I love the kid who comes to guys defense and tell the educated young black guy that the south freed the slaves first…before the North.
This guy is what happens when you fall asleep in history class!
Hat Tip to All Other Persons blog…
This is a great post and article on how some neo-confederates have distorted a picture of Black Union Soldiers with their white officer into a photo of “black confederates”.
Here we have the original photo…
A contemporary recruitment poster…
Here is the fake 1st Louisiana Native Guard photo…
And finally, the website that sells (or sold the photo…appears not to be for sale any longer) the photo…The Great War of the Confederacy’s Rebel Store.
If you want to read about how this photo and its fake were discovered head on over to Retouching History for the complete scoop.
Are we really supposed to take these guys seriously…don’t answer…it’s a rhetorical question. But really, how do they plan to secede with this clown at the forefront of the SCLoS? And for the other nutball…the little southern cultural get-to-gether sounds more like a real hoot of a good time….not!
As we creep ever closer to 2011 and the 150th Anniversary of the War of the Rebellion several states have begun websites for celebrating and presenting the history of the War on the Internet. Unlike the Sons of Confederate Veterans 150th Website, Pennsylvania has a very nice website with some verying informative links and content.
One of the first things to catch my eye under the heading of UNDERSTAND was the part on the causes of the war. For once it was nice not to see a large listing of “lost cause” mythology and I was also pleasently surprised to see a nice list of books and authors who are highly respected in the field of Civil War history…
Each major page on the site provides an impressive list of secondary sources for the reader to expand his/her knowledge far beyond the Pa. 150th site. Even as I write this post I am surfing through the site and I am very impressed with the amount of information that has been provided. It is my hope that as many states that can afford it (I live in Illinois and we can’t afford anything…but I am sure we will have a site) can provide the public with a site similar to this one in scope and appearance.
Here are links to other Sesquicentinnial sites…
- Virginia
- Arkansas
More to come in the future…
In the days leading to the Civil War, a battery of Citadel cadets on Morris Island fired at the supply ship Star of the West as it approached Fort Sumter, forcing the ship to turn around.
A red palmetto flag flew over the cadets during the attack on Jan. 9, 1861, which marked a victory for them, and was a significant precursor to the war.
The war officially began on April 12, 1861, with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter. But some Citadel alumni and others consider the shots fired at Star of the West to be the first shots of the Civil War… Read the Rest of the Story.
Star of the West entering Charleston Harbor on Jan. 9, 1861
Beck needs to go back and take American History all over again.
Hey Richard, maybe Glenn was taught too much American Exceptionalims in school!
A great deal has been written in the day following the “You Lie” outburst directed towards President Obama by South Carolina Rep. Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson (seen above in a lovely apology/fundraising video). Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin rightly makes the following comment:
Others have tried to situate Wilson into a broader historical narrative that includes the likes of John Calhoun, Preston Brooks, and South Carolina’s own place in the story of secession, Civil War, and Massive Resistance. These narrative memes are so predictable, but ultimately tell us next to nothing about what motivated Joe Wilson’s outburst. Oh…I get it. Because Calhoun, Brooks, and Thurmond are so easily lumped together in some vague reactionary category we might as well throw good old Wilson in there.
But we know that nothing happens in a vacuum there is much more to good olde Joe Wilson than meets the eye. Over at Alternet.org there is an article about 14 things we should know about Joe, which include the following: He is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, served as an aide to Segregationist Presidential candidate and Senator Strom Thurmond and…
When Thurmond’s bi-racial daughter, fathered out of wedlock with an African-American teenage girl, came forward in 2003 — after Thurmond’s death — Wilson castigated Thurmond’s daughter, saying he did not believe her story. Essie Mae Washington-Williams was conceived of a union Thurmond had with his family’s 16-year-old maid. Thurmond was 22 at the time. “It’s a smear on the image that [Thurmond] has as a person of high integrity who has been so loyal to the people of South Carolina,” Wilson said, according to TPM. Wilson later apologized to Washington-Williams.
Wilosn is also well known in South Carolina for being one of seven state senators who voted against taking down the confederate flag from the statehouse dome back in 2000.
Republican Steve King of Iowa says: “He is an officer and a gentleman and everyone who knows him knows that…being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line. So I think Maureen Dowd is trying to whip this up and I also know she’s trying to put race into it. I didn’t know what race she was talking about when I first read her line on that.” Source
So, with friends like this who apparently don’t care how others in the south or in other parts of the country feel about the confederate flag, I am sure Joe Wilson will continue to raise more and more money for his 2010 campaign. But it is the parts that make up the whole and speak volumes to us about who Joe Wilson really is. And contrary to what Kevin Levin says we should lump Wilson in with others like Calhoun, Brooks and Thurmond. Wilson’s “racism” is not the racism that we are used to seeing, the blatant KKK, Nazi-Skinhead racism of the 1980’s or the anti-civil rights racism of the 1960’s. This new breed of racism is an altogether new beast.
This new breed of racism is much more mainstream and much harder to detect. It is not, nor has it really ever been, only in the south but it has much origins in common with the south. It is deeply rooted in the “honoring” of the old confederacy and the old south. The racism is hidden from plain site and even infiltrates groups without their knowing. The SCV is the most obvious example of this new type of racism. Not everyone in the SCV or who flies the confederate flag is a racist, but racism has found a convenient hiding place. You know the old addage…where better to hide a tree than in a forest.
WASHINGTON- The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind. Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t. But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts. The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president.
Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber. I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race. I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.
But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it. “A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson. “In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”
Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black. Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.
For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both. The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson. “A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.
“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!
It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.” Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”
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