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MONUMENT OR MANATEE?

Residents of Bradenton, Florida have begun a petition to replace their town's Confederate memorial with a statue of Snooty the Manatee.

On Sunday, Snooty - who was oldest sea cow in captivity at 69 years of age - died at the South Florida Museum after he became trapped in a hatch door and drowned.



HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?

The statue of a Confederate cavalryman in Rockville, Maryland has been removed from outside a courthouse and placed near a privately run Potomac River ferry named for a Confederate General Jubal Early.

Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett tells local media the statue cost about $100,000 to move.

Numbers from bid document shared by Leggett's Office:

The company that moved the 13-ton statue was actually the low bidder for the move. The county says it didn't really have other examples to compare the cost of the project to.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy donated the Confederate Solider Statue in 1913.

SOME OF THE PEOPLE SOME OF THE TIME

The Vernon County, Wisconsin fair has banned the sale of Confederate Battle Flags.

John McClelland Jr., is the vice president of the Vernon County Fair, a nonprofit organization. He said the 11-member board voted to bar the vending of Confederate Battle Flags in June. Despite the board approving the ban, many members were less than enthusiastic. Therefore, McClelland, declined to clarify the margin by which the vote was passed.

"As a board, we decided it wasn't a necessary item," McClelland said in reference to the Flag. "It's a piece of our history, but someone got their feelings hurt. So we decided not to sell it."

McClelland said people have contacted him upset over the board's decision, and that when he thinks of the confederate battle flag, he thinks of the television show "The Dukes of Hazzard," which first aired during the late 1970s, and not of racism or hate.

"It goes both ways," McClelland said. "You make two people happy and 50 people get angry."



STILL WAITING

The citizen advisory committee assigned to make a recommendation concerning the future of the Confederate monument in downtown Shreveport again postponed voting on a resolution at its meeting Tuesday night.

The nine-member panel first postponed voting on a recommendation at its July 6 meeting due to the absence of Secretary Jackie Nichols.

Two members, R. Timothy Jones and Straughter David Morris, Sr., were absent on Tuesday.

"I move that we postpone until all members can be present to cast a vote," Committee Member John Andrew Prime said.

The committee plans to meet again on Aug. 10. When a recommendation is adopted by the committee, it will be forwarded to the Caddo Parish Commission for consideration.

Before adjourning Tuesday, Nichols gave a report on the comments collected at previous meetings. "There were 232 speakers and non-speakers turning in comment cards," she said Of the comments collected voicing an opinion on the monument, 135 people said they want to keep the monument where it is, and 97 people voiced support for moving the monument. Comment cards that did not specify an opinion were not counted, she said.



PRESIDENT TRUMP DOES IT AGAIN

Fulfilling his promise for the second time this year, President Trump donated his second-quarter salary of $100,000 to the Department of Education on Wednesday to help fund a STEM camp, which teaches young students about science, technology, engineering and math.

Previously we had reported that the President donated his first-quarter salary to the Department of Interior, for battlefield restoration.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released a statement Wednesday thanking President Trump for his donation, lauding "his commitment to our nation's students and to reforming education in America so that every child, no matter their ZIP code, has access to a high quality education."

In these very - I mean very - weird times of ours, few phenomena appear weirder than what I would describe as the mania for pulling down or otherwise removing memorials to dead Confederates. New Orleans has done it. My own University of Texas has done it. Dallas now talks of doing it, as my respected one-time colleague at The News, James Ragland, informs us.

I feel the urgent need to inquire of the iconoclasts, the breakers of images: Why? To what purpose? With what sensible aim in view?

The reply generally comes through clenched teeth: Hmmmph! On account of slavery, isn't that clear enough? The promoters commonly think it is. Why, these unconscionable rebels - Jeff Davis, Robert E. Lee, John B. Hood, and so on - betrayed their country and fought to preserve slavery. Their images defile and deface the American community, sowing disharmony, perpetuating racism.

I find it's generally a waste of time to interpose between Lee's grave, bearded image and the wreckers' wrath any information respecting the old general's meritorious character and, equally to the point, his postwar commitment to healing the nation's self-inflicted injuries. (During the war, his name for the soldiers of the North was always "those people.") The statue wreckers are seldom interested in the kind of historical detail that schools used to impart about the war itself: with due attention paid to the diligent measures required over many years to heal the gaping, bleeding wounds of war.

Let's go back to where we started. What are we trying to do here? We're out, are we, to heal by destroying and displacing, thereby rekindling divisive passions? What an odd conceit, that we should forcibly replace old pieties with new ones, and expect thanks for it! I am sorry to inform the wreckers that, as we say in the South, that ole dog won't hunt.

I can appreciate, as I think everyone must, that 1) the abolition of slavery represented an enormous gain for civilization, that 2) the sooner blacks and whites learn to function as a united people, the better for America, and that 3) the modern South teems with folk - Vietnamese, Cubans, Chinese, Mexicans, Californians - who wouldn't know "Dixie" from a Mesopotamian funeral chant.

I am not in favor of, as many seem to be, re-fighting a war that ended 152 years ago. I am for continuing to absorb the experience all of the country went through then and forging even a larger unity than existed before this statue nonsense arose.

The whole enterprise of taking down statuary to appease the ideological passions of a talkative handful is silly. I cannot think of a better word for it. It's ridiculous: unworthy of a mature and sensible people.

Once the statues are down, what have you got besides some suddenly vacant pedestals? Well, not moral unity, that's for sure. You've made a lot of people mad who weren't previously mad at you. You've called into question your intellectual bona fides by twisting historical facts to fit a manufactured and distorted narrative. To espouse a silly cause is to run the risk of becoming known as silly.

The matter goes still further. So Dallas goes along with unhorsing Gen. Lee, right there in the park bearing his name (which name, of course, has to be changed to something appropriately anodyne). Yet that's hardly the logical end. The revolution is hungry. We have to wipe out school names, street names, fort names redolent of the late Confederacy. And not just the Confederacy. The American slaveocracy was large; it was powerful. Among its members: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, with their large monuments and even larger legacies. What makes Robert E. Lee a likelier target than the Father of Our Country?

This business of digging up the dead and exhibiting their shortcomings has no predictable end. Today's heroes and heroines become fair game for great-grandkids: topics for future ridicule and disrespect. Seldom in our history - alas - has the counsel to look before you leap seemed more relevant, or more ignored, than right now.

Email:  wmurchison@sbcglobal.net

What is the purpose of this blog is to expose your minds to the real history in broadening your understanding of events that which puzzle and make you ponder, as you are going to hear things which you have never heard.

In this journey of the past exposing you to the civil war of your present, the world will be viewed by an American who was abused by the Confederacy, refused amnesty by the North, and in this, a clear vision appeared of the the realities of America.

The author is Lt. General James Longstreet. In review of his prowess and writings, he was the American Napoleon of the Civil War. No one wanted to battle James Longstreet and his army, because as one Union officer noted, "One or a thousand men, you go up against Longstreet and you lose".

Pay attention to the following letter:

Head-quaeters First Corps, 

February 26, 1865. 

General E. E. Lee, Commanding 

 

General, 

 

I have just heard from General Ewell indirectly that he can raise force enough at Richmond to hold the lines on this side, so that my corps may be withdrawn temporarily to your right, that is, if you can put a part of the Second Corps in place of Pickett's division. 

 

This arrangement will give you force enough to meet any move that the enemy may make upon your right. If he makes no move, then you can, when the proper moment arrives, detach a force to the aid of General Beauregard, and if the enemy should then press you, you can abandon Petersburg and hold your line here, and take up the line of the Appomattox. But I think that the enemy will be forced to move a force south the moment that he finds that you are reinforcing against Sherman, else he will encounter the risk of losing Sherman as well as Richmond. 

 

There is some hazard in the plan, but nothing can be accomplished in war without risk. 

 

The other important question is provisions. We are doing tolerably well by hauling from the country and paying market prices in Confederate money. If you would give us gold I have reason to believe that we could get an abundant supply for four months, and by that time we ought to be able to reopen our com- munication with the South. The gold is here, and we should take it. 

 

We have been impressing food and all of the necessaries of life from women and children, and have been the means of driving thousands from their homes in destitute conditions. Should we hesitate, then, about putting a few who have made im- mense fortunes at our expense to a little inconvenience by im- pressing their gold ? It is necessary for us, and I do not think that we should let our capital fall into the enemy's hands for fear of injuring the feelings or interests of a few individuals. We have expended too much of blood and treasure in holding it for the last four years to allow it to go now by default. I think that it may be saved. If it can, we should not leave any possible contingency untried. I think, however, that the enemy's positions are so well selected and fortified that we must either wait for an opportunity to draw him off from here or await his attack. For even a successful assault would cripple us so much that we could get no advantage commensurate with our loss. 

 

I remain with great respect, and truly, your obedient servant, 

 

J. LONGSTREET, 

Lieutenant- General

To understand the above, the Southern leadership had made several miscalculations:

1. They were planning to have England or France invade America to help their cause. They trusted their allies and discovered too late that the Europeans were fond of starting wars, but not fond of bleeding their own blood in them.

 

2. They intended to fight a civil or a war which was one with honor, while Abraham Lincoln's mindset was this was not a war, but a criminal action of traitors to be hung.

 

3. They were expecting early victories would force Abraham Lincoln to peace.

The question in this is the known quantity that there were Southerners who were not dealing in Confederate currency, but were only transacting business in gold, and hording that gold. It was a known stockpile which the elite of the Confederacy knew of, and would not touch, as it belonged to a most powerful interest.

None of this  gold was being introduced or invested into the South for the war effort, in even lucrative markets as rail. The Southern railroads remained unfinished and worse yet, there was absolutely no conformity in rail lines, in different tracks had different widths for different trains.

As in all wars, it was the Patriotic poor who were being infringed upon to absolute poverty in it was their livestock being eaten and confiscated, along with their produce. It was a point in how did a Southern farmer plant tobacco, cotton or grains, if their mules are in army harness and their milk cow died the year before to feed the Confederate military.

Does this sound a great deal like these Pentagon wars of this last generation, and Mr. Trump signing a blank check for more wars, as 95 million Americans are without work, America is 21 trillion dollars in debt, the Kushner's live in a 5 million dollar mansion, the Buffett's and Zuckerbergs have all the billions, and it is the same situation the Confederacy faced.

Yet even in the final desperate months of the Army of Virginia, General Longstreet saw yet an advantage for the South, in it still could prolong the war even at that late stage, and obtain a victory as they were depriving the North of Southern cotton.

Pay attention to the quote in the North was confiscating Southern cotton and appears to actually been buying the cotton, in other words Abraham Lincoln was funding and feeding the Confederacy in this great struggle.

When Lincoln embargoed Southern cotton to European  trade, it was for the reason that the North needed that cotton or the North would collapse. The South understanding this edge, began destroying the cotton, as the North needed it more than the South.

All of this high moral abolitionist Negroid suffrage, and just like the Rockefellers doing business with the Nazis, communists or terrorists, Abraham Lincoln was conducting business with the South for cotton or the Union would crumble, and why not, as it is the same financiers who did business with the South are the same ones having LaVoy Finicum shot in Oregon over energy resources under American ranches in the 21st century.

Longstreet to Lee waging Use of Gold:

Even in March 1865, if the Confederacy would have seized the gold of the financiers, purchased the supplies which were being horded, the Confederacy could have turned the corner on this war by keeping their cotton, to keep their Capital Richmond, and force the federals to recognize the Right of the States and the Right of the People.