Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
The Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has come up with an idea for celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War—known to some as the “War between the States.” The veterans group has proposed that the state of
Mississippi issue a series of specialty license plates commemorating the war. These specialty plates, planned for the years 2011 through 2015, would each have a different design.
What has some people upset is the specialty license plate slated for the year 2014, which would honor General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest, a native of Tennessee, is considered by some to have been a military genius. Others feel differently about Forrest who is “reviled” by some for allegedly having lead a massacre of Black Union troops at Fort Pillow in his home state in 1864. It should be noted that Forrest also served as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
According to ABC News, the NAACP is planning to send a letter to Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour requesting “that he publicly denounce the license plate and use his office to prevent it from being issued.” Derrick Jackson, president of the Mississippi state NAACP, said of Forrest: “He should be viewed in the same light that we view Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The state of Mississippi should deny any vanity tags which would highlight racial hatred in this state.”
Although many historians agree that Nathan Bedford Forrest distanced himself from the KKK later in his life, some believe “it was too little too late because the Klan had already turned violent before Forrest left.”
Sources
As to what I’ve read, didn’t you read Mr. Foote’s book? Or the accounts of the soldiers about what was done to those blacks who surrendered? Apparently not, whitey.
Now that you’ve expressed that you are going to refrain from posting here, your cooperation in that regard is appreciated.
budda, the troops didnt surrender, did u even read ur own damn link? it stated that braddford said he didnt surrender!!!lol!!!!!!!!! u posted it fool!
but alias, after reading the bio on jonathan turley, i will refraim from posting on his blog. u see he represents muslim extremists who kill americans, 2 i have read about so far. so i surley dont want my name on someones page who represents murders am madmen who blow up buildings an planes. i had no idea this was a racist blog posted by people who hate america, an support the killings of americans!!! good day to you all!
OS,
Never got to meet Mr. Foote although I would have surely enjoyed the pleasure of his acquaintance.
You’re the one who was giving me orders not to address you, redneck.
Upset that it earned you the finger? Awwwwww. Too bad.
This is the deep end of the pool and there’s no lifeguard on duty. If you don’t like me deflating your lies and bullshit? Your options are leave or continue to get pummeled. If you don’t like getting bit, you shouldn’t poke the bear.
Now how about killing surrendered troops, huh?
Just because they were black!
That sure is a heroic action.
If you’re a coward and a racist.
Like Connecticut and Rhode Island, however, Massachusetts had a problem with masters who simply turned out their slaves when they grew too old or feeble to work. Unlike the later Southern system, which took pride in its paternal care for slaves in their old age, Massachusetts masters had to be forced to keep theirs by a 1703 law requiring them to post �50 bond for every slave manumitted, to provide against the slave becoming indigent and the responsibility of some town. There are also instances on record of slave mothers’ children given away like puppies or kittens by masters unwilling or unable to support them. There was no law against this.
Hey, Bi, did You ever meet Shelby Foote? He had a million fascinating stories to tell and a memory like an encyclopedia. One of the best researchers on the Civil War I ever met.
budda dont tell me where to post. who the heck died an made u king of this blog? do u have any facts to put forth? or just more racial slurs an threats?
Unlike one who has made some comments here, Elaine knows what century she is living in, as do the rest of us who made it out of the fourth grade.
We also know what country we live in and that our flag has 50 stars and 13 stripes.
Now back to your regular programming. Thank you for your attention to these matters.
A Confederate sergeant, in a letter written home shortly after the battle said that “the poor, deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hand scream for mercy, but were ordered to their feet and then shot down.” – Quote from The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol. 3, Red River to Appomattox by Shelby Foote. New York: Random House, 1974. pp. 111-112.
Yep.
That’s some hero who orders surrendered troops shot just because of their skin color.
elaine this may intrest u > SLAVERY in MASSACHUSETTS
Massachusetts was the first slave-holding colony in New England, though the exact beginning of black slavery in what became Massachusetts cannot be dated exactly. Slavery there is said to have predated the settlement of Massachusetts Bay colony in 1629, and circumstantial evidence gives a date of 1624-1629 for the first slaves. “Samuel Maverick, apparently New England’s first slaveholder, arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 and, according to [John Gorham] Palfrey, owned two Negroes before John Winthrop, who later became governor of the colony, arrived in 1630.”[1]
The first certain reference to African slavery is in connection with the bloody Pequot War in 1637. The Pequot Indians of central Connecticut, pressed hard by encroaching European settlements, struck back and attacked the town of Wetherfield. A few months later, Massachusetts and Connecticut militias joined forces and raided the Pequot village near Mystic, Connecticut. Of the few Indians who escaped slaughter, the women and children were enslaved in New England, and Roger Williams of Rhode Island wrote to Winthrop congratulating him on God’s having placed in his hands “another drove of Adams’ degenerate seed.” But most of the men and boys, deemed too dangerous to keep in the colony, were transported to the West Indies aboard the ship Desire, to be exchanged for African slaves. The Desire arrived back in Massachusetts in 1638, after exchanging its cargo, according to Winthrop, loaded with “Salt, cotton, tobacco and Negroes.”
“Such exchanges became routine during subsequent Indian wars, for the danger of keeping revengeful warriors in the colony far outweighed the value of their labor.”[2] In 1646, this became the official policy of the New England Confederation. As elsewhere in the New World, the shortage and expense of free, white labor motivated the quest for slaves. In 1645, Emanuel Downing, brother-in-law of John Winthrop, wrote to him longing for a “juste warre” with the Pequots, so the colonists might capture enough Indian men, women, and children to exchange in Barbados for black slaves, because the colony would never thrive “untill we gett … a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our business.”[3]
Most, if not all, of the limited 17th century New England slave trade was in the hands of Massachusetts. Boston merchants made New England’s first attempt at direct import of slaves from West Africa to the West Indies in 1644, but though the venture was partially successful, it was premature because the big chartered companies still held monopoly on the Gold Coast and Guinea. By 1676, however, Boston ships had pioneered a slave trade to Madagascar, and they were selling black human beings to Virginians by 1678. For the home market, the Puritans generally took the Africans to the West Indies and sold them in exchange for a few experienced slaves, which they brought back to New England. In other cases, they brought back the weaklings that could not be sold on the harsh West Indies plantations (Phyllis Wheatley, the poetess, was one) and tried to get the best bargain they could for them in New England. Massachusetts merchants and ships were supplying slaves to Connecticut by 1680 and Rhode Island by 1696.
The break-up of the monopolies and the defeat of the Dutch opened the way for New England’s aggressive pursuit of the slave trade in the early 1700s. At the same time, the expansion of New England industries created a shortage of labor, which slaves filled. From fewer than 200 slaves in 1676, and 550 in 1708, the Massachusetts slave population jumped to about 2,000 in 1715. It reached its largest percentage of the total population between 1755 and 1764, when it stood at around 2.2 percent. The slaves concentrated in the industrial and seaside towns, however, and Boston was about 10 percent black in 1752.
As in other maritime colonies of New England, the chief families were among the chief slavers. Cornelius Waldo, maternal great-grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a slave merchant on a large scale, a proud importer of “Choice Irish Duck, fine Florence wine, negro slaves and Irish butter.” His ship, Africa, plied the Middle Passage packed with 200 black people at a time crammed below-decks, though lethal epidemics of “flux” sometimes tore through the captives and cut into Waldo’s profits. Peter Fanueil, meanwhile, inherited one of the largest fortunes of his day, which was built in large part on his uncle’s slave trade. His philanthropy with this money gave Boston its famed Fanueil Hall.
Massachusetts, like many American colonies, had roots in a scrupulous fundamentalist Protestantism. Christianity was no barrier to slave-ownership, however. The Puritans regarded themselves as God’s Elect, and so they had no difficulty with slavery, which had the sanction of the Law of the God of Israel. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination easily supported the Puritans in a position that blacks were a people cursed and condemned by God to serve whites. Cotton Mather told blacks they were the “miserable children of Adam and Noah,” for whom slavery had been ordained as a punishment.
A Massachusetts law of 1641 specifically linked slavery to Biblical authority, and established for slaves the set of rules “which the law of God, established in Israel concerning such people, doth morally require.” When two Massachusetts slave merchants joined with London slave raiders in a massacre of an African village in 1645, the colonial government registered its indignation, because the two men were guilty of the Biblical crime of “man-stealing” (kidnapping Africans instead of acquiring them in the approved way, in exchange for rum or trinkets) — and because the slaughter of 100 or so villagers had taken place on a Sunday. Nonetheless, because of its Scriptural foundation, Massachusetts’ attitudes toward slaves in some ways were more progressive than those of other colonies.
Like Connecticut and Rhode Island, however, Massachusetts had a problem with masters who simply turned out their slaves when they grew too old or feeble to work. Unlike the later Southern system, which took pride in its paternal care for slaves in their old age, Massachusetts masters had to be forced to keep theirs by a 1703 law requiring them to post �50 bond for every slave manumitted, to provide against the slave becoming indigent and the responsibility of some town. There are also instances on record of slave mothers’ children given away like puppies or kittens by masters unwilling or unable to support them. There was no law against this.
Later reminiscences, long after slavery’s end, emphasized the benign nature of Massachusetts slavery, but the laws and statutes of the time show it to be grim enough, and the need for control over even so small a population of blacks as lived in Massachusetts was felt to be great. Fear of an uprising no doubt was behind the 1656 exclusion of blacks (and Indians) from military duty. Concern about fugitive slaves, meanwhile, probably lay behind the 1680 act by which the colony imposed heavy fines on captains of ships and vessels that took blacks aboard, or sailed away with them without permission from the governor. Protection of masters’ property from slave theft certainly motivated the 1693 statute that forbade anyone from buying anything from a black, Indian or mulatto servant.
Boston, which had the largest slave population, also had its own layer of controls, on top of the province-wide ones. In statutes enacted at various times between the 1720s and 1750s, slaves in Boston were forbidden to buy provisions in market; carry a stick or a cane; keep hogs or swine; or stroll about the streets, lanes, or Common at night or at all on Sunday. Punishments for violation of these laws ranged up to 20 lashes, depending on aggravating factors.
Black slaves were singled out for punishment by whipping if they broke street lamps, under a law of 1753, and a special law allowed severe whippings for any black person who hit a white one (1705-6).
The colony, along with Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, punished both races for miscegenation. But Old Testament abhorrence of “mixed natures” may help explain why the Massachusetts statue was more severe than that of any other colony on the continent. The Massachusetts law against mixed marriage or sexual relations between the races [Massachusetts Acts and Resolves, I, 578], dating to 1705, was passed “for the better preventing of a spurious and mixt issue.” It subjected a black man who slept with a white woman to being sold out of the province (likely to the cruel plantations of the West Indies). Both were to be flogged, and the woman bound out to service to support any children resulting from the illicit union. In cases involving a white man and a black woman, both were to be flogged, the man fined �5 and held liable for support of any children, and the woman to be sold out of the province.
the lady elaine who started this blog is from mass, she should do some reaserch on the people from that states laws, like in the first slavery laws in this nation, which told the lawful way a new englander could make a slave out of an indian. she so interested in southern acts, while she seems to forget those of her own state.maybe she will post some on how her state wiped out an enslaved the indians!! lol!! doubt it but we will see an leave the light on for her
This is how this is going to work:
If you don’t like me calling you out on your historical revisionism and thinly veiled racism?
Don’t post here, redneck.
Because as long as you want to pimp out that war criminal Forrest as a hero, I’m going to smack you down, sport.
whatever budda, please refraim from commenting to me anymore, as i want no part of ur childish mind an ur racial slurrs. grow up
mike, u keep saying southerners who want the truth known, not the half truths an lies are racists. why? why is it that u who is educated enough to look up the truth on ft pillow, but would rather go with a false story? when u say an orginaization LIKE the scv, u show ur colers.u never learned i had an incident of simple assault, i stated that it was my son clearly. but as i can still see there are those here who would rather attack the messenger instead of the message, old an worn out tatic. how bought u mike? is your life crystal clean. do u have a record? my son got into a fight over a girl, big deal! what does that have to do with this blog discussion? i really like how u handpicked through my words but ignored all the redneck an other racist remarks by the others.why? there words doesnt help ur cause does it? have u ever even been to the state u trashed”mississippi” mike? do u think u are the only person in this world who had to fight to survive?an mike i never asked u or anyone to fight me. i stated that they didnt have the gall to come say that to my face! most racists dont. i have nothing to hide like some on here, not u mike the others. i only wanted to deal with facts, but the slander an name calling began by budda an others, as so often does when someone exposes the truth an since the truth does nothing for there cause of history distortion they attack the messenger instead of the message that they cant refute!! the facts about slavery are well known, the north had the first roles in this trade with the passage of the state of mass law. my ancestors owned no slaves if that makes u feel better, they were simple country folk who fought to defend there homes an states from the invading terrorists,murders,an rapists. he served 2 years in a vicious yankee prison in rock island illinois. who here would not fight to defend there homes, women, an freedom! mike if u get time read the south under siege 1830-2000 written by frank conner.the jewish confederates is another good one, but jack hinsons ONE mans WAR a civil war sniper best tells the story of why most folks in dixie fought. the cut his sons heads off for hunting deer, an put the decapitated heads on his fence posts. he killed every last one of them, u wont read the truth of yankee soldiers deeds in the govt history books.
You are clearly much dumber than I initially gave you credit for, redneck.
mike after many childish attacks by those on this page, i told them they would not say that to my face, i give them my address.I never said to fight.u choose to read my comments, and at the same time ignoring those before an during mine?why? I have no problem discussing anything with you, as you are a man not ashamed of his name. The doll worshippers an childern, an those who distort history to fan the flames of hatred,i will refraim from discussing anything with. so to answer your questions sir. 1 slavery was an evil as i have already stated that has been forced on all races of the world. 2 yes,but u seem to forget that it was in all original 13 colinies including the north, an the northern ships brought them here, and the fact of northern slavedealers, an africans who enslaved africans. 3.a resounding yes 4. yes 5 yes, but u seem to forget they were treated badly in the north for some reason, one can only guess why. the scv exists mike because those who won the war wrote history, an as we see in some of the links used here, they are full of falsehoods to make the north seem in a good light. go back an read lincolns words in the debate, not douglas, here is an excerpt “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior” does that sound like a man who fought a war for slavery,i think not. mike the war was fought to end the republic as it was founded so the answer to that is no! when this nation was founded it was made of 13 colonies who voluntaraly joined a union, they had the right to leave it. to here some folks argue that the south was entirly responsible for slavery in this country is absured an shows an ignorance of american history.MIKE if u go back an read i tried to point out the distortions of history in this blog, when those above could not refute that they started the age old game of calling me a racist, an i asure u im not. after each vicious attack i admit i lost my temper an stooped to their level. for that i apoligize to you an those who do not hide behind alias an wooden dolls.the scv is hear to set the truth free mike, we are not racists, we have black, an brown members by the thousands. this group was formed to set the truth free. slavery existed all over this world mike. white people have been enslaved mike. if u go back an look at early american history mike u will see slavery existed from the beginning. not long after this country was founded a law was passed called the alian an sediation acts.it was a series of laws meant to strengthen the goverments hands an silence its critics.in 1828 the 20th congress passed the tariff of abominations hiking average import duties 50% since most southerners were indigent, these tariffs meant to protect northern factories really riled up the south, on feb 1 1833 south carolinia rejected the tariff an declared it null an void.in response president andrew jackson sent congress a force bill an only after seeing south carolinia militia raise a force of 25,000 to defend against the invasion, did congress at the last minute made a comprimise.did u know mike that idiania, organ,iowa,an illinois banned immigration to its states of any black people, slave or free? alot of what the war about was money! in 1789 the states were the creators of a federal goverment, in 1861 with western expansion the federal goverment was the creator of a large majority of states. in 1786 a majority of the states derived all their powers an attributes as states from congress under the constitution. in 1789 the people of the united states were citizens of states originally sovereign an independent, in 1861 a vast majority of people in the united states were citizens of states that were originally mere dependencies of the federal goverment ‘WHICH WAS THE AUTHER AN GIVER OF THERE POLITICAL BEING”. This was the basis of the structual change in our goverment by 1861. THe new states were slow to believe they were on a plane of perfect equality with any of the original 11 who formed the goverment. Washington had built control into there creation. This and the fact that the election of president lincoln on a purely sectional vote staisfied the southern states that the union could not permanatly exist. If southern states could not leave peaceably then war was inevitable.during the war of 1812 the federalists were the ones complaining of goverment policy an threatend to pull there states out of the union.new england had meetings to consider the succession of its state then. so the south was not the first states to have problems with a goverment which sought to take away its soveriegnty.the states formed the federal goverment, an had a right to succed from it, an that is why lincoln invaded.war is hell make no mistake about it, in 1860 the north had already outlawed slavery, an the northern slaveholders simply sold there slaves to slaveholders in southern states. the southern states were not offered that option, an it was not possible for them to let go of what at the time was considered to be money”a slave was costly which is why the average southerner had none”. again back to this blog, the author stated that forrest started the klan. NOT TRUE, 2. the author stated that forrest massacered some helpless defensless black soldiers, NOT TRUE, the valant an brave colered soldiers did not surrender facing overwhelming odds an fought almost to the last man. the author used info that has long been disproved by northern an southern reaserchers. Rather than revel in the valor an ability of the black union soldiers at fort pillow, people like mr leanord pitts, who is no friend of the south,an routinly uses outdated info in hs OPINION colums,would rather choose to see the black union soldiers as incompetent victims of THAT DEVIL FORREST, which is utter hogwash.so again i have set the record straight mike, as that is what members of the scv do when someone deliberatly misinterprets history to fan the flames of hatred. WE WILL LEAVE THE LIGHT ON FOR ETERNITY, you can count on that.
best regards,
Brent Waller MS SCV
I am pondering the fate of life.
Why must one endure scrutiny, after the persons position has been made abundantly clear?
Nothing good is evil and nothing evil is good. But to the evil doer they are good and to the person expressing good they may be evil.
It is in the eyes of the preceptor of what is good and what is evil. I can not say what is why and why is what.
“It is not I who is being evasive but rather you.”
This is the barely adult version of the childish arguing game where one kid mimics the others answers. You can choose to play it, which only exposes more about you, or you can actually answer the questions. I’m not playing rhetorical tricks, nor am I being dishonest as to the point of my questions. Each response someone makes here, no matter how responsive, reveals the responders thought processes. In that sense you don’t have to answer my questions for me to logically infer the reasons for your evasions.
It is not I who is being evasive but rather you.