Me? I'll be enjoying looking at this picture of the conqueror of Atlanta, William Tecumseh Sherman






Confederate Memorial Day: when multiple states celebrate treason in defense of slavery


“What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality?”

Monday is Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, one of two states that still set aside a state holiday — meaning government offices are closed — to honor those who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The other, Mississippi, will celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on April 30.

In addition, other states, including South Carolina (which celebrates Confederate Memorial Day on May 10), Florida (which will celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on Thursday), and Texas (which celebrated Confederate Heroes Day on January 19), honor the legacy of the Confederacy without closing government offices.

And in several states — including Alabama — Confederate figures like President Jefferson Davis and Gen. Robert E. Lee are also honored with their own holidays, with supporters arguing that doing so is important to preserve Southern history.

Now, 157 years after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter — marking the beginning of the Civil War — Americans still debate its causes. But the underlying reasoning for the secession of Southern states from the Union, and the launching point for the bloodiest conflict in American history, couldn’t be more clear. In fact, the instigators themselves explained them.

The Confederacy was built on slavery and created to save slavery
The Confederacy, or the Confederate States of America, was established with the purpose of preserving the institution of slavery. This is now viewed as a controversial take in 2018, but it is, in fact, true. Alabama seceded from the Union on January 11, 1861, in the belief, as stated during the Alabama Secession Convention held that month, that “the institution of African slavery now existing in the slaveholding states” was “a moral, social, and political blessing.”

A few weeks earlier, in December 1860, Stephen F. Hale, Alabama’s commissioner to the state of Kentucky, wrote the following to Kentucky Gov. Beriah Magoffin regarding Alabama’s reasonings for exiting the Union (emphasis added):

What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped by the heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed? In the Northern States, where free negroes are so few as to form no appreciable part of the community, in spite of all the legislation for their protection, they still remain a degraded caste, excluded by the ban of society from social association with all but the lowest and most degraded of the white race. but in the South, where in many places the African race largely predominates, and as a consequence the two races would be continually pressing together, amalgamation or the extermination of the one or the other would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin? God forbid that they should.

He added:

If we triumph, vindicate our rights, and maintain our institutions, a bright and joyous future lies before us. We can clothe the world with our staple, give wings to her commerce, and supply with bread the starving operative in other lands, and at the same time preserve an institution that has done more to civilize and Christianize the heathen than all human agencies besides-an institution alike beneficial to both races, ameliorating the moral, physical, and intellectual condition of the one and giving wealth and happiness to the other.

(The “institution” to which he was referring was the institution of slavery.)

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/23/17271408/confederate-memorial-day-racism-civil-war-slavery