Southern Shame, Southern Ghosts (CONFEDERATE FLAG BAN)

World Net Daily ^ | September 30, 2010 | Franklin Raff

[golux]

The University of Mississippi has terminated its mascot, "Colonel Reb." The mascot, an archetypal Southern gentleman with a hat, cane, and a little bow-tie, is of course racist.

Affable, bearded and jaunty, with a bright costume that cleverly foiled his dark history on the plantation, Col. Reb, when he was alive, looked rather like that other infamous slave-driver, Col. Sanders, whose inscrutable and permanent smile these days (in markets where he still shows his face) offers only a faint clue as to the fortunes he's made in his long, post-war masquerade as a peddler of fried chicken.

"We just want it to be over," said one Mississippi student on the subject of Col. Reb's execution.

Watch your back, Sanders.

There is of course nothing sacred about a football mascot or a corporate brand, and nothing particularly sad about the disappearance of either one, except for the fact that now there is nothing left of Southern symbolism to erase.

(SNIP)

And now we learn that what legions of Americans consider to be a transcendent symbol of extraordinary military leadership and valor, states' rights, indefatigable heroism, enduring pride and strength in the face of terrible odds and calamitous defeat – the Confederate battle flag – is now officially deemed a symbol of hate by the U.S. armed forces. Prospective members of all branches of the armed forces who happen to have a "Confederate flag" tattoo are automatically rejected.

(SNIP)

When they once again encounter their ancestors, which I believe they will, how will so many Americans account for their feeble treachery?

Maybe, like the Mississippi student, they will say: "We just wanted it to be over."

I wonder what some of those old heroes might say in reply....

(SNIP)

[Non-Sequitur]

You idiot, he was responding to Lincoln and his savagery...

Amazing that Lee, in an 1856 letter, knew what Lincoln was going to say years later.

...of course he thought slavery was more humane than this;

If slavery is more 'humane' than freedom then perhaps you would like to try it out?

[jessduntno]

ME: What’s the matter, truth got your tongue?

You: And what would you know about that?

ME: Your tongue? Like all of the members of any sex or species the thought of any knowledge of your tongue is repulsive.

You left out that psychotic general’s famous leeter;

On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”

Do you think the desire to kill the women and children are your favorite aspects of the great General’s conduct of the war? It was so necessary, too ... the Southern army being in position to pour into the north.

You are proud of this “toughness” aren’t you?

[mac_truck]

If anyone is soft on the concept of war its today's confederate flag waving neo-secessionist.

You need look no further than the constant bitch about bad ol' William Tecumsuh Sherman for evidence of that proclivity either.

You neo-rebs keep trying to cover up those liberaltarian roots but they still keep growing back.

[jessduntno]

“If slavery is more ‘humane’ than freedom then perhaps you would like to try it out?”

There were many thousands who declined to die in Liberia at “Honest Abe’s” invitation. Even though they were offered. The segregationists like Lincoln would far rather they die there, out of sight.

If it comes to MY chance to experience slavery, it would be dealt by a Marxist hand and I wouldn’t find out what it was like, I would be living in the South. I would fight; after it became clear, once again, that the Northern hypocrites and elites have decided to take over the entire country to make it the way they want it, on their time table, and to kill as many as possible.

[jessduntno]

One of the reasons Lincoln wanted to keep slavery from the territories was to protect the opportunities of free white workers (another was to decrease opportunities for miscegenation). Speaking at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1856, he said that the territories “should be kept open for the homes of free white people.” Even his cherished plan of sending freed blacks to Liberia was looked at from the economic vantage of free white labor. In his 1862 annual address to Congress, he said: “With deportation, even to a limited extent, enhanced wages to white labor is mathematically certain.”

Slavery not only diminished the white worker’s economic equality, it eroded his political equality. The constitutional provision by which the slave states counted blacks as three fifths of a person in the census meant that “three slaves are counted as two people” in Congress, with the result that “in all the free States no white man is the equal of the white man of the slave States.” Lincoln repeatedly argued against slavery as violating the interest of white workers. This is what Frederick Douglass meant in 1876, when he said of Lincoln:

He was preëminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men…. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race

[jessduntno]

“If all earthly power were given me,” said Lincoln in a speech delivered in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, “I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land.” After acknowledging that this plan’s “sudden execution is impossible,” he asked whether freed blacks should be made “politically and socially our equals?” “My own feelings will not admit of this,” he said, “and [even] if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not ... We can not, then, make them equals.”5

One of Lincoln’s most representative public statements on the question of racial relations was given in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857.6 In this address, he explained why he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have admitted Kansas into the Union as a slave state:

There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races ... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas ...

Racial separation, Lincoln went on to say, “must be effected by colonization” of the country’s blacks to a foreign land. “The enterprise is a difficult one,” he acknowledged,

but “where there is a will there is a way,” and what colonization needs most is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.

To affirm the humanity of blacks, Lincoln continued, was more likely to strengthen public sentiment on behalf of colonization than the Democrats’ efforts to “crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him ...” Resettlement (”colonization”) would not succeed, Lincoln seemed to argue, unless accompanied by humanitarian concern for blacks, and some respect for their rights and abilities. By apparently denying the black person’s humanity, supporters of slavery were laying the groundwork for “the indefinite outspreading of his bondage.” The Republican program of restricting slavery to where it presently existed, he said, had the long-range benefit of denying to slave holders an opportunity to sell their surplus bondsmen at high prices in new slave territories, and thus encouraged them to support a process of gradual emancipation involving resettlement of the excess outside of the country.

[jessduntno]

While it is true that Lincoln regarded slavery as an evil and harmful institution, it also true, as this paper will show, that he shared the conviction of most Americans of his time, and of many prominent statesmen before and after him, that blacks could not be assimilated into white society. He rejected the notion of social equality of the races, and held to the view that blacks should be resettled abroad. As President, he supported projects to remove blacks from the United States.

‘Military Necessity’

Lincoln himself specifically cited “military necessity” as his reason for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. After more than a year of combat, and in spite of its great advantages in industrial might and numbers, federal forces had still not succeeded in breaking the South. At this critical juncture of the war, the President apparently now hoped, a formal edict abolishing slavery in the Confederate states would strike a blow at the Confederacy’s ability to wage war by encouraging dissension, escapes, and possibly revolt among its large slave labor force.78

As the war progressed, black labor had become ever more critical in the hard-pressed Confederacy. Blacks planted, cultivated and harvested the food that they then transported to the Confederate armies. Blacks raised and butchered the beef, pigs and chicken used to feed the Confederate troops. They wove the cloth and knitted the socks to clothe the grey-uniformed soldiers. As Union armies invaded the South, tearing up railroads and demolishing bridges, free blacks and slaves repaired them. They toiled in the South’s factories, shipping yards, and mines. In 1862, the famous Tredegar iron works advertised for 1,000 slaves. In 1864, there were 4,301 blacks and 2,518 whites in the iron mines of the Confederate states east of the Mississippi.79

Blacks also served with the Confederate military forces as mechanics, teamsters, and common laborers. They cared for the sick and scrubbed the wounded in Confederate hospitals. Nearly all of the South’s military fortifications were constructed by black laborers. Most of the cooks in the Confederate army were slaves. Of the 400 workers at the Naval arsenal in Selma, Alabama, in 1865, 310 were blacks. Blacks served with crews of Confederate blockade-runners and stoked the firerooms of the South’s warships.80

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the legendary cavalry commander, said in a postwar interview: “When I entered the army I took 47 Negroes into the army with me, and 45 of them were surrendered with me ... These boys stayed with me, drove my teams, and better Confederates did not live.”81

On several occasions, Lincoln explained his reasons for issuing the Proclamation. On September 13, 1862, the day after the preliminary proclamation was issued, Lincoln met with a delegation of pro-abolitionist Christian ministers, and told them bluntly: “Understand, I raise no objections against it [slavery] on legal or constitutional grounds ... I view the matter [emancipation] as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.”82

To Salmon Chase, his Treasury Secretary, the President justified the Proclamations’s limits: “The original [preliminary] proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification, except as a military measure,” he explained. “The exceptions were made because the military necessity did not apply to the exempted localities. Nor does that necessity apply to them now any more than it did then.”83

[wardaddy]

. It's hard not to draw the conclusion that you don't want to accept that a lot of people in the South aren't that enthusiastic about Confederate mythology and symbols.

that is untrue at least amongst whites and any hesitation a few libs might have is because they have been browbeaten by the same forces at play here

i hope you are happy but meanwhile black culture just gets worse and is taking white trash with it X...some progress ...just like all that other "racial healing" I've been dealing with for nearly 50 years now as things get more screwed up and dangerous for my kindand worse our head in the sand views on race have crippled us on every other major issue facing us now

but by all means...just like President Bro...let's worry about Southern symbols and how they have become so offensive and ignore illegitimacy, black corruption and crime and so forth.

you guys do what you do here because you like the getback, it kills you that southern whites are the backbone of social conservatism and it detracts from the real issues and I think some...maybe not you...enjoy calling folks here racist

now what sort of conservative goes to a right wing site to live to smear folks as bigot or racist?

you tell me....I already know why and gave my two bits earlier...ya

man if folks ever throw off the yoke of racial redress in our culture than "we will indeed be free at last...good God almighty free at last"

till then it's no better than a poll tax and nightriders with lawyers

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

So you agree with Lee that slavery was the best thing for black people, right?

[jessduntno]

About as much as you agree with “Honest” Abe that sending thousands of people you hate into an inhospitable land, most likely to die, was a good idea. The death rate was terribly high. The living (for those that could survive) was far more miserable than any plantation.

By the way, lest you continue to make the mistake of thinking that the South was not in sympathy with “Honest” Abe;

For many years the American Colonization Society (boostered by “Honest” Abe and his hero, tried to persuade the United States Congress to appropriate funds to send colonists to Liberia. Although Henry Clay led the campaign, it failed. The society did, however, succeed in its appeals to some state legislatures. In 1850, Virginia set aside $30,000 annually for five years to aid and support emigration. In its Thirty-Fourth Annual Report, the society acclaimed the news as “a great Moral demonstration of the propriety and necessity of state action!” During the 1850s, the society also received several thousand dollars from the New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Maryland legislatures.

[Act by State of Virginia making appropriations for removal of free persons of color to Liberia], 1850 American Colonization Society

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

So how do you do this? Do you just do a search on "Lincoln 1856" and then cut and paste a Garry Wills article without attribution?

Let's look at the Frederick Douglass speech, though. Here's what he also said:

His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

Nice. Now you’re posting large parts of articles from the Holocaust denial IHR site. I guess that it’s all of a piece with you.

[Non-Sequitur]

You left out that psychotic general’s famous leeter;

He had beeter quotes than that. For example: "My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."

He was right, too.

Do you think the desire to kill the women and children are your favorite aspects of the great General’s conduct of the war? It was so necessary, too ... the Southern army being in position to pour into the north.

Actually as Sherman was campaigning in Georgia the rebel army was headed the other way, towards the North, where Hood would slaughter it at Franklin.

You are proud of this “toughness” aren’t you?

Indeed.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

So just to be clear, your position is that sending freed blacks to Liberia was something akin to savage racism, right?

[Non-Sequitur]

There were many thousands who declined to die in Liberia at “Honest Abe’s” invitation. Even though they were offered. The segregationists like Lincoln would far rather they die there, out of sight.

So what you are saying is that in your view slavery was much better than freedom. And freedom in the U.S. - where they could never be citizens, had no rights that a white man was bound to respect, and were faced with the worst kind of racism in the North and even worse racism in the South - was preferable to freedom in Liberia - where they could carve out their own life free from the oppression they faced in the U.S.

You, sir, are an idiot.

If it comes to MY chance to experience slavery, it would be dealt by a Marxist hand and I wouldn’t find out what it was like, I would be living in the South. I would fight; after it became clear, once again, that the Northern hypocrites and elites have decided to take over the entire country to make it the way they want it, on their time table, and to kill as many as possible.

Sure you would.

[Non-Sequitur]

Nice cut-and-paste. Next time take out the footnote numbers and people might think you wrote it. Based on the content, however, they'll never mistakenly conclude you know what you're talking about.

[rockrr]

Grant purchased his slave for one reason, and one reason alone - to manumit him. He never rented that slave out. It was a different slave that he engaged elsewhere on a more casual basis and is reputed to have rented out.

You are conflating the slaves that he was overseer to for his FIl to a later time.

REL did own slaves in the same way that Grant did - by virtue of a family association. At least Grant didn’t have *his* slaves flogged to make an example of them.

[Non-Sequitur]

This is what Frederick Douglass meant in 1876, when he said of Lincoln...

What do you think Douglass meant a few lines later when he said this?

"When, therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw the independence of the black republic of Haiti, the special object of slave-holding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her minister, a colored gentleman, duly received here in the city of Washington; under his rule we saw the internal slave-trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave trade, and the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer; under his rule, assisted by the greatest captain of our age, and his inspiration, we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds; under his rule, and in the fullness of time, we saw Abraham Lincoln, after giving the slave-holders three months' grace in which to save their hateful slave system, penning the immortal paper, which, though special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long, we saw all this and more."

Or this in closing?

"Fellow-citizens, I end, as I began, with congratulations. We have done a good work for our race today. In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator, we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us; we have been fastening ourselves to a name and fame imperishable and immortal; we have also been defending ourselves from a blighting scandal. When now it shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors; when the foul reproach of ingratitude is hurled at us, and it is attempted to scourge us beyond the range of human brotherhood, we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln."

[Non-Sequitur]

About as much as you agree with “Honest” Abe that sending thousands of people you hate into an inhospitable land, most likely to die, was a good idea. The death rate was terribly high. The living (for those that could survive) was far more miserable than any plantation.

If everyone had felt that it was a bad idea to send people into an inhospitable land, where a high death rate killed many, then the North American continent would never have been settled by Europeans. Good thing for us that some people believed the risks were worth taking, huh?

[rockrr]

jessduntno: You left out that psychotic general’s famous leeter;

Non-Sequitur: He had beeter quotes than that.

OK, no fair to be using secret code...;-)