So you are a Nation comprised of a Union of States. Your Nation is founded by men who believe that personal freedom is above all else. Your Constitution is written by the men who helped organise and fight its very War of Independence. Some of the States believe, very strongly, that their purchase of; ownership of; and indeed commercial use of slaves is an internal matter, and it’s no business of the other States to interfere with their internal policies. Eventually, an elected President decides that the Southern Slave States are acting illegally by proposing to secede from that same Union which the founding fathers worked so hard to build.
Lincoln had the North, the industry, the commerce, the beginnings of the powerhouse which America would become. Lincoln’s Northern Army General’s had few men who were capable of traffic planning, which is what modern warfare was becoming. But the South had Confederate Army Generals and military daring and genius in abundance, with such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave-owner, a soldier who rose from the ranks to become a Corps Commander. They also had Robert E. Lee, who resigned from West Point Military Academy, and also refused the offer of command of the Northern Armies because he was a Virginian, and would not wage war against his own. He was appointed head of the Army of Northern Virginia, and with his own crop of extremely competent generals and commanders, wreaked havoc against the Northern Armies. But the scar against Lee’s name was always to be that he also owned slaves, and benefited financially from keeping slaves working on his wife’s vast estates until the estates became profitable; and only then emancipating those slaves.
The Civil War was fought with one of the deciding battles centred around Gettysburg, and it was here that Robert E Lee proved himself incapable of accepting that the Union’s Corps held the high ground, good ground; highly defensible ground, and were sufficiently reinforced to defend their ground, and their men: Lee thought that his Army of Virginia could make the breakthrough and smash the very centre of the Union Armies by sending General Pickett’s 15,000 soldiers on the mile-long march across open rising ground, which would be swept by massive cannon fire from the Union Army corps, straight into the stone walls held by Union armies.
15,000 men marched out bravely behind their colours hoping that the most concentrated cannon fire ever established would have shattered the Union’s defences: and less than 4,000 staggered back as they returned: beaten and demoralised. Never again would the Southern Armies head North again, but that War would go on for many months before the South capitulated.
I write this small note because the mayor of New Orleans has finally got his way, and Robert E. Lee’s statue is dumped next to abandoned police cars and other scrap. Fair enough, he has the political power to do this, because he states that the statue represented White domination of the South, and he, as a supporter of Black rights, wants to show that they’re in charge.
The big question, now; is when are they coming for THIS?