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Originally Posted by PaulS
I don't understand how anybody can support those POS still being in the same spots w/our heroes. Too bad you don't understand.
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350 thousand Union soldier casualties and thousands of others to keep this country together and yet we are re-litigating everything today all over again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Dad Fisherman
They were pardoned Paul, every single one of them. In order to heal the country and move forward. I know that’s a foreign concept to those still pissing and moaning about Columbus Day, but I’ve moved on from it.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
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^^^ This.
Quote:
Originally Posted by detbuch
They were not traitors. Perhaps you couldn't answer if states are necessary because you don't understand why they were not traitors.
At the time, states had a lot more of their sovereignty intact than they do now. Their states had seceded from the union. They were patriots of the states they fought for, not traitors.
I understand Lincoln's argument that states could not secede without approval of the other states with whom they had a legal compact. But it wasn't clear then, nor totally so now, that the southern states did not have the right to secede. It certainly would be unfair to ask the average southerner what the complicated legal arguments were.
They fought with the same fidelity for their country as did the Union soldiers. Their sovereign states were their primary country, and the Confederacy was the new union to which their states belonged.
Lincoln understood that and saw no need to compound unnecessary animosities and to recognize the tragedy of brothers, literal or national, who were called to so brutally slaughter each other. Lincoln was not at all happy about having to kill so much of the flowering manhood of the South. He would have been repulsed by your point of view.
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Col Robert E Lee resigned his commission from the US Army when he was asked by General Winfield Scott to take the reigns of the US Army. But to take command of the US Army would required Lee to invade his home state of Virginia. Would you attack CT if directed so from New York regardless of the reason? I do not condone his fighting for the CSA but I can understand when he said he had no desire to draw a sword except in the defense of his home state, which was Virginia, and his home, which is now (appropriately IMO) Arlington National Cemetery.
A terrible war, mismanaged by both sides, as a result of bad politicians and politics on both sides, and a horrible reconstruction afterward.
Many of the points being re-litigated today were resolved then and the ones that were not (subjugating black people for example) we need to a better job on fixing and making fair today. Revisionist history and re-contesting of 150 years ago under today's standards is entirely unfair, unjust, and impossible without serious consequences.
The debt to keep this country together was paid for in blood, 150 years ago.