Spitting on Confederates

For 130 years, this monument stood in Richmond, Virginia.

This is Confederate General Ambrose Powell Hill, one of Stonewall Jackson’s ablest divisional commanders. The general was buried beneath the monument.

Last December, as part of its campaign to wipe out every trace of the Confederacy, the Richmond city government tore down the monument, dug up the general, and expelled him from the Capital of the Confederacy.

Hill’s outraged descendants had no choice but to rebury their ancestor, which they did last weekend, in Culpepper, Virginia.

The family worried that the bigots who screamed obscenities as the general came down might contaminate the reburial, so they publicized it only by word of mouth. I was worried attendance would be sparse, but there must have been at least 400 people. This is a very partial view.

You can see the coffin in the foreground, ladies dressed in period-costume morning, and reenactors behind them. The guard fired repeated volleys.

I shook hands with John Hill, a descendant, who was dressed in a replica of the battle shirt his ancestor wore.

I also laid my hand on the coffin of a Confederate general, something I am never likely to do again.

The Confederate Mechanized Cavalry was there. They are members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who ride motorcycles. There must have been at least 20 of them.

And, of course, we sang Dixie.

It was moving to watch the reenactors march away from the gravesite. The tramping of their boots sounded as authentic as their uniforms and rifles.

The reinterment was an impressive display of forbidden loyalty. I wonder how many more might have paid their respects to the general if the family had felt it could publicize the ceremony.

As a rule, the intensity of historical grievances fades over time. Japan and the United States are friends, despite Pearl Harbor and a terrible war in the Pacific.

Vietnam and the United States are friends, despite a more recent war that many Americans, even at the time, thought was a cruel, disastrous mistake.

And yet, hatred for the South only grows. If we treated Japan the way we treat the Confederacy, there would be no trade. No Japanese would get visas. America would be so hostile to Japanese-Americans that most of them would leave. Watching anime would be treason. Long ago we would have chopped down the Washington cherry trees that Japan gave us in 1912.

Credit: Jay Wald, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And even if Japan never took any counter-measures — just like the Confederacy, which never fights back — the hatred and sanctions would get worse every year.

What happened with the Confederates? The very men they were trying to kill — Union soldiers — respected and honored them. One of the Yankees who fought under General Edward Ord was at Appomattox for Lee’s surrender, which meant the Union had won.

He watched the men in grey stack arms for the last time and expected to be filled with joy.

Instead, he wrote: “I remember how we sat there and pitied and sympathized with these courageous Southern men who had fought for four long and dreary years all so stubbornly, so bravely and so well, and now, whipped, beaten, completely used up, were fully at our mercy — it was pitiful, sad, hard, and seemed to us altogether too bad.”

Stonewall Jackson was hit by friendly fire at the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863 and died in this house.

Outside, there is a small display that records the words of Union General Gouverneur Warren: “I rejoice at Stonewall Jackson’s death as a gain to our cause, yet in my soldier’s heart I cannot but see him the best soldier of all this war, and grieve his untimely end.”

Foreigners admired the Confederates. On the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol, there still stands a statue of Jackson.

The pedestal says: “Presented by English gentlemen as a tribute of admiration for the Soldier and Patriot Thomas J. Jackson.”

Englishmen had no political stake in the war or why it was fought. Britain abolished slavery 30 years before the United States did. These men just wanted to honor a soldier and patriot. When the statue arrived in Richmond from England in 1872, a team of 300 men pulled it to the square where it now stands. According to the papers, “‘not a few ex-Union officers and soldiers’ joined Confederate veterans in pulling the statue.”

During the first half of the 20th century, the US Army named 10 military bases for Confederate generals, including A.P. Hill.

Credit: Meisberger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There is Fort Beauregard, Fort Hood, Fort Lee, and Fort Pickett. This was a gesture of reconciliation and generosity to the South, to honor its great fighting men. There are still Navy ships named after Confederate victories, such as this cruiser, the Chancellorsville, and landing craft named Malvern Hill, Harpers Ferry, and Mechanicsville.

The M5A1 tank was named for Jeb Stuart.

This M-3 tank was called the Robert E. Lee.

There was a variant of the M-3, called the Grant, for the Union general, shown shoulder to shoulder on the left.

There is a 1936 postage stamp honoring Lee and Jackson.

This stamp from 1970 is of Jefferson Davis, Lee, and Jackson on the huge rock carving at Stone Mountain.

Here’s General Lee all by himself on a 1955 stamp from what was called the “liberty series.”

Dwight Eisenhower was a Kansas boy, but when he was president, he hung a portrait of Lee in the Oval Office.

He explained why: “General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. . . . Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.”

The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest honor the Congress can award.

Credit: Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1956, it was awarded collectively to all surviving veterans of the Civil War, north and south. The obverse says “Honor to Great Soldiers and to Great Americans,” and depicts both Grant and Lee. And note Confederate insignia on the reverse.

Did those Congressmen vote to award that medal because they hated black people? Or wanted to bring back slavery? Of course not. They wanted to honor the courage and sacrifice of men who fought for their country.

It’s been a strange career for Confederates. During the war, they were courageous, honorable opponents. A hundred years later, they were “great soldiers and great Americans.” Today, they are scum.

What happened?

What happened was a wrenching redirection of every American social policy to make it cater to the failures, feelings, grievances, and demands of blacks. This is a form of collective insanity. It’s the insanity of considering it immoral ever to point out that blacks have an average IQ 15 points lower than the white average, much less to argue that that difference explains an awful lot.

It’s the insanity of decriminalizing crimes only because blacks — and sometimes Hispanics — commit them so often, whether it’s turnstile jumping, public defecation, shoplifting, disturbing the peace, or even resisting arrest.

It’s insanity that leads to headlines like “San Francisco reparations committee proposes a $5 million payment to each Black resident.”

Blacks, with a straight face, are asking for 41 times the median net worth of the American family. They demand compensation for harm they never suffered to be paid by people who never hurt them. And the city takes this seriously.

Only insanity explains this: “Astrophysics professor warns astronomy ‘steeped in systemic racism.”

It is insanity when a Vanderbilt professor says, “Math is a white, cisheteropatriarchal space.”

It is insanity when colleges stop requiring the SAT or ACT only because blacks and Hispanics get low scores.

This website lists 1,800 schools, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford that ditched the requirement.

More insanity: “California Schools Named After Washington and Jefferson Hit Renaming Buzzsaw.”

Not even the father of his country deserves an elementary school named in his honor.

It was insanity to destroy or remove 30 monuments to Christopher Columbus during the BLM riots.

Credit: Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What’s Columbus got to do with black degeneracy or murder rates?

It’s insanity to remove Robert E. Lee as a representative of Virginia in the Capitol Rotunda and replace him with Barbara Johns, whose highest achievement in life was to become an elementary-school librarian.

Credit Image: © Rod Lamkey/CNP via ZUMA Wire

Now the two greatest Virginians, memorialized in the Capitol are George Washington and a black woman no one ever heard of.

There is the quiet, insidious, ubiquitous insanity of a long Wall Street Journal article called “Juvenile Crime Surges,” that scrupulously fails to mention that this is overwhelmingly a black problem.

It’s insanity when “Elite K-8 school teaches white students they’re born racist.”

There’s been the decades-long insanity of passing the Civil Rights Act of 1965 to forbid racial discrimination — and then using the very same law to discriminate against whites and Asians.

There is video after video of black misbehavior of a kind almost never seen among whites, but insanity requires that we believe that it’s somehow the fault of white people. [1:18 – 1:30] The Confederacy is just another casualty. Does anyone believe that walking by a Confederate monument made the blacks we just saw behave that way?

Credit: Martin Falbisoner, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Do monuments make them shoot each other or get low test scores? Does spitting on the Confederacy help blacks — or does it just feed their crazed delusion that nothing is ever their fault?

Of course, the greatest casualty of this insanity is free speech. Facts refuse to conform to egalitarian edicts, and anyone who talks about them is a villain who must be silenced and destroyed.

It was a different country that could call Confederates and Union men alike “great soldiers and great Americans.” Today, it’s hard to believe there ever was such a country, isn’t it? That was a country worth having. What our rulers are building for us today is not. And there won’t be a country worth having until Confederates can once more take their place among those whom Englishmen once called “soldiers and patriots.”

 

 

Know Your Confederate History: Confederate Sniper Jack Hinson and his Rifle

The Story of Civil War Sniper Jack Hinson and His Rifle

 

I can also recommend the book Jack Hinson’s One Man War, A Civil War Sniper by Lt. Col. Tom McKenney, USMC (Ret.)

 

 

Top 5 Biographies of Robert E. Lee

1. R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman

 

Published in 1934, this four-volume book by Douglas Southall Freeman chronicles all of the major events and highlights of Robert E. Lee’s military career.

The book discusses everything from Lee’s experiences in the Mexican-War to his surrender at Appomattox. Freeman depicts Lee as an honest, straightforward man who is “one of the small company of great men in whom there is no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. The New York Times referred to the entire work as “Lee Complete for All Time” while Stephen Vincent Benet’s review in the New York Herald Tribune referred to it as a “a complete portrait – solid, vivid, authoritative, and compelling.”

The book is now considered the definitive biography of Robert E. Lee.

Douglas Southall Freeman, who died in 1953, was a newspaper editor, military analyst, and a pioneering radio broadcaster.

In addition to his biography about Lee, Freeman also wrote a highly acclaimed six-volume biography of George Washington.

Freeman won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1935 for his biography of Robert E. Lee and one in 1958 (posthumously) for his biography of George Washington.

 

2. Robert E. Lee: A Biography by Emory M. Thomas

 

Published in 1995, this book by Emory M. Thomas explores the real Robert E. Lee, not the legend that he became.

Thomas argues that Lee’s image has been distorted over the years partly due to his own hidden nature and partly due to the myths and legends that surround him.

In the book’s foreward, Thomas goes on to say that Lee was a complex, mysterious man and to truly understand him you need to look into his inner character:

“Lee, the enigma, seldom if ever revealed himself while he lived. To understand him, it is necessary to look behind his words and see, for example, the true nature of the lighthouse keeper Lee encountered during his surveying mission in 1835. It is also important to peer beyond Lee’s words and recall what he did as well as what he said. Sometimes the existential Lee contradicted the verbal Lee.”

Thomas also points out that the real Robert E. Lee has been overshadowed by the legend that he later became:

“In addition to looking behind and beyond his words, it is well to remember that Lee once possessed of flesh and blood. This is important because so many have made so much of Lee during the years since he lived that legend, image and myth have supplanted reality. Lee has become a hero essentially smaller than life.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. A review in Publisher’s Weekly “highly recommended” the book due to its unique take on this iconic figure:

“Synthesizing printed and manuscript sources, he presents Lee as neither the icon of Douglas Southall Freeman nor the flawed figure presented by Thomas Connolly. Lee emerges instead as a man of paradoxes, whose frustrations and tribulations were the basis for his heroism. Lee’s work was his play, according to the author, and throughout his life he made the best of his lot…Highly recommended.”

A review by Kirkus Reviews praised the book for presenting a fair and balanced view of this controversial figure:

“A comprehensive new biography that seeks to give a balanced portrait of the famed Confederate general. Thomas undertakes a daunting task here, seeking to recover the real, living human from the mythology surrounding Lee since his death in 1870. In this effort he hews a middle ground between early 20th century hagiographies and revisionist contemporary interpretations…Well written and based largely on primary documentation, a good effort at understanding a complex personality.”

A review by Patrick T. Reardon in the Chicago Tribune called the book an “interesting, readable examination of Lee’s life” but states that it “leaves the general still very much a mystery.”

A review in the New York Review of Books called it “The best and most balanced of the Lee biographies.”

Emory M. Thomas is Regents Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Georgia.

Thomas is also the author of eight books about the Civil War era, which include The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865; The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience; Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War; Bold Dragoon: The Life of J.E.B. Stuart; The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital; The Dogs of War: 1861; The American War and Peace: 1860-1877.

3. Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee by Michael Korda

 

Published in 2014, this book by Michael Korda is a full-scale biography of Lee’s life and military career.

The book attempts to dispel the myths surrounding Lee to reveal the true human being underneath. In the book, Korda describes Lee as a serious, hard-working military man with a surprisingly fun side:

“A perfectionist, obsessed by duty and by the value of obedience, he might have been a grim figure, except for the fact that he had another side, charming, funny, and flirtatious. The animal lover, the gifted watercolorist, the talented cartographer – the topographic maps he drew for the Corps of Engineers are works of art, as are the cartoons he drew for his children in Mexico. The father who adored having his children get into bed with him in the morning, and telling them stories, or having them tickle his feet; the adoring husband; the devoted friend – these are all facets of the same man. He was the product of a rationalist education and at the same time a romantic, who sought for a spiritual answer to the problems of life – a man of contradictions, whose natural good manners and courtly bearing disguised his lifelong soul-searching.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. A review by David Shribman in the Boston Globe described it as “Lively, approachable, and captivating…Like Lee himself, everything about Clouds of Glory is on a grand scale” while Publisher’s Weekly referred to it as “superbly engaging.”

Kirkus Reviews called it “A masterful biography of the beloved Civil War general…Lee is a man for the ages, and Korda delivers the goods with this heart-wrenching story of the man and his state” and a review by David Holahan in the Christian Science Monitor stated “Korda clearly has command of his subject…[Clouds of Glory] is well-considered and amply documented. Military buffs will find much to feast on.”

Yet, other reviewers were a little more reserved in their praise. Historian Eric Foner reviewed the book for the Washington Post and took issue with Korda’s grasp of the broader issues of the Civil War and Lee’s attitude towards them:

“When it comes to the broader historical context, Korda sometimes falters. He does not display familiarity with recent literature on the Civil War era. For example, the one book he cites on desertion from the Confederate armies, a subject of considerable recent scholarship, was written in 1924. Korda notes that Lee’s views on slavery and race have too often been ‘swept under the rug,’ but his own discussion is scattered and incomplete…Although Korda describes him as a political moderate, there was nothing moderate in Lee’s stance during the 1860 presidential campaign… Toward the end of the Civil War, Lee came to accept the necessity of enlisting black soldiers in the Confederate armies; a handful were enrolled a month before the surrender at Appomattox. Yet, Korda notes, his racial views ‘never changed.’ Unfortunately, the book fails to devote sufficient attention to Lee’s appearance in 1866 before the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which showed him at his worst.”

A review by historian Fergus M. Bordewich in the New York Times also points out these inconsistencies as well as a number of glaring factual errors, yet still referred to the book as an ”admiring and briskly written biography…”

Michael Korda is a British author and former editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster. Korda has written a number of history books, including Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia; Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory; With Wings Like Eagles: The Untold Story of the Battle of Britain; Ike: An American Hero; Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

 

4. General Lee: A Biography of Robert E. Lee by Fitzhugh Lee

 

Published in 1894, this book by Fitzhugh Lee, Robert’s E. Lee’s nephew, chronicles Lee’s life using his unpublished private letters.

The book briefly discusses Lee’s family history before delving deep into the events of his military career. Fitzhugh Lee explains, in the book’s preface, that since General Lee never wrote a memoir, this book is an attempt to tell Lee’s story through his own words:

“In this volume the attempt has been made to imperfectly supply the great desire to have something from Robert E. Lee’s pen, by introducing, at the periods referred to, such extracts from his private letters as would be of general interest. He is thus made, for the first time, to give his impressions and opinions on most of the great events with which he was so closely connected.”

Despite being published over 100 years ago, the book is still a big seller and is highly recommended by fans of Robert E. Lee.

Fitzhugh Lee was a general in the U.S. army during the Spanish-American war and a cavalry general for the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.

In addition to General Lee: A Biography, Fitzhugh Lee also wrote another book, titled Cuba’s Struggle Against Spain, as well as an article about General Lee.

 

 

5. Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History by Alan T. Nolan

 

Published in 1991, this book by Alan T. Nolan debunks the myths and legends about Lee to set the record straight about this iconic figure.

As Nolan explains in the preface, the book does not give a full account of Lee’s life and instead examines the legend of Robert E. Lee and uses evidence to prove or disprove specific claims about him:

“This book is not, therefore, a biography and offers no full account of Robert E. Lee’s life. It is, instead, an examination of major aspects of the tradition that identifies Lee in American history. In raising questions and drawing conclusions about this tradition, I have attempted to set fort the evidence. The reader who thinks I am asking the wrong questions or disagrees with my conclusions may, in evaluating my thesis, consider the evidence on which it is based. This evidence does not include any new or sensational facts or new primary materials. On the contrary, my inquiry concerns what the familiar and long-available evidence actually establishes about Robert E. Lee. The results of my inquiry are not so much an expose as simply an attempt to set the record straight.”

The book received positive reviews when it was published. A review by Peter Andrews in the Washington Post stated that although he believed the book wouldn’t appeal to a wide audience, it is a must-read for Lee historians:

“However, any future author dealing with Lee will have to face up to Nolan’s material and we will all be the better for it. A man struggling with his times, his prejudices and his sense of honor makes a more arresting subject than a public figure who forever seems to be speaking in copybook maxims.”

Yet, historian James McPherson reviewed the book for the New York Review of Books and accused Nolan of being disingenuous in his claim that the book was not intended to defame Lee:

“But this disclaimer of bias is a bit disingenuous. Nolan is a lawyer by profession. The book has something of the tone of an indictment of Lee in the court of history, with the author as prosecuting attorney. He wants the jury—his readers—to convict Lee of entering willingly into a war to destroy the American nation.”

McPherson goes on to say though that despite this the book presents a more realistic view of Lee than the legends do:

“There is truth in some of these charges; it is not the whole truth, however. Nolan’s portrait of Lee may be closer to the real Lee than the flawless marble image promoted by tradition. But the prosecutorial style of his book produces some new distortions.”

Alan T. Nolan is a former lawyer and author of numerous books about the Civil War, including The Iron Brigade: A Military History; Giants in Their Tall Hats: Essays on the Iron Brigade; Rally, Once Again!: Selected Civil War Writings.

 

 

Know Your Southern History: Why We Eat Black-Eyed Peas

Why We Eat Black-Eyed Peas

 

Grandson (excitedly): “Wait, I think I know!: was it black-eyed peas?”

Grandpa: “Yes, that’s right. Although our ancestors from those days usually called them by other names such as ‘cornfield peas’ or ‘cow peas.’”

Grandson: “Why did they call them that?”

Grandpa: “They called them cow peas because they fed them to their cattle and other animals; some Southerners called them cornfield peas because they planted them in cornfields to keep the soil energized in those fields. Sometimes they planted rows of black-eyed peas in between rows of corn. Anyway, the northern army couldn’t destroy all of the black-eyed peas in the South due to their great abundance. By “abundance,” I mean there were lots and lots of them in all parts of the South, dried and sacked, and stockpiled for feeding their farm animals.

You see, black-eyed peas were thought by many people back then, both in the North and in the South, to be “animal food,” not fit for humans to eat. Since the Old South was an agrarian society, it had an abundance of farm animals of every sort, which of course had to be fed and taken care of, and black-eyed peas or corn field peas were a main food source for their animals.”

Never Forget and Celebrate Your Southern History.

 

Never Forget What They Have Done

What kind of enemy is so depraved that they would dig up the bones of your ancestors and heroes only to desecrate them?

No Russian would do this. No Iranian, or Chinese.

And yet we’re supposed to call these monsters our ‘countrymen’.https://t.co/QsapyxPHuY

— Jason Kessler (“Happenings”) (@TheMadDimension) December 14, 2022

 

This was posted by the Director of Operations of the company that the mayor hired to remove my ancestors monument. This is very unprofessional. I had to exhume my ancestors remains yesterday. And something like this should have never been posted. pic.twitter.com/bVFlZF9par

— John Hill 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@JohnnyReb1989) December 14, 2022