I had some correspondence with an editor of the Post and Courier July 10, 2019 when I sent them a letter for publication in response to their July 6 editorial "Don't let extremists define our national symbols." As a result, I saw an opening to send some valuable Southern history to this newspaper and I jumped on it. Their editorial is good in that they are alarmed at Nike removing the Betsy Ross flag as well as the Charlottesville city council ending a celebration of Thomas Jefferson, and the idiots on the San Francisco school board voting to paint over an 80-year-old work of art portraying the life of George Washington. The Post and Courier does not want us to validate bad people who attempt to redefine patriotic symbols, but wait! THEY in the media have been doing exactly that for years ad nauseam! The media is the primary reason we have this politically correct hate and destruction of history in the body politic. Here is the 250 word letter-to-the-editor that got this started:
The editor wrote back and asked who the "you" was and that gave me my opening:
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government. . .
[i] Death statistics for the war have been upped from 620,000 to between 650,000 and 850,000. These are the widely accepted statistics of historian J. David Hacker of Binghamton University. See Rachel Coker, “Historian revises estimate of Civil War dead,” published September 21, 2011, Binghamton University Research News – Insights and Innovations from Binghamton University,.
7 Comments
8/11/2019 11:46:40 pm
Excellent! The Charleston editor might also be reminded that as many as a million Freedmen - or one quarter of the population - between 1862 and 1870 died of disease and neglect under the care of their "liberators." When asked what was to be done with those freed by his Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator," said "Let them root, hog, or die."
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Susan Wilson
8/12/2019 07:36:14 am
I have seen before the mention of the number of freedmen who died during that time frame. Is there any source or documentation that can be pointed to in order to support that figure?
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8/16/2019 03:02:35 pm
Hi Susan, I posted a comment for you, below, about the book, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction. Good questions! Gene 8/16/2019 02:21:32 pm
Good point, Bo! Of course, Lincoln's first desire was to send black people back to Africa or recolonize them in a suitable place such as Central America somewhere. Just three months before the Emancipation Proclamation - in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation - Lincoln stated that efforts to recolonize black people would continue. The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation also stated that the purpose of the war then, as it had been all along, was restoration of the Union and NOT to end slavery.
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8/16/2019 02:42:43 pm
Susan, The book, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction, by Jim Downs, might answer your excellent questions. I have the book but have not yet read it. Inside the front cover it begins: "Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundred of thousands of freed people." The book was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. --- I would note that the author, Jim Downs, had as his adviser at Columbia University, Eric Foner. Foner is the darling of the politically correct crowd but much of his history is extremely biased and based more on today's politics than on a truthful examination of the past.
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Roderick Mills
8/20/2019 12:47:50 pm
I was at one time working with some kids on Facebook to promote Southern History and of course our traffic was blocked and limited by Facebook. We kept trying to tell the Pro-Union Anti-Confederacy Crowd that attacks on Confederate symbols would turn into attacks on what they considered American symbols proper and it happened more quickly than I expected.
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8/21/2019 02:56:51 pm
Roderick, You are so right. This is the worst time for truth in all of American history. It is the result of the left's politicization of history, their fraudulent, shallow "got cha"-you-racist politics. It might work short term but in the long run, they will be as despised and distrusted as the news media, which is not believed by 75% of the public. They will not win and we should continue to HASTEN their demise. Gene
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AuthorGene Kizer, Jr. is an author and historian in Charleston, South Carolina, and founder of Charleston Athenaeum Press. He graduated magna cum laude from the College of Charleston in 2000 at middle age with History Departmental Honors, the Rebecca Motte American History Award, and the highest award for the History Department, the Outstanding Student Award. He is author of Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument.; The Elements of Academic Success, How to Graduate Magna Cum Laude from College (or how to just graduate, PERIOD!); and Charleston, SC Short Stories, Book One. He married his last ex- by sneaking into Fort Johnson and saying vows on the exact ground from where the first shot of the War Between the States was fired, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861. He lives on James Island where he is also broker-in-charge of Charleston Saltwater Realty . Please contact him through Charleston Athenaeum Press. Archives
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