Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

The 1852 Western & Atlantic Depot in Dalton, Georgia is looking for a buyer. Priced to move at $500K, OBO.

I got a birthday comin’ up, just sayin’.

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As you all know by know, last week a crowd pulled down the “Silent Sam” statue at the University of North Carolina. I don’t have much to say about that, that I didn’t say last year after a mob toppled the Confederate monument in Durham. Pretty much the same dynamics were at play in both cases.

In the Silent Sam case, much attention has been focused on that monument’s dedication address by Julian Carr (right), at that time the Commander of the North Carolina Division of the United Confederate Veterans. Carr was, for all intents and purposes, the official representative for all surviving Confederate veterans in that state. In his address, he boasted about the time he “horse-whipped a negro [sic.]  wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady,” that he remembered as a “pleasing duty.”

Awful as that is, it’s the paragraph that immediately precedes that quote that stands out as speaking more directly to how Carr saw the monument, and what it represented:

The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are, that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South – When “the bottom rail was on top” all over the Southern states, and to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States – Praise God.

When Carr talks about former Confederate soldiers “during the four years immediately succeeding the war,” whose “courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South,” “when ‘the bottom rail was on top’ all over the Southern states,” he’s saluting the Klu Klux Klan and other night riders who used fear, intimidation, and violence to keep Freedmen in check. It’s easy for a modern audience to skim right past his vague, innocuous phrasing, but North Carolinians in 1913, white and black alike, understood exactly what he was referring to.

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The current Mississippi State Flag (left) and one historical variant of the Magnolia Flag (right).

Recently I got into a Facebook discussion about the state flag of Mississippi, and suggested that a better choice would be the Magnolia Flag, which is both a much older symbol of that state, deeply intertwined with its history, and also more distinctly Mississippian than the Confederate knock-off the state uses now. Naturally I was told almost immediately to “keep your mouth shut” because I’m not actually from Mississippi. Such is the nature of social media, I suppose.

But I was amused by another commenter in that thread, who (twice) posted this meme, presumably to show support among African Americans in Mississippi for retaining the current flag:

If you guessed that the man in the picture wasn’t really carrying petitions to preserve the current Mississippi flag, you’d be right — but only half right, because it’s far more ludicrous than that. He’s actually Carlos E. Moore, a Mississippi attorney who also serves as a municipal judge in Clarksdale. He made news last year when he had the state flag removed from his courtroom. The photo itself is from a local news story in 2008 that has nothing whatever to do with the dispute over the flag.

Suffice to say, I don’t think Judge Moore is going to be collecting petitions to retain the current Mississippi State Flag anytime soon.

I don’t have high expectations for the Confederate Heritage™ folks generally, but sometimes the rank dishonesty really is breathtaking, even for someone as jaded about it as I am. As I’ve said before, if you have to brazenly lie like that to preserve your “heritage,” maybe it’s not worth saving.

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Update, August 20: Several folks in that discussion have averred that the current Mississippi State Flag was originally adopted by a public referendum — “The 1894 flag was voted by the PEOPLE. By the VOTERS.”

That’s not true, either. 

The design was adopted by the Mississippi Legislature based on S.B. 134, the passed the Senate on February 6, 1894 (pp. 350-53, PDF). It was approved by the House of Representatives the next day.

The True Southron™ struggle against objective, observable reality continues.

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The man who attempted to blow up the Dick Dowling monument in Houston last year pleaded guilty back in March, and today was sentenced to six years in prison.

Schneck pleaded guilty in March before U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr. to a willful attempt to maliciously damage or destroy property in violation of federal law. At the time, a federal prosecutor dismissed a sentence enhancement related to the harm an explosion could have caused, which could have allowed for a longer prison sentence.

Schneck had a history of concocting homemade explosives. At sentencing, judge asked him why he did it this time.

“The intent was to damage the statue significantly,” he said.

Schneck pleaded guilty in March before U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr. to a willful attempt to maliciously damage or destroy property in violation of federal law. At the time, a federal prosecutor dismissed a sentence enhancement related to the harm an explosion could have caused, which could have allowed for a longer prison sentence.

Schneck had a history of concocting homemade explosives. At sentencing, judge asked him why he did it this time.

“The intent was to damage the statue significantly,” he said.

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Image: Houston Firefighters arrive a the scene of a “law enforcement operation” led by the FBI on the 2000 block of Albans Road Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, in Houston. Godofredo A. Vasquez / Houston Chronicle