“Lincoln, I’m bored. Let’s go out and do something tonight.”
“Well, Mary, what do you want to do? We could go see that new play at the Ford Theatre. Or we could stay home and hang Bobby Lee in the backyard.”
“You know I’ve been wanting to show off my new gown. So let’s go to the play tonight and we’ll hang Lee this weekend. We can invite the Sewards and Stantons over and have a barbecue.”
And thus, once again, history turns on a dime. (I can’t provide a cite, but some historians state that Lee escaped hanging on the White House grounds because Mary Lee heard Mrs. Stanton had already planned to draw and quarter Alexander Stephens as part of a Friends of Opera fundraiser and wanted spare Lee long enough to upstage her by having him buried to his neck in sand while children (as the Union) and dwarves (as the Confederacy) recreated the Battle of Gettysburg using Lee’s head as Little Round Top, then top it off with a nice blackberry cordial reception and a performance by Jenny Lind.)
United Daughters of the Confederacy, so I can’t imagine why they would (unless your other ancestors included Major Thanatopsis Pickett-Beauregard of the 18th Louisiana Mounted Transvestite Sidesaddle Camel Brigade or some other rebel soldier).
Right. That’s the problem. I’ve got both. I just thought that maybe there was a special exclusion clause or something.
GO HOME YANKEE! IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, GO THE HELL BACK NORTH!
Sorry, this just made me flash back to my few years in NC, where I was treated to those exact words in addition to constant blathering about the “war of northern aggression.” After a while I wanted to show REAL northern aggression and punch some teeth out.
Now I’m south FL and I never hear about how evil I am for the crime of being raised in NY.
While I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, I do want to say that I really do think that the original decision to begin burying the invalids who died at Arlington House while being treated there was one of the most calculated acts of spite I can imagine.
Have they ever figured out who is buried in Grants tomb?
Not the Fugitive Slave Act, though I’ll get to that in a moment. There’s a historic episode which is not much understood now (the Civil War itself overwhelmed it in history) called Bleeding Kansas. Kanas was at the crossroads of America. The Southern elites were pants-pissing, out-of-their-minds terrified that if Kansas came into the Union as a Free State, it would tilt the balance irrevocably toward Abolition. (Similar thoughts had led to oddball Southerners invading Cuba and Panama previously, to little effect except to blacken America’s name, even though it was emphatically not national policy.)
Various compromises had been tried, and they were workable if awkward. Problem was, the last compromise took down the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In short, Senator Steven Douglas of Illinois (the Little Giant, one of America’s greatest speakers and politicians, period) brokered a different cromprise over the intercine sectional dispute: the territories themselves would decide to be free or slave when adopting a Constirution to become a full State. Good emocracy, bad policy: the short version is that people from across the South rushed to claim Kansas.
But it didn’t work. Meanwhile, appalled Northerns were not going to take this kind of power grab lying down, and founded their own companies to help free-state settlers come in. With more money and more interest in setling western territores (this is why the balance swung toward the North in the first place), they easily outpaced Southern settlement. Magically, the South declared that such interference was a gross presumption, apparently feeling their unsuccessful attempt to do the same did not render them hypocrites… since it had been unsuccessful. This weird pattern of personal failure and about-face to public ethics would repeat several times over in the run-up to the Civil War.
Even before free-staters claimed Kansas, however, Missourians unleashed a wave of violence against Kansas. I won’t go into details, only to say it was unprovoked and brutal, designed to intimidate free-soil settlers from the North. The governer was disgusted by the actions, but Southern elements in Washington, D.C. prevented him from doing anything about it. He quit and the next two did the same. Ironically, all three governers of Kansas were originally pro-Southern, but the South’s own works drove them to oppose it.
The bloodshed continued, and the North was outraged by the killing, looting, and rapine. Ironically, the South probably could have claimed Kansas as a slave state without the brutality, since they had previously held a majority in the state. This majority had created a territorially legislature, which became crucially important in the next few years. More and more free-staters came in, and Kansas partisans started raiding into Missouri, returning fire with fire.
Eventually, the Kansas territorial legislature, ardently pro-slave, ensured its reelection in flagrantly fixed polls. (And I mean flagrantly; they just dumped faked ballots by the pound, with more votes being cast than registered voters.) They ignored and refused to seat honestly-elected free-soil representatives. Then they started fashioning a state Consitution. I won’t go into all the evils involved here, except that the South’s leaders provided the most dishonest and hypcritical cover for this in Washington. Eventually, the free-soil settlers would simply reject the Kansas Constitution, even to the point of denying themselves statehood for years, in outrage over slavery’s tricks. And note that every passing year Kansas made more and more Northerns angry at the South.
Meanwhile, John Brown had grown so outraged that he launched an attack on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal, trying to raise, arm, and lead a slave rebellion. The North responded with, well, congratulations. Few wanted a bloody slave rebellion, but were honestly impressed with John Brown. Even his more honest opponents found the man inspiring, devoted, rational (later racist writers in the early 1900’s claimed he was insane), and devoutly committed to what he saw as a divinely-inspired plan. And so it may have been: his death was a public-relations catalyst which practically ensured the Civil War would take place.
The Fugitive Slave Act was a different issue. Despite their claims of state sovereignty, the South demanded a repressive legal cover for bounty hunting and the return of escaped slaves. Suffice it to say that the act made many, many enemies, and was used to kidnap free blacks as well as escaped slaves - who were legally free in the North.
Nitpick: Alexander Stephens was the Confederate VP. Stephen Douglas was a Democratic candidate for President from Illinois in 1860 and a friend of Lincoln; Douglas strongly backed the Union war effort once fighting began.
James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is indeed an excellent one-volume history of the Civil War, and won the Pulitzer Prize. Geoffrey Ward’s book accompanying Ken Burns’s The Civil War PBS series is also very good. Bruce Catton wrote the text for the American Heritage picture book of the Civil War. Any of these offer a terrific intro to the “War of the Rebellion” (as it was called for many years in the North). If you want something meatier and more lyrical, check out Shelby Foote’s trilogy.
Sorry I’ve neglected the thread. I’ve been very busy. I’m on a press tour and I had to go to a civil war site where I was subjected to the tour guide I found so objectionable. It was an old woman, and I was representing my publication, so I couldn’t say anything to her about her delusions. Plus, my Southern upbringing prevents me from being rude to old women, even when the old women are insane neo-Confederates. So naturally I got drunk at dinner and posted on the Dope.
Double or nothing this year!
(I totally forgot about that! How much did we bet?)
The best line near the end of that series:
Narrator: “Only this time…the South won!”
Colonel: “NOW you can call it the Civil War!”
Yes they have. They did DNA testing recently and were stunned.
[spoiler]Anna Nicole Smith.
The creepy thing is that her remains clearly date to 1885, and yet she only died this past year. When they exhumed her grave in Florida they found some ancient Jewish guy named Yeshua and a bunch of family members all named either Joe or Mary, and six mummified penguins.[/spoiler]
Is who serious, vibe? Are you reacting to a dumbass relative, a Daughters of the Confederacy tour guide, or what? What brought on this particular Pitting?
What difference does it make? The name itself is absurd and by all rights should be abandoned anyway. The only people that use it are people that have some sort of investment in creating controversy by trolling, people who are totally delusional, or people that like refighting a war in which one side was clearly in the wrong, talking about tactics long since obsolete, and fighting over an issue now seen to be so controversial that it doesn’t even exist anymore.
I think that the whole Civil War industry is absurd. Let it go, people.
George Carlin once said of Civil War re-enactors, “Let 'em use live ammunition and clean up the gene pool!” 
Nobody. Grant and his missus are *entombed * there.
Can’t we all just copy the postwar belles and call it “The Late Unpleasantness” ?
I have issues with them for the same reason, my daughter qualifies for the DAR - my son (an adoptee) does not.
Which happens to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of because God only knows how many people have birth certificates and baptismal records with their father’s name on them - but their mother was two timing. This isn’t something that (until recently) was provable for most people.
I agree, but after all, weren’t the Founding Fathers traitors to the British government? In fact Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying,“Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
:Shrug: “Treason is a matter of dates” - Talleyrand
Even if he were your biological son, he wouldn’t qualify for the DAR, although the SAR would likely accept him.