Great Speech

by Bryan

6 comments

1 Badtux { 05.24.17 at 12:46 am }

Indeed. You can’t say that these statues are merely “history” when it’s only the slave owners, and not the slaves, who have statues in these public parks and squares. I would feel much more sympathetic to those claiming that a statue of Jefferson Davis was history if they also put up a monument right by that statue to the slaves that toiled unpaid upon Davis’s plantation upon threat of death if they did not do so, the slaves who swiftly killed Davis’s overseers and seized the plantation for themselves the moment Union troops were heard in the distance, and in turn were slaughtered by a raiding party of Confederate cavalry upon the personal order of President Davis. A monument to those dead slaves, slaughtered upon President Jefferson Davis’s personal order, right beside the monument to Jefferson Davis would be history.

But President Davis alone on a stone plinth? That’s not history. That’s KKK racist propaganda.

So it goes.

2 Bryan { 05.24.17 at 1:49 pm }

It is not like Davis was even popular in the South. Beginning in 1862 with his draft law he was portrayed as a tyrant in Southern newspapers. Pickett never talked to Lee again after Gettysburg. There was little that the revisionists want to preserve from the actual history of the Civil War. They want people to believe that Birth of a Nation was based on fact.

3 Badtux { 05.24.17 at 6:45 pm }

Yep, by the end of the war Davis was probably the most hated man in the South, even more hated than Sherman (and that’s pretty darn hated). He was widely considered to be rigid, micromanaging, incompetent in his conduct of the war, and incompetent in his management of the Confederate economy, where families whose men had been drafted were starving while plantations sitting on the richest soil of the South were still growing cotton they couldn’t sell rather than food that people needed.

If that monument to Davis had been historically accurate, it would have had rotten egg and tomato splotches all over it…

4 Bryan { 05.24.17 at 9:14 pm }

I don’t think Cajuns would have wasted anything that might be edible, which covers a lot of ground, but there are various forms of ‘fertilizer’ available for the same purpose. The war was about slaves, but the people who owned them were exempt from the draft, and didn’t have to supply food to the army or the people. It is difficult to see how this was a good idea.

5 Badtux { 05.24.17 at 9:19 pm }

Well, to be fair, most of the slave owners did go to war, unlike Deadbeat Donnie and his chickenhawk contingent who found every way possible to personally stay out of a war in Vietnam that they supported. Of course they could afford to go to war, they had overseers and etc. to handle their plantations while they were gone. Yet still, they kept growing tons of cotton rather than the food that their armies needed. The Confederacy was lost, in the end, to sheer stupidity — poor leadership, bad decisions en masse by the planter class who started the war to defend slavery, etc. But then, that’s what slavery does — if you have slaves, there’s no need to actually *think* to get by, you have slaves for that. So it goes.

6 Bryan { 05.24.17 at 10:24 pm }

It was sold as a short, glorious adventure to people, thanks to the labor of slaves, had very little to occupy them. Everyone thought it would be over quickly, like every other war started by fools, for stupid reasons, that all seemed to drag on for years.

Cornmeal and bacon can only sustain you for so long before desertion seems like a good idea.