The Search for Heroes

[Diana9]

View attachment 4755

Why would U.S. soldiers pose with a confederate flag?

Southern boys I suspect.

 

[Glorybound]

Why would U.S. soldiers pose with a confederate flag?

Southern boys I suspect.

Well, those particular guys might be southern, sure, but the flag is also associated with rebellion, not only here in the US but worldwide. When I was in Limerick, Ireland I watched a Hurling championship game on tv in the hotel. There was an Irishman standing up in the stands waving a huge CBF back and forth, he was rooting for his team from County Cork, who are named the 'Rebels'. I'm sure the furthest thing from his mind was worrying about the racist connotations that might be applied to the flag.

It's displayed by people who pride themselves on doing things in an unconventional manner in other areas of endeavor, not so much here in the US because it's literally too close to home and the negative meaning of the flag would overshadow any other meaning they might want to project. And not because they're racists or Confederate sympathizers, but because the flag also represents an esprit de corp, a panache, and conveys an image that one has the guts/marbles to take their own path rather than the conventional way. In that sense they are rebels, mavericks and they're proud to be so, and that flag tends to symbolize these people who do things their own way.

 

[Diana9]

I understand about foreigners, but the boys depicted in the picture are U.S. soldiers apparently in a foreign country (Afghanistan perhaps?), presenting the U.S.A. The U.S. flag, the flag of the U.S. armed forces is the stars and stripes, not the rebel flag of the Confederacy which warred against the United States. That doesn't look like good form to me, and I'm wondering if there are military regulations against troops flying a flag that for all intents and purposes symbolizes rebellion against the country they serve.

 

[Glorybound]

Maybe the flag conveys their rebellious spirit, their predisposition to do things their own way, a symbol of their unit's spirit, morale, cohesiveness. And they're not flying it, they're holding it for the photo, I doubt that it's displayed when they're on patrol or in combat.

 

[Nathanb1]

Why would U.S. soldiers pose with a confederate flag?

Southern boys I suspect.

Because they want to.

 

[Nathanb1]

I understand about foreigners, but the boys depicted in the picture are U.S. soldiers apparently in a foreign country (Afghanistan perhaps?), presenting the U.S.A. The U.S. flag, the flag of the U.S. armed forces is the stars and stripes, not the rebel flag of the Confederacy which warred against the United States. That doesn't look like good form to me, and I'm wondering if there are military regulations against troops flying a flag that for all intents and purposes symbolizes rebellion against the country they serve.

Sometimes I can't believe I'm reading what I'm reading. The war ended in 1865.

 

[Diana9]

Maybe the flag conveys their rebellious spirit, their predisposition to do things their own way, a symbol of their unit's spirit, morale, cohesiveness. And they're not flying it, they're holding it for the photo, I doubt that it's displayed when they're on patrol or in combat.

This isn't like showing off a flag of Mickey Mouse. We all know what the rebel flag means. It is a symbol of rebellion against the United States of America.

They are in uniform. As long as they are it would seem to me that they are beholden to honor the country they serve, and "the spirit" the stars and stripes represent. They can do whatever they wish as civilians, but when they are in uniform in a foreign country where they are at war, being photographed with a foreign national, they represent the United States, not just their unit, and ought not to have the option to show off symbols of rebellion against their country.

 

[Diana9]

Sometimes I can't believe I'm reading what I'm reading. The war ended in 1865.

Exactly. Then why are they flying a flag that was surrendered in the war that ended in 1865?

 

[Glorybound]

This isn't like showing off a flag of Mickey Mouse. We all know what the rebel flag means. It is a symbol of rebellion against the United States of America.

They are in uniform. As long as they are it would seem to me that they are beholden to honor the country they serve, and "the spirit" the stars and stripes represent. They can do whatever they wish as civilians, but when they are in uniform in a foreign country where they are at war, being photographed with a foreign national, they represent the United States, not just their unit, and ought not to have the option to show off symbols of rebellion against their country.

Well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion Diana.

 

[Diana9]

Yes, that is my opinion, and I stand by it.

 

[Nathanb1]

Yes, you're entitled to your opinion. I get that. I really do. However, these guys are obviously in a combat zone somewhere. My feeling is they can carry around a danged pirate flag if they want to. It apparently means something to them (can't read the names of the battles on it--too small) so by George, let 'em go for it.

I guess when I pick up a gun and tote it off to Afghanistan or some other Godforsaken place I'll have the right to criticize them. I'm sure they'd be happy to trade places with any of us right this minute.

 

[CSA Today]

The Florence Nightingale of the South


The announcement of Juliet Opie Hopkins' passing almost went unnoticed. "Death of a Well Known Southern Lady" it read, a one-column headline buried in the March 10, 1890, edition of The Washington Post. Yet when more complete arrangements appeared in the next day's paper, some Washingtonians realized that a truly unusual lady had departed the scene. Pallbearers, it was announced, would be the Senators and Representatives from the state of Alabama, assisted by officers of the United States Army. And on the order of Gen. John Schofield, commander of the Army, burial would be in Arlington Cemetery with full military honors.
Such distinction aroused more than a few curious inquiries. Had not this "Southern lady" been involved in the late rebellion? Was this not the individual who had—with boundless secessionist energies and a personal financial sacrifice estimated between $200,000 to $500,000—established and managed several military hospitals for Confederate soldiers?
What then could possible recommend her memory to the attention of the commanding general of the United States Army?
At least two elderly gentlemen in the throng gathered at her graveside knew. This lady they honored had not only given all of herself and all of her fortune to the cause, she had gone forth prepared to die for her people.
Courage! Both these men, bowed now by the years but once soldiers of prominence who had served the South, had seen it in the soldiers of the Gray, hundreds of times on dozens of fields. And they had seen it in this woman. On this day, it was the reason they had come to say goodbye.
With heads uncovered they kept their counsel. After the war, the regard for the heroism of this woman had not been forgotten. Whether it was free passage on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, the hundreds of notes of thanks from admirers, or the beautiful sterling service presented to her by veterans of the Mobile Rifles, she had accepted with gracious humility the generous accolades of her fellow Alabamians.
But now, a generation later, how many who stood at her grave remembered what she had done that day at Seven Pines?
In silence, General Joe Wheeler and General Joe Johnston watched as all that was mortal of this noble woman was committed to the sacred soil of Arlington Cemetery. Both knew of her extraordinary valor on the first day of June 1862. In an age when exposure to combat was unthinkable for women, this nurse had disregarded all deference to her gender, shunned all concerns for her own safety, and accompanied her Alabama boys into their baptism of fire, far exceeding the noble duties with which she had been charged.
Unnoticed in the immediate confusion of the battlefield, and subsequently ignored in the official reports, Juliet Opie Hopkins, battlefield nurse, had also been numbered among the wounded at Seven Pines. For while assisting a mortally injured officer to a stretcher, she was herself twice wounded, one bullet shattering a bone in her left leg. She would walk with a limp for the rest of her life.
But history will never forget her valor that June day 150 years ago. Thus reads her Citation for the Confederate Medal of Honor:
"Untiring in her efforts to minister to the wounded and ignoring warnings for her own safety, Mrs. Hopkins proceeded onto the battlefield to aid the injured. While lifting a desperately wounded officer, Mrs. Hopkins was herself serious wounded in the left leg and in the days that followed, her extraordinary record of selfless courage and devotion to duty during the battle brought her to the grateful notice of the commanding general."

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-florence-nightingale-of-the-south

 

[CSA Today]

Captain John Singleton Mosby (6 December 1833--30 May 1916)

Mosby's Regulars, C.S.A.
Raid on Fairfax Court House, Virginia
8-9 March 1863.

"With only twenty nine men, Captain Mosby stealthily entered the enemy's line undetected and under cover of night made his way to the headquarters of the commanding general at Fairfax Courthouse. After ordering telegraph lines cut and all combatants, horses, arms, and ammunition seized, Captain Mosby, accompanied by several raiders entered a private resident and captured the brigadier general commanding. With his raid complete, his captured stores and prisoners guarded, and all his men accounted for, Captain Mosby, now more than ten miles behind enemy lines, led his men south and then abruptly west to confuse pursuers. Again employing stealth and brazen audacity, Captain Mosby guided his column into the night past numerous enemy camps and picket posts until dawn, he was safely beyond enemy lines. As a results of his daring raid, Captain Mosby captured one brigadier general, two captains, thirty other prisoners, fifty-eight horses and numerous arms and equipment… all without firing a shot. In this singular action that so typified his movements throughout the war, Captain Mosby instilled a fearsome respect among foes while engendering a lasting admiration from his comrades in arms."

Source: Gregg S. Clemmer, Valor in Gray: Recipients of the Confederate Medal of Honor, p.117.

 

[CSA Today]

I understand about foreigners, but the boys depicted in the picture are U.S. soldiers apparently in a foreign country (Afghanistan perhaps?), presenting the U.S.A. The U.S. flag, the flag of the U.S. armed forces is the stars and stripes, not the rebel flag of the Confederacy which warred against the United States. That doesn't look like good form to me, and I'm wondering if there are military regulations against troops flying a flag that for all intents and purposes symbolizes rebellion against the country they serve.

 

[johan_steele]

Why would U.S. soldiers pose with a confederate flag?

Southern boys I suspect.

IIRC there is a Virginia Army National Guard unit that directly traces its lineage to the Regiments of the Stonewall Brigade. At one time they carried two flags, their CBF had the honors from the ACW and the US flag all the honors accured since. This may well be a pic of that unit.

 

[CSA Today]

David Herbert Llewellyn, M.D.
9 September 1837 (Wiltshire England) -- 19 June 1964


Surgeon, CSS Alabama, CSN
Engagement with USS Kearsarge of coast of Cherbourg, France
19 June 1864

"With the battle lost and the Alabama going down, Dr. Llewellyn, upon hearing the to order to abandon ship patiently assisted the wounded into a crowded lifeboat. Despite the entreaties of those he had helped, Dr. Llewellyn remained aboard the Alabama, refusing to board the lifeboat for fear of capsizing the already dangerously crowded vessel. When the great ship disappeared beneath the waves, Dr. Llewellyn was last seen jumping into the turbulent open sea, never once having mentioned that he could not swim."

Source: Gregg S. Clemmer, Valor in Gray: Recipients of the Confederate Medal of Honor, p.267.

 

[CSA Today]

"Passionate Civil War tale of William B. Mumford lives on
Inspired to rip down the Union flag, Mumford was hanged. His persecutor was immortalized in ceramic."

Sometimes, history's ties to Kansas City are thin as spider silk, but still so robust they must be recounted.
Such is the tale of William B. Mumford, hanged for treason 150 years ago this month in New Orleans. His wife, Mary, who died 100 years ago, also this month, rests in our Forest Hill Cemetery.
Mumford was a victim of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler, who was not called Beast for nothing.
New Orleans, the South's greatest city, was out of the war early. Union Commodore David Farragut had sailed his fleet past the ineffectual rebel river forts in spring of 1862 and demanded the city's surrender. While the mayor dithered, some Federal Marines rowed ashore and raised Old Glory over the U.S. Mint on April 26.
Mumford, a passionate Confederate supporter, tore it down and was wounded during the deed by a piece of brick sent flying when a Union gunboat opened fire. Mumford may have ripped up the banner himself, or a supportive mob might have done it for him as he dragged it through the streets.
Either way, Butler, in charge of the 10,000 Federals about to occupy the city, was not amused.
He ordered the arrest of the 44-year-old, well-to-do gambler for having "wickedly and traitorously rebelled against the Government of the United States to which he owed allegiance." If this were a hanging offense, it applied to a fifth of Americans at this point in time.
Ignoring the question of whether the city was even under Union jurisdiction when the deed was committed, the military tribunal took only one day to convict.
Mary Mumford begged Butler for mercy, and the general coldly told how she "wept bitterly, as did the children, who fell about my knees, adding all those moving acts which perhaps they had been instructed to say or do, or which perhaps naturally came to them."
He advised her to visit her husband in his Custom House cell to prepare the doomed man: "Let him in the few hours he has to live look to God for his pardon." Supposedly he softened his refusal with a promise of aid to the family.
William Mumford, a veteran of the Seminole and Mexican-American wars, gave a good farewell speech in front of the mint that morning of June 7, and then the knot broke his neck.
Confederate authorities were outraged, and CSA President Jefferson Davis proclaimed Butler "a common enemy of mankind," one who should be allotted his own length of stout rope if ever captured.
But Abraham Lincoln's first appointed major general of volunteers did not get his Beast nickname — he also would be called Spoons for an alleged taste for Southern family silverware — because of this particular act.
It came from his response to the vitriol being hurled by New Orleans ladies toward the occupying Yankees. Women would spit on their blue uniforms. Farragut himself supposedly had a chamber pot emptied on his head.
Butler's General Order No. 28, the "Woman's Order," put the city on notice that such manners would mean members of the gentle sex "could be used as a woman of the town plying her vocation." It did not mean aristocratic women could be raped, just that they could expect to be cursed and their gowns exported upon in reply by the soldiers.
Nevertheless, New Orleans society was shocked spitless.
Butler was squat, neck-less, bald, cross-eyed and morosely squinty, but engravings of his likeness were in high demand — so women could line their chamber pots with his face.
Today, one can buy copies of such a bowl at Louisiana's Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall in New Orleans. The museum also has a scrap of the flag Mumford tore down and a piece of the rope that hanged him.
By year's end, Lincoln had transferred his public relations headache, who also was taking kickbacks on smuggled cotton, to another command, where he would bumble every military action entrusted to him.
The Mumfords also left New Orleans for rebel territory to the east. After the war, like a lot of Southern households, they were in a bad way.
Butler, meanwhile, had become a U.S. representative from Massachusetts. As the story goes and is oft repeated, he brought the Mumford family to Washington, where government jobs were found for the widow. Recently a contributor to the New York Times' excellent Civil War blog "Disunion" concluded: "Despite his flaws, it appears the 'Beast' had a heart after all."
Yet, W.B. Mumford Jr., who had moved to Kansas City in 1877, later refuted the story, saying the jobs came through family connections in Massachusetts. He also discounted Butler's tale that a rebel fund amassed $10,000 for the martyr's family, who entrusted it to an Episcopal minister who had run away with it.
There was one more juicy story, also probably untrue, that this same William Jr. had left Kansas City in 1884 for Chicago, allegedly aiming to assassinate Butler at a political convention. When Butler confided this, he asked it not be repeated until after his death. Supposedly, Butler had dismissed it all as some lie passed along by excited newspapers, declaring he was close to the young man, and: "If I live until Mumford's son assassinates me, I shall rival Methuselah in the number of my years."
The younger Mumford, who was in the drugstore business and later went into Kansas City real estate, does not appear to have replied to that tale, but he hardly seemed close to Butler.
His mother left Washington and joined him here in 1882.
That was the year the party-flopping Butler was elected governor of Massachusetts. Two years later, largely despised by Republicans and Democrats, he joined a third, the Greenbackers. On that ticket he ran for president, getting less than 2 percent of the vote.
Mary Mumford lived in Kansas City three decades and was residing with her younger son, Charles, when she died at age 86. Her grave marker calls her an unselfish woman of beautiful traits.
In Lowell, Mass., Butler's imposing stone notes his rather haughty definition of civil liberty. On the back is a bronze relief showing Death with her hand on the tall, lean, maned warrior — hardly the image with which to line a chamber pot.

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/26/3675559/passionate-civil-war-tale-of-william.html

 

[CSA Today]

1st Lieutenant William Alexander McQueen (3 February 1839--9April 1865)


Garden Battery, Palmetto Light Artillery, C.S.A.
Battle OF Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

3 July 1863


"Having just endured the severe cannonade that preceded the great charge and knowing that his supply of ammunition was seriously depleted, Lieutenant McQueen nevertheless volunteered his gun to go forward in support of the infantry in the impending attack. Racing his 12-pounder field howitzer some 400 yards to the front where he arrived ahead of the oncoming infantry, Lieutenant McQueen opened fire on the enemy, quickly bringing a concentrated return fire to his position. As the infantry passed his position, he stubbornly maintained his fire despite two men mortally wounded. As more men fell, Lieutenant McQueen was himself struck in the leg and head yet instructed his men to continue their fire. In the course of the attack, Lieutenant McQueen eventually attracted more than twenty enemy cannon to bear on his position…instead of on the infantry. Only when two more men had been wounded and all six horses killed by the severe shelling, did he reluctantly order the survivors to seek protection. This being impossible, they were eventually extricated by a rescue team from the rear."

Greg S. Clemmer, Valor in Gray: Recipients of the Confederate Medal of Honor, p. 313.

 

[CSA Today]

Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest (13 July 1821- 29 October 1877)

Forrest Cavalry, C.S.A.
Battle of Shiloh, Tennesse8 April 1862

"Confronted by advancing regiments of enemy infantry and cavalry, Colonel Forrest instead seized the initiative and with 350 troopers – the rear guard of the army – charged the infantry, wrecked their line and sent them in confusion against their cavalry. With the enemy advance shattered, Colonel Forrest personally led a vigorous pursuit of the fugitives, racing far ahead of his men and stopping only when suddenly faced with a brigade of enemy infantry drawn up in a line of battle. Alone and surrounded by dozens of horsemen shouting, 'kill him' and 'shoot that man!' Colonel Forrest fought desperately to cut his way free. Despite his mount mortally wounded and himself desperately hurt with a bullet lodged against his spine, Colonel Forrest shot his way to safety with his service revolver, providing his men with an outstanding example of the type of personal bravery that would characterize his actions throughout the war."

Greg S. Clemmer, Valor in Gray: Recipients of the Confederate Medal of Honor, p. 191.

 

[CSA Today]

1st Lieutenant Richard William Dowling (14 January 1837—23 September 1867)

1st Texas Heavy Artillery, CSA
Battle of Sabine Pass, Texas
8 September 1863

"Attacked by four enemy gunboats, Lieutenant Dowling ordered his 42 men to hold fire until the gunboats reached a pre-measured range. At his command and in spite of the hot and furious assault on his position, Lieutenant Dowling's men answered with an incredibly accurate fire. After 45 minutes of action in which 137 projectiles were fired from six guns – two of which were soon put out of action – Lieutenant Dowling's command inflicted more than 400 casualties and compelled the surrender of the Clifton and Sachem together with350 prisoners while sustaining no serious injuries. By his intrepid leadership and defense at Sabine Pass, lieutenant Dowling thwarted an amphibious enemy invasion of Texas by 5,000 infantry on an armada of twenty-two transports and four gunships.

Greg S. Clemmer, Valor in Gray: Recipients of the Confederate Medal of Honor, p. 53