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Party Like It's 1861!
Apr. 7th, 2010 01:25 pmApparently the fates have decided to make this the official American Bigoted Douchebags Week as Mississippi hate mongers have to give up centre stage to revisionist history in honouring the South's glorious fight to own people, torture them, rape them, lynch them with impunity, work them to death, destroy their heritage and eliminate their hopes. However, the new twist is that the Civil War didn't really factor slavery in enough to, you know, mention it existed at the time.
April will be Confederate History Month in Virginia
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040604416.html
McDonnell said Tuesday that the move was designed to promote tourism in the state, which next year will mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the war. McDonnell said he did not include a reference to slavery because “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”
The seven-paragraph declaration calls for Virginians to “understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.”
Avoiding the whole point that the sacrifice of generations of slaves are what allowed the affluent Virginians to help push their state towards a war against the Union, there's a funny little fact that kind of questions the whole 'slavery not being important enough to earn a mention' in his statement. Slaves totalled 30.7% of Virginia's population in 1860. So a third of the population of the state earned the rights and protections as full American citizens as a result of the Civil War. In fact, Virginia's slave population was the largest in the United States at the time, so it is the most significant state in which freedoms were extended. You'd think that an event which turned the ancestors of 19% of his state's citizens from chattel to human beings might deserve a mention.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm
April will be Confederate History Month in Virginia
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040604416.html
McDonnell said Tuesday that the move was designed to promote tourism in the state, which next year will mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the war. McDonnell said he did not include a reference to slavery because “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”
The seven-paragraph declaration calls for Virginians to “understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.”
Avoiding the whole point that the sacrifice of generations of slaves are what allowed the affluent Virginians to help push their state towards a war against the Union, there's a funny little fact that kind of questions the whole 'slavery not being important enough to earn a mention' in his statement. Slaves totalled 30.7% of Virginia's population in 1860. So a third of the population of the state earned the rights and protections as full American citizens as a result of the Civil War. In fact, Virginia's slave population was the largest in the United States at the time, so it is the most significant state in which freedoms were extended. You'd think that an event which turned the ancestors of 19% of his state's citizens from chattel to human beings might deserve a mention.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm
