Couldn’t you retro-retro-secede back into the District of Columbia? Though you might be worse off there, of course.
Are you saying Sweet Iced Tea wasn’t the goal-
then explain why McDonald’s WILL NOT give me regular old iced tea even north of the mason-dixon these days?!
Obligatory reference to a contempory cartoon about Confederate slave-soldiers:
I honestly don’t know even though I’ve tried to find out. The Fort Pillow Massacre seems the surest evidence of it being carried out though historians are divided on whether that was ordered or mob mentality by the soldiers. I don’t think it was carried out very often if it was at all- there were black soldiers in most PoW camps.
The 54th Massachusetts- which wasn’t all blown away besieging Battery Wagner as *Glory *implies- had several members who wound up at Andersonville where the other troops respected them for their discipline. Most of the blacks at Andersonville and at other PoW camps segregated themselves for protection against both rebels and white comrades.
[QUOTE=Inigo Montoya]
Sampiro I am shocked, SHOCKED that you would dare to impugn the acumen of a self-proclaimed “fairly respected writer.”
[/QUOTE]
Reading that quote of hers made me wonder: JK Rowling is the most respected and richest Y.A. writer alive today- possibly of all time. So does this mean witchcraft is real? Because that, too, is on the internet…
IMO there is probably as much or more disinformation on the internet as there is information.
Cite ME.
Go further north. I loves me my [sweet] iced tea (it’s so common, the word “sweet” isn’t even used here) and order it all the time when I’m at restaurants, fancy or fast food.
I’m in Canada, though …
(I have to keep remembering not to order iced tea when I’m in the States (never been south of the M-D line) as that stuff is terrible - how can people actually drink that???)
It surprises me that soldiers fighting for the ‘losing side’ would get pensions. From the U.S. government? Was it some kind of move to advance solidarity in the country? I suppose if most of those fighting were conscripts it would be the gracious thing to do.
The federal government didn’t give pensions to CSA veterans. The state governments did.
I think the whole comment about the whole thing comes from an earlier article by Ta-Nahesi Coates about the black confederates question.
My guess is that Ms Masoff probably isn’t all that familiar with the way armies work. She may assume, like a lot of layman, that an army is all combat units and not realize that armies usually have more support units than combat units.
So she may have heard that blacks were part of the Confederate army (which they were in support roles) and assumed that meant that blacks were fighting in combat.
I don’t know exactly how Virginia goes about it, but in many states, the state Board of Education will vet a number of texts, saying that they meet the standards the state has for the subject at that grade level. If you look at most state BOE (whatever they may be called) you’ll note that some of the people there are politicians, who have no experience nor qualifications for teaching. (Many do, of course, but the point I’m trying to make is that from the get-go, not everyone evaluating texts has the background to determine accuracy, accessibility, nor suitability of a given text.)
From there, the purchasing is left to the individual school districts.
And again, the decisions get made at least as much by people who got onto the local school boards without any professional pedagogical pedigrees, as by people who have the background to evaluate a text. Add in any kind of passion for, shall we say unpopular viewpoints, and you can get people pushing texts like this that distort the facts in the support of some larger goal.
Og knows I’ve got my gripes with teacher’s unions, school administrators, and the like, but let’s the place the blame for this sort of nonsense right where it belongs, mostly: With the people who get into school boards with the idea of fixing education so that it teaches “the right lessons to our children.”
As mentioned they were from states, and far from advancing solidarity they were a MAJOR bone of contention for many years. There were bills presented by southern Congressmen to get the Federal government to fund Confederate pensions which, for obvious reasons, never passed (my guess is that the southern Congressmen never expected them to but wanted something they could brag about trying to do and would have gotten away with had it not been for those meddlin’ [del]kids[/del]Yankees). Periodically northern (or at least non-southern) Congressmen would ask for increases in Federal pensions and the southerners would usually block-vote against it on the argument that their states didn’t benefit and shouldn’t have to pay taxes for it, which like most contentious bills led to a lot of wheeling and dealing in smoke filled rooms- “We’ll vote for your extra $5 per month to Union vets if you give us x, y, and z”. Federal Civil War pensions never were much- I think Harriet Tubman (herself a combat veteran) drew $8 per month as the widow of a veteran- but states subsidized them.
Wikipedia doesn’t count.
Great OP.
Thanks Sampiro, this is why I’m hooked on dope.
Totally off-topic, but on the subject of pensions they still flush out a surviving widow every now and again- I think officially the last died in 2006 but they’ve called “last Civil War widow” several times only for another to pop up. These women were the results of widows pensions.
Some states, both North and South, gave pensions to the soldiers and to their widows. Obviously it was expected that if a 75 year old soldier died his widow would be relatively close to his own age or at least over 50 or so, and 99 times out of 100 that was right in the beginning. The problem was that by the 1910s and 1920s they were still working on the true concern for bonafide widows paradigm but a forerunner to welfare fraud (albeit legal) was beginning to take place both north and south.
By the World War I era the Civil War veterans were getting so old that many of them had long outlived their wives. They needed caretakers and most of them hated the thought of going to live in a Veterans Home (just one step above the poorhouse), BUT they had something to offer much younger women: their own pension while alive (which might not be much- $25 or maybe $40 or so- but this was when many people lived on farms and didn’t have to use as much cash, you could get by on in and their widows pension when they were gone (which wasn’t as much but was better than nothing). Symbiotic marriages of convenience came into play: a woman marries an old man and takes care of him til he dies and then she draws a few dollars per month thereafter. Usually the veterans families didn’t much object because these men weren’t rich anyway and the widows pension wasn’t coming out of their pocket and they weren’t going to get it anyway, and meanwhile Gramps has Miss Bonnie to look after him so we’re off the hook, win-win.
Even so the state didn’t mind when it was a 45 year old widow or spinster marrying a 90 year old man, but it got to the point of the absolutely ridiculous. When it got to the point of of 18 year old girls marrying 85 year olds- and such unions did happen- the states finally said “This is bogus, these widows pensions aren’t meant to support able bodied 22 year olds until they’re able to find somebody else” and they started amending the legislation- it was only good for widows who’d been married for X number of years or were over 60 years old (this when a Confederate veteran would of necessity been 80 or better) and stating that the pensions stopped automatically when a widow remarried (most 25 year olds don’t want to forego marriage the rest of their life for $15 per month or whatever) and so of course these May-December paper marriages stopped happening.
BUT, there were a few who did this before the leaks were fixed, and while even a teenager who married a man older than her great-grandfather for his pension would have to be a century old now they do periodically find one. (Usually they never claimed a pension or lost it by remarriage or whatever, and since the marriages were rarely consummate or anything and it was a bit embarassing they don’t talk about it, but now they’ve become such an oddity that when one is discovered she becomes a local celebrity for a while just as if she’d married for love.)
Ah. The money coming from the State makes sense.
Thanks for all the interesting history!
If you mention this, you should also mention Governor McDonnell’s apology and the fact that in the future this event will be celebrated as Civil War History Month.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/24/AR2010092405881.html
Since I wasn’t exactly pleased about this proclamation last year, I’m happy that this is being addressed.
Judah P. Benjamin was not a convert to Catholicism. He lived his life as a Jew. He received Catholic last rites on his deathbed, at the insistence of his wife - reportedly while unconscious. I don’t believe this constitutes a conversion.
My mistake then. I assumed he converted because of the last rights and because of his career in England after the war (I didn’t realize Jews could be appointed to judgeships and Queen’s Counsel [Disraeli was of course but he was definitely a convert]).
I’ve read a lot on Jefferson Davis in the last couple of years and he was a very complex man- easy to hate and easy to like. He was a brilliant administrator and organizer but a micromanager, a “man of the people” and an ardent snob and classist (especially so for somebody who lived almost his entire life on the charity of others), and his wildly erratic views on blacks could fill a book in and of themselves (on one hand he was a fanatical white supremacist even by the standards of the 1860s, on the other he taught several of his slaves to read and had them manage his business affairs and entrusted his family to them, and many of his former slaves seemed to genuinely like him after the war).
One thing that’s consistent is that for all his racial benightedness he was amazingly tolerant for a man of his time on the subject of religion. He himself was Episcopalian (not particularly devout- he didn’t actually join a church until 1861) but his closest friends included Benjamin (and he would flatly jerk a knot in somebody’s head if they called him ‘The Dirty Israelite’ or some other slur), several devout Catholics, and he even took measures to allow Black Hawk and other captive Sauks be allowed to practice their religion while in his custody.
In Grant’s memoirs he credited Davis’s “military genius” (his words) with several northern victories; he didn’t think much of him as a military mind. It’s interesting because Davis didn’t want to be president of the CSA but a high ranking general. It would be interesting to see in retrospect how he would have done in that capacity.
The ironic thing was that, on paper, Davis looked like he was eminently qualified to be a wartime President. He was a West Point graduate, had led a regiment in the Mexican War, and had been Secretary of War and Chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. He was chosen by the delegates at Montgomery because he appeared to be so highly qualified. It was only after he took office that it became apparent his actual skills did not live up to his resume.