Posted on 04/28/2019 5:38:51 PM PDT by ameribbean expat
While many have began criticizing the dead former Confederate leader, in 1975 the Senate, which included freshman Democratic Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, unanimously approved the reinstatement of General Robert E. Lee’s citizenship to the U.S.
*****
Lee died in 1870 without citizenship.
Independent Virginia Sen. Harry F. Byrd spearheaded the push for reinstating Lee’s citizenship posthumously, and it passed through both chambers after the House, voting 407 to 10 in favor of the reinstatement on July 23, 1975.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
But...but Trump farted! Impeach!!!
Biden actually did something right.
History is inconvenient to socialists. Exposes them.
Its why they are so possessed to destroy those certain unflattering elements of it.
And he used Charlottesville, an effort to stop Lee’s statue from being torn down, as a campaign launch. Delicious irony.
Lee has more honor and respect in his little finger than creepy Joe has in his entire body.
I believe, "Independent Virginia Sen. Harry F. Byrd" was a lifelong Democrat!
But that was before the Democrats got Woke....
1975 was before PC Revisionism overtook Academia.
General Robert E. Lee's Parole and Citizenship:
"On May 29, 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon to persons who had participated in the rebellion against the United States. There were fourteen excepted classes, though, and members of those classes had to make special application to the President.
"Lee sent an application to Grant and wrote to President Johnson on June 13, 1865:
""Being excluded from the provisions of amnesty & pardon contained in the proclamation of the 29th Ulto; I hereby apply for the benefits, & full restoration of all rights & privileges extended to those included in its terms. I graduated at the Mil. Academy at West Point in June 1829. Resigned from the U.S. Army April '61. Was a General in the Confederate Army, & included in the surrender of the Army of N. Va. 9 April '65."
"On October 2, 1865, the same day that Lee was inaugurated as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, he signed his Amnesty Oath, thereby complying fully with the provision of Johnson's proclamation. But Lee was not pardoned, nor was his citizenship restored. And the fact that he had submitted an amnesty oath at all was soon lost to history.
"More than a hundred years later, in 1970, an archivist at the National Archives discovered Lee's Amnesty Oath among State Department records (reported in Prologue, Winter 1970). Apparently Secretary of State William H. Seward had given Lee's application to a friend as a souvenir, and the State Department had pigeonholed the oath.
"In 1975, Lee's full rights of citizenship were posthumously restored by a joint congressional resolution effective June 13, 1865.
"At the August 5, 1975, signing ceremony, President Gerald R. Ford acknowledged the discovery of Lee's Oath of Allegiance in the National Archives and remarked: "General Lee's character has been an example to succeeding generations, making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride."
This article is chronologically all over the place. Lee's citizenship was restored in 1975 because archivists found it wasn't in 1865. The 1975 vote was to symbolically correct a historical error. It had nothing and could not have anything to do with Charlottesville or Trump over 40 years later.
Dems get to say they’ve “evolved” since then.
“evolved” is the great cure all for dems when it comes to the past.
Lee did more to reunite the Union an just about anyone else. Many opponents from the Civil War became the best of friends afterwards.
His character has been subjected to that ordeal, and who can point to any spot upon it? His clear, sound judgment, personal courage, untiring activity, genius for war, and absolute devotion to his State mark him out as a public man, as a patriot to be for ever remembered by all Americans. His amiability of disposition, deep sympathy with those in pain or sorrow, his love for children, nice sense of personal honour and genial courtesy endeared him to all his friends. I shall never forget his sweet winning smile, nor his clear, honest eyes that seemed to look into your heart whilst they searched your brain.
I have met many of the great men of my time, but Lee alone impressed me with the feeling that I was in the presence of a man who was cast in a grander mould, and made of different and of finer metal than all other men. He is stamped upon my memory as a being apart and superior to all others in every way: a man with whom none I ever knew, and very few of whom I have read, are worthy to be classed. I have met but two men who realize my ideas of what a true hero should be: my friend Charles Gordon was one, General Lee was the other.
Viscount Field Marshall, Garnet Wolseley on Lee.
In 1938, 75 years after the battle, the surviving soldiers on both sides gathered at Gettysburg for one last reunion. They got along very well. Just goes to show that those Yankees weren’t woke in 1938.
Harry F. Byrd received 15 electoral votes in 1960 from Southern Democrats who refused to vote for the Kennedy/Johnson ticket.
William Mack Lee
Body Servant to General Robert E. Lee.
He stayed with General Lee throughout the war and until the day Lee died in 1870.
Mack said of General Lee after his death, “I was raised by one of the greatest men in the world. There was never one born of a woman greater than General Robert E. Lee, according to my judgment. All of his servants were set free ten years before the war, but all remained on the plantation until after the surrender.”
General Lee left Mack $360 in his will, which Mack used to go to school. He became an ordained Missionary Baptist minister in Washington, DC, and through the years started 14 churches.
Dey all racis! We need to redefine history!
The period in American history known as reconstruction when blacks were given the vote (then restricted) gets the revisionist treatment or ignored because it doesn’t fit into the socialists agenda which calls for division. The reason those monuments in question are placed, honoring men who fought for their cause when after defeat did not continue on. But rather chose to accept and support the result to unuify the country
Ford supported the bill and signed it, but the South still went for Carter.
“rebutted by a simple Internet search? What a surprise.”
I’m not sure what you think you rebutted.
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