Guest Post by Ann Coulter
My ancestors were Presbyterian abolitionists who fought on the Union side, but I get really ticked off when imbeciles take a sledgehammer to my country’s history.
Last week, with self-satisfied glee, savages tore down the 14-foot statue of Robert E. Lee designed by the French sculptor Antonin Mercie and installed in 1890 on land deeded to the state — in return for a promise that the Commonwealth of Virginia “will hold said Statue and pedestal and Circle of ground perpetually sacred to the Monumental purpose to which they have been devoted and that she will faithfully guard it and affectionately protect it.”
But Virginia’s supreme court ruled that the state had a “free speech” right to violate the deed. On that theory, no contract can ever be enforced. I have a free speech right to say that I will NOT deliver 20 pounds of bananas!
It’s not just “Southerners” who revere Lee, as his Wikipedia page implies. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called Lee “one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.” Dwight Eisenhower said Lee was “noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.” Even Ulysses S. Grant called him “the acknowledged ablest general in the Confederate army.”
The son — not grandson — of a hero of the American Revolution, Lee graduated second in his class at West Point, then distinguished himself in the Mexican-American War. Lee’s reputation was so great that President Lincoln asked him to take command of the Union forces against the South. But Lee was a Virginian and felt compelled to take Virginia’s side, so he resigned from the U.S. Army.
(For my illiterate readers and anyone who gets his news from MSNBC: That makes Lee the opposite of a “traitor.” A traitor is someone who pretends to be on your side, while secretly working with the enemy, not someone who loudly announces, I quit. My friends and I are leaving.)
Among his accomplishments, there’s also the minor fact that Lee saved the country. Immediately after a bitter, bloody civil war, pitting brother against brother — four of Mary Lincoln’s five brothers fought for the Confederacy — the landscape littered with the dead, Lee ensured that the South would accept defeat.
When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, he was at the height of his powers, idolized throughout the South. The president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, wanted to fight on, telling his officers, “I think we can whip the enemy yet, if our people will turn out.”
But Lee, not Davis, held the hearts of his countrymen. When one of Lee’s own officers urged him to lead a guerilla war against the North, Lee remonstrated, “as a Christian people, there is now but one course to pursue. We must accept the situation; these men must go home and plant a crop, and we must proceed to build up our country on a new basis.”
He could easily have pulled a Trump and told his supporters, We got screwed! Take to the hills! They would have followed. Hundreds of thousands more lives would have been lost. The country might never have recovered.
But Lee said no, it ends now.
In his biography of Grant, Ron Chernow says the Union general believed that “had Lee resisted surrender and encouraged his army to wage guerrilla warfare, it would have spawned infinite trouble. … Such was Lee’s unrivaled stature that his acceptance of defeat reconciled many diehard rebels to follow his example.”
Thanks to Lee, we became a functioning country again within about 15 years, instead of becoming Serbia, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Rwanda and on and on and on.
After Lee’s surrender, Union soldiers saluted their defeated foes. Erstwhile warring officers embraced one another. One Confederate officer said: “Great God, thought I to myself, how my heart swells out to such a magnanimous touch of humanity! Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?” When told of Lee’s surrender, Lincoln ordered the Union band to play “Dixie.” Years later, Grant spoke of his deep affection for Lee’s army, second only to that for his own men.
Never has a civil war ended with such love between the former enemies. That’s our history, our country, our war — North and South, black and white.
The vandalizing of American history has absolutely nothing to do with black people or slavery. Lots of historical figures had slaves. Not only American heroes like Washington and Jefferson, but Kamala Harris’ ancestors — according to her own father. Barack Obama is the only president who might be descended from slave traders, a particularly repellent group, inasmuch as Kenya was a major player in the slave trade.
How about these white saviors demand a box on their Ivy League admission forms: “If admitted to Harvard, would you be willing to give up your place to a black person?” That will NEVER happen. Instead, we get: I went out and courageously defaced a Confederate statue! Because some things are more important than my personal comfort.
No, the moving force behind this frenzied destruction of American history isn’t black people suddenly offended by monuments that have been around for a century; it’s pushy newcomers, bitter that their ancestors had nothing to do with the creation of this country. After other people’s ancestors carved a nation out of the wilderness, they just kind of showed up. Now they go around obliterating anything that reminds them that this country was up and running long before they got here.
America’s leading hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, titles its report on Confederate symbols “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy.” Yes, exactly, it’s not their heritage, so it must be destroyed. My ancestors fought on the Union side, but they were involved, and it matters to me.
MSNBC’s smirking Chris Hayes can get weepy about some ancient Roman ruin, and Rachel Maddow about a building in Warsaw, but I care about my history. These savages are smashing and graffitiing my antiquities.
How would they like it if we took a sledgehammer to “Piss Christ”?
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Next will be Washington, Jefferson and company. There will be no end to the Marxist plan to destroy American history.
Sorry but the American “conservative” movement is filled and populated with cowards. Until you people start nominating and electing real conservatives, or in the alternative use force to effect the change you seek – this will continue.
When you seek someone to blame, look in the mirror.
“You people?” What does that make you? I am a Libertarian, so any Conservative I support has to be “real” and traditional. So I don’t have to look in the mirror I am not part of the problem, never have been.
Yah, we’ll vote em out in the mid-terms….
“Until you people start nominating and electing real conservatives….”
No doubt you will become quite illustrious in the camps, advocating your platform of term limits and recall ballots for the Warden and his kapos. Why, your followers may even nominate you as “Groovy, man!”
“When you seek someone to blame, look in the mirror.”
Oh, i was unaware of the existence of the Haus Stormers! Where can I sign up?
I read the article to the poinr where Coulter lambastes Trump for continuing to challenge the stolen election. Knowing the subsequent history of Southern subjugation by the Yankees during the following hundred years I believe Davis to be the heroic figure, not Lee. Capitulation to tyranny is never acceptable.
Stonewall Jackson and Bedford Forrest were the real heroes, Lee made it easy for the Union by fighting pitched battles against superior forces instead of waging a hit and run campaign…
That’s a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking, isn’t it? I don’t believe that Lee “made it easy for the Union” by fighting pitched battles. Most of which he fucking won. If he had “made it easy”, the South would have collapsed in 1862.
And how do you conduct a “hit and run”campaign (which Lee did at the Seven Days, 2nd Manassas, Chancellorsville, etc) at the Army-level with foot infantry, any better than Bobby Lee? Lee was a fighter. He had the superior troops, numbers be damned. And the balls to use them.
Unless you want to compare Lee to Jackson in the Valley. Hint- Jackson and Forrest manuevered corps-level formations. They did not have to co-ordinate multi-corps Armies.
Lee was them, and more. If it hadn’t been for dirty Yankee foreign politics and that cowardly blockade, we’d all be speaking Geechee and celebrating our Constitution instead of seeing it waste away.
“My ancestors were Presbyterian abolitionists …”
Your ancestors were chimpanzees with very large Adams Apples.
Nevertheless, this was one of Apple Annie’s better efforts.
She still believes Obama’s biological father was the Kenyan.
Check the mirror, Fucky.
I am (obviously) a Southerner and proud of my heritage. America began at Jamestown, the War of Independence was brought to a close in the South, and our contribution to this country is vast. Simply put, without the South there is no America. No other part of America has ever intrigued and fascinated outsiders more than the South, although that interest is often enough generated by the strangeness others see in us.
No Southerner has ever claimed that the South is a “city on a hill”. We never have tried to tell anybody else how to live, pointed out their flaws, or demanded that they do as we say. We are – most of us – Christians who know all too well how fallen man is. We will never point out the mote in anybody else’s eye.
Our purpose in life is to live it. Many of us drink too much and engage in other sins. So what? At least we do not run around bothering and pestering other people.
I say this with absolutely no intention of attacking any other part of the country or claiming any sort of superiority for my own. I love our country, all of it, with no exceptions (OK, hold San Francisco in its current state). I certainly have no dislike of any of my fellow Americans, as long as they are patriots – I know this leaves out a considerable chunk of the population, but so be it. They can repent any time.
We have been the nation’s whipping boy since before the Civil War. Those who did not have to face living in the middle of a huge population of blacks found it easy to preach to those who did. These days we can’t help but feel a bit of wry amusement at what those saintly folks have done to Northern cities. At the same time we know that they are destroying the country, slowly but surely, along with the influx of aliens and the mindless, suicidal Left.
The slavery thing is forever being thrown in our faces. As a man who has literally been in every country in this hemisphere, I can only say, “Go piss up a rope”.
The South was not some bizarre, freakish region that popped up like some horrid cancer in the pristine land of goodness and light that was the United States. Slavery was the rule in every single colony of the New World, every last one. British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and even Danish! All were guilty of the same crime. Most African slaves went to Brazil, only about five percent ended up on our shores (the lucky five percent, by the way) and slavery was not finally ended until the 1880’s in Brazil and Cuba. In Puerto Rico, supposed “homeland” of AOC, it was abolished in 1873. New England and the other northern colonies (and, later, states) all embraced slavery. Rhode Island and Massachusetts were major slave trading centers, with their ships transporting hundreds of thousands of slaves to the New World. Greed was not confined to Southerners.
As for the Civil War, the South had one war objective: Leave the Union. Yes, slavery was the root cause of the war, as it was a slave-based commodity economy that had made the South prosperous and different. But slavery was perfectly safe (if restricted in expansion) within the Union, as Lincoln himself made clear. A group of Southern hotheads had ambitions they could not realize within the Union and agitated for secession but the event that finally broke the ties of brotherhood between the North and South forever was the attack on Harper’s Ferry by John Brown and a gang of renegades.
The Burning Platform has published several articles which accurately explain that the Left in this country literally wants to kill us. They are really that sick and twisted. Well, how do you think Southerners felt when they learned that Brown, an intelligent, brave, but unbalanced fanatic, sought to ignite a slave rebellion in the South, with all the horrors it would bring? The slave rebellion in Haiti was not that far in the past and its aftermath was even worse. Then they learned the other part. Prominent, wealthy, influential men in the North had financed this lunatic scheme. Worse, huge number of people in the North (but not all, by any means) openly applauded Brown’s murders. That was the final straw. For most Southerners, if their “brothers” in the North wanted them killed in their beds along with their families, the Union was already dead, a fiction.
Brown’s “invasion” would have been comical had it not resulted in the deaths of a number of people (the first one they murdered was a free black man). And just who was calle don to suppress this treasonous criminal act?
Colonel Robert E. Lee, U.S. Army, ably assisted by one Lt. Jeb Stuart and a party of U.S. Marines.
When Lee made his decision to leave the army when Virginia left the Union, do you think the memory of Harper’s Ferry might have had something to do with it? And Lee was what we call an FFV, a member of the First Families of Virginia. These people – the Lee’s, the Washington’s, the Jefferson’s, the Monroe’s, the Madison’s, the Carter’s, the Randolph’s – had virtually created the United States. Lee was well aware of it and had been raised among the Founders. To suggest that he, of all people, was incapable of deciding if secession was a legal right, is absurd.
Following the war, Lee did all he could to bring about reconciliation between the North and South. His views of the blacks were those of almost all white Americans of the time but they were not ones of hostility or hate. He wished them well and admired many blacks but feared for their future. A wise man, General Lee.
Now they have taken down his statue in the city he and his men defended with such stubborn valor. Good. The creatures who inhabit Richmond today do not deserve a monument to such a man. The governor of that once noble state is a worthless buffoon, likely to be replaced soon by another clown.
There is a saying in Spanish. A cada marrano llega su Noche Buena. Every pig will have its Christmas Eve. Roast pig is a favorite for that festival. The Left had better enjoy life now because when the dam breaks they will be the main course.
“Yes, slavery was the root cause of the war”
yes, it was the Tariff and the northern industrialists who wanted the war..Then Lincoln blockaded the southern ports, which started it…
https://stillnessinthestorm.com/2018/11/slavery-in-america-who-really-owned-and-operated-the-slave-trade/
Jews in New York and Boston financed the slave trade, and yankees owned the ships..
And here’s another example.
Seven southern US states, mostly led by Republican governors, say they are now facing shortages of monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19 after the federal government took over the distribution, citing the need for “equity.” …
In Texas, the Biden administration told the state “to reduce its use of the therapeutic treatment that has literally been saving lives and reducing hospitalizations,” Mark Keough, a judge in charge of Montgomery County, just north of Houston, said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “The manufacturer has confirmed supplies are ample but due to the Defense Production Act, the White House and it’s agencies are the only entities who can purchase and distribute this treatment,” Keough added.
https://www.rt.com/usa/535052-biden-rations-monoclonal-treatments/
Slavery ended in every country without resorting to civil wars, except in the United States. Why is that?
I have read opinions that slavery was already dying as an institution in America … that it had at best another decade or two before it also dissolved of it’s own burdensome weight in America.
Who fired the first shot?
The South. Perhaps they were goaded into it … felt they had no other choice (even thought there are ALWAYS other choices) … but, fact is, they fired first.
That’s not a criticism. Just the way it happened. But I do wonder what would have happened if the South refused to fire weapons, then or later. Would Lincoln have had enough support to start the war? My guess is ‘no’, but what the fuck do I know.
The CW was a Masonic/bankster stacked deck from the get-go, the usual suspect wanted our land and the wealth of the plantation owners. Now, Yankees want to move south , still wanting what we have. Better weather, better housing cost, lower taxes. Why can’t Yankees stay on THEIR side of the Mason-Dixon and leave us alone?
Point remains: surrender was a step in the road to now. Josie Wales was right (& Clint, in different words, told Geffen to fuck off when he suggested the movie needed to be shortened…).
Southrons gone guerilla woulda’ pervaded the invaders with dread. But, it would have been necessary to drive north, root out the bankers & financiers, & dreadicate them, too, else they’d just regroup & return. To prevail for a little while, an actual civil war it woulda’ took, because Yankees are like zombies, never stop coming back. Same as now.
Bottom layer of molecules in the line: agrarians vs industrians, the steel weeds are gonna overrun croppers. And agrarian-industrian blends are devil-deals: dark side will prevail.
The ignorance is staggering. Most people don’t realize that the South stood for an agrarian nation and not a commercial nation run by international banksters. So the North won and the freed African Americans who got to live in ghettos in the big cities. What a great trade off.
Yes, I know all about the tariff. As for Davis or Lee, Davis would not have been there to see Lee’s army slaughtered to the last man. Slavery and the South’s agrarian economy opposed its interests to those of the North. Please read Gary Gallagher, The Confedrate War, re why Lee and others refused to authorize guerrilla warfare. Ditto why “hit and run” warfare would have failed. The Confederates inteded to establish a respected government, not a nest of bandidos. First shot? I believe it was in Charleston harbor, not Boston. Not sure hiw that makes the South the aggressors…..
A good read until the author felt the need to dump a bucket of shit on President Trump for no good reason.