For All You Texans...
 

Today is Confederate Heroes Day in Texas.

Happy Confederate Heroes Day. :)

Re: For All You Texans...
 

I don't celebrate the Confederacy, nor their economic or racial agenda, in any way shape or form.

Glad they lost and yet ... only to see the aristocrats and power brokers replace one shameful chapter in our history, with Jim Crow.

Nothing heroic about a war with over 1 million casualties. Please don't make this ungodly atrocity about states rights. Good day.

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Thanks for sharing.

Re: For All You Texans...
 

That's my line, bubba. :icecream

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Thanks for commenting? :)

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Nice... but then I don't remember you having much good to say about UNITED States either.

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Interesting post. It's a part of history and, despite some people's efforts to erase it/change it, it is what it is.

Re: For All You Texans...
 

I have mixed feelings about the Confederacy. Slavery was obviously a huge moral injustice and it's hard to fathom how people could get worked up enough to fight to defend such an "institution."

My own forebears on this continent were Southerners, though none of my ancestors fought for the South. They seem to have been among those who were pushed out of the Atlantic seaboard by the rise of the slave aristocracy and they moved West. Landing in Tennessee, some appear to have been associated with the attempt to create the new state of "Franklin" along with the Knoxville Whigs and refused to secede. Others voted enthusiastically to leave the Union.

I have the sheriff's report of how one of my great-great-great.... uncles shot and killed my great-great-great-great grandfather in 1865, in the wake of the collapse of General Polk's Army of Tennessee. My uncle (a minister no less) had gone to my grandfather's house (neither men were related, just their descendants) along with a small "mob" seeking to take the black smithing tools from my by then elderly great-great-great-great grandfather and to give them to a "free black."

The grandfather was Cherokee - though probably part "white." The uncle was the descendant of Scot-Irish immigrants. In the altercation the uncle shot the grandfather, who then staggered back into his house mortally wounded. The next day, the uncle came back to the house and found the grandfather slowly dying of his wounds. The uncle took the tools and left $75 in Confederate currency as "payment." The grandfather died the following day.

No charges were filed and no repayments were demanded. It was just a case of some things that "got out of hand." Some twenty years later, the grand daughter of my great-great-great-great grandfather would marry the nephew of the man who had killed her grandfather. Go figure.

Why did a bunch of white Southerners go and demand that an elderly Cherokee half breed give up his black smithing tools in exchange for worthless Confederate script to a free black?

The fact that I can't even "take sides" in this dispute without betraying some family only adds to the complication.

I think snippets like this tell the real story of the Confederacy. My people were miscegenistic half breeds (from all kinds of "breeds") yet they were proud Southerners. Go figure.

Happy Confederate Heroes Day.

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Well the thing that I think most people miss is this. What was going on at the time of the Civil War was, indeed, upheaval about many things including the end of slavery. But people seem to see it as something that the south invented or that the south only participated in. Slavery had been here since nearly the very beginning and had been an accepted practice for most of the history of mankind.

So what we see in the mid to late 1800's is the natural upheaval any major change in human thinking brings about. Mankind was coming to a crossroads in what treatment of our fellow man is acceptable. What had always been acceptable was no longer able to be seen as right or just.

So the generation that suffered through the hard and arduous shift in the thinking of mankind and did, eventually, all over the world bring an end to slavery as an accepted practice now forever bears a mark equal to saying that they invented slavery.

Yes there were those who stood against it. Many here find "freedoms" in religion that they didn't grow up with and these changes are hard and find battles all along they way... but, in the end, those who fight through these times are those who fought public opinion and all the upheaval that brings and made it to a place that was previously not available.

I think it is so sad that the generation that was waking up to a new and better paradigm will always be remembered as the participants in a frame of mind that their themselves forged the change from.

But we are taught these prejudices and they live and thrive.

I know what these men lived and died for and I honor them. If they lived and died for what DA thinks they lived and died for then they deserve no honor. But I don't hold that belief.

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Because some people just do what's right. (Although shooting your GGG Grandfather wasn't right. :) )

But the fact is that people blowing up a church and killing innocent little girls makes the news. (And it should)

The good people standing for what is right for the entire human race doesn't so a one sided picture gets painted and people believe it to be just like that and we all get white washed with the same broad brush. It's easy to lump people in a heap and judge them all at once. Especially if you never have to actually meet one face to face and see that we're all pretty much the same.

I really like the show Undercover Boss. The last episode was great. I know it's a bit "set up" but the thing that happens in my eyes is this. A big boss high up in his lofty office has to meet these people face to face that he so easily made decisions on when they were "the employees". That's so easy. But under the heap is humanity. People. People who might not see things they way we think they see them if they were ever given half a chance.

It's easy to judge from ones lofty castle. It's easy to roll them all up in a ball and call them scoundrels. But stories like the one you present happened all over the place too. But no one knows those so they form their opinions... curse us... spit our way... and deem us as evil hate mongers. That's so easy to do. But they don't know me... They don't know my dad or my grandfather or my GGG grandfather. Nor do they want to because it's so easy to just make the judgment and move on.

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Thanks for the thoughts, D4T. The chaotic nature of human history is what stands out to me as well. While obviously slavery was unjust, it's worth noting that the Bible doesn't even condemn it. The Bible merely sought to engage the practice and get the slaveholders in Roman times to act with compassion and brotherly kindness. I think that it was by emphasizing a "one-on-one" kind of relationship between slave and slaveholder that we got things to break up a bit. Also, by declaring the slave to be the slaveholder's "brother," the essential humanity of the slave could not be questioned.

The Civil War ended up being largely a conflict over slavery. Even the "States Rights" issue involved slavery - A state's right to do what? And, whether new states should be slave or free? The fact that the other intense regional and cultural differences between North and South ended up being summed up by the slavery issue speaks to both the importance of that issue, but also to the victory of the "Slave Aristocracy" over other elements within Southern society.

A lot of Southern history involved a fierce competition and dispute about how the economy of the region was to be built. There were intense debates over having a "Nation of Farmers" versus having a "Nation of Plantations." The price and availability of land was at stake along with other issues. If a man could not afford to own his own farm because the Plantation system was driving up speculation and prices, then he was as much a servant as most slaves.

The Slave Aristocracy temporarily won that contest, only to loose it all in the Civil War. For us today to equate all things "Southern" or all things "Confederate" with the "Slave Aristocracy" ignores the lives, contributions and values of the Southerners who opposed slavery. The vast majority of Southerners never owned a slave. And, those who didn't own slaves but still had antipathy toward blacks usually did so because they were in competition with the labor of black slaves, having been driven off their own land because of the very existence of the slaves.

Unfairness and injustice dominated the lives of so many people. Those that made it through those times can accurately be called "Heroes," IMHO (discounting the obviously horrendous scoundrels like those at Andersonville, etc).

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Yeahhh...I'm in Texas, but I think I'll pass....

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Yeah... There was far more to it than that.

But... even so. The pivot point of whether there would or would not be war is this one point. If the south seceded there was going to be war. If the south did not secede there would have been no war.

The war wasn't about slavery. Slavery was an issue of the day. An issue that every civilized society worked past without war during that same span of time. It was about exactly what Lincoln said it was about... to save the union... in other words... to keep the south from seceding.

That is the one factor that would have called war or no war.

One can discuss how much slavery had to do with the south seceding... but the war was about keeping the south from seceding.

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Some say that the South had more right to secede from the Union than the Colonies had to rebel against Great Britain.

When in the course of human events...it becomes necessary...

Doesn't the Declaration of Independence discuss this very issue?

Would secession ever be OK?

What issues would be worth seceding over?

After reading a bit about what formed the Union, I am wondering if, like the merger in the 40's, it should have never happened at all...

Re: For All You Texans...
 

What can I say ............I'm a Yankee.

Re: For All You Texans...
 

:thumbsup

Re: For All You Texans...
 

Long live the Queen? :)