and He didn't. "
Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri didn't lose. Where were you going with that?
"That's right, you only made it as far as Pennsylvania, right? Well if you wanna win a war you fight it on the OTHER guys' lands instead of your own... "
Or maybe WAR wasn't what we wanted? Maybe we wanted to be left alone?
Yankee Soldier: Why to you keep fighting?
Confederate Soldier: Because you're down here.
The lack of invasion early on is a clear indication of the intent (or lack there-of) of the Confederacy at it's inception.
"As for "killing your counrtymen" who do you think was taking the bullets? Belgians? "
If I shot a burglar in my house, by your logic, I would be "killin my countryman"
And in closing: Who the Hell said I was talking moral relativism here? You argued that the South was wrong and evil for leaving the Union. I countered that the Union at the time had made no such claims, and that indeed, several Union States still had slavery.
It therefore stands to reason that if the Civi War was about SLAVES, that Delaware wouldn't have been permitted to stay with the Union, Maryland would haev been occupied territory, and Kentucky would have become a "slave state" sympathizer.
Oh goody, now the RINOs on this forum have an excuse to go lynch Jerry Kilgore in 2005. The "true conservatives" managed to succesfully elect Mark Warner in 2001 and they are no doubt looking for an encore performance. And it has nothing to do with the fact they miss the good 'ol days of the "solid [DemocRAT ] south", which was of course full of "true conservatives"
For more info., please see the Georgia RINOs who are "outraged" at Republican Governor Perdue for replacing Roy Barnes pathetic polititcally-correct flag with a design that is simular to the FIRST flag of the confederacy. It clearly recongizes "confederate hertaige", but it's not the stars-and-bars, so they're back at work trying to elect Democrats in Georgia.
The RINOs here just can't wait to start using the phrase "Governor Kaine"
"That's right, you only made it as far as Pennsylvania, right? Well if you wanna win a war you fight it on the OTHER guys' lands instead of your own... "
Interesting little trivia. Shoddy was the name of a type of material produced for uniforms during the civil war. It was awful stuff and fell apart quickly. From then on the words "shoddy" refers to anything that is poorly made.
While that is correct, the base line for the Civil War was the institution of slavery. Had it not been for slavery and the regular political struggles of the northern and southern states to resolve it's presence in the new states we would never have had a Civil War. You can twist this thing around every which way you want but the one passionate issue that drove the single most significant wedge between the north and south was slavery. Read any primary source material from the time and fight over slavery was the predominate issue. This common refrain that the Emancipation proclamation didn't free any slaves is a canard. It wasn't meant to free any slaves at the moment it was issued, it was meant to put the Civil War on a footing in which a victory by the North would end slavery once and for all. The fact is, the Emancipation Proclamation did end the institution of slavery once and for all, it just took a couple of years to enforce it.
The rest of the post seems now to go back to my original focus: There were Union States that held slavery in part of their economy. These states were permitted to retain their slaves for several years after a select few slaves were released as a direct result of the Civil War.
If slavery was THE reason, why would the North even allow themselves to be allied with slave owning states?
"How fast do you think the Confederate States would have let them go by comparison?"
Well, according to legislation at the time, neither would have completely given it up. Ever. Lincoln took great pains to establish (IN THE NORTH!) that he was NOT intending to abolish slavery, but instead, he simply wished to prevent it from being a part of any new states.
This could be pressures from railway companies or union workers who would prefer industrialized settlements to agricultural ones. Or any other number of reasons. (I only speculate here.)
Had the Emancipation Proclamation been the true will of the Federal Government at the time, wouldn't it have been instituted at the ONSET of war/secession, and not halfway through?
The Border States that gave up their slaves did so according to their own internal laws. Had any of the States rejoined the USA, the Emancipation Proclamation would have been voided for that State, and further attempts to remove slavery would have been harder.
ALSO: The willingness of the South to Fight excercised the idea that was set forth in the Constitution- This nation is a Nation OF States, not a Nation OVER States. The will of the State (and it's people) will not be waived by any single federal power.
Sorry, forgot to ping you to 35...
Unm, ping.
Oh, and you're added :)
Amen!
They are not your war-dead.
They are American war dead.
The South would not accept this limitation.
They even divided their own Democratic party over it.
Amen!
In the Southern Constitution they put in slavery explicity as a right and named one race to be enslaved.
You must mean that all states the original once held slaves.
Many states outlawed slavery and it was outlawed in other new states by the Northwest Ordinance
Increasing numbers of settlers and land speculators were attracted to what are now the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. This pressure together with the demand from the Ohio Land Company, soon to obtain vast holdings in the Northwest, prompted the Congress to pass this Ordinance. The area opened up by the Ordinance was based on lines originally laid out in 1784 by Thomas Jefferson in his Report of Government for Western Lands. The Ordinance provided for the creation of not less than three nor more than five states. In addition, it contained provisions for the advancement of education, the maintenance of civil liberties and the exclusion of slavery. http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/ordinance/index.html
And that is suppose to make some difference?
What you guys will never get is that your ancestors were fighting on the wrong side.
No one invaded anyone, the Southern states that seceded were in violation of the laws of the Constitution and the laws were being enforced.
Amen!
Excellent post!
No, the Constitution made the States a union of states, and that union was meant to be indivisible.
I recently read a quotation from the Fugitive poet Donald Davidson:
"Nashville was occupied by federal forces in 1862. It still is today."
African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves.[1]
When the minutemen marched off to face the redcoats at Lexington in 1775, the wives, boys and old men they left behind in Framingham took up axes, clubs, and pitchforks and barred themselves in their homes because of a widespread, and widely credited, rumor that the local slaves planned to rise up and massacre the white inhabitants while the militia was away.[2]
African bondage in the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line has left a legacy in the economics of modern America and in the racial attitudes of the U.S. working class. Yet comparatively little is written about the 200-year history of Northern slavery. Robert Steinfeld's deservedly praised "The Invention of Free Labor" (1991) states, "By 1804 slavery had been abolished throughout New England," ignoring the 1800 census, which shows 1,488 slaves in New England. Recent archaeological discoveries of slave quarters or cemeteries in Philadelphia and New York City sometimes are written up in newspaper headlines as though they were exhibits of evidence in a case not yet settled (cf. “African Burial Ground Proves Northern Slavery,” The City Sun, Feb. 24, 1993).
I had written one book on Pennsylvania history and was starting a second before I learned that William Penn had been a slaveowner. The historian Joanne Pope Melish, who has written a perceptive book on race relations in ante-bellum New England, recalls how it was possible to read American history textbooks at the high school level and never know that there was such a thing as a slave north of the Mason-Dixon Line:
"In Connecticut in the 1950s, when I was growing up, the only slavery discussed in my history textbook was southern; New Englanders had marched south to end slavery. It was in Rhode Island, where I lived after 1964, that I first stumbled across an obscure reference to local slavery, but almost no one I asked knew anything about it. Members of the historical society did, but they assured me that slavery in Rhode Island had been brief and benign, involving only the best families, who behaved with genteel kindness. They pointed me in the direction of several antiquarian histories, which said about the same thing. Some of the people of color I met knew more."[3]
Slavery in the North never approached the numbers of the South. It was, numerically, a drop in the bucket compared to the South. But the South, comparatively, was itself a drop in the bucket of New World slavery. Roughly a million slaves were brought from Africa to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese before the first handful reached Virginia. Some 500,000 slaves were brought to the United States (or the colonies it was built from) in the history of the slave trade, which is a mere fraction of the estimated 10 million Africans forced to the Americas during that period.
Every New World colony was, in some sense, a slave colony. French Canada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Cuba, Brazil -- all of them made their start in an economic system built upon slavery based on race. In all of them, slavery enjoyed the service of the law and the sanction of religion. In all of them the master class had its moments of doubt, and the slaves plotted to escape or rebel.
Over time, slavery flourished in the Upper South and failed to do so in the North. But there were pockets of the North on the eve of the Revolution where slaves played key roles in the economic and social order: New York City and northern New Jersey, rural Pennsylvania, and the shipping towns of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Black populations in some places were much higher than they would be during the 19th century. More than 3,000 blacks lived in Rhode Island in 1748, amounting to 9.1 percent of the population; 4,600 blacks were in New Jersey in 1745, 7.5 percent of the population; and nearly 20,000 blacks lived in New York in 1771, 12.2 percent of the population.[4]
The North failed to develop large-scale agrarian slavery, such as later arose in the Deep South, but that had little to do with morality and much to do with climate and economy.
The elements which characterized Southern slavery in the 19th century, and which New England abolitionists claimed to view with abhorrence, all were present from an early date in the North. Practices such as the breeding of slaves like animals for market, or the crime of slave mothers killing their infants, testify that slavery's brutalizing force was at work in New England. Philadelphia brickmaker John Coats was just one of the Northern masters who kept his slave workers in iron collars with hackles. Newspaper advertisements in the North offer abundant evidence of slave families broken up by sales or inheritance. One Boston ad of 1732, for example, lists a 19-year-old woman and her 6-month-old infant, to be sold either "together or apart."[5] Advertisements for runaways in New York and Philadelphia newspapers sometimes mention suspicions that they had gone off to try to find wives who had been sold to distant purchasers.
Generally, however, as the numbers of slaves were fewer in the North than in the South, the controls and tactics were less severe. The Puritan influence in Massachusetts lent a particular character to slavery there and sometimes eased its severity. On the other hand, the paternal interest that 19th century Southern owners attempted to cultivate for their slaves was absent in the North, for the most part, and the colonies there had to resort to laws to prevent masters from simply turning their slaves out in the streets when the slaves grew old or infirm. And across the North an evident pattern emerges: the more slaves lived in a place, the wider the controls, and the more brutal the punishments for transgressions.
Slavery was still very much alive, and in some places even expanding, in the northern colonies of British North America in the generation before the American Revolution. The spirit of liberty in 1776 and the rhetoric of rebellion against tyranny made many Americans conscious of the hypocrisy of claiming natural human rights for themselves, while at the same time denying them to Africans. Nonetheless, most of the newly free states managed to postpone dealing with the issue of slavery, citing the emergency of the war with Britain.
That war, however, proved to be the real liberator of the northern slaves. Wherever it marched, the British army gave freedom to any slave who escaped within its lines. This was sound military policy: it disrupted the economic system that was sustaining the Revolution. Since the North saw much longer, and more extensive, incursions by British troops, its slave population drained away at a higher rate than the South's. At the same time, the governments in northern American states began to offer financial incentives to slaveowners who freed their black men, if the emancipated slaves then served in the state regiments fighting the British.
When the Northern states gave up the last remnants of legal slavery, in the generation after the Revolution, their motives were a mix of piety, morality, and ethics; fear of a growing black population; practical economics; and the fact that the Revolutionary War had broken the Northern slaveowners' power and drained off much of the slave population. An exception was New Jersey, where the slave population actually increased during the war. Slavery lingered there until the Civil War, with the state reporting 236 slaves in 1850 and 18 as late as 1860.
The business of emancipation in the North amounted to the simple matters of, 1. determining how to compensate slaveowners for the few slaves they had left, and, 2. making sure newly freed slaves would be marginalized economically and politically in their home communities, and that nothing in the state's constitution would encourage fugitive slaves from elsewhere to settle there.
But in the generally conservative, local process of emancipating a small number of Northern slaves, the Northern leadership turned its back on slavery as a national problem.
State Mass. N.H. N.Y. Conn. R.I. Pa. N.J. Vt. European settlement 1620 1623 1624 1633 1636 1638 1620 1666 First record of slavery 1629? 1645 1626 1639 1652 1639 1626? c.1760? Official end of slavery 1783 1783 1799 1784 1784 1780 1804 1777 Actual end of slavery 1783 c.1845? 1827 1848 1842 c.1845? 1865 1777? Percent black 1790 1.4% 0.6% 7.6% 2.3% 6.3% 2.4% 7.7% 0.3% Percent black 1860 0.78% 0.15% 1.26% 1.87% 2.26% 1.95% 3.76% 0.22%
1. "RUN away on the 13th of September last from Abraham Lincoln of Springfield in the County of Chester, a Negro Man named Jack, about 30 Years of Age, low Stature, speaks little or no English, has a Scar by the Corner of one Eye, in the Form of a V, his Teeth notched, and the Top of one of his Fore Teeth broke; He had on when he went away an old Hat, a grey Jacket partly like a Sailor's Jacket. Whoever secures the said Negro and brings him to his Master, or to Mordecai Lincoln ... shall have Twenty Shillings Reward and reasonable Charges" [Pennsylvania Gazette, Oct. 15, 1730]. Mordecai Lincoln (1686-1736) was great-great-grandfather of President Lincoln.
2. Josiah H. Temple, History of Framingham, Massachusetts, Framingham, 1887, p.275.
3. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England 1780-1860, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998, preface, page xiii.
4. Stanley L. Engerman, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, "Slavery,” in Susan B. Carter, Scott S. Gartner, Michael Haines, Alan Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2004.
5. "Boston News Letter," May 1, 1732.
I have another idea...Lets have a Yankee AS*H*LE Month, for those that want to dishonor Southerners....
The difference between Yankees & Southerners, is that we believe it was ALL American blood. Northern & Southern.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.