[Rebeleye]

A friend of mine told me that, whenever he drives by the statue of Civil War general Nathan Forrest on Interstate 65, he always salutes it. With his middle finger.

Nathan Forrest, as you'll recall, is the Confederate ''hero'' who founded the Ku Klux Klan.

Today, 137 years after the last shot was fired in the Civil War, the enemy regroups. Under pressure from students, Vanderbilt University dropped the word ''Confederate'' from the name of its ''Confederate Memorial Hall.'' The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which contributed $50,000 towards the construction of the building, promptly sued Vanderbilt to get their money back.

Just who are the Daughters of the Confederacy? In 1931, Nashville Chapter No. 1 ''voted to see that the last meeting place of the Ku Klux Klan in Nashville … [was] suitably marked.'' In 1944 and 1966, the UDC's minutes record their opposition to integration. More recently, a Murfreesboro woman whose family belongs to the UDC wrote me to say that Martin Luther King's ''only contribution [was] to stir-up more prejudice and being killed.''

Lest we forget, the Confederacy aimed to destroy the United States. Every Confederate soldier, by the mores of his age and ours, deserved not a hallowed resting place at the end of his days but a reservation at the end of the gallows. The UDC honors traitors.

''But the war was not about slavery,'' they whine. ''It was about states' rights.'' But the ''right'' Confederates sought to defend was the right to murder, rape, and torture millions of Africans, with impunity.

Here is how one slave owner exercised his ''rights'': ''Through a period of four months, including the latter stages of pregnancy, delivery, and recent recovery therefrom … he beat [his slave] with clubs, iron chains and other deadly weapons time after time, burnt her, inflicted stripes over and often, with scourges.''

The Confederacy's own vice president, Alexander Stephens, declared that the Confederacy ''rests upon the great truth that the negro is not the equal of the white man, that slavery — the subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.''

Today's Confederates, who deny that the war was about slavery, are the new holocaust revisionists.

Black Americans and white Europeans object to the statue of a 19th century Hitler standing in public view off an interstate highway. It and the Confederate flags surrounding it represent nothing less than a death threat against scores of millions of people of color. That monument must go. Not only because it's racist and violent but also because it's just plain ugly.

The issue is not black vs. white.

The mostly white Green Party of the United States has issued a statement supporting Vanderbilt's decision. Southerners black and white recoil with disgust when the UDC claims that it alone represents ''Southern heritage.''

Here in Nashville, there are plans to investigate the source of the UDC's funds. If researchers can trace them back to slavery, they will demand that reparations be paid to the true children of the Confederacy — the descendants of the slaves — before one cent is paid by Vanderbilt back to the UDC.

Indeed, the race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the Confederacy was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed and their lands given to the landless freed slaves.

The Daughters of the Confederacy say we must remember their dead. And I agree: Let us remember the cruelty inflicted upon helpless women and children by cowards masquerading as civilized men.

The tyranny and evil they visited upon millions must never be forgotten.

[moyden]

The professor is right. Slavery was a hideous evil.

[17th Miss Regt]

Lest we forget, the Confederacy aimed to destroy the United States.

Hogwash. The Confederate states wanted to leave the Union and live in peace with them. The only way he can say this is if he means that secession on the part of any state would destroy the Union. That is quite a stretch. If he is saying that the Confedarcy intended to conquer the Union and re-establish slavery everywhere, he is smoking some real good stuff, or is simply a deluded liberal. Probably both.

[Pushi]

This does not even rate an intelligent reply.

[moyden]

I don't agree with everything the professor said. Some of it is ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than idiots who cling to a culture from 150 years ago for their "identity".

Get over it, already. Slavery was a hideous evil.

[wastoute]

This guys is hallucinating! Which armies invaded which states? The Federal Armies made war in the southern states, not vice versa. Bobbie Lee tried to go north one time and was sent home at Gettysburg (at the loss of one of my ancestors). Joseph Stoutenger was killed in the first day of fighting with the 147th New York Volunteers.

[rogerthedodger]

I don't even know where to begin. This comes from someone with a doctoral degree? The notion that the Confederacy sought to destroy the United States is insane, for one. The thought that Confederate soldiers were traitors is equally worthy of ridicule, and in truth, personally insulting to me and others who are descended from brave men who sacrificed for their families and homes.

[Campion]

Not only because it's racist and violent but also because it's just plain ugly.

Whatever else he got wrong, he got this one right. That statue is ugly as sin. Why not put up a (good quality!) statue of Pat Cleburne, who was not a racist and actually has the distinction of paying the ultimate price for his Rebel sympathies a few miles south of the site in question ... instead of Forrest, who survived the war, became filthy rich and founded a disgraceful organization.

[rwfok]

Farley's Homepage

[arly]

Is this clown any relation to the deceased Chris Farley?...
if so it's pretty strange having two comedians in the same family!
If I ever have to go to war I hope and pray that I have about a half dozen men of Nathan Bedford Forrest's courage and fight in the same fox hole!

[The Iguana]

Every Confederate soldier, by the mores of his age and ours, deserved not a hallowed resting place at the end of his days but a reservation at the end of the gallows.

That certainly would have gotten Reconstruction off to a positive start. (/sarcasm off)

Not that there weren't some Radical Republicans (i.e., Ben Wade) who were advocating policies along these lines. Fortunately for the country, they did not get their way.

Harrassing the UDC makes about as much sense as current neo-confederate efforts to glorify the CSA.

I wonder what that $50,000 comes to in 2002 dollars?

[Dionysius]

The revisionist ravings of yet another tenured radical. I swear, they can't even drive by a statue without making it part of their agenda. Flipping it the bird is pitifully sophomoric and defines their inellectual status.

[don-o]

Lest we forget, the Confederacy aimed to destroy the United States.

That's all the reading it takes to know that yet another Clymer is in print.

[WhiskeyPapa]

There's no good side to the CSA.

Walt

[WhiskeyPapa]

Today's Confederates, who deny that the war was about slavery, are the new holocaust revisionists.

That's a valid point. There's a passel of 'em on FR, too.

Walt

[Ohioan]

This rant sounds like Communism, pure and simple. No one rooted in the American tradition would make some of the statements included in it.

As for the U.D.C., I refer to them specifically as one of the good and decent organizations, in contrast to the hatemongers, active in modern day America. (See How To Recognize The Bigot In The Argument.)

Men of good will can debate the question of secession. But only one with hate in his heart would so impugn the honor and motives of so many fine Americans. It is not treason to have a different understanding and belief as to the permanency of an institution, or as to where primary allegiance lies.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[usadave]

It and the Confederate flags surrounding it represent nothing less than a death threat against scores of millions of people of color.

LOL! It takes quite an imagination to come up with a line like that.

[Junior]

Lest we forget, the Confederacy aimed to destroy the United States.

Beep. Circle takes the square. The United States would have gone on even if the Confederacy had been allowed to go its merry way. This writer is being purposefully disingenuous, which is par for the course for certain hateful Yankees.

[ZULU]

"Indeed, the race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the Confederacy was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed and their lands given to the landless freed slaves."

No. The race problems that wrack America today are due to the hostility engendered between white southerners and blacks AFTER the Civil War by the conscienceless employment of freed black slaves as weapons of intimidation by the Radical Republicans against the defeated South.

This article is rife with the kinds of half-truths, lies, and vicious innuendos which are the hallmarks of liberal political thinking.

Less than 10% of all Southerners were slave-holders. The overwhelming number of Confederates fought the Union forces because an outside military force, i.e. the "Union" army, invaded their country.

Many conservatives today would hardly consider Mr. King a paragon of loyalty or virtue. His connections with communist elements are as legendary as his affairs with women besides his wife. The fact that the federal files on this man have been sealed says a lot. He hardly deserves a national holiday. Crispus Attucks, or some of the black officers who died at Battery Wagner are more disserving of that honor than he ever will be.

The New England states threatened seccession before the War of 1812. The fact is, most people back then considered their primary loyalties to thier home state, rather than to the Union. The organization of Union troops along state lines rather than federal ones reflects this.

Abraham Lincoln deliberately sought to create an incident at Fort Sumter. Unforunately, South Carolina took the bait. Lincoln then further aggrevated the situation by calling for volunteer troops from the South to oppress fellow Southerners.

Slavey was a great eveil, true, but it would have died out within a few generations without a civil war. At that time only the U.S. and Brazil (and of course the Islamic states as they still do), permitted slavery. Internationally it was a dying institution and would have died a natural death in the South years before had not a Yankee, Eli Whitney, invented the Cotton Gin.

The very same Northern Industrialist who had earned their first dollars in the slave trade, and who allowed their foreign laborers to live a life of poverty and squalor few slaveholders in the south would have imposed on their own slaves, were the loudest in condemning the South.

Interesting that their consciences were awakened to the evils of slavery only AFTER they longer could derive any profit from that institution.

As for the generals and men in the ranks who fought on BOTH sides of that conflict, victims of their age and the conscienceless politicians who engineered that conflict, they are ALL heros who died fighting for their country and they ALL merit our respect and honor.

[Sloth]

There is some truth in this article, but it is buried amidst so much Barbra Streisand that it's essentially worthless.

[reg45]

It and the Confederate flags surrounding it represent nothing less than a death threat against scores of millions of people of color.

What hogwash! The Southern, slave owning, aristocracy had no desire to eliminate their unpaid working class. What would they have done without them? Sadly, slavery was one of the foundations of ante-bellum society in the South.