Lincoln’s true Christian nature. He wanted to put out the fires of hatred.
Too bad Trump can’t find the same anger for murderous Nazis as he did for Nordstrom after it stopped selling his daughter’s handbags.
Wisdom? The northern white protestant elite decided to re-empower the southern white protestant elite. The people who fought and died didn’t choose anything. Those who celebrate the confederacy and spout nonsense like “the south shall rise again” should be doing so from Antarctica.
Pretend the seceding south was primarily Mexican or Native American, and then picture how “reconciliation” would have turned out.
By that logic, how is Abraham Lincoln not nearly as criminal as the Confederates?
I’m sorry, what logic is that? Lincoln didn’t take up arms against his country.
Read a fucking book, you two. Lincoln was assassinated, remember? Andrew Johnson is who brought us failed Reconstruction. The people who fought were not permitted to properly occupy the South, so the South promptly went back to Slavery Lite with a bunch of terrorism mixed in.
Yet Lincoln was in favor of reconciliation. He probably wouldn’t have done it the way Johnson did it, and possibly he wouldn’t have allowed Jim Crow to take hold, but treating the former Confederates as traitors was never on the table except among the frothing radical Republicans.
This was unnecessarily bitter. I apologize.
I recommend Eric Foner and I have heard that the new Oxford History on this era is excellent.
Radical Republicans were the most powerful party in Congress and there is a lot of evidence Lincoln had moved to them. That you describe them as frothing is bizarre.
Indeed, if Grant had enough troops and without Johnson’s awful start, there are lots of indications that he would have done the job right.
Well, I doubt all that. The primary difference between Johnson and Lincoln was that Johnson actively sympathized with the South, while Lincoln did not. But treason trials weren’t going to happen, for reasons going beyond Lincoln’s personal feelings on the matter(fears that the courts would declare secession constitutional for one), and the main priority was going to be reconciliation.
People often pull the “loyalty to his state” argument with Lee. But why is that supposed to be a defense? If my state did something I thought was wrong, I wouldn’t defend it. If I had the means, which Lee did, I’d move.
Patriotism is ultimately loyalty to ideals. Being loyal to a piece of land makes no sense. Being loyal to a government only makes sense if that government is doing what you consider to be the right thing.
I’ve already made myself clear on conservative symbols. People in this country know what the Confederacy was about. It seems that a lot of people do not know what Che Guevara was about. I admit, I don’t know anything about him and looked him up, and his Wikipedia page sounded like a liberator. Then I read he started the first Cuban slave camps, and I realize he’s not so great.
Eventually, we’ll get to the point where everyone knows what he did, and I will agree that wearing those shirts–if anyone even still does: I’ve not seen them–should be seen as equivalently bad.
As for the Dukes, I would be okay with a compromise where it’s still the General Lee but it has an American flag on it, and stands for the good stuff the guy did in the American Army before his betrayal.
Again, I urge you to visit some mainstream scholarship on this.
It is not solely about Johnson, of course. But the US would be a very different place if Booth hadn’t shot Lincoln for being too antiracist or if Grant had 200,000 instead of 20,000 people to enforce the law in the South. It’s not about the pardons. It is about letting the Confederacy reestablish itself substantially.
I think that’s accurate. I just don’t see how it relates to treating the secessionists as treasonous scum. The people of the time decided not to do that.
One subset of people chose to be soft on the traitors. They won, largely because they were willing to assassinate and terrorize, not because they were chastened by war or whatever you posit.
The subset of people who actually won the election and subsequent elections. Ulysses Grant could have decided to take a hard line as well. He also chose not to.
Southern apologist bullshit. Johnson was elected by a bullet. Lots of other from 1865 were also elected by bullets or the threat of them. You don’t know shit about what Grant did or tried, obviously, or why he faced the forces he did. Hint: not because the people who fought just wanted to be friends again.
Which wouldn’t be happening, of course, without the platform to OP gave them. They are “defending” the confederate flag (again) because they have been trolled. I have a prediction of my own - absolutely nothing new on either side will be brought up in this thread.
If someone starts a pro-confederate flag thread, sure jump on them hard with both feet. But screaming out the obvious about a hot-button topic on a board with known apologists is just message board masturbation.
But, hey, don’t let me spoil your outrage. Carry on.
Up next: rape is bad!
Not so sure there. Lincoln’s own policy was “Let 'em up easy”, pretty much like Johnson’s. The difference was that Lincoln could have made it stick, but Johnson couldn’t resist the punitive Radical Republican agenda. What advances were made after the war were due to their Reconstruction programs.
What would have made a difference would have been if Tilden had won just one more state in 1876, and the bargain to make Hayes president in return for ending Reconstruction hadn’t happened - it took a century of Jim Crow and lynchings just to recover our societal losses.
You also have to acknowledge that the North benefited from slavery as well, and that opposition to it was far from universal, and that there was a serious abolitionist movement in the South too. Lincoln and many other statesmen of the time knew it, and recognized that demonizing the South and angelizing (if that’s a word) the North were inappropriate and unhelpful.
Yes, how dare someone bring up a topic that is currently in the news. How dare someone see racist shitheads defending the flag and get angry enough to Pit it.
If we did that thread on rapists, it would be because rape apologists were in the news again. Would you then come in and defend the rape apologists and say the thread was a troll? Would you again push a ridiculous standard of not being able to say anything unless you brought something new to the table?
The OP is not trolling. The OP does not post trolling stuff. Nothing about the thread indicates a desire to piss off people for their amusement.
It’s a normal, if short, Pit OP.
Dude, get the fuck over yourself. I’m too cool to be outraged by white supremacy.
Well, I do wonder about the wisdom of taking down Confederate monuments pretty much as soon as the anti-confederates seem to have the upper hand politically. A lot of people feel very strongly about this stuff and it might have helped to let them finish dying off until all that was left was the true racist deplorables.