You have really gone off the deep end now OS. Equating the Federal Government of 1861 or even today with the monarchy of King George III is, frankly, off the wall.old salt wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 8:32 pm1860 was much closer to 1776 than 2021, in more than just years. So let's just erase history & cancel them all. Don't you feel superior now ?a fan wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 8:24 pmSome don't want to do that, either, as you very well know. And I gotta say, I don't blame them one bit. But with founding fathers? You can argue it was the time period, blah blah blah....and at least have some reasonableness to what you're saying.old salt wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 8:14 pmYet we still celebrate our founding fathers.a fan wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 8:12 pmNo one is erasing the history. But I think it's not too much to ask to not CELEBRATE active rebellion to protect slavery.
Now you can say that each man fought for their own reason and all that.....but you can't escape the question that so many wish to avoid, and the question that makes each man's motivation for fighting for the South immaterial, as it relates to the outcome.
And that question is: what would have happened if the South won?
And when you answer that question, it becomes obvious to even the most obtuse observer that celebrating these men is, to put it politely, in poor taste.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... 115579444/
But for those who would have kept Americans in chains for......who can say how many more decades? There's no wiggle room there, IMHO.
These are all opinions, obviously, OS. And the shades of gray you are always telling me that I need to use more, and stop being an "all or nothing" guy...........
Not for nothing, but it might interest you to know that the British crown outlawed slavery in 1833.
As I said, I don't support erasing those Confederates from our history but I do think celebrating them as some sorts of heroic figures isn't appropriate either. Just discovering the other day, that the large portrait of R.E. Lee in the USMA library depicts him in his Confederate uniform illustrates the problem. He is depicted elsewhere at the academy in his U.S. Army uniform which I find appropriate as a former Superintendent while an officer in that same army.
Here's another reading of history....after the defeat of the Confederacy, the South was occupied by U.S. Army troops for over 10 years and none of those former Confederates were commemorated. In fact, Jefferson Davis was imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe in Virginia. Indicted but never tried for treason, Davis was released on bond in May 1867. Lee and general officers of the Army of Northern Virginia were covered by parole per the terms of the surrender at Appomattox. The heart of the terms was that Confederates would be paroled after surrendering their weapons and other military property whilst keeping their personal animals (horse or mules) and sidearms if surrendered soldiers promised to not take up arms again, the United States government would not prosecute them. Grant also allowed Confederates to keep their mounts and sidearms. The Attorney General of the United States affirmed this in June 1865 for all Confederate officers who surrendered.
The primary reason for the rise of The Lost Cause and Jim Crow was the disputed election of 1876. The Compromise of 1877 was an unwritten deal, informally arranged among United States Congressmen, that settled the intensely disputed 1876 presidential election. It resulted in the United States federal government pulling the last troops out of the South, and ending the Reconstruction Era. Through the Compromise, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden (the Governor of New York) on the understanding that Hayes would remove the federal troops whose support was essential for the survival of Republican state governments in South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. Hayes received 185 electoral votes to Tilden's 184 electoral votes. Despite losing the election, Tilden won the popular vote with 4,301,000 votes to 4,036,000 votes for Hayes.
Ironically, this mess also resulted in the Electoral Count Act of 1876 which some of DOPUS' cronies tried to manipulate to overturn the 2020 election. Legal experts decry the wording of the statute and recommend that it me totally re-written to insure that it could not be manipulated to overrule the results of a legitimate election.
Not to digress too much but take 30 minutes a listen to Muhammad Ali on his own history of black and white back in 1971- it's simultaneously sad yet hilarious.