Very interesting. I remember Aunt Jemima from my childhood but I never knew she was actually a real person.
The Republican party was founded specifically to abolish slavery, a fact which stopped being taught in many, if not most, schools in the early 1970s. I am sure there will be disagreement, but I will point out that the Confederacy had a right to secede from the Union. In fact, any state has the right. It's in the very beginning of our primary founding document, the Declaration of Independence: "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
When I was growing up, we watched a lot of cowboy shows. The good guys were identifiable by their white hats and the bad guys by their black hats. I grew up with the 2-dimensional idea that good guys were always good and bad guys were always bad. Of course, life experiences changed that, and at some point, I realized that no one -- with but one exception -- is all good or all bad. The best of humans are not 100% good, or vice versa. Sadly, it seems that our culture would have us revert to the old concept.
The meaning of the quote from the Declaration of Independence is up for debate. Personally, I believe that that paragraph was referring to the bonds between Great Britain and the American colonies. I am certainly no expert on "states rights", BUT if they did have the right to secede, it is also true that Pres Lincoln had a so-called "right" to stop the dissolution of the Union.
We don't want any of that state's rights talk around here. If we allow that, the next thing you know, people are going to want to have individual rights, like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble. There's no place for any of that nonsense in the United States. This is America, for God's sake. All power should be in the hands of the president, unless, of course, the president is a Republican.
11 states did secede and legally, a common misunderstanding is that everyone that has ever been born in the south are all scoundrels and slave owners couldn't be farther from the real truth. I should have said one state split which was Virginia and of course West Virginia was accepted by the Union as a state. There were French Plantation owners, Haitian and many other nationalities all of whom packed up and left the country when war started because they knew they would be targeted. So most sold their plantations and took their plantations back to their own countries. This was what happened to the plantation that I was working on 30 years ago. It was a Haitian owner who was married to a Black woman and he could see the future I suppose and just left. The Plantation home was so well built that when I worked their 30 years ago the roof was still the original roof that was built when the plantation home was built. After I left the state and returned that Plantation house has been totally restored to it's original condition when new. The Plantation never had electricity until the mid 60s and two old single sisters were still living in the Plantation home. On the death of the last sister the nephew of the sisters became the heir, he had just retired and paid the taxes required to take possession. 30 days later he was out around the home chopping weeds and cleaning up all the neglect and he had a major heart attack killing him. Once again another tax session came into play and his wife became by law the next heir. So within one month the state of La made some big bucks with that criminal tax law they use. The man's wife had a daughter and one son and I worked for the Daughters husband and her brother he moved into the Plantation home. Part of the property that he had inherited had gas wells and he became rich overnight. He was such a lazy person he never worked, he ran out and bought a new Ferrari and would get drunk and let his buddies take his car. He would leave the top down during rain storms while he was passed out in his big empty house. It was kind of comical actually. His gas wells went into reserve and the money turned off so he finally had to go to work to survive. Last I heard years ago he was a gun smith.
Might I ask just who gets to ascertain who is a scoundrel and who is not? I believe that a huge part of the problem is that so many people believe it's a black or white situation. (No pun intended.) Those who judge any person by just one action or event, without considering everything else is being willfully ignorant or simply naive.
Yes, I agree with you that only a small percentage of southern confederate soldiers ever actually owned slaves.
I don't disagree that this declaration was specifically referring to GB and the American Colonies, but it was clearly a statement of his ideals -- and by extension, ours. The paragraph is about the situation as it relates to a group of people (not "us" or "American Colonists"), the solution and reason for the solution, the rights of man, and how the solution is approached. Nothing really personal in there that I can see. I have read a LOT of Thomas Jefferson's writings and a LOT of his good friend James Madison's explanations of what Jefferson said/meant, and I note that Jefferson was was pretty to-the-point. He did not say "Well, we can see that this thing with GB isn't working out so well, so we feel it is necessary for us to dissolve the political bands. It's just for us, guys, so do NOT try this at home. And, hey, Lafayette! We aren't talking about you! This is just for us." * Jefferson was an idealist and a tad on the radical side, and for the most part, it seems that he believed that principles should be applied to all situations, and that he considered that dissolution of the bands a matter of "Nature's God" and God's nature. * Ok, so it's a bit hyperbolic, but you see what I mean, right?
Most of the south was a major food provider and like history already says the North had all the Industry that played a very major role in them being victorious. Only a few battles were fought this far down and around Baton Rouge and even as far as 40 miles from the River. There was one pretty large group of soldiers buried down in the Atchafalaya River Basin. That is about 4 miles from where I live today, and when the Corp of Engineers came in to raise the levee height some years ago to stop major flooding in the local populated areas, a large burial site was discovered and it was decided to exhume all and place them at a little small country church grave yard so that future flooding would not destroy their graves. They all have small markers on each man.
I'm not specifically referring to only the Civil War, but, historically, the victor of any war gets to decide who is a scoundrel ad who is not. If Germany had won WW2, our history would be written very differently.
Nor am I, because this thread is not about the Civil War, really. It's about mobs of people who insist that anyone who fought in a specific war do not deserve to be buried where they were buried or memorialized -- not "glorified" as mentioned earlier in this thread -- in any way. Well, actually that's not exactly right either. The mobs have made and are making decisions as to who is allowed to go along with their lives unmolested and who should be figuratively -- and sometimes literally -- stomped into the ground like extras in The Day of the Locust because the comportment of their lives and the things they believe in do not live up to the qualifications as said locust deem correct. And it about those who believe that if they just go along with the mob, their lives will be less bumpy or their elections will be favorable. Confederate soldiers were not really comparable to German soldiers because they were NOT German soldiers. They were American citizens who have descendants who are American citizens who, whatever they believe in apparently have no right to their ancestor(s) rest in peace. Some of them literally. The Reconciliation Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery was put up in the very early 20th century in hopes, or perhaps in the belief, that reconciliation between the North and South was possible, or at least a good idea. I think that forgiveness is by far more healthy than holding on to a grudge, particularly when that grudge started more than a century and a half ago with people none of us knew. Note: I have no dog in this fight: I have no Confederates in my family tree. My ancestors fought for the Union.
I didn't mean to compare confederate soldiers to German soldiers. I only meant that the victors are almost always the ones who get to write the history. Put another way, if the confederates had won the war, our history would have a very, very different slant. PS: I had not thought about the descendants of the Confederates simply wanting their ancestors to rest in peace. But you have a good point.