Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

This is one bad cliche after another:

No word yet on whether former Virginia Flagger Heimbach, who was to be one of the featured speakers at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, will be asked to return his Distinguished Service Medal.

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Update, March 14: Lots more, um, raw details at The Daily Beast:

Heimbach and Jessica told Parrott they’d ended the relationship, but Parrott and Heimbach’s wife were skeptical. They arranged to “set up” Heimbach and Jessica in a trailer on Parrott’s property to catch them having sex.

Parrott stood on a box outside the trailer and watched Heimbach and Jessica have sex inside, according to a police report. When the box broke under Parrott’s weight, he entered the trailer to confront them. Heimbach allegedly choked him and chased him into a house, where Parrott threw a chair at him. Heimbach hit back, choking him into unconsciousness, according to the police report.

Parrott fled to a Walmart near his home and called police around 1 a.m. Tuesday morning.

Ewww.

h/t Margaret Blough.

Update, March 15: Matt Parrott announced, as part of the disbanding of his organization, that he’s destroying membership data and the physical storage media related to the group. But the Traditionalist Workers Party, as well as Parrott and Heimbach individually, are defendants in a lawsuit stemming from last August’s rally in Charlottesville. Probably not a wise move.

Back in the Mesozoic Era of this blog, I did a couple of posts on a South Carolina woman named Annie Caddel. She had moved to Summerville, into a predominantly African American neighborhood that had been founded as a settlement of former USCTs after the Civil War, and made a point of flying her Confederate Battle Flag. This didn’t go over real well with her neighbors, and there soon followed an escalating series of incidents including allegations of vandalism to her home, and a series of ever-taller flagpoles and privacy fences put up by the neighbors. Even H. K. Edgerton, the peripatetic performance artist and Confederate beard, made an appearance (above). You can read my earlier posts here and here. It sure seemed like a rancid, toxic mess.

Needless to say, Ms. Caddel was a heroine of the True Southron™ crowd. Or she was until last week, when after seven years she lowered her flag and presented it to Kenneth Battle, Chairman of the Summerville-Dorchester Museum, to be displayed there in an effort to promote unity and reconciliation in the community.

Now, the True Southrons in South Carolina have labeled her a “traitor” and a “Judas.” 

No good deed goes unpunished, y’all.

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Update, March 7: Corrected the description of Ms. Caddell’s neighborhood as being predominantly African American, not Summerville as a whole.

Workers replace the black tarp with which the City of Charlottesville covered the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee after John Miska (not shown) attempted to remove the covering in Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S., August 23, 2017. REUTERS/Justin Ide

A state district court in Charlottesville, Virginia has ruled that statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in city parks qualify as war memorials under state law, and are therefore protected under a Virginia statute passed in 1998. The judge also ruled that the city, that sought to remove the monuments, can go ahead with renaming the parks where they sit.

If I understand the ruling correctly, this runs counter to a ruling in a similar case on Danville, where the district court held that the 1998 statue only applied to monuments or memorials erected after that date. (Wut?) That ruling was allowed to stand by the Virginia Supreme Court, that declined twice to hear the case.Seems likely that the court will have to get involved now, with conflicting rulings at the district level.

The court also ordered black plastic tarps removed from both statues that the city had put in place months ago, ostensibly “in mourning” for the violence at the white supremacist rally there last August. (Wut?)

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The District Attorney in Durham, North Carolina has dropped the remaining charges against protesters accused of pulling down a Confederate monument there in August.

A few days after the violence in Charlottesville, a group of angry protesters surrounded a Confederate monument on the courthouse grounds in Durham and, as law enforcement watched from the sidelines, pulled it down. The monument had been the subject of a long-running dispute in the community, with the county government claiming they could not take down or relocate the monument because recently-passed state “heritage preservation” laws prohibited local governments from doing so.

The final criminal cases fell apart because prosecutors could not firmly establish that those charged were the persons seen in video of the event:

During Monday’s trials, Assistant District Attorney Ameshia Cooper struggled to introduce evidence and witness statements that clearly connected the defendants with being responsible for toppling the statue.

“The court finds the state has failed to identify who the perpetrator was. … Furthermore, the court has noted there is no evidence of a conspiracy,” District Court Judge Fred Battaglia said after the first trial.

And. . .

Many questions remain in the case, such as why there wasn’t more evidence.

During the toppling, law enforcement stood on the steps of the old courthouse. Some shot video. Also, after the toppling, deputies issued search warrants, went into people’s homes, ripping mattresses, taking computers, paper and other items of people who were charged said at the time.

Echols declined to take any questions after Tuesday’s press conference.

Twelve people were initially charged with two felonies and two misdemeanors after the Aug. 14 demonstration, but Echols later decided to not to pursue the felony charges. He next dropped charges against three of the 12, saying he did not have sufficient evidence to link them to the toppling of the statue.

On Tuesday, Echols also announced that he would dismiss the charges against against Loan Tran, who in December accepted deferred prosecution on three misdemeanors. Tran had also agreed to pay $1,250 in restitution and perform 100 hours of community service.

“In this case, fairness requires that similar cases be treated similarly,” Echols said.

The Heritage-not-Hate folks are, naturally, convinced that this was rigged from the start not to vigorously prosecute in this case.

I said at the time that this was straight-up mob vandalism, and should be prosecuted. Still feel that way.

The much more fundamental problem, that’s been lost in the shouting, is North Carolina’s law that blocks local communities from making decisions about the monuments they themselves own and maintain. (Several other states have these laws, including Tennessee and Virginia, although the latter is the subject of a high-profile case pending right now.) If Durham could have acted to relocate the statue as they had been petitioned to do prior to August 2017, it would likely still be intact at another location. Now they’re left with this:

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Update, February 22: The Atlantic has a an article up detailing how both the sheriff’s department and the district attorney failed to make a solid case against those charged with pulling down the statue. Plenty of failures from the very start.

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A friend and blog reader sent me this today, a page from the September 10, 1864 issue of Harper’s Weekly, detailing the Battle of Mobile Bay the month before.

Here, the Confederate ironclad Tennessee engages the U.S. Steam Sloop Richmond. Illustrations like this are often more fanciful than authentic, but in this case there’s some interesting detail, like the chain mesh draped over the midships section of Richmond to protect her boiler and machinery spaces.

Thank you, Mark!

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Happy Mardi Gras from the New Orleans and the Krewe of Comus, 1873!

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My post yesterday about the doctored photograph purporting to show a Marine raising the Confederate Battle Flag on Okinawa was intended as a one-off – direct, self-contained, and not really necessitating a follow-up. But it turns out that it prompted a response that’s a near-perfect example of how the True Southrons™ insulate themselves from information that challenges their preferred notions.

A few hours after my post, this thread popped up on the Southern Heritage Preservation Group, one of the largest and oldest “heritage” forums on social media:

It follows a well-established pattern:

First, make a vague inquiry about the truth of a claim, that doesn’t cite the specific image challenged, doesn’t provide the detailed critiques made of it, and doesn’t include a link where others can review and assess it for themselves.

Second, make a flat assertion that the image is authentic, with a link to one of the many websites that feature it.

Third, post a follow-up complaining that anyone who questions the image is obviously “crazy” or a “Leftist,” and so presumably shouldn’t be taken seriously.

And finally, post an image completely unrelated to the one in question, that (again, presumably) is to be taken as evidence that the first one is authentic.

Deny, deride, deflect. Repeat as often as needed.

It seems obvious to me that the original inquiry wasn’t about getting to the observable, knowable truth about the Okinawa image; it was seeking assurance that yes, in fact, that really was a Confederate Battle Flag in the picture. No wonder these folks seem impervious to observable, empirical evidence – they work awfully hard at it.

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If you follow the debates over the public display of the Confederate Battle Flag online, you’ve likely seen this image (right), purportedly showing a World War II Marine in the Pacific. Why, the argument goes, if the Confederate flag was good enough for the Greatest Generation, are you precious librul snowflakes all up in arms about it?

You can see this image in about a bajillion places. But it turns out that this is (yet another) little bit of dishonesty from the True Southrons™.

As Corey Meyer noted recently on the Facebook machine, the image has been Photoshopped to replace the United States flag with the Confederate one. Here’s the original, via the U.S. Marine Corps Archives on Flickr:

Marine Corps Archives caption:

The Stars and Stripes on Shuri Castle-Marine Lieutenant Colonel R.P. Ross, Jr., of Frederick, Md., plants the American flag on one of the remaining ramparts of ancient Shuri castle on Okinawa. This banner was the same that the First Marine Division raised at Cape Gloucester and at Peleliu. The flagpole is a Japanese staff that was battered and bent by American shellfire.

And here’s the Confederate flag that’s been Photoshopped into it:

Here they are together:

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: if you have to make up phony evidence to support your “heritage,” it’s not worth saving.

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A colleague returned recently from a trip Hawai’i, and brought me a copy of Neil Bernard Dukas’ A Military History of Sovereign Hawai’i. This was a neat image, although not very strictly CW.

Major Henry Neilson (l.) and Lieutenant Paul Manini (r.), First Hawai’an Cavalry, c. 1855. The First Hawai’ian Cavalry was organized in response to a riot by thousands of sailors off the whaling ships at Honolulu. The book says the uniforms were purchased from France, and were essentially off-the-shelf, including French Imperial Eagle emblems — which some locals, worried about the prospect of U.S. annexation of the islands, took for American eagles. The uniform colors are not recorded but a few years later, after having been disbanded and then re-organized, they wore a “Garibaldi costume” with a red shirt and blue pants. Image source: Queen’s Hospital Museum.

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