That's the progressive way...that's how they originally got over on us and since...have doubled down.

I used to think that they were clever. Now I think they are just stupid...and 'stupid'
is dangerous.

Like those "Scare" quotes?

According to the current word-play this is called "human trafficking" but I never understood why that term need exist when it is in fact a convoluted way to say "slavery".

Yes, monuments like this are erected in celebration of what they did, not a floating abstraction of "great general" without regard to what they were fighting for.

On the lighter side...https://youtu.be/yjw6y4ClQwg

I wasn't aware of Congress changing the legal status of Confederate soldiers. Thanks for that.

Regarding the statues, if they were truly erected to honor his ability as an American general, then Benedict Arnold is equally entitled to statues in his honor. I'm not saying this facetiously, the two men share many similarities. Both fought for the U.S. and then switched sides. Arnold's U.S. military career was arguably more valuable to the nation than Lee's, prior to his defection to the South. Arnold actually had more justification for his defection, as he was repeatedly passed over for promotion, while Lee, as you mentioned, was offered command of the Northern forces.

Ultimately I don't think either Benedict Arnold or Robert E. Lee are deserving of statues in their honor.

I now have read one account and find my opinion of Robert E. Lee lessened.
Do I think his statues should be taken down, no. His statues weren't erected to honor his memory of slave ownership (which was limited and for a limited time), they were erected to honor his ability as American general. Lincoln offered Lee command of the Northern forces.

U.S. Public Law 85-4254 section 410
In 1958 Congress granted Confederate soldiers the game legal status as US soldiers, protecting graves and monuments from desecration and even providing a pension to those who served during the war.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill...

David Barton fabricates quotes and takes real ones out of context for his revisionist history trying to make it look this country was founded on the Bible. Read original quotes, but watch the source and the validity of the context and what is being argued based on them.

"Wallbuilders" itself is a dubious site for religious historical revisionism by David Barton"...What! maybe you don't like it but our forefathers used the Bible often...David/Wallbuilders holds millions of original documents and personal letters of our founding and our founders...When it comes to history...I trust only originals...especially these days.

I too once held your view until faced with the empirical facts, ex. Speeches written from passages from the Bibles etc. It no longer scares me anymore because I have a deeper understanding of our biblical ancestors and their bicameral brain sets, (their points of view etc.).

But...you are certainly entitled to your opinion...the discussion here as with any posts on the Gulch have been interesting and enlightening...wouldn't trade it for the world.

The link is in his post that you just responded to.

I don't know of internet purging of such quotes; sometimes they are hard to find (or made harder to find). "Wallbuilders" itself is a dubious site for religious historical revisionism by David Barton, known for fabricating quotes and distorting meaning by dropping context, so be careful to verify what you find there.

But yes, libraries have been purged. An example on another topic is the library in the little town of Peninsula, Ohio. Peninsula is one of the five small communities where the National Park Service purged hundreds of property owners -- i.e., seized homes, businesses, farms and land by eminent domain -- for the Cuyahoga National Recreation Area (now National Park), which ordeal was documented on a PBS Frontlines episode "For the Good of All" in 1982 following the purge. The library had a large collection of documents, most of which disappeared by the time I was there 10 or 15 years ago researching it. The library's board of directors had been taken over by elitists who worship the National Park and who could care less about the people who used to live there, but who don't want people to know what their favorite government agency had done to spoil the romantic imagery.

As for the internet, the NPS Administrative History of the Cuyahoga NRA I had once found on the NPS history pages in its website, but had not finished with or completely downloaded, disappeared. I eventually found it, by means too complex to go into here, squirreled away on an obscure government documents site not accessible by a direct search. The experience tipped me off to dig up several other such Administrative Histories kept hard to find and containing embarrassing (to them) information, including their internal personal attacks on individuals who have opposed their abusive tactics.

Haven't seen that account. I will search, read and revise my opinion if necessary. Appreciated.

AJ, what is your opinion of Lee in light of the account of former slave Wesley Norris, regarding Lee's mistreatment and torture of himself and his sister? Do you still consider Robert E. Lee to be deserving of statues in his honor?

AJ...here is an interesting and accurate account of slavery by Washington and Jefferson. (was actually looking for stuff on Lincoln.

This site is the best resource I have found and it has accumulated millions of original documents and personal letters of our founding and our founders.
https://wallbuilders.com/george-washi...

Best I can find is that Lincolns father did not own slaves. When they bought the house in Illinois they did not have slaves and some sites say that Mary inherited slaves, (her father did not owned slaves) and they sold them upon inheritance.
I cannot vet the sources out to my satisfaction at this point.

The rabid religious conservatives are now 'downvoting' history that conflicts with their apologetics for the Confederacy.

It wasn't "happenstance" that he deliberately kept his slaves as long as he legally could and brutally punished those who tried to escape.

He chose to lead the Confederate army because he wanted it to win the war; through his military success he dragged out it. That is the "hindsight" of historical knowledge.

If you lived thousands of years ago you would 'think differently' -- like fellow tribesman of the stone age. So what. Lee was a statist and supporter of slavery and is judged accordingly.

Everything is "complicated". That is why we think conceptually in essentials rather than rationalize subjectively out of mental fog.

Inheriting slaves from his father he set them free. Also inheriting slaves from his marriage he set them free within 5 years. Yes, he owned slaves but there is a difference between shopping and spending money and happenstance. Agree?

Lincoln did not make the Civil War about slavery. The Confederacy seceded and started the war over slavery after years of political battles over it. Conservatives putting statist "states rights" over the rights of the individual, now in strained rationalizations for the Confederacy, will never be able to defend capitalism and individualism. They are defensively playing right into the hands of the smear-mongering left trying to brand us all as racists.

Re: "While he owned a plantation (Arlington) he never owned slaves."
Yes he did.
http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/01/03/robe...

We aren't explaining anything to Aztec priests; they are all dead, and their imagined acquiescence is not required to understand what they did and evaluate it and them. That slavery is and was immoral is an objective fact based on the nature of man, which has not changed since the Aztecs or the 16th century Puritans or the 17th and 18th century south.

The principles of objective morality are based on the facts of the nature of man, not cultural relativism. This isn't the subjective Pragmatism with its "what's true today may not be tomorrow".

Burning people as "witches" and persecuting and executing Quakers was also immoral, whenever it was done and regardless of what the religious/political leaders and their followers thought about it in their rationalizing.

Concepts are not arbitrarily expanded to lump dogs, cats and horses in with rational beings to "look upon" as whatever someone wants. If and when any such animals biologically evolve to live by independent rational thought, and to which the concept morality objectively applies, then we can conceptualize and identify immoral subjugation -- without condemning anyone who ever had a pet and for which the concept does not apply.

We do "take care in how we judge those who came before us". We do not "erase history". We look at the philosophical ideas as they evolved through centuries of history and what that meant in practice, not as random acts of nastiness dropping the intellectual context. "Nasty" behavior then or now does not imply cultural relativism with a warning to not judge. It shows that you had better judge -- by objective criteria -- and understand the ideas that caused it as well as those who held better ideas that led to progress.

Thank you ewv...

Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence as he submitted it to Congress denounced Britain for bringing slavery to America:

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce; and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

quoted in Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922 (emphases in original).

If the Civil War had gone the other way I still don't think slavery would have lasted, just like it didn't last, at least in that crude form, in most of the civilized world, but it would have lasted longer in the south than it did. The south may not have ever rejoined with the north as one nation, but there was such a growing intellectual and activist opposition to slavery and willingness to defy it and help those who escaped that there would have been constant insurrection and warfare, officially declared or not, until the old slave-feudal system collapsed.

As for maintaining statues in commemoration, there should be no government monuments at all (see Ayn Rand's "The Monument Builders") other than perhaps military cemeteries and memorials and a few major symbols like the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC.

But removing monuments now is far from a priority, and the current hysteria is an irrational, contrived movement to promote leftist group think denouncing the origins of this country entirely. They are dominating public thought through a compliant media that lurches from one fad to another as the left demands that we go on the defensive to its alleged moral superiority about everything from statues to conspiracies about the president being a Russian spy.

Far more important than the statues, we should be systematically demolishing statutes -- think of it as a statues for statutes program.