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Fact -When the Civil War started, Lincoln asked Robert E Lee to lead all Union troops

EatTheRich

President
Oh, there are any number of good ideas expressed in the CSA constitution. There's no point in discussing them. You don't care that Cromwell supported slavery, but all you care about when it comes to the CSA leadership is slavery. But even if their motives were as completely impure as you would have them be, what does that have to do with statues erected 40 years later, that have now been in place for 100 years? They motives of the people who put those up were largely no different from their counterparts who put up statues to their former leaders.
The motives of those who put the statues up was to stake out a claim for white supremacy in the midst of their efforts to undo Reconstruction-era integration and impose Jim Crow.
 

EatTheRich

President
Your first sentence simply ignores Cromwell's history. He preserved and expanded slavery under his rule.

How is their reaction more "valid" than the reaction of someone who's great grandfather fought in the CSA Army and wasn't a slaveowner? How is it more valid than the veterans who put the statue in place? Everyone's view is valid. For the most part, there wasn't a KKK robe anywhere near these statues. The KKK was force in the 1870s, largely fell apart, and re-emerged as a political force in the 1920s. It didn't put these statues in place.
Yes, they fought to preserve slavery. So what?
There are more statues of KKK founder Forrest than any of the other generals. The CSA self-identified with the causes of slavery and white supremacy as its sole reason for existence. The statues were put up by avowed white supremacists for stated white aupremacist reasons.
 

EatTheRich

President
I know of no one who desires their removal, which is sort of my point. But if you must remove Lee, when do we remove Washington, Jefferson, really any of the first five or six presidents all of whom either owned slaves or came from slaveholding states?
Don't tell me this is a made-up issue. It was already an issue 25 years ago when schools in New Orleans renamed Washington and Jefferson schools to remove the "slaveholder."
John Adams did not own slaves, nor did he live in a slaveowning state when elected president.
 

EatTheRich

President
But Lee would be no better or worse in that regard than Washington and Jefferson - -and the rest of the statement is factually wrong as Lee DID NOT fight to "destroy the union" a point already made.
Washington and Jefferson were allied with a progressive bourgeoisie and with the urban and rural popular movement, and created a country that for nearly a century was (revolutionary France aside) the great hope of all free people in the world; they still deserve opprobrium for their basic allegiance to the slaveowning class. Lee opposed the bourgeoisie and the popular movement in the name of this slaveowning class’s unchallenged supremacy, with no redeeming element to his thoroughly reactionary assault on that bastion of freedom.
 

EatTheRich

President
In the actual event, they got a lot of supplies and bought their best naval ships from England, under the table for the most part. If England or France had recognized with full diplomacy, allied, and used their large navies to lift the blockade, well, history would have been very different. That the British didn't come in after the Trent affair was probably a surprise to almost everyone, and a genuine shock to CSA leadership.
That they didn’t was due to the popular working-class movement in Britain which stood against slavery because it was not as morally debased as the bourgeoisie and because it saw its own ruin in the alliance of the Confederate planter and the British bourgeois.
 

EatTheRich

President
Colonies were considered part of the Empire. By your lights he fought to end the Empire. In so doing, he extended slavery for 32 years as the British Empire outlawed the practice 32 years before it ended in the U.S.

You act as though the CSA knew that people would disagree with it violently 150 years after it had ceased to exist. You evaluate Lee, Davis, and other CSA leaders based on 21st, not 19th, century morality. Pretty bizarre argument there, Mid.
You also talk as if the British abolition of slavery happened in a vacuum, and not in response to a French Revolution inspired by American victory and by the depletion of the French treasury in the American Revolution, a Haitian Revolution inspired by American victory and intimately bound up with the French Revolution, and a new confidence on the left as a result of the American, French, and Haitian victories.
 
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