Apparently Connie Chastain’s website, 180 Degrees True South, was not enough of a platform for her own style of poor history and praise of Southern Heritage that she had to develop a new Facebook page by the same name.  Here she has collected various suspicious characters who have never been afraid to show their racism when it comes to discussing the cause of the War of the Rebellion or attempting to downplay the role of slavery in the coming of the war.  She has gathered the likes of John C. Hall who recently posted the following…

“Levin is a jewish name of the tribe of the Levites….No doubt his is the typical liberal jew. Most of these types of jewish people are very liberal and see the South as a great evil. Not all are like this…I have a Jewish client from the Bronx….he loves the South and always askes me how is the war going….lol…..So consider the source…He won’t let me post  on his blog either to defend the South..the hell with him…..”

You will no doubt remember Mr. Hall from his posts over at Brooks Simpson’s Crossroads.

One of the first people to join Connie’s new site was “Mr. Secession” himself, Michael Hill who founded and runs the League of the South which is known for statements like this…

“If the scenario of the South (and the rest of America) being overrun by hordes of non-white immigrants does not appeal to you, then how is this disaster to be averted? By the people who oppose it rising up against their traitorous elite masters and their misanthropic rule. But to do this we must first rid ourselves of the fear of being called ‘racists’ and the other meaningless epithets they use against us. What is really meant by the [anti-racist] advocates when they peg us as ‘racists’ is that we adhere to ethnocentrism, which is a natural affection for one’s own kind. This is both healthy and Biblical. I am not ashamed to say that I prefer my own kind and my own culture. Others can have theirs; I have mine. No group can survive for long if its members do not prefer their own over others.” — Mike Hill, Web essay

And…

“[T]he Southern League supports a return to a political and social system based on kith and kin rather than an impersonal state wedded to the idea of the universal rights of man. At its core is a European population.” — Michael Hill, essay on League of the South website, 2000″

Finally Connie is supported in her quest for poor historical analysis by Michael C. Lucas.  He does not have the racial undertones that the others do, but his understanding of history for a member of our armed forces is atrocious.  He is well known for comments on Brooks’ Crossroad and for winners like this…

 ”I am a Confederate Spartan!”

Whatever the hell that is… and one more…

“To the contrary Mr Levin, and a great many PC historians, PC Radicals, and just people who have nothing better to do have a great contempt and objective distorting facts and perpetuating hate against Confederate Americans.”

Sooner or later the “P” and the “C” are going to break on the keyboards of those who believe in this great “PC” conspiracy.

It is very obvious that Connie is surrounding herself with some very extreme people with extreme ideologies.  You can see a complete members list here.  I have refused to join her site and take part in the bullshit that is Connie Chastain’s understanding of the War of the Rebellion and history in general.  However, my hat is off to Rob Baker and Neil Hamilton  for putting up with the antics of those mentioned above.  For me, I have grown to tired of it to continue to beat my head against a wall over and over.

Update…John Cummings has posted some more pictures and thoughts on his theory.

I think anyone familiar with the Civil War knows this picture…however you may have not seen it colorized as you see above.  I think this adds a touch of realism that you just don’t get with the usual black and white.  In the recent couple of days and weeks I have noticed new claims to where this photo was actually taken.  It has been a mystery ever since William Frassanito published his book, Gettysburg: A Journey In Time.  Once I looked through this book I was hooked on the then and now pictures of the war…no matter the battlefield or place.

There have been several claims to finding the correct camera position for the series of pictures but not one has been definitive.  So in this post I have linked to as many of the claims as I can find and I look to you, my readers to give me your take on the evidence presented by the following people.

Scott Hartwig…Here, Here and Here

John Cummings…Here…and don’t forget to read John’s excellent blog for all things Spotsy!

Jerry Coates…via Gettysburg Daily…Here, Here and Here and in the first version of this story that I saw….Rendezvous at Gettysburg with Additional Photos from 1997.

There is more discussion of the Images on Military History Online….Here, Here, Here, Here and Here

If you have any more links or just want to tell me which historian has the right idea please post in the comments section.  I have a favorite theory from one of the men above, but I will keep it to myself until I get some of your feedback.  Good Luck!

Above you will see a video shot during the Lee-Jackson Celebration on Saturday January 14, 2012.  Approximately 360 people marched in the parade (including the Virginia Flaggers which includes now famous Southern Heritage Advocates Susan Frise Hathaway, Still Karen and Billy Bearden) and about 1500 people attended the ceremony in the cemetery at Jackson’s grave site.  This ceremony took place in Lexington, Virginia the site of a recently enacted flag ordinance that has been highly contested by Southern Heritage Advocates and the SCV’s is currently suing the city over the ordinance.  Andy Hall of Dead Confederates posted over at Civil War Memory about the Lexington flag ordinance and he points out very clearly…

The ordinance bars any flag, other than the U.S. national flag, that of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the City of Lexington. There are lots of news stories out there that say the city banned Confederateflags, but that’s not what the ordinance actually says:

 1. Only the following flags may be flown on the flag standards affixed to light poles in the City and no others:

 a. The national flag of the United States of America (the “American flag”).

b. The flag of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Code of Virginia, Title 1, Chapter 5.

c. The City Flag of Lexington.

2. The American flag, the flag of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the City Flag of Lexington may be flown by the City on the light poles that have standards affixed to them on dates adopted by City Council. A copy of the dates for the flying of said flags is available through the City Manager’s office or the office of the director of public works. Currently the holidays or designated days are as follows: Independence Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Flag Day, Martin Luther King Day, Memorial Day, Lee-Jackson Day, Presidents Day, and on the day of the annual Rockbridge Community Festival. On such dates or days the flag(s) may be flown for more than one day. No other flag shall be permitted.

Nothing set forth herein is intended in any way to prohibit or curtail individuals from carrying flags in public and/or displaying them on private property.

Despite what one wants to believe, the flag ordinance does not single out and ban the rebel flag and has a pretty good chance at standing up in court.  It should be painfully obvious to even the most casual observer that the rebel flag was alive and well in the city of Lexington on January 14th.

In another strange twist, the blowhards over at Facebook’s Virginia War Between the States Sesquicentennial, a site run by Susan F. Hathaway, has posted the picture below of Billy Bearden collecting the Lexington Proclamation declaring January 14th as Lee/Jackson Day.  The question I have is why did Billy Bearden or any of the “Virginia Flaggers” have to pick up this declaration? Was it just to rub the day in the nose of the mayor who is now the target of these outsiders in her bid for re-election?  Oddly there were others who confused the flag ordinance with the Lee-Jackson celebration.  However, the celebration and day went off without a hitch, and they took lots of pictures including these which are a virtual whose-who of the Southern Heritage Advocate crowd…I will have to post on some of these pictures in a separate post.

Metta Andrews- Eliza's Sister

Today we continue our look at Eliza Frances Andrews’ A Diary of a Georgia Girl.  This post will focus on Chapter I: Across Sherman’s Track, December 19-24, 1864.  Ms. Andrews begins the chapter with an explanatory note describing how she and her sister would travel to Southwest Georgia to stay the winter with her older sister…

“EXPLANATORY NOTE. – At the time of this narrative, the writer’s eldest sister, Mrs. Troup Butler, was living alone with her two little children on a plantation in Southwest Georgia, between Albany and Thomasville. Besides our father, who was sixty-two when the war began, and a little brother who was only twelve when it closed, we had no male relations out of the army, and she lived there with no other protector, for a good part of the time, than the negroes themselves. There were not over a hundred of them on the place, and though they were faithful, and nobody ever thought of being afraid on their account, it was lonely for her to be there among them with no other white person than the overseer, and so the writer and a younger sister, Metta, were usually sent to be her companions during the winter. The summers she spent with us at the old home.

But in the fall of 1864, while Sherman’s army was lying around Atlanta like a pent-up torrent ready to burst forth at any moment, my father was afraid to let us get out of his sight, and we all stood waiting in our defenseless homes till we could see what course the destroying flood would take. Happily for us it passed by without engulfing the little town of Washington, where our home was situated, and after it had swept over the capital of the State, reaching Milledgeville November 23d, rolled on toward Savannah, where the sound of merry Christmas bells was hushed by the roar of its angry waters”

I do find it interesting that despite what one hears today about the rape and pillage of southern women by Sherman’s “hordes” that these young women would travel across Georgia just after Sherman’s Army had passed.  She does comment on why their travels were delayed…

“By the middle of December, communication, though subject to many difficulties and discomforts, was so well established that my father concluded it would be practicable for us to make the journey to our sister. We were eager to go, and would be safer, he thought, when once across the line, than at home. Sherman had industriously spread the impression that his next move would be on either Charleston or Augusta, and in the latter event, our home would be in the line of danger. Southwest Georgia was at that time a “Land of Goshen” and a “city of refuge” to harassed Confederates. Thus far it had never been seriously threatened by the enemy, and was supposed to be the last spot in the Confederacy on which he would ever set foot – and this, in the end, proved to be not far from the truth.”

When they did travel, they experienced the destruction brought on by secession…

“Since the destruction of the Georgia, the Macon & Western, and the Central railroads by Sherman’s army, the whole tide of travel between the eastern and western portions of our poor little Confederacy flows across the country from Mayfield to Gordon. Mett and I, with two other ladies, whom we found on the train at Camack, were the first to venture across the gap – 65 miles of bad roads and worse conveyances, through a country devastated by the most cruel and wicked invasion of modern times.”

The narrative then describes an event that challenges some of the myths of the march. Notice how they encounter numerous soldiers who one would think would be required to be with the army and how she says that they has a royal breakfast when food was supposed to be scarce.  It is there encounter with a Confederate Colonel and his new bride, a wounded soldier, a Captain of the Texas Rangers, a lieutenant and a “handsome” young captain.  I would think that for a country on the brink of defeat they would need every able-bodied soldier from the lowest private to General Lee himself in the ranks.

“Near us sat a handsome middle-aged gentleman in the uniform of a colonel, with a pretty young girl beside him, whom we at once spotted as his bride. They were surrounded by a number of officers, and the bride greatly amused us, in the snatches of their conversation we overheard, by her extreme bookishness.”

“We had a royal breakfast, and while we were eating it, Mr. Belisle, who had spent the night at the hotel, drove up with a four-mule wagon, in which he had engaged places for us and our trunks to Milledgeville, at seventy-five dollars apiece. It was a common plantation wagon, without cover or springs, and I saw Mr. Simpson shake his head ominously as we jingled off to take up more passengers at the hotel. There were several other conveyances of the same sort, already overloaded, waiting in front of the door, and a number of travelers standing on the sidewalk rushed forward to secure places in ours as soon as we halted. The first to climb in was a poor sick soldier, of whom no pay was demanded. Next came a captain of Texas Rangers, then a young lieutenant in a shabby uniform that had evidently seen very hard service, and after him our handsome young captain of the night before.”

Very odd in deed for December of 1864 just after Sherman made his march from Atlanta to the Sea without much resistance.  I am sure there is a very good reason for this, however Eliza does not explain it to the reader.  The most interesting part of this chapter so far has to do with the killing of Yankee prisoners.

“Just beyond Sparta we were halted by one of the natives, who, instead of paying forty dollars for his passage to the agent at the hotel, like the rest of us, had walked ahead and made a private bargain with Uncle Grief, the driver, for ten dollars. This “Yankee trick” raised a laugh among our impecunious Rebs, and the lieutenant, who was just out of a Northern prison, and very short of funds, thanked him for the lesson and declared he meant to profit by it the next chance he got. The newcomer proved to be a very amusing character, and we nicknamed him “Sam Weller,” on account of his shrewdness and rough-and-ready wit. He was dressed in a coarse home-made suit, but was evidently something of a dandy, as his shirt-front sported a broad cotton rude edged with home-made cotton lace. He was a rebel soldier, he said: “Went in at the fust pop and been a-fightin’ ever since, till the Yankees caught me here, home on furlough, and wouldn’t turn me loose till I

had took their infernal oath – beg your pardon, ladies – the jig’s pretty nigh up anyway, so I don’t reckon it’ll make much diff’rence.”

        He told awful tales about the things Sherman’s robbers had done; it made my blood boil to hear them, and when the captain asked him if some of the rascals didn’t get caught themselves sometimes – stragglers and the like – he answered with a wink that said more than words:

        “Yes; our folks took lots of prisoners; more’n'll ever be heard of agin.”

        “What became of them?” asked the lieutenant.

        “Sent ‘em to Macon, double quick,” was the laconic reply. “Got ‘em thar in less’n half an hour.”

        “How did they manage it?” continued the lieutenant, in a tone that showed he understood Sam’s metaphor.

        “Just took ‘em out in the woods and lost ‘em,” he replied, in his jerky, laconic way. “Ever heerd o’ losin’men, lady?” he added, turning to me, with an air of grim waggery that made my flesh creep – for after all, even Yankees are human beings, though they don’t always behave like it.

        “Yes,” I said, “I had heard of it, but thought it a horrible thing.”

        “I don’t b’lieve in losin’ ‘em, neither, as a gener’l thing,” he went on. “I don’t think it’s right principul, and I wouldn’t loseone myself, but when I see what they have done to these people round here, I

can’t blame ‘em for losin’every devil of ‘em they kin git their hands on.”

        “What was the process of losing?” asked the captain. “Did they manage the business with fire-arms?”

        “Sometimes, when they was in a hurry,” Mr. Weller explained, with that horrible, grim irony of his, “the guns wouldgo off an’ shoot ‘em, in spite of all that our folks could do. But most giner’ly they took the grapevine road in the fust patch of woods they come to, an’ soon as ever they got sight of a tree with a grape vine on it, it’s cur’ous how skeered their hosses would git. You couldn’t keep ‘em from runnin’ away, no matter what you done, an’ they never run fur before their heads was caught in a grape vine and they would stand thar, dancin’ on nothin’ till they died. Did you ever hear of anybody dancin’ on nothin’ before, lady?” – turning to me.

        I said he ought to be ashamed to tell it; even a Yankee was entitled to protection when a prisoner of war.

        “But these fellows wasn’t regular prisoners of war, lady,” said the sick soldier; “they were thieves and houseburners,” – and I couldn’t but feel there was something in that view of it.

One has to wonder about this type of activity and how often it occured during the March and the war.

To be continued…

A Slave in the White House (click to see video) by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor was recently featured on the Daily Show with John Stewart.  The author tells the story of one of James Madison’s slaves, Paul Jennings.  Starting at the two minute mark I think John Stewart make the author admit to what Kevin Levin was speaking to in this post where Ms. Taylor says that she just wanted to tell the story of Paul Jennings without passing judgement on Dolly and James Madison with regards to slavery. 

Great interview, infromative and funny.

I hope that this will be the beginning of a new series that will take a closer look a historical documents.  I have made an attempt at a similar series before with no avail or follow-up.  I have also tried to keep my distance to the pissing matches that develop over comments and post at certain Neo-confederate websites like Facebook’s SHPG or SNN.  I have not done a very good job.  Why?  Well it is so damn easy to get their dander up over basic historical facts that they have a hard time accepting.  But I must try harder not to engage in their poor version of history and to make this blog more academic in nature.  Now, that does not mean I will not call them out on some of their most outrageous comments and claims, but it will not be the focus of the blog anymore.

My first post in this new series will come from Eliza Frances Andrews and her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl.  As I said in an earlier post, I usually read with a pencil or highlighter in hand to mark information I find interesting.  It will be in this series that I post those highlighted sections for you to read and if you feel the need make a comment or two.  I hope the quotes will provide a basis for some constructive discussion and exchange of information that will lead to a better understanding of the American Civil War.  My first post deals with a diary from a woman who experience Sherman’s March to the Sea first hand and is writing the introduction to her work in the early 1900′s.

So let’s get started…From Andrews’ diary introduction…

“Never was there an aristocracy so compact, so united, so powerful. Out of a population of some 9,000,000 whites that peopled the Southern States, according to the census of 1850, only about 300,000 were actual slaveholders. Less than 3,000 of these – men owning, say, over 100 negroes each, constituted the great planter class, who, with a small proportion of professional and business men affiliated with them in culture and sympathies, dominated Southern sentiment and for years dictated the policy of the nation.”

“Narrow and provincial we may have been, in some respects, but take it all in all, it is doubtful whether the world has ever produced a state of society more rich in all the resources for a thoroughly wholesome, happy, and joyous life than existed among the privileged “4,000″ under the peculiar civilization of the Old South – a civilization which has “served its purpose in the evolution of the race and passed away forever. So completely has it vanished that the very language in which we used to express ourselves is becoming obsolete.”

She continues…

“…the author frankly admits that it is violently and often absurdly partisan – and it could not well have been otherwise under the circumstances. Coming from a heart ablaze with the passionate resentment of a people smarting under the humiliation of defeat, it was inevitable that along with the just indignation at wrongs which ought never to have been committed, there should have crept in many intemperate and indiscriminate denunciations of acts which the writer did not understand, to say nothing of sophomorical vaporings calculated now only to excite a smile.”

“I cannot better express this feeling than in the words of an old Confederate soldier at Petersburg, Va., where he had gone with a number of his comrades who had been attending the great reunion at Richmond, to visit the scene of their last struggles under “Marse Robert.” They were standing looking down into the Crater, that awful pit of death, lined now with daisies and buttercups, and fragrant with the breath of spring. Tall pines, whose lusty young roots had fed on the hearts of dead men, were waving softly overhead, and nature everywhere had covered up the scars of war with the mantle of smiling peace. I paused, too, to watch them, and we all stood there awed into silence, till at last an old battle-scarred hero from one of the wiregrass counties way down in Georgia, suddenly raised his hands to heaven, and said in a voice that trembled with emotion: “Thar’s three hundred dead Yankees buried here under our feet. I helped to put ‘em thar, but so help me God, I hope the like ‘ll never be done in this country again. Slavery’s gone and the war’s over now, thank God for both! We are all brothers once more, and I can feel for them layin’ down thar just the same as fur our own.”

And finally she discusses her father, a Union man…

“And now I have just a word to say on a personal matter – a solemn amende to make to the memory of my dear father, to whose unflinching devotion to the Union these pages will bear ample testimony. While I have never been able to bring myself to repent of having sided with my own people, I have repented in sackcloth and ashes for the perverse and rebellious spirit so often manifested against him. How it was that the influence of such a parent, whom we all loved and honored, should have failed to convert his own children to his way of thinking, I do not myself understand, unless it was the contagion of the general enthusiasm around us. Youth is impulsive, and prone to run with the crowd. We caught the infection of the war spirit in the air and never stopped to reason or to think. And then, there were our soldier boys. With my three brothers in the army, and that glorious record of Lee and his men in Virginia, how was it possible not to throw oneself heart and soul into the cause for which they were fighting so gallantly? And when the bitter end came, it is not to be wondered at if our resentment against those who had brought all these humiliations and disasters upon us should flame up fiercer than ever.”

“My father died before the horrors of that period had passed away; before the strife and hatred he so bitterly deplored had begun to subside; before he could have the satisfaction of seeing his grandson fighting under the old flag that his father had followed and that his sons had repudiated.”

Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland, and the author of such books as The Real Lincoln, has written a recent article on Ron Paul and destroying the “Party of Lincoln” in response to an article by Michael Gerson.  I have been dealing with DiLorenzo for years and he has not changed his tone on Lincoln despite the mountain of evidence against DiLorenzo’s interpretation.  Even Brooks Simpson has dealt with this author and the same issues and this post is only to serve as a reminder how bull-headed some of the Southern Heritage supporters can be.

DiLorenzo starts off with the usual Libertarian screed about the author he is attacking for his views and quickly jumps into bashing Lincoln with is non-stop poor understanding of history.

“Gerson’s tone is dripping with venomous hatred when he accuses Ron Paul of being some kind of nut by calling the Civil War “senseless” and of saying that Lincoln ruled with an iron fist. Generations of historians have also called the Civil War “senseless” or something similar. “The bumbling generation” is how some historians describe the Civil War-era politicians who plunged the nation into war, the most preeminent of whom was Lincoln himself. But when Ron Paul refers to the war in that way what he has in mind is the true historical fact that all other countries of the world that ended slavery in the nineteenth century – including most of the Northern states in the U.S – did so peacefully. The British, French, Spaniards, Dutch, Swedes, Danes, and others ended slavery in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, all of Central America, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, the French and Danish colonies, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela without resorting to the mass murder and destruction of war.”

The one thing that has always troubled me about DiLorenzo’s writing is that he always fails to consult the actions of the Confederacy when it comes to the start of the war.  I once emailed DiLorenzo on just that fact.  Sadly I do not have the email any longer to post his response.  But suffice to say DiLorenzo claims to not have worried about the actions of the South in the coming of the Civil War.  He seems to believe that Lincoln would have started a war against the South no matter what once Lincoln was in the White House.  So when a “historian” does not deal with the actions of the other principle player in the event, it is then easy to make the jump to the idea that all other nations peacefully freed their slaves.  Sure, there is no mention of the South’s strong defense of the institution to counter DiLorenzo’s claim.

Also in the above quote DiLorenzo claims that the rest of the slave-holding nations did so without the “mass murder and destruction of war”.  Who was mass murdered during the Civil War?  Southerners?  Really?  Can you be mass murdered if you fight back?

DiLorenzo makes this claim again in the article…

Of course, Lincoln’s “save the Union” rhetoric was always outrageous nonsense. The original American union of the founding fathers was a voluntary union based on the Jeffersonian notion in the Declaration of Independence that the just powers of government result only from the consent of the governed, and whenever that consent was withdrawn, it was the duty of the governed to abolish that government. It was nothing more than a practical political arrangement and not some magical, mystical, sacred union that “justified” the mass murder of more than 350,000 Southerners to “save” it. Indeed, the founding fathers would probably have thought such a thing to be perhaps the biggest atrocity in world history.

There are more problems with DiLorenzo’s understanding of how Slavery played a role in the war.  He uses the over used 1862 quote of…

Only Gerson’s beloved “Party of Lincoln” used slaves as political pawns in a war that all of them – Lincoln as well as the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress of 1861-1865 – stated over and over again was commenced to “save the union” (and consolidate political power in Washington, D.C.), and not to disturb Southern slavery. As Lincoln said in his famous 1862 letter to newspaper editor Horace Greeley, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” On July 22, 1861 the U.S. Congress announced to the world that the purpose of the war it had commenced was NOT “interference with the rights or established institutions of those states” [i.e., slavery], but to preserve the Union with the rights of the several states unimpaired.” Gerson is obviously unaware of all of this.

This fits completely with an understanding of the Union war goals and the goals of an early war Lincoln.  However DiLorenzo then goes on to contradict himself in terms of slavery and what the war was about.

In his first inaugural address Lincoln threatened “invasion” and “bloodshed” in any state that refused to collect the newly-doubled tariff on imports, which at the time constituted more than 90 percent of all federal tax revenues. Two years later the Republican Party apparently decided that the murder of hundreds of thousands and the destruction of entire cities in the South could not be justified before world opinion if it was motivated by the greed for money and power – which of course it was, as is almost always the case with all wars. So the slaves were used as political pawns to cover up the true intentions of the Party of Lincoln, which from that time on has described itself as the “Grand Old Party” or the party of great moral ideas!

Which is it?  Is the North fighting to save the Union as Lincoln said in the inauguration or is it using slavery to cover up government greed.  It should also be common knowledge for a Lincoln “scholar” to understand that the Morrill Tariff was passed after the deep South seceded.

There are also several historical errors in DiLorenzo’s article, so let’s have a look at those.

Gerson also mocks the notion that Lincoln ruled “with an iron fist,” which also demonstrates his complete ignorance of this aspect of American history. It is well known by anyone who bothers to learn about it that Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus (even his own attorney general said so) since only Congress can legally do so.

The president is allowed to suspend Habeas Corpus in a time of Rebellion and the Southern states were in rebellion against the Government ever since the Constitutional election of Lincoln to the office of the president.

Lincoln issued an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Roger B. Taney after Judge Taney issued his opinion that Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus was unconstitutional.

No, Lincoln did not issue the order, he only had it drawn up and then decided not to use the order.

instituted the first federal military conscription law

In the North maybe, in 1863, but one must remember that the South and Jefferson Davis did this in 1862.

Gerson is also unaware that the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to “rebel territory,” where the U.S. Army had no ability to free anyone, and that Lincoln called it a “war measure” that would have ended had the war ended on the next day. In other words, it freed no one, and had the war abruptly ended Lincoln was perfectly satisfied to allow the Southern states to do whatever they wanted to do with the slaves as long as they continued to pay federal tariff taxes. Indeed, in one speech he nonchalantly forecast that slavery would probably fade away sometime in the early twentieth century.

This one is so ridiculous it is almost not worth dealing with.  Any serious student of the Civil War understands the scope and objective of the Emancipation and had the war ended Lincoln would have possibly been satisfied with allowing the South to keep its slaves.  The Republican platform in 1860 said nothing about ending slavery only to keep it from spreading to the territories.  Congress could have dealt with that without the secession of the Southern states as it did with the Northwest Territory in 1787.  But again, DiLorenzo does not take into account the actions of the south.

And finally an anti-climatic whopper…

If Ron Paul succeeds in his “quest to undo the Party of Lincoln” it would be the greatest advance in freedom for Americans since the ending of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1866.

Sigh!   It was Dec. 18, 1865.  So much for teaching an old dog new tricks.

Here’s an excerpt:

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 67,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

There as been a flurry of activity on the net today between some of  the history oriented bloggers and the Southern Heritage Drum-beaters. Brooks Simpson over at CWCrossroads has applied some heat on the true meaning behind the heritage crowd and has drawn the attention of some of it largest flunkies. I think a commenter on Michael Cushman’s SNN, Tony Gunter, had one of the best comments…

“Your YouTube channel is titled “RedShirtArmy” presumably after the 19th century militia that inflicted terrorism on African-American citizens in the south during the Redemption period. How can you take umbrage at Professor Simpson calling your organization racist?  He is on much firmer ground calling you a racist than you are calling him a liberal.”

Keeping that comment in mind, I think it is also fitting the Brooks points out a certain League of the South video , posted by Michael Cushman from SNN, that actually called for the assassination of federal officials has been flagged as “offensive or inappropriate” by YouTube.  It seems those who support “Flagging” got flagged!

Huh!

http://themoderatevoice.com/68771/confederate-history-month/

Connie Chastain has been in a very elongated debate on this site with another poster…so much so that I have asked her to use her own blog for the purposes of denying the truth of the history of the Civil War.  However, Connie fails to use her own blog because I suspect she gets very few readers and must resort to add  her comments to Facebook’s SHPG to get anyone to agree and listen to her. 

Here are some recent quotes from the SHPG from discussion with a new member Ryan Quint and new thorn-in-their-side Eric Jacobson…

Connie Chastain says…

Eric, the first thing out of his mouth was that he was here to PROVIDE BALANCE.

This is the SOUTHERN HERITAGE Preservation Group. What’s so hard to understand about that? This is not a “civil war discussion group” or even a “civil war MEMORY discussion group.” It is the SOUTHERN HERITAGE Preservation Group.

Ryan does call Connie on some of her hypocrisy…

Then Miss Chastain, if that is the case about how I should ignore this group because it is Southern Heritage, why are you such a prolific poster on Levin’s, and Hall’s, and Meyer’s blogs? Because you find some faults with what they say. And you want to interject your opinion. You can form a circle of peers and say “Yes, tally ho, that’s right,” and have a bubble of perceived truth, but the fact of the matter is that there will always be different opinions.

However, Connie must protect her reputation and claim she is not a “prolific” poster…

Mr. Quint, I am not a prolific poster on any of those groups, particularly Andy’s. I post more on Brooks Simpson’s blog than any of them. The owners of those blogs post entry after entry after entry that never see a comment from me in the comment threads. I go for days or weeks without commenting sometimes.

But, in point of fact, those are CIVIL WAR oriented blogs, not Southern Heritage blogs. Moreover, those guys COME HERE for material. They lurk here, spy here, they repost on their blogs comments we make here and then, quite frequently, lie about or misconstrue what we say (Simpson is especially bad to lie and mischaracterize what we say).

These quotes continue to show that Connie makes a complete separate distinction between *Heritage* and “History”.  How one can claim to be a Southern Heritage preservationists and not be concerned with the history of the South…meaning anything outside the dates of 1861-1865 …and in the same breath not being concerned over the causes of the war is down right baffling.  Connie somehow believes that one can remember the brave heroics of the southern soldier without dealing with the cause in which he fought.  By doing so she is completing the “Lost Cause” trifecta…”Deny, Deny, Deny”!  I wonder how much of Mildred Lewis Rutherford Connie has read?