Robert E. Lee is Not Our Heritage

[midcan5]

There is a statute in Ohio from the Civil War that is our heritage. You can see it here: http://www.harrisonnewsherald.com/?p=10872. America was founded on the belief that all men are created equal, it took a while to achieve that and some may say we still aren't there. Let's not go backward. White nationalists, white supremacists, the alt-right, KKK, and neo-Nazis do not represent the heritage that is America. The Confederacy sought to destroy our heritage as Americans not support it, that much should be clear. Over six hundred thousand died to maintain America's dream of equality for all.

"It is a ‘white man’s government,’ is it? Why, the very first blood shed for the assertion of your independence and the establishment of your nationality, upon the field of Lexington, was the blood of a black citizen of Massachusetts. And when they came to the work, after the victory had been achieved, and the independence of the nation acknowledged, of organizing a constitutional government of the United States, in a majority of the States of the Union the black men voted with white men, and the man who denies it is simply ignorant of the history of his own country. . . .

Your armies bore witness that 175,000 of the black population, made free by the proclamation of liberty, were in the army of the republic. When you consider that the majority of the black population were the slaves of rebels, and within their territory, unable to signify to the United States Government their unwillingness to serve it, the fact that as large a population of the black population as of the free whites rushed to the defense of your flag, speaks well for their patriotism. . . "

Source: https://balkin.blogspot.com, 'John Bingham on Racial Equality' Gerard N. Magliocca

"Bingham lived two more years and died in Cadiz on March 19, 1900. Bingham was interred in Union Cemetery in Cadiz. In 1901, the citizens of Harrison County, Ohio erected a bronze statue honoring Bingham in Cadiz." http://www.ohiocivilwarcentral.com/entry.php

And there is a history and a heritage and it is not one we should be proud of.

"There is a crucial difference between leaders like Washington and Jefferson, imperfect men who helped create the United States, Ms. Gordon-Reed said, and Confederate generals like Jackson and Lee, whose main historical significance is that they took up arms against it. The comparison, she added, also “misapprehends the moral problem with the Confederacy.”" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/a...jefferson.html

"“We would not want to whitewash our history by pretending that Jim Crow and disenfranchisement or massive resistance to the civil rights movement never happened,” he said. “That is the part of our history that these monuments testify to.”" [from above]

States rights my....

John Bingham and the Story of American Liberty: The Lost Cause Meets the 'Lost Clause' https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....ract_id=343460

I Studied the Alt-Right So You Don’t Have To: https://medium.com/form-and-resonanc...o-e123aa6a3d20


"Education is dangerous - every educated person is a future enemy." Hermann Goering

"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance." Eric Hoffer

[midcan5]

Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the United States of America and he was a poor military leader of the South, He was a savage person to the slave families and individuals. More of the actual man is documented below with sources and other references inside the articles for the person who wants to understand the real history of slavery.

"Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi."

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...derate/535512/

"Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

"The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee."

"I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy." Robert E Lee

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...al-lee/529038/

[midcan5]

No replies? That surprises me as usually you get a false equivalence argument from the right wing? Well conservatives should statues to people who wanted to destroy the US of A be removed?

[midcan5]

Another excellent piece on what the Civil War was about, slavery, is quoted below. That the right wing conservatives and other supremacist types and authoritarians of the right have not or can not reply to the substance and content of this thread makes it an excellent source document for the student interested in the real reasons and cause.

"In Apostles of Disunion, which quotes and analyzes this rhetoric, Dew has produced an eye-opening study of the men appointed by seceding states as commissioners to visit other slave states—for example, Virginia and Kentucky—in order to persuade them also to leave the Union and join together to form the Confederacy. “I found this in many ways a difficult and painful book to write,” Dew acknowledges, but he nevertheless unflinchingly concludes that “to put it quite simply, slavery and race were absolutely critical elements in the coming of the war…. Defenders of the Lost Cause need only read the speeches and letters of the secession commissioners to learn what was really driving the Deep South to the brink of war in 1860–61.”"

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001...thern-comfort/

[Bill]

No replies? That surprises me as usually you get a false equivalence argument from the right wing? Well conservatives should statues to people who wanted to destroy the US of A be removed?

Not sure why they even allowed them to be displayed... Damn liberal country.... Apathy or perhaps they just felt sorry for the losers??

[midcan5]

I thought this piece on a confederate general interesting.

"Senator William Mahone was one of the most maligned political leaders in post-Civil War America. He was also one of the most capable. Compared to the Roman traitor Cataline (by Virginia Democrats), to Moses (by African American congressman John Mercer Langston), and to Napoleon (by himself), Mahone organized and led the most successful interracial political alliance in the post-emancipation South. Mahone’s Readjuster Party, an independent coalition of black and white Republicans and white Democrats that was named for its policy of downwardly “readjusting” Virginia’s state debt, governed the state from 1879 to 1883."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b06a788a2af43e

[chink]

There is a statute in Ohio from the Civil War that is our heritage. You can see it here: http://www.harrisonnewsherald.com/?p=10872. America was founded on the belief that all men are created equal, it took a while to achieve that and some may say we still aren't there. Let's not go backward. White nationalists, white supremacists, the alt-right, KKK, and neo-Nazis do not represent the heritage that is America. The Confederacy sought to destroy our heritage as Americans not support it, that much should be clear. Over six hundred thousand died to maintain America's dream of equality for all.

"It is a ‘white man’s government,’ is it? Why, the very first blood shed for the assertion of your independence and the establishment of your nationality, upon the field of Lexington, was the blood of a black citizen of Massachusetts. And when they came to the work, after the victory had been achieved, and the independence of the nation acknowledged, of organizing a constitutional government of the United States, in a majority of the States of the Union the black men voted with white men, and the man who denies it is simply ignorant of the history of his own country. . . .

Your armies bore witness that 175,000 of the black population, made free by the proclamation of liberty, were in the army of the republic. When you consider that the majority of the black population were the slaves of rebels, and within their territory, unable to signify to the United States Government their unwillingness to serve it, the fact that as large a population of the black population as of the free whites rushed to the defense of your flag, speaks well for their patriotism. . . "

Source: https://balkin.blogspot.com, 'John Bingham on Racial Equality' Gerard N. Magliocca

"Bingham lived two more years and died in Cadiz on March 19, 1900. Bingham was interred in Union Cemetery in Cadiz. In 1901, the citizens of Harrison County, Ohio erected a bronze statue honoring Bingham in Cadiz." http://www.ohiocivilwarcentral.com/entry.php

And there is a history and a heritage and it is not one we should be proud of.

"There is a crucial difference between leaders like Washington and Jefferson, imperfect men who helped create the United States, Ms. Gordon-Reed said, and Confederate generals like Jackson and Lee, whose main historical significance is that they took up arms against it. The comparison, she added, also “misapprehends the moral problem with the Confederacy.”" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/a...jefferson.html

"“We would not want to whitewash our history by pretending that Jim Crow and disenfranchisement or massive resistance to the civil rights movement never happened,” he said. “That is the part of our history that these monuments testify to.”" [from above]

States rights my....

John Bingham and the Story of American Liberty: The Lost Cause Meets the 'Lost Clause' https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....ract_id=343460

I Studied the Alt-Right So You Don’t Have To: https://medium.com/form-and-resonanc...o-e123aa6a3d20


"Education is dangerous - every educated person is a future enemy." Hermann Goering

"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance." Eric Hoffer

robert e lee was a fine ,to hang the banner of slavery on the men that fought in that war is a lie in it's self.

Less than 5% of the whites in the South owned slaves. Fully 3/4's of the white people of the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery or the plantation system.

This was written by none other than the late John Hope Franklin in From Slavery to Freedom, McGraw-Hill, 1994., p. 123. Franklin was a Harvard educated Professor Emeritus of History and Professor of Legal History at Duke University. Dr. Franklin also happened to be a Black man. This may come as an inconvient truth to some here.

So, why did they fight. As Prof. V.L. Parrington said in his Pulitizer Prize winning book Main Currents in American Thought, "slavery was only the immediate casus belli. The deeper cause was the antagonistic conceptions of the theory and functions of the political state that emerged from antagonistic economic systems."

my great grandfather served in the 6th louisiana cav CSA ,he was a good man and ht did not win any slaves,as was the case for most ot the men that served.

shame on you

[Damocles]

Heritage is not the same thing as history. While Robert E. Lee is part of U.S. history, I would not call him part of my heritage. He has had nothing to do with my heritage...

Heritage is the unique collection of crap (buildings, statues, parks, museums, etc.) around people that they use to create their culture. So, people who live in CO likely would never consider that guy part of their "heritage"...

While people in Virginia may consider his statues, etc. as part of their heritage, there is nothing particularly sacred about heritage, it also doesn't erase history if you choose to collect different items in order to build a more proud or even simply a different heritage than that of losing a frikin' war fought for a different nation who had the expansion of slavery encoded into their constitution.

In fact I would likely be embarrassed, and personally against, including statues to traitors who lost wars as part of my "heritage"... I'm glad I grew up elsewhere. You get to pick what you promote to build your culture, you don't get to choose what you use to build your history. History shouldn't be forgotten, and there is a place for that kind of thing and pedestals in poses that make them look like heroes isn't one of them...

I know I wouldn't want some statue of a KKK member sitting on or near the steps of Colorado's Capital Building.

[midcan5]

....my great grandfather served in the 6th louisiana cav CSA ,he was a good man and ht did not win any slaves,as was the case for most ot the men that served.

shame on you

This discussion is about American history and the inability of Americans to accept what the Civil War was about. Revising history and making excuses for mistakes is not the function of this debate. Honesty is. We don't know your great grandfather so let him rest in peace. But that doesn't mean Americans cannot be honest about their history.

"I can testify about the South under oath. I was born and raised there, and 12 men in my family fought for the Confederacy; two of them were killed. And since I was a boy, the answer I’ve heard to this question, from Virginia to Louisiana (from whites, never from blacks), is this: “The War Between the States was about states’ rights. It was not about slavery.”

I’ve heard it from women and from men, from sober people and from people liquored up on anti-Washington talk. The North wouldn’t let us govern ourselves, they say, and Congress laid on tariffs that hurt the South. So we rebelled. Secession and the Civil War, in other words, were about small government, limited federal powers and states’ rights.

[b]But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union — which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy — reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/opinion/19Ball.html


"Her conclusion is that the Americans who fought the Civil War overwhelmingly thought they were fighting about slavery, and that we should take their word for it."

"In this unprecedented account, Chandra Manning uses letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers to take the reader inside the minds of Civil War soldiers-black and white, Northern and Southern-as they fought and marched across a divided country. With stunning poise and narrative verve, Manning explores how the Union and Confederate soldiers came to identify slavery as the central issue of the war and what that meant for a tumultuous nation. This is a brilliant and eye-opening debut and an invaluable addition to our understanding of the Civil War as it has never been rendered before." http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...andra-manning/

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...l_War_Was_Over

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...roubled-refuge

Heritage is not the same thing as history. While Robert E. Lee is part of U.S. history, I would not call him part of my heritage. He has had nothing to do with my heritage....

I have to disagree with that statement, this is about American history and that is a history of all of us.

Dictionary definition: something that is handed down from the past, as a tradition: a national heritage of honor, pride, and courage.


"If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded." Karl Marx

[PostmodernProphet]

Not sure why they even allowed them to be displayed... Damn liberal country.... Apathy or perhaps they just felt sorry for the losers??

demmycrats put them up.......

[Damocles]

I have to disagree with that statement, this is about American history and that is a history of all of us.

Dictionary definition: something that is handed down from the past, as a tradition: a national heritage of honor, pride, and courage.


"If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded." Karl Marx

You have again conflated history and heritage. History simply is, and is something that should not be forgotten, heritage is what we choose to celebrate, to generate the flotsam of culture around us. We can choose better images to create a great culture while remembering history in museums rather than "heritage" by making hero worshiping statues of traitors.

[PostmodernProphet]

You have again conflated history and heritage. History simply is, and is something that should not be forgotten, heritage is what we choose to celebrate, to generate the flotsam of culture around us. We can choose better images to create a great culture while remembering history in museums rather than "heritage" by making hero worshiping statues of traitors.

agreed......my heritage is based in my ancestors......all of them lived in the Netherlands until 1880.....the Civil War is part of American history.......heritage is personal, not corporate.......history is corporate......

[Bill]

demmycrats put them up.......

So then the demmycrats can take them down......

[PostmodernProphet]

So then the demmycrats can take them down......

I've said it several times......

[midcan5]

I've said it several times......

So then if you say something several times it makes it true? LOL When you review who was put up these statues it is kinda interesting, also that there are so many. Consider that the Civil war was about destroying the United States and keeping people as objects to be sold. Is that something to be proud of? I was also surprised at the General who doesn't have a statue, see link below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...tes_of_America

Missing General: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b06a788a2af43e


"Her conclusion is that the Americans who fought the Civil War overwhelmingly thought they were fighting about slavery, and that we should take their word for it."

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...andra-manning/