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In the course of these exchanges, I have had a number of my posts modified to suit the tastes of others.
This has not been a problem for me, until today.
The words I write are of no consequence, nor of any real moment. Many times they are the product of a reaction or a retaliation for a similar slight of an opposing viewpoint.
Nothing of any historical consequence, if lost.
The words of President Jefferson Davis, are, on the other hand, very important. Many of you could do with a good study of the man, whatever your opinions of him you may presently hold.
It is in this wise, then, that I inform the party responsible for MOVING the thread I started that I cannot find it anywhere on these pages.
If it has indeed been MOVED, I should like to know where it has gone.
If it has been DELETED, in its entirety, then in my dissent, I now record the impropriety of this action.
I may be deleted, but not the president of our Confederate states.
Unless he is thence returned to his former place, under his chapter heading (with or without my sideline comments)
then I shall not be posting here again, as BEOWULF.
It would not be proper for one of his Confederate descendants to be in the company of those who do not welcome his discourse, at all.
Either the post is replaced, or its location be revealed, and generally known, or I have nothing further to contribute to
this gathering.
Was moved to the mod corner for review. Your words bordered on the racist and purposefully offensive. Mod Gods will look at it and decide.
__________________ Few take the trouble to understand or to view the American scene with perspective. And we Americans love to find ourselves guilty of something. However, it is never I who am guilty, but those other Americans, the past or present government or the other political party. Americans almost never find other countries guilty. It is always ourselves or our fancied influence in other countries. Louis L'amour
Unless he is thence returned to his former place, under his chapter heading (with or without my sideline comments)
then I shall not be posting here again, as BEOWULF.
Beowulf
Was moved to the mod corner for review. Your words bordered on the racist and purposefully offensive. Mod Gods will look at it and decide.
You will have to take that up with my sources, because I got the terms I used from them.
Michael A. Hoffman THEY WERE WHITE AND THEY WERE SLAVES (page 117) gives us the account of the 'negrophile senator'; the rest come from Letitia Burwell and other period writers, such as ISHBELL ROSS, and HUDSON STRODE, and others...doubtless many of whom you have never heard tell of before.
If you find anything 'purposefully offensive', it is from history.
If you find history purposefully offensive, then you agree with those who wish to see the Confederate Battle Flags
disappear....
But this comes at a price, Brother Steele.
Your own chat sites will be next, make no mistake. None of us will be discussing anything if those Confederate Battle Flags disappear, or if your idea of 'offensive' is left to run its natural course.
If you begin to think the period of time is offensive, and such a majority can force its will upon all of us...
You may remove anything I said without any comment on my behalf. I am not historical. You may remove any passage I quoted without any comment from me. Ole does this BETIMES.
But the writings of Jefferson Davis, as presented, must be inviolate. Abraham Lincoln's words are MANY THOUSANDS OF TIMES more offensive, from a White Supremacist point of view, than any thing Davis ever thought, or did, and any of the period slang to which I gave reference.
I trust the president will be restored to his proper place,
under Chapter X, with any of my comments or criticisms
from other writers on the subject censored as deemed
necessary.
You must realize that we still live in two very different parts of the world...
Things you find offensive are measured with different standards.
An elderly black friend of mine asked me the other day if I was still "writing about the Golden Age?"
I nearly fell over. I had not heard that term for the antebellum South since the Minstrel Shows we used to
have here when I was a small boy.
She was serious. Apparently the stories that came down to her differ somewhat from what is routinely preached on these sites.
Their lives (Her gr-gr-grandparents) as tobacco farmers changed dramatically after the war; they had to TRAVEL to get work; any work. Hog killing. You name it. Seasonal stuff only.
Not like before the war... when Virginia had enough wealth to sustain all of its people.
Unless Honor is served with regard to the removal of the presidential writings, I shall decline to write further, and shall secede from this Union, which I will no longer feel
an equal part.
"I am sure I feel no hostility towards you senators from the North."
"In the course of my services here, surrounded by a great variety of senators... there have been 'points of collision'."
"But whatever offense there has been to me, I leave here. I carry with me no hostile remembrance..."
"Whatever offense I have given, or for which satisfaction has not been demanded, I have, senators, in this hour of parting, to offer you my apologies - for any pain, which, in the heat of discussion I have inflicted".
Unless Chapter X is restored to these pages, it only remains for me to "bid you... a final... adieu".
Beowulf
POST SCRIPT:
Unless President Jefferson Davis, a slave owner, is free to move about these territories
as freely as any other historical quote, then he can get better terms out of the Union, and the value of our words is so undermined and the sectional majority vote so against us,
that we 'must part'.
But one cannot legislate sectional policies concerning HISTORY under the banner of 'political correction'.
History MUST be 'grand-fathered in', just as the original South wanted their dwindling property in slaves to also be accepted, at the time.
(To understand that fully, you have to read Davis on the myth of slave expansion in the West).
(excerpts taken from) Jefferson Davis' Farewell Address to the Senate
My wifes ancestors were slaves, I have listened to their stories; and their stories differ dramiticly from what you would have us believe about the "Golden Age." Brutal and anything but pleasent is what comes to mind. I've seen the scars on the land and the people caused by slavery and it's "Golden Age" and those scars are still present today. Though they fade and heal there are those who only wish to open them wide again. I'm sick to death of those so ignorant as to believe slavery a good thing, for anyone.
Racism is offensive, racism cloaked as history is equally so. You've been told where the post went. I don't really care if you post or not or if you think your honor has somehow been done harm. As the site will still be here whether you are or not. Racism, etc is not acceptable on this site. Purposefully wording posts so they are offensive is also frowned upon, you know this it isn't a new concept. I don't know what Ole has edited away, and frankly I don't care as I trust the man implicitly. I trust his honesty and integrity; they are unimpeachable in my eyes. If it was edited I believe you know full well why. You know full well it was not to silence you.
I don't edit posts to make them less offensive, I move them to the mod forum for the mod gods parusal. If they decide they are ugly and they die the death of annonymity so be it. Either way works, Ole's way is probably better as it allows the conversation to continue. I cannot bring myself to edit other peoples post, no matter how offensive they may be.
Have a nice day.
__________________ Few take the trouble to understand or to view the American scene with perspective. And we Americans love to find ourselves guilty of something. However, it is never I who am guilty, but those other Americans, the past or present government or the other political party. Americans almost never find other countries guilty. It is always ourselves or our fancied influence in other countries. Louis L'amour
Hi Shane: I couldn't agree more. I understand, and even agree with Beowulf's assertion that history should not be tampered with, but to the extent that it sometimes tends to gloss over some of the most painful times and practices in our national history, it perhaps should be modified, at least on a forum where emotions tend to run rampant from time to time. That is best left up to the persons who own the forum, and causes no harm to history.
What I offer here comes from a book I downloaded a while back from Gutenberg.org. I have not yet had time to read it, but the introduction caught my attention. It's hard to read in the sense that it is ugly and even upsetting. While the book (from the description) appears to deal with the treatment of federal prisoners at Andersonville and apparent denials that they were ever mistreated, the introduction equates it with the same type of claims by Southerners that slaves were rarely mistreated and considered just part of a loving family.
The book, Andersonville: Fifteen Months a Guest of the So-Called Southern Confederacy, was written by John McElroy (late of Co. L., 16th Ill. Cav.) and published in 1879. The introduction was written by Robert McCune.
In part, he writes:
"This work is needed. A generation is arising who do not know what the preservation of our free government cost in blood and suffering. Even the men of the passing generation begin to be forgetful, if we may judge from the recklessness or carelessness of their political action. The soldier is not always remembered nor honored as he should be. But, what to the future of the great Republic is more important, there is a great danger of our people under-estimating the bitter animus and terrible malignity to the Union and its defenders cherished by those who made war upon it. This is a point we can not afford to be mistaken about. And yet, right at this point this volume will meet its severest criticism, and at this point its testimony is most vital and necessary.
"Many will be slow to believe all that is here told most truthfully of the tyranny and cruelty of the captors of our brave boys in blue. There are no parallels to the cruelties and malignities here described in Northern society. The system of slavery, maintained for over two hundred years at the South, had performed a most perverting, morally desolating, and we might say, demonizing [sic] work on the dominant race, which people bred under our free civilization can not at once understand, nor scarcely believe when it is declared unto them. This reluctance to believe unwelcome truths has been the snare of our national life. We have not been willing to believe how hardened, despotic, and cruel the wielders of irresponsible power may become.
When the anti-slavery reformers of thirty years ago set forth the cruelties of the slave system, they were met with a storm of indignant denial, villification and rebuke. When Theodore D. Weld issued his 'Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses,' to the cruelty of slavery, he introduced it with a few words, pregnant with sound philosophy, which can be applied to the work now introduced and may help the reader better to accept and appreciate its statements. Mr. Weld said:
" 'Suppose I should seize you, rob you of your liberty, drive you into the field, and make you work without pay as long as you lived. Would that be justice? Would it be kindness? Or would it be monstrous injustice and cruelty? Now, is the man who robs you every day too tender-hearted ever to cuff or kick you? He can empty your pockets without remorse, but if your stomach is empty, it cuts him to the quick. He can make you work a life-time without pay, but loves you too well to let you go hungry. He fleeces you of your rights with a relish, but is shocked if you work bare-headed in summer, or without warm stockings in winter. He can make you go without your liberty, but never without a shirt. He can crush in you all hope of bettering your condition by vowing that you shall die his slave, but though he can thus cruelly torture your feelings, he will never lacerate your back -- he can break your heart, but is very tender of your skin. He can strip you of all protection of law, and all comfort in religion, and thus expose you to all outrages, but if you are exposed to the weather, half-clad and half-sheltered, how yearn his tender bowels! What! talk of a man treating you well while robbing you of all you get, and as fast as you get it? And robbing you of yourself, too, your hands and feet, your muscles, limbs and senses, your body and mind, your liberty and earnings, your free speech and rights of conscience, your right to acquire knowledge, property and reputation, and yet you are content to believe without question that men who do all this by their slaves have soft hearts oozing out so lovingly toward their human chattles that they always keep them well housed and well clad, never push them too hard in the field, never make their dear backs smart, nor let their dear stomachs get empty!'
"In like manner we may ask, are not the cruelties and oppressions described in the following pages what we should legitimately expect from men who, all their lives, have used whip and thumb-screw, shot-gun and bloodhound, to keep human beings subservient to their will? Are we to expect nothing but chivalric tenderness and compassion from men who made war on a tolerant government to make more secure their barbaric system of oppression?
"These things are written because they are true. Duty to the brave dead, to the heroic living, who have endured the pangs of a hundred deaths for their country's sake; duty to the government which depends on the wisdom and constancy of its good citizens for its support and perpetuity, calls for this 'round, unvarnished tale' of suffering endured for freedom's sake......"
It is not my intent to provoke an argument about CW prisons, at least not on this thread. I know little about Northern prisons where Confederate soldiers were held, and indeed know only a little about Andersonville. But I was stricken by the words in the introduction to the book mentioned here, and I fail to understand, regardless of what sectional allegiance one adopts, how slavery in any part of the world can be defended or any attempt made to minimize what it obviously did to the souls of those who were its victims.
__________________ "In leaving this unpretentious record, therefore, I seek to do simply what I would have had my fathers do for me.
KINSMEN OF THE COMING CENTURIES, I BID YOU HAIL AND GODSPEED!"
[From his Introduction to "Memoirs of a Volunteer," by John Beatty - published in 1879
It was not the words of Jefferson Davis that were censured, it was yours. We have a great deal of fun on this board batting about ideas and facts and interests. You waltzed in and immediately turned over any sense of subjects, threads or forums with your curiously mixed worship of J. Davis and diatribes on modern libertarianism. And you refused to take the hint.
If you want to continue discussing Jeff Davis' post-war work, stick with the rules of the board: stay on topic, do not introduce modern politics, do not insult our liberal colleagues, do not present lightly veiled racist comments.
We have a diverse membership. With the tiniest bit of consideration for that membership, you would not be holding the mooky end of the stick. Any problems you have, you brought on yourself. For a more sympathetic board, check out LewRockwell.com.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
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