The ongoing debate on the role that Confederate heroes should play in a microcosm

I’ve always liked the sentiment that Union veteran and writer Ambrose Bierce wrote after visiting his old battlefields in West Virginia and a place where Confederates were buried in ‘A Bivouac of the Dead’:

“They were honest and courageous foemen, having little in common with the political madmen who persuaded them to their doom and the literary bearers of false witness in the aftertime. They did not live through the period of honorable strife into the period of vilification–did not pass from the iron age to the brazen–from the era of the sword to that of the tongue and pen. Among them is no member of the Southern Historical Society. Their valor was not the fury of the non-combatant; they have no voice in the thunder of the civilians and the shouting. Not by them are impaired the dignity and infinite pathos of the Lost Cause. Give them, these blameless gentlemen, their rightful part in all the pomp that fills the circuit of the summer hills.”

Chris

It is easy to condemn slavery. As Lincoln said, “If slavery isn’t wrong then nothing is wrong.”

But the specific endorsements of slavery in the secession documents of some deep south states are not found in Arkansas or other upper south states. Moreover, Davis himself changed his mind about slavery stating specifically in July 1864 to Lincoln emissaries that ‘The south is not fighting for slavery, it is fighting for independence.” After Congress approved recruitment of slaves as soldiers, he backed it up with an executive order specifying that any slave accepted as a soldier much also be granted manumission papers.

Now, if you are going to let Lincoln change his mind about “not disturbing slavery in the states where it existed at the start of the war”, the it is necessary to permits Davis and the Confederacy to also change their War aims. Yet the common dogma of present-era historians only permits Lincoln to change his mind. It is a false dogma.

Dodd should be honored for giving up his life instead of betraying accomplices. One such accomplice was probably a teenage girl from Vermont.

1. Davis’ statement was made in July 1864 to two Lincoln peace emissaries. The chief reason it is in the historical record is that Lincoln used the comment *against* Davis by proclaiming that Davis would never agree to reunion and that the war must go on.

Thus, *Lincoln* still put reunion ahead of emancipation. Moreover, “reunion” was nothing more than a code word for Yankee hegemony in North America. That is what resulted in the ensuing 100 years, and that is what Davis wanted to avoid.

2. Davis *may* have made similar statements earlier, but historians don’t look for them because it does not conform to the false southerners-are-alway-evil dogma.

3. Certainly other prominent Rebels supported conditional emancipation earlier including Cleburne and 11 other Army of Tennessee officers in December, 1863. Cleburne’s proposal provided for manumission of the slave-soldier’s entire family. Kenner of Louisiana was even earlier.

4. Foskett discredits Davis’s decision to grant freedom to slaves in exchange for volunteering as Confederate soldiers. because it is motivated by a desire for a new military weapon. He thereby falsely implies that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation lacked similar motives.

In point of fact, the Emancipation Proclamation was *chiefly* adopted as a military and diplomatic weapon. Lincoln hoped it would (1) deter Confederate diplomatic recognition, (2) force the Confederate army to disperse troops in order to guard against slave uprisings, and (3) lead to defacto impressment of African-Americans into the Union army.

5. One reason Davis could not accept slaves into the army until March 1865 was because of his respect for constitutional procedures. The Congress of the USA was also more conservative than Lincoln, but Lincoln had less respect for the legal process. He did not wait for Congress to emancipate slaves whereas Davis did. This gets to the core of the differences between the two governments.

1. Evidently Foskett thinks denial is a river in Africa.

2. Yes, it *is* pretty simple. Lincoln was interested in emancipation chiefly as a weapon of war because it would damage the other side at no cost to his own.

3. Guys like Foskett often claim that states rights and independence were excuses made up by southerners after the War. But statements by Davis, Cleburne and others during the War demonstrate the error in such claims just as does the naming of Confederate General States Rights Gilst preceded Sumter by thirty years.

There *was *a fundamental difference between north and south in the primacy of states rights and conservative interpretation of the constitution. Pretending otherwise is common Yankee revisionism.

4. Foskett repeats standard Yankee hypocrisy by permitting Lincoln to change his war aims but not Davis.

5. I have ancestors on both sides of the War, but can readily concede the Yankee forebears shamelessly waged the war for economic domination of North America. I think they were wrong to do it. But I have no obligation of “heritage” to deny their selfish motivation and ruthless, cowardly conduct against helpless civilians.

Mr. Spencer,

You’re new here, so you get one warning, and one warning only.

To be quite clear about this: I pay for this website, so that means that I get to make the rules. The rules are what they are. I am the sole arbiter of them, and there is no right of appeal. Ever. If you don’t like the rules, there’s a simple solution: don’t bother coming back here, because they most assuredly are not going change just because you don’t like them.

There are three rules: (1) no posting under false or assumed names or anonymously (you’re okay with that one); (2) Be polite and respectful at all times; personal attacks are never acceptable and are never tolerated; and (3) nobody–and especially people whom I don’t know–gets to insult me on my own website.

Those are the rules. As I said, they are not negotiable, and there is no right of appeal.

Your comments are coming dangerously close to crossing the line on rule number 2. Again, I couldn’t possibly care less whether you think your comments are appropriate in tone or content. Your opinion about that subject is entirely irrelevant, as this is not a democracy. It’s a dictatorship with me as the benevolent despot, and when it comes to the application of the rules, my opinion is the ONLY one that matters.

Here is my ruling: Either dial back the snarky semi-personal attacks, or you’re gone. This is the one and only warning you will get. You will get no further warnings. There is no right of appeal. Make a comment that I think is inappropriate, it will be deleted, and your IP address will be permanently banned.

I trust that I have made myself abundantly clear.

Eric J. Wittenberg
Site Owner

Dennis: Good point. The other one I’d add is that Manning’s book a few years back made a strong case about the fallacy of assuming that because most southerners didn’t own slaves, slavery was not a large (if not the largest) factor in why they were fighting. Secession began and steamrolled because of the perception (right or wrong) that Lincoln’s election presaged a northern attack on an important (commercially and culturally) southern institution. One didn’t need to actually own slaves in order to decide that defending the institution of slavery was a worthwhile purpose.

Rats! I left out a word above! the last sentence should have read …existed or been SOLVED (my caps) without resorting to armed conflict.

My apologies!

If you think African-American slaves are not fully human, then the defense of the “peculiar institution”, or indeed its expansion, is worth fighting for. I submit this belief was common in the US pre-Civil War. Very few believe it now, which is why it is difficult for us to understand how people with otherwise noble qualities supported the institution of slavery.