Thread of Statue Removals

[Saint Austin 776]

1 minute ago, SimonBolivar said:

What was the point of Southern independence? Slavery. 

 

 

Initially, yes. But after Lincoln's call for volunteers that drove the Upper South out of the Union, it become more about a perceived abuse of executive power.

[Asithappens 978]

1 minute ago, Saint Austin said:

Initially, yes. But after Lincoln's call for volunteers that drove the Upper South out of the Union, it become more about a perceived abuse of executive power.

 

Yeah, no it didn't.

It was about slavery.

[bad_teammate 13481]

Love the Twister game apologists play.

27 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

Also, the reasons for secession are not the same as the reasons for the war or soldiers' motivations for fighting.

The soldiers' motivations are irrelevant, and you know that.

But the war was kicked off by secession and and secession was done because of slavery.

[Pescado_Rojo 19559]

[Saint Austin 776]

1 minute ago, Asithappens said:

 

Yeah, no it didn't.

It was about slavery.

So when Virginia voted not to secede before Lincoln's call for volunteers, and then switched its vote to secede after Lincoln's call to put down the rebellion by force, that was about slavery?

[FondrenRoad 4378]

1 minute ago, Saint Austin said:

You are confusing the reasons for secession and the reasons for war. However, it's interesting that you reference the Crittenden Compromise and Corwin Amendment. While Lincoln did oppose the Crittenden Compromise, he approved of the  Corwin Amendment. In fact, in his first inaugural he stated:

If anything, Lincoln's approval of the Corwin Amendment and the seceded states' decisions to remain out of the Union only furthers the argument that the war was more about Southern independence than slavery.

Perhaps all these executive orders lately have you forgetting the requirements for an amendment.  In the end, Corwin would have been worse than Crittenden. At least Crittenden was narrowly tailored and would have been undone later.

Lincoln was an appeasement President before he was a wartime President. Nobody doubts that.

And yes, they wanted to be independent....wait for it.....so they could maintain slavery. Yes, @Hugo Stiglitz, they were white supremacists too.  Good guys all around. 

I get that people want to be proud of where they are from. What I don't get is why people feel the need to apply that to the confederacy.  You aren't from the confederacy. It was a short lived failed nation. You are from your individual state and the United States. 

The confederacy was bad. Slavery is bad.  White supremacy is bad.  Had the confederacy won, could it have, over time, reformed into a nation that is a champion for civil rights?  Sure.  But instead it just has it formative period where it was both objectively and subjectively shitty.

[Saint Austin 776]

1 minute ago, bad_teammate said:

Love the Twister game apologists play.

The soldiers' motivations are irrelevant, and you know that.

But the war was kicked off by secession and and secession was done because of slavery.

This isn't Lost Cause bullshit. I'm not denying the first round of secession was primarily because of slavery. We've all read the ordinances of secession. My reference of the soldiers' motivations for fighting had more to do with the argument that Confederate soldiers fought to maintain slavery, and it's just as simple as that.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

This take is a macro perspective:  it was about POWER and the South losing their perceived power.  

 

[Saint Austin 776]

4 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

This take is a macro perspective:  it was about POWER and the South losing their perceived power.  

It was definitely about power. But that also swings both ways. If the federal government allowed the South to go away peacefully, it would lose an immense amount of power, geographically, politically, and economically. The North's motivations for war laid in those reasons, as well as the more intangible "preservation of the Union," and not for the reason of abolition.

[bad_teammate 13481]

18 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

This isn't Lost Cause bullshit. I'm not denying the first round of secession was primarily because of slavery. We've all read the ordinances of secession. My reference of the soldiers' motivations for fighting had more to do with the argument that Confederate soldiers fought to maintain slavery, and it's just as simple as that.

Here's what you actually said, though: "All of y'all saying that the war was about slavery might be interested to hear what Lincoln had to say."

So you might have intended something else, but that's what you said.

The Southern states seceded to protect slavery. The Confederates then occupied American military installations. When American soldiers tried to resupply an American military installation, the Confederate soldiers attacked, which kicked off the hot war.

The war was about slavery.

If you don't want to be lumped in with the Lost Cause, don't talk like the Lost Cause.

[Foosters 18231]

7 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

It was definitely about power. But that also swings both ways. If the federal government allowed the South to go away peacefully, it would lose an immense amount of power, geographically, politically, and economically. The North's motivations for war laid in those reasons, as well as the more intangible "preservation of the Union," and not for the reason of abolition.

I don't think anyone on this sight thinks Abe started the war to end slavery. I'm not sure why that matters. We didn't fight WWII to stop the holocaust either.

[TwiceHorn 31995]

9 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

It was definitely about power. But that also swings both ways. If the federal government allowed the South to go away peacefully, it would lose an immense amount of power, geographically, politically, and economically. The North's motivations for war laid in those reasons, as well as the more intangible "preservation of the Union," and not for the reason of abolition.

Yeah, putting aside the slavery issue, I have always been intrigued by the abstract idea of going to war to prevent secession.  I don't think you can really argue that the Constitution forbids secession.  I think its very nature is that if the union stops serving the purpose of one or more states, it should be dissolved as to those states.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

You need to look no further than the race related massacres and genocides that took place in the South during reconstruction to understand that the Civil War was absolutely about slavery. 

Edited June 23, 2020 by Hugo Stiglitz

[Saint Austin 776]

1 minute ago, bad_teammate said:

Here's what you actually said, though: "All of y'all saying that the war was about slavery might be interested to hear what Lincoln had to say."

So you might have intended something else, but that's what you said.

The Southern states seceded to protect slavery. The Confederates then occupied American military installations. When American soldiers tried to resupply an American military installation, the Confederate soldiers attacked, which kicked off the hot war.

The war was about slavery.

If you don't want to be lumped in with the Lost Cause, don't talk like the Lost Cause.

You're still referring to the causes for secession and the war as if they're interchangeable; they're not.

[MaybeACoordinator 8350]

1 hour ago, bad_teammate said:

All of y'all saying the war wasn't about slavery might be interested to hear what the seceding states had to say.

 

The North did not fight to free the slaves but the South picked a fight to keep the slaves. It's that simple.

 

All y'all who think that only Confederates are legit targets of iconoclasm seem to believe that Black people give a shit whether or not Lee, Jackson, Davis et al were "traitors" who wanted to break away from one White supremacist government in order to set up an even more White supremacist government. What do you think Frederick Douglass would think about an argument like that?

That we should spare monuments to the likes of the men who enslaved him and his people just because these slaveowners died before their state had a chance to secede?

Or that Sam Houston should get a pass because he wanted to keep his slaves, but only in the Union rather than the Confederacy?

As for Jackson being added to the list because of the Trail of Tears, for the life of me it's hard to figure out why he and he alone has become the scapegoat for all this country has done over the last 400 years of ethnic cleansing against the Indians.

It was Grant who sicced Custer so disastrously against the Sioux. 

Ulysses S. Grant Launched an Illegal War Against the Plains Indians, Then Lied About It
The president promised peace with Indians — and covertly hatched the plot that provoked one of the bloodiest conflicts in the West

Spoiler

In July 1874, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led a thousand-man expedition into the Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota. He was under orders to scout a suitable site for a military post, a mission personally approved by President Ulysses S. Grant, but he also brought along two prospectors, outfitted at his expense. Although largely unexplored by whites, the Black Hills were long rumored to be rich in gold, and Custer’s prospectors discovered what he reported as “paying quantities” of the precious metal. A correspondent for the Chicago Inter Ocean who accompanied the expedition was less restrained in his dispatch: “From the grass roots down it was ‘pay dirt.’” Taking him at his word, the nation’s press whipped up a frenzy over a “new El Dorado” in the American West.

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The United States was going into the second year of a crippling economic depression, and the nation desperately needed a financial lift. Within a year of Custer’s discovery, more than a thousand miners had streamed into the Black Hills. Soon Western newspapers and Western congressmen were demanding that Grant annex the land.

 

 

 

 

 

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There was one problem: The Black Hills belonged to the Lakota Indians, the most potent Indian power on the Great Plains. They had taken the territory from the Kiowas and the Crows, and they had signed a treaty with the United States guaranteeing their rights to the region. The Lakotas most esteemed the Paha Sapa (literally, “hills that are black”) not for their mystic aura, as is commonly assumed, but for their material bounty. The hills were their meat locker, a game reserve to be tapped in times of hunger.

The outcry for annexation brought Grant to a crossroads. He had taken office in 1869 on a pledge to keep the West free of war. “Our dealings with the Indians properly lay us open to charges of cruelty and swindling,” he had said, and he had staked his administration to a Peace Policy intended to assimilate Plains nations into white civilization. Now, Grant was forced to choose between the electorate and the Indians.

He had no legal reason for seizing the Black Hills, so he invented one, convening a secret White House cabal to plan a war against the Lakotas. Four documents, held at the Library of Congress and the United States Military Academy Library, leave no doubt: The Grant administration launched an illegal war and then lied to Congress and the American people about it. The episode hasn’t been examined outside the specialty literature on the Plains wars.

During four decades of intermittent warfare on the Plains, this was the only instance in which the government deliberately provoked a conflict of this magnitude, and it ultimately led to the Army’s shocking defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876—and to litigation that remains unsettled to this day. Few observers suspected the plot at the time, and it was soon forgotten.

For most of the 20th century, historians dismissed the Grant administration as a haven for corrupt hacks, even as the integrity of the man himself remained unquestioned. More recent Grant biographers have worked hard to rehabilitate his presidency, and they have generally extolled his treatment of Indians. But they have either misinterpreted the beginnings of the Lakota war or ignored them altogether, making it appear that Grant was blameless in the greatest single Indian war waged in the West.

Throughout his military career, Grant was known as an aggressive commander, but not a warmonger. In his Personal Memoirs, he damned the Mexican War, in which he had fought, as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation,” and he excoriated the Polk administration’s machinations leading to hostilities: “We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it.” And yet in dealing with the Lakotas, he acted just as treacherously.

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This article is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine

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**********

The treaty between the Lakotas and the United States had been signed at Fort Laramie in 1868, the year before Grant took office. “From this day forward,” the document began, “all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease.”

Under the Fort Laramie Treaty, the United States designated all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the Black Hills, as the Great Sioux Reservation, for the Lakotas’ “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation.” The treaty also reserved much of present-day northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana as Unceded Indian Territory, off-limits to whites without the Lakotas’ consent. To entice Lakotas onto the reservation and into farming, the United States promised to give them a pound of meat and a pound of flour a day for four years. Whether those who wished to live off the hunt rather than on the dole could actually reside in the Unceded Territory, the treaty did not say. All Lakota land, however, was to be inviolate.

The Great Sioux Reservation (Guilbert Gates)

Most Lakotas settled on the reservation, but a few thousand traditionalists rejected the treaty and made their home in the Unceded Territory. Their guiding spirits were the revered war chief and holy man Sitting Bull and the celebrated war leader Crazy Horse. These “non-treaty” Lakotas had no quarrel with the wasichus (whites) so long as they stayed out of the Lakota country. This the wasichus largely did, until 1874.

Custer’s official mission that summer, finding a site for a new Army post, was permitted under the treaty. Searching for gold was not.

As the pressure rose on Grant to annex the Black Hills, his first resort was rough diplomacy. In May 1875, a delegation of Lakota chiefs came to the White House to protest shortages of government rations and the predations of a corrupt Indian agent. Grant seized the opportunity. First, he said, the government’s treaty obligation to issue rations had run out and could be revoked; rations continued only because of Washington’s kind feelings toward the Lakotas. Second, he, the Great Father, was powerless to prevent miners from overrunning the Black Hills (which was true enough, given limited Army resources). The Lakotas must either cede the Paha Sapa or lose their rations.

When the chiefs left the White House they were “all at sea,” their interpreter recalled. For three weeks, they had alternated between discordant encounters with hectoring bureaucrats and bleak hotel-room caucuses among themselves. At last, they broke off the talks and, the New York Herald reported, returned to the reservation “disgusted and not conciliated.”

Meanwhile, miners poured into the Black Hills. The task of running them out fell to Brig. Gen. George Crook, the new commander of the Military Department of the Platte, whose sympathies clearly rested with the miners. Crook evicted many of them that July, in accordance with standing policy, but before they pulled up stakes he suggested they record their claims in order to secure them for when the country opened up.

 

 

 

 

The Lakota chief Red Cloud (seated, second from left, in 1877) signed the treaty establishing the Great Sioux Reservation. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs)

Throughout these proceedings, Crook thought the Lakotas had been remarkably forbearing. “How do the bands that sometimes roam off from the agencies on the Plains behave now?” a reporter asked him in early August.

“Well,” Crook said, “they are quiet.”

“Do you perceive any immediate danger of an Indian war?” the reporter persisted.

“Not just now,” Crook answered.

Grant gave negotiation one more try. He appointed a commission to hold a grand council on the Great Sioux Reservation and buy mining rights to the Black Hills.

The only member of the commission who knew the Lakotas was Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry, the urbane and kindly commander of the Department of Dakota. Why not, he suggested, encourage the Lakotas to raise crops and livestock in the Black Hills? No one listened.

 

The grand council convened that September but quickly foundered. Crazy Horse refused to come. So did Sitting Bull; when the commission sent a messenger to talk to him, he picked up a pinch of dirt and said, “I do not want to sell or lease any land to the government—not even as much as this.” Subchiefs and warriors from the non-treaty Lakota villages did attend the council, but to intimidate any reservation chief who might yield. Gate-crashing whites—some well-meaning and others of questionable intent—advised the reservation chiefs that the Black Hills were worth tens of millions of dollars more than the commission was prepared to offer. Those chiefs then said they would sell—if the government paid enough to sustain their people for seven generations to come.

The commission sent word back to Washington that its “ample and liberal” offer had been met with “derisive laughter from the Indians as inadequate.” The Lakotas could not be brought to terms “except by the mild exercise, at least, of force in the beginning.”

By October 1875, Grant was plotting a new course to break the impasse. Early that month, the War Department ordered Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan, the ranking officer in the West, to come to Washington. The order bypassed the Army’s commanding general and Sheridan’s immediate superior, William T. Sherman. The order itself doesn’t survive, but Sheridan’s response, addressed to the adjutant general in Washington and included in Sherman’s papers at the Library of Congress, notes that he had been summoned to “see the secretary [of war] and the president on the subject of the Black Hills.” This telegram is the first of the four documents that lay out the conspiracy.

On October 8, Sheridan cut short his honeymoon in San Francisco to make his way east.

**********

Sensing trouble on the Plains, a group of New York pastors met with Grant on November 1 and exhorted him not to abandon his Peace Policy in order to satisfy a specie-starved public. That “would be a blow to the cause of Christianity throughout the world.”

“With great promptness and precision,” the New York Herald reported, the president assured the clergymen that he would never abandon the Peace Policy and “that it was his hope that during his administration it would become so firmly established as to be the necessary policy of his successors.” Smelling a rat, the Herald correspondent added, “In that he might possibly be mistaken.”

Grant was, in fact, dissembling. Just two days later, on November 3, he convened a few like-minded generals and civilian officials to formulate a war plan and write the necessary public script. On that day, the Peace Policy breathed its last.

Grant had taken nearly a month in choosing his collaborators. He knew he could count on his secretary of war, William Belknap. And earlier that fall, when he had to replace his secretary of the interior after a corruption scandal, Grant broke with the custom of consulting the cabinet on secretarial choices and privately offered the job to Zachariah Chandler, a former senator from Michigan and a hard-liner in Western affairs. Also invited were a pliable assistant interior secretary named Benjamin R. Cowen and the commissioner of Indian affairs, Edward P. Smith (who, like Belknap, would eventually leave office after a corruption scandal of his own).

Opposition to Grant’s plan might have come from his highest-ranking military officer, Sherman. He was one of the men who had signed the Fort Laramie Treaty on behalf of the United States. He advocated using force against Indians when warranted, but he had once written Grant of his anger at “whites looking for gold [who] kill Indians just as they would kill bears and pay no regard for treaties.” And though Grant and Sherman had become close friends when they led the Union to victory, they had grown apart over politics since the Civil War. After Belknap usurped the general’s command prerogatives with no objection from Grant, Sherman had moved his headquarters from Washington to St. Louis in a fit of pique. He was not invited into the cabal, though two of his subordinates—Sheridan and Crook—were.

That Grant held a meeting on November 3 was public knowledge, but the outcome was not. “It is understood the Indian question was a prominent subject of attention,” the Washington National Republican reported, “though so far as learned there was no definite decision made upon any subject relative to the policy of the Administration in its management of the Indian tribes.”

Crook, however, shared the secret with his trusted aide-de-camp Capt. John G. Bourke, and it is thanks to Bourke’s Herculean note-taking, embodied in a 124-volume diary held at the West Point library, that we can discover the secret today. Buried in one of those volumes is this entry, the second of the four incriminating documents: “General Crook said that at the council General Grant had decided that the Northern Sioux [i.e, the Lakotas] should go upon their reservation or be whipped.”

Generals Wesley Merritt, Philip Sheridan, George Crook, James William Forsyth and George Armstrong Custer examine a document. (Crook and Sheridan)

 

The conspirators believed that Sitting Bull and the non-treaty Lakotas had intimidated the reservation chiefs out of selling the mining rights to the Black Hills. Crush the non-treaty bands, they reasoned, and the reservation chiefs would yield.

Despite overwhelming popular support for seizing the Black Hills, Grant could expect heated opposition from Eastern politicians and the press to an unprovoked war. He needed something to shift the fault to the Lakotas.

He and his collaborators came up with a two-phase plan. First the Army would deliver the ultimatum to which Bourke referred: Repair to the reservation or be whipped. The Army would no longer enforce the edict affirming Lakota ownership of the Black Hills. This is revealed in the third document, also at the Library of Congress, a confidential order Sheridan wrote to Terry on November 9, 1875:

At a meeting which occurred in Washington on the 3d of November ...the President decided that while the orders heretofore issued forbidding the occupation of the Black Hills country by miners should not be rescinded, still no fixed resistance by the military should be made to the miners going in....

Will you therefore cause the troops in your Department to assume such attitude as will meet the views of the President in this respect.

If the Lakotas retaliated against incoming miners, so much the better. Hostilities would help legitimize the second phase of the operation: The non-treaty Lakotas were to be given an impossibly short deadline to report to the reservation; the Indian Bureau was to manufacture complaints against them, and Sheridan was to make ready for his favorite form of warfare, a winter campaign against unsuspecting Indian villages.

The Army’s commander had no ink-ling of the intrigue until November 13, when Sherman asked Sheridan why he hadn’t yet filed his annual report. Sheridan’s reply, also at the Library of Congress, rounds out the conspiracy: “After my return from the Pacific Coast,” Sheridan wrote insouciantly, “I was obliged to go east to see...about the Black Hills, and my report has thus been delayed.” Rather than elaborate on the war plan, Sheridan simply enclosed a copy of his orders to Terry, suggesting to Sherman they “had best be kept confidential.”

Sherman exploded. How could he be expected to command, he wrote to his brother, Senator John Sherman, “unless orders come through me, which they do not, but go straight to the party concerned?” He vowed never to return to the capital unless ordered.

The Black Hills (Bryan Schutmaat)

**********

To manufacture complaints against the Lakotas, the Grant administration turned to an Indian Bureau inspector named Erwin C. Watkins, who had just come back from a routine tour of the Montana and Dakota Indian agencies. Watkins’ official duties were administrative, such as auditing Indian agents’ accounts. But in reporting on his tour, he went well beyond the scope of his authority to describe the behavior of the non-treaty Lakotas, though it is unlikely he ever saw one.

The Watkins report singled them out as “wild and hostile bands of Sioux Indians” who “richly merit punishment for their incessant warfare, and their numerous murders of settlers and their families, or white men wherever found unarmed.” Most offensive, they “laugh at the futile efforts that have thus far been made to subjugate them [and] scorn the idea of white civilization.” Without ever mentioning the Fort Laramie Treaty, the report concluded that the government should send a thousand soldiers in to the Unceded Territory and thrash the “untamable” Lakotas into subjection.

Watkins had long worked in Zachariah Chandler’s Michigan political machine, and he had served under Sheridan and Crook in the Civil War. His report, dated November 9, encapsulated Sheridan’s and Crook’s views. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that the conspirators had ordered Watkins to fabricate his report, or even wrote it themselves.

While leaking the Watkins report—it made headlines in a handful of papers—the conspirators obscured their war preparations. At Crook’s headquarters in Wyoming Territory, rations and ammunition were being stockpiled, pack trains prepared, troops marshaled in from outlying forts. Something clearly was afoot, but Crook and his staff declined to discuss it with the local press.

The Chicago Inter Ocean correspondent who had stoked the gold frenzy, William E. Curtis, actually came close to exposing the plot. After sounding out his Army contacts, Curtis told his readers just five days after the White House meeting, “The roving tribes and those who are known as wild Indians will probably be given over entirely to the military until they are subdued.” The precise identity of his source is unknown, but when Curtis took the matter up with the high command, a senior officer dismissed talk of war as “an idle fancy of a diseased brain.” Curtis didn’t press the matter, and an Inter Ocean correspondent in the field concluded that war was unlikely for the simple reason that Lakota Indian agents told him, truthfully, that the Indians had no wish to fight.

On December 3, Chandler set in motion the first phase of the scheme. He directed the Indian Bureau to inform Sitting Bull and the other non-treaty chiefs that they had until January 31, 1876, to report to the reservation; otherwise they would be considered “hostile,” and the Army would march against them. “The matter will in all probability be regarded as a good joke by the Indians,” Sheridan wrote to Sherman, who had lost interest in what his subordinate was up to.

By then the Lakotas were snowbound in villages scattered throughout the Unceded Territory. Their attitude hadn’t changed; they had no truck with the wasichus so long as they stayed off Lakota land, which their chiefs had no intention of surrendering. Their response to Chandler’s ultimatum was unthreatening and, from an Indian perspective, quite practical: They appreciated the invitation to talk but were settled in for the winter; when spring arrived and their ponies grew strong, they would attend a council to discuss their future.

Indian agents dutifully conveyed the message to Washington—where Edward Smith, the commissioner of Indian affairs, buried it. Sticking to the official line secretly scripted in November, he declared that the Lakotas were “defiant and hostile”—so much so that he saw no point in waiting until January 31 to permit the Army to take action against them. Interior Secretary Chandler, his superior, duly endorsed the fiction. “Sitting Bull still refuses to comply with the directions of the commissioners,” he told Belknap, and he released authority for the non-treaty Lakotas to the war secretary, for whatever action the Army deemed appropriate.

Sheridan had a green light. On February 8, he ordered Terry and Crook to begin their campaign.

The winter operations were a bust. Terry was snowbound. Crook mistakenly attacked a village of peaceable Cheyennes, which only alienated them and alerted the non-treaty Lakotas. Worse, the Army’s stumbling performance hardly persuaded the reservation chiefs that they needed to cede the Black Hills.

That spring, thousands of reservation Indians migrated to the Unceded Territory, both to hunt buffalo and to join their non-treaty brethren in fighting for their liberty, if necessary. The Army launched an offensive, with columns under Crook, Terry and Col. John Gibbon converging on the Lakota country. The Indians eluded Gibbon. Crook was bloodied at the Battle of the Rosebud on June 17 and withdrew to lick his wounds. Eight days later, some of Terry’s men—the 7th Cavalry, under Custer—set upon the Lakotas and their Cheyenne allies at the Little Bighorn and paid the ultimate price for Grant’s perfidy.

 

 

 

 

“The Great Spirit gave us this country as a home,” Crazy Horse said after the war that began over the Black HIlls. “You had yours.” (Bryan Schutmaat)

**********

Then came the cover-up. For eight months, Congress had paid little heed to events in the Lakota country. Only after the Little Big Horn debacle did Congress question the war’s origins and the government’s objectives.

The conspirators had prepared for congressional scrutiny. The new secretary of war, J. Donald Cameron, took just three days to submit a lengthy explanation, together with Watkins’ report and 58 pages of official correspondence on the subject. Absent was Sheridan’s incriminating order to Terry from November 9, 1875.

Military operations, Cameron assured Congress, targeted not the Lakota nation, only “certain hostile parts”—in other words, those who lived in the Unceded Territory. And the Black Hills, Cameron attested, were a red herring: “The accidental discovery of gold on the western border of the Sioux reservation and the intrusion of our people thereon, have not caused this war, and have only complicated it by the uncertainty of numbers to be encountered.” If Cameron were to be believed, the war lust of young Lakotas had brought on the conflict.

Certainly many congressmen recognized Cameron’s chicanery for what it was. But with the nation’s press clamoring for retribution after the Little Bighorn, they dared not dispute the administration’s line. Congress gave the Army carte blanche to conduct unremitting war. By May 1877, the Lakotas had been utterly defeated.

Nearly everyone seemed content to blame them for the conflict. A singular dissenting voice was George W. Manypenny, a reform-minded former Indian Bureau commissioner. He surmised that “the Sioux War of 1876, the crime of the centennial year, [was] inaugurated” at the White House in November 1875. But he was dismissed as an Indian apologist, and no one took his allegations seriously.

In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the Lakotas were entitled to damages for the taking of their land. The sum, uncollected and accruing interest, now exceeds $1 billion. The Lakotas would rather have the Black Hills.

We never hear about the Black Hawk War, sort of the Trail of Tears for the tribes north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, and seldom hear about battles like Tippecanoe or Horseshoe Bend or conflicts like the Seminole Wars in the context of Indian Removal and the policies of the commanders-in-chief of those times. And we never hear about how that fucking evil bastard John C. Calhoun pretty much compelled Jackson to remove the Five Civilized Tribes by threatening to set state militias against the US Army should Jackson attempt to enforce SCOTUS rulings in favor of the tribes. So...his choice was to have the federals march on Georgia and fight a mixed force of several state militias who would no doubt attempt to massacre the Tribes in their midst at some point or to move the tribes, accede to Calhoun, and thereby avoid a Civil War Jackson believed he might lose.

Jackson believed peaceful removal, no matter how miserable and disastrous it turned out, his only option, and was sincere when he said in later years that his main regret in life was that he failed to hang Calhoun for treason when he had the chance. 

If Jackson was so horrible to the Cherokee, why then did Sam Houston remain fanatically loyal to Jackson for the rest of both their lives? Houston's loyalty to the tribe that had adopted him was sincere, and it certainly seems like Houston believed Jackson had done the best he could. 

As for Houston's rival Mirabeau Lamar...man, that fucker was a Calhounite dickhead. Not only a slaveholder, not only a secessionist, but also a genocidal maniac when it came to Indians -- he explicitly called for their "total extinction." His Texas presidency was a profligate disaster driven by his white supremacist beliefs that resulted in the disastrous Santa Fe expedition. On leaving office he had quintupled the Republic of Texas's debt via one idiotic calamity after another. 

Although generations of my family have attended Lamar HS (and one kid is still enrolled) and although my great-aunt pretty much built Lamar U's library from the ground up (and has a portrait hanging in a reading room dedicated to her memory), if anybody in this state knew shit about his true history, his would have been one of the first people canceled.

Ironically he is known as the Father of Texas Education. Well, Lamar, you failed. If that were not so, you'd be cast as the bastard you were. (Oh, and his poetry fucking sucked, too.) 

To sum all this up, every single US president has failed the Indians, especially those who were in office prior to 1900, but in the  reverse of that parable from Mark, we take all the sins from a whole herd of pigs and put them in the body of Jackson and now we want to toss him, alone, off a cliff. 

And we say things like "Well, if he did some good things and slaveholding was his only blemish, then his memorials should remain." With Jackson, we all seem to agree that he should be judged by the worst thing he ever did, a decision he was forced into making, and that he regretted having to make until his dying day. 

And double-fuck John C. Calhoun and MB Lamar with a nail-studded baseball bat. 

 

Edited June 23, 2020 by MaybeACoordinator

[Michael Knight 13189]

53 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

This isn't Lost Cause bullshit. I'm not denying the first round of secession was primarily because of slavery. We've all read the ordinances of secession. My reference of the soldiers' motivations for fighting had more to do with the argument that Confederate soldiers fought to maintain slavery, and it's just as simple as that.

WW2 was only started by the English and French because Germany wanted to get their land back.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Michael Knight

[Saint Austin 776]

18 minutes ago, Michael Knight said:

WW2 was only started by the English and French because Germany wanted to get their land back.

Ah yes, the famous Anglo-French invasion of Poland...

[bad_teammate 13481]

44 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

You're still referring to the causes for secession and the war as if they're interchangeable; they're not.

The war started because the Confederate states attacked American soldiers.
Let's get even more particular. The war started because Confederate Soldier X fired the first shot.
Let's even even more particular. The war started because Confederate Soldier X's mama fucked his daddy.

If we drill down far enough then we can pretend slavery had nothing to do with it!!!

[SimonBolivar 11039]

9 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

Ah yes, the famous Anglo-French invasion of Poland...

The famous Union shelling of Fort Sumter?

[Saint Austin 776]

Just now, SimonBolivar said:

The famous Union shelling of Fort Sumter?

I never said the South didn't fire the first shot. The difference is that the South was trying to conquer a single fort smack dab in the middle of Charleston Harbor, as opposed to the North that wanted to conquer, well, everything.  

[elfenix 34661]

6 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

The war started because the Confederate states attacked American soldiers.
Let's get even more particular. The war started because Confederate Soldier X fired the first shot.
Let's even even more particular. The war started because Confederate Soldier X's mama fucked his daddy.

If we drill down far enough then we can pretend slavery had nothing to do with it!!!

*captain james

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

6 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

The famous Union shelling of Fort Sumter?

Wait..... I thought that was the Germans ?

[Saint Austin 776]

Just now, Onboard 2.0 said:

Wait..... I thought that was the Germans ?

They bombed Pearl Harbor, dumbass

[bad_teammate 13481]

7 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

I never said the South didn't fire the first shot. The difference is that the South was trying to conquer a single fort smack dab in the middle of Charleston Harbor, as opposed to the North that wanted to conquer, well, everything.  

If someone is in my house and I kick them out, am I "conquering" my house?

I guess, but the general use of "conquer" in military context has to do with taking someone else's territory for your own.

Some Lost Cause verbiage, IMO

[Michael Knight 13189]

24 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

Ah yes, the famous Anglo-French invasion of Poland...

The French and English declared war on Germany

[Saint Austin 776]

29 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

If someone is in my house and I kick them out, am I "conquering" my house?

I guess, but the general use of "conquer" in military context has to do with taking someone else's territory for your own.

Exactly.

[bad_teammate 13481]

8 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

Exactly.

So you believe the US Army was "conquering" the Confederacy in the sense that the Confederacy was a separate nation worthy of recognition as such as opposed to merely a rebellious force with a false claim?

[Saint Austin 776]

Just now, bad_teammate said:

So you believe the US Army was "conquering" the Confederacy in the sense that the Confederacy was a separate nation worthy of recognition as such as opposed to merely a rebellious force with a false claim?

Correct.

[TwiceHorn 31995]

1 hour ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

The North did not fight to free the slaves but the South picked a fight to keep the slaves. It's that simple.

The kind of thought experiment here is:  had the southern states not seceded, would there have been a war over slavery?

[bad_teammate 13481]

1 minute ago, Saint Austin said:

Correct.

So not Lost Cause, but totally Lost Cause.

[Saint Austin 776]

15 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

So not Lost Cause, but totally Lost Cause.

The Lost Cause is about downplaying or even flat-out rejecting the role that slavery played in sectional differences and disunion; that's not what I'm doing. 

It's not exactly radical to state that the Confederacy formed its own short-lived county. Its several states went through the formal process of secession with many even having binding referendums, ratified its own constitution, formed its own executive, legislative, and judicial branches, coined its own money, and raised its own military. It was never successful enough on the battlefield to merit international recognition, but that doesn't mean the country or its institutions didn't exist until it was conquered by Union forces.

You're welcome to criticize the reasons for secession or the wisdom for doing so, but those are separate issues from whether or not the Confederacy was, briefly, its own country.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Saint Austin

[bad_teammate 13481]

Just now, Saint Austin said:

The Lost Cause is about downplaying or even flat-out rejecting the role that slavery played in sectional differences and disunion; that's not what I'm doing. 

Like if someone said, "All of y'all saying that the war was about slavery might be interested to hear what Lincoln had to say."?

The Lost Cause movement is about elevating the nobility, dignity, and validity of the Confederate cause. Minimizing slavery's role in the war and discussing the Confederacy as a legitimate nation being invaded/conquered by the USA is quintessential Lost Cause shit. It's how they talk.

If you don't want to be confused with them, why do you keep talking like them? It's weird.

Quote

It's not exactly radical to state that the Confederacy formed its own short-lived county. Its several states went through the formal process of secession with many even having binding referendums, ratified its own constitution, formed its own executive, legislative, and judicial branches, coined its own money, and raised its own military. It was never successful enough on the battlefield to merit international recognition, but that doesn't mean the country or its institutions didn't exist until it was conquered by Union forces.

And it wouldn't be radical, I guess, to say that my house would be its own country if I declared it so, made my dog the treasurer, my wife the president, and copy/pasted the US Constitution but added "oh and every state HAS to allow slavery, they can't choose not to."?

"Conquer" is a word choice with a purpose. A Lost Cause purpose. It's intended to make the USA seem antagonistic, greedy, and avaricious and the South seem victimized and put-upon.

And you can believe those things, this is America and being a Lost Cause guy is allowed.

But if you don't believe those things, then stop talking like you do.

[Saint Austin 776]

4 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

And it wouldn't be radical, I guess, to say that my house would be its own country if I declared it so, made my dog the treasurer, my wife the president, and copy/pasted the US Constitution but added "oh and every state HAS to allow slavery, they can't choose not to."?

I don't know, did your house form its own state in the Union before voting to secede? If not, it's a pretty bad analogy. 

6 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

"Conquer" is a word choice with a purpose. A Lost Cause purpose. It's intended to make the USA seem antagonistic, greedy, and avaricious and the South seem victimized and put-upon.

Use whatever word you like then. It doesn't change the fact the U.S. gov't brought the seceded states back into the Union by force. 

[workswithseed 2201]

18 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

The Lost Cause is about It was never successful enough on the battlefield to merit international recognition.

 

https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/confederate-medals?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1

The Confederacy was pretty poor, so poor that it never really gave out medals. Except for this little battle. Also John "RIP" Ford made sure that the Union soilders left without a shot.

 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23367]

The Lost Cause was to protect white supremacy and pretend it didn’t exist (the force is still strong in this department today.)  You ever wonder why much of Civil War history revolves around trivial battle maneuvers and maps?  Yeah, that’s the distraction. 

[GRHorn 105]

6 hours ago, Fuck Tim Beck said:

Yale too. But too many famous alumni so we will hear nothing about it.

Yale was a legit slave trader. The university has even admitted such in the past. Should be a slam dunk to the people typically concerned with such matters. 
 

 

[hobbes2702 13353]

3 hours ago, Saint Austin said:

Initially, yes. But after Lincoln's call for volunteers that drove the Upper South out of the Union, it become more about a perceived abuse of executive power.

Shut the fuck up. Jesus Christ this is such absolute bullshit

[bad_teammate 13481]

"Back" is an interesting metaphor, because technically the states never went anywhere.

What the US did was reclaim its own land that had been illegally occupied by a rebellious military.

Phrasing matters a lot, you know that. It's what Lost Causers rely on.

 

 

[Saint Austin 776]

3 minutes ago, hobbes2702 said:

Shut the fuck up. Jesus Christ this is such absolute bullshit

Who am I to argue with such eloquence and historical citations? Now go get your shine box.

[hobbes2702 13353]

1 minute ago, Saint Austin said:

Who am I to argue with such eloquence and historical citations? Now go get your shine box.

You’re trying to thread some thread some incredibly ridiculous and convoluted distinction between the reasons for secession and the reasons for war. I don’t need to be eloquent to realize you’re full of shit. I don’t need historical citations to prove a point that is universally accepted by everyone that’s not a closeted racist. 
 

Do you even know what that phrase means? Because you usually need to have an actual point for it to apply. But I guess you’re not eloquent enough to understand.

[Saint Austin 776]

Just now, hobbes2702 said:

You’re trying to thread some thread some incredibly ridiculous and convoluted distinction between the reasons for secession and the reasons for war. I don’t need to be eloquent to realize you’re full of shit. I don’t need historical citations to prove a point that is universally accepted by everyone that’s not a closeted racist. 
 

Do you even know what that phrase means? Because you usually need to have an actual point for it to apply. But I guess you’re not eloquent enough to understand.

I already made those points throughout this entire thread. It's all there for your consumption. You, on the other hand, instead of responding on the merits like others have, chose to pull a "Leroy Jenkins" without any argument or intelligent thought. Am I still being too convoluted for you?

[hobbes2702 13353]

Oh I responded to the “merits” of your argument. That’s why I said it’s absolute bullshit. I don’t need to rehash what several posters wiser than myself have already said. You’re entire point is 100% bullshit. I’m sorry your ancestors chose to be pieces of shit and you feel the need to defend them, but here’s the good news, you still have time to reverse the cycle.

[RomaVicta 30508]

8 minutes ago, Saint Austin said:

I already made those points throughout this entire thread. It's all there for your consumption. You, on the other hand, instead of responding on the merits like others have, chose to pull a "Leroy Jenkins" without any argument or intelligent thought. Am I still being too convoluted for you?

Yours is argument by exhaustion. You quote and cite unendingly. You don't measure relative weight of evidence. Any source will do because any answer is worthy. A consensus of world class historians is the same as a crackpot blog post just so long as you can keep firing your guns. Your only hope is having the last word and the delusion that, having made the last inapt utterance, you have achieved victory.

If my metaphor of an actual battle were in fact the reality of this contest, you'd be no more than a tattered soldier full of holes beside the line of march. Maybe your middle finger would remain prominently displayed in death as a curse to the passing victors.

 

[TwiceHorn 31995]

Yall need to ease up on Saint Austin, I think.

He's not arguing that slavery wasn't the root cause of the Civil War, as if to somehow legitimize slavery or the CSA.

He is arguing that secession created another sovereign nation of somewhat dubious legitimacy founded on a repugnant principle and that was the casus belli for the Civil War.  Conquering that nation and repatriating the states and citizens thereof into a nation that had emancipated slaves and banned slavery was the goal of the war.

Without succession, one wonders what might have happened.

[Grade of D as in David 13255]

19 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Yall need to ease up on Saint Austin, I think. He's busy giving piggy back rides.

Fify

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

2 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

The Lost Cause was to protect white supremacy and pretend it didn’t exist (the force is still strong in this department today.)  You ever wonder why much of Civil War history revolves around trivial battle maneuvers and maps?  Yeah, that’s the distraction. 

Gosh I don't know 600k plus Americans dying in a war lasting 4 years might garner some interest in the actual battles, strategy, stories, maneuvers and yes maps of the you know............. war.  

Not a whole lot different than people having an interest in pretty much every armed conflict for our entire human history.

Did you focus group this post  ?  If so you might wanna fire that group.  

[TwiceHorn 31995]

Shit, "secession."

For some reason, I make typos on this forum that I wouldn't make in an regular word processor or email.  And/or my mental spellchecker is more turned off here than elsewhere.

[workswithseed 2201]

52 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Yall need to ease up on Saint Austin, I think.

He's not arguing that slavery wasn't the root cause of the Civil War, as if to somehow legitimize slavery or the CSA.

He is arguing that secession created another sovereign nation of somewhat dubious legitimacy founded on a repugnant principle and that was the casus belli for the Civil War.  Conquering that nation and repatriating the states and citizens thereof into a nation that had emancipated slaves and banned slavery was the goal of the war.

Without succession, one wonders what might have happened.

Some say that if the CSA was still around, that every European country would stop buying from them. I'd figure the same if they didn't leave.

[workswithseed 2201]

19 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Gosh I don't know 600k plus Americans dying in a war lasting 4 years might garner some interest in the actual battles, strategy, stories, maneuvers and yes maps of the you know............. war.  

Not a whole lot different than people having an interest in pretty much every armed conflict for our entire human history.

Did you focus group this post  ?  If so you might wanna fire that group.  

First iron clad ships, first use of trench warfare. We were the precursor to ww1

[workswithseed 2201]

2 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

The Lost Cause was to protect white supremacy and pretend it didn’t exist (the force is still strong in this department today.)  You ever wonder why much of Civil War history revolves around trivial battle maneuvers and maps?  Yeah, that’s the distraction. 

Yeah, this might be one of your dumber takes the more I think of it. Onboard is pretty much on point of why this is bad.