Posted on 03/28/2008 12:15:10 PM PDT by cowboyway
Over the last few months, celebrations for Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday have drawn attention to the Kentucky native's life and his legacy as president. But the 200-year anniversary of another Kentucky president's birth, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, is receiving mixed reviews.
"I'll say it this way - winners write history," said Ron Bryant, a Lexington historian writing a book on Davis. "We need heroes, we need villains. Lincoln became a hero and Davis a villain."
Davis was born in what is now Todd County, Ky., in 1808, one year before Lincoln. Davis served as the only president of the 11 southern states that seceded from the Union between 1861 and 1865. The Confederate States of America surrendered in 1865, and Davis was locked in prison the same year.
Despite being denounced by many civil rights groups, signs of Davis' legacy can still be found throughout the state.
In Southwest Kentucky, a structure resembling the Washington Monument stands in memory of Davis. At 351 feet tall, the Jefferson Davis Monument is the fourth largest freestanding obelisk in the world, according to Kentucky State Parks.
Although Kentucky never seceded from the Union, a statue of Davis stands in the rotunda in the state's Capitol building.
"The Civil War is still very much alive in many places," said Cliff Howard, a Jefferson Davis impersonator. "Kentucky was on both sides of the fence. It still is."
Having heard of Kentucky's reputation for "being a little backward," integrated strategic communications senior James Davidson Jr. was not surprised about Davis' statue in the Capitol building.
Davidson, first-vice president of UK's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said a statue of Davis leaves a bad impression.
"What is Frankfort saying to the rest of Kentucky with it being there?" Davidson said. "I respect everyone's heritage and Southern tradition, but given the history, I think it shouldn't be there."
The statue of Davis, installed in 1936, is one of five statues in the Capitol building. Lincoln is the largest in the center, and Davis stands in the corner behind his right shoulder. Former Kentucky Congressman Henry Clay, physician and drafter of the state constitution Ephraim McDowell and former Vice President Alben Barkley also stand in the rotunda.
The last time Davis' statue came into debate was 2003, when a coalition of African-American groups protested its presence in the Capitol building. A state advisory committee left the issue up to former Gov. Ernie Fletcher, who took no action during his term.
Gov. Steve Beshear does not plan to remove the statue because Davis is a historical figure who represents part of Kentucky's cultural history, a spokeswoman said.
Student Government President Nick Phelps said his feelings on the statue in the Capitol building resembled how he felt during a controversy two years ago about a 46-foot mural in Memorial Hall depicting the history of Lexington and its surrounding area. The mural, which some said stereotyped American Indians and blacks, was not removed.
"I was not in support of removing the mural, so I would not support removing Jefferson Davis," Phelps said. "I don't think we should remove history. I think it removes the question, 'Who is he?' "
Many students might ask the same question about Davis.
In Kentucky, the Civil War is part of the middle school curriculum. Unless students take an advanced placement history course in high school, that's usually the last time they focus on 19th century American history, said Nayasha Owens-Morton, a U.S. history and African-American history teacher at Bryan Station Traditional High School.
William Campbell has taught a class on Lincoln at UK for about 10 years as an English and honors professor. Students going into his class know little about the confederate president, he said.
"About Jefferson Davis, Kentuckians tend to know that he was from our state, that there's a memorial dedicated to him somewhere in the state, and that he was the president of the Confederacy," Campbell said. "Of Lincoln's writings, most have read only the Gettysburg Address. Of Davis's writings, most have read nothing."
Denial of facts do not change the facts, in other words, just because Lincoln said that the South couldn't secede doesn't mean that they didn't secede.
But the so-called Confederacy did invade territory that, by its own admission, it had no sovereign jurisdiction over. Namely Pennsylvania.
That's called War; a war that was brought on by disHonest Abe for political purposes. I'm sure that you know that the stratagem behind Lee's invasion was to bring an end to Lincoln's illegal war.
What do you mean by the "so-called Confederacy"? Is this another example of denial?
The South was being financially squeezed by the north and the threat of the sudden removal of it's labor force spelled complete financial ruin.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact and if you are indeed 'wideawake', then you need to wrap your mind around that.
No, but apparently the CSA was under this impression, which is why they chose to start the shooting by attacking a federal installation that had already stated it would be forced to surrender in a few days anyway.
Davis knew exactly what he was doing at Sumter. The CSA, at the time, consisted of 7 states, all in the Deep South and almost exclusively agricultural. There was no way this was a viable nation.
The CSA needed at least some, hopefully all, of the other 8 slave states to be able to withstand a confrontation with the Union. There were strong pro-Union movements in each of them, and in the days before polling nobody really knew what public opinion was.
Davis ordered the shooting to start as a way of forcing these states to pick a side. If all went with the CSA, secession would have succeeded, as even Lincoln later agreed.
If all stayed with the Union, the war would have been over quickly and relatively bloodlessly. In fact, it's likely some of the seceded states would have chickened out and "unseceded," as other southern states abandoned SC during its earlier confrontation with Jackson.
As it happened, four slave states (MO, KY, MD, DE) eventually stayed in the USA; three joined the CSA (AR, NC, TN) and one (VA) split in two.
This did not give the CSA enough resources to be able to win, but it gave it enough to fight bloodily for 4 years, with over 600k Americans being killed.
On news being received of the fighting at Sumter, VA immediately seceded, despite the convention having rejected secession a couple days before. Please note that VA received news of an attack by the CSA on the USA, not the other way around. So Davis' ploy succeeded.
There was no threat whatsoever of a "sudden removal of it's labor force." Lincoln and the Republican platform were both very clear that there was no constitutional right to interfere in slavery within a state. Only the expansion of slavery was threatened. The accepted theory on both sides was that this would cause the eventual death of slavery, but it certainly wouldn't be sudden.
To eliminate slavery throughout the nation would require ratification by 3/4 of the states. Since 15 of the 34 states were slave states, this was unlikely, to put it mildly.
I’m curious.
You seem to recognize that the colonies in 1776 and the South in 1860 had the right to rebel when they thought their liberties were threatened.
Do you accept that southern slaves, whose human rights actually were being trampled, not just threatened, had a similar right, indeed duty, to use violence against their oppressors? If not, why not?
To take it another step, did others have the right to fight alongside the slaves in defense of their human rights, as the French fought alongside the American revolutionists? IOW, was John Brown’s attempted insurrection, while hare-brained and incompetent, a thoroughly moral enterprise? If not, why not?
LOL
The British could have said that about the 13 colonies. That is just a BS statement.
Davis ordered the shooting to start as a way of forcing these states to pick a side.
Lincoln ordered the reinforcement of Ft. Sumter to instigate action from the South in order to justify his invasion.
If that's true then nothing ever gets done. Maybe that's a good thing much of the time, but there are times when absolute inactivity in government can make real problems. Compromise gets a bad name until you get someone like Davis in power.
BTW, from the original article:
In Kentucky, the Civil War is part of the middle school curriculum. Unless students take an advanced placement history course in high school, that's usually the last time they focus on 19th century American history, said Nayasha Owens-Morton, a U.S. history and African-American history teacher at Bryan Station Traditional High School.
Unbelievable if true.
That 7 agrcultural states would be heavily outnumbered and outgunned in any confrontation with 27 increasingly industrialized states is a BS statement? LOL
The British could have said that about the 13 colonies.
The new USA didn't share an undefended and indeed indefensible border of well over 1000 miles with a hostile and much more powerful nation.
It is of course true that Lincoln and Davis were playing chicken over the 8 unseceded slave states. Davis blinked by choosing to fire the first shot. Lincoln won that round.
The Buchanan administration, heavily dominated by southerners and doughfaces, apparently made some sort of understanding with SC in December, although exactly what this understanding was is disputed.
When Lincoln, the legally elected president, took office, he was not bound by any such informal agreement. He had the perfect right to set his own policy.
He nevertheless communicated with SC to let them know that he would attempt to introduce only food and other supplies into the fort, not reinforce it for military purposes.
The South's economic problems were due to the North's blockade of Southern ports which stopped cotton exports. The blockade by the North was in fact a recognition of the Confederacy as a separate nation. By international agreements, blockades could only be between separate countries. The North belatedly recognized this in 1865 and tried to recast the blockade as the closing of Southern ports instead of a blockade enforced by gunships.
They [the North] were importing war materiel, for the most part ...
Are you making this up as you go? For a tabulation of the largest import items of the North see http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1981097/posts?page=190#190. And for customs income and the effect of inflation see http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1981097/posts?page=206#206.
In fact, total revenues, using only Union resources, increased by 10 to 20 times over those from the entire country in 1860.
It's magic. At that rate of increase, the North would have amassed the entire wealth of the globe by the 1870s.
You run the numbers. By the end of the war, the Union had spent $6B on the war, in 4 years.
Total federal budget for 1860 was $60M, 1% of the amount spent on the war over four years.
You are correct about the misuse of the term blockade by the Union.
I agree that I was mistaken about the products being imported.
I should also mention that about 2/3 of Union war expenditures were financed by borrowing. They were not all paid out of current revenues, which may have been implied in some of my earlier posts.
Nevertheless, the Union was spending over $2M/day by the end of the war. This amount was greatly increased over time by pensions and interest on the loans, etc.
So you're saying that a people can't form a 'viable' government unless they're able to kill all their enemies? By your definition, countries like Ireland shouldn't be allowed to exist because they're 'heavily outnumbered and outgunned'. Like I said, a BS statement.
The new USA didn't share an undefended and indeed indefensible border of well over 1000 miles with a hostile and much more powerful nation.
But the new Confederacy did share a 1000 mile border with a hostile neighbor. You're exactly right.
He nevertheless communicated with SC to let them know that he would attempt to introduce only food and other supplies into the fort, not reinforce it for military purposes.
If Lincoln was so diligent in communicating with SC, why didn't he communicate with Major Anderson?
Because the Confederates shot at any ship that approached the fort? It's not like Lincoln had the option of contacting Anderson by email or ham radio.
Per my comments about a hostile border. Surely you will agree that even had secession been carried out peacefully there would have been numerous occasions for future conflict.
Who gets the territories?
A major reason for southern anger was failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Would recovering slaves somehow be easier from a foreign country than from a neighboring state?
Would Virginia, dragging the rest of the Confederacy behind, attempt to recapture West Virginia?
Would the Confederacy allow displaced Missourians or Kentuckians to raid into their home states, "occupied" by the federals?
POed by the Union, would the CSA close the Mississippi to Union traffic? Would they be tempted to place tariffs on goods being imported up the Missippi to Illinois?
As Lincoln said, we could NOT physically separate. So the question becomes: Is it easier to remain married, or go through a divorce with all it bitterness and then still live together in the same house?
The illegal attempt by the so-called Confederacy to secede from the Union failed.
That's called War; a war that was brought on by disHonest Abe for political purposes.
The war was brought on by the so-called Confederacy. They began the rebellion. Their illegal forces mobilized before the Union mobilized. They initiated hostilities as well.
I'm sure that you know that the stratagem behind Lee's invasion was to bring an end to Lincoln's illegal war.
At this point you are speaking like a member of an 1860's Code Pink. There was nothing illegal at all about the President's constitutionally authorized prerogative of putting down insurrection.
Lee's strategy in invading Pennsylvania was to try to defeat the legitimate army of the nation he betrayed. However, Lee was a wise man and he knew that even had he succeeded in encircling Washington DC, the government would have evacuated the capital by means of its superior Navy and lived to fight on and crush the insurrection.
What do you mean by the "so-called Confederacy"? Is this another example of denial?
If you built a wall around your house, declared your property the "Sovereign Republic Of Cowboyway", shot and killed a neighbor who was near your property and then engaged in a three-year standoff with the police before you emerged starving and filthy from your basement, would it be denial to refer to your little project as a so-called Republic, or would it be denial to pretend that it really was one?
No, it was not.
That's a common myth retailed today by people who want to pretend that the so-called Confederacy was about more than keeping human beings as property.
the threat of the sudden removal of it's labor force spelled complete financial ruin.
There was never any question of removing any labor force.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact and if you are indeed 'wideawake', then you need to wrap your mind around that.
The Southern section of the country was not on the verge of death, so any reference to a suicide pact is ridiculous. As it turned out, the effects on the South of the insurrection the South started were far more brutal than any legislation President Lincoln - with a 10 vote Democrat majority Senate and a Republican minority House - could ever have seen enacted during his first term.
And yet, the South is still around.
So clearly following the Constitution in 1860 would not have been suicide for the Southern section.
It wasn't a matter of choosing life over suicide, it was a matter of a gang of crybabies taking their marbles and going home.
Spare us the victimology.
That's one helluva lame excuse. On the one hand, you blame Davis, who was in Montgomery, AL for the attack on Sumter but excuse Lincoln, who was in DC (about the same distance to Sumter as Montgomery) for not communicating his agreement with SC to Anderson. Just lame.
Surely you will agree that even had secession been carried out peacefully there would have been numerous occasions for future conflict.
Here's the dirty little secret: There's always gonna be conflict and war.
As Lincoln said, we could NOT physically separate.
That's the kinda of language that just boggles the mind. You're saying that because of geographical reasons, we're perpetually bound regardless of circumstances. That's narrow minded and foolish and I hope you don't intend to take me down with you if there is a total democrat/socialist/communist takeover because of geography.
Davis was in direct telegraphic communication with Beauregard, or was if he wanted to be. That’s almost as efficient a method of communication as any we have today.
Meanwhile, Anderson was in a beseiged fort, all communication cut off by surrounding forces.
Why you think physical distance is relevant is beyond me.
Later in the war Confederates were sometimes surrounded and beseiged. Davis probably found it difficult to communicate with Pemberton at Vicksburg.
As to inability to actually separate, by your own posts, you agree that southern slaveowners were angry with northerners who helped their slave escape despite the Fugitive Slave Act. Please explain how this problem would be more efficiently handled without violence over an international than a state boundary.
You want to take a crack at answering my questions in post 45?
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