Most of the people who founded the country were compromised in some way by slavery and many personally owned large numbers of slaves. But these people also created the country, its system of freedoms, rights. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/hawley-de… via @TPM
2/ They notched aspirations that - even they didn't honor them or betrayed them - provided the leverage through which excluded communities fought for their own inclusion. This is a complicated legacy. Confederate leaders create no complexity. To a man the central political ...
3/ act of their lives was to say that the most important value of slavery and the supremacy of the white race. It's all there in the documents. And on top of this, they literally tried to destroy the country. Every Confederate leader was a traitor.
4/ Even in the context of the Confederacy there are some interesting and valorous examples, even when we look at white Southerners and generals. Gen. George Henry Thomas was a Virginian three of his superiors - including Lee - defect to the Confederacy. He remained true to...
4/ his oath and served the Union with great distinction in the West. His family disowned him and never spoke to him again. A more complicated but historically interesting example is James Longstreet, one of the most high-profile, successful of Confederate Generals.
5/ For much of the war he served as Lee's principle subordinate. Unlike so many other Confederate Generals, after the war Longstreet became a Republican and ally of Commanding General and then President Grant. One of his last major public acts of the Reconstruction ...
6/ Era was at the so-called Battle of Liberty Place where he led a largely African-America troops and police against an anti-Reconstruction "White League" militia trying to wrest control over the Louisiana government after the disputed 1874 election.
7/ For obvious reasons Longstreet's reputation took a severe hit in Lost Cause mythology and for much of the last century he was wrongly blamed for Lee's critical defeat at Gettysburg. Of course a central pillar of Lost Cause mythology was the claim that the South's ...
8/ fight was really about states rights. Longstreet memorably said "I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery." Slavery and white supremacy are the only values the Confederate heroes represent. And if that weren't enough they were all traitors.
