The President and the Confederacy

[Savonarola]

In a similar vein, one of our Territorial Governors, Lewis Cass, later oversaw the Trail of Tears.  Now the Detroit City Council strikes back:

Council targets Lewis Cass
Two months after Councilwoman Barbara-Rose Collins famously railed against imperialists who marched Cherokee on the Trail of Tears, the council is targeting the guy who put them on it: former Michigan Territorial Gov. Lewis Cass.

Councilwoman JoAnn Watson is sponsoring a resolution urging DPS officials to change the name of Cass Technical High School because it's named after Cass. The onetime governor and senator not only did the dirty work for Andrew Jackson, but his bio reads like a Who's Who of some of the United States' worst moments. He backed the Mexican War and pushed policies that perpetuated slavery.

But what's in a name? Is Cass today synonymous with a long-dead dude with bad ideas or has it grown to embody the school that's widely perceived one of Detroit's finest? When people think of Cass do they think of the grouchy-looking governor or the school that produced Jack White, Lily Tomlin, David Alan Grier and Diana Ross?

The alumni are resoundingly going with the latter, rebuffing efforts to tweak history. They voted last week to resist the change, and now Watson's resolution is on hold.

You've got a future in politics, Tim.   

[Jaron]

Why deal with the problems of today when we can deal with the problems of... two centuries ago!

Tim, you are a waste of flesh, bone, plastic and radiation therapy.

[jimmy olsen]

In a similar vein, one of our Territorial Governors, Lewis Cass, later oversaw the Trail of Tears.  Now the Detroit City Council strikes back:

Council targets Lewis Cass
Two months after Councilwoman Barbara-Rose Collins famously railed against imperialists who marched Cherokee on the Trail of Tears, the council is targeting the guy who put them on it: former Michigan Territorial Gov. Lewis Cass.

Councilwoman JoAnn Watson is sponsoring a resolution urging DPS officials to change the name of Cass Technical High School because it's named after Cass. The onetime governor and senator not only did the dirty work for Andrew Jackson, but his bio reads like a Who's Who of some of the United States' worst moments. He backed the Mexican War and pushed policies that perpetuated slavery.

But what's in a name? Is Cass today synonymous with a long-dead dude with bad ideas or has it grown to embody the school that's widely perceived one of Detroit's finest? When people think of Cass do they think of the grouchy-looking governor or the school that produced Jack White, Lily Tomlin, David Alan Grier and Diana Ross?

The alumni are resoundingly going with the latter, rebuffing efforts to tweak history. They voted last week to resist the change, and now Watson's resolution is on hold.

You've got a future in politics, Tim.   

I'm not a fan of changing names or anything like that, I think the President honoring war memorials dedicated to traitors and the cause they fought for is something entirely different.

[jimmy olsen]

Why deal with the problems of today when we can deal with the problems of... two centuries ago!

Tim, you are a waste of flesh, bone, plastic and radiation therapy.

No plastic in me, it's all metal. And I never had radiation therapy either.

[Jaron]

How the FUCK are Confederate war veterans traitors?

[Neil]

Tim represents everything that's wrong with the world today.  Having a panic attack about what folks died for a hundred and fifty years ago is a waste of lifespan.  Like the Japanese or the French, we can honour that they fought bravely, if not the causes that they fought for.

[ulmont]

How the FUCK are Confederate war veterans traitors?

They rebelled against the duly constituted governmental authority and attempted the violent overthrow of the state.  That's pretty much the definition.

[jimmy olsen]

Tim represents everything that's wrong with the world today.  Having a panic attack about what folks died for a hundred and fifty years ago is a waste of lifespan.  Like the Japanese or the French, we can honour that they fought bravely, if not the causes that they fought for.

That monument honors the cause, not just the men.

http://hnn.us/articles/85884.html

The  monument was given to the Federal Government by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which raised the funds to erect it. The UDC's reasons for the monument are instructive. In the address of Mrs. Daisy McLaurin Stevens, President General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at its dedication, she makes clear that the monument is to glorify the ideas of the Confederacy:

   

Great ideas and righteous ideas are alone immortal. The eternal years of God are theirs. The ideas our heroes cherished were and are beneficial as they are everlasting. These were living then; they are living to-day and shall live to-morrow and work the betterment of mankind. Thus our heroes are of those who, though dead, still toil for man through the arms and brains of those their examples have inspired and quickened to nobler things.

Since the United Daughters of the Confederacy upheld in multiple publications in the early 20th Century that the Ku Klux Klan was the heroic effort of the Confederate soldier, we have an idea what the "noble past" and "ideas our heroes cherished" were. Of course one of these "ideas" was secession to preserve the institution of African slavery.

Likewise General Bennett H. Young, Commander-in-Chief of the United Confederate Veterans also defends the cause of the Confederate soldier, the neo-Confederate cause of their descendants, and defends secession in his speech as follows:

   

At this hour I represent the survivors of the Southern army. Though this Confederate monument is erected on Federal ground, which makes it unusual and remarkable, yet the men from whom I hold commission would only have me come without apologies or regrets from the past. Those for whom I speak gave the best they had to their land and country. They spared no sacrifice and no privation to win for the Southland national independence.

    I am sure I shall not offend the proprieties of either the hour of the occasion when I say that we still glory in the records of our beloved and immortal dead. The dead for whom this monument stands sponsor died for what they believed to be right. Their surviving comrades and their children still believe that that for which they suffered and laid down their lives was just; that their premises in the Civil War were according to our Constitution....

    The sword said the South was wrong, but the sword is not necessarily guided by conscience or reason. The power of numbers and the longest guns cannot destroy principle nor obliterate truth. Right lives forever, it survives battles, failures, conflicts, and death. There is no human power, however mighty, that can in the end annihilate truth.

[Jaron]

How the FUCK are Confederate war veterans traitors?

They rebelled against the duly constituted governmental authority and attempted the violent overthrow of the state.  That's pretty much the definition.

They did no such thing. They wanted the Union to leave them the fuck alone. You would make it sound as if Confederate stormtroopers occupied DC and Chicago!

I would argue that at the time of the Civil War, citizens had more loyalty to their state governments, and obedience to the federal government was such a far flung concept as to be entirely foreign to these men. Their state leadership said "We're going to do THIS", and they obeyed.

Fighting for one's beliefs , even at the cost of your life, is the ultimate in American values going back to the Revolution.

Honor these men. They've earned it just as much as any Union veteran. The only difference between the two is the side of the Mason-Dixon line they were born on!

[Malthus]

What can one say, other than "mew?"

[Ed Anger]

What can one say, other than "mew?"

Squee!

[Barrister]

meowtf

[Berkut]

<snip jaron blowing traitors and slavers>

Arguing that they had good reason to be traitors is not really arguing that they were not traitors to begin with.

[ulmont]

They did no such thing. They wanted the Union to leave them the fuck alone. You would make it sound as if Confederate stormtroopers occupied DC and Chicago!

The Confederates wished they could have occupied DC, yes.

I would argue that at the time of the Civil War, citizens had more loyalty to their state governments, and obedience to the federal government was such a far flung concept as to be entirely foreign to these men. Their state leadership said "We're going to do THIS", and they obeyed.

The fact that not all obeyed the state leadership, and the whole "brother v. brother" aspect of the Civil War, shows that people had choices.

[Jaron]

<snip jaron blowing traitors and slavers>

Arguing that they had good reason to be traitors is not really arguing that they were not traitors to begin with.

I am arguing not that they had a good reason to be traitors, but that their loyalty was to the state, not the federal. To call them traitors for disobeying what must have seemed almost foreign rule would be analyzing these men under a convex lens of modernity.

I will not allow the honor of my Confederate ancestors to be jaded and insulted.

***

And no, Dick, the war was entirely defensive. Had the Confederacy occupied DC, it would have been to end the war, not to declare New York, Illinois or Ohio Confederate client states.


Good work, President Obama. You continue to show the American people that change has come indeed to this GOP weary land.