Day 54. April 23, 1862.
54
did not seem to occur to the generous donor….
April Wensday 23
Quite cool this morning and very stormy all night. I did not sleep* very much last night. I received a letter from Mrs Mary M Burket and John [illeg. looks like N Stoner] and was glad to hear from them all. We are still at a camp near town
*Knowing Ephraim, he probably didn’t sleep a wink. Oh, to have some of his thoughts last night on paper now.
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis Donald E. Reynolds P. 207
“One year ago today, the Charlotte North Carolina Whig ran this:
And now to the North let us say, wage your irrepressible conflict with fire and sword, until you have depopulated our towns, demolished our houses, devastated our fields, laid waste our forests, and deluged our land in fraternal blood, and still your object is unattained. This can only be bought at the price of our total extermination. But you will reap as the reward of your unholy war a bitterness of antipathy against you, which centuries will fail to wipe out of the remembrance of our children’s children.”
What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 140-141
“Print shaped everything we associate with the coming of the Civil War. Although Bleeding Kansas was far removed from the East and John Brown’s* raid freed no slaves, these events gained critical significance because they were amplified and distorted by newspapers. Without the papers, many events we now see as decisive would have passed without wide consequence. With the papers, events large and small stirred the American people every day. The press nurtured anticipation and grievance. Americans of the 1850s grew newly self-conscious, deeply aware of who they were and who others said they were. The “North” and the “South” took shape in words before they were unified by armies and shared sacrifice.
It was surely no accident that a long-brewing sectional animosity boiled over when railroads, telegraphs, and newspapers proliferated in the 1840s and 1850s. Suddenly, local bargains and gentlemen’s agreements in Washington could not stand. Politicians could no longer get away with saying one thing in one place and something altogether different somewhere else, for their speeches raced ahead of them by telegraph and newspapers. Rival editors wrenched the most inflammatory words out of context, underlining their danger, amplifying their threat. Territorial expansion took on a new meaning when railroads and steamboats accelerated America’s frantic rush in every direction, when American Indians were removed and foreign threats faded.
The Civil War was brought on by people imaginatively constructing chains of action and reaction beyond the boundaries of their own time and space. In distinctly modern ways, people North and South in 1860 and 1861 anticipated events, made warnings and threats, imagined their reponses, imagined the responses of others. This is one reason the Civil War seems to have, as Lincoln put it, “come,” why the war seemed both inevitable and surprising, easily explainable yet somehow incomprehensible. People on both sides were playing out future scenarios even as they responded to immediate threats. They recognized how deeply contingency could run and how quickly things could shift; a Supreme Court’s decision or a presidential election could change the evolution of vast structures of slavery and economic development.”
What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 205
“By 1860 the United States had 3,725 newspapers with an annual circulation of nearly 888 million copies– up from 186.5 million copies in 1840. The number of telegraph miles in service went from 0 to 50,000 in those twenty years, and the number of railroad miles increased from 2,818 to 36.626.”
Note: Please see May 20 for more in-depth on newspapers.
CALHOUN’S REAL MONUMENT.
“In one of the hospital tents for special cases, as I sat to-day tending a new amputation, I heard a couple of neighboring soldiers talking to each other from their cots. One down with fever, but improving, had come up belated from Charleston not long before. The other was what we now call an “old veteran,” (i.e., he was a Connecticut youth, probably of less than the age of twenty-five years, the four last of which he had spent in active service in the war in all parts of the country.) The two were chatting of one thing and another. The fever soldier spoke of John C. Calhoun’s monument, which he had seen, and was describing it. The veteran said: “I have seen Calhoun’s monument. That you saw is not the real monument. But I have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined south; nearly the whole generation of young men between seventeen and thirty destroyed or maim’d; all the old families used up—the rich impoverish’s, the plantation cover’d with weeds, the slaves unloos’d and become the masters, and the name of southerner blacken’d with every shame—all that is Calhoun’s real monument.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 772-773
Note: Calhoun’s final words purported to be, “The South, the poor South!”
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life Barbara J. Fields, Karen Elise Fields P. 182
Note: Quoting a woman:
“We all hated all that Calhoun stood for. Our white city fathers wanted to keep what he stood for alive. So they named after him a street parallel to Broad– which, however, everybody kept on calling Boundary Street for a long time. And when I was a girl, they went further: they put up a life-size figure of John C. Calhoun preaching and stood it up on the Citadel Green, where it looked at you like another person in the park. Blacks took that statue personally. As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, “Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place.” The “niggers” didn’t like it. Even the “nigger” children didn’t like it. We used to carry something with us, if we knew we would be passing that way, in order to deface that statue– scratch up the coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose– because he looked like he was telling you there was a place for “niggers” and “niggers” must stay there. Children and adults beat up John C. Calhoun so badly that the whites had to come back and put him up high, so we couldn’t get to him. That’s where he stands today, on a tall pedestal. He is so far away now until you can hardly tell what he looks like.”
Journal of the Annual Encampment of the Department of Massachusetts, Grand Army of the Republic Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Massachusetts. P. 195 Note: Excerpt from a 1910 Massachusetts meeting. Elisha Hunt Rhodes
“‘We think of the reunited South, and I am not one of those who wants to find fault with what is done in the South. I pity those people. I have seen much of them since the war. I remember standing one day looking at a monument in Athens, Ga., when a young collegian said to me, ‘I suppose you object to this monument being here.’ ‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘if you people want to perpetuate your shame, I care little about it. You are simply telling the story to your children of how you tried to pull down the old flag and how you failed.’ Another day I stood by the monument in Winchester, Va., and I read upon it an inscription which told how men had died for liberty, had died for constitution in that country. An old gentleman asked me what I thought of it. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘the day will come when you will put a ladder up against that monument, and you will hire a colored man who once wore the shackles to climb that ladder and efface every word of that inscription, for it is false. There is no truth in it.’ Those men were brave men, and I am willing to pay tribute to their bravery; but they did not die for liberty, they did not die for their constitution, they did not die for their country. Two, or three, or four or five years afterward I stood in the same place, and a Confederate soldier whom I was visiting said to me, ‘Do you remember what you said to that old gentleman about that inscription?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Look at it now.’ I said, ‘Yes, nature has been kind to you,’ for the moss had grown over it so that it could not be read. It had been completely effaced.”
Note: 6/29/21: The House passes the bill to replace Confederate statues in the U.S. Capitol; 120 Republicans voted against it. Another term for statue is treason participation trophy. There’s still 2,000 up in 2022, but in the year 2021, according to the SPLC, “a record 73 Confederate memorials [removed] from public spaces– the second-highest number of removals in one year since we began tracking,” & had their throats cut before they even knew what happened. Byeeee.
Note: 7/16/21: Charlottesville city worker Devon Henry (Black) tweets with a clip: he stands on a moving 18-wheeler flatbed next to a freshly removed statue captured & surrounded by crime scene-looking yellow rope. He films as the truck moves farther & farther away from where the statue sat for so many decades. He wears a black t-shirt with white letters, “Good Trouble,” & his baseball hat reads Norfolk State Alumni. He tells the camera “Another day at the office, baby, another day at the office. This dude on his last ride. See ‘ya. Bye Felicia. General Leroy. Hasta la vista, baby.” His tweet says, “I was clear of the assignment… Congrats #Charlottesville and to all those that fought so hard for this day to become a reality. Those confederate statues brought about a lot of hope to Cville. Well, they gone now… enjoy this win and keep pushing towards a new day! #LoveOverHate. And then snapped 3 photos of the now-blank dirt ground where various generals once loomed, with “Views look a little different around Charlottesville. #Gone.”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 337-342 (selections)
“Here in the ghostly night rides through the moonlit, aromatic evening to whip a Negro or a prostitute or some poor white given to violating the Seventh Commandment or drinking up his scant earnings instead of clothing his children, or merely given to staying away from church; to tar and feather a labor organizer or a schoolmaster who had talked his new ideas too much—in slow, swaying noonday parades through the burning silence of towns where every Negro was gone from the streets, and the Jews and the Catholics and the aliens had their houses and shops shuttered—here was surcease for the personal frustrations and itches of the Klansmen, of course. But also the old coveted, splendid sense of being a heroic blade, a crusader sweeping up mystical slopes for White Supremacy, religion, morality, and all that had made up the faith of the Fathers: of being the direct heir in continuous line of the Confederate soldiers at Gettysburg and of those old Klansmen who had once driven out the carpetbagger and tamed the scalawag; of participating in ritualistic assertion of the South’s continuing identity, its will to remain unchanged and defy the ways of the Yankee and the world in favor of that one which had so long been its own.
In the very hour when they seemed to have it in their power to do what they had plainly set out to do, the people themselves showed a curious hesitancy and revulsion—a strange unreadiness to go through with it. The same disgust for the Klan’s crimes and the same proud shrinking from the thought that the South was being treated as a comic land because of the anti-evolution laws and attacks on intelligence, which assuredly moved some of the leaders, probably had something to do with that in the more informed levels in general.
At any rate, there the hesitancy, the drawing back, was. After the Scopes trial, for all the indubitable majority opposition to Darwinism, only two states went on to pass anti-evolution laws, and those two were the two which by all standards were the most benighted, Mississippi and Arkansas. And if other movements against intelligence int he schools continued occasionally to flare up, they invariably died of inanition. As for the Klan, though it blazed up brilliantly in the Al Smith campaign of 1928, I think there is no doubt that thereafter it was doomed simply by increasingly swift internal causes.’”
Factoid: Lincoln & Darwin were born on the same day: February 12, 1809.
Note: From the 10-day injunction to stop Lee’s Monument Avenue removal, filed in Circuit Court for the city of Richmond, 6/8/20:
“That the Commonwealth of Virginia is a party to a deed recorded in the Clerk’s Office of Henrico Circuit Court in March 1890 whereby the Commonwealth accepted the conveyance and “guaranteed” to “hold said statue and pedestal and circle of ground perpetually sacred to the monumental purpose” and to “faithfully guard it and affectionately protect it.’”
“On Seeing England for the First Time.” Jamaica Kincaid
“There were monuments everywhere; they commemorated victories, battles fought between them and the people who lived across the sea from them, all vile people, fought over which of them would have dominion over the people who looked like me. The monuments were useless to them now, people sat on them and ate their lunch. They were like markers on an old useless trail like a piece of old string tied to a finger to jog the memory, like old decoration in an old house, dirty, useless, in the way. Their skins were so pale, it made them look so fragile, so weak, so ugly. What if the power to simply banish them from their land, send boat after boatload of them on a voyage that in fact had no destination, force them to live in a place where the sun’s presence was a constant? This would rid them of their pale complexion and make them look more like me, make them look more like the people I love and treasure and hold dear, and more like the people who occupy the near and far reaches of my imagination, my history, my geography, and reduce them and everything they have ever known to figurines as evidence that I was in divine favor, what if all this was in my power? Could I resist it? No one ever has.”
Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers Susie King Taylor docsouth.unc.edu P. 65-66
“I read an article, which said the ex-Confederate Daughters had sent a petition to the managers of the local theatres in Tennessee to prohibit the performance of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” claiming it was exaggerated (that is, the treatment of the slaves), and would have a very bad effect on the children who might see the drama. I paused and thought back a few years of the heart-rending scenes I have witnessed; I have seen many times, when I was a mere girl, thirty or forty men, handcuffed, and as many women and children, come every first Tuesday of each month from Mr. Wiley’s trade office to the auction blocks, one of them being situated on Drayton Street and Court Lane, the other on Bryant Street, near the Pulaski House. The route was down our principal street, Bull Street, to the courthouse, which was only a block from where I resided.
All people in those days got all their water from the city pumps, which stood about a block apart throughout the city. The one we used to get water from was opposite the court-house, on Bull Street. I remember, as if it were yesterday, seeing droves of negroes going to be sold, and I often went to look at them, and I could hear the auctioneer very plainly from my house, auctioning these poor people off.
Do these Confederate Daughters ever send petitions to prohibit the atrocious lynchings and wholesale murdering and torture of the negro? Do you ever hear of them fearing this would have a bad effect on the children? Which of these tow, the drama or the present state of affairs, makes a degrading impression upon the minds of our young generation? In my opinion is is not “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” but it should be the one that has caused the world to cry “Shame!” It does not seem as if our land is yet civilized. It is like times long past, when rulers and high officers had to flee for their lives, and the negro has been dealt with in the same way since the war by those he lived with and toiled for two hundred years or more. I do not condemn all the Caucasian race because the negro is badly treated by a few of the race. No! for had it not been for the true whites, assisted by God and the prayers of our forefathers, I should not be here to-day.”
Note: Twitter comments left on WVIR NBC29:
So sad! God help these people that are lost, amen! God Bless Robert E Lee!
This town has plenty of liberal idiots. So intelligent to destroy property. Sad and this votes. Wow
Time to set landmines. The vandalism will stop.
Cowards! Do it in front of us! I dare you pos!!
well maybe I camp out there I take care of it.
Low lifes never take a vacation.
Why don’t they put cameras up or do something
Shoot them !
Charlottseville don’t care. Look at the lengths they went to to try to remove the statues.
Low life to pick on a statue, what do you hope to get out of it?
I bet there are some people that would volunteer to guard all historical statues. If they could handle the situations in their own way.
The Charlottesville Vandal Society, a racist organization.
Dont rely on the state to defend the law, if you really care just get a ghilley suit and camp out in the bushes
They need too charge Charlottesville Council for not putting up cameras
GIF Show me on this doll where the statue hurt you
The day of reckoning is coming and it’s not going to be pretty!
Let them try to outrun a bullet.
Rosa Parks statue going up this week. Time to return the favor. Cover in white paint.
@Stonekettle
And so, we’re back to this bullshit about the Confederate flag being about “heritage.”
So I ask again: WHAT heritage?
That flag flew over PART of the South for <2% of its history. What does it represent that the AMERICAN FLAG does not?
Be VERY specific. Show your work.
Note: According to the Washington Post, when it landed from France at the James River docks “shortly after 5 p.m., May 7…. 10,000 citizens clamped 20,000 hands on ropes and hauled three huge crates a mile and a half up to the empty tobacco field now known as Monument Avenue.” 10k people, including 3k children hauled Mr. Lee in 1890 20 years after his death. Other reports put the distance a good two miles that all them po’ face white folk all struggled, using 700-foot-ropes, after which 150k showed up at the unveiling.
***As far as other monument controversy: In a 2019 secret arrangement, UNC awards the Silent Sam statue to the NC Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), as well as $2.5 million for upkeep (faculty vote condemns). The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designates groups such as the SCV as neo-Confederate Hate Groups: “Reactionary, revisionist predilection for symbols of the Confederate States of America (CSA), typically paired with a strong belief in the validity of the failed doctrines of nullification and secession– in the specific context of the antebellum South– which rose to prominence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.” The League of the South (LOS) is listed as the most prominent neo-Confederate hate group in the country. United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is also listed.
They started in on the White plantation nostalgia, the Whites in the South and North did, bought into it by the ’80s soon enough after cotton bales were the only beings left in a Charleston city square flaming up a night sky awaiting the first Union troops, the 21st U.S. Colored Reg’t (marching & singing John Brown’s Body) whose commander got the formal surrender, the keys to what’s left of the city from the Mayor walking out to meet them. But those 700-foot-long ropes. How they can be used. That statue still up. That was the war. To be clear: While not otherwise occupied with White lady activities, the UDC was known for being present at monument dedications to the KKK, Concord, NC. as one instance. Note: since writing the above, the bullshit finally came down on 9/8/21. Weighing 12 tons, it had sat on less than an acre. Less than an acre.
Note: “Confederate Monuments and the History of Lynching in the American South: An empirical Examination” is 2021 research study spearheaded by Kyshia Henderson at UVA showing “the number of lynching victims in a county is a positive and significant predictor of the number of Confederate memorializations in that county” and “memorializations reflect a racist history, one marred by intentions to terrorize and intimidate Black Americans in response to Black progress.” “The researchers also cite a review of 30 dedication speeches for Confederate memorials, which found that nearly half invoked “explicit racist language,” including phrases such as “love of race” and “your own race and blood.”
batten.virginia.edu/about/news/new-uva-study-finds-correlation-between-lynchings-and-confederate-monuments
Obviously, it didn’t take a study to put on paper pure common sense. Anyway, one estimate is that VA. has 239 Confederate memorials, 62 right in front of courthouses, 54 of which were erected between 1889-1936. Another count has over 223 public spaces in VA. with memorials to the Confederacy, more than in any other State. There are roughly 718 Confederate monuments & statues in the U.S., unless you count the 1700 total by the SPLC. But numbers, like so many war-related facts, are impossible to come by. One thing isn’t: the villagers have got themselves some torches again come 2017 after Heather Heyer’s death in Charlottesville, which set off the “Unite the Right KKK Rally,” or may as well have been known as. And the 2015 Mother Emanuel Church massacre also brought to light the role of Confederate symbols on American ground. However, as of 2021, the SPLC said VA. is removing more “Confederate symbols, monuments” than any other state. See the slpcenter.org for more. In the meantime, lest we forget other massacres, Mountain Meadows, 1857.
Note: The petitioner who filed is a descendant of a contributor to the Lee Monument Fund. There were, as of 2020, 1,761 Confederate symbols in public spaces across the U.S. Lee, his statue bit by bit by bit coming down, the beak chipped off the Eagle in front of the Lee statue in 2019, ‘ole Albemarle County, Charlottesville, then the next night the Eagle loses his head. Maybe the Southerners caterwauling about Lee– who claim to adore the stones– should place them elsewhere for their safety, the statue bit by bit by bit carried off like so much carrion. Monuments, of fake men sitting atop fake horses looking fakely determined, facing North, their flags, handkerchiefs of snot, Hawaiian shirts bombasted out over hairy fat saucer bellies, stained with god knows what Dockers, Rebel names of schools & buildings, parks, bridges, water bodies, satellites (there must be, right?)…. then there’s all the objects of memorabilia that still sells like hotcakes. See April 13, Americanheritagecommittee.com’s obnoxious shop selection. Below, a handkerchief donor story:
The Civil War in 50 Objects Harold Holzer and the New York Historical Society P. 11 (excerpt)
“The Palmetto and the Snake Confederate Palmetto Flag, 1961”
One of the more unlikely relics in the New York Historical Society’s Civil War collection is this handkerchief-sized cotton flag. Less than a foot square in overall dimensions and somewhat tattered, it retains evidence of the vivid blue with which its unknown creator painted it in 1861, around the same time South Carolina declared its independence from the Union and joined the Confederacy.
According to the donor who presented the banner to the Society at war’s end, this state flag flew proudly in Charleston during the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter– waving in that day’s strong winds as a testament to Southern defiance during the opening hours of the Civil War.
The design for South Carolina’s new state flag, featuring a white palmetto tree set against an azure field, with a white crescent moon tucked into its upper hoist corner, had been formally adopted only three months earlier. But its inspiration could be traced all the way back to 1765, when foes of the British Stamp Act angrily toted blue flags in their protest parades, most of them featuring an emblem pattern composed of three crescent moons– increasingly interpreted as a defiant symbol of liberty. Just such a flag flew from Charleston’s Sullivan’s Island when it came under attack by the British fleet in June 1776. It was said that the city’s defender, the patriot colonel William Moultrie, credited an impenetrable wall of palmetto tree logs at the site of the fort subsequently named for him with saving the island from destruction by enemy shells. In tribute, South Carolina added an upright palmetto tree to the state flag in 1861, as if to serve notice to Union forces that it would again, and always, be prepared to resist what it regarded as invasion.
The flag’s other dominant symbol, the coiled snake, dated to the Colonial period. Benjamin Franklin had issued his famous woodcut, “Join, or Die,” in 1754, showing a snake sliced into pieces, each representing a different disconnected colony. The image was meant to call to mind an ancient legend that held that if a snake was cut into sections, it would return to life if joined back together before the sun went down. By adapting and visualizing this myth, Franklin meant to inspire the squabbling colonies to make themselves stronger through national unity. The coiled-snake motif eventually appeared on American currency, on military uniforms, and of course on flags– the generic snake eventually replaced by an indigenous American rattlesnake, the pieces restored and inseparable, and a new slogan in place to ward off aggressors: “Don’t tread on me.”
By the outbreak of the Civil War, the combination of all these potent emblems in South Carolina iconography served to vivify the assertion of the seceded states that they were fighting a noble battle for their independence and liberty little different from the struggles of the founders against Great Britain during the Revolutionary War. As the historian Reid Mitchell has pointed out, “The flag itself was the emblem of the community that sent companies and regiments into the field…. Their flags linked them to their homes.” Since flags were unusually made by women, they required protection much as the soldiers’ wives and mothers needed protection. “The flag was the physical tie between the homelife they had left and fought for and the war into which they were plunged.” Yet the fact that South Carolina felt compelled to maintain its own flag at a moment of emerging Southern nationalism testified as well to the challenges facing a new Confederate nation founded on states’ rights: some of its own component parts still considered themselves independent republics. Not for a while longer did the Stars and Bars come into general use in all areas of the Confederacy. The problem with the Stars and Bars motif was that it so closely resembled the Stars and Stripes, especially on the battlefield. For that reason the Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard designed a separate “battle flag” based on the St. Andrew’s cross.
Nevertheless, artists on both sides returned frequently to the palmetto-and-snake motifs throughout the Civil War– both to further sanctify the idea of Southern independence and, from the other side, to brand it as outright treason.
It would be unfair to conclude that Confederate nationalism waned over the course of the Civil War simply because patriotic emblems grew scarcer or, conversely, that emblems grew scarcer because nationalism waned. The truth has little to do with demand or patriotism. In fact, so much of Southern industry began focusing on war production, so many artists and artisans took up arms, that neither the time nor the manpower remained on hand to supply a full panoply of civilian goods. Imports, meanwhile, declined precipitously as a result of the Union blockade. Through all the deprivation, flags retained their special romance, and it was not unusual for an engraver assigned to “official” work in the Confederate Treasury or Post Office departments to place a flag prominently on currency or stamps. And when Lost Cause artists* reinvigorated Confederate memory after 1865, flags and flag bearers resumed their dominant place retrospectively. Artists like William L. Sheppard and Allen C. Redwood made flag bearers objects of special attention and reverence, illustrating the legend that those bearing the colors almost always fell picturesquely and passed their banners to an eager comrade before either soldier or flag hit the ground. The reality was more complicated, but one story that has the ring of truth involved an enlisting officer who told a potential recruit that he would be especially proud to carry the regimental flag because it bore the words “Victory or Death.”
The enlistee replied, “I object to the motto.”
“Why so?” inquired the officer. “How shall it be changed?”
The recruit answered: “Make it victory or pretty damned badly wounded, and I’m your huckleberry.”
If enthusiasm varied, so did the use of enthusiasm-generating symbols. Toward the end of the war, the snake symbol that had begun appearing frequently in American cartoons created in the North was no longer the coiled rattler symbolizing American defiance but the equally venomous new symbol of Northern Democratic opposition to the war: the copperhead. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia artists might depict Jefferson Davis strung up from a symbolic palmetto or hanging from the proverbial sour apple tree of derisive song. In one end-of-war print titled “Young America,” the nation was symbolized by the cherubic infant Hercules, seen choking the life out of the two serpents dispatched by a jealous Hera, according to Greek myth, but redeployed now to remind Northerners that national survival had been threatened by the reptilian offenses of sedition and rebellion. The palmetto and snake, once used to represent liberty and endurance, came in the end to refer to treason.
That makes it doubly ironic that in June 1865, E.C. Estes, the business manager and secretary of the executive committee for the National Freedman’s Relief Association, sent this flag to George H. Moore, librarian of the New York Historical Society, accompanied by the following affidavit: “Herewith is a small Palmetto Flag which was in use by the Rebels during the attack on Fort Sumter. Mr. Chs. C. Leigh obtained it in that vicinity some years ago. He is certain of its genuineness, and when about to leave home a month ago, at my suggestion deemed it best to send it to you.”
At the time, the association was busy collecting clothing and cash not for unrepentant white advocates of the Lost Cause but for ex-slaves uprooted and impoverished by the war. Perhaps Estes and Leigh meant this only as a prize of the war. It did not seem to occur to the generous donor that the flag had once represented the last defense against the freedom of the once-enslaved people his organization was now endeavoring to sustain.
Mitch Landrieu, Mayor of New Orleans, in 2017, at the last Confederate monuments taken away in New Orleans (excerpt): “It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, they fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.”
very stormy all night….
Like that blood isn’t going to pass down. You think that blood isn’t going to pass down? That blood’s gonna to pass down.
That’s the kind of blood that lasts forever.
The streets don’t forget.
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