Should Tennesseans Memorialize Southern Traitors?

Should the Polish people memorialize fellow Poles who collaborated with the Soviets? This of course is a

Photo:  ChristoGenea.org
Photo: ChristoGenea.org

preposterous question to ask, yet the “logic” displayed in a recent National Review article suggests that the answer to the question would be an unequivocal “yes.”

The article in question is “The Romance of the Confederacy” by one Josh Gelernter (March 28 issue), who is identified as someone who “writes for National Review and The Weekly Standard.” In this article Gelernter points out that there were Southerners in the Union Army during the War to Prevent Southern Independence. In border states like Maryland, for instance, about half the men who fought were on the Union side. Rather than memorializing the ancestors of the vast majority of Southerners — the foot soldiers of the Confederate Army, almost none of whom owned slaves (as Gelernter admits) — it is this class of traitors who should be honored and memorialized instead, he writes. Southerners should “abandon the Confederacy” and embrace “the heritage of Southern Unionists.” To your average Southerner, this would be identical to the Polish people memorializing and honoring their fellow countrymen who collaborated with the Soviets.

Gelernter begins his preposterous proposal with quotations of some of Lincoln’s more outlandishly false and phony commentary. He quotes Lincoln as being opposed to men who “wrung their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” but omits the fact that in his first inaugural address Lincoln pledged his full support of the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering in Southern slavery. In that speech Lincoln declared that, in his opinion, slavery was already constitutional (as opposed to the opinion of Lysander Spooner, author of The Unconstitutionality of Slavery), and that he had “no objection” to making it “express and irrevocable” in the text of the U.S. Constitution. Lincoln’s real position, based on his actions and not just his pretty words, was that it was fine and dandy for a man to wring his bread from another man’s brow as long as he kept paying federal taxes.

In the same sentence Gelernter also quotes another piece of nineteenth-century Republican Party propaganda – that the South seceded to “extend” slavery. The truth is that (continue reading)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *