Happy Sedition Surrender Day

[Regan MacNeil]

 

[swingline]

Lee should have been hanged as a traitor.

 

[LanceyHoward]

Somebody said "Winners get to write the history". After the Civil War the white people of the country reconciled in part by allowing the losers to write the history. So when I hear this outcry about Critical Race Theory I think about the tortured attempts to make Jefferson Davis a hero.

 

[Regan MacNeil]

The whole Lost Cause movement makes me want to beat the **** out of someone.

 

[User 150927]

If I had a time machine, I would go back to the end of the civil war and make sure all these f****** got hanged for their treasonous behavior.

 

[Justin_Rice]

The whole Lost Cause movement makes me want to beat the **** out of someone.

I believe strongly in Lincoln's "Malice towards none; charity towards all" version of reconstruction, but it spawned 100 years of placating Southerners.

 

[2muchcoffeeman]

Lee should have been hanged as a traitor.

Along with Davis, the surviving members of the Confederate cabinet and Congress, and several other senior Confederate military leaders.

 

[cyclingwriter2]

Somebody said "Winners get to write the history". After the Civil War the white people of the country reconciled in part by allowing the losers to write the history. So when I hear this outcry about Critical Race Theory I think about the tortured attempts to make Jefferson Davis a hero.

In the early aftermath of the Capitol assault in January when GOPers were saying that we needed to let trump and his allies not be held accountable in order to not tear the country apart, what you just wrote bounced around in my head. Basically, we let the traitors off with a light slap on the wrist in the name of reconciliation and promptly screwed over generations of minorities in the process.

 

[User 149557]

I’m more angry about the Compromise of 1877 than any other action of this country.

Our original sin was heinous. But to throw away the blood and labor of generations, to undo the work of freeing a people for short political gain is even more unforgivable.

 

[britwrit]

Lee's reputation as a general is so inflated by whom he faced for most of the war. Once he faced someone competent (and willing to throw away so many Union lives,) the end was near.

 

[User 149557]

McClellan approached war like a 17-year old working the late shift at Taco Bell.

McClellan definitely would’ve turned off the sign at 1:46 a.m. and refused to answer the drive-up speaker.

 

[Justin_Rice]

Lee's reputation as a general is so inflated by whom he faced for most of the war. Once he faced someone competent (and willing to throw away so many Union lives,) the end was near.

Meh. Lee navigated the politics of Army command more successfully than most others on both sides.

And he did a good job of frequently steering the AoNVa in a way such that the AoP was compelled to attack. Being on the Strategic Offensive but the Tactical Defensive was a very good posture in the 1860s, when we were just trying to figure out how to fight wars World War I style.

I think Lee was very good. And I agree: Had the Union stumbled into a Grant-like commander earlier, the war would have been over sooner.

In thinking about the Overland Campaign, Antietam and Chancellorsville in particular AoP commanders were just too willing to throw their hands up in defeat and retreat.

Grant didn't win big in the Wilderness, but that he didn't say "Welp we didn't win the entire war today. Guess we gotta limp back across the Rappahannock" was a singular turning point in the war in the East.

 

[User 149557]

Please take this joke in stride, everybody:

We’re dangerously close to this thread looking like a University of Michigan football message board.

 

[TrooperBari]

 

[maumann]

My favorite pastime is to go up to anyone with a Confederate flag on their vehicle and ask if they might have a $5 bill in their pocket. Or a penny.

 

[Justin_Rice]

I guess going with a George Thomas reference woulda been to obscure ...

 

[Pilot]

I've always been a big Civil War history guy, and a history guy in general, and a year or two ago I really got into joining Facebook groups.

There are some truly incredible ones... I joined one dedicated to WW2 Battleships and Battlecruisers, and it's literally daily posts masturbating about the Bismark, Yamato and the US Iowa-class battleships. All day, every day, same people, same ships, same conversations.

Another is "Aviation Archeology" or something, where they hunt down (mostly) WW2 crashes and a lot of the people in the group are actively involved in rebuilding those planes. People post some random piece of aluminum or steel and people will pinpoint what part of what plane it's from, "Ah, that's the bracket that held the fuel tank on a Spitfire, probably built between April and June, 1941."

So I joined ALL these Facebook groups that fit my historic interests and stumbled into a couple of Southern sympathizing Civil War groups.

I know some of you live down there so this isn't news, but holy ****. Ho. Ly. ****. They spend hours and hours each day convincing themselves the war wasn't about slavery, posting clips from old books, posting old speeches, dismantling arguments they've been battered with elsewhere. They post about how great Nathan Bedford Forrest was 2-3-4 times a day. Every day. There are at least 3-4 posts a week about black Confederates and, less often but still existing, posts about how slaves didn't have it bad, etc.

There's a ... professionalism? to some of the leaders that's chilling, and an intensity from many of them that's disgusting.

I keep almost quitting the group but haven't. It's like rubbernecking a car wreck. It's the same as reading the comments on a Breitbart article or reading a QAnon message board. I'm fascinated at how insane people can be, at the way they can contort their perspective to justify basically anything.

There are groups on the other side, too, believe it or not. One guy about started Civil War, Rnd 2 the other day when he praised a particular artillery officer for "turning Confederates attacking in Pickett's Charge into pink mist."

Anyway, sad day for the ****ing sadistic, racist pieces of **** of the world.

 

[Justin_Rice]

The people who live in the red confuse the **** out of me.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

They might have officially surrendered but the insurgency continues.

 

[Justin_Rice]