Deconstructing Trump on Lee and Grant (image) - comments made at Ohio political rally
cnn.com/politics/live-…
cnn.com/politics/live-…
FACT: Robert E. Lee was a slave owner who chose to lead a traitorous rebellion. He supported a war designed to keep humans enslaved via an economic and social system of white supremacy.
Trump’s Lost Cause frame on Robert E. Lee was not scripted, so this appears to be what Trump believes (or at least holds in his head)
What is the Lost Cause, you ask? Reframing the war from one designed to preserve slavery to a war of Northern aggression against heroic Southern protection of constitutional rights.
The Lost Cause myth began with Lee’s farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia
encyclopediavirginia.org/Lost_Cause_The…
encyclopediavirginia.org/Lost_Cause_The…
“Robert E. Lee was the war’s foremost general, indeed the greatest commander in American history, while Ulysses S. Grant was a mere bludgeoner...”
nybooks.com/articles/2001/…
nybooks.com/articles/2001/…
“In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic.”
smithsonianmag.com/history/how-i-…
smithsonianmag.com/history/how-i-…
Loewen, a retired University of Vermont sociology professor: “Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about.”
Did you know that despite the North's greater population, the army of the Confederacy was almost equal in size to the US Army during the first year of the war?
ushistory.org/us/33b.asp
ushistory.org/us/33b.asp
When WV, KY, MD and DE joined the Union rather than the Confederacy, the South lost industry and manpower.
“Lincoln was probably a better war president than Jefferson Davis and certainly offered a better explanation to his own people of what they were fighting for than Davis... “ IMAGE
historynet.com/why-the-south-…
historynet.com/why-the-south-…
One competent commander, Lee, was not enough, despite Trump’s assertion. War is not an individual sport.
The Confederacy lost the war in the West. “In the crucial theater of the war, the Confederacy did not have a competent commanding general.”
The Confederacy lost the war in the West. “In the crucial theater of the war, the Confederacy did not have a competent commanding general.”
This history I did not learn in school in south Georgia. My Civil War history was “the war between the states” as told in GWTW.
The impetus for Trump’s revisionist history lesson: Grant was born in Ohio, which fought to preserve the Union.
The 3/5ths compromise was powerful.
From 1789 to 1861, US presidents were Southerners—all of them slaveholders — for 49 of those 72 years. The only presidents to be re-elected in this period were slaveholders.
From 1789 to 1861, US presidents were Southerners—all of them slaveholders — for 49 of those 72 years. The only presidents to be re-elected in this period were slaveholders.
The election of 1860 was historic: Lincoln won without a single Southern electoral vote. His platform? Containing the expansion of slavery.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St…
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St…
It sounds as though the men of the Confederacy lied, repeatedly, not unlike today’s GOP:
“slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity.”
nybooks.com/articles/2001/…
“slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity.”
nybooks.com/articles/2001/…
<<If slave states remained in a Union ruled by Lincoln and his Republican cohorts, “the safety of the rights of the South will be entirely gone.”>>
<<Georgia’s commissioner to Virginia dutifully assured his listeners that if Southern states stayed in the Union, “we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything.” >>
<<And so on ad nauseam. The secession conventions and the commissioners grossly exaggerated the Republican threat to slavery in 1861.>>
Today’s white supremacy — from the KKK to Charlottesville to the Proud Boys — has its roots in the Lost Cause.
And so does Trump’s base.
One president and what percentage of his supporters?
RT
RT
Full 1928 essay from W.E.B. DuBois on Robert E. Lee
“People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War.”
cwmemory.com/2017/05/30/w-e…
“People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War.”
cwmemory.com/2017/05/30/w-e…
