Comments for Beaufort County defends southern history; opposes War on History attack | Eastern North Carolina Now

Big Government Bob's lame attempt to change the discussion to a different subject, Jim Crow makes no sense, as he again does not have a good grasp on history. He apparently knows little outside the leftwing narrative. What Jim Crow most resembles are the Black Codes of the antebellum NORTH. The Black Codes imposed in many northern states created far more severe restrictions on free blacks than the later Jim Crow laws of the South. Free blacks, which were 20% of the black population in the South, were generally given more rights in the South prior to the war than in many northern states. This is reflected on the differing treatment of black soldiers by the two sides during the war. The North gave them half the pay of white soldiers while the South gave them full pay. The North put them in segregated units while the South integrated its units. The North did not allow minorities to serve as commissioned officers while the South did allow it and even had a minority general.

Commented: Friday, May 12th, 2023 @ 10:51 am By: John Steed

Jim Crow is not inherited guilt. We did that.

Commented: Friday, May 12th, 2023 @ 9:42 am By: Big Bob

Try as we might, We can absolve the sins of our fathers, by ignoring our own.

Commented: Thursday, May 11th, 2023 @ 11:40 pm By: Big Bob

As to BLM being Marxist, there was a video posted on this site 2 or 3 years ago, where one of the three co-founders of BLM boasted that she and another of the BLM co-founders were "trained Marxists". The third co-founder had lots of Marxist connections but apparently she was just an untrained Marxist. I take them at their word as to what they are, but apparently you want to whitewash it.

As to you, your support of attacks on history is identifal to Mao's Cultural Revolution, and you clearly support the Marxist CRT. Of course, there are other strains of totalitarianism that also support similar attacks on history like Muslim fanatics like ISIS and the Taliban and fascists.

Commented: Thursday, May 11th, 2023 @ 8:47 pm By: Conservative Voter

Bolshevik Bob is taking the same position on destroying historic monuments that was taken by ISIS, the Taliban, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He is a fellow traveller with all of those cancel culture tyrants.

Confederae mounuments were erected at the same interval after the war as the Union monuments, and inded a similar interval as World War I and World War II monuments. And who is it that has been making major attacks on monuments here? The Marxist BLM organization, that's who. BLM has been attacking historical monuments all over the world..

Commented: Thursday, May 11th, 2023 @ 3:46 pm By: Conservative Voter

It is hard to imagine why Randy Walker went along with woke cancel culture against the south. Cancel culture is nothing but evil.

Commented: Thursday, May 11th, 2023 @ 12:41 pm By: Bubba

There is one other inconvenient fact for the postwar northern narrative about the war being fought over slavery. That has to do with the position of key generals on that issue. If the narrative were correct, one would expect the northern generals to be anti-slavery and the southern generals pro-slavery. Thus it does not fit that when Grant and Lee met at Appamattox, it was Grant, not Lee, who was the slave owner.

Grant and his wife Julia owned slaves which were in Kentucky, a state still in the Union and not under the Emancipation Proclamation and continued to own them until December 1865, months after the war ended, when the Grant family slaves were finally freed by the 13th Amendment. In 1861, Grant wrote a letter to a close friend in which he emphatically stated that the only reason for the war was preserving the union, and that if the politicians tried to make it about anything else like ending slavery, he might switch sides and fight for the south.

Robert E. Lee, on the other hand, freed the hundreds of slaves he inherited from his father in law as soon as that estate was settled. In 1859, Lee wrote that" slavery is an institution of moral and political evil".

And if you then look at the second best known generals, that pattern holds.

Sherman never had enough money to own slaves, but it is documented that when he was stationed at Fort Moultrie, Sherman rented a slave. Also when he was hired to run Louisians's state military academy, he wrote a letter to send for his wife who was with her parents at the time and advised her that she should buy a slave when she arrived. His wife's family had more money than Sherman himself.

On the other hand, Stonewall Jackson never owned slaves, and prior to the war, when he was an professor at VMI, he started and personnally conducted a program run through his church to teach blacks, both free and slave, to read and write. It was probably the first black literacy program ever conducted in the south. After he went into the Confederate army, Jackson sent part of every military paycheck home to keep that program running.

And Bobbie, don't try to deflect again with your "whataboutism" (a leftist term you should know well). This thread is about monuments to military heroes.

Commented: Thursday, May 11th, 2023 @ 9:50 am By: John Steed

Yeah John, I confused the federal legislative part of the 13th Amendment with the Emancipation Proclamation. You have a keen eye for historical detail.

Your recountment of General Waite would make a fine post here on ENC NOW in our reformed "A Historical Perspective" section.

Commented: Wednesday, May 10th, 2023 @ 8:31 pm By: Stan Deatherage

John, still, I thought the Emancipation Proclamation passed the Northern congress, which also, as as by-product, brought "Negro" soldiers in the Northern Army.

Commented: Wednesday, May 10th, 2023 @ 6:24 pm By: Stan Deatherage

John, I think you failed to mention the Emancipation Proclamation, which was not proposed by Lincoln until January 1, 1863, nearly 2 years into the Civil War, completely expresses the greatest priority regarding the North was preserving the Union.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a political maneuver to change the course of the war that was not going well for the North at that time.

Commented: Wednesday, May 10th, 2023 @ 4:01 pm By: Stan Deatherage

Bobbie, you really do not know much about history do you? Lincoln's rationale for attacking the South was "to preserve the union", not to end slavery. The Republican platofrm of 1860 did not call for the abolition of slavery in the South. The month before Lincoln sent an armed intervention fleet to Charletson, forcing the South to take Fort Sumter before it arrived, Congress passed two major bills. At that time, the souterhn members of Congress had resigned and left, and the north had total control. One bill was the Morrill Tariff that almost tripled import duties, a huge deal for the South. The other was the Corwin Amendment.

What was the Corwin Amendment? It was a proposed amendment to the US Constitution that was passed by the required supermajority and submitted to the states for ratification. Lincoln endoresed it in his first Inaugural Address. The Corwin Amendment would have given Constitutioinal protection to slavery and made it impossible to abolish at the national level without amending the Constitution again.

Saying the north started the war to end slavery, just weeks after passing a Constitutional Amendment to pootect slavery is ludicrous.

Then their is the Fremont Affair. Missouri's state government was pro-Southern, so in 1861, Lincoln appointed General Fremont as miliary governor of the state. Fremont was an abolishionist and used that authority to issue a proclaimation abolishing slavery in the state. Lincoln responded by firing Fremont, revoking the proclamation, and using federal troops to return slaves that Fremont had already freed to their masters.

That over a year after the war started Lincoln went on an anti-slavery kick was mostly a foreign policy ploy. He finally comprehended how close his government had come to the UK entering the war on the side of the South in the Trent Affair, and his "preserve the union" gambit was laughted at in the UK. "How can a country that owes its own existance to seceding from the British empire possibly complain about someone secceding from them?", the Brits chortled. Lincoln was trying to create a moral stand to keep the UK out of the war, but many in the UK never believed it. The quotes below from Marx and Dickens are good examples of that, as well as an incident in the House of Commons when a pro-northern MP made reference to the war being about slavery but was shouted down in parliament with cries of "No, its the tariffs".

While I would agree that the end of slavery was by far the most important psoitive result of the war, it was NOT the cause of the war.

Commented: Wednesday, May 10th, 2023 @ 1:27 pm By: John Steed

It is bad enough when illegal aliens demand cultural changes in western countries, but when globalists among our own citizens try to destroy our history, that is a low blow.

While French president Macron is a worm on many things, he did get preservation of history right. When the French branch of BLM started demanding removal of history, Macron went on nationwide TV and announced that no one would be erased from French history and no monuments would be removed. When BLM decided to attack a monument in Paris they didn't like, Macron sent a heavy police detail to defend it and arrest the attackers, who were then charged with major crimes, convicted, and jailed. That put an end to the attacks on mounuments.

Commented: Wednesday, May 10th, 2023 @ 12:26 pm By: borderhawk

Thank you commissioners Deatherage, Richardson, Rebholz, and Waters for voting to preserve our history. It is hard to fathom what the others were thinking.

Commented: Wednesday, May 10th, 2023 @ 6:52 am By: Victoria

When you advocate for the anti-history pogrom of Mao's Cultural Revolution, Little Bobbie, that makes you a Maoist. From your posts, you are also an adocate of "equity" as the far left uses that term today, which is a very different thing than equality, and it is consistent with Marxist ideology. You also support Marxist concepts like CRT, DEI, and ESG.

Actually, when you consider what Marx wrote concerning the war, your position, Bobbie, is considerably to the left of Marx.

Commented: Tuesday, May 9th, 2023 @ 7:39 pm By: John Steed

Why celebrate our Confederate past? One has to look past the partisan explanations of the north that it was about slavery (odd that it did not become that for over a year since the war started) or the South that it was about state's rights. I look to the ananlysis of the greatest statesman of the 20th century, Sir Winston Churchill, who was also a meticulous student of history and wrote a book on US history entitled "The Great Republic". That book contains a chapter on the causes (plural) of the War Between the States.

What Churchill identifies as the primary cause of the war is the final rupture of a conflict of ideas that had existed since the country was founded, between the concept of a powerful central government, originally advocated by Alexander Hamilton and represented in 1861 by the North, and the concept of limited government originally advocated by THomas Jefferson and represented in 1861 by the South. The Confederate government was organized around the Jeffersonian principles of limited government, and that was an ideal worthy to fight for, and worthy to celebrate today.

Churchill as a foreigner analyzing the causes of the war was in a much better position to be objective than northerners or southerners here.

Commented: Tuesday, May 9th, 2023 @ 6:52 pm By: Steven P. Rader

That was a complex period of history, and blanket condemnations are for the uninformed or the malicious. British political philosopher Lord Acton, most famous for his quote that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely", for example wrote that the Confederate Constitution was a masterpiece of establishing limited government and he was more upset "with the stake that was lost at Richmond" than he was joyful over "that which was saved at Waterloo".

Your usual guiding light, Karl Marx, wrote "the war is not about slavery; it is a war of economic subjugation by the North against the South." Novelist Charles Dickens, a leader in the British anti-slavery movement said essentially the same thing in different words.

The valour of our southern soldiers and sailors, black and white, is something we should never lose sight of, and those who destroy their monuments are just despicable. Most southern soldiers joined to defend their homes and families from foeign invasion.

Commented: Tuesday, May 9th, 2023 @ 4:45 pm By: John Steed

The above quote by George Orwell is a good one, but there is a better one from his novel "1984" which is directly on point with what the leftists are doing today to our history:

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right." -Geroge Orwell, from "1984"

Bob, I would also point out to you that to true southerners, maligning their ancestors are fighting words.

Commented: Tuesday, May 9th, 2023 @ 1:04 pm By: Steven P. Rader