I have zero dog in this fight (all my ancestors were in Europe during the Civil War), but it’s helpful to read&cite the Constitution when arguing about it.
Section 10 does specifically prevent the States from doing certain things, such as entering into treaties with other countries, granting titles of Nobility, etc. However, the Tenth Amendment states:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
So there are some things the States are explicitly prohibited from doing, but any powers that aren’t granted to the Feds default to the States.
He’s in “Birth of a Nation” as “Evil Senator Stoneman” – although the character is supposed to be based on somebody else. And…
hey! There’s a wiki article on George Stoneman, I’ll be damned. I’m amused that it seems to match up on his military record pretty closely to family history, but that the family lore on his political career may have had some wild stories mixed in…
Too bad most of my relatives who knew this stuff have passed on. And they were still incensed at Griffith’s slander from probably their parent’s time.
(dude had nice hair… not so sure about the beard, though)
When I was a kid I remember being somewhere in the south (yeah, good memory, huh?) when the waitress asked where we were from. My dad said and the waitress actually asked to be removed from our table.
We were from Sherman’s hometown. I have no idea how common knowledge his hometown was/is, but that waitress knew it.
My wife hails from Vicksburg Mississippi, site of a protracted siege near the end of the war. When my mother-in-law told me the town was looking for a new slogan to update their image, I suggested “Vicksburg: We’re not eating rats anymore!” She was not amused.
Silly thing is, that “rock and roll” song was about something that happened 104 years earlier! No way that either the performers or their intended audience were personally effected. Or their parents either.
I would not imagine that 1 person in 100, even along the path of and descendants of people directly affected by his march, would know Sherman’s hometown. (I knew he was from Ohio, I even knew the names of his foster parents and his wife and kids and why he had the middle name Tecumseh, but I had to look up his hometown.)
Wow. To me, this says that this waitress (at least) knows how to hold a protracted grudge. To keep this sort of bile alive takes some effort–seeing as how there is no repeated offenses happening. :rolleyes: Thankfully, I am sure she’s a rarity.
One of Joan Baez’s crimes against humanity was singing, “'till StoneWALL’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again…” Stupid on many levels, and a lesson in why you should learn the historical context before you sing a song about history.
And like the fuckwits in the Balkans claiming to be avenging an 11th Century (or earlier) injustice, neither that, nor the fact that it was written by a Canadian, will matter to people who are so wrapped up in the Civil War that they think it’s still 1861. To some folks, the fact that a Canuck wrote it will be seen as more evidence that their misguided cause is somehow “just.” Because a Canuck wouldn’t have been influenced by the eeeevil Yankee controlled edumactional system in the US, which distorts the “true” history of the South and the Civil War as a way of justifying the continued oppression the North exerts on the South today. Note to any Southerners who might be reading this and are actually convinced that this is the case, the simple fact of the matter is 99% of the north doesn’t give a shit about the Civil War. In history classes, we spent more time talking about Abe Lincoln (and since it was Ohio) why McClellan wasn’t the idiot most historians say he was (and, of course, most of them, are, in fact right, he was an idiot) than the Civil War in general.
I always heard (and read) it as so much cavalry, which is lame, but not necessarily wrong.
And at least she took out the incorrect date for the fall of Richmond. And made it “the Robert E. Lee”, which was a steamboat which could have been seen in Tennessee, as opposed to the general himself, who never was.
How about “Out of the caves, and into the casinos!”?
Speaking of uplifting tunes:
“I wanna go back to Dixie,
Take me back to dear ol’ Dixie,
That’s the only li’l ol’ place for li’l ol’ me.
Ol’ times there are not forgotten,
Whuppin’ slaves and sellin’ cotton,
And waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee.
(It was never there on time.)”
If you ever want to be provokingly insulting, you can always say “You do know, don’t you, that the Union would have been within it’s rights to hang every man who ever wore rebel grey?”
Can’t speak for others, but my response would be “Then why didn’t they bring Davis to trial? Many southerners as well as northerners would have loved to see him hang and according to you it was an open-shut case.”
