Compatriots,
Requests for funds to be considered by The Budget and Finance Committee and the General Executive Council (GEC) at the GEC's March 19, 2011 meeting must be received by February 1, 2011. Funding requests should be sent to Adjutant in Chief Rand (chuckrand3@gmail.com) and Executive Director Sewell (exedir@scv.org). It is prefered that requests and supporting documentations be sent as attachments to an email message.
If you send the request and supporting documents in hard copy format, it should be sent to AIC Rand, Executive Director Sewell and Army Commanders Earnest, Strain and Honnoll who also serve on the Budget and Finance Committee. Mailing address can be found on the national committee page at this address:
http://www.scv.org/committeeView.php?cid=BFf.
Those seeking funds should also fill out the form at this address on scv.org: http://www.scv.org/pdf/SCVFundRequests.pdf.
The information requested in the form is the minimum that is needed to consider a request. You are encouraged to submit other information regarding your request if it helps clarify the purpose and other particulars of the project.
If you have any questions please contact me by email of phone at 318-387-3791.
Chuck Rand
Adjutant In Chief
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Virginia's Confederate Soldier Monuments
Despite Virginia's Role in Electing First Black President, Confederate Soldier Statues Hold Their Ground
By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Driving by, you might not notice the man with the gun. He has been the recipient of flowers and curses, the victim of drunken drivers and vandals. One public figure suggested throwing him into the river. Some people don't even know who he is.
Virginia is home to what scholars say is the densest concentration of Confederate common-soldier statues of any state. Visitors from outside the South are sometimes surprised to see them: more than 100 unknown infantrymen, often in prominent places across the state. Locals tend to take for granted the lone figure that often stands near the county courthouse, commemorating what came to be known to some as the "lost cause" and to others as the war that ended slavery.
Long considered a conservative Southern state when it came to politics, Virginia turned that image upside down in November when it helped elect the nation's first black president. Many of those voters were in Northern Virginia, home to many transplants from other states. But the election also prompted some native Virginians to take another look at the statues and what they represent.
Growing up in Willisville in Loudoun County, Jennifer Grant, 33, rarely thought about the statue of a soldier with a rifle that has guarded the courthouse in Leesburg since 1908. When she did, the thoughts were not cheery.
"I didn't like it," said Grant, who is black and is a deputy clerk at the county courthouse. But, she said, "there were certain things people didn't talk about."
During and after the civil rights movement, some did talk about it, calling for the statues to be removed. But the memorials had staunch defenders, particularly among the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had raised money to erect many of them.
"What's offensive to me might not be offensive to you, and vice versa," said Debby Mullins, president of the organization's Mary Custis Lee-17th Virginia Regiment chapter, which helps maintain a statue in Alexandria. "Everybody should be able to celebrate their heritage."
The fact that the statues went up at all testifies to the South's resurgence soon after its defeat, said John Coski, library and research director at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.
"How unusual it is that the losers in a war . . . were free to erect monuments to their heroes," he said, noting that the South began regaining political clout soon after the war. "A monument always testifies to power -- to who was in power at the time."
Monuments to the Civil War appeared soon after it ended, but the solitary-soldier trend began in Virginia in the late 1880s. "Appomattox," unveiled in 1889 at Prince and Washington streets in Alexandria, was one of the first.
The soldier, unarmed and sporting a walrus moustache, faces south, his back to the Capitol, slightly swayback, head bowed. Below him are the names of Alexandria residents killed in the war.
His expression is subject to interpretation.
For the rest of the article and to see photos of some of the statues visit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR2009032003233.html?sid=ST2010011702315
By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Driving by, you might not notice the man with the gun. He has been the recipient of flowers and curses, the victim of drunken drivers and vandals. One public figure suggested throwing him into the river. Some people don't even know who he is.
Virginia is home to what scholars say is the densest concentration of Confederate common-soldier statues of any state. Visitors from outside the South are sometimes surprised to see them: more than 100 unknown infantrymen, often in prominent places across the state. Locals tend to take for granted the lone figure that often stands near the county courthouse, commemorating what came to be known to some as the "lost cause" and to others as the war that ended slavery.
Long considered a conservative Southern state when it came to politics, Virginia turned that image upside down in November when it helped elect the nation's first black president. Many of those voters were in Northern Virginia, home to many transplants from other states. But the election also prompted some native Virginians to take another look at the statues and what they represent.
Growing up in Willisville in Loudoun County, Jennifer Grant, 33, rarely thought about the statue of a soldier with a rifle that has guarded the courthouse in Leesburg since 1908. When she did, the thoughts were not cheery.
"I didn't like it," said Grant, who is black and is a deputy clerk at the county courthouse. But, she said, "there were certain things people didn't talk about."
During and after the civil rights movement, some did talk about it, calling for the statues to be removed. But the memorials had staunch defenders, particularly among the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had raised money to erect many of them.
"What's offensive to me might not be offensive to you, and vice versa," said Debby Mullins, president of the organization's Mary Custis Lee-17th Virginia Regiment chapter, which helps maintain a statue in Alexandria. "Everybody should be able to celebrate their heritage."
The fact that the statues went up at all testifies to the South's resurgence soon after its defeat, said John Coski, library and research director at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.
"How unusual it is that the losers in a war . . . were free to erect monuments to their heroes," he said, noting that the South began regaining political clout soon after the war. "A monument always testifies to power -- to who was in power at the time."
Monuments to the Civil War appeared soon after it ended, but the solitary-soldier trend began in Virginia in the late 1880s. "Appomattox," unveiled in 1889 at Prince and Washington streets in Alexandria, was one of the first.
The soldier, unarmed and sporting a walrus moustache, faces south, his back to the Capitol, slightly swayback, head bowed. Below him are the names of Alexandria residents killed in the war.
His expression is subject to interpretation.
For the rest of the article and to see photos of some of the statues visit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR2009032003233.html?sid=ST2010011702315
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Message for Vicksburg
Civil War message opened, decoded: No help coming
Sat Dec 25, 2010
RICHMOND, Va. – A glass vial stopped with a cork during the Civil War has been opened, revealing a coded message to the desperate Confederate commander in Vicksburg on the day the Mississippi city fell to Union forces 147 years ago.
The dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.
The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton's surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.
The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.
"He's saying, 'I can't help you. I have no troops, I have no supplies, I have no way to get over there,' " Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message. "It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was."
The bottle, less than 2 inches in length, had sat undisturbed at the museum since 1896. It was a gift from Capt. William A. Smith, of King George County, who served during the Vicksburg siege.
It was Wright who decided to investigate the contents of the strange little bottle containing a tightly wrapped note, a .38-caliber bullet and a white thread.
"Just sort of a curiosity thing," said Wright. "This notion of, do we have any idea what his message says?"
The answer was no.
Wright asked a local art conservator, Scott Nolley, to examine the clear vial before she attempted to open it. He looked at the bottle under an electron microscope and discovered that salt had bonded the cork tightly to the bottle's mouth. He put the bottle on a hotplate to expand the glass, used a scalpel to loosen the cork, then gently plucked it out with tweezers.
The sewing thread was looped around the 6 1/2-by-2 1/2-inch paper, which was folded to fit into the bottle. The rolled message was removed and taken to a paper conservator, who successfully unfurled the message.
But the coded message, which appears to be a random collection of letters, did not reveal itself immediately.
Eager to learn the meaning of the code, Wright took the message home for the weekend to decipher. She had no success.
A retired CIA code breaker, David Gaddy, was contacted, and he cracked the code in several weeks.
A Navy cryptologist independently confirmed Gaddy's interpretation. Cmdr. John B. Hunter, an information warfare officer, said he deciphered the code over two weeks while on deployment aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. A computer could have unscrambled the words in a fraction of the time.
"To me, it was not that difficult," he said. "I had fun with this and it took me longer than I should have."
The code is called the "Vigenere cipher," a centuries-old encryption in which letters of the alphabet are shifted a set number of places so an "a" would become a "d" — essentially, creating words with different letter combinations.
The code was widely used by Southern forces during the Civil War, according to Civil War Times Illustrated.
The source of the message was likely Maj. Gen. John G. Walker, of the Texas Division, who had under his command William Smith, the donor of the bottle.
The full text of the message to Pemberton reads:
"Gen'l Pemberton:
You can expect no help from this side of the river. Let Gen'l Johnston know, if possible, when you can attack the same point on the enemy's lines. Inform me also and I will endeavor to make a diversion. I have sent some caps (explosive devices). I subjoin a despatch from General Johnston."
The last line, Wright said, seems to suggest a separate delivery to Pemberton would be the code to break the message.
"The date of this message clearly indicates that this person has no idea that the city is about to be surrendered," she said.
The Johnston mention in the dispatch is Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, whose 32,000 troops were encamped south of Vicksburg and prevented from assisting Pemberton by Grant's 35,000 Union troops. Pemberton had held out hope that Johnston would eventually come to his aid.
The message was dispatched during an especially terrible time in Vicksburg. Grant was unsuccessful in defeating Pemberton's troops on two occasions, so the Union commander instead decided to encircle the city and block the flow of supplies or support.
Many in the city resorted to eating cats, dogs and leather. Soup was made from wallpaper paste.
After a six-week siege, Pemberton relented. Vicksburg, so scarred by the experience, refused to celebrate July 4 for the next 80 years.
So what about the bullet in the bottom of the bottle?
Wright suspects the messenger was instructed to toss the bottle into the river if Union troops intercepted his passage. The weight of the bullet would have carried the corked bottle to the bottom, she said.
For Pemberton, the bottle is symbolic of his lost cause: the bad news never made it to him.
The Confederate messenger probably arrived to the river's edge and saw a U.S. flag flying over the city.
"He figured out what was going on and said, 'Well, this is pointless,' and turned back," Wright said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101225/ap_on_re_us/us_message_in_a_bottle
Sat Dec 25, 2010
RICHMOND, Va. – A glass vial stopped with a cork during the Civil War has been opened, revealing a coded message to the desperate Confederate commander in Vicksburg on the day the Mississippi city fell to Union forces 147 years ago.
The dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.
The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton's surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.
The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.
"He's saying, 'I can't help you. I have no troops, I have no supplies, I have no way to get over there,' " Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message. "It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was."
The bottle, less than 2 inches in length, had sat undisturbed at the museum since 1896. It was a gift from Capt. William A. Smith, of King George County, who served during the Vicksburg siege.
It was Wright who decided to investigate the contents of the strange little bottle containing a tightly wrapped note, a .38-caliber bullet and a white thread.
"Just sort of a curiosity thing," said Wright. "This notion of, do we have any idea what his message says?"
The answer was no.
Wright asked a local art conservator, Scott Nolley, to examine the clear vial before she attempted to open it. He looked at the bottle under an electron microscope and discovered that salt had bonded the cork tightly to the bottle's mouth. He put the bottle on a hotplate to expand the glass, used a scalpel to loosen the cork, then gently plucked it out with tweezers.
The sewing thread was looped around the 6 1/2-by-2 1/2-inch paper, which was folded to fit into the bottle. The rolled message was removed and taken to a paper conservator, who successfully unfurled the message.
But the coded message, which appears to be a random collection of letters, did not reveal itself immediately.
Eager to learn the meaning of the code, Wright took the message home for the weekend to decipher. She had no success.
A retired CIA code breaker, David Gaddy, was contacted, and he cracked the code in several weeks.
A Navy cryptologist independently confirmed Gaddy's interpretation. Cmdr. John B. Hunter, an information warfare officer, said he deciphered the code over two weeks while on deployment aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. A computer could have unscrambled the words in a fraction of the time.
"To me, it was not that difficult," he said. "I had fun with this and it took me longer than I should have."
The code is called the "Vigenere cipher," a centuries-old encryption in which letters of the alphabet are shifted a set number of places so an "a" would become a "d" — essentially, creating words with different letter combinations.
The code was widely used by Southern forces during the Civil War, according to Civil War Times Illustrated.
The source of the message was likely Maj. Gen. John G. Walker, of the Texas Division, who had under his command William Smith, the donor of the bottle.
The full text of the message to Pemberton reads:
"Gen'l Pemberton:
You can expect no help from this side of the river. Let Gen'l Johnston know, if possible, when you can attack the same point on the enemy's lines. Inform me also and I will endeavor to make a diversion. I have sent some caps (explosive devices). I subjoin a despatch from General Johnston."
The last line, Wright said, seems to suggest a separate delivery to Pemberton would be the code to break the message.
"The date of this message clearly indicates that this person has no idea that the city is about to be surrendered," she said.
The Johnston mention in the dispatch is Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, whose 32,000 troops were encamped south of Vicksburg and prevented from assisting Pemberton by Grant's 35,000 Union troops. Pemberton had held out hope that Johnston would eventually come to his aid.
The message was dispatched during an especially terrible time in Vicksburg. Grant was unsuccessful in defeating Pemberton's troops on two occasions, so the Union commander instead decided to encircle the city and block the flow of supplies or support.
Many in the city resorted to eating cats, dogs and leather. Soup was made from wallpaper paste.
After a six-week siege, Pemberton relented. Vicksburg, so scarred by the experience, refused to celebrate July 4 for the next 80 years.
So what about the bullet in the bottom of the bottle?
Wright suspects the messenger was instructed to toss the bottle into the river if Union troops intercepted his passage. The weight of the bullet would have carried the corked bottle to the bottom, she said.
For Pemberton, the bottle is symbolic of his lost cause: the bad news never made it to him.
The Confederate messenger probably arrived to the river's edge and saw a U.S. flag flying over the city.
"He figured out what was going on and said, 'Well, this is pointless,' and turned back," Wright said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101225/ap_on_re_us/us_message_in_a_bottle
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Sen. Ford Supports South Carolina Secession Observance
African-American State Senator defends Secession celebrations
December 22nd, 2010
Many South Carolinians objected to a recent Civil War memorial celebration, leading to NAACP-sponsored demonstrations at the Charleston site of the Secession Gala and in front of its attendees’ hotels.
But one local African-American official recently defended the secession celebration.
Robert Ford, state senator from Charleston, openly stated his support for celebrations of the sesquicentennial of South Carolina’s secession.
In a December 21 press release, Ford stated “every African American and every White citizen across the United States should celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War.”
The War Between the States had black soldiers on both opposing sides, Ford pointed out, and both slaves and free black men in the Confederate military.
“Those men who fought and died in the Civil War of 1860-1865 did so because they felt that they were doing the right thing,” Ford said. “In 2010, who are we and why do we think that we have the right to say they were wrong? “So, to all of those brave men – black and white, slaves and free – we should make every effort to take part in this celebration over the next five years.”
The sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War will be in 1865.
The South Carolina Secession Gala, held in Charleston on December 20, was sponsored by the Confederate Heritage Trust with aid from the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Three local Republican officials participated in a dramatic reenactment of the State Assembly's signing of the Ordinance of Secession.
The local chapter of the NAACP organized a protest of the Gala at its Gaillard Auditorium location, followed by a march to a nearby AME church for a forum to discuss the event and its indication of reborn racism.
Ford has served in the state senate since 1993, and ran for governor in the 2010 Democratic primary.
http://www.examiner.com/charleston-democrat-in-charleston-sc/african-american-state-senator-defends-secession-celebrations
December 22nd, 2010
Many South Carolinians objected to a recent Civil War memorial celebration, leading to NAACP-sponsored demonstrations at the Charleston site of the Secession Gala and in front of its attendees’ hotels.
But one local African-American official recently defended the secession celebration.
Robert Ford, state senator from Charleston, openly stated his support for celebrations of the sesquicentennial of South Carolina’s secession.
In a December 21 press release, Ford stated “every African American and every White citizen across the United States should celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War.”
The War Between the States had black soldiers on both opposing sides, Ford pointed out, and both slaves and free black men in the Confederate military.
“Those men who fought and died in the Civil War of 1860-1865 did so because they felt that they were doing the right thing,” Ford said. “In 2010, who are we and why do we think that we have the right to say they were wrong? “So, to all of those brave men – black and white, slaves and free – we should make every effort to take part in this celebration over the next five years.”
The sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War will be in 1865.
The South Carolina Secession Gala, held in Charleston on December 20, was sponsored by the Confederate Heritage Trust with aid from the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Three local Republican officials participated in a dramatic reenactment of the State Assembly's signing of the Ordinance of Secession.
The local chapter of the NAACP organized a protest of the Gala at its Gaillard Auditorium location, followed by a march to a nearby AME church for a forum to discuss the event and its indication of reborn racism.
Ford has served in the state senate since 1993, and ran for governor in the 2010 Democratic primary.
http://www.examiner.com/charleston-democrat-in-charleston-sc/african-american-state-senator-defends-secession-celebrations
Jeff Davis Swearing In as President of the CSA to be Reenacted
Confederate leader's oath to be recreated in Ala.
By PHILLIP RAWLS
Dec. 22, 2010
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Hundreds of Civil War re-enactors will parade up Montgomery's main street to the state Capitol on Feb. 19 to recreate the swearing-in of Confederate President Jefferson Davis 150 years ago.
African-American leaders might protest nearby with a message that the Confederacy should be remembered with shame for trying to keep blacks enslaved rather than with celebration.
Organizers say they are not trying to create controversy.
"We are trying to present a historical account of what happened 150 years ago," said Thomas Strain Jr. of Tanner, a member of the national board of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The national SCV is organizing the event, with more than 700 people already signed up to participate in the parade. Strain said it will look like the militia units and private citizens who marched up Dexter Avenue on Feb. 18, 1861, to see Davis take the oath of office at the top of the state Capitol steps. Several thousand people, including descendants of Davis, are expected to watch the parade and swearing-in ceremony.
Organizers will then fast-forward a month to recreate the raising of the first Confederate flag at the Capitol. But it will be done on a flagpole near the Capitol rather than using the main pole on the dome. In 1993, black legislators won a lawsuit that ended Alabama's practice of flying the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol dome, and the SCV isn't trying to buck that court ruling.
"I'd love to see it up there, but that's not going to happen," Strain said.
Alabama's longest-serving black legislator, Democrat Alvin Holmes of Montgomery, was one of the lawmakers who won that lawsuit. Holmes said he plans to work with civil rights groups to organize a protest, much like occurred Monday night when a "Secession Ball" was held in Charleston, S.C. Members of the NAACP marched and held a vigil and one leader called that celebration "disgusting."
"The Confederacy was to maintain the institution of slavery," he said. "People can argue it was about states' rights, but the states' rights was to maintain slavery. They wanted slaves and they didn't want the federal government to get involved."
Various events are being planned to mark the Civil War Sesquicentennial, from those under the auspices of the National Park Service and states to privately organized events such as the swearing-in recreation in Alabama. Nearly 2 percent of the nation's population, more than 600,000 people, died in the Civil War.
Robert Reames of Birmingham, state commander for the SCV, prefers to call the Civil War "the War Between the States." He said the re-enactment Feb. 19 will have a simple message: "That our ancestors did what they did in a honorable fashion and we're here to remember that honor."
Holmes, a retired college history teacher, said groups such as the SCV present a glamorous view of the war and don't talk about how it left the South economically depressed for decades.
"It wasn't great. It was shameful," he said.
By PHILLIP RAWLS
Dec. 22, 2010
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Hundreds of Civil War re-enactors will parade up Montgomery's main street to the state Capitol on Feb. 19 to recreate the swearing-in of Confederate President Jefferson Davis 150 years ago.
African-American leaders might protest nearby with a message that the Confederacy should be remembered with shame for trying to keep blacks enslaved rather than with celebration.
Organizers say they are not trying to create controversy.
"We are trying to present a historical account of what happened 150 years ago," said Thomas Strain Jr. of Tanner, a member of the national board of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The national SCV is organizing the event, with more than 700 people already signed up to participate in the parade. Strain said it will look like the militia units and private citizens who marched up Dexter Avenue on Feb. 18, 1861, to see Davis take the oath of office at the top of the state Capitol steps. Several thousand people, including descendants of Davis, are expected to watch the parade and swearing-in ceremony.
Organizers will then fast-forward a month to recreate the raising of the first Confederate flag at the Capitol. But it will be done on a flagpole near the Capitol rather than using the main pole on the dome. In 1993, black legislators won a lawsuit that ended Alabama's practice of flying the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol dome, and the SCV isn't trying to buck that court ruling.
"I'd love to see it up there, but that's not going to happen," Strain said.
Alabama's longest-serving black legislator, Democrat Alvin Holmes of Montgomery, was one of the lawmakers who won that lawsuit. Holmes said he plans to work with civil rights groups to organize a protest, much like occurred Monday night when a "Secession Ball" was held in Charleston, S.C. Members of the NAACP marched and held a vigil and one leader called that celebration "disgusting."
"The Confederacy was to maintain the institution of slavery," he said. "People can argue it was about states' rights, but the states' rights was to maintain slavery. They wanted slaves and they didn't want the federal government to get involved."
Various events are being planned to mark the Civil War Sesquicentennial, from those under the auspices of the National Park Service and states to privately organized events such as the swearing-in recreation in Alabama. Nearly 2 percent of the nation's population, more than 600,000 people, died in the Civil War.
Robert Reames of Birmingham, state commander for the SCV, prefers to call the Civil War "the War Between the States." He said the re-enactment Feb. 19 will have a simple message: "That our ancestors did what they did in a honorable fashion and we're here to remember that honor."
Holmes, a retired college history teacher, said groups such as the SCV present a glamorous view of the war and don't talk about how it left the South economically depressed for decades.
"It wasn't great. It was shameful," he said.
STEPHEN DILL LEE INSTITUTION - FEBRUARY 4, 2011
THE STEPHEN DILL LEE INSTITUTE
WISHES YOU A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS
AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR
Don’t forget to register for the February 4-5 Institute to be held at the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston. The Institute is the primary educational outreach tool of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Registration information and hotel reservation information may be found at the Institute website located at www.StephenDLeeInstitute.com. Please support our Southern history and educators. Discounts for hotel reservations will be available until January 15.
Scholarships for students and teachers are still available. Anyone having questions can contact Brag Bowling at 804-389-3620 or email to bragdonb@verizon.net.
See you in balmy Charleston, South Carolina on February 4, 2011.
WISHES YOU A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS
AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR
Don’t forget to register for the February 4-5 Institute to be held at the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston. The Institute is the primary educational outreach tool of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Registration information and hotel reservation information may be found at the Institute website located at www.StephenDLeeInstitute.com. Please support our Southern history and educators. Discounts for hotel reservations will be available until January 15.
Scholarships for students and teachers are still available. Anyone having questions can contact Brag Bowling at 804-389-3620 or email to bragdonb@verizon.net.
See you in balmy Charleston, South Carolina on February 4, 2011.
Confederate Gunboat Located in South Carolina
Archaeologists find wreckage of Confederate gunboat December, 21 2010
(CNN) -- The Ides of March was indeed a portentous day for the Confederate gunboat Peedee and its the 90-man crew, which heaved three artillery pieces overboard and torched the doomed vessel in the waning weeks of the Civil War.
The C.S.S. Peedee, built inland between Florence and Marion, South Carolina, was unable to reach the Atlantic Ocean because Union forces had taken coastal Georgetown. The crew scuttled the wooden Peedee on March 15, 1865, leaving its remains in the Pee Dee River.
In 2009, state underwater archaeologist Chris Amer confirmed the discovery of two of three cannon that were placed on the Peedee at Mars Bluff Navy Yard.
On Tuesday, Amer announced that the University of South Carolina team had located the mostly salvaged wreckage of the Peedee, which lies a few feet below the river bottom and a field of timbers.
"They are kind of like pick-up sticks," Amer said of the timbers, which may be remnants of logging operations.
Working with a $200,000 grant, the team plans to raise the two cannon -- one a smoothbore Dahlgren, the other a Brooke rifled gun -- in the spring or summer of 2011 and continue looking for the other Brooke piece and remains of the Mars Bluff Navy Yard, which Amer thinks are upstream of the wreckage. The artillery pieces were dumped about one mile from the site of the wreckage.
The researchers also want to retrieve several cannonballs for preservation at nearby Francis Marion University.
The Confederacy built inland shipbuilding operations across the South. But many of the vessels saw limited, if any, action before they were scuttled or destroyed by Union forces.
The C.S.S. Peedee was able to lob at few shells at Union forces when its steam-powered propellers churned upstream to Cheraw shortly before its demise.
"It was trapped," Amer said of the gunboat.
Built to protect the coast or patrol waterways, the Peedee and others in its class were hardly built for speed.
"They couldn't have been chasing blockade runners," said Amer.
No contemporary photographs or drawings of the vessel survive, and records disagree even on the Peedee's length. It may have been 170 feet or 150 feet long.
A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredging operation in 1906 cleared the channel and broke the Peedee up, Amer said. The propellers, which were removed in 1925, are at the Florence Museum. In 1954, salvagers got the engines, a boiler, propeller shafts and a section of the stern.
Using information from Michael Hartley, an archaeologist who witnessed the 1954 salvage when he was 12, Amer went to the spot and matched the information with magnetic readings.
"In November, Amer used sonar to search for the debris and found evidence of the wreck," the University of South Carolina said in a statement Tuesday. Amer found ripples on the sand where sediment had built up over debris and magnetic "hits" in straight lines depicting iron bolts along bedding timbers.
Amer concedes the wreckage is in pieces. But he wants to determine the vessel's length and more about its history.
The archaeologist with the university's South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology said he hopes the project can attract more research dollars. He wants to know, for example, more about the navy yard, which built at least two other vessels, one a steam tender, the other a torpedo (bomb) boat.
"Anything Confederate is gold," Amer said.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/12/21/confederate.gunboat/
(CNN) -- The Ides of March was indeed a portentous day for the Confederate gunboat Peedee and its the 90-man crew, which heaved three artillery pieces overboard and torched the doomed vessel in the waning weeks of the Civil War.
The C.S.S. Peedee, built inland between Florence and Marion, South Carolina, was unable to reach the Atlantic Ocean because Union forces had taken coastal Georgetown. The crew scuttled the wooden Peedee on March 15, 1865, leaving its remains in the Pee Dee River.
In 2009, state underwater archaeologist Chris Amer confirmed the discovery of two of three cannon that were placed on the Peedee at Mars Bluff Navy Yard.
On Tuesday, Amer announced that the University of South Carolina team had located the mostly salvaged wreckage of the Peedee, which lies a few feet below the river bottom and a field of timbers.
"They are kind of like pick-up sticks," Amer said of the timbers, which may be remnants of logging operations.
Working with a $200,000 grant, the team plans to raise the two cannon -- one a smoothbore Dahlgren, the other a Brooke rifled gun -- in the spring or summer of 2011 and continue looking for the other Brooke piece and remains of the Mars Bluff Navy Yard, which Amer thinks are upstream of the wreckage. The artillery pieces were dumped about one mile from the site of the wreckage.
The researchers also want to retrieve several cannonballs for preservation at nearby Francis Marion University.
The Confederacy built inland shipbuilding operations across the South. But many of the vessels saw limited, if any, action before they were scuttled or destroyed by Union forces.
The C.S.S. Peedee was able to lob at few shells at Union forces when its steam-powered propellers churned upstream to Cheraw shortly before its demise.
"It was trapped," Amer said of the gunboat.
Built to protect the coast or patrol waterways, the Peedee and others in its class were hardly built for speed.
"They couldn't have been chasing blockade runners," said Amer.
No contemporary photographs or drawings of the vessel survive, and records disagree even on the Peedee's length. It may have been 170 feet or 150 feet long.
A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredging operation in 1906 cleared the channel and broke the Peedee up, Amer said. The propellers, which were removed in 1925, are at the Florence Museum. In 1954, salvagers got the engines, a boiler, propeller shafts and a section of the stern.
Using information from Michael Hartley, an archaeologist who witnessed the 1954 salvage when he was 12, Amer went to the spot and matched the information with magnetic readings.
"In November, Amer used sonar to search for the debris and found evidence of the wreck," the University of South Carolina said in a statement Tuesday. Amer found ripples on the sand where sediment had built up over debris and magnetic "hits" in straight lines depicting iron bolts along bedding timbers.
Amer concedes the wreckage is in pieces. But he wants to determine the vessel's length and more about its history.
The archaeologist with the university's South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology said he hopes the project can attract more research dollars. He wants to know, for example, more about the navy yard, which built at least two other vessels, one a steam tender, the other a torpedo (bomb) boat.
"Anything Confederate is gold," Amer said.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/12/21/confederate.gunboat/
Secession Ball in Charleston, South Carolina
At Charleston's Secession Ball, divided opinions on the spirit of S.C.
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
CHARLESTON, S.C.- "Dixie," that emotionally freighted and much-debated anthem of the old Confederacy, starts soft when it's done right, barely above a whisper. But each sotto voce syllable of the opening verse, each feather-light scrape of the fiddle strings, could be heard without straining when the ladies in the hoop skirts and the men in the frock coats rose in reverence to celebrate the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's secession.
"We are very proud of who we are," said Chip Limehouse, a South Carolina legislator who rented a historically accurate suit and vest for the formal ball celebrating the anniversary. "This is in our DNA."
Great-great-great-granddad fought the Yankees, lost his plantation, was bathed in glory, the men and women at the ball like to say. They're proud of their ancestors, they declare, and that's why they paid $100 apiece to take part in an event touted as a "joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink."
Outside Charleston's bulky concrete municipal auditorium, on an unseasonably chilly Southern night, some of the men and women in a crowd of about 100 were thinking about their own ancestors: slaves who picked the cotton for the forebears and allies of the men and women inside. "Disgusting," the Rev. Joseph A. Darby, vice president of the local NAACP chapter, said of the event inside.
On the street, they lifted protest signs; inside, they lifted drinks with names like "Rebel Yell." The stubborn inside-outside faceoff that throttled this jewel of a Southern city on Monday night hints at dramas to come, an unending series of Civil War anniversaries stretching from secession and the firing on Fort Sumter to the laying down of arms at Appomattox. For the next 41/2 years - the span of the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history - Americans black and white will have ample opportunities to wrestle with delicate, almost-impossible-to-resolve questions of legacy and history, of what to commemorate and what to condemn.
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, but the commemoration will be followed by similar events in other states - parades and balls and speeches and plaques. The anniversaries will press current politicians to tiptoe through minefields of nuance. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley called the Secession Ball "unfortunate" and "the opposite of unifying," but several big-name lawmakers not only attended, but donned costumes to do so.
The emotions of the day were on display at a ceremony dedicating a historical marker about the secession. Someone in the audience yelled "You're a liar" when Riley told the crowd that South Carolinians were motivated to secede, in part, by a desire to preserve slavery. Riley has invited President Obama to narrate portions of Abraham Lincoln's greatest speeches in an observance of the firing on Fort Sumter; it's unclear whether he will accept.
When Lincoln's name was mentioned at the Secession Ball's theatrical performance, a reenactment of South Carolina's secession convention that drew from historical documents, the actors hissed. "Impeach," one of the actors called out. Lincoln and the North were responsible for "vulgar tyranny," the actors said. A narrator intoned that the 169 South Carolina men who voted unanimously to secede were "compelled by the same sublime courage" as the men who fought against Britain in the Revolutionary War the century before. Slavery was mentioned, but the main reasons for secession were portrayed as high tariffs and Northern states using Southern tax money to build their own infrastructure.
The star of the show, playing the convention president, is one of South Carolina's most powerful present-day politicians, state Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell, a Confederate heritage defender who has owned a Civil War memorabilia business. McConnell gets a kick out of reenacting battles and is known for firing his personal cannon, dubbed "Big Ray."
The guests, enthusiasts in tuxedos, flouncy skirts or militia uniforms, sashayed from the cavernous theater into a party room where images of huge Confederate battle flags were projected on the wall. Two African American police officers leaned glumly against a wall in the hallway as the predominantly white crowd filed past. Guests picked at ham and biscuits while a string band with a defiant name - Un-Reconstructed - played waltzes and the Virginia reel. A receiving line formed; women curtsied and men dramatically doffed their top hats. At times, it seemed like a dress-up party for grown-ups.
Many in the crowd are members of "secession camps," small groups of Civil War history buffs collected under the banner of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And there were the battle reenactors - men whom Civil War tour guide Jack Thomson, a guest at the ball, calls "the bang-bang, shoot-'em-up types." Their intricate uniforms, with brass buttons and braid-draped epaulets, can cost upward of $1,000 each. On any given weekend in the South, someone slips into gray or blue to relive bygone battles, plotting counterattacks and flanking maneuvers. Limehouse's family once offered their plantation - Airy Hall - for a battle reenactment. "They were out there getting eaten up by no-see-ums," his wife, Sue, said of the true believers. "Torture. Pure torture."
Chip, a parking company owner who represents Berkeley and Charleston counties in the South Carolina House of Representatives, grinned when the subject of the protests came up. "They actually helped ticket sales," Limehouse said of the protestors. "We'd like to thank them. Without them, we wouldn't have made budget."
Go to this link for the rest of the story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/21/AR2010122105341.html
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
CHARLESTON, S.C.- "Dixie," that emotionally freighted and much-debated anthem of the old Confederacy, starts soft when it's done right, barely above a whisper. But each sotto voce syllable of the opening verse, each feather-light scrape of the fiddle strings, could be heard without straining when the ladies in the hoop skirts and the men in the frock coats rose in reverence to celebrate the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's secession.
"We are very proud of who we are," said Chip Limehouse, a South Carolina legislator who rented a historically accurate suit and vest for the formal ball celebrating the anniversary. "This is in our DNA."
Great-great-great-granddad fought the Yankees, lost his plantation, was bathed in glory, the men and women at the ball like to say. They're proud of their ancestors, they declare, and that's why they paid $100 apiece to take part in an event touted as a "joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink."
Outside Charleston's bulky concrete municipal auditorium, on an unseasonably chilly Southern night, some of the men and women in a crowd of about 100 were thinking about their own ancestors: slaves who picked the cotton for the forebears and allies of the men and women inside. "Disgusting," the Rev. Joseph A. Darby, vice president of the local NAACP chapter, said of the event inside.
On the street, they lifted protest signs; inside, they lifted drinks with names like "Rebel Yell." The stubborn inside-outside faceoff that throttled this jewel of a Southern city on Monday night hints at dramas to come, an unending series of Civil War anniversaries stretching from secession and the firing on Fort Sumter to the laying down of arms at Appomattox. For the next 41/2 years - the span of the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history - Americans black and white will have ample opportunities to wrestle with delicate, almost-impossible-to-resolve questions of legacy and history, of what to commemorate and what to condemn.
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, but the commemoration will be followed by similar events in other states - parades and balls and speeches and plaques. The anniversaries will press current politicians to tiptoe through minefields of nuance. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley called the Secession Ball "unfortunate" and "the opposite of unifying," but several big-name lawmakers not only attended, but donned costumes to do so.
The emotions of the day were on display at a ceremony dedicating a historical marker about the secession. Someone in the audience yelled "You're a liar" when Riley told the crowd that South Carolinians were motivated to secede, in part, by a desire to preserve slavery. Riley has invited President Obama to narrate portions of Abraham Lincoln's greatest speeches in an observance of the firing on Fort Sumter; it's unclear whether he will accept.
When Lincoln's name was mentioned at the Secession Ball's theatrical performance, a reenactment of South Carolina's secession convention that drew from historical documents, the actors hissed. "Impeach," one of the actors called out. Lincoln and the North were responsible for "vulgar tyranny," the actors said. A narrator intoned that the 169 South Carolina men who voted unanimously to secede were "compelled by the same sublime courage" as the men who fought against Britain in the Revolutionary War the century before. Slavery was mentioned, but the main reasons for secession were portrayed as high tariffs and Northern states using Southern tax money to build their own infrastructure.
The star of the show, playing the convention president, is one of South Carolina's most powerful present-day politicians, state Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell, a Confederate heritage defender who has owned a Civil War memorabilia business. McConnell gets a kick out of reenacting battles and is known for firing his personal cannon, dubbed "Big Ray."
The guests, enthusiasts in tuxedos, flouncy skirts or militia uniforms, sashayed from the cavernous theater into a party room where images of huge Confederate battle flags were projected on the wall. Two African American police officers leaned glumly against a wall in the hallway as the predominantly white crowd filed past. Guests picked at ham and biscuits while a string band with a defiant name - Un-Reconstructed - played waltzes and the Virginia reel. A receiving line formed; women curtsied and men dramatically doffed their top hats. At times, it seemed like a dress-up party for grown-ups.
Many in the crowd are members of "secession camps," small groups of Civil War history buffs collected under the banner of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And there were the battle reenactors - men whom Civil War tour guide Jack Thomson, a guest at the ball, calls "the bang-bang, shoot-'em-up types." Their intricate uniforms, with brass buttons and braid-draped epaulets, can cost upward of $1,000 each. On any given weekend in the South, someone slips into gray or blue to relive bygone battles, plotting counterattacks and flanking maneuvers. Limehouse's family once offered their plantation - Airy Hall - for a battle reenactment. "They were out there getting eaten up by no-see-ums," his wife, Sue, said of the true believers. "Torture. Pure torture."
Chip, a parking company owner who represents Berkeley and Charleston counties in the South Carolina House of Representatives, grinned when the subject of the protests came up. "They actually helped ticket sales," Limehouse said of the protestors. "We'd like to thank them. Without them, we wouldn't have made budget."
Go to this link for the rest of the story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/21/AR2010122105341.html
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Articles on the SCV Blog
Compatriots,
The SCV Blog is a tool set up by the SCV to post information from the SCV about events, activities, GEC meetings, important deadlines and other information designed to keep the work of the SCV moving ahead. It is also used as a platform to present news items of interest to SCV members, from news papers, television stations, and other media sources.
Sometimes the artilces from the media that are published on the SCV Blog contain imformation that is not historically accurate or opinions that run counter to those of the SCV. It is not the intention of the Blog to suggest that this information or opinions are those of the SCV. However to get a good understanding of a story or controversy it is necessary to publish "both sides" and the SCV Blog does this to give SCV members a reasonalby complete picture.
The SCV Blog has been contacted regarding having comments from SCV members on the Blog about published items - more often that not regarding those that contain information or opinons that they disagree with. The best way to counter inaccurate fact / opinion is to post comments, not on the SCV Blog, but in the comments section for the artice in question. Most pieces posted here have a comments section on the website the article came from and the links to the articles are posted on the SCV Blog at the bottom of each article to make finding them easier.
I appreciate the comments received regarding the SCV Blog and hope you find it interesting and informative.
Chuck Rand
Adjutant In Chief
The SCV Blog is a tool set up by the SCV to post information from the SCV about events, activities, GEC meetings, important deadlines and other information designed to keep the work of the SCV moving ahead. It is also used as a platform to present news items of interest to SCV members, from news papers, television stations, and other media sources.
Sometimes the artilces from the media that are published on the SCV Blog contain imformation that is not historically accurate or opinions that run counter to those of the SCV. It is not the intention of the Blog to suggest that this information or opinions are those of the SCV. However to get a good understanding of a story or controversy it is necessary to publish "both sides" and the SCV Blog does this to give SCV members a reasonalby complete picture.
The SCV Blog has been contacted regarding having comments from SCV members on the Blog about published items - more often that not regarding those that contain information or opinons that they disagree with. The best way to counter inaccurate fact / opinion is to post comments, not on the SCV Blog, but in the comments section for the artice in question. Most pieces posted here have a comments section on the website the article came from and the links to the articles are posted on the SCV Blog at the bottom of each article to make finding them easier.
I appreciate the comments received regarding the SCV Blog and hope you find it interesting and informative.
Chuck Rand
Adjutant In Chief
Secession Marker Unveiled; NAACP Protest Flops with Only 9 Protesters
Secession festivities begin; only a handful of protesters rally
Dec 20, 2010
Tracey Amick
Mayor Riley attends some of the day's events.
A small group turned out to protest the gala.
CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) - Several hours after officials unveiled a new historical marker to identify the site where South Carolina delegates signed the Ordinance of Secession a small group of protesters rallied against the day's commemorative activities.
The marker was unveiled Monday in downtown Charleston, where Institute Hall once stood. Monday marked the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's secession from the Union, which led to the Civil War.
Michael Allen says the marker itself is just the start of the sesquicentennial commemoration.
"This is the beginning of a four-year journey and beyond of looking at a tragic part of our American experience," he said.
Randy Burbage says it's important to study the history around the events leading up to the war. And he says the marker itself helps tell the story.
"People walking down the street, unless they saw the plaque on the wall of this building, wouldn't have realized where it was at," Burbage said.
Nine members of the Charleston branch of the NAACP picketed outside the Francis Marion Hotel Monday afternoon. People who are attending the South Carolina Secession Gala Monday night at Gaillard Auditorium are staying there.
"Take your celebration someplace else and I don't know whether someplace because I don't think there's an appropriate place to have a celebration about the Confederacy," said Charleston NAACP branch president Dot Scott.
Organizers of the gala say secession is not about slavery, but is about states' rights. Scott disagrees.
"This is about states' rights to own slaves, and while every time there is an issue we're speaking about, oh they're bringing in the race issue," Scott said.
The NAACP also protested at the Embassy Suites hotel.
After the hotel protests the NAACP planned to march from Gaillard Auditorium to Morris Brown AME Church on Morris Street.
http://www.live5news.com/Global/story.asp?S=13712669
Dec 20, 2010
Tracey Amick
Mayor Riley attends some of the day's events.
A small group turned out to protest the gala.
CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) - Several hours after officials unveiled a new historical marker to identify the site where South Carolina delegates signed the Ordinance of Secession a small group of protesters rallied against the day's commemorative activities.
The marker was unveiled Monday in downtown Charleston, where Institute Hall once stood. Monday marked the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's secession from the Union, which led to the Civil War.
Michael Allen says the marker itself is just the start of the sesquicentennial commemoration.
"This is the beginning of a four-year journey and beyond of looking at a tragic part of our American experience," he said.
Randy Burbage says it's important to study the history around the events leading up to the war. And he says the marker itself helps tell the story.
"People walking down the street, unless they saw the plaque on the wall of this building, wouldn't have realized where it was at," Burbage said.
Nine members of the Charleston branch of the NAACP picketed outside the Francis Marion Hotel Monday afternoon. People who are attending the South Carolina Secession Gala Monday night at Gaillard Auditorium are staying there.
"Take your celebration someplace else and I don't know whether someplace because I don't think there's an appropriate place to have a celebration about the Confederacy," said Charleston NAACP branch president Dot Scott.
Organizers of the gala say secession is not about slavery, but is about states' rights. Scott disagrees.
"This is about states' rights to own slaves, and while every time there is an issue we're speaking about, oh they're bringing in the race issue," Scott said.
The NAACP also protested at the Embassy Suites hotel.
After the hotel protests the NAACP planned to march from Gaillard Auditorium to Morris Brown AME Church on Morris Street.
http://www.live5news.com/Global/story.asp?S=13712669
Monday, December 20, 2010
Descendants View South Carolinia Ordinance of Secession
Civil War: Remembering Secession Ordinance signers
Amid Old South nostalgia on 150th anniversary, some acknowledge signers unleashed war
By CAROLYN CLICK
The great-great-grandsons and great-great-granddaughters of the signers of the Ordinance of Secession, along with at least one cousin “four-times removed,” gathered Sunday to honor their ancestors and remember the 1860 convention in Columbia and Charleston that sparked the Civil War.
The United Daughters of Confederacy sponsored the memorial event, held at the S.C. Department of Archives and History, which displayed the historic document for the 200or so spectators. There was a wreath, a roll call of signers, ladies in period costume, salutes to the U.S., South Carolina and Confederate States of America flag, and a rousing chorus of “Dixie” at the conclusion.
But amid the Old South nostalgia was some acknowledgement that the signers — mostly powerful, wealthy, slaveholding men — had unleashed a bloody war that would leave the South devastated and destitute for generations.
Eric Emerson, agency director and state historic preservation officer of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, pulls out the original 1860 Ordinance of Secession from the climate controlled archives. Descendants of signers of the 1860 Ordinance of Secession gathered Sunday at the SC Department of Archives and History to hold a memorial service for the signers. The event, sponsored by the SC Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, is part of the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the signing of the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession.
“This was an act which carried with it a great price,” said David Rutledge, a descendant of the secession convention’s president David F. Jamison. “D.F. Jamison and men like him would sow the winds of war but it would be his wife, his children and his children’s children who would reap the whirlwind.”
Jamison himself would die during the war and his sons suffer. His family plantation, Burwood, was destroyed by Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, leaving Jamison’s wife, Elizabeth, and minor children in abject poverty, Rutledge, a Greenville attorney, told the gathering.
Another signer, John Saunders Palmer, lost two sons in the war. When a locket worn by his son James Palmer was returned to him, along with the bullet which killed him, John Saunders Palmer told his wife: “You take the locket, I’ll take the bullet — I’m the one who put it in him,” Rutledge recounted.
Everyone, it seemed, had a story to tell and at the reception following, many shared family stories handed down from generation to generation. Carol Perrin Cobb of Greenville and Jean Perrin Derrick of Lexington, great-great-grand-nieces of signer Thomas Charles Perrin, of Abbeville, had slightly different versions of the tale of their ancestor allegedly throwing the great seal of South Carolina into the Savannah River.
Cobb said she has never felt anything but pride in her ancestor’s participation in the secession convention and gets perturbed when others suggest their cause was tainted by the Confederates’ fierce adherence to slavery.
“They don’t realize that we were fighting the Revolutionary War again,” she said.
But Rutledge noted that the “good names of the signers have been sullied” over the last 50 years, a development he regrets.
Over those years, historians have delved more deeply into the causes and impact of the war and the federal Reconstruction period that followed, probed the lives of slaves and their descendants, and drawn connections to the civil rights era and 21st century politics.
As the sesquicentennial is marked in the state, Eric Emerson, executive director of the S.C. Department of Archives and History, hopes that people will develop “a deeper level of understanding” of secession and war that goes beyond the nostalgia and gets at the heart of one of the most turbulent and talked about periods in South Carolina history.
Rutledge said he would hope that that the “the names of our ancestors will be continued to be honored — by ourselves, by our children and by our children’s children.”
But he said his own children, in their 20s, have no interest in the Civil War.
About 75 descendants were among the 200 who attended the afternoon event, said Nita Keisler, registrar of the Mary Boykin Chesnut chapter of the UDC.
Most were graying, but there was at least one young descendant, who was a great-great-great-great-grandson of one of the signers.
Read more: http://www.thestate.com/2010/12/06/1592984/civil-war-remembering-secession.html#ixzz18gzzFsLe
Amid Old South nostalgia on 150th anniversary, some acknowledge signers unleashed war
By CAROLYN CLICK
The great-great-grandsons and great-great-granddaughters of the signers of the Ordinance of Secession, along with at least one cousin “four-times removed,” gathered Sunday to honor their ancestors and remember the 1860 convention in Columbia and Charleston that sparked the Civil War.
The United Daughters of Confederacy sponsored the memorial event, held at the S.C. Department of Archives and History, which displayed the historic document for the 200or so spectators. There was a wreath, a roll call of signers, ladies in period costume, salutes to the U.S., South Carolina and Confederate States of America flag, and a rousing chorus of “Dixie” at the conclusion.
But amid the Old South nostalgia was some acknowledgement that the signers — mostly powerful, wealthy, slaveholding men — had unleashed a bloody war that would leave the South devastated and destitute for generations.
Eric Emerson, agency director and state historic preservation officer of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, pulls out the original 1860 Ordinance of Secession from the climate controlled archives. Descendants of signers of the 1860 Ordinance of Secession gathered Sunday at the SC Department of Archives and History to hold a memorial service for the signers. The event, sponsored by the SC Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, is part of the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the signing of the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession.
“This was an act which carried with it a great price,” said David Rutledge, a descendant of the secession convention’s president David F. Jamison. “D.F. Jamison and men like him would sow the winds of war but it would be his wife, his children and his children’s children who would reap the whirlwind.”
Jamison himself would die during the war and his sons suffer. His family plantation, Burwood, was destroyed by Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, leaving Jamison’s wife, Elizabeth, and minor children in abject poverty, Rutledge, a Greenville attorney, told the gathering.
Another signer, John Saunders Palmer, lost two sons in the war. When a locket worn by his son James Palmer was returned to him, along with the bullet which killed him, John Saunders Palmer told his wife: “You take the locket, I’ll take the bullet — I’m the one who put it in him,” Rutledge recounted.
Everyone, it seemed, had a story to tell and at the reception following, many shared family stories handed down from generation to generation. Carol Perrin Cobb of Greenville and Jean Perrin Derrick of Lexington, great-great-grand-nieces of signer Thomas Charles Perrin, of Abbeville, had slightly different versions of the tale of their ancestor allegedly throwing the great seal of South Carolina into the Savannah River.
Cobb said she has never felt anything but pride in her ancestor’s participation in the secession convention and gets perturbed when others suggest their cause was tainted by the Confederates’ fierce adherence to slavery.
“They don’t realize that we were fighting the Revolutionary War again,” she said.
But Rutledge noted that the “good names of the signers have been sullied” over the last 50 years, a development he regrets.
Over those years, historians have delved more deeply into the causes and impact of the war and the federal Reconstruction period that followed, probed the lives of slaves and their descendants, and drawn connections to the civil rights era and 21st century politics.
As the sesquicentennial is marked in the state, Eric Emerson, executive director of the S.C. Department of Archives and History, hopes that people will develop “a deeper level of understanding” of secession and war that goes beyond the nostalgia and gets at the heart of one of the most turbulent and talked about periods in South Carolina history.
Rutledge said he would hope that that the “the names of our ancestors will be continued to be honored — by ourselves, by our children and by our children’s children.”
But he said his own children, in their 20s, have no interest in the Civil War.
About 75 descendants were among the 200 who attended the afternoon event, said Nita Keisler, registrar of the Mary Boykin Chesnut chapter of the UDC.
Most were graying, but there was at least one young descendant, who was a great-great-great-great-grandson of one of the signers.
Read more: http://www.thestate.com/2010/12/06/1592984/civil-war-remembering-secession.html#ixzz18gzzFsLe
SCV To Be On MSNBC TONIGHT
Compatriots,
This evening at 5 PM and 7 PM Eastern the SCV is scheduled to have a representative on MSNBC. The topic will be the Secession Ordinance signing and ball which will be held this evening in Charleston, SC and which Al Sharpton plans to protest.
Please spread the word about this appearance.
Chuck Rand
AIC
This evening at 5 PM and 7 PM Eastern the SCV is scheduled to have a representative on MSNBC. The topic will be the Secession Ordinance signing and ball which will be held this evening in Charleston, SC and which Al Sharpton plans to protest.
Please spread the word about this appearance.
Chuck Rand
AIC
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Contractor Chosen for New Branch of the Museum of the Confederacy
J.E. Jamerson awarded bid to build Confederate Museum
STEPHANIE A. JAMES
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
The Museum of the Confederacy has selected J.E. Jamerson and Sons as the general contractor to build the satellite museum in Appomattox.
J.E. Jamerson and Sons was selected after the museum interviewed a handful of other contractors.
"We were very impressed by Jamerson's track record," Rawls said on Friday.
Rawls added that the museum board members were particularly impressed with Jamerson's institution building.
"We are excited to be chosen as the general contractor for the Museum of the Confederacy-Appomattox," said Phillip Jamerson, President of J. E. Jamerson and Sons according to a press release. "The Museum will be important to the economic development of Appomattox as well as to the region."
J.E. Jamerson and Sons has constructed churches, banks, and residential buildings.
Some institutions that J.E. Jamerson and Sons has built includes Appomattox Health Dept. Appomattox Courthouse Building, Southside Community Hospital Endscopy Renovation in Farmville, Jamerson Family YMCA in Lynchburg, Merryman Athletic Center at Virginia Tech and Thomas Jefferson Health Facility in Charlottesville.
J.E. Jamerson has also completed renovation and restoration work at Appomattox Courthouse National Historic Park, also known as the Surrender Grounds.
Along with the museum's announcement of a contractor last week, the museum also announced that it has selected Rigg Ward Design of Richmond as its exhibit designer.
Rigg Ward Design has done work for the Smithsonian as well as worked on exhibit projects for The Library of Congress, The Atlanta History Center, South Carolina National Heritage Corridor and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
Site work is scheduled to begin in January if weather permits, said Rawls. The museum is slated to open Spring 2012. When the museum is completed, the museum will be 11,000 square feet.
In 2007 when requests for proposals were sought by the museum, Appomattox was competing with other localities and some people were wondering if the museum would even locate to Appomattox.
Rawls said that all the plans are coming to fruition.
"People did not believe it was going to happen. Now it really is," said Rawls.
In September, a ground-breaking ceremony was held at the future location of the museum at the six acres of property where Burge Road and Horseshoe Road cross off of State Route 24.
Three years ago, the museum announced that Appomattox was chosen to be one of the satellite museums after the Richmond-based museum was seeking a new location after experiencing a decrease in visitors, financial hardships, and the expansion of Virginia Commonwealth University.
The museum will display Civil War artifacts and end of the Civil War themed items like Gen. Robert E. Lee's uniform and the pen that Lee used to sign surrender documents.
http://www.wpcva.com/articles/2010/12/16/appomattox/news/news31.txt
STEPHANIE A. JAMES
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
The Museum of the Confederacy has selected J.E. Jamerson and Sons as the general contractor to build the satellite museum in Appomattox.
J.E. Jamerson and Sons was selected after the museum interviewed a handful of other contractors.
"We were very impressed by Jamerson's track record," Rawls said on Friday.
Rawls added that the museum board members were particularly impressed with Jamerson's institution building.
"We are excited to be chosen as the general contractor for the Museum of the Confederacy-Appomattox," said Phillip Jamerson, President of J. E. Jamerson and Sons according to a press release. "The Museum will be important to the economic development of Appomattox as well as to the region."
J.E. Jamerson and Sons has constructed churches, banks, and residential buildings.
Some institutions that J.E. Jamerson and Sons has built includes Appomattox Health Dept. Appomattox Courthouse Building, Southside Community Hospital Endscopy Renovation in Farmville, Jamerson Family YMCA in Lynchburg, Merryman Athletic Center at Virginia Tech and Thomas Jefferson Health Facility in Charlottesville.
J.E. Jamerson has also completed renovation and restoration work at Appomattox Courthouse National Historic Park, also known as the Surrender Grounds.
Along with the museum's announcement of a contractor last week, the museum also announced that it has selected Rigg Ward Design of Richmond as its exhibit designer.
Rigg Ward Design has done work for the Smithsonian as well as worked on exhibit projects for The Library of Congress, The Atlanta History Center, South Carolina National Heritage Corridor and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
Site work is scheduled to begin in January if weather permits, said Rawls. The museum is slated to open Spring 2012. When the museum is completed, the museum will be 11,000 square feet.
In 2007 when requests for proposals were sought by the museum, Appomattox was competing with other localities and some people were wondering if the museum would even locate to Appomattox.
Rawls said that all the plans are coming to fruition.
"People did not believe it was going to happen. Now it really is," said Rawls.
In September, a ground-breaking ceremony was held at the future location of the museum at the six acres of property where Burge Road and Horseshoe Road cross off of State Route 24.
Three years ago, the museum announced that Appomattox was chosen to be one of the satellite museums after the Richmond-based museum was seeking a new location after experiencing a decrease in visitors, financial hardships, and the expansion of Virginia Commonwealth University.
The museum will display Civil War artifacts and end of the Civil War themed items like Gen. Robert E. Lee's uniform and the pen that Lee used to sign surrender documents.
http://www.wpcva.com/articles/2010/12/16/appomattox/news/news31.txt
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Real Sons - Last Links To History
Confederates’ offspring
are ‘last links’ to History
By Bill Torpy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When he mentions that his daddy fought for the Confederacy, H.V. Booth gets more than a few raised eyebrows.
Enlarge photo Bita Honarvar, bhonarvar@ajc.com H.V. Booth, who will turn 92 this month, is believed to be one of only two men alive in Georgia who are the sons of Confederate veterans. His father was a guard at Andersonville. Booth stands at his father’s grave at Antioch Baptist Church Cemetery in Dewy Rose near Elberton.
Enlarge photo Family photo H.V. Booth, at about age 3, is pictured with his father, who lived until 1934. H.V. was 15 when his dad died.
His father, Isham Johnson Booth, a country boy from north of Athens, played a bit part in the Civil War. But it was a grim role, the memory of which never left him and was something he rarely spoke about. He was a guard at Andersonville, the prisoner-of-war camp in south-central Georgia that has become synonymous with suffering.
Booth, who turns 92 this month, is the end of a chapter of American history. He is an actual son of a Confederate veteran. There aren’t many anymore. The Sons of the Confederate Veterans — the organization, that is — believes there are about 30 “real sons” still alive, including two in Georgia.
Their fathers were young when Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered in 1865 but old when they sired children in the early decades of the 20th century.
Near Vidalia, at a crossroads called Tarrytown, lives 84-year-old John McDonald, whose father enlisted with his rifle and horse when he was just 13, following two older brothers.
“We’re the last link,” Booth said in a recent interview. “We’re the last link of the mouth to the ear.”
There wasn’t much mouth-to-ear. Isham Booth didn’t talk about the war much to his son. They were too busy working. The elder Booth was a stern man who eked out a living as a sharecropper and died at age 86 in 1934, when his son was 15. Up until the end, he picked 90 to 100 pounds of cotton a day.
“He didn’t believe in schooling,” Booth recalled from his living room in Elberton in northeast Georgia. “He believed in working. He said a poor man didn’t need anything but a burial plot.”
It was a message from a man who knew early on that life was hard.
Isham Booth was born in 1847 and joined the Confederacy when he was 16. There was a mustering field near Elberton, where the army took in new recruits. “They’d say, ‘We need 400 men to send to Virginia. We need 100 men in Alabama,’ ” Booth said.
At the time, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army was bearing down on Georgia, and young Isham Booth, it is believed, stayed in state. At some point, he was assigned to Camp Sumter (now known as Andersonville), which started holding Union prisoners in early 1864. By August, more than 32,000 were stuffed like chickens into a squalid 26.5-acre pen.
Skeletal prisoners were common. In July 1864, a Union prisoner wrote in his diary the compound was a “hell on Earth where it takes 7 of its ocupiants [sic] to make a shadow.”
Almost 13,000 prisoners died of disease, starvation and exposure to 100-degree days and freezing rains.
Isham Booth “said it was the awfulest place he ever saw in his life,” his son recalled. “He told me a lot of times about that old creek. It came into camp with a good head. By the time it ran through camp, it was gone. They used it up.”
The guards and their livestock used the head of the stream. Prisoners were left with befouled water.
“They’d get the fever,” Booth said. “Daddy said they died like flies. There was no food, no medicine. He felt sorry for them.”
Eventually, the guards started dropping, too.
“He came down with a fever,” Booth said. “They put him on a mule and drew him a map. It took about four days to get home. He said he was about dead when he got home.” It was nearly a 200-mile trip.
Isham Booth recovered and was heading back to duty when he learned the war was over. But he was listed as a deserter (unknown to him for decades) until he cleared it up in 1927. That allowed him to receive a $25-a-month Confederate pension. His wife, Miranda Lue, received a stipend until she died in 1968. By then, it was $110.
Times were tough in the rural South early in the past century, and the pensions made aging Confederates attractive, said Ben Sewell, national executive director of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “The old veterans received pensions and younger women married them for the pensions,” he said.
H.V. Booth, who was 15 when his father died, doesn’t know much about how his parents came to marry. His mother, who had been widowed, was 38 when H.V. was born. His father was 72. H.V. was his 12th and final child.
There were more than 130 “real sons” when Sewell came to the organization nine years ago. Now there are about 30. “We’re losing them at a pretty quick pace,” he said.
Booth displayed a knobby cane given to his father by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1930, the 65th anniversary of the Civil War’s end.
This year is the 65th anniversary of the end of World II, the war for H.V. Booth’s generation.
Booth, who was in the Navy, was assigned to an LST, a tank landing craft. He served in the South Pacific in some of history’s most ferocious battles: Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
When Booth returned, he worked for more than three decades at a Ford dealership, eventually owning it. He went broke doing so and eventually lost his home. He then worked another two decades as the night manager for a senior citizens complex until “I was getting pretty old.”
Life has been hard. “I’ve buried two wives and two boys,” he said, choking back a tear. “It’s not normal for parents to bury their children.”
Near Vidalia in southeast Georgia, real son John McDonald said he doesn’t remember much about his father. James Malachi McDonald was 79 years old in 1926 when he had his 16th — and last — child, John. Five years later, just a week shy of turning 84, McDonald’s father was dead.
John, who turned 84 this week, chuckled at the idea of having his own 4-year-old son at this age. “I’d be delighted,” he said.
His mother, Ida Lucinda, was 43 when he was born. She had been married before but her husband ran out on her. She wasn’t hunting a pension, McDonald said. “My mother was very attractive,” he said. “They felt like they were good for each other.”
McDonald vaguely remembers sitting on his father’s lap at church and playing with his watch or watching him pull up in his buggy.
“I remember he got a whip on me a couple days before he died,” he said.
His father apparently didn’t tell his wife much about the war. Or she didn’t pass it on to him. Family research found that he signed up when he was 13. They believe he did so after seeing two older brothers enlist.
After the Civil War, James Malachi bought a tract of land and farmed well into the 20th century.
John McDonald worked as an onion farmer and as a supervisor at a clothing mill. The man with antebellum roots has moved into the 21st century and even fiddles around a bit with his computer. “I’m very slow,” he admits.
http://www.ajc.com/news/confederates-offspring-are-last-774444.html
By Bill Torpy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When he mentions that his daddy fought for the Confederacy, H.V. Booth gets more than a few raised eyebrows.
Enlarge photo Bita Honarvar, bhonarvar@ajc.com H.V. Booth, who will turn 92 this month, is believed to be one of only two men alive in Georgia who are the sons of Confederate veterans. His father was a guard at Andersonville. Booth stands at his father’s grave at Antioch Baptist Church Cemetery in Dewy Rose near Elberton.
Enlarge photo Family photo H.V. Booth, at about age 3, is pictured with his father, who lived until 1934. H.V. was 15 when his dad died.
His father, Isham Johnson Booth, a country boy from north of Athens, played a bit part in the Civil War. But it was a grim role, the memory of which never left him and was something he rarely spoke about. He was a guard at Andersonville, the prisoner-of-war camp in south-central Georgia that has become synonymous with suffering.
Booth, who turns 92 this month, is the end of a chapter of American history. He is an actual son of a Confederate veteran. There aren’t many anymore. The Sons of the Confederate Veterans — the organization, that is — believes there are about 30 “real sons” still alive, including two in Georgia.
Their fathers were young when Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered in 1865 but old when they sired children in the early decades of the 20th century.
Near Vidalia, at a crossroads called Tarrytown, lives 84-year-old John McDonald, whose father enlisted with his rifle and horse when he was just 13, following two older brothers.
“We’re the last link,” Booth said in a recent interview. “We’re the last link of the mouth to the ear.”
There wasn’t much mouth-to-ear. Isham Booth didn’t talk about the war much to his son. They were too busy working. The elder Booth was a stern man who eked out a living as a sharecropper and died at age 86 in 1934, when his son was 15. Up until the end, he picked 90 to 100 pounds of cotton a day.
“He didn’t believe in schooling,” Booth recalled from his living room in Elberton in northeast Georgia. “He believed in working. He said a poor man didn’t need anything but a burial plot.”
It was a message from a man who knew early on that life was hard.
Isham Booth was born in 1847 and joined the Confederacy when he was 16. There was a mustering field near Elberton, where the army took in new recruits. “They’d say, ‘We need 400 men to send to Virginia. We need 100 men in Alabama,’ ” Booth said.
At the time, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army was bearing down on Georgia, and young Isham Booth, it is believed, stayed in state. At some point, he was assigned to Camp Sumter (now known as Andersonville), which started holding Union prisoners in early 1864. By August, more than 32,000 were stuffed like chickens into a squalid 26.5-acre pen.
Skeletal prisoners were common. In July 1864, a Union prisoner wrote in his diary the compound was a “hell on Earth where it takes 7 of its ocupiants [sic] to make a shadow.”
Almost 13,000 prisoners died of disease, starvation and exposure to 100-degree days and freezing rains.
Isham Booth “said it was the awfulest place he ever saw in his life,” his son recalled. “He told me a lot of times about that old creek. It came into camp with a good head. By the time it ran through camp, it was gone. They used it up.”
The guards and their livestock used the head of the stream. Prisoners were left with befouled water.
“They’d get the fever,” Booth said. “Daddy said they died like flies. There was no food, no medicine. He felt sorry for them.”
Eventually, the guards started dropping, too.
“He came down with a fever,” Booth said. “They put him on a mule and drew him a map. It took about four days to get home. He said he was about dead when he got home.” It was nearly a 200-mile trip.
Isham Booth recovered and was heading back to duty when he learned the war was over. But he was listed as a deserter (unknown to him for decades) until he cleared it up in 1927. That allowed him to receive a $25-a-month Confederate pension. His wife, Miranda Lue, received a stipend until she died in 1968. By then, it was $110.
Times were tough in the rural South early in the past century, and the pensions made aging Confederates attractive, said Ben Sewell, national executive director of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “The old veterans received pensions and younger women married them for the pensions,” he said.
H.V. Booth, who was 15 when his father died, doesn’t know much about how his parents came to marry. His mother, who had been widowed, was 38 when H.V. was born. His father was 72. H.V. was his 12th and final child.
There were more than 130 “real sons” when Sewell came to the organization nine years ago. Now there are about 30. “We’re losing them at a pretty quick pace,” he said.
Booth displayed a knobby cane given to his father by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1930, the 65th anniversary of the Civil War’s end.
This year is the 65th anniversary of the end of World II, the war for H.V. Booth’s generation.
Booth, who was in the Navy, was assigned to an LST, a tank landing craft. He served in the South Pacific in some of history’s most ferocious battles: Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
When Booth returned, he worked for more than three decades at a Ford dealership, eventually owning it. He went broke doing so and eventually lost his home. He then worked another two decades as the night manager for a senior citizens complex until “I was getting pretty old.”
Life has been hard. “I’ve buried two wives and two boys,” he said, choking back a tear. “It’s not normal for parents to bury their children.”
Near Vidalia in southeast Georgia, real son John McDonald said he doesn’t remember much about his father. James Malachi McDonald was 79 years old in 1926 when he had his 16th — and last — child, John. Five years later, just a week shy of turning 84, McDonald’s father was dead.
John, who turned 84 this week, chuckled at the idea of having his own 4-year-old son at this age. “I’d be delighted,” he said.
His mother, Ida Lucinda, was 43 when he was born. She had been married before but her husband ran out on her. She wasn’t hunting a pension, McDonald said. “My mother was very attractive,” he said. “They felt like they were good for each other.”
McDonald vaguely remembers sitting on his father’s lap at church and playing with his watch or watching him pull up in his buggy.
“I remember he got a whip on me a couple days before he died,” he said.
His father apparently didn’t tell his wife much about the war. Or she didn’t pass it on to him. Family research found that he signed up when he was 13. They believe he did so after seeing two older brothers enlist.
After the Civil War, James Malachi bought a tract of land and farmed well into the 20th century.
John McDonald worked as an onion farmer and as a supervisor at a clothing mill. The man with antebellum roots has moved into the 21st century and even fiddles around a bit with his computer. “I’m very slow,” he admits.
http://www.ajc.com/news/confederates-offspring-are-last-774444.html
Saturday, December 4, 2010
MSNBC ATTACKS SCV
Compatriots,
Below is the link to the recent MSNBC "news" piece regarding the SCV. We must be prepared for this type of attacks during our observances of the Sesquicentennial - always remembering, regardless of the attacks, it is our duty to honor our ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/#40443607
Below is the link to the recent MSNBC "news" piece regarding the SCV. We must be prepared for this type of attacks during our observances of the Sesquicentennial - always remembering, regardless of the attacks, it is our duty to honor our ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/#40443607
HATE GROUP ( NAACP) TO PROTEST CHARLESTON BALL
NAACP to protest secession event
Organizer defends intent of play, dinner, dancing
By Robert Behre
rbehre@postandcourier.com
Friday, December 3, 2010
The shots are solely verbal -- and expected to remain that way -- but at least one Civil War Sesquicentennial event is triggering conflict.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans plan to hold a $100-per-person "Secession Ball" on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium. It will feature a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago, an act that severed the state's ties to the Union and put the nation on the path to the Civil War.
Jeff Antley, who is organizing the event, said the Secession Ball honors the men who stood up for their rights.
"To say that we are commemorating and celebrating the signers of the ordinance and the act of South Carolina going that route is an accurate statement," Antley said. "The secession movement in South Carolina was a demonstration of freedom."
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People plans to protest the event, said Charleston branch President Dot Scott. She deferred further comment to Lonnie Randolph, president of the state NAACP.
"It's amazing to me how history can be rewritten to be what you wanted it to be rather than what happened," Randolph said. "You couldn't pay the folks in Charleston to hold a Holocaust gala, could you? But you know these are nothing but black people, so nobody pays them any attention."
When Southerners refer to states' rights, he said, "they are really talking about their idea of one right -- to buy and sell human beings."
Antley said that's not so.
"It has nothing to do with slavery as far as I'm concerned," he said. "What I'm doing is honoring the men from this state who stood up for their self-government and their rights under law -- the right to secede was understood."
Antley said, "Slavery is an abomination, but slavery is not just a Southern problem. It's an American problem. To lay the fault and the institution of slavery on the South is just ignorance of history."
Antley said about 500 people are expected to attend the ball, which begins with a 45-minute play and concludes with a dinner and dancing. S.C. Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, an ardent Civil War re-enactor, is among the actors in the play. The actual ordinance of secession document also will be on display.
Randolph said the state NAACP is consulting with its national office in Baltimore regarding the format of the protests, which also could extend to other 150th anniversary events. "There is not one event that's off the table," he said.
Asked whether there could be good sesquicentennial events, Randolph said, "If there were a dialogue to sit down and discuss that event 150 years ago and how it still negatively impacts the lives of so many people in this state and around the country, that would be a good discussion, but not an event to sit down and tell lies about what happened and glamorize those people who thought America was so sorry and so bad that they wanted to blow it to hell. That's what they did -- that's what they attempted to do, and we want to make that honorable?"
Charleston is receiving increased national attention as the nation's plans for the sesquicentennial move forward. This was where it began, with the state becoming the first to secede on Dec. 20, 1860, and firing the first shot on April 12, 1861.
Most of the Lowcountry's sesquicentennial events have been announced with little controversy -- many involve lectures by respected historians and scholars.
In its vision statement for the observance, the National Park Service said it "will address the institution of slavery as the principal cause of the Civil War, as well as the transition from slavery to freedom -- after the war -- for the 4 million previously enslaved African Americans."
Michael Allen of the National Park Service said he is aware of plans for the Secession Ball but noted that most sesquicentennial events have found common ground among those with differing viewpoints.
"Now some people might be upset with some pieces of the pie. I understand that," Allen said. "I think that's the growth of me, as a person of African decent, is to realize that people view this in different ways."
Allen said other sesquicentennial commemorations being planned will mark events that have a strong black history component, such as Robert Smalls' theft of the Confederate ship Planter and the 54th Massachusetts' assault on Battery Wagner.
"At least what's being pulled together by various groups, be they black or white or whatever, will at least be more broad-based and diverse than what was done in 1961," Allen said. "Hopefully, at the end of the day, all Carolinians can benefit from this four-year journey."
Tom O'Rourke, director of the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission, said sesquicentennial organizers were fooling themselves if they thought the Confederate side of the story was going to be buried in the observances.
"I think there will be controversy, I think there will be hurt feelings, and I think that as this anniversary passes, we will question what else we could have done to tell the whole story," he said. "But I am OK with all of that. ... I think all discussion is progress."
http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/dec/03/naacp-to-protest-secession-event/
MESSAGE FROM SOUTH CAROLINA DIVISION COMMANDER SIMPSON
OFFICIAL communiqué from the South Carolina Division
Sons of Confederate Veterans
4 December 2010
South Carolina
Theatrical Performance and Secession Ball
Gaillard Auditorium Charleston, SC
Compatriots and Southern Brothers and Sisters
Our Confederate Heritage is continually under attack and now on the eve of the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the secession of South Carolina, the “sesquicentennial war” has begun and the opposition has renewed its intent to bring dishonor and disgrace to the memory of the brave men and women who stood for true Constitutional Liberty and opposed a tyrannical and oppressive federal government. It has been announced that some groups are planning to stage a protest that night; we cannot allow this attack to go unanswered; we must speak now and do so loudly.
NAACP to protest secession event
The upcoming Commemorative Ball and Theatrical Performance, reenacting the signing of the SC Ordinance of Secession on December 20, 1860, has gained International attention and again placed South Carolina’s Confederate Heritage in the cross hairs of political correctness. What will you do….what can you do?
Realizing the season and Joy of Christmas is upon us and financial burdens rest heavy upon many families, it may be difficult or impossible for each of you to join us in Charleston for this historic event on MONDAY, DECEMBER 20th 2010. However, I am constantly reminded of the many sacrifices made by our Confederate fathers, many paying the ultimate sacrifice. If you have not secured tickets to this evening of celebration and remembrance, but somehow feel you can bear the weight of the cost, please make your plans to join us in large number to overwhelmingly validate our purpose, our heritage and our right to assemble without fear or reservation and tell the world we are Confederate and we are Southern.
Like the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the 170 men who “unanimously” signed the SC Ordinance of Secession, they risked their lives, fortunes and sacred honor…..can we risk less?
If you cannot attend, please pray for the evening’s events and for all who will be present asking our Heavenly Father to grant His blessing, peace and mercy; all to His Glory. This is our time, our place, our Home. Join me and hundreds of other Southerners in Charleston to commemorate history and enjoy a one of a kind evening you will remember for the rest of your life!
http://www.scsecessiongala.org/index.html
In memory of the Men who wore the Gray!
Mark A. Simpson, Commander
South Carolina Division
Sons of Confederate Veterans
HP: 864-576-4561
Office: 864-576-1224
Mobile: 864-680-2514
Commander.Simpson@gmail.com
Organizer defends intent of play, dinner, dancing
By Robert Behre
rbehre@postandcourier.com
Friday, December 3, 2010
The shots are solely verbal -- and expected to remain that way -- but at least one Civil War Sesquicentennial event is triggering conflict.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans plan to hold a $100-per-person "Secession Ball" on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium. It will feature a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago, an act that severed the state's ties to the Union and put the nation on the path to the Civil War.
Jeff Antley, who is organizing the event, said the Secession Ball honors the men who stood up for their rights.
"To say that we are commemorating and celebrating the signers of the ordinance and the act of South Carolina going that route is an accurate statement," Antley said. "The secession movement in South Carolina was a demonstration of freedom."
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People plans to protest the event, said Charleston branch President Dot Scott. She deferred further comment to Lonnie Randolph, president of the state NAACP.
"It's amazing to me how history can be rewritten to be what you wanted it to be rather than what happened," Randolph said. "You couldn't pay the folks in Charleston to hold a Holocaust gala, could you? But you know these are nothing but black people, so nobody pays them any attention."
When Southerners refer to states' rights, he said, "they are really talking about their idea of one right -- to buy and sell human beings."
Antley said that's not so.
"It has nothing to do with slavery as far as I'm concerned," he said. "What I'm doing is honoring the men from this state who stood up for their self-government and their rights under law -- the right to secede was understood."
Antley said, "Slavery is an abomination, but slavery is not just a Southern problem. It's an American problem. To lay the fault and the institution of slavery on the South is just ignorance of history."
Antley said about 500 people are expected to attend the ball, which begins with a 45-minute play and concludes with a dinner and dancing. S.C. Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, an ardent Civil War re-enactor, is among the actors in the play. The actual ordinance of secession document also will be on display.
Randolph said the state NAACP is consulting with its national office in Baltimore regarding the format of the protests, which also could extend to other 150th anniversary events. "There is not one event that's off the table," he said.
Asked whether there could be good sesquicentennial events, Randolph said, "If there were a dialogue to sit down and discuss that event 150 years ago and how it still negatively impacts the lives of so many people in this state and around the country, that would be a good discussion, but not an event to sit down and tell lies about what happened and glamorize those people who thought America was so sorry and so bad that they wanted to blow it to hell. That's what they did -- that's what they attempted to do, and we want to make that honorable?"
Charleston is receiving increased national attention as the nation's plans for the sesquicentennial move forward. This was where it began, with the state becoming the first to secede on Dec. 20, 1860, and firing the first shot on April 12, 1861.
Most of the Lowcountry's sesquicentennial events have been announced with little controversy -- many involve lectures by respected historians and scholars.
In its vision statement for the observance, the National Park Service said it "will address the institution of slavery as the principal cause of the Civil War, as well as the transition from slavery to freedom -- after the war -- for the 4 million previously enslaved African Americans."
Michael Allen of the National Park Service said he is aware of plans for the Secession Ball but noted that most sesquicentennial events have found common ground among those with differing viewpoints.
"Now some people might be upset with some pieces of the pie. I understand that," Allen said. "I think that's the growth of me, as a person of African decent, is to realize that people view this in different ways."
Allen said other sesquicentennial commemorations being planned will mark events that have a strong black history component, such as Robert Smalls' theft of the Confederate ship Planter and the 54th Massachusetts' assault on Battery Wagner.
"At least what's being pulled together by various groups, be they black or white or whatever, will at least be more broad-based and diverse than what was done in 1961," Allen said. "Hopefully, at the end of the day, all Carolinians can benefit from this four-year journey."
Tom O'Rourke, director of the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission, said sesquicentennial organizers were fooling themselves if they thought the Confederate side of the story was going to be buried in the observances.
"I think there will be controversy, I think there will be hurt feelings, and I think that as this anniversary passes, we will question what else we could have done to tell the whole story," he said. "But I am OK with all of that. ... I think all discussion is progress."
http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/dec/03/naacp-to-protest-secession-event/
MESSAGE FROM SOUTH CAROLINA DIVISION COMMANDER SIMPSON
OFFICIAL communiqué from the South Carolina Division
Sons of Confederate Veterans
4 December 2010
South Carolina
Theatrical Performance and Secession Ball
Gaillard Auditorium Charleston, SC
Compatriots and Southern Brothers and Sisters
Our Confederate Heritage is continually under attack and now on the eve of the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the secession of South Carolina, the “sesquicentennial war” has begun and the opposition has renewed its intent to bring dishonor and disgrace to the memory of the brave men and women who stood for true Constitutional Liberty and opposed a tyrannical and oppressive federal government. It has been announced that some groups are planning to stage a protest that night; we cannot allow this attack to go unanswered; we must speak now and do so loudly.
NAACP to protest secession event
The upcoming Commemorative Ball and Theatrical Performance, reenacting the signing of the SC Ordinance of Secession on December 20, 1860, has gained International attention and again placed South Carolina’s Confederate Heritage in the cross hairs of political correctness. What will you do….what can you do?
Realizing the season and Joy of Christmas is upon us and financial burdens rest heavy upon many families, it may be difficult or impossible for each of you to join us in Charleston for this historic event on MONDAY, DECEMBER 20th 2010. However, I am constantly reminded of the many sacrifices made by our Confederate fathers, many paying the ultimate sacrifice. If you have not secured tickets to this evening of celebration and remembrance, but somehow feel you can bear the weight of the cost, please make your plans to join us in large number to overwhelmingly validate our purpose, our heritage and our right to assemble without fear or reservation and tell the world we are Confederate and we are Southern.
Like the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the 170 men who “unanimously” signed the SC Ordinance of Secession, they risked their lives, fortunes and sacred honor…..can we risk less?
If you cannot attend, please pray for the evening’s events and for all who will be present asking our Heavenly Father to grant His blessing, peace and mercy; all to His Glory. This is our time, our place, our Home. Join me and hundreds of other Southerners in Charleston to commemorate history and enjoy a one of a kind evening you will remember for the rest of your life!
http://www.scsecessiongala.org/index.html
In memory of the Men who wore the Gray!
Mark A. Simpson, Commander
South Carolina Division
Sons of Confederate Veterans
HP: 864-576-4561
Office: 864-576-1224
Mobile: 864-680-2514
Commander.Simpson@gmail.com
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Special Exhibit to be Held AT LSU
LSU Libraries Special Collections Exhibition to Feature Civil War-era Letters and Diaries
11/30/2010
BATON ROUGE – Beginning Dec. 6 and running through April 30, 2011, LSU Libraries Special Collections will present the exhibition “The Dear Ones at Home: Women’s Letters and Diaries of the Civil War Era,” at Hill Memorial Library.
Marking the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, which started April 12, 1861, the exhibition explores the variety of women’s experiences during the war, and its impact on their worlds.
Drawing on the rich manuscript holdings of the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, “The Dear Ones at Home” reveals what life was like on the home front, as women as well as men mobilized for the war. The exhibition displays photographs from the collections, including a daguerreotype of Varina Howell Davis, as well as illustrations from Harper’s Weekly.
Letters and diaries written by women at the time show how, as nurses and home front organizers, they supported or hindered the Confederate effort. As sweethearts and wives, they used their powers of affection to compel or dissuade men to serve.
For example, on April 14, 1862, Amelia Faulkner of Faulkland Plantation in Louisiana wrote to her friend, Henrietta Lauzin of Baton Rouge, that “girls ought to have nothing but soldiers for their beaux and if all girls thought as we do, there would be more companies leave this state.” But that same year, Mary Pugh of Lafourche Parish wrote to her husband, Richard, “you have done enough now to satisfy yourself and everyone else, so come now, if only for the sake of your little wife.”
Documents included in the exhibit also show how women faced the perils of battle and occupation. For example, in a letter to a female friend, J. Young Sanders Jr., wrote, “My gentle friend, never come in contact with the enemy’s brutal soldiering, if it is avoidable… but flee them as you would a hideous pestilence. They wage war upon women and feeble old men.” Also, Ann Wilkinson Penrose’s diary records her fury when the Federals came to arrest her father in New Orleans: “My blood boiled, I felt possessed with fury… I made my way down as fast as I could with my crutches… I felt as if I could strike them to the ground.”
Additional items in the exhibit reflect women’s political attitudes and their reactions to the end of war and slavery.
Prepared by LSU Curator of Manuscripts Tara Laver and Exhibitions Coordinator Leah Jewett, the exhibition also explores how women responded and adjusted, successfully or unsuccessfully, to wartime changes in courtship and marriage; death and mourning; women’s work and gender roles; religious observance and faith; as well as race relations. Manuscript reminiscences of the war years and contemporary and modern published works of fiction and non-fiction are featured, including several antebellum pieces by African-American women writers.
Also on display is a complete set of prints from artist Edwin Forbes’s “Life Studies of the Great Army,” published in 1890. Forbes travelled with the Union army, sketching images of camp life as a special correspondent for the contemporary publication “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News.” After the war, he completed etchings based on his war-time sketches, compiling them for his work.
In association with the exhibition, as part of Women’s History Month, LSU Assistant Professor of History Alecia P. Long will hold a presentation titled “(Mis)Remembering General Order No. 28: Benjamin Butler, the Woman Order, and Historical Memory” at noon on March 2, 2011 in the Hill Memorial Library lecture hall.
Both the exhibition and lecture are free and open to the public.
Hill Memorial Library is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays. When classes are in session, the library is open Tuesday evenings until 8 p.m.
For more information, visit the Special Collections’ Web site at www.lib.lsu.edu/special.
Aaron Looney
LSU Media Relations
225-578-3871
alooney@lsu.edu
http://www.lsu.edu/ur/ocur/lsunews/MediaCenter/News/2010/11/item22457.html
11/30/2010
BATON ROUGE – Beginning Dec. 6 and running through April 30, 2011, LSU Libraries Special Collections will present the exhibition “The Dear Ones at Home: Women’s Letters and Diaries of the Civil War Era,” at Hill Memorial Library.
Marking the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, which started April 12, 1861, the exhibition explores the variety of women’s experiences during the war, and its impact on their worlds.
Drawing on the rich manuscript holdings of the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, “The Dear Ones at Home” reveals what life was like on the home front, as women as well as men mobilized for the war. The exhibition displays photographs from the collections, including a daguerreotype of Varina Howell Davis, as well as illustrations from Harper’s Weekly.
Letters and diaries written by women at the time show how, as nurses and home front organizers, they supported or hindered the Confederate effort. As sweethearts and wives, they used their powers of affection to compel or dissuade men to serve.
For example, on April 14, 1862, Amelia Faulkner of Faulkland Plantation in Louisiana wrote to her friend, Henrietta Lauzin of Baton Rouge, that “girls ought to have nothing but soldiers for their beaux and if all girls thought as we do, there would be more companies leave this state.” But that same year, Mary Pugh of Lafourche Parish wrote to her husband, Richard, “you have done enough now to satisfy yourself and everyone else, so come now, if only for the sake of your little wife.”
Documents included in the exhibit also show how women faced the perils of battle and occupation. For example, in a letter to a female friend, J. Young Sanders Jr., wrote, “My gentle friend, never come in contact with the enemy’s brutal soldiering, if it is avoidable… but flee them as you would a hideous pestilence. They wage war upon women and feeble old men.” Also, Ann Wilkinson Penrose’s diary records her fury when the Federals came to arrest her father in New Orleans: “My blood boiled, I felt possessed with fury… I made my way down as fast as I could with my crutches… I felt as if I could strike them to the ground.”
Additional items in the exhibit reflect women’s political attitudes and their reactions to the end of war and slavery.
Prepared by LSU Curator of Manuscripts Tara Laver and Exhibitions Coordinator Leah Jewett, the exhibition also explores how women responded and adjusted, successfully or unsuccessfully, to wartime changes in courtship and marriage; death and mourning; women’s work and gender roles; religious observance and faith; as well as race relations. Manuscript reminiscences of the war years and contemporary and modern published works of fiction and non-fiction are featured, including several antebellum pieces by African-American women writers.
Also on display is a complete set of prints from artist Edwin Forbes’s “Life Studies of the Great Army,” published in 1890. Forbes travelled with the Union army, sketching images of camp life as a special correspondent for the contemporary publication “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News.” After the war, he completed etchings based on his war-time sketches, compiling them for his work.
In association with the exhibition, as part of Women’s History Month, LSU Assistant Professor of History Alecia P. Long will hold a presentation titled “(Mis)Remembering General Order No. 28: Benjamin Butler, the Woman Order, and Historical Memory” at noon on March 2, 2011 in the Hill Memorial Library lecture hall.
Both the exhibition and lecture are free and open to the public.
Hill Memorial Library is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays. When classes are in session, the library is open Tuesday evenings until 8 p.m.
For more information, visit the Special Collections’ Web site at www.lib.lsu.edu/special.
Aaron Looney
LSU Media Relations
225-578-3871
alooney@lsu.edu
http://www.lsu.edu/ur/ocur/lsunews/MediaCenter/News/2010/11/item22457.html
Monday, November 29, 2010
FEDS DO LITTLE TO RECOGNIZE WAR FOR SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE
No federal recognition for Civil War anniversary
By Clint Johnson | GUEST COLUMNIST
November 27, 2010
On April 12, 2011, South Carolina troops will once again fire on Fort Sumter.
This time, unlike 150 years ago, the United States, like Rhett Butler, does not give a damn.
The sesquicentennial anniversary of the start of the American Civil War is six months away, but no Federal commission has been appointed to recognize it. The 100th anniversary in 1960 reignited the nation’s interest in its bloodiest conflict, in which at least 620,000 Americans died, but there seems to be no enthusiasm for history now.
North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia have formed commissions, and North Carolina will sponsor some symposiums and living histories, but it appears that most other governors and legislatures are wary of spending too much money on historical events that the public might consider frivolous.
It is sad that the nation now chooses to ignore the conflict. Many presidents have dealt with the war’s aftermath. A few days before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln asked a band to play his favorite song: Dixie. In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt returned the Confederate battle flags, then toured the South, saluting those flags at every train stop. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson dedicated the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke before veterans of both sides at the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Dwight D. Eisenhower kept a photo of Robert E. Lee on his White House desk and asked the nation’s boys to emulate Lee at the 1960 Republican nominating convention.
President Obama is unlikely to follow their example because of the same problem that has hampered public discourse over the last 20 years: political correctness.
To his credit, earlier this year, President Obama ignored a nasty letter signed by some historians and anti-Confederate activists asking him to stop the practice of laying a wreath at the Confederate Memorial at Arlington. These historians actually asked the president of the United States to dishonor American war veterans, which is what Confederate soldiers are recognized as by the United States government.
That incident got some press, but it was overshadowed when the governor of Virginia issued a proclamation recognizing Confederate History Week. He was labeled a racist for not mentioning slavery in the same proclamation. When Mississippi’s governor observed that the charge was much ado about nothing, he too was labeled a racist.
I imagine most Southern politicians will not be defending their state’s decision to leave the Union out of fear of getting that same label. It is PC doctrine that the South’s practice of slavery led to the war. Bringing up contributing factors such as high tariffs, high taxes on cotton exports or states’ rights only invites charges of obfuscation that the real cause of the war was slavery.
Personally, I am fine with the United States sitting out the 150th anniversary, because I have already seen what the feds have done in reinterpreting the Civil War at our national battlefield parks.
Since the Clinton administration proclaimed that slavery was the cause of the war, Civil War-related national parks have undergone a change in focus from explaining the battle to explaining social change. At the new visitor’s center at Gettysburg, a film does not spend a great deal of time explaining the movements of the two armies that fought there, but it does make the strained connection that the Union victory led directly to the civil rights movement. Before going to Fort Sumter, visitors walk past several panels detailing Southern slavery. There is scant mention of Northern slavery in places like New York City, where slaves died at a young age from overwork, or how the wealthiest Rhode Islanders were successful slavers.
How should the anniversary be observed? What I will do for the next four years is honor the millions of men and women, free and enslaved, who fought for the cause they believed was right. I’ll remember how North Carolinians in the Army of Northern Virginia won a coveted nickname — Tar Heels — given them for their refusal to leave the battle lines when confronted with overwhelming odds. I’ll read and write about and re-enact the war.
On April 12, 2011, I will be shooting at Yankees from Fort Moultrie. I’ll have to play a South Carolinian. North Carolina was still in the Union on April 12, 1861.
Clint Johnson of Ashe County writes about the Civil War and reenacts both sides with the 26th Regiment of North Carolina Troops.
The Journal welcomes original submissions for guest columns on local, regional and statewide topics. Essay length should not exceed 750 words. The writer should have some authority for writing about his or her subject. Our e-mail address is: Letters@wsjournal.com. You may also mail a typed essay to: Letters to the Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. Please include your name and address and a daytime telephone number.
http://www2.journalnow.com/news/2010/nov/27/no-federal-recognition-for-civil-war-anniversary-ar-571169/?referer=http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fjournalnow.com%2Far%2F571169%2F%3Fsms_ss%3Dfacebook%26at_xt%3D4cf2a35b109a39a9%252C0&h=79269&shorturl=http://journalnow.com/ar/571169/
By Clint Johnson | GUEST COLUMNIST
November 27, 2010
On April 12, 2011, South Carolina troops will once again fire on Fort Sumter.
This time, unlike 150 years ago, the United States, like Rhett Butler, does not give a damn.
The sesquicentennial anniversary of the start of the American Civil War is six months away, but no Federal commission has been appointed to recognize it. The 100th anniversary in 1960 reignited the nation’s interest in its bloodiest conflict, in which at least 620,000 Americans died, but there seems to be no enthusiasm for history now.
North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia have formed commissions, and North Carolina will sponsor some symposiums and living histories, but it appears that most other governors and legislatures are wary of spending too much money on historical events that the public might consider frivolous.
It is sad that the nation now chooses to ignore the conflict. Many presidents have dealt with the war’s aftermath. A few days before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln asked a band to play his favorite song: Dixie. In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt returned the Confederate battle flags, then toured the South, saluting those flags at every train stop. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson dedicated the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke before veterans of both sides at the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Dwight D. Eisenhower kept a photo of Robert E. Lee on his White House desk and asked the nation’s boys to emulate Lee at the 1960 Republican nominating convention.
President Obama is unlikely to follow their example because of the same problem that has hampered public discourse over the last 20 years: political correctness.
To his credit, earlier this year, President Obama ignored a nasty letter signed by some historians and anti-Confederate activists asking him to stop the practice of laying a wreath at the Confederate Memorial at Arlington. These historians actually asked the president of the United States to dishonor American war veterans, which is what Confederate soldiers are recognized as by the United States government.
That incident got some press, but it was overshadowed when the governor of Virginia issued a proclamation recognizing Confederate History Week. He was labeled a racist for not mentioning slavery in the same proclamation. When Mississippi’s governor observed that the charge was much ado about nothing, he too was labeled a racist.
I imagine most Southern politicians will not be defending their state’s decision to leave the Union out of fear of getting that same label. It is PC doctrine that the South’s practice of slavery led to the war. Bringing up contributing factors such as high tariffs, high taxes on cotton exports or states’ rights only invites charges of obfuscation that the real cause of the war was slavery.
Personally, I am fine with the United States sitting out the 150th anniversary, because I have already seen what the feds have done in reinterpreting the Civil War at our national battlefield parks.
Since the Clinton administration proclaimed that slavery was the cause of the war, Civil War-related national parks have undergone a change in focus from explaining the battle to explaining social change. At the new visitor’s center at Gettysburg, a film does not spend a great deal of time explaining the movements of the two armies that fought there, but it does make the strained connection that the Union victory led directly to the civil rights movement. Before going to Fort Sumter, visitors walk past several panels detailing Southern slavery. There is scant mention of Northern slavery in places like New York City, where slaves died at a young age from overwork, or how the wealthiest Rhode Islanders were successful slavers.
How should the anniversary be observed? What I will do for the next four years is honor the millions of men and women, free and enslaved, who fought for the cause they believed was right. I’ll remember how North Carolinians in the Army of Northern Virginia won a coveted nickname — Tar Heels — given them for their refusal to leave the battle lines when confronted with overwhelming odds. I’ll read and write about and re-enact the war.
On April 12, 2011, I will be shooting at Yankees from Fort Moultrie. I’ll have to play a South Carolinian. North Carolina was still in the Union on April 12, 1861.
Clint Johnson of Ashe County writes about the Civil War and reenacts both sides with the 26th Regiment of North Carolina Troops.
The Journal welcomes original submissions for guest columns on local, regional and statewide topics. Essay length should not exceed 750 words. The writer should have some authority for writing about his or her subject. Our e-mail address is: Letters@wsjournal.com. You may also mail a typed essay to: Letters to the Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. Please include your name and address and a daytime telephone number.
http://www2.journalnow.com/news/2010/nov/27/no-federal-recognition-for-civil-war-anniversary-ar-571169/?referer=http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fjournalnow.com%2Far%2F571169%2F%3Fsms_ss%3Dfacebook%26at_xt%3D4cf2a35b109a39a9%252C0&h=79269&shorturl=http://journalnow.com/ar/571169/
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Georgia Division TV Ads
Compatriots,
View the following link for the ads the Georgia Division has produced to run on television stations in Georgia.
http://www.youtube.com/user/gascv11#p/u
View the following link for the ads the Georgia Division has produced to run on television stations in Georgia.
http://www.youtube.com/user/gascv11#p/u
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
SCV Awards Medical Research Grant
Sons Of Confederate Veterans Funds Valuable Medical Research
Columbia, TN - November 23, 2010
The Sons of Confederate Veterans has awarded a Brooks Medical Research Fellowship in the amount of $35,000 to Dr. Joshua A. Bush, who is currently affiliated with the University of Virginia.
Bush's medical research will focus on a new way to perform bone grafts. The title of his research is "Degradable and Functional Bone Graft Substitute for the Treatment of Large and Non-Union Fractures." This study will look at a "new chitosan/xylan composite hydrogel" that may be used as a functional bone graft substitute to effectively treat large fractures.
"The goal is to deliver a functional and versatile gel material that is compatible with current surgical practice, which improves the healing response and final outcome when compared to the currently used collagen gel carriers" reads his study.
The fellowship will cover a twelve-month period of time during which Bush will give updates concerning the status of his research over six months.
Dr. Bush earned his Ph,D. at Texas A&M University in 2005 and was a research fellow at the University of Virginia in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery from the fall of 2006 to the fall of 2009.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans is the direct heir to the United Confederate Veterans and the oldest hereditary organization for male descendants of Confederate soldiers. Organized in Richmond, Virginia in 1896, the SCV serves as a historic, patriotic and nonpolitical organization dedicated to ensuring a true history of the 1861 to 1865 period is preserved and to honor the sacrifices made by those who fought for the Confederate cause. The headquarters for the SCV are located at historic Elm Springs in Columbia, Tenn.. The organization has more than 30,000 members across the United States and in some foreign countries.
The Brooks Fund is one example of how the SCV promotes education and research. Awards and grants to post doctoral medical researchers (medical doctors, doctors of dental surgery and PhD.'s in allied medical fields) doing medical research at medical schools. Grants are $12,000 or more per approved research project in a given year.
The medical researcher, either male or female, applying for this grant must present evidence that he or she has a Confederate ancestor that would qualify for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the United Daughters of the Confederacy, though they need not be a member.
Bush has applied for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans through the service of his second great-grandfather, James Russell Bush, a private with Company A, of the 39th Mississippi Infantry.
Written by Norman Michael "Mike" Conley of the SCV Public Relations and Media Committee.
Media:
Contact: I. A. Davis, Chairman, 770-297-4788, jajeffdavis@webtv.net
or visit: www.scv.org
http://www.einnews.com/china/pr-news/241746-sons-of-confederate-veterans-funds-valuable-medical-research-
Columbia, TN - November 23, 2010
The Sons of Confederate Veterans has awarded a Brooks Medical Research Fellowship in the amount of $35,000 to Dr. Joshua A. Bush, who is currently affiliated with the University of Virginia.
Bush's medical research will focus on a new way to perform bone grafts. The title of his research is "Degradable and Functional Bone Graft Substitute for the Treatment of Large and Non-Union Fractures." This study will look at a "new chitosan/xylan composite hydrogel" that may be used as a functional bone graft substitute to effectively treat large fractures.
"The goal is to deliver a functional and versatile gel material that is compatible with current surgical practice, which improves the healing response and final outcome when compared to the currently used collagen gel carriers" reads his study.
The fellowship will cover a twelve-month period of time during which Bush will give updates concerning the status of his research over six months.
Dr. Bush earned his Ph,D. at Texas A&M University in 2005 and was a research fellow at the University of Virginia in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery from the fall of 2006 to the fall of 2009.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans is the direct heir to the United Confederate Veterans and the oldest hereditary organization for male descendants of Confederate soldiers. Organized in Richmond, Virginia in 1896, the SCV serves as a historic, patriotic and nonpolitical organization dedicated to ensuring a true history of the 1861 to 1865 period is preserved and to honor the sacrifices made by those who fought for the Confederate cause. The headquarters for the SCV are located at historic Elm Springs in Columbia, Tenn.. The organization has more than 30,000 members across the United States and in some foreign countries.
The Brooks Fund is one example of how the SCV promotes education and research. Awards and grants to post doctoral medical researchers (medical doctors, doctors of dental surgery and PhD.'s in allied medical fields) doing medical research at medical schools. Grants are $12,000 or more per approved research project in a given year.
The medical researcher, either male or female, applying for this grant must present evidence that he or she has a Confederate ancestor that would qualify for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the United Daughters of the Confederacy, though they need not be a member.
Bush has applied for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans through the service of his second great-grandfather, James Russell Bush, a private with Company A, of the 39th Mississippi Infantry.
Written by Norman Michael "Mike" Conley of the SCV Public Relations and Media Committee.
Media:
Contact: I. A. Davis, Chairman, 770-297-4788, jajeffdavis@webtv.net
or visit: www.scv.org
http://www.einnews.com/china/pr-news/241746-sons-of-confederate-veterans-funds-valuable-medical-research-
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Thanksgiving Message
23 November 2010
Beaufort, South Carolina
Thanksgiving Day
Compatriots,
Thanksgiving Day is soon upon us. This day has become marked as a time for families and friends to come together and give thanks for the many blessings that the Lord has bestowed upon us. Let us recount our blessings with all the grace that is the definition of a true Southron.
Unfortunately, on Thanksgiving Day we may hear of some credit given to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln for proclaiming the first Thanksgiving Day. Or, even more prominently, we see the first Thanksgiving Day associated with the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth Rock, in what is now Massachusetts.
So much of what we hear about American history, and the genesis of our American holidays, is often simply wrong.
The first Thanksgiving in this country was, in fact, celebrated at Jamestown, Virginia in December 1607. The Berkley Plantation’s charter required that the day of the colonist’s safe arrival, “…shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving….” The Pilgrims were still thirteen years into the future. (See: “The Real First Thanksgiving”)
Of course, the politically correct love to point to the happy scene of the Pilgrims in their black garb, white collars and stiff hats, sitting at a grand banquet with the ruddy savages, all in all a scene of peace and ethnic tranquility. This joint celebration took place because the Pilgrims’ socialistic economic practices (i.e., a common storehouse) had driven them to the brink of starvation, before the Indians took pity and rescued them.
It should be noted that there was an even earlier Thanksgiving. History records that the Spanish settlement at Saint Augustine celebrated a feast with the indigenous peoples in 1565: “After the Mass, Menendez de Aviles invited the Timucuans to join him for the first communal meal of Europeans and natives together,” This was apparently the first communal act of thanksgiving in the first permanent European settlement of what is now the United States. (See: “In U.S. History, Florida beats New England professor says”)
But, despite all the credit incorrectly given to the Pilgrims of New England, it is President Lincoln who is oft credited with the first Thanksgiving proclamation because it began an unbroken string of such acts occurring in late November.
But Lincoln was not even the first president to do so since George Washington had issued such a proclamation in 1789. More to the point for us, Confederate President Jefferson Davis declared Friday, November 15, 1861 as, “…a day of national humiliation and prayer…,” — a full two years before Lincoln’s more famous declaration.
Since that time, Thanksgiving Day has become a federal holiday and has lost almost all of its original meaning. Now, Thanksgiving is little more than the opening day of shopping season, followed by a day, christened with the most befitting nickname, “Black Friday.” In 1861, however, it was a different story.
At the time he issued his proclamation, Pres. Davis understood the enormity of the danger the South was facing and his decision to call upon the, “…reverend clergy and the people of these Confederate States to repair on that day to their homes and usual places of public worship, and to implore blessing of Almighty God upon our people, that he may give us victory over our enemies, preserve our homes and altars from pollution, and secure to us the restoration of peace and prosperity” was more than just a platitude.
Now, in 2010 our country also faces many crises: economic crises, crises of faith; crises of the moral and political decay of society; our troops are at war in foreign fields; and our precious Southern heritage is under attack on many fronts.
During these hard times when all God’s people are suffering, let us be thankful of the blessing that we have. We have the love of our brothers and sisters and we have our rich Southern heritage. But of all our blessings, nothing is sweeter than the promise of God’s love and redemption.
During this Thanksgiving season, we should all remember the sacrifice of our noble Confederate forebears. We can learn much from their example made during their time of trial.
So, on this Thanksgiving Day, when we are giving thanks and enjoying the company of our family and friends, let’s stand tall with the knowledge that together we are perpetuating the wishes of President, Jefferson Davis and sharing in a ritual that proclaims the superiority of God and keeps us mindful of our need for his mercies.
Confederately yours,
Michael Givens
Commander-in-Chief
Sons of Confederate Veterans
(931) 442-1831
http://scv.org/
Beaufort, South Carolina
Thanksgiving Day
Compatriots,
Thanksgiving Day is soon upon us. This day has become marked as a time for families and friends to come together and give thanks for the many blessings that the Lord has bestowed upon us. Let us recount our blessings with all the grace that is the definition of a true Southron.
Unfortunately, on Thanksgiving Day we may hear of some credit given to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln for proclaiming the first Thanksgiving Day. Or, even more prominently, we see the first Thanksgiving Day associated with the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth Rock, in what is now Massachusetts.
So much of what we hear about American history, and the genesis of our American holidays, is often simply wrong.
The first Thanksgiving in this country was, in fact, celebrated at Jamestown, Virginia in December 1607. The Berkley Plantation’s charter required that the day of the colonist’s safe arrival, “…shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving….” The Pilgrims were still thirteen years into the future. (See: “The Real First Thanksgiving”)
Of course, the politically correct love to point to the happy scene of the Pilgrims in their black garb, white collars and stiff hats, sitting at a grand banquet with the ruddy savages, all in all a scene of peace and ethnic tranquility. This joint celebration took place because the Pilgrims’ socialistic economic practices (i.e., a common storehouse) had driven them to the brink of starvation, before the Indians took pity and rescued them.
It should be noted that there was an even earlier Thanksgiving. History records that the Spanish settlement at Saint Augustine celebrated a feast with the indigenous peoples in 1565: “After the Mass, Menendez de Aviles invited the Timucuans to join him for the first communal meal of Europeans and natives together,” This was apparently the first communal act of thanksgiving in the first permanent European settlement of what is now the United States. (See: “In U.S. History, Florida beats New England professor says”)
But, despite all the credit incorrectly given to the Pilgrims of New England, it is President Lincoln who is oft credited with the first Thanksgiving proclamation because it began an unbroken string of such acts occurring in late November.
But Lincoln was not even the first president to do so since George Washington had issued such a proclamation in 1789. More to the point for us, Confederate President Jefferson Davis declared Friday, November 15, 1861 as, “…a day of national humiliation and prayer…,” — a full two years before Lincoln’s more famous declaration.
Since that time, Thanksgiving Day has become a federal holiday and has lost almost all of its original meaning. Now, Thanksgiving is little more than the opening day of shopping season, followed by a day, christened with the most befitting nickname, “Black Friday.” In 1861, however, it was a different story.
At the time he issued his proclamation, Pres. Davis understood the enormity of the danger the South was facing and his decision to call upon the, “…reverend clergy and the people of these Confederate States to repair on that day to their homes and usual places of public worship, and to implore blessing of Almighty God upon our people, that he may give us victory over our enemies, preserve our homes and altars from pollution, and secure to us the restoration of peace and prosperity” was more than just a platitude.
Now, in 2010 our country also faces many crises: economic crises, crises of faith; crises of the moral and political decay of society; our troops are at war in foreign fields; and our precious Southern heritage is under attack on many fronts.
During these hard times when all God’s people are suffering, let us be thankful of the blessing that we have. We have the love of our brothers and sisters and we have our rich Southern heritage. But of all our blessings, nothing is sweeter than the promise of God’s love and redemption.
During this Thanksgiving season, we should all remember the sacrifice of our noble Confederate forebears. We can learn much from their example made during their time of trial.
So, on this Thanksgiving Day, when we are giving thanks and enjoying the company of our family and friends, let’s stand tall with the knowledge that together we are perpetuating the wishes of President, Jefferson Davis and sharing in a ritual that proclaims the superiority of God and keeps us mindful of our need for his mercies.
Confederately yours,
Michael Givens
Commander-in-Chief
Sons of Confederate Veterans
(931) 442-1831
http://scv.org/
Saturday, November 6, 2010
SCV Objects To Klan Abuse of Confederate Flag
Klan misuses Confederate flag horriblyBy Lee Herron
North Augusta, S.C.
Friday, Nov. 5, 2010
I need to ask letter writer Allen Smith ("Where are Confederate flag's defenders?" Nov. 3) a question: Would you have been at the Augusta State University protest if Confederate supporters came? No -- because it is much easier to remain in the comforts of home, while lambasting those for not doing what you are not willing to do yourself.
I watched the news and I observed a Christian flag being flown by the Ku Klux Klan. Why did you not decry the local churches for the Klan using the Christian flag as you did the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy? The official flag of the Klan is the U.S. flag. Why do you not decry the Veterans of Foreign Wars for the misuse of the U.S. flag?
Augusta Chronicle Staff Writer Adam Folk interviewed me the morning before the protest. His article was published on the front page of the Oct. 23 Metro section, titled "Confederate group will not protest at Augusta State." I told Adam that we will not join the protest because of concerns of being mistaken for supporting the Klan instead of protesting them.
The media have and will manipulate their pictures and video to make it look like we are there in support of the Klan. I told Adam: "Our intention was to counter protest the Klan for their use of the Confederate flag and the hateful way they use it. They've basically hijacked a flag of honor and are using it for their hateful purposes and that is wrong."
Hear me loud and clear again: Even though the Klan has a First Amendment right to use whichever flag they choose, I demand that they stop using and abusing the Confederate flag in any way, shape or form! The Confederate flag does not belong to them! It belongs to the Confederate veterans themselves.
Lee Herron
North Augusta, S.C.
(The writer is commander of Brig. Gen. E. Porter Alexander Post 158 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.)
http://chronicle.augusta.com/opinion/letters/2010-11-04/klan-misuses-confederate-flag-horribly
North Augusta, S.C.
Friday, Nov. 5, 2010
I need to ask letter writer Allen Smith ("Where are Confederate flag's defenders?" Nov. 3) a question: Would you have been at the Augusta State University protest if Confederate supporters came? No -- because it is much easier to remain in the comforts of home, while lambasting those for not doing what you are not willing to do yourself.
I watched the news and I observed a Christian flag being flown by the Ku Klux Klan. Why did you not decry the local churches for the Klan using the Christian flag as you did the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy? The official flag of the Klan is the U.S. flag. Why do you not decry the Veterans of Foreign Wars for the misuse of the U.S. flag?
Augusta Chronicle Staff Writer Adam Folk interviewed me the morning before the protest. His article was published on the front page of the Oct. 23 Metro section, titled "Confederate group will not protest at Augusta State." I told Adam that we will not join the protest because of concerns of being mistaken for supporting the Klan instead of protesting them.
The media have and will manipulate their pictures and video to make it look like we are there in support of the Klan. I told Adam: "Our intention was to counter protest the Klan for their use of the Confederate flag and the hateful way they use it. They've basically hijacked a flag of honor and are using it for their hateful purposes and that is wrong."
Hear me loud and clear again: Even though the Klan has a First Amendment right to use whichever flag they choose, I demand that they stop using and abusing the Confederate flag in any way, shape or form! The Confederate flag does not belong to them! It belongs to the Confederate veterans themselves.
Lee Herron
North Augusta, S.C.
(The writer is commander of Brig. Gen. E. Porter Alexander Post 158 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.)
http://chronicle.augusta.com/opinion/letters/2010-11-04/klan-misuses-confederate-flag-horribly
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Funding Requests for Spring GEC Meeting
Compatriots,
The next meeting of the General Executive Council of the Sons of Confederate Veterans will be in March of 2011. Requests for funding of projects to be considered at the March meeting of the GEC must be submitted to the Budget and Finance Committee no later than FEBRUARY 1, 2011.
Requests should be sent to Executive Director Ben Sewell at exedir@scv.org and to myself at chuckrand3@gmail.com. It is recommended that requests be submitted electronically using the form on scv.org:
http://www.scv.org/pdf/SCVFundRequests.pdf
Additional information regarding the request can also be provided as needed along with the funding request form.
If you have any questions you can reach me at 318-387-3791.
YOS,
Chuck Rand
Adjutant In Chief
The next meeting of the General Executive Council of the Sons of Confederate Veterans will be in March of 2011. Requests for funding of projects to be considered at the March meeting of the GEC must be submitted to the Budget and Finance Committee no later than FEBRUARY 1, 2011.
Requests should be sent to Executive Director Ben Sewell at exedir@scv.org and to myself at chuckrand3@gmail.com. It is recommended that requests be submitted electronically using the form on scv.org:
http://www.scv.org/pdf/SCVFundRequests.pdf
Additional information regarding the request can also be provided as needed along with the funding request form.
If you have any questions you can reach me at 318-387-3791.
YOS,
Chuck Rand
Adjutant In Chief
Dolls Examined for Possible Use in Smuggling
Civil War dolls get X-rayed for signs of smuggling
STEVE SZKOTAK
Associated Press
Wed Oct 27
RICHMOND, VA.
Two Civil War-era dolls thought to have been used to smuggle medicine past Union blockades were X-rayed Wednesday, disclosing hollowed papier-mache heads that once could have contained quinine or morphine for wounded or malaria-stricken Confederate troops.
The 150-year-old dolls, dubbed Nina and Lucy Ann, were likely packed with the drugs and shipped from Europe in the hope that Union troops would not inspect toys when looking for contraband, a museum official said.
Nina and Lucy Ann were taken to VCU Medical Center from their home next door, The Museum of the Confederacy, to see if the contours inside their craniums and upper bodies were roomy enough to carry the medicines.
The conclusion: yes.
The next step could be forensic testing for any traces of the drugs.
The dolls were given to the museum by donors who said they were used to smuggle medicine past Northern blockades to Southern troops.
Nina was donated to the museum in 1923 by the children of Gen. James Patton Anderson, who commanded the Tennessee Army of the Confederacy. She has red felt boots.
Lucy Ann, attired in a salmon-colored cape and dress, was given to the museum in 1976by an anonymous donor. She is adorned with a coral necklace.
Lucy Ann has an open gash on the rear of her bonneted head, possibly made when its contents were emptied. Nina was likely disassembled then stitched back together.
Museum officials believe the dolls were in fact used for smuggling in the Civil War.
"In all of the research that I have been able to do, these are the only two confirmed smuggling dolls that I've been able to find," said Catherine M. Wright, collections manager at the museum. The X-rays were conducted as part of the museum's continuing research of its vast Confederate holdings, believed to be the largest in the U.S.
"People have been so interested in children's toys and dolls from the Civil War in general," she said. "The smuggling aspect is very captivating."
Wright carried the dolls, each 2 to 3 feet long, in a box to the radiology department of the hospital.
Registered technologist Lanea Bare gently placed each doll on the X-ray table, taking images of each facing up, then on their sides. Ghostly images were then displayed on a screen in the busy radiology department, drawing stares and wisecracks from passing doctors and technicians as the dolls lay neatly back in their box.
"Looking here, this looks like a cavity in the head and upper chest," said Dr. Ann S. Fulcher, pointing to Nina's image on the screen. "That's probably where the majority of the goods, the medicine, was put."
The hospital visit was free-of-charge.
The dolls' heads and shoulders are stitched to the bodies, which are stuffed with wool or cotton. Safety pins used to secure their clothing, including undergarments, were visible in the X-rays.
The museum knows little about the dolls' silent service to the Confederacy.
One theory is that they were purchased in Europe, then shipped to a Southern port with the medicines stuffed in their heads to avoid detection by the North's blockade of Southern ports.
"The idea behind the smuggling dolls is that even if a ship was boarded and searched, it was unlikely that they were going to do such a thorough search that they would find this medication hidden inside of dolls," Wright said.
The blockade from 1861 until 1865 was intended to thwart the delivery of arms, soldiers and supplies such as medicine to the South. Rhett Butler, the fictional rogue in Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," was a blockade runner.
A well-known illustration from the period shows a woman tying bundles of medication under her hoop dress for delivery to Confederate troops, Wright said.
Once the dolls reached a port, the powdered quinine would be pressed into pills for Southern troops, Wright said.
Malaria was widespread among Union and Confederate troops. Some 900,000 Union troops contracted malaria during the war, leaving 4,700 dead, according to the "Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War."
Statistics for Southern troops were not compiled but malaria was probably more widespread, said Robert Krick, park historian at the Richmond National Battlefield Park, which includes the site of the Confederacy's largest hospital.
Wright, the museum collections manager, was elated after the examination.
"This has been really thrilling," she said. "It's not often that you get to research a topic that one else has ever worked with before."
___
The Museum of the Confederacy: http://www.moc.org
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101027/ap_on_re_us/us_civil_war_dolls_2
STEVE SZKOTAK
Associated Press
Wed Oct 27
RICHMOND, VA.
Two Civil War-era dolls thought to have been used to smuggle medicine past Union blockades were X-rayed Wednesday, disclosing hollowed papier-mache heads that once could have contained quinine or morphine for wounded or malaria-stricken Confederate troops.
The 150-year-old dolls, dubbed Nina and Lucy Ann, were likely packed with the drugs and shipped from Europe in the hope that Union troops would not inspect toys when looking for contraband, a museum official said.
Nina and Lucy Ann were taken to VCU Medical Center from their home next door, The Museum of the Confederacy, to see if the contours inside their craniums and upper bodies were roomy enough to carry the medicines.
The conclusion: yes.
The next step could be forensic testing for any traces of the drugs.
The dolls were given to the museum by donors who said they were used to smuggle medicine past Northern blockades to Southern troops.
Nina was donated to the museum in 1923 by the children of Gen. James Patton Anderson, who commanded the Tennessee Army of the Confederacy. She has red felt boots.
Lucy Ann, attired in a salmon-colored cape and dress, was given to the museum in 1976by an anonymous donor. She is adorned with a coral necklace.
Lucy Ann has an open gash on the rear of her bonneted head, possibly made when its contents were emptied. Nina was likely disassembled then stitched back together.
Museum officials believe the dolls were in fact used for smuggling in the Civil War.
"In all of the research that I have been able to do, these are the only two confirmed smuggling dolls that I've been able to find," said Catherine M. Wright, collections manager at the museum. The X-rays were conducted as part of the museum's continuing research of its vast Confederate holdings, believed to be the largest in the U.S.
"People have been so interested in children's toys and dolls from the Civil War in general," she said. "The smuggling aspect is very captivating."
Wright carried the dolls, each 2 to 3 feet long, in a box to the radiology department of the hospital.
Registered technologist Lanea Bare gently placed each doll on the X-ray table, taking images of each facing up, then on their sides. Ghostly images were then displayed on a screen in the busy radiology department, drawing stares and wisecracks from passing doctors and technicians as the dolls lay neatly back in their box.
"Looking here, this looks like a cavity in the head and upper chest," said Dr. Ann S. Fulcher, pointing to Nina's image on the screen. "That's probably where the majority of the goods, the medicine, was put."
The hospital visit was free-of-charge.
The dolls' heads and shoulders are stitched to the bodies, which are stuffed with wool or cotton. Safety pins used to secure their clothing, including undergarments, were visible in the X-rays.
The museum knows little about the dolls' silent service to the Confederacy.
One theory is that they were purchased in Europe, then shipped to a Southern port with the medicines stuffed in their heads to avoid detection by the North's blockade of Southern ports.
"The idea behind the smuggling dolls is that even if a ship was boarded and searched, it was unlikely that they were going to do such a thorough search that they would find this medication hidden inside of dolls," Wright said.
The blockade from 1861 until 1865 was intended to thwart the delivery of arms, soldiers and supplies such as medicine to the South. Rhett Butler, the fictional rogue in Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," was a blockade runner.
A well-known illustration from the period shows a woman tying bundles of medication under her hoop dress for delivery to Confederate troops, Wright said.
Once the dolls reached a port, the powdered quinine would be pressed into pills for Southern troops, Wright said.
Malaria was widespread among Union and Confederate troops. Some 900,000 Union troops contracted malaria during the war, leaving 4,700 dead, according to the "Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War."
Statistics for Southern troops were not compiled but malaria was probably more widespread, said Robert Krick, park historian at the Richmond National Battlefield Park, which includes the site of the Confederacy's largest hospital.
Wright, the museum collections manager, was elated after the examination.
"This has been really thrilling," she said. "It's not often that you get to research a topic that one else has ever worked with before."
___
The Museum of the Confederacy: http://www.moc.org
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101027/ap_on_re_us/us_civil_war_dolls_2
Walter Williams Writes on Black Confederates
Virginia's Black Confederates
by Walter E. Williams
One tragedy of war is that its victors write its history and often do so with bias and dishonesty. That's true about our War of 1861, erroneously called a civil war. Civil wars, by the way, are when two or more parties attempt to take over the central government. Jefferson Davis no more wanted to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington, in 1776, wanted to take over London. Both wars were wars of independence.
Kevin Sieff, staff writer for The Washington Post, penned an article "Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers," (Oct. 20, 2010). The textbook says that blacks fought on the side of the Confederacy. Sieff claims that "Scholars are nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history." William & Mary historian Carol Sheriff said, "It is disconcerting that the next generation is being taught history based on an unfounded claim instead of accepted scholarship." Let's examine that accepted scholarship.
In April 1861, a Petersburg, Va., newspaper proposed "three cheers for the patriotic free Negroes of Lynchburg" after 70 blacks offered "to act in whatever capacity may be assigned to them" in defense of Virginia. Ex-slave Frederick Douglass observed, "There are at the present moment, many colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down ... and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government."
Charles H. Wesley, a distinguished black historian who lived from 1891 to 1987, wrote "The Employment of Negroes as Soldiers in the Confederate Army," in the Journal of Negro History (1919). He says, "Seventy free blacks enlisted in the Confederate Army in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sixteen companies (1,600) of free men of color marched through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in Virginia."
Wesley cites Horace Greeley's American Conflict (1866) saying, "For more than two years, Negroes had been extensively employed in belligerent operations by the Confederacy. They had been embodied and drilled as rebel soldiers and had paraded with white troops at a time when this would not have been tolerated in the armies of the Union."
Wesley goes on to say, "An observer in Charleston at the outbreak of the war noted the preparation for war, and called particular attention to the thousand Negroes who, so far from inclining to insurrections, were grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of shooting the Yankees."
One would have to be stupid to think that blacks were fighting in order to preserve slavery. What's untaught in most history classes is that it is relatively recent that we Americans think of ourselves as citizens of United States. For most of our history, we thought of ourselves as citizens of Virginia, citizens of New York and citizens of whatever state in which we resided. Wesley says, "To the majority of the Negroes, as to all the South, the invading armies of the Union seemed to be ruthlessly attacking independent States, invading the beloved homeland and trampling upon all that these men held dear." Blacks have fought in all of our wars both before and after slavery, in hopes of better treatment afterwards.
Denying the role, and thereby cheapening the memory, of the Confederacy's slaves and freemen who fought in a failed war of independence is part of the agenda to cover up Abraham Lincoln's unconstitutional acts to prevent Southern secession. Did states have a right to secede? At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, James Madison rejected a proposal that would allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. He said, "A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."
Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.
by Walter E. Williams
One tragedy of war is that its victors write its history and often do so with bias and dishonesty. That's true about our War of 1861, erroneously called a civil war. Civil wars, by the way, are when two or more parties attempt to take over the central government. Jefferson Davis no more wanted to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington, in 1776, wanted to take over London. Both wars were wars of independence.
Kevin Sieff, staff writer for The Washington Post, penned an article "Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers," (Oct. 20, 2010). The textbook says that blacks fought on the side of the Confederacy. Sieff claims that "Scholars are nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history." William & Mary historian Carol Sheriff said, "It is disconcerting that the next generation is being taught history based on an unfounded claim instead of accepted scholarship." Let's examine that accepted scholarship.
In April 1861, a Petersburg, Va., newspaper proposed "three cheers for the patriotic free Negroes of Lynchburg" after 70 blacks offered "to act in whatever capacity may be assigned to them" in defense of Virginia. Ex-slave Frederick Douglass observed, "There are at the present moment, many colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down ... and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government."
Charles H. Wesley, a distinguished black historian who lived from 1891 to 1987, wrote "The Employment of Negroes as Soldiers in the Confederate Army," in the Journal of Negro History (1919). He says, "Seventy free blacks enlisted in the Confederate Army in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sixteen companies (1,600) of free men of color marched through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in Virginia."
Wesley cites Horace Greeley's American Conflict (1866) saying, "For more than two years, Negroes had been extensively employed in belligerent operations by the Confederacy. They had been embodied and drilled as rebel soldiers and had paraded with white troops at a time when this would not have been tolerated in the armies of the Union."
Wesley goes on to say, "An observer in Charleston at the outbreak of the war noted the preparation for war, and called particular attention to the thousand Negroes who, so far from inclining to insurrections, were grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of shooting the Yankees."
One would have to be stupid to think that blacks were fighting in order to preserve slavery. What's untaught in most history classes is that it is relatively recent that we Americans think of ourselves as citizens of United States. For most of our history, we thought of ourselves as citizens of Virginia, citizens of New York and citizens of whatever state in which we resided. Wesley says, "To the majority of the Negroes, as to all the South, the invading armies of the Union seemed to be ruthlessly attacking independent States, invading the beloved homeland and trampling upon all that these men held dear." Blacks have fought in all of our wars both before and after slavery, in hopes of better treatment afterwards.
Denying the role, and thereby cheapening the memory, of the Confederacy's slaves and freemen who fought in a failed war of independence is part of the agenda to cover up Abraham Lincoln's unconstitutional acts to prevent Southern secession. Did states have a right to secede? At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, James Madison rejected a proposal that would allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. He said, "A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."
Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
South Carolina Student Fights Against School Bigotry
Court to hear SC Confederate clothing case
Associated Press
October 27, 2010
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - A South Carolina school district's refusal to let students wear Confederate-themed clothing is the subject of a federal appeals court review.
A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond will hear arguments Wednesday in the case of Candice Hardwick, who claims the Latta School District violated her free-speech rights by prohibiting her from wearing shirts depicting the Confederate battle flag.
A federal judge last year dismissed a lawsuit filed by Hardwick in 2006 when she was a 15-year-old high school sophomore. The judge ruled that school officials acted appropriately to prevent conflict in the racially diverse schools.
Hardwick wants the appeals court to reinstate the lawsuit.
http://www.wset.com/Global/story.asp?S=13393979
Associated Press
October 27, 2010
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - A South Carolina school district's refusal to let students wear Confederate-themed clothing is the subject of a federal appeals court review.
A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond will hear arguments Wednesday in the case of Candice Hardwick, who claims the Latta School District violated her free-speech rights by prohibiting her from wearing shirts depicting the Confederate battle flag.
A federal judge last year dismissed a lawsuit filed by Hardwick in 2006 when she was a 15-year-old high school sophomore. The judge ruled that school officials acted appropriately to prevent conflict in the racially diverse schools.
Hardwick wants the appeals court to reinstate the lawsuit.
http://www.wset.com/Global/story.asp?S=13393979
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
SCV Announces New Recruitment Website
Please view the new SCV recruitment website:
1800mysouth.com
Please use and share with others!
1800mysouth.com
Please use and share with others!
Confederate Records Found in Georgia
Confederate records foundBy Carole Hawkins
Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2010
Carole Hawkins/Staff
Jeanne Lenderman, librarian at the Augusta Genealogical Society, holds a letter written by Stokes F. Ivey, who served in the Confederate Army.
Carole Hawkins/StaffDaphne Hopson, president of the of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, William Henry Talbot Walker #2253 chapter, holds an early 20th century scrapbook of the UDC's Ida Evans Eve Chapter in Thomson. Records from the now-defunct chapter date back to as early as 1898 and list the organization's early members and historical snippets about the Civil War veterans to which they were related. The records were recently uncovered at the Augusta Genealogical Society.
"I don't want to hurt it," she said.
Spidery handwriting inside revealed it was a muster roll from the Thomson Guards, a McDuffie County company that had been part of the 10th Regiment of Georgia Volunteers of the Confederate Army. The list of names was a human snapshot of local Confederate soldiers.
The muster roll came from a box records from one of Georgia's original chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The box was recently rediscovered at the Augusta Genealogical Society. Directors theorize it may have been sent there for safekeeping after an estate settlement.
Many of the documents are member applications for the now defunct Ida Evans Eve UDC chapter in Thomson, which formed three decades after the Civil War. Also included are old UDC charters and scrapbooks of the group's activities during the early 1900s.
"I think it's a very significant find. A lot of these old records don't exist anymore," said Hopson, president of today's William Henry Talbot Walker UDC Chapter in Augusta.
To join the UDC, prospective members must prove direct lineage with someone who served in the Confederate Army. The Ida Evans Eve application records are thus interesting for genealogical reasons, but the records' age also places them a handshake away from history. Many applicants proved their heritage with letters from soldiers who had served with their relatives. The letters sometimes turned personal.
"You may well be proud of your father's name for he was a good man and a brave soldier," Confederate veteran G.H. Embree wrote in a letter to Lillie Paschal McCord.
The Thomson Guards muster roll says the company began its service May 11, 1861, and was made up of mainly planters and their sons from Columbia County and what is now McDuffie County. Only 77 of its 130 soldiers returned home. Some died at Gettysburg, others at Sharpsburg. Next to some men's names was written simply, "died during the war." Nearly as many men died of disease as battle wounds.
Hopson could relate to the sacrifices. Her great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier from Mississippi who became a prisoner of war at a battle at Fort Donaldson.
The rediscovered records will be sent next month to the UDC's division headquarters near Stone Mountain, where they will be placed in a museum in climate-controlled conditions, Hopson said.
http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/metro/2010-10-26/confederate-records-found?v=1288079242
Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2010
Carole Hawkins/Staff
Jeanne Lenderman, librarian at the Augusta Genealogical Society, holds a letter written by Stokes F. Ivey, who served in the Confederate Army.
Carole Hawkins/StaffDaphne Hopson, president of the of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, William Henry Talbot Walker #2253 chapter, holds an early 20th century scrapbook of the UDC's Ida Evans Eve Chapter in Thomson. Records from the now-defunct chapter date back to as early as 1898 and list the organization's early members and historical snippets about the Civil War veterans to which they were related. The records were recently uncovered at the Augusta Genealogical Society.
"I don't want to hurt it," she said.
Spidery handwriting inside revealed it was a muster roll from the Thomson Guards, a McDuffie County company that had been part of the 10th Regiment of Georgia Volunteers of the Confederate Army. The list of names was a human snapshot of local Confederate soldiers.
The muster roll came from a box records from one of Georgia's original chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The box was recently rediscovered at the Augusta Genealogical Society. Directors theorize it may have been sent there for safekeeping after an estate settlement.
Many of the documents are member applications for the now defunct Ida Evans Eve UDC chapter in Thomson, which formed three decades after the Civil War. Also included are old UDC charters and scrapbooks of the group's activities during the early 1900s.
"I think it's a very significant find. A lot of these old records don't exist anymore," said Hopson, president of today's William Henry Talbot Walker UDC Chapter in Augusta.
To join the UDC, prospective members must prove direct lineage with someone who served in the Confederate Army. The Ida Evans Eve application records are thus interesting for genealogical reasons, but the records' age also places them a handshake away from history. Many applicants proved their heritage with letters from soldiers who had served with their relatives. The letters sometimes turned personal.
"You may well be proud of your father's name for he was a good man and a brave soldier," Confederate veteran G.H. Embree wrote in a letter to Lillie Paschal McCord.
The Thomson Guards muster roll says the company began its service May 11, 1861, and was made up of mainly planters and their sons from Columbia County and what is now McDuffie County. Only 77 of its 130 soldiers returned home. Some died at Gettysburg, others at Sharpsburg. Next to some men's names was written simply, "died during the war." Nearly as many men died of disease as battle wounds.
Hopson could relate to the sacrifices. Her great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier from Mississippi who became a prisoner of war at a battle at Fort Donaldson.
The rediscovered records will be sent next month to the UDC's division headquarters near Stone Mountain, where they will be placed in a museum in climate-controlled conditions, Hopson said.
http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/metro/2010-10-26/confederate-records-found?v=1288079242
Friday, October 22, 2010
2011 S. D. Lee Institute To be Held
THE 2011 STEPHEN DILL LEE INSTITUTE
Lincoln vs. Jefferson: opposing visions of america
The Sons of Confederate Veterans request you save the dates of February 4-5, 2011, so that you may attend the Stephen Dill Lee Institute at the Hotel Francis Marion in Charleston, South Carolina.
As of this date, the following speakers will lecture---
Thomas DiLorenzo – “Poles Apart: Lincoln and Jefferson’s Economic Views”
Donald Livingston – “Is Nullification Constitutional? The Jeffersonian Position”
Kent Masterson Brown – “Kentucky’s Jeffersonians”
Marshall DeRosa – “Lincoln’s Unconstitutional Constitutional Legacy”
Donnie Kennedy – “Republican: Lincoln or Jefferson”?
On Friday February 4, there will be a special Meet the Speakers night hosted by the South Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Special guest speaker will be Dr. David Aiken of the College of Charleston and the Citadel.
Conference fees remain the same at $150 for non-SCV participants and $125 for SCV members and families. The hotel has offered a significant discount at $129 per night and is located in the heart of historic Charleston.
The Institute has significant Scholarship funding for students and teachers. Contact Brag Bowling at 804-389-3620 for further information. Also please visit the Institute website at www.StephenDLeeInstitute.com to register and obtain hotel information.
Lincoln vs. Jefferson: opposing visions of america
The Sons of Confederate Veterans request you save the dates of February 4-5, 2011, so that you may attend the Stephen Dill Lee Institute at the Hotel Francis Marion in Charleston, South Carolina.
As of this date, the following speakers will lecture---
Thomas DiLorenzo – “Poles Apart: Lincoln and Jefferson’s Economic Views”
Donald Livingston – “Is Nullification Constitutional? The Jeffersonian Position”
Kent Masterson Brown – “Kentucky’s Jeffersonians”
Marshall DeRosa – “Lincoln’s Unconstitutional Constitutional Legacy”
Donnie Kennedy – “Republican: Lincoln or Jefferson”?
On Friday February 4, there will be a special Meet the Speakers night hosted by the South Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Special guest speaker will be Dr. David Aiken of the College of Charleston and the Citadel.
Conference fees remain the same at $150 for non-SCV participants and $125 for SCV members and families. The hotel has offered a significant discount at $129 per night and is located in the heart of historic Charleston.
The Institute has significant Scholarship funding for students and teachers. Contact Brag Bowling at 804-389-3620 for further information. Also please visit the Institute website at www.StephenDLeeInstitute.com to register and obtain hotel information.
Confederate Veteran to Be Honored in North Carolina
VALE, NC – A memorial service to honor Confederate soldier Solomon A. Workman will be held on Sunday, October 24, 2010, at 4:00 p.m. at Trinity Lutheran Church in Vale, Lincoln County, North Carolina.
A new military grave marker supplied by the Veterans Administration was installed by the W.J. Hoke Camp 1616, Sons of Confederate Veterans of Lincolnton. Tony Jenkins, of Lincolnton, initiated the project by providing the required documentation to the Veterans Administration, and Andrew Johnson of W.J. Hoke Camp 1616 assisted Jenkins with the installation of the marker.
Tony’s brother, Jerry, also helped with the installation.
Workman was born on July 4, 1842, and married Susannah Catherine Reinhardt (born in Lincoln County on March 7, 1846) on August 10, 1865. He enlisted on August 14, 1861, at the age of 20, and served in Company E, 32nd Regiment, North Carolina Infantry. He was wounded in the foot at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and returned to duty prior to September 1, 1863, and was hospitalized at Charlottesville, Virginia, on September 25, 1864, with a gunshot wound. A farmer in the Vale area, Workman died on May 7, 1897, and is buried in the Trinity Lutheran Church Cemetery in Vale.
The service will be held rain or shine at the Trinity Lutheran Church Cemetery, 2700 Trinity Lutheran Church Road, Vale, North Carolina.
http://www.lincolntribune.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=21188&ref=nf
A new military grave marker supplied by the Veterans Administration was installed by the W.J. Hoke Camp 1616, Sons of Confederate Veterans of Lincolnton. Tony Jenkins, of Lincolnton, initiated the project by providing the required documentation to the Veterans Administration, and Andrew Johnson of W.J. Hoke Camp 1616 assisted Jenkins with the installation of the marker.
Tony’s brother, Jerry, also helped with the installation.
Workman was born on July 4, 1842, and married Susannah Catherine Reinhardt (born in Lincoln County on March 7, 1846) on August 10, 1865. He enlisted on August 14, 1861, at the age of 20, and served in Company E, 32nd Regiment, North Carolina Infantry. He was wounded in the foot at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and returned to duty prior to September 1, 1863, and was hospitalized at Charlottesville, Virginia, on September 25, 1864, with a gunshot wound. A farmer in the Vale area, Workman died on May 7, 1897, and is buried in the Trinity Lutheran Church Cemetery in Vale.
The service will be held rain or shine at the Trinity Lutheran Church Cemetery, 2700 Trinity Lutheran Church Road, Vale, North Carolina.
http://www.lincolntribune.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=21188&ref=nf
SCV Tells Truth About Black Confederates and PC Crowd Becomes Hysterical
Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers
By Kevin Sieff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War -- a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the conflict.
The passage appears in "Our Virginia: Past and Present," which was distributed in the state's public elementary schools for the first time last month. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Scholars are nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history. Virginia education officials, after being told by The Washington Post of the issues related to the textbook, said that the vetting of the book was flawed and that they will contact school districts across the state to caution them against teaching the passage.
"Just because a book is approved doesn't mean the Department of Education endorses every sentence," said spokesman Charles Pyle. He also called the book's assertion about black Confederate soldiers "outside mainstream Civil War scholarship."
Masoff defended her work. "As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write," she said. "I am a fairly respected writer."
The issues first came to light after College of William & Mary historian Carol Sheriff opened her daughter's copy of "Our Virginia" and saw the reference to black Confederate soldiers.
"It's disconcerting that the next generation is being taught history based on an unfounded claim instead of accepted scholarship," Sheriff said. "It concerns me not just as a professional historian but as a parent."
Virginia, which is preparing to mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, has long struggled to appropriately commemorate its Confederate past. The debate was reinvigorated this spring, when Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) introduced "Confederate History Month" in Virginia without mentioning slavery's role in the Civil War. He later apologized.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group of male descendants of Confederate soldiers based in Columbia, Tenn., has long maintained that substantial numbers of black soldiers fought for the South The group's historian-in-chief, Charles Kelly Barrow, has written the book "Black Confederates."
The Sons of Confederate Veterans also disputes the widely accepted conclusion that the struggle over slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. Instead, the group says, the war was fought "to preserve their homes and livelihood," according to John Sawyer, chief of staff of the Sons of Confederate Veterans' Army of Northern Virginia. He said the group was pleased that a state textbook accepted some of its views.
The state's curriculum requires textbook publishers and educators to explore the role African Americans played in the Confederacy, including their work on plantations and on the sidelines of battle. Those standards have evolved in recent years to make lessons on the Civil War more inclusive in a state that is growing increasingly diverse.
When Masoff began work on the textbook, she said she consulted a variety of sources -- history books, experts and the Internet. But when it came to one of the Civil War's most controversial themes -- the role of African Americans in the Confederacy -- she relied primarily on an Internet search.
For the rest of the story use the link below:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/19/AR2010101907974.html
By Kevin Sieff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War -- a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the conflict.
The passage appears in "Our Virginia: Past and Present," which was distributed in the state's public elementary schools for the first time last month. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Scholars are nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history. Virginia education officials, after being told by The Washington Post of the issues related to the textbook, said that the vetting of the book was flawed and that they will contact school districts across the state to caution them against teaching the passage.
"Just because a book is approved doesn't mean the Department of Education endorses every sentence," said spokesman Charles Pyle. He also called the book's assertion about black Confederate soldiers "outside mainstream Civil War scholarship."
Masoff defended her work. "As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write," she said. "I am a fairly respected writer."
The issues first came to light after College of William & Mary historian Carol Sheriff opened her daughter's copy of "Our Virginia" and saw the reference to black Confederate soldiers.
"It's disconcerting that the next generation is being taught history based on an unfounded claim instead of accepted scholarship," Sheriff said. "It concerns me not just as a professional historian but as a parent."
Virginia, which is preparing to mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, has long struggled to appropriately commemorate its Confederate past. The debate was reinvigorated this spring, when Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) introduced "Confederate History Month" in Virginia without mentioning slavery's role in the Civil War. He later apologized.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group of male descendants of Confederate soldiers based in Columbia, Tenn., has long maintained that substantial numbers of black soldiers fought for the South The group's historian-in-chief, Charles Kelly Barrow, has written the book "Black Confederates."
The Sons of Confederate Veterans also disputes the widely accepted conclusion that the struggle over slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. Instead, the group says, the war was fought "to preserve their homes and livelihood," according to John Sawyer, chief of staff of the Sons of Confederate Veterans' Army of Northern Virginia. He said the group was pleased that a state textbook accepted some of its views.
The state's curriculum requires textbook publishers and educators to explore the role African Americans played in the Confederacy, including their work on plantations and on the sidelines of battle. Those standards have evolved in recent years to make lessons on the Civil War more inclusive in a state that is growing increasingly diverse.
When Masoff began work on the textbook, she said she consulted a variety of sources -- history books, experts and the Internet. But when it came to one of the Civil War's most controversial themes -- the role of African Americans in the Confederacy -- she relied primarily on an Internet search.
For the rest of the story use the link below:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/19/AR2010101907974.html
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Hate Monger Attacks Lee Statue in Texas
Austin man tries to damage Robert E. Lee monument
by KVUE News
kvue.com
October 11, 2010 at 3:36 PM
An Austin man was caught in the act of trying to damage Robert E. Lee monument on the University of Texas campus.
UT police got a report of a man climbing the bronze statue near Homer Rainey Hall.
Officers found Nicholas Chaney climbing down the statue. They found a hacksaw in his backpack. Police say he was attemping to saw off the spurs on the bronze monument. They found fresh cuts and other damage on the statue.
Nicholas Chaney, 20, is charged with criminal mischief on a public monument. The incident happened on Friday. The charge is a state jail felony.
http://www.kvue.com/news/Austin-man-tries-to-damage-Robert-E-Lee-monument-104729074.html
by KVUE News
kvue.com
October 11, 2010 at 3:36 PM
An Austin man was caught in the act of trying to damage Robert E. Lee monument on the University of Texas campus.
UT police got a report of a man climbing the bronze statue near Homer Rainey Hall.
Officers found Nicholas Chaney climbing down the statue. They found a hacksaw in his backpack. Police say he was attemping to saw off the spurs on the bronze monument. They found fresh cuts and other damage on the statue.
Nicholas Chaney, 20, is charged with criminal mischief on a public monument. The incident happened on Friday. The charge is a state jail felony.
http://www.kvue.com/news/Austin-man-tries-to-damage-Robert-E-Lee-monument-104729074.html
Sunday, October 10, 2010
140th Anniversary of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Death
"Strike the Tent."
140th Anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s death
By Calvin E. Johnson Jr.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
A program commemorating the 140th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s death is set for Monday, October 11, 2010, featuring a 12:15 PM lecture by Dr. William C. Davis, at Lee Chapel Auditorium at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
The headline from a Richmond newspaper read:
“News of the death of Robert E. Lee, beloved chieftain of the Southern army, whose strategy mainly was responsible for the surprising fight staged by the Confederacy, brought a two-day halt to Richmond’s business activities.”
The American flag, which Robert E. Lee had defended as a soldier, flew at half mast in Lexington, Virginia.
General Lee died at his home at Lexington, Virginia at 9:30 AM on Wednesday, October 12, 1870. His last great deed came after the War Between the States when he accepted the presidency of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University. He saved the financially troubled college and helped many young people further their education.
Some write that Robert E. Lee suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on September 28, 1870, but was thought to greatly improve until October 12th, when he took a turn for the worse. His condition seemed more hopeless when his doctor told him, “General you must make haste and get well—-Traveller—-has been standing too long in his stable and needs exercise.”
Virginia Military Institute (VMI) Cadet William Nalle said in a letter home to his mother, dated October 16, 1870,:
“I suppose of course that you have all read full accounts of Gen Lee’s death in the papers. He died on the morning of the 12th at about half past nine. All business was suspended at once all over the country and town, and all duties, military and academic suspended at the Institute, and all the black crape and all similar black material in Lexington, was used up at once, and they had to send on to Lynchburg for more. Every cadet had black crape issued to him, and an order was published at once requiring us to wear it as a badge of mourning for six months.”
Read entire letter on Virginia Military Institute website.
The rains and flooding were the worse of Virginia’s history on the day General Lee died. On Wednesday, October 12, 1870, in the presence of his family, Lee quietly passed away.
The church bells rang as the sad news passed through Washington College, Virginia Military Institute, the town of Lexington and the nation. Cadets from VMI College carried the remains of the old soldier to Lee Chapel where he laid in state.
Memorial meetings were held throughout the South and as far North as New York. At Washington College in Lexington eulogies were delivered by: Reverend Pemberton, Reverend W.S. White—Stonewall Jackson’s Pastor and Reverend J. William Jones. Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis brought the eulogy in Richmond, Virginia. Lee was also eulogized in Great Britain.
When all settled down, Mrs. Robert E. Lee said, “If he had succeeded in gaining by the sword all the South expected and hoped for, he could not have been more honored and lamented.”
Many thousands witnessed Lee’s funeral procession marching through the town of Lexington, Virginia, with muffled drums and the artillery firing as the hearse was driven to the school’s chapel where he was buried.
US President Dwight D. Eisenhower knew and appreciated our nation’s rich history. President Eisenhower was criticized for displaying a portrait of Robert E. Lee in his office. This was part of his response; quote:
“Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by this nation.” unquote
This Christian-gentleman’s last words were, “Strike the Tent.”
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/28581
140th Anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s death
By Calvin E. Johnson Jr.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
A program commemorating the 140th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s death is set for Monday, October 11, 2010, featuring a 12:15 PM lecture by Dr. William C. Davis, at Lee Chapel Auditorium at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
The headline from a Richmond newspaper read:
“News of the death of Robert E. Lee, beloved chieftain of the Southern army, whose strategy mainly was responsible for the surprising fight staged by the Confederacy, brought a two-day halt to Richmond’s business activities.”
The American flag, which Robert E. Lee had defended as a soldier, flew at half mast in Lexington, Virginia.
General Lee died at his home at Lexington, Virginia at 9:30 AM on Wednesday, October 12, 1870. His last great deed came after the War Between the States when he accepted the presidency of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University. He saved the financially troubled college and helped many young people further their education.
Some write that Robert E. Lee suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on September 28, 1870, but was thought to greatly improve until October 12th, when he took a turn for the worse. His condition seemed more hopeless when his doctor told him, “General you must make haste and get well—-Traveller—-has been standing too long in his stable and needs exercise.”
Virginia Military Institute (VMI) Cadet William Nalle said in a letter home to his mother, dated October 16, 1870,:
“I suppose of course that you have all read full accounts of Gen Lee’s death in the papers. He died on the morning of the 12th at about half past nine. All business was suspended at once all over the country and town, and all duties, military and academic suspended at the Institute, and all the black crape and all similar black material in Lexington, was used up at once, and they had to send on to Lynchburg for more. Every cadet had black crape issued to him, and an order was published at once requiring us to wear it as a badge of mourning for six months.”
Read entire letter on Virginia Military Institute website.
The rains and flooding were the worse of Virginia’s history on the day General Lee died. On Wednesday, October 12, 1870, in the presence of his family, Lee quietly passed away.
The church bells rang as the sad news passed through Washington College, Virginia Military Institute, the town of Lexington and the nation. Cadets from VMI College carried the remains of the old soldier to Lee Chapel where he laid in state.
Memorial meetings were held throughout the South and as far North as New York. At Washington College in Lexington eulogies were delivered by: Reverend Pemberton, Reverend W.S. White—Stonewall Jackson’s Pastor and Reverend J. William Jones. Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis brought the eulogy in Richmond, Virginia. Lee was also eulogized in Great Britain.
When all settled down, Mrs. Robert E. Lee said, “If he had succeeded in gaining by the sword all the South expected and hoped for, he could not have been more honored and lamented.”
Many thousands witnessed Lee’s funeral procession marching through the town of Lexington, Virginia, with muffled drums and the artillery firing as the hearse was driven to the school’s chapel where he was buried.
US President Dwight D. Eisenhower knew and appreciated our nation’s rich history. President Eisenhower was criticized for displaying a portrait of Robert E. Lee in his office. This was part of his response; quote:
“Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by this nation.” unquote
This Christian-gentleman’s last words were, “Strike the Tent.”
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/28581