Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Battle flag uproar

My First National is supposed to arrive today. Have never flown any Confederate flag before, but since a certain faction of our country has made this an issue, I will fly it till the day I die.

My family has shed blood in every War this nation has ever had, to provide me with the many rights I hold today, and now I feel as though all they fought for is coming under attack bit by bit.

It's a shame our teachers don't have the balls to teach the entire truth about the Civil War, Reconstruction and Gov Davis' Black Police force here in Texas. If you teach our children only partial truths they have lost their heritage.

SAKO, if you are the sort of man who knowingly and unapologetically repeats a lie, there is really nothing I can do for you.

Sako and 222Rem, my Black friend is a retired Military Noncom, I dunno how long he served exactly but obviously long enough for a comfortable retirement income.

At present he is employed by choice as an JROTC instructor at a large, lower-income urban high school, instilling values of honor, love of country and integrity into youth who sorely need such a role model. They love him, he loves them, over the years he has turned several lives around.

His position on the flag, as stated to me is, that flag flew over the enslaved ancestors of his wife, children and grandchildren. While he doesn't believe it is synonymous with hate, neither does he want it flown in state-supported locations.

You can ridicule his position if ya want, but I doubt you'd be crass enough to do it to his face.

My own position on the flag, as previously stated, was that re: flying it in public places it oughta be put to a vote, I would vote for it, my friend would probably vote against it, majority wins.

Birdwatcher

How ironic; look in the mirror much or often?

Fortunately for all of us we do not live in a democracy

Ya know, its a popular fallacy that, when Santa Anna invaded Texas in '36, that all the Texians here rallied to fight him. Most actually avoided combat, a thing noted with complaint by those Americans pouring in to fight, and who would actually end up doing most of it.

Smithwick was one of a small minority of Texians that repeatedly ran towards the sound of gunfire. He was involved under Bowie in driving the Mexicans out of San Antone in December of '35, and would very probably have fallen at the Alamo except for a bout of malaria that had him laid up in Bastrop. He did go on to serve as a Texian scout at the time of San Jacinto.

If few Texians actually fought, even less ever joined a Ranging Company. The reasons for that were simple: Loss of one's horse, one's rifle and all one's gear at any given point were probable (a ruinous expense), and one ranger estimated the death rate in this service during those early years ran about 50% per annum.

Smithwick voluntarily served in Ranging Companies several times, at one point pursuing a party of Comanche horse thieves for more than two weeks deep into Comancheria.

When the Comanches requested an agent to live among them, Smithwick was about the only man in his already-select company who dared. During his six months with the Comanches he was marked for death and very nearly killed by a vengeful party of Wacos, and saved when his Comanche hosts communicated to the Wacos that they would have to kill them first.

Besides his considerable military exploits Smithwick likely made the first rifled gun made in Texas, and very possibly made the knife Jim Bowie was carrying during the siege of the Alamo.

He was one of the founders of Weber's Prairie, south of Bastrop, and built the first mill in the area of Marble Falls.

Highly respected in the State, and personally aquainted through his prior service with most of the State's leaders, he even ran for public office in an attempt to stave of secession.

When secession, and his own murder, became inevitable, he sold his possessions and formed a company of like-minded folk, urging all he could to join him. While he believed the South would lose, before the outbreak of hostilities no one had any idea as to the coming scale or duration of that violence, and indeed Texas escaped most of that, being so far West.

Most all of the violence against non-combatant civilians here was perpretrated by Confederate sympathisers.

There is no evidence Smithwick ever took military action against the Confederacy, he did stay out of the state thereafter so as to avoid righteous violence against those who had murdered his friends.

In view of all that, and considering your graceless comments here, it seems a certainty that you are a much lesser man than Smithwick ever was.

Birdwatcher

??

Everything I wrote is still here.

Give an example.

I notice Birdwatcher is avoiding the logical analysis presented earlier.

Gee, why is that?

It wasn't in regard to things no longer being here; it was in regard to what you accuse Sako of doing - I.e., the same thing you repeatedly do.

We both agree that our Constitution is the very distilled essence of who we are as a people, under God. This is exactly why all of our service members, new citizens, and government hires are sworn to uphold and defend it.

You say the Confederates were a free people. I say the Confederates were a people determined to permanently enslave more than 3.5 million men, women and children living in their midst.

You say Lincoln "wiped his ass" with the US Constitution. I say what the Confederates did to it was possibly worse. They perverted it.

They wrote into it several modifications designed specifically to permanently codify, expand and protect the enslavement of these 3.5 million people for perpetuity.

Words mean things, and THAT how the Confederates defined themselves, and what they swore to uphold.

Birdwatcher

You avoid the logical progression argument. Lincoln had NO authority to do any of what he did. The Southern states did. Totalitarianism vs freedom, and you choose the former in spite of your own words.

Even if this BS is accepted at face value, so what? You've already acknowledged that a people should be free to break away from a gov't that no longer represents them. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled slavery legal less than a decade prior. Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States does it prevent a state or states from seceding. Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the POTUS the authority to do what Lincoln did against the South.

Thus, you have a free people declaring independence from a gov't that no longer represents them and giving their legal, Constitutional rationale for the same. Conversely, you have a federal government listing its unconstitutional, illegal rationale for preventing said independence; and not once listing slavery as the reason behind the invasion.

Therefore, you're continually supporting an illegal, unconstitutional subjugation of an otherwise Constitutionally permitted secession based upon a revisionist agenda and rationale. Basically, you're contradicting that which you say a free people can and should be able to do because you "feel" that one of their rationales for such action is immoral.

That's a damned slippery, and damned dangerous slope you've put yourself on. Be prepared to slide down it to your own demise whenever the gov't decides that it "feels" some of your freedoms are immoral.

And what is his position on the Stars and Stripes, that flew over his wife's ancestors for a much longer time? miles

Sako posted for purposes of ridicule, without retraction, that my opinion was that the flag should come down lest it offend people or some such. Whereas I had specifically stated in response to a question that while it didn't offend me, and in private you could do what you like, in public places it should be put to a vote.

OK, now give me an incidence of me posting a deliberate falsehood, or ANY falsehood, ever, on these boards.

Birdwatcher

Don't make sense, miles. It upsets the propaganda machine of Birdwatcher, Obama, and Soros.

That the War of Northern Aggression was based purely on slavery and all Confederates fought the war for slavery, whilst all Yankees fought to oppose the same.

"Therefore, you're continually supporting an illegal, unconstitutional subjugation of an otherwise Constitutionally permitted secession based upon a revisionist agenda and rationale. Basically, you're contradicting that which you say a free people can and should be able to do because you "feel" that one of their rationales for such action is immoral."

Mike...... this seems to be a correct summation of your position.

Any SANE, FAIR and well-informed individual would recognize this as a FALSEHOOD!

Lincoln's action (and many that followed, incidentally, the ONLY president to suspend the Constitution (Habeas Corpus) was illegal, whilst the South's was entirely within the scope of the Constitution. But it would be dishonest of me not to admit I'm glad the United States, at least until recently, became the nation it did.

Its the absolute and unadulterated truth, and therefore the very antithesis of "BS".

Here's the Confederate Constitution in its entireity.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp

Here's one of the authors of that document explaining the meaning of that Constitution, and the reasons for the changes from the US original.

http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/amgov/stephens.html


And of those five Confederate States giving formal Declarations of Causes of WHY they left the Union, here they are...

http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html

Birdwatcher

"His position on the flag, as stated to me is, that flag flew over the enslaved ancestors of his wife, children and grandchildren. While he doesn't believe it is synonymous with hate, neither does he want it flown in state-supported locations.

You can ridicule his position if ya want, but I doubt you'd be crass enough to do it to his face."

If your friend complained to me about the Confederate flag on public property, I WOULD be crass enough to tell him that I'm offended by driving on streets in our Texas towns named for a rabble-rousing, adulterous, sham of a christian preacher, but I accept it as blackmail paid by others, not me.

I concur, but I believe the North was right and I ever fired a shot in support of that abominable Confederate Constitution I'd hang my head in shame.

But hey, my number one voting issue is Pro-Life too.

I'm simple minded that way.

Birdwatcher