Posted on 05/12/2010 11:50:16 AM PDT by Davy Buck
"General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America. . ."
(Excerpt) Read more at oldvirginiablog.blogspot.com ...
Agreed...IT DIDN’T WORK!!!!
I often think, I would LOVE to see a great movie done about George Washington. I think he is one of the most amazing men who ever lived, and you couldn’t get a pipsqueak to play THAT part. (I always thought Liam Neeson would be perfect to play that part, he is a big guy, has the same kind of bone structure in his face and those piercing gray-blue eyes, same as Washington. There was a pretty decent movie a few years back where Washington was played by Jeff Daniels in “The Crossing”, and I have to say...I thought he did a fine job.
But NO MATTER how hard I tried to see him as General George Washington, I kept seeing Jim Carrey beside him. I just couldn’t do it...
Washington was amazing. While it is true that he never threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, he DID throw a stone over the Natural Bridge in VA, which is something like 215 feet to the bottom of the arch (I think) which is pretty impressive!
You have to see "Gods and Generals." Robert Duvall took the role over from Sheen, and has the kind of presence you would expect from Lee. Duvall is in fact, a distant descendant of Lee.
As a bit of trivia, Les Kinsolving played General Barksdale in the movie, a distant ancestor of his.
Lee is not at all comparable to the Confederate leaders. Robert E. Lee was always opposed to slavery and freed his slaves long before the war. He was strongly opposed to secession, pointing out that the Confederate movement was an attempted revolution against the Revolution of 1776. He only agreed to fight for Virginia after she seceded. He was constantly at odds with the slavemaster Confederate leaders during the war and was never allowed to command more than his own Army of Northern Virginia until the final weeks of the war.
Actually, no. The South attempted to leave belligerantly. They fired first and got more than they bargained for.
Some Virginians stayed with the Union army -- George Thomas and Philip Cooke to name two. Most felt that their duty was to protect their homes and family.
For me, there is honor on both sides... anguished decisions on both sides... men of valor on both sides... men of integrity on both sides...
What intriques me the most about the war are the quality of these men...on both sides.
No... I think we can all agree that you would benefit from a better education on the subject.
Grant is another amazing guy. A complete, total failure living in threadbare clothes on skid row one day, then within a pretty short time, commanding an army.
He was an impressive guy, and knew how to lead. I think having lived on the margins for a while as a failure, he didn’t care much for the trappings of power. He was, by all accounts, a pretty unassuming guy.
Doing fine.
Slavery was dying out in the civilized world at that time anyway
I am NOT arguing in favor of slavery- you knee-jerkers just relax.
I am saying remove slavery from the equation and NOW ask yourself- Does the federal government have to ability to tell states what they can do?
If, instead of slavery, the south was fighting to prevent the federal government from forcing them to ..oh, I dunno..buy health insurance, for example.
Now whose side are you on? All the states at the time agreed to join the US union with the expectation they could withdraw if they disliked what the federal govt was doing
Yeah, the more I read about Grant, the more I like him.
Wilson was a proto socialist piece of crap...he set the stage for Marxist FDR.
This sounds like communist garbage/liberalism. Not even going to waste one more second with this.
Seen it!
Robert Duvall is one of my all time favorites! One of my FAVORITE movies is “Open Range”, where he raises a shot glass up and toasts a saloon of hostile people with the salutation:
“Good Health to them who has it comin’.”
Heh, my good friend veeram has modified that toast to refer to various liberals, terrorists and other enemies of the US: “A Good Beatin’ to them who has it comin’.”
A true American is Robert Duvall...
Funny...tempers STILL run hot over the Civil War.
As someone who was born in VA, raised around the world as a military brat, and came of age as a Yankee, I never thought much about the Civil War past the historical dates, battles and so on.
When I went in the US Navy, for the first time in my life I was called “Damn Yankee”!
That just FLOORED me! I had no idea.
Let’s keep it civil here folks, so we don’t have a war...:)
Daniels made a great Joshua Chamberlain in Gettysburg and Gods and Generals, but I agree...there was something slightly lacking in his Washington.
The civility boat on Civil War threads sailed a long time ago...
Me too. I always had an impression of him as a somewhat insensitive, uncaring, bloodthirsty commander who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the men he was sending across a field, and an incompetent politician who could barely get out of his own way.
I read several books about him, as well as his memoirs, and I came out with a very different impression of the man.
In truth, by all accounts he kept his suffering over the fate of his troops to himself as what he saw as a necessary role of leadership, and his failings as a politician were not that he was corrupt and a dimwit, but that he was entirely too trusting of those around him.
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