A History of Racism Erased From U.S. Capital

I presume you are aware that the decision on the part of Southern states - beginning with my own, Virginia - to have the statues of Confederate figures placed in the U.S. Capitol created quite an uproar at the time. It was viewed by many in this country as a provocative act, not a gesture of healing and good will, and people were quite right to view it as such because it was a deliberately provocative act. Of course, it helps to understand the context within which all of this took place, during the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era when Confederate bitter enders and nostalgics were attempting to reimpose the Antebellum South's "old ways" in their states, which were now free of the Union troops that had prevented them from doing so in the past.

As I mentioned earlier, this all began with the politicians in my own fair commonwealth, Virginia, who thought it was a good idea to send a statue of Robert E. Lee in full Confederate battle dress as our "representative" in the U.S. Capitol. As much as I respect Lee for the things he did for this country - particularly the decision to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant instead of prolonging this nation's agony by scattering his troops throughout the countryside to continue the fighting, killing, destruction and hatred indefinitely - he was not worthy of the distinction. In the pantheon of great Virginians, Lee's place comes well after that of Washington (who was already memorialized in the Capitol), James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe (who was nearly KIA at the Battle of Trenton), Patrick Henry, George Mason, John Marshall and several others. Indeed, Lee was one of America's greatest military leaders and tacticians, but his victories are qualified by the fact that they came at the expense of some of the worst military leaders in American history, and when he was finally confronted with a general equal to his own talents and aggressiveness - Ulysses S. Grant - his string of successes came to an abrupt end. Eleven months after Grant crossed the Rapidan, Lee was surrendering his army at Appomattox Court House.

I have no sympathy or respect for the self-serving "progressives" who are trying reverse all the hard-earned racial progress that has been made in this country for the past several decades - they're amongst the most despicable excuses for human beings in this country.

 

The radical Republicans were more than happy to use reconstruction as a power grab and for profit. The stolen presidential election of 1876 was a prime example and their swan song. The south was totally disgusting when they enacted Jim Crow laws once they had control of their states again.

Since you don't like statues, what do you think of giving veterans' benefits to Confederate soldiers? There were wives of Confederate soldiers who were drawing benefits until the 1960s. Old guys married some very young women.

As Grant and Lee, Lee and Stonewall Jackson were superior to him. They did far more with less than Grant did. Grant had the advantage of almost unlimited resources which allowed him to attack the Army of Northern Virginia relentlessly. McClellan and Mead, after Gettysburg, allowed the South to lick their wounds after the big battles, much to Lincoln's chagrin. Grant made a huge blunder with a frontal assault at Cold Harbor, which he acknowledged. Grant was the best independent commander the Union had. I'll give you that. Winfield Scott Hancock might have been a great general, but he never got an independent command.

We are in complete agreement on this point.

 

Bad times...

I like statues, John, so please don't put words in my mouth. For the record, I think the decisions regarding the fates of the Confederate statues in our communities are our decisions to make. If the people in Richmond want to take down the statues on Monument Avenue, so be it, and if the people in my county want to leave up the memorial to our county's Confederate soldiers, so be it. If the people outside our communities don't like the decisions we make, tough sh*t.

As for your questions, 'what do I think of giving veterans' benefits to Confederate soldiers and their wives?', my answer is that the states those men fought for made a commitment to them and their spouses, and the states had an solemn obligation to make good on that commitment. Thus, as a Virginian, I would have had no problem helping pay for the benefits of the Virginians who fought for the Confederacy, even though I have no sympathy for the Confederacy that brought war, death and destruction to our fair Commonwealth. However, I don't see why the U.S. and the states that fought for the Union should help us pay for those benefits. If they wanted to do so out of the goodness of their hearts and the spirit of reconciliation God bless them, but those governments didn't make a commitment to those soldiers, ours did. The obligation is ours, not theirs.

The Confederates certainly had to do more with a lot less, which is something the Secessionists should have thought through before rushing headlong into war. The Southern Cause was a suicide mission.

As for Grant and Lee, I think they were remarkably similar generals. Both were aggressive generals who put a premium on maneuver, and save for a few exceptions avoided costly frontal assaults on their opponents' center. In the cases of Cold Harbor and Gettysburg, both generals broke from their standard operating procedure because they felt compelled to do so, and later both generals would regret the rash decisions they made on those occasions.

 

A lot of the people who are ripping down statues are outside agitators who are not residences of the community. They get bug in their brain because some radical educator told them something. These kids are very impressionable. I know. I was once a sophomore in college too. It does not mean "wish fool" for nothing. They have been taking down statues that freed slaves raised money and paid for in the 19th century because Lincoln is standing above a slave who kneeling on the ground. These violent kids have no respect for history, and they don't want to get one.

I am glad that I saw Richmond when I did. There was a big Confederate museum there when I visited it. I wonder what is left of it? There was also Jefferson Davis' "Confederate White House" which you could tour. I am sure that the message is much more woke now.

This little token kind of sums up the radical Southern attitude, "No submission to the North." It was made in Cincinnati, Ohio and sold throughout the South. Hard core southerners carrited them as pocket pieces or as watch fobs. Collectors call them "The Wealth of the South" tokens.

 

See, here's the crucial thing about the civil war: It was easy for the North, as an industrial base to sing holier than thou and advocate for complete abolition(all the meanwhile having their own slavery practices, but that was something both during and post war, they were able to cover up amidst their readers. Oh yeah, we're not purely the good guys. I wonder how that would've went down, if both sides saw they were more or less the same.)

https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-north-and-slavery/

So, the easy fix to all of this, would have been to aid some in industrializing the South. To THIS DAY, we have still failed to do this. We will sooner fix some god forsaken country across the sea, then we would to improve Mississippi or Arkansas. And we wonder why a portion of Americans there are socially resentful? Why shouldn't they be?

This conflict is entirely unnecessary and is propagated so that people can sit in power. That's it. There are those who have so little campaigning and political skill, they need to socially divide the citizens to win elections.

 

The South seceded to protect slavery. That still isn't okay. "But we make money doing it" isn't a good excuse.

 

I would say the vast majority of them are outside agitators. Look at what happened in Charlottesville back in 2017. The debate over the Lee statue began within the community and the next thing you know thousands of outsiders on both sides decide they're going to stick their noses in other people's business and look what happened. The "progressive" authorities in the city and the capital decide that violence is personally and politically advantageous for themselves so rioters were allowed to turn the city into a war zone and a young woman winds up getting killed. Then the governor adds insult to injury by getting on TV and lying to the public about it and arranges for a sham "investigation" that absolves himself and his fellow Demokrats in C'ville of any wrongdoing. Madness.

A lot of them aren't kids - they're the same radical Left wacktivists who were also involved in the "anti-war", Occupy Wall Street, anti-police and anti-Trump protests:







ANSWER, WWP, PSL, Antifa - the whole alphabet soup of radical Left astroturf that masquerades as mainstream America, and the LW MSM has been running cover for that trash for decades....

It probably is a good idea you went when you did because Richmond has gone completely to hell since 2020. The city is going on its fourth police chief since Mayor Lavar Stoney stabbed the RPD in the back when it was trying to control the rioters he let run amok in the city, the police department is way under staff, homicides are up, gun violence is up, some areas of the city are no-go zones after dark, you name it. The city was already a shithole before 2020 but now things are out of control and the city's leaders are blaming everything but themselves for the mess they made.

Nice tokens.

Cincinnati, eh? On its face that sounds absurd, but I've read that there were a lot of Confederate sympathizers in Southern Ohio back then.

 

Cincinnati was only separated from Kentucky, a slave state, by the Ohio River.

 

And the people in Southern Ohio had extensive trade relations with their neighbors to the south. We had the inverse situation here in Virginia. The initial votes to secede were rejected in no small part because of our extensive trade relations with our neighbors to the north.

Are those tokens part of your personal own collection?

 

I used to think it was astounding the Germany would gloss over Hitler and not really teach about it.

But here we are, doing the same.

 

I have a collection these pieces with an emphasis on politics. I thought about writing an update on the classic work with more about the issues and campaigns, but my problem is collectors want rarity ratings. That is hard to do. My collection has over 500 19th century political campaign tokens in it. I have a few hundred 20th century pieces as well.

 

Wow - That's mighty impressive. I imagine you've learned a lot about History in the process of gathering your collection.

 

Yes, I have. I have written numerous articles for hobby publications, wrote a couple hundred radio spots for American Numismatic Association in the 1990s and have posted tens of thousands of messages on hobby related chat boards. Coins are my prime focus, but coins, tokens, political history and economics are all intertwined.

I throw up some images of items here now and then, but it has generated limited interest. Thank you for your response.

 

History ain't for snowflakes, that's for sure.

One of the arguments for leaving up the Confederate monuments here in the South is that it forces us to confront the ugly aspects of our checkered past - slavery, racism, war and the destruction of the South. Several years ago an individual here in this forum foolishly declared that "racism was good for America" and it reminded me that the statues were testimony to the fact that racism was never good for America. Racism brought the evil of chattel slavery to our shores. It compelled the Founders to make hypocrites of themselves and violate the lofty ideals expressed in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence. It was the root cause of the bloodiest chapter in our nation's history, the Civil War, and left much of the South in ruins and destitute of its men. It led to another century of racial strife during the Segregation/Jim Crow era. Furthermore, as Mississippi's great Nobel laureate William Faulkner pointed out in some of his novels (ex., Absalom, Absalom!) and Frederick Douglass pointed out in his autobiographies, slavery and racism corrupted everything it touched, and over time it completely warped Southern society in very deep and profound ways (much as Communism warped the societies that were enslaved behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains).

Like I said, History ain't for snowflakes, and those statues are indeed a painful reminder of the ultimate disastrous consequences of what happens when Man thinks he can get away with violating his own Nature by enslaving his fellow man. The lesson to be learned there is that he can't - eventually he will pay for his arrogance. It's a lesson men keep forgetting because many of us want to keep sweeping it under the rug and concealing it from our consciousness.

And so idiots on Internet chat forums bleat "Racism was good for America!" and ignorant kids grow up blissfully unaware of the death, carnage and destitution that Socialism brought hundreds of millions of hapless human beings over the course of the past century....

 

When Abraham Lincoln ran for president in 1860, he was not an abolitionist candidate. His position was that slavery could continue in the states where it already existed, but it could spread to any territories. That position was spelled out on many of his campaign tokens.



Lincoln proposed plans to compensate slaveholders in return for freeing their slaves. He wanted to use tiny Delaware, which had a smaller number of slaves as a test case. It never came to that because the hotheads in the South supported the spread of slavery everywhere, according to the decision that was outlined in the Dred Scott decision.

It's impossible to get into the head of a politician who died almost 160 years ago, but was LIncoln's position a pro-business stance? Lincoln had been a member of the Whig Party and Henry Clay was his idol. Clay advocated the "American System" which supported high tariffs which protected American business from foreign competition. The revenues from the tariffs were to be used for internal improvements, like roads, bridges and canals, which promoted more business activity. Was Lincoln's plan to compensate slaveholders a political solution or was it a way to avoid economic hardship in the South? It could have been a bit of both.

 

I knew of the first part of your post, that's very standard accepted history about the Civil War. But I didn't know that Lincoln indeed had put an initiative forward to attempt to compensate the slaveowners. Is there anything you can reference me to search or sites to find out more about the Delaware Plan?

 

Google "Lincoln Delaware Plan" and you will get your answer. Unfortunately some of them, like the progressive rag, The Atlantic, will want you to subscribe or give up your first born.

 

nope, we still teach about it, we just no longer allow people to put Statues in the center of town or the capital to worship it - there is a difference

in Iraq they tore down the Statues of Saddam, not to forget history, but to change the future

 

Then they need to erase New Yorker George Washington as well. At the time of his death he owned 123 slaves. You can't hide from history by removing statues. You should just be thankful that we finally eliminated slavery from our society. That is also history.

 

Who do you know that worships statues?

 

I don't know anyone like that, everyone I know doesn't mind the losers statues and what they represent being removed

 

George Washington a New Yorker?

 

.

 

I have never been to the capital thus doubt I have ever seen the offending items. Nonetheless I still know about slavery.

 

I oppose it, not because I care about the statues but because the left is trying to erase history. It is cowardice not to face history.