Happy Confederate Surrender Day!

What about Robert E. Lee High?

 

"We've only had 15 casualties so far, and we're going to get that down to zero," -- Jeff Davis

 

"I wasn't on the battlefield, so I don't consider it a loss."
--Jefferson Davis, shortly after Gettysburg

 

I love that there are still “It WaSn’T aBoUt SlAvErY!!!!” people the same way I love that one of my Facebook friends thinks Coronavirus is a made-up thing being used by Trump and John F Kennedy Jr. for cover as they rescue sex slave mole children from tunnels in New York City and prepare to arrest and execute Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

 

“We’re gonna get this Army charging back by May1. This Confederation wasn’t built to be shut down.”
— J. Davis

 

I have found that when dealing with the "It wasn't about slavery, it was about state's rights" nonsense, that the Texas Declaration of Secession I posted shuts that down fast. First two paragraphs declare the date and where they're meeting. Para three throws down that it's all about slavery, in language that is stark and bald in its racism.

It gets hard to argue against pretty quickly.

 

"I like soldiers who don't get killed to protect my right to own slavvv, errr, defend state rights," -- Jeff Davis

 

Still there.

 

Of course, to be a pedant, the last Confederate forces west of the Mississippi didn't surrender until June.

 

There’s a book that describes the efforts the initial confederate government went through to convince other states to secede. Written documents all starting with keeping slavery. They sent delegations to various State capitols to convince them to fight for the right to keep and own slaves.

Directly refuting the neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst for the resulting onset of hostilities in 1861, Charles B. Dew finds in the commissioners' brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners included in their speeches a constitutional justification for secession, to be sure, and they pointed to a number of political "outrages" committed by the North in the decades prior to Lincoln's election. But the core of their argument―the reason the right of secession had to be invoked and invoked immediately―did not turn on matters of constitutional interpretation or political principle. Over and over again, the commissioners returned to the same point: that Lincoln's election signaled an unequivocal commitment on the part of the North to destroy slavery and that emancipation would plunge the South into a racial nightmare

 

Amazon image isn't showing for me.

The book is "Apostles of Disunion."

Very compelling.

 

Bullshit.
The United States was codified through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The South wasn't being ruled by a despot an ocean away who was making up the rules as he went along. The Southern states were in open rebellion against a government and a system they agreed to join. They were never an independent nation. They were terrorists.
Grant would have been within his rights to stand Lee and his general staff against the wall at the Appomattox courthouse and shot them all.