Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Talk of removing Confederate monuments starts a war of words in Dallas

I have lived in the south my whole life....all over the south from Alabama to KY, mostly in VA....and I agree 100%. White or black, trying to live in the past, is like keeping your head up your azz. Prosperity lies in the future, for those that want to achieve it.

Every soldier of the Confederacy and every black that was a slave, are long dead. Very few living can even remember having known such a person, and they themselves would be very old now. We are no longer honoring memories, because we have no memory of such things....some people are trying to live out a history that is not there own. And IMO that serves no legitimate purpose.

In the county I live in, if you drive around you will see battle flags hanging off trailers all over the place. Why? I don't know. They started popping up in droves when the controversy of the flag reignited after Dylan Roof murdered those church people. Then Niki Haley took down the flag at the SC capitol. Half the flaggers don't have roots in the south going back as far as the civil war. Most of them are unemployed or underemployed, on welfare, methheads, etc. How is this honoring the south? It is more like a statement of "My life sucks but eff you too."

The battle flag largely disappeared from the time of Appomattox until the KKK revived in the WWI time period, and Jim Crow embraced during the fight for segregation.

Controversy over the flag has brought other more benign relics into controversy, and I think that is too bad. Monuments to Confederate soldiers, Confederate cemeteries and most of the statues should not be a problem, and probably would not have been issue but for the flag issue. Naming public schools after Confederates is something that's time has gone as well, IMO.

Civil War history is fascinating. But lets look to the future.

I think he was Rodney's brother.

Yes, rotknee kang, got millions, died near broke od'd and drowned in a swimming pool, the intelligence is blindingly numbing.

The Negro figured out a long time ago that if he plays his cards right, he can get something for nothing.....well, almost nothing, anyway. As a people, they have never been too enthused about work, mostly because their African ancestors didn't really have to work. They lived in a place where the climate was suitable for year round growing conditions, and food from plant and animals was abundant. It wasn't a cold climate, and they didn't have the chore that people in the northern climates did in order to survive.

After the Civil Rights Act was passed, and the Democrats stole them away from the GOP, they began to exchange their votes for freebies......welfare checks, food stamps, subsidized housing, Medicaid, Affirmative Action, all of which served to destroy what their was of the so called Black family. Black women figured out real quick that the more kids they had, the more money and free stuff they could get, providing that they didn't have a man in the picture. Oh, it was alright for the man to come around at night for breeding purposes, but he needed to maintain a low profile in order for her lifestyle to continue. As time has gone by, they have refined their system of making a living in exchange for voting Democrat.

All of which brings us to the current trend of the Negro wanting the Confederate memorials and statues removed. They know that their number one weapon is white guilt. Make the White man feel bad about something, and they'll get something out of it......for nothing, because all they had to do was complain. Give most of them a test and ask them who Robert E. Lee was, and they'll probably say he was a rapper, and that Stonewall Jackson was an offensive lineman in the NFL. The majority of the Negro population is ignorant of the reasons that these memorials were put up in the first place. It hadn't nothing to do with slavery, they were simply a way of honoring brave men who died fighting for a cause that deemed worthy.......and most of them didn't own a slave.

So, what will the Negro gain by a statue of Robert E. Lee being removed? Oh, they might put a statue of Snoop Dog in it's place, and make him feel better. Or, maybe they'll name another road after MLK, or a school. But, in reality, he isn't going to benefit one iota. All it serves to do is widen the breach between him and me, because I see such things as a slap in the face of those of us who see the historical side of this issue. If I had my way, the next time some Negro agitator wants a Confederate statue removed, I'd say okay.......just as long as you let me stick that statue up your ass....sideways.

So what does Memorial Day mean to you? Just an excuse to take off a Monday in May and have a barbecue?

Yes, every soldier and every slave from that era is long dead, and soon you'll be able to say that about WWII Veterans. Once they're gone should we stop honoring their memory? When that time comes will honoring their memory be "living a history that is not our own?"

And who are you to say what a "legitimate purpose" is? I have a written citation for a medal my father received in WWII hanging on my wall to remind me what they did for us. And to remind me that compared to what they went through, I've never had a bad day. I hope you agree that's a legitimate purpose. I'll give that to my sons, and hopefully they'll pass it on to their kids and not just pitch it in the trash because they "don't want to live a history that's not their own."

Certainly it's a part of history that's very much my own and very much their own. The same as Confederate memorials are. Read up on some of the things they did, like Jackson's Valley Campaign. Incredible feats of human endurance and bravery. Why would we want to just forget all that?

Seems the KKK had a big protest about taking down the statue of Lee in Charlottesville, VA. Since they are for it, I say tear the damn thing down.

If you're gonna tear "anything" down, tear it "all" down, fair is fair!

BTW, Fu-k the klan too!

White people, especially cultural southerners, have no one to blame but themselves if they are feeling put upon.

They came out in support of Trump too, guess that means you voted for Hilary.

The KKK did more to destroy the south than Sherman.

You really are that stupid.

Have you ever read a book about the future? Most have such little practical value--they are a few that were eerily predictive...most are proved wrong.

History is more than just events. It is a record of culture and attitudes. Wiping it away or changing it because it isn't in vogue, is not thinking,--every fool believes they are more intelligent than the last generation.

Why not let all the butt-hurt have their own little pavilion. They can put up a plaque denouncing the past and espouse their superior virtues. Doing this every 40 years ought to be interesting.

Right, I don't hate someone for simply being born a particular race, of course that can't be helped, I judge by actions, the klan hating indiscriminately is the very antithesis of any form of cognoscente intelligence.

I AM FROM THE NORTH MICHIGAN TO BE RIGHT . THE SOUTH AND FLAGS THE GENERALS THE WAY OF LIFE IT WAS IN THE 1800 TILL NOW IS AND WAS HISTORY . WEATHER LIKE IT OR NOT IT WAS HISTORY . I FOR ONE BEING 70 YEARS OLD WE USE TO PLAY WAR BETWEEN NORTH & SOUTH . WHEN THIS DEMOCRAT PARTY WENT FROM THE U.S. TO HITLER TIME . AND FORGOT EVERYTHING ABOUT THE U.S. IN STARTED TO THINK THEY WERE IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE ILLEGAL PRESIDENT OF 2008 -2017 FORGETTING EVERYTHING HILLARY CLINTON IN WHO CARES AND 30,000 EMAIL WENT TO 70,000 NOBODY CARES AND THE BENGAZE THING . ALL PEOPLE SHOULD WAKE UP TO THE FACT THEY ARE CORRUPT AS U CAN GET PEOPLE HISTORY FLAG STATUE OF LEE HISTORY SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN

IN DEFENSE OF GENERAL LEE

By Edward C. Smith
Saturday, August 21, 1999
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

Let me begin on a personal note. I am a 56-year-old, third-generation, African American Washingtonian who is a graduate of the D.C. public schools and who happens also to be a great admirer of Robert E. Lee's.

Today, Lee, who surrendered his troops to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House 134 years ago, is under attack by people -- black and white -- who have incorrectly characterized him as a traitorous, slaveholding racist. He was recently besieged in Richmond by those opposed to having his portrait displayed prominently in a new park.

My first visit to Lee's former home, now Arlington National Cemetery, came when I was 12 years old, and it had a profound and lasting effect on me. Since then I have visited the cemetery hundreds of times searching for grave sites and conducting study tours for the Smithsonian Institution and various other groups interested in learning more about Lee and his family as well as many others buried at Arlington.

Lee's life story is in some ways the story of early America. He was born in 1807 to a loving mother, whom he adored. His relationship with his father, Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, (who was George Washington's chief of staff during the Revolutionary War) was strained at best. Thus, as he matured in years, Lee adopted Washington (who had died in 1799) as a father figure and patterned his life after him. Two of Lee's ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence, and his wife, Mary Custis, was George Washington's foster great-granddaughter.

Lee was a top-of-the-class graduate of West Point, a Mexican War hero and superintendent of West Point. I can think of no family for which the Union meant as much as it did for his.

But it is important to remember that the 13 colonies that became 13 states reserved for themselves a tremendous amount of political autonomy. In pre-Civil War America, most citizens' first loyalty went to their state and the local community in which they lived. Referring to the United States of America in the singular is a purely post-Civil War phenomenon.

All this should help explain why Lee declined command of the Union forces -- by Abraham Lincoln -- after the firing on Fort Sumter. After much agonizing, he resigned his commission in the Union army and became a Confederate commander, fighting in defense of Virginia, which at the outbreak of the war possessed the largest population of free blacks (more than 60,000) of any Southern state.

Lee never owned a single slave, because he felt that slavery was morally reprehensible. He even opposed secession. (His slaveholding was confined to the period when he managed the estate of his late father-in-law, who had willed eventual freedom for all of his slaves.)

Regarding the institution, it's useful to remember that slavery was not abolished in the nation's capital until April 1862, when the country was in the second year of the war. The final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was not written until September 1862, to take effect the following Jan. 1, and it was intended to apply only to those slave states that had left the Union.

Lincoln's preeminent ally, Frederick Douglass, was deeply disturbed by these limitations but determined that it was necessary to suppress his disappointment and "take what we can get now and go for the rest later." The "rest" came after the war.

Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the few civil rights leaders who clearly understood that the era of the 1960s was a distant echo of the 1860s, and thus he read deeply into Civil War literature. He came to admire and respect Lee, and to this day, no member of his family, former associate or fellow activist that I know of has protested the fact that in Virginia Dr. King's birthday -- a federal holiday -- is officially celebrated as "Robert E. Lee-Stonewall Jackson-Martin Luther King Day."

Lee is memorialized with a statue in the U.S. Capitol and in stained glass in the Washington Cathedral.

It is indeed ironic that he has long been embraced by the city he fought against and yet has now encountered some degree of rejection in the city he fought for.

In any event, his most fitting memorial is in Lexington, Va.: a living institution where he spent his final five years. There the much-esteemed general metamorphosed into a teacher, becoming the president of small, debt-ridden Washington College, which now stands as the well-endowed Washington and Lee University.

It was in Lexington that he made a most poignant remark a few months before his death. "Before and during the War Between the States I was a Virginian," he said. "After the war I became an American."

I have been teaching college students for 30 years, and learned early in my career that the twin maladies of ignorance and misinformation are not incurable diseases. The antidote for them is simply to make a lifelong commitment to reading widely and deeply. I recommend it for anyone who would make judgment on figures from the past, including Robert E. Lee.

[Dr. Smith is co-director of the Civil War Institute at American University in Washington, D.C.]

No. But you are. For bringing up the KKK in the first place.

This is just another in the long list of liberal "scorched earth" efforts to expunge American history. Sanitizing the landscape of statues, named buildings and memorials allows them to mold those who have no knowledge of their history. They have had remarkable success around the countryside working their agenda.

Start at Gettysburg. If you are going to remove a statue of a Southern soldier, wipe out everything of the South from Gettysburg. Then start your way south and remove it all. Then all you have is the North fighting against no one. The figures show that almost 2 million people visit there each year, so it looks like a good place to start tearing them down. Think maybe if you start there, they would stop all the removals immediately. At heart, I am a son of the South.

Except it wasn't treason. States seceding is both a Constitutional and a natural right.