The removal of the P.G.T. Beauregard monument in New Orleans City Park has sparked controversy again over the role African-Americans played in the Civil War.
New Orleans Mayor, Mitch Landrieu, his supporters and Black Lives Matters have been campaigning for almost 2 years to remove the remaining 12 Confederate Civil War monuments displayed throughout the city. Those campaigning to destroy the monuments denounce them as symbols of hatred and white supremacy.
Or are they actually campaigning to hide the historical evidence threatening to expose the truth lurking behind the strong racially charged rhetoric surrounding the democratic party platform?
Most students are taught a sickeningly distorted version of history. Textbooks, the media, and other informative resources generally depict Southern blacks as excitedly awaiting President Abraham Lincoln’s “Liberty-dispensing troops” as they marched across the south (while raping, murdering and destroying everything white along the way) during the Civil War.
Unfortunately for liberals, real life is not that black and white. There is a larger battle being fought than the destruction of monuments, it a fight to change history.
Even Harvard University has stepped into this controversy inadvertently admitting the truth as they sought to take down boldly renewed historians threatening the updated “politically correct” narrative.
But most historians of the past 50 years hold that the root cause of the Civil War was slavery. They bristle at the idea of black Confederates, which they say robs the war of its moral coin as the crucible of black emancipation.
Of the past 50 years? That is alarming. The profession of history as we knew it used to know it involved only the use of facts, historical documents and analytical thinking. Has the public at large been informed that the profession of history has disintegrated into a puddle of melted snowflakes and feelings? Really, Harvard University. Shame is in order for the destruction of truth and those with respect for their profession.
Historian, John Stauffer, specializes in anti-slavery movements, the Civil War, and American social protest.
At the Harvard Faculty Club on Wednesday (Aug. 31), Stauffer opened the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute’s Fall Colloquium Series with a lecture on black Confederates. He acknowledged that critics of the concept now dominate the academic arena, including one scholar who called it “a fiction, a myth, utter nonsense.”
Stauffer also outlined evidence that the notion of black Confederates is at least partly true — an assertion that he said got him “beaten up” at a Washington, D.C., history event months ago.
Stauffer reveals historical documents from the Civil War have always shown, continue to show and will continue to show that blacks voluntarily fought for the confederacy. Even the acclaimed 19th-century civil rights activist Frederick Douglass acknowledged the phenomenon of blacks choosing to fight for the confederacy.
In August 1861, Douglass published an account of the First Battle of Bull Run, which noted that there were blacks in the Confederate ranks. A few weeks later, Douglass brought the subject up again, quoting a witness to the battle who said they saw black Confederates “with muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets.” Douglass also talked to a fugitive slave from Virginia, another witness to Bull Run, who asserted that numerous black units were forming in Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia.
The answer to why this occurred is not as puzzling as some people might think. They loved the south and the North wasn’t actually fighting to end slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the acclaimed patron of freedom was in all reality just another politician trying to market a long drawn out failing war to increase federal government power.
In their fourth debate, at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, Lincoln made his position clear. “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he began, going on to say that he opposed blacks having the right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office and to intermarry with whites.
Furthermore Lincoln had also publicly stated numerous times that provided Blacks were ever to be freed one day he should propose sending them straight back to Africa.
“My first instinct would be to send them to Liberia” (the African state founded by the American Colonization Society in 1821).”
When that failed he then proposed sending them to Central America if they truly felt Africa to be far too barbaric of a continent to return to after enjoying the comforts of America.
Nearly a decade later, even as he edited the draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in August of 1862, Lincoln hosted a delegation of freed slaves at the White House in the hopes of getting their support on a plan for colonization in Central America. Given the “differences” between the two races and the hostile attitudes of whites towards blacks, Lincoln argued, it would be “better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
Lincoln’s viewpoint is of even more interest when contrasted with the lives of free blacks living in the South before the Civil War. There were numerous free blacks who not only lived in freedom but wealthy plantation owners who owned black slaves. In fact, in percentage to the population, free blacks were far more likely to be slave owners than whites in the South. Only 6% of Southern whites ever owned black slaves at the peak of slavery. Whereas, approximately 28% of free blacks in the south owned black slaves.
Lincoln was no friend of the black man. The Emancipation Proclamation was just a flamboyant show to the South that he still believed the Union had power over the Confederacy, Furthermore, the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in territory controlled by the Confederacy.
Since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a military measure, it didn’t apply to border slave states like Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, all of which had remained loyal to the Union. Lincoln also exempted selected areas of the Confederacy that had already come under Union control in hopes of gaining the loyalty of whites in those states. In practice, then, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t immediately free a single slave, as the only places it applied were places where the federal government had no control—the Southern states currently fighting against the Union.
The true crime occurring in New Orleans and across the country is this attack on academia and bold attempt to deprive African-Americans of their historical love and pride in the South.
Were Southerners expected to leave their homes after the Union army raped, plundered and murdered their way through the South? No. It was still their home regardless of the travesties and injustices that occurred on the land. Many African-Americans living in the South at the time felt the same way about their homes and the land. It’s as simple as that.
What it looked like when the statue of PGT Beauregard was removed pic.twitter.com/hErJGHt485
— Matt Sledge (@mgsledge) May 17, 2017
Source: Breitbart, History.com, and the Harvard Gazette
Image: Wikicommons
How much do Who pay you for it creep!
Boycott New Orleans and watch this mayor change his tune
You’re wrong!!!