Should Minnesota return Virginia's Confederate battle flag?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's cool that some 13 years later, I can look at my horrible, mangled writing and see little that bothers me that isn't stylistic. It does concern me that I described Robert E. Lee as "anti-slavery" even though he disregarded his father-in-law's will, which manumitted his many slaves, to pay for upkeep for his sisters-in-law. Robert E. Lee, annoyed that the slaves disliked this, proceeded to sell the most "uppity" slaves after putting them in slave jail, which was a grave violation of his mother-in-law's desire to never break-up families. In short: Robert E. Lee deserved to be killed via firing squad for torture and abuse.

One reason why I've maintained strident pro-Unionism over all of these years is that I frequently encountered Confederate apologists, sympathizers and other "Lost Cause" BS as a teen, as Confederate nonsense was normalized 15 years ago. So I still have some residual sense that it's transgressive to argue against the Confederacy and that it's very important also.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's cool that some 13 years later, I can look at my horrible, mangled writing and see little that bothers me that isn't stylistic. It does concern me that I described Robert E. Lee as "anti-slavery" even though he disregarded his father-in-law's will, which manumitted his many slaves, to pay for upkeep for his sisters-in-law. Robert E. Lee, annoyed that the slaves disliked this, proceeded to sell the most "uppity" slaves after putting them in slave jail, which was a grave violation of his mother-in-law's desire to never break-up families. In short: Robert E. Lee deserved to be killed via firing squad for torture and abuse.

One reason why I've maintained strident pro-Unionism over all of these years is that I frequently encountered Confederate apologists, sympathizers and other "Lost Cause" BS as a teen, as Confederate nonsense was normalized 15 years ago. So I still have some residual sense that it's transgressive to argue against the Confederacy and that it's very important also.

Robert E. Lee revisionism is the American equivalent of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth.

What's remarkable about it is that it was widely accepted as fact by fairly serious people even though his actual views were hidden in plain sight. Such was the commitment of the US to American Civil War revisionism!

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's cool that some 13 years later, I can look at my horrible, mangled writing and see little that bothers me that isn't stylistic. It does concern me that I described Robert E. Lee as "anti-slavery" even though he disregarded his father-in-law's will, which manumitted his many slaves, to pay for upkeep for his sisters-in-law. Robert E. Lee, annoyed that the slaves disliked this, proceeded to sell the most "uppity" slaves after putting them in slave jail, which was a grave violation of his mother-in-law's desire to never break-up families. In short: Robert E. Lee deserved to be killed via firing squad for torture and abuse.

One reason why I've maintained strident pro-Unionism over all of these years is that I frequently encountered Confederate apologists, sympathizers and other "Lost Cause" BS as a teen, as Confederate nonsense was normalized 15 years ago. So I still have some residual sense that it's transgressive to argue against the Confederacy and that it's very important also.

Robert E. Lee revisionism is the American equivalent of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth.

What's remarkable about it is that it was widely accepted as fact by fairly serious people even though his actual views were hidden in plain sight. Such was the commitment of the US to American Civil War revisionism!

Then there's General Sherman, who happened to be a white supremacist who was the first President of the Louisiana state university.

Considering that Sherman issued Special Order 15, which confiscated ~400000 acres of land, cutting into 40 acre parcels that were then given to freedmen to farm, I fail to see why his personal views about black people in the antebellum period are relevant. Further, Sherman never owned slaves, was not fond of slavery and was never part of slave society, even if he was fond of the South. In this way, he was similar to Grant, who married the daughter of a plantation owner and even briefly owned a slave that was given to him by his father-in-law (!) but who clearly had a lot of disdain for slavery because he manumitted that slave. Grant was also known to not give his wife's slaves any orders, he refused to discipline them.

In the final analysis, the typical Union officer was not chiefly motivated by abolitionism, though more than a few were, and was generally racist, as was common at the time, but next to none of them approved of slavery and most found it vile, a viewpoint that became stronger as the war dragged on. In contrast, the typical Confederate officer owned many slaves!