Trump’s Civil War Battle

In military terms, President Trump walked into an ambush yesterday when his Administration announced that it will “not even consider” renaming military bases that were named in honor of Confederate soldiers from the Civil War or, as we sometimes call it in the South, “the War Against Northern Aggression” or the “War Between the States.” The move will be popular among many in Trump’s base but there is a definite downside as well.

In a series of tweets, the president noted that bases such as Fort Benning, Fort Hood, and Fort Bragg have a long and distinguished history as the launching points for armies that helped to win two world wars. In his concluding tweet, Trump said, “Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · Jun 10, 2020

It has been suggested that we should rename as many as 10 of our Legendary Military Bases, such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Benning in Georgia, etc. These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a...

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

...history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom. The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds, and won two World Wars. Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations...

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That’s a reasonable argument that appeals to a lot of people, particularly those with a nostalgia for Civil War and WWII history. That’s a group that includes me.

As I’ve written before, I come from a family that has been in the South since at least the early 1800s and I had several ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. My great-grandfather was a prisoner of the federal government at the notorious POW camp in Elmira, New York after the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was among the first integrated elementary school classes in my county in the early 1970s. When I attended the University of Georgia, I frequently drove past a historical marker near Athens memorializing the murder of Col. Lemuel Penn, a black army officer, by local Ku Klux Klan members in 1964. I currently live only a few miles away from Fort Benning.

When Gov. Zell Miller removed the Confederate emblem from the Georgia flag in 2001, I was against the move. At the time, I thought that it was mere historical reminder. Since then, I’ve changed my mind.

The flag that Miller changed in 2001 only dated back to 1956. The Confederate emblem was added that year to protest the sweeping civil rights advances. Rather than a nod to state history, the 1956 flag was a spiteful insult to a large share of Georgia’s population. As it turns out, a lot of the Confederate memorials date back to the Civil Rights era.

I still respect and admire many Confederates, imperfect as they were. Some were good men but they made the decision to support a cause that was evil. Although many argue that the war was about state’s rights, reading the Declarations of Causes for secession by the Southern states makes it apparent very quickly that the state right in question was “the subject of African slavery” as the document passed by Georgia stated.

What changed my mind on the issue was putting myself in the shoes of people on the other side of the argument. Not only is it understandable that black citizens would object to Confederate emblems and memorials, but a lot of whites do as well. There has been a lot of population shifting since 1865 or even 1956. A great many white residents of Southern states are just as offended by Confederate tributes as minorities are. My remembrance of my Southern heritage is not as important as national racial unity.

Enter Donald Trump.

President Trump’s tweets were in response to a statement by an army spokesman earlier this week that “The secretary of Defense and secretary of the Army are open to a bipartisan discussion on the topic.” In other words, no one was forcing the army to rename its bases. The army was voluntarily offering to do so. That is almost certainly a hint that the army prefers to change the names.

A better move by President Trump would have been to take a big swing at the fat, lazy curveball that the army pitched right across the center of the plate, by saying something along the lines of, “I call on Congress to rename bases that are named in the memory of Confederate soldiers. In light of our changing national culture on race, I feel that it is appropriate to rededicate these facilities to the memory of our great military leaders who helped lead our nation to victory in more recent wars.”

Instead the president whiffed at the pitch and got a strike.

While there are many passengers on the Trump train who will be elated to see that the base names will remain unchanged, Trump’s stance won’t endear him to black voters, moderates, or swing state voters outside the South. The move won’t even necessarily help a lot in Southern states where many white Republicans and conservatives are embarrassed by our Confederate history.

Trump already has the Southern states (minus Florida) locked up. Defending Confederate names won’t help him there but a Nixon-goes-to-China moment in which President Trump called for respectfully setting aside Confederate emblems would have been a boon outside of the deep-red states.

Instead, the president chose to deepen the racial divide. A great many Americans already view the Republican Party as racist and defending the honor of long dead Confederates is going to confirm that stereotype.

Likewise, the army had several good reasons for its readiness to change the names. For one thing, many soldiers serving on those bases are minorities and may have ancestors that people like Henry Benning, Braxton Bragg, and John Bell Hood fought to keep enslaved. Black soldiers make up 21 percent of army personnel, even though only 13 percent of the US population is black. It is not unreasonable that the army wants minority recruits to feel welcome.

Further, while the president notes that our military heritage is one of winning, the Confederates did not win. That was bad news for my ancestors who lived the war and then the post-war era, but it’s good news for me. I would not want to live in a Confederate States of America where, if slavery didn’t still exist, something along the lines of Jim Crow or Apartheid probably would. People who say that Confederate memorials are participation trophies are not totally wrong.

Finally, it is ironic that so many big military bases are named for people who became famous as rebels who tried to rip the United States apart. People who say that the United States is the only country that celebrates people who unsuccessfully committed treason are also not wrong.

So what to do about the situation? In my opinion, the fate of local memorials should be decided locally. Let people vote on whether to remove them. Some will go and some will stay, but honor the wishes of the local citizens.

National military bases are a different problem. Military bases in the South are not the property of the states in which they exist. They are the property of American citizens from all over the country. These bases represent the country as a whole and really should be renamed.

There is no shortage of victorious heroes to name them after. Fort Benning could be renamed after George S. Patton, the famous (and infamous) armor general of WWII. Patton actually lived on Fort Benning in 1941 and 1942 while he commanded the 2nd Armored Division there. A good namesake for Fort Bragg, a special operations mecca and home of the 82nd Airborne Division, would be Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, who led the 82nd in the first large-scale airborne assault in US Army history, the 1943 invasion of Sicily.

Renaming the bases could have been a moment when Trump called the country to national unity in putting aside the vestiges of a time when we were even more divided as a nation than we are today. Trump’s intransigence means a deeper racial divide, however, as the president forsakes the opinions of a majority of Americans to pander after the votes of a shrinking number of Confederate-Americans.

Originally published on The Resurgent 

On Race And Growing Up Southern

The controversy over Confederate statues is something I have thought a lot about. Perhaps unlike many, my experience has allowed my position to change over the years.

I grew up in small town Georgia. I attended an elementary school that was predominantly black. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were growing up in the shadow of the Jim Crow South. I was in elementary school in the 1970s, less than a decade after the full integration of Georgia public schools.  Lester Maddox (D-Ga.), the avowed segregationist governor, was not even a distant memory.

What’s more, my classmates and I were scarcely a decade and 20 miles away from the murder of Col. Lemuel Penn, a decorated hero of WWII who happened to be black. Penn was murdered by a trio of Ku Klux Klansmen for the crime of driving through Athens, Georgia in 1964. The murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury prompting the FBI to charge the men with civil rights violations under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I can only remember two brushes with the Klan. As a high school student, a classmate showed me a Ku Klux Klan ring one day. It was like a class ring, but instead of the school name, it was engraved with the words “Ku Klux Klan.”

In the other instance, I was a college student working part-time at a local pharmacy when Klan members appeared on the town square one day. The Klansmen, dressed in white robes with no hoods, tried to hand out leaflets to anyone who would take them. Even at that point, they were such an anachronism that everyone in the store took turns driving by to gawk at them. No one seemed to be taking leaflets.

The world had changed a lot in a short time. My classmates and I scarcely thought about race. We got along fine as kids generally do. In my youth, we were aware of race, but pushed it to the background. I remember my parents telling me that I should treat everyone with respect, but that the races should not mix sexually.

I would be willing to bet that they have evolved past the intermarriage taboo now. I know I have. I care more about the content of the character of my children’s future spouses than skin color. I would prefer they have an honorable and decent mate who is black, Hispanic or Asian than what is referred to as “white trash” in the South.

My experience taught me that children have to learn hatred. They don’t come to it naturally. A proud moment for me as a father was when my own children failed to even comprehend race as a descriptive characteristic. “Why does anybody care about skin color?” they asked.

For years, I subscribed to the notion that race relations were nothing to be concerned about. No living blacks were slaves and no living whites were slave owners. If that was the case, what was there to argue about?

As I learned about civil rights history and talked to my black friends, my opinion slowly changed.

My family has been in Georgia since the early 1800s. In an undated photo, my ancestors are standing outside their cabin with a black man who is almost certainly their slave.

Several of my ancestors were Confederate soldiers. My great-grandfather was captured at the Battle of Spotsylvania and spent the rest of the war in a (damn)Yankee prison camp in Elmira, N.Y. Today, Elmira is forgotten by history, but it was a brutal place in 1864.

The mortality rate among the prisoners was 25 percent, rivalling the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Ga. But Georgia was subject to a federal naval blockade that meant that even Confederate soldiers didn’t have enough to eat. Supplies were plentiful in New York, but overcrowding, disease, inadequate protection from the New York winter and lack of food still killed thousands of prisoners. Many of those who survived were emaciated and unrecognizable when they returned home.  

If I feel bitter about the treatment of my grandfather and his brothers-in-arms, none of which I never met, how much more bitter do blacks feel about slavery and Jim Crow? I can scarcely imagine.

While there are no living slaves today, Jim Crow is a recent memory. Older blacks experienced it personally. Younger blacks have heard first-hand accounts of whites-only water fountains and lunch counters, of the Freedom Riders, of lynchings, of the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in which Klansmen killed four little girls, of the murders of Medgar Evers, Lemuel Penn, Martin Luther King and more.

While slavery and Jim Crow are distant history in my experience, they aren’t so far in the past for my black friends. Even black conservatives like Tim Scott (R-S.C.) have stories of prejudice and “driving while black” to tell. Racism is in retreat, Charlottesville notwithstanding, but it isn’t dead and never will be. Vestiges of racism will probably be around forever.

The world is full of longstanding ethnic problems. There is the black-white divide in America. We also have tension between Native Americans and European newcomers. In Texas, there are still hard feelings on both sides over the Alamo, Goliad, San Jacinto and the border clashes that occurred after Texas independence. In other countries, there are ethnic conflicts that have lasted for centuries between Jews and Arabs, Armenians and Turks, ethnic Russians and their subjugated countries, the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans…. The list goes on and on.

In most cases, people have dealt with these conflicts by dredging up old hurts and killing people because of it. Then the children of these victims take vengeance on the next generation of the other group in an endless cycle.

One way to avoid this vicious cycle is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Would most whites hold a grudge if their parents and grandparents had been treated as second-class citizens and had to fear for their lives if they acted as normal human beings, as Emmett Till did? You bet they would.

Would blacks and non-Southerners feel protective about Confederate memorials if their ancestors had fought and died under the Confederate banner?  Many Confederates who did not own slaves simply fought to protect their homes from the federal invaders. Sherman burned everything in his path on his march to the sea and Union soldiers committed numerous atrocities on Southerners. In 1864, for example, Union forces forcibly deported 400 civilian women from Roswell, Ga. to the North. Most of these women never returned home.

The point is that both sides have legitimate grievances. If we persist in fighting over the status of biggest victim and inflicting revenge on the other side, then the dispute will continue to fester and grow.

The ultimate answer is forgiveness. The Bible that most of us, black and white, purport to believe teaches that forgiveness heals the victim as well as the perpetrator. The Bible also teaches that race is unimportant, that we are all equal – and equally sinful – at the foot of the cross.

As to Confederate statues, I prefer to keep them, but I understand the point of view of those who oppose them. To me, the issue of statues is unimportant compared to other issues we face such as the national debt, Islamic terror, and the fundamental decay of American society. To me, the disposition of statues of should be a local issue decided by the people of the community, not outsiders with an axe to grind.

Who was more right and who was more wrong is less important than that we now live together as Americans. That’s why it distresses me when my conservative friends take the bait so easily and quickly find themselves in the moral equivalence game between leftists and neo-Nazis who claim to be working toward the president’s agenda.

Solutions to many of the world’s problems would be possible if more people would attempt to understand the point of view of the opposing side. Before making up your mind on an issue, walk a mile in their shoes. 

Originally published on The Resurgent

It's time to lower Confederate flag

In the wake of last week’s mass murder in Charleston, SC, amid the usual calls for gun control has come a secondary demand that South Carolina remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in Columbia. For perhaps the first time, conservative Republicans such as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Senator Lindsey Graham have joined the calls to remove the flag. As a lifelong Southerner and staunch conservative, I agree that the time has come to lower the Confederate flag.

I grew up respecting the heroes of the Confederacy. As a native Georgian, I learned family lore about my ancestors who had fought for the South, including one great-great-grandfather who was captured at the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864 and then interned at the notorious federal prison camp in Elmira, NY. I still hold a great deal of respect for Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.  

There is disagreement even on the nature of the flag in question. Some defenders of the South Carolina flag point out that it was not the national flag of the Confederacy. In reality, the rectangular “Southern Cross” was the Confederate navy jack and was similar to the Confederate battle flag. The flags of the Confederacy can be seen on USflag.org. Both the battle flag and the navy jack were a Confederate flags and, in the minds of most Americans have come to be the Confederate flag.  Photos of the South Carolina flag appear to be the Confederate battle flag, a square version of the Southern Cross carried by the Confederate army. In the end, the exact version of the flag is irrelevant.

Confederate apologists have long made the claim that the Civil War (which should more properly be called the War of Secession) was about state’s rights, not slavery. There is some truth to this argument. The rub is that the state right in question was the right to keep slavery, the South’s “peculiar institution,” legal. This is made abundantly clear in the declarations of causes passed by the seceding states. These declarations are available for review on CivilWar.org.

South Carolina, the first state to secede, cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as their reason for leaving the Union. More specifically, the Carolinians charged that “non-slaveholding States… assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.”

In Georgia’s declaration, its delegates cite slavery as the reason for secession in the document’s second sentence: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.”

One must conclude not only that secessionists were leaving the Union to protect slavery, but that they were proud of their pro-slavery stance. Given that the Confederacy was born to protect slavery, it is also a given that the Confederacy was a racist institution. Therefore, the Confederate flag must be a racist symbol.

Proponents of the flag also argue that the United States flag must also be a racist symbol because Old Glory flew over legal slavery for longer than the Southern Cross. This statement is in error for several important reasons. First, slavery was never a federal matter. It was always subject to the individual states. A timeline of slavery by Mount Holyoke College shows that Vermont banned slavery with a constitutional amendment in 1777, one year after the Declaration of Independence. Other northern states had banned the practice by 1804.

Additionally, the Constitution itself reflects American uneasiness about slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise is often incorrectly interpreted to mean that the Constitution considered slaves to be three-fifths of a man. In reality, the Three-Fifths Compromise laid the foundation for the eventual abolition of slavery by providing a check to the power of the Southern slave states.

Likewise, the Constitution granted Congress the power to prohibit the importation of slaves after 20 years, an action that Congress took in 1807 when it passed the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves. In the South, even though slaves were no longer imported, the slave trade persisted as children of domestic slaves were separated from their families and sold to new owners. After the slave trade was declared to be piracy by Congress in 1819, the US Navy took an active role alongside the Royal Navy in bringing slave smugglers to justice and ending the slave trade in the Atlantic Ocean.

In contrast with the Confederacy, the United States took strong action to hasten the end of slavery. Even though the American flag flew over slavery for almost 100 years, slavery was never the official policy of the United States. In the end, secession hastened the end of American slavery. The 13^th amendment, which abolished slavery, was ratified on December 6, 1865, much earlier than it is likely to have been passed without the war.  

The racist association of the Confederate flag did not end with the war. The flag was raised above the South Carolina statehouse in 1961 to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the Civil War according to Daniel Hollis, the last surviving member of the centennial commission. Hollis doesn’t recall a racial motive behind the raising of the flag, but South Carolina politicians, mostly Democrats, were fighting against desegregation at the time. In fact, South Carolina’s delegates seceded from the national Centennial Commission to protest President Kennedy’s decision to move the ceremonies to Charleston’s navy base rather than exclude black delegates who had been refused entrance to the segregated Francis Marion Hotel. The brouhaha was referred to as the Second Battle of Fort Sumter.

The South Carolina statehouse flag may not have been explicitly associated with segregation, but elsewhere the Confederate flag was adopted by anti-civil rights activists. The Georgia Encyclopedia notes that the inclusion of the Southern Cross on the Georgia state flag in 1956 was prompted by the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decisions in 1954 and 1955. Rep. Denmark Groover said, after the new Georgia flag was adopted, that it “will show that we in Georgia intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for and will fight for,” a reference to preserving segregation.

The South Carolina flag was moved from the top of the statehouse to a different site on the statehouse grounds as part of a compromise in 2000. The Georgia flag was changed in 2001.

The best argument for keeping the Confederate flag is as a memorial for Confederate soldiers. An estimated 260,000 Confederate soldiers died in the war. This was almost five percent of the total non-slave population of the Confederacy. Another 194,000 were wounded and 31,000 taken prisoner. It is appropriate to fly Confederate flags at war memorials. It is not appropriate to give the flag a place of prominence on the state capitol grounds or on a state flag.

The bitter truth is that Confederate soldiers, even the majority who did not own slaves, fought to preserve a racist system, even as they were protecting their homes. After the fall of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery, the flag became the symbol of racial segregation in the form of “Jim Crow” laws and “separate-but-equal” treatment of blacks. As such a racist symbol, the Confederate flag has no place in a modern American government.

This is not to say that the Confederate flag should be banned. Freedom of speech dictates that people should have the right to fly the flag on private property, wear it on their clothes or paint it on their cars a la “Dukes of Hazzard.” It would also be improper to attempt to erase all vestiges of the South’s Confederate history from society. Slavery, the Confederacy and the Civil War happened and that history should be openly acknowledged and discussed.

There is a vast difference, however, between a state government endorsing the Confederate ideals by prominent placement of the flag and flying the flag at a memorial or displaying it at a museum. By keeping such a divisive symbol, states marginalize 30-40 percent of their populations. If the flag keeps alive the memory of Confederate soldiers, it is fair to say that it also keeps alive the memory of slavery and Jim Crow for black Southerners. It hearkens back to the 1960s when Klansmen could murder a black army officer, as they did not far from where I grew up, and all-white juries would unanimously acquit the killers. Bringing down the Confederate flag would be an important step in putting this racist part of our past behind us.

An addition to being good for country, lowering the Confederate flag would be a good thing for conservatives. Democrats never miss a chance to imply (or state outright) that Republicans are racist. Quite often, conservatives step right into these liberal traps.

To many minority voters, defending the flag of a 150-year-old failed racist nation makes conservatives seem like racists themselves. Conversely, hauling down the flag would remove a roadblock to increased minority participation in the GOP. If Republicans want to win future elections, they must find ways to reach out to minority voters rather than alienating them over trivial issues. In 2015, the Republican Party can either spend political capital trying to rehabilitate the Confederate flag, a lost cause in itself, or wooing minority voters. It cannot do both effectively.

Opposition to the Confederate flag spreads across racial lines. Rasmussen found that by a three to one margin, voters oppose having the Confederate flag continue to fly in front of the South Carolina statehouse. Outside of white Southerners, themselves a minority, support for the Confederate flag is thin.

South Carolina’s Confederate flag will come down, whether now or in the not-too-distant future. If the flag, hoisted by Democrats in both 1861 and 1961, is taken down now, under the effort led by Governor Nikki Haley, a woman who is herself a member of an ethnic minority, today’s Republicans will be completing the job that was started by Republican Abraham Lincoln more than 150 years ago. The irony will be delicious. 

Read the full article on Examiner.com

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