So tonight, the Sons of Confederate Veterans are celebrating slavery, racism and their culture of white supremacy down in South Carolina. The NAACP will be protesting the SCV’s celebration of a hate-filled ideology and as the local Charleston paper pointed out the Civil War is nothing to celebrate. But the SCV is an organization dedicated to celebrating North American terrorists and American traitors–so their embrace of racism, slavery and hate is just part of their initiation rites.
Still, it is decidedly unAmerican.
Now, we can be sure that the SCV and other Confederate Party dead-enders will deny the connection and continue their spinning of the reasons that they started the Civil War. For over 146 years, they have been selling the idea that slavery and racism were just minor factors inspiring the treason of their Confederate ancestors. That is, of course, bullshit.
And so, to help the SCV with their dance of hate this evening, I offer the following graphic:
Cheers
dengre
[Hat tip to Joe from Lowell for the idea and Sly for inspiration]
danielx
Now THAT will raise some blood pressure in SC…..they believe that W.T. Sherman was the fucking devil incarnate down there.
Evolutionary
Being the great grandson of several Union Veterans, I support the sentiment of this post wholeheartedly!
Dave
Love the graphic. I always thought a great t-shirt would be a mock band-tour style with Sherman’s “Marching Through The South” Tour 1864-65 on it. With every tour date and location crossed out with “Cancelled: Fire” written over it.
mumford
Now that’s funny…
Valdivia
Love this. Can we make a mug and/or tshirt of this?
MAJeff
About a year after my best friend moved from Minnesota to Georgia, he called me and said, “Sherman didn’t burn enough.”
Dennis G.
@Dave:
One is free to take this image and make such a t-shirt. The SCV will be using the next decade to spin their revisionist history bullshit, so anything that can be done to call them out will be useful as well as fun.
Cheers
General Stuck
Sherman went scorched earth for the simple reason to make the southerners think twice about doing what they did, again. It’s been a while now, and that tactic likely worked. But time heals some wounds, and facts get once again, faded into new dash for old and thoroughly conquered ideas.
Buck
I will never understand these people. If they have so much hate, why not just leave the damn country?
Stupid pricks should all go DIAF.
Trainrunner
OMG: They are going to be screening parts of Birth of a Nation as part of the celebration.
I just watched that film last week. It is, hands down, the most hateful, racist–and EFFECTIVE–piece of manipulative cinema I’ve ever seen. (And I study film for a living.)
That fact alone–that they are showing clips to CELEBRATE–clinches the deal: They are racist. End. of. story.
agrippa
Too small to be a country; too large to be an insane asylum.
There was one way for the South to lose their ‘ unique way of life’. Start and lose a Civil War.
arguingwithsignposts
I think I like this pose a little better, with his hand in his jacket, like he’s getting ready to pull out a big ole can of whoop-ass.
Vance Maverick
@Trainrunner: I think it’s the NAACP that’s doing that — it’s not the neo-Confederates.
I’d like to register a dissenting voice: Sherman is, as it were, a rhetorical bridge too far. As a card-carrying liberal and Northerner (despite some Southern ancestry), I endorse the justice of the cause, but I can’t endorse the brutality of the methods. And surely this is a case where persuasion is more called for than provocation (or military destruction).
Buck
@MAJeff:
Would make a great bumper sticker… for those of you who don’t mind keyed cars.
Alex
I agree with the entirety of this post as it relates to both substance and sentiment. Might I respectfully cavil on a stylistic point? While I certainly appreciate the tu quoque embedded in the use of “unAmerican” and “traitor” as terms of opprobrium against Southern conservatives/racists, I find the hypocrisy a bit too galling. I assume that the writer of this post, as well as many of the readers, despise the use of these terms in everyday political parlance — in fact, I doubt their use would be accepted outside of this context. While I do think these terms have some independent value — i.e. that people like Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, the Rosenbergers, and others associated with Soviet communism very much deserved these labels — I doubt most other readers would. I will rest my case on this admittedly minor point, merely drawing a comparison to the oft-cited use of Buckley scorning the Birchers by people who hated Buckley and all that he stood for (then and now).
New Yorker
That graphic is excellent. Sherman is well known for torching Atlanta and the subsequent “March to the Sea”, but he may have been even more brutal to South Carolina. He and his men knew where the rebellion had begun….
jurassicpork
Just in the nick of time, too. Because my annual Christmas shopping list of the best presents to get your embarrassing right wing relative is now up, with 15 sure fire winners.
Boudica
@Evolutionary: As the great-great-granddaughter of several Confederate veterans, I, too, support the sentiment of this post wholeheartedly!
dmsilev
Always worth pointing out that Sherman burned large swaths of South Carolina at least as thoroughly as he did Georgia. For some reason, the latter is much more well known, even though the former was arguably the greater accomplishment (much nastier terrain, some actual organized opposition, etc.).
dms
Buck
@Dave:
SNORT! Good one.
New Yorker
@Vance Maverick:
You have a point, but sometimes after all the propaganda from the recalcitrant South about how noble their cause was and how dignified their side was….you do want to taunt them with reminders of the smoking embers that our side left in its wake.
Besides, compared to some scorched-earth campaigns in history, Sherman’s was rather mild. He didn’t leave behind mass graves full of massacred civilians, for instance.
Comrade Luke
The crazy thing is that when you go to the articles linked to in this post, you can’t go more than two or three deep into the comments before people are talking about how the author is some crazed leftist, and how the war was not about slavery. Including the Guardian in the UK fercrissakes!
Buck
@jurassicpork:
Thanks. My favorite is the stigmata temporary tattoos. Loads of fun!
AxelFoley
@Dave:
Hahahahahahahahahaha!!!
Love that idea!
Dennis G.
@Alex:
“UnAmerican’ is a phrase that is freighted with darkness. I used it here as a half-snark to call out the appropriation of American patriotism by these celebrators of Confederate treason. It is a difficult phase to use and I can see how it might not hit the mark for some. Please accept my apologies for that. So it goes.
Cheers
BP in MN
@Alex: If it were just a policy
disagreement, I would see your point. I may think that, say,
Republican opposition to the START treaty work’s against American
interests and is a petty bit of politicking that puts party above
country, but I in no way think it would constitute treason. But in
this case, it’s simply descriptive. The SCV are actively
commemorating and celebrating an act of treason that sparked the
bloodiest conflict in American history, and one fought for the
preservation of ownership and oppression of fellow human beings.
The SCV are not traitors; note that the adjectives you object to
are not directed at them. However, the men they honor were traitors
to this country, their cause was despicable, and that fact needs to
be made blatantly clear and not allowed to be obfuscated.
PGE
I really have gotten so fed up with Southern celebration of treason that I’m in favor of a national holiday celebrating Appamatox.
150 years and they won’t let it go. Maybe they will if, instead of ignoring it, we rub their noses in the result.
Comrade Misfit
@MAJeff: When I was stationed in SC, I had the same opinion. Sherman’s army should not have left standing a single structure in the state.
All you have to do is read the formal declarations of secession by Texas, South Carolina and a few other states. Their main beef, and in most cases their only beef, was northern opposition to the continuation of slavery.
Maybe I’m running afoul of Godwin’s Law, here, but talking about secession and not mentioning slavery is like discussing the Second World War and forgetting to mention the extermination camps.
stuckinred
@PGE:My wife is from Appomattox.
stuckinred
Remember, those of us who went to Vietnam and protested it when we came home were traitors according to these fine patriots.
Cacti
I’ll happily volunteer for the 150th anniversary reenactment of the torching of Columbia in 2015.
But only if I get to be the one who says…
“Here is where treason began, and by God, here is where it shall end.”
Odie Hugh Manatee
@General Stuck:
The only thing Sherman did wrong was that he forgot to salt the ground after burning everything on it.
I saw where they unveiled a new plaque commemorating the heroes of secession and slavery, saying enthusiastically that they had four years of coming events planned to commemorate different parts of the Civil War.
This being the case, I look forward to their reenacting the ass-kicking the north gave them with the same enthusiasm that they are starting this out with.
Jager
I am so fucking sick of Southerners. (and their supporters in the North) If I never hear a drawl again, I can die a happy man!
CDWard
We should kick Jackson off the 20 dollar bill for his genocide against the Native Americans and replace him with Sherman. On the back we could have a beautiful lithograph of the burning of Atlanta.
DearOldDad
I am willing to bet that the same southerners who are appaled by Sherman’s tactics were all in favor of “shock and awe”
change
I’ll just remind everybody of this simple, undeniable fact:
Nobody who attended any secession convention was a Republican, and Abraham Lincoln was also a Republican.
Yutsano
@change: Okay, now THAT was just hilarious.
asiangrrlMN
Oh yeah. That hits the spot. Nice bit of ‘shopping, Dennis G.
@Yutsano: Intentionally or non?
Unintentional, I see.
change 2
@asiangrrlMN:
What do you care Ms. China?
Svensker
Gah, the letters over at that editorial are just horrifying. Bet they’re all Say-rah fans, also too.
Mike in NC
I’d love to have the Sherman t-shirt and would wear it any time I had to travel to SC.
You mean wasn’t a RINO, you dumb fuck?
change
Sherman was also (wait for it) a…..REPUBLICAN.
Cat
My humble offering.
http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/552/sherman.jpg
J. Michael Neal
@change: And if he (or, even better, Grant) were on the ticket as a Republican, I’d happily vote for him.
Haley Barbour, not so much.
Uloborus
@change:
Alright. Since you don’t seem to have gotten the reference: The reason people are laughing at you for saying this is that around the time of the civil rights act (and that’s NOT a coincidence) the South saw a dramatic reversal in the positions of the two parties. The modern Republican party is full of the Democrats of that period and vice versa, because the Democrats as a party decided to be liberal and support civil rights, and the Republicans decided to use something called ‘The Southern Strategy’ to exploit racism to win elections against Democrats.
So rather than surprising us with a crucial fact that’s embarrassing to our position, you’re demonstrating your own ignorance of history.
Buck
@change:
Then WHAT THE FUCK has happened to you people???
amk
LOL. Niiice.
Nutella
@Uloborus:
The Democratic politicians who dominated what was known as the “Solid South” started to leave the Democratic party in the late 40’s when civil rights first began to take hold. More left at the time of the civil rights act and the last remaining Dixiecrats fled in 1972 rather than have anything to do with George McGovern, so we got a new “Solid South” of Republican politicians and the Nixon presidency.
Not a history to be proud of.
asiangrrlMN
@Buck: Best. Answer. Evah!
amk
@change: It’s better to be silent and thought you might be stupid than open your mouth and confirm it and all that.
J
@Trainrunner: It is something else, isn’t it? Woodrow Wilson is alleged to have said it was ‘history written with lightening’ and that the sad thing was that it was all true. Pro-secession revisionism achieved an astonishing ascendancy until relatively recent times. I just saw by chance ‘Santa Fe Trail’ (1940) with Errol Flynn as the dashing JEB Stuart in the years before the war (Ronald Reagan plays his side kick, George Custer–completely inaccurate, there is apparently no reason to believe they ever met). There is one tiny hint that the abolitionists are not solely responsible for the violence in Kansas, otherwise all the villains are abolitionists. Flynn explains that the South shouldn’t be forced to end slavery, but will do it on its own. In another touching scene, escaped slaves ask to be taken back into bondage. A very revealing document.
Rex
If you’ll read up on Grant’s presidency, many aspects of it domestically are remarkably similar to George W. Bush’s. Sherman was not especially well-disposed to political office either. Voting for military leaders because they send a tickle up your leg isn’t necessarily the best civic course of action, as history has shown many times.
J
@Evolutionary: I’ve quoted it here before, so I won’t do it again, but to me Robert Lowell’s poem, For the Union Dead, is one of the most beautiful in the language.
asiangrrlMN
@change 2: Nice. Now that’s not change I can believe in!
P.S. I’m not Chinese. I’m Taiwanese. Not that I expect you to know the difference.
J
Now that BJ has become such a bastion of pro-Union sentiment, perhaps the Battle Hymn of the Republic could play in the background?
Omnes Omnibus
@J: Has become? When wasn’t it?
General Stuck
@J:
I’d call it anti neo confederate sentiment.
asiangrrlMN
@General Stuck: Ditto what General Stuck said. I am pro-truth as well (which means owning up that slavery was the cause for the Civil War), and I am anti-talk of secession.
J
@asiangrrlMN: ‘The party of Lincoln’ may be the saddest four words I know. In my youth there were decent Republicans like Mark Hatfield and Jacob Javits. I remember watching the ’76 Republican convention (almost Reagan, but Ford got it). A very elderly senator Javits, in a wheel chair, addressed the gathering on the theme ‘we must remember those less fortunate than ourselves’ (there is some legislation bearing his name providing opportunities for the handicapped). They booed him.
J. Michael Neal
@Rex:
Not really. In actuality, it may have been one of the less corrupt administrations between Lincoln and T. Roosevelt. He is slandered precisely because his attempt at Reconstruction was effective until it was dismantled by Rutherford Hayes.
And I will continue to maintain that either he or Sherman would be a lot better than anything the Republicans have nominated recently.
asiangrrlMN
@J: That was in 1976? Damn. So, the Republicans have been traveling down this road (again) for a long time. That doesn’t make me very sanguine about them turning it around any time soon.
New Yorker
@change:
And this is about as relevant as the question of whether Oliver Cromwell was a Tory or a Whig.
How about you go take a poll of everyone attending the secession celebrations and find out if they’re Democrats or Republicans.
SRW1
@change:
Change, were can we sponsor your trip to Charleston to educate them rebels about that fact?
Mino
Hey! I’m reading Sherman’s autobiography right now. I highly recommend it.
ulee
Love the haircut. Really. Tomorrow I’m going to Dom’s barber shop in Hallowell, Maine and saying, “Make me look like William Tecumseh Sherman.”
Lit3Bolt
Yay, this thread is full of South bashing and celebrations of atrocities. Can we also celebrate Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as Dresden next week? The Nips and Nazis were bad guys too…
Also, I won’t comment about all the black ghettos in the North and the white supremacists in the Midwest…
The North: “Our racism is more subtle, thus we are better.”
4tehlulz
@Lit3Bolt: How many Northern states fly the flag of treason?
Jose Padilla
“If you’ll read up on Grant’s presidency, many aspects of it domestically are remarkably similar to George W. Bush’s.”
Grant was basically a good guy who inherited a bad situation. George W. Bush was, well, the opposite.
Jason
@Buck: They tried to leave the country, in a way.
I can’t decide which would be better, a time machine to go back and persuade the Union to let them go. Or for Gen. Sherman to be reincarnated and burn it all to ash.
Though, I *DO* love that idea of a tour date shirt. If you make it, I will buy it.
c u n d gulag
Dennis,
Love your stuff!
Hey, I have an idea – stop calling them members of the Republican Party, and start calling them members of the RepubliConfederate Party!
It’s more accurate.
Happy Holidays! (Oooooh, that’ll piss off the Christian righties!)
AuldBlackJack
RE: the whole ‘he was a Republican/he was a Democrat’ canard.
This thing only covers election results from 1920 to the present, but it’s pretty obvious that what political parties represent changes much more quickly than the people who choose to affiliate themselves with those parties.
Dennis G.
@change:
The modern Republican Party has been captured by the old Confederate movement that voted for treason 150 years ago. After the Civil War they took over the Democratic Party as the home of white supremacy in America. In the wake of FDR and the following 4 Democratic Presidents leading up to 1980, the Confederates moved to the Republican Party as part of a ‘Southern Strategy’. Reagan openly embraced these old Confederate racists and in the 1980s they moved to the GOP en masse. Now the so-called Republican Party is actually the Confederate Party wearing a skin and the so-called ‘conservative movement’ is just the same old white supremacist movement lightly tea-stained to obscure its face of hate.
@J:
Or ‘Marching Through Georgia”…
shpx.ohfu
As someone who regularly hears the atrocities committed by rednecks against the English language, I just want to say that the “of” in the first phrase is completely superfluous.
It’s “all y’all.” The “of” demonstrates that the writer is an effete liberal Yankee godless commie.
Dennis G.
@Cat:
Nice. Sherman always looks like he’s about to open a can of whoopass in photos of this period. I liked the arms folded, but the reaching inside of the coat for the can is nice too.
Dennis G.
@shpx.ohfu:
As one who lived for years in the South, please know that it was intentional.
atomjack
Whenever anyone mentions Sherman, I always think of this.
Odie Hugh Manatee
From Wikipedia on the March to the Sea:
This is what really says all that needs to be said about the secessionist leaders; they wanted everyone to fight and die for their cause but when push came to shove, the chickens showed their yellow streaks as they fled the coop. Same with their hero, Davis, who was caught trying to escape while wearing his wife’s overcoat. While I’m sure the revisionists will be quick to claim that Davis was just holding it for his wife, it’s clear that the rebellion was led by weak, flawed men who were desperately grasping for a way of life that was slipping away from them.
I like Sherman’s orders regarding taking livestock while on the march:
Even he knew that the rebellion was fueled largely by the rich and he sought to make them pay for it. Good for him.
Paul in KY
@CDWard: like your idea!
Paul in KY
@atomjack: That was a well drawn cartoon. Especially liked the cloned Gen. Sherman’s comments!
Porlock Junior
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Blockquotes don’t work, of course.
De massa run? Ha ha!
De darkeys stay? Ho ho!
It mus’ be now de kingdom comin’
An’ de year ob Jubilo!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWYHxsMTOJ0&feature=related
Fine old song. Doesn’t get enough play. (Somehow the disreputable old Darky Dialect doesn’t have quite the sting it has in other contexts. But I’m open to correction if that’s wrong.)