Robert E Lee & statue controversy

The President asked him to be supreme commander of the Northern Army but Robert E. Lee declined.  He was against slavery, his farm was right across the river from Washington, DC, but he sadly thought the Union was falling apart. “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages,” he had written 3 years earlier.  But if the union was to fall, his first duty was to Virginia, his home state.  (We have to discern that loyalty to one’s state was strong among those born around 1800)  Lee had been the son of a Revolutionary War general and his wife was Mary Custis, step-great granddaughter of George Washington. Like Lincoln, Lee wanted negotiation between the two sides of hothead abolitionists and white-supremacist slave owners.  Virginians saw S. Carolinans to be much at fault for the revolt. They were deep into cotton and slavery.  Lincoln alleged the union was at stake and no family had been more involved in establishing the union than Lee’s. A lesser known fact about secession was that the aristocratic, plantation-owning portion of the south demanded revolt, yet only 704 legislators/delegates voted for secession--until events swept half the states into the Confederacy. Only 6% of southerners owned slaves.

            Lee reluctantly resigned his position in the US Army and went to Richmond as a military advisor to Jefferson Davis.  But when Gen. Johnston was killed in 1862, Lee was given command of the Army of Northern Virginia. In many ways he was the South’s answer to Lincoln, a leader whose personal probity and virtuous inspiration sanctified their cause.  He had served with distinction in the Mexican War and 32 years as an army engineer, was second in his class at Westpoint, then appointed to head that institution.  But he had something to live down.  His father, Revolutionary War general ‘light horse Harry’ Lee had not served Washington well, had been a crooked governor of Virginia and put the family into bankruptcy. So Lee set himself deliberately on a path to uphold family honor.

            He was a strong Episcopal Christian who hated slavery. “In all my perplexities and distresses, the Bible has never failed to give me light and strength.”  When his father-in-law died in 1857, Lee became estate executor and promised to free all the slaves.  Things didn’t go well when the slaves found out they were to go free in 5 years and several ran off at once.  If Lee could not get the estate out of debt, creditors would put liens on all the slaves.  Lee had renegades rounded up, punished (counter his feelings) and did indeed manage to manumit every one in 1862, while commanding an army.

            The South was outmanned 20 million to 5 million in white population and had few industries.  The Confederacy was doomed—unless Lee could trick the North into a decisive battle that would cripple their larger army.  That hope went down the drain at Gettysburg, July, 1863. “I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me. I know too well my weakness, that our only hope is in God.” When the end came in April 1865, Lee found a new duty to heal the country. “I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South its dearest rights. But I have never cherished toward them bitter or vindictive feelings, and I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them.” He was appointed President of Washington College in Lexington and started a campaign to reconcile the two sides with support of the 13^th Amendment. “While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is onward, & we give it the aid of our prayers & all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the progress as well as the result in his hands who sees the end; who chooses to work by slow influences; & with whom two thousand years are but as a single day,” Lee wrote.

            Perhaps the greatest irony of Lee’s legacy is that he greatly opposed Confederate public memorials and statues being put up to commemorate the cause.  In 2017 USA saw two neo-facist groups vie in tearing down Lee’s statue at Chancellorsville. Obviously both had little knowledge whatsoever of the man or the issues in the Civil War. And likely too, clueless of his faith in God or the role he played in reconstruction, conferring with Pres. Grant 5 times at the White House. Only fools refuse to learn what has come before them.

Know your opponent, Live free or die

Understanding your opposition is vitally important in politics. The Left sees not just Trump but also all of his supporters as guilty of Racial and Religious hatred. It may not apply to Apathetic Joe Democrat, but what I am writing about certainly applies to their leaders.  Passion, hatred and fear of D’s toward Trump is genuine, even though it strikes many Americans as absurd.  No sooner was he elected than Lawrence Tribe and Maxine Waters wanted him impeached before he could take office.  Noah Millman called for a military coup.  Many others called for his removal on grounds of mental instability and the Asst. Attorney General volunteered to “wear a wire” to effect his 25^th Amendment removal. Yet many staunch conservatives thought Trump wasn’t that conservative. What was triggering Dems? They charged him with racism and white supremacy.  How did they come up with that?  Trump had said, trying to quell a riot, that there were ‘good’ people on both sides of the Charlottesville statue standoff.  This event is terribly important to D’s because it’s about as close to direct evidence as they can come up with.  Otherwise they have to insert motive into his talk. In actual fact socialist Jason Kessler of Occupy Wall Street fame organized “the right” in the Charlottesville standoff. It was staged!

      Yet it is more than Trump.  “There’s no such thing as a good Trump voter, “ Jamelle Bouje wrote in Slate. Just a rogue opinion?  Not exactly.  “bitter people who cling to their God and their guns, “ Obama stated telling why he hated R’s.  “Deplorables, racists, white nationalists, white supremacists”—that’s you and me that Dem Presidents and candidates are referring to.  “Christian fascists”, I was called on CNN one night.  What Dems claim contemptuously is that they think a guy like me lives to lock them in concentration camps. (What!?  I’d have to feed them and waste good land for the darned camps.)  But here’s the principle.  What they accuse us of being actually applies to themselves—psychological projection.  Calling Christians fascists will raise your dander.  I belong to the world’s largest Protestant denominational group which has more African brothers than N. America and Europe combined.  Did not my Lord and Savior say that “God so loved the world…that WHOSOEVER believes in Him shall not perish…” That “God would have ALL MEN to be saved…” “There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free…” And don’t I follow a Leader who just let people disagree with him and did nothing—didn’t call down fire from heaven or anything in His power. But it was Democrats—to the man—who tried to impeach without a proven crime, surveilled and lied to FISA court, leaked lies to the press, perjured before Congress.  What’s going on?  Were they just mad that their team lost in 2016? No. People will fight and die for their country or an ideology but not for the Rotary Club or the Wichita Wingnuts.

            Here’s what they are up to.  Read their historic narrative. Nehisi Coates wrote in Atlantic about the time of Trump’s inauguration that America has been racist since 1776 (now extended to 1619 by NY Times), that is, from the beginning.  Coates wasn’t impressed by Jefferson’s  “all men are created equal” because he was a slave-owner and it is known that the Constitution affirmed slavery.  Nor was the Civil Rights movement any big event, though it provided a neutral set of laws about race.  The Big deal was Obama’s election who constantly promised to “remake America”. Coates also repeated The Switch in which all Southern Democrats joined the Republicans and D’s became anti-racist in 1968.  Trump?  He was a usurper elected by racists and hated Christians. Of course, historians worldwide have choked on all aspects of this narrative.  Jefferson could not free his slaves because he was forever hopelessly in debt and creditors had put liens on his land and slaves.  But in 1782, right after Washington’s victory at Yorktown, he wrote of his hope for slavery’s demise.  The myth of the Constitution’s affirmation of slavery comes from Common Core written by leftists, borrowing, amazingly enough, from Justice Roger Taney’s decision in Dred Scott (that runaway slaves had to be returned even if they made it to the North).  Lincoln was quick to debunk Taney’s out-of-thin-air claim and campaigned on it.  The 1787 Constitution actually forbid all slave importation and trade by 1807. 1619 was the year a storm-battered slave ship arrived at Jamestown and traded a few slaves to colonists in return for fixing their boat. The colonists were glad to send them on their way and treated the slaves like family.  The Switch ain’t so.  Af-Ams began to vote in large blocks for FDR’s handouts.  After WW II many Southerners had seen enough of the horrors of Japanese and German racism and came home with new attitudes.  That led to a crisis for the Dems who were about to lose the South.  LBJ came up with a game plan to win black vote like Tammany Hall (Dem machine in northern cities).  Trade giveaways for votes.  It was the modern version of the “Happy Slave” on the plantation who refuses to run away.  The Republican platform remains essentially unchanged over the years—The Grand Old Party. 

            Obama’s remake is an attempt to not just trick Af-Ams but all minorities into staying on the urban plantation. Party leaders (plantation owners), like Clintons and Obamas get filthy rich while doing little of substance for the minorities. This mimicks the Peron regime of Argentina which wrecked their economy by sucking businesses dry with socialist giveaways. Whites have little place in this dependency except to be poor or constantly  repent of their White Supremacy (which some do).  Trump has made inroads into the Caucasian and Christian vote and that is why he is their enemy.

            But in order to have their plantation, the Left has to obliterate Liberty which makes people think on their own.  Clearly the rioters who tear down monuments are not about racism, since they tear down statues of Frederick Douglass and Lincoln!  Their leadership is Marxist-socialist. The Dem platform is almost a carbon copy of Mussolini’s 1922 platform.  Yet, sneakily, they call themselves Anti-fa.  The absolute requirement to be a communist or fascist is to be anti-Christian.  Christianity, through John Locke, ‘father of modern psychology’, gave us the concepts of Liberty, Equality, Tolerance, Property Rights and universal Rights, that tells government to keep its hands off people’s lives.  Thnking people want limited government and the American Dream.  So what the Left fights for is the dissolution of the United States.  And this applies from moderate Dems who want a grab bag of changes in the Constitution to the Bernie Left who want it all gone. Know your opponent. Live free or die.

I love watching a BBC version of “House Hunters”, "Escape to the Country"—especially when the buyers use slang.  One guy, told a very favorable price, smiled and said, “That certainly put the cat among the pigeons.” Asked why she wanted to move out of London, an expecting  wife said, “I don’t want to be a mum in a flat.” (mother in an apartment)  Another couple wanted a home in the country to run “a holiday let or glamping.” (vacation rental/B&B and glamour camping like Americans do when they own an RV.) When a bedroom is big it is a “double” or small, a “single” and if there is no closet it needs a “bespoke wardrobe” (bespoke=’manufactured’. Means an armoire) 

But why the heck are there no new houses? The answer is what we will enjoy if Democrats take over and tax houses federally.  Building new means a big federal tax. So it is better to convert the barn or chicken house built in 1584. Plus the crown or state often owns the land thus you can’t fully own.  You pay Ground Rent to the queen or an earl or whomever owns the land.  The proclivities of Brits are humorous.  Houses come with ducks--doors only 4 ½ feet tall that even a small woman has to duck for. Many houses have 7 foot ceilings and only 5 or so windows—there was once a tax on number of windows.  All this adds up to a property market when country homes go for a national average of 300,000 pounds ($400,000) for a typical stucco-sided, thatched roof, 'front door opens on the sidewalk or street' abode.  Old houses had a boiler tank that was also hot water tank in the attic (no basements), often open air so rats could die in the water.  Thus faucets come in pairs.  Hot water is not potable, but cold is.  The only amenity is that the garden (yard) is green with their glorious climate.  Brits have little 13” TVs like we used to have and spend a lot of time growing flowers, reading books and driving under 5000 miles a year because they are poor. This and national healthcare that leaves everyone with bad teeth and a waiting list for a gall bladder operations is as the Dems aspire to.

William Wallace to Wycliff

You’ve probably seen Braveheart. How much of it is true? Let’s look at the characters.  Edward I, “Longshanks” because he was 6’2 in an era of men who were 5’5, was a terrific soldier and ambitious.  He was indeed the archetype cruel English oppressor.  Brutal and violent, he was autocratic and wanted all of Britain under his control.  Yet his wife, Eleanor of Castile, was very devoted and it kept him unusually (for that era) monogamous.  He conquered Wales and went to Crusade in the Holy Land where he was wounded with a poison dagger.  Eleanor had gone with him and tended him back to health by licking his wounds sucking out the poison.  She bore him at least 14 children. When she died in 1290 he was heartbroken.  Edward’s problem is that he needed big armies and in those feudal days, the only way to get one was when his vassal lords met their obligations of military service in return for their lands.  2^nd problem, how to pay the soldiers? Parliament kept denying the king funds.  So he would conquer and then plunder the conquered.  In Braveheart, Longshanks has devastated Scotland, killing her sons and raping her daughters. Historically these hideous abuses were by his underlings.  Longshanks sneakily took over Scotland.  Scottish King Alexander died in 1286 leaving infant Margaret as an only heir.  Edward used manipulation to betroth her to his son, who was only 5.  But the girl died.  Presenting himself as an honest broker, he convinced the Scottish lords that he would decide impartially who should be their king.  He put a puppet in place named John Balliol.  Balliol however, later decided to challenge Longshanks hence provoking war.  Balliol was defeated and several towns were massacred by Edward.  He put Scotland under direct English rule.

            The Scottish nobles piled heavy burdens on the backs of the commoners to pay for the war and weaseled to make a deal with Edward.  It was at this point that William Wallace stepped in, a lesser nobleman and farmer who had had enough.  He had a secret weapon, Highlanders.  Those were the tribal people who lived in the northern hills of Scotland. What did he tell them? We don’t know, but Braveheart’s words were romanticized by bards as the movie quotes: “And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that to come, and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” He was a brave man with a sufficient number of followers but armed only with pointed poles against knights.  They met, not on open field, as in the movie, but at Stirling Bridge, bottle-necking the force under John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, from crossing the Forth River. More English tried to cross the open river and the Scots muscled them down.  The English retreated, and Wallace was crowned Guardian of the Kingdom. It didn’t last. Earl Surrey regrouped and defeated Wallace the next year at Falkirk in 1298.  Then Wallace’s army disbursed and he became a hunted man. Edward’s men found him in 1305, took him to London, executed and quartered him.  So brutal was his execution, and the Church protested.  Wallace was considered a good Christian.

            Thereupon the Scots became so angry, they rallied behind Robert VIII de Bruce, a man who actually did have some claim to the Scottish throne, but constantly wavered.  A year later, Longshanks died.  On his grave is the title, “Hammer of the Scots”.  He may have hammered them but he failed to crush them. Robert the Bruce went on to win the Scottish independence.  In the aftermath of Edward I’s brutal ruthlessness, Wallace became a martyr, England lost claim to Scotland, English finances were in ruin, the English nobles distrusted the monarchy, and Parliament established the precedent of no new law without their consent.  In the vacuum the English Church became more powerful, which led to resentment of the laity.   A young professor of theology, John Wycliff, began to find explosive ideas 150 years before the Reformation. God is sovereign over all and predestines men.  Man’s relationship to God is direct and requires no priest. Bread and wine are also present in the Mass. And he produced a clandestine Bible translation into English.  This rehearsal of the Reformation was protected by John of Gault and his anti-clerical party in Parliament. Even after Wycliff, England hungered for change, and was ready for Protestanism.     

Gutenberg

Johannes knew metals.  His father had been goldsmith for the Bishop of Mainz.  And Johannes knew that if you took a fine punch to a sheet of copper and pounded an intricate image in it, treated with some oil, you could then pour tin solder (tin, antimony and lead) into the negative of the mold design and get a positive that was durable, yet melted at lower temperatures, making the replication process easier. Using the copper mold repeatedly, you could replicate cast images which could be used to press a stamp onto other things. And what did Johannes want to cast? Small backwards letters.

            His last name was Gensfleisch which in German means “goose flesh”.  Johannes was embarrassed by the name so he used the name of their house, Gutenberg, “mountain estate”.  Many of his childhood years were spent in Strasbourg, France as a result of the family being political refugees. His father read Latin and derived much peace from reading the Bible.  That’s what Gutenberg wanted to replicate in an inexpensive way.  None of his techniques were entirely new.  Typography, printing with moveable type, had been used as early as 1041 in China.  In 1314 Wang Chen used 60,000 moveable wooden type characters to print a book on agriculture. He even experimented with metal type.  But with a language of no alphabet, there was no advantage to moveable type. Chinese newspapers today have 45,000 characters for which a typesetter must locate with each new word.   Laurens Coster of Haarlem, Netherlands is said to have printed with metal type in 1430 but it didn’t hold ink well.  Gutenberg found an oil-based ink, invented a rack to retain the letters, and hooked them to a press that farmers used to press grapes or olives.  Bingo, the printing press.  Yet we don’t know much about his Strasbourg trials and errors.  Were his first copies made with some other clamping method since early letters were so crooked? After moving back to Mainz, he secured a loan from the wealthy Johann Fust.  A German poem was printed in 1450 and indulgences in 1451. In 1455, Fust sued and bankrupted Gutenberg and slyly took control of his business.  Then in 1456, Gutenberg set up another shop and printed his dream, 4000 copies of The Gutenberg Bible. Several are still in existence, two in British museums. It has no chapters, verses, or paragraphs. There were no copyrights and making money was very difficult, but the printing press changed the world forever. 

            Before printing, the Church held closely to education.  Hand copied books were costly and full of errors. Authors could not reach a wide audience.  Europe’s largest libraries were about 300 books.  But monasteries began to increasingly record trial-and-error derived methods to improve life in the 1300s, schools multiplied and literacy rose. Businesses wanted literate bookkeepers and wealthy women loved stories of chivalry and romance. Demand drove the market.  Muslims brought Chinese paper-making methods to Europe, and linen rags were found to provide good fibers. Doubtless, the printing industry would have arisen even without Gutenberg, but his genius was to put methods together in a device and a commercial process.  Authorship thereupon became lucrative and influential.  Books were a cheap education. Scholars could work in concert in remote places by referencing specific pages of certain editions. Printing made the Bible a common possession and paved the way for Luther’s appeals. Finally it promoted writing in native languages rather than Latin because most readers could not speak the dead tongue.  But on a personal note, books were the magic that unlocked the world to this deaf ranch kid who couldn’t hear birds sing or make out adult conversations.  And by the way, I have far more than 300 books and need to clean house one of these days.

Powell

There is something undomesticated in the heart of a man.  Eve was created in the Garden of Eden but Adam was created in the outback and has never since stopped exploring.  As a child who grew up in the Flint-Osage Hills, I can still visualize what my dog and I discovered along Mill Creek.  A rock table on a hillside where rattlers used to sunbathe, a chesnut stump still trying to regrow, despite dying from the Great Chesnut Blight of the 1890s, and the only existing surface expression of the Nemaha Fault, a 60 foot cliff.  I was told not to get too near the cliff.  I used a lariat to go down over a lesser side.

            John Wesley Powell was the son of an itinerant Methodist preacher from New York.  The family moved to Wisconsin and then Ohio, then Boone County, Illinois.  Little John didn’t miss a thing.  He walked for 4 days to cross Wisconsin.  When he turned 20 he rowed from Decatur, MN to the sea on the Mississippi River.  Then he did the same thing on the Ohio from Pittsburgh and the Des Moines River and the Illinois River.   His dad didn’t want him to study naturalism, but John took after Adam to go where no man has ever gone before.  He studied at Wheaton College, a Christian Liberal Arts college but didn’t get a degree.  The Civil War had started and he joined the 20^th Illinois volunteers.  Such forces were put in light duty and he was an engineer.  Stationed at Cape Girardeau, he recruited an artillery battery and was transferred to the east.  At Shiloh, he lost an arm and the raw nerve damage left him in pain for life. Despite his loss of an arm he returned to fight at Vicksburg and then in the battle of Atlanta. Faithful, wounded vets get government appointments and Powell was appointed to teach at Illinois State U. and also serve as professor of geology at Illinois Wesleyan and be curator of IL. St. Museum of Natural History.  But Powell was itchy.  He went “West, young man.”

            His goal was to explore Colorado and travel the Green and Colorado Rivers.  In 1868, his team became the first to climb Long’s Peak in Colorado.  Despite the fact--no because--nobody had ever lived to navigate the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and everyone said it couldn’t be done, Powell wanted to do it.  With 4 wooden boats and a homemade life preserver, the one-armed man took 9 men down the rapids. One man quit and 3 others were lost, but 930 miles later they emerged at the Virgin River.  Powell knew that he had descended into a geologic cut-bank that went a mile deep into the heart of the continent. One trip was not enough to get photographs and samples of rocks and plants.  So a year later Powell led a larger team to retrace part of the journey. Powell’s notes on the Indian tribes of the area led to the establishment and his appointment as Director of Bureau of Ethnology. Though his ideas were 19^th Century, his works assisted later Indian Reform Movement leaders and anthropological studies and protections.  He served over a decade as head of US Geological Survey.  Powell disliked plans of the railroads to place settlers in the arid West.  With time, his foresight of conservation and water rights problems proved true, especially after the Dust Bowl era. But his scientific advancements pale in the hearts of males everywhere, compared to the memory of the brave guy with one arm who went down the whitewater of the Grand Canyon in a fishing boat.  For men are created in the image of God, Wild, Dangerous, Unfettered and Free. 

Irish, Scots, Welsh

Why were the Irish so persecuted in early America but the Scots and Welsh were not? All were Gaelic-speaking Celts with a similar culture 2000 years ago. Celts were unusual in that they were never able to create a central government.  Distrust set in once the group got larger than the clan/tribe. Yet they hung together closely in small circles. Rome invaded and remade the Bretons and Welsh into Romans.  Then they left as their empire declined leaving the population to defend themselves. At a time when the Irish became Christians (after 410), pagans swamped the Bretons who fled to the mountains of Wales or to Brittany, France.  Anglo-Saxon invaders never did conquer rocky Wales. Conquering and making cultural change in a people who hang together in clans and have no king is very difficult.  Wales was finally made partly British by Edward III, 1284, who introduced the English language. In Luther’s time, Scotland was what the isles had been before Rome—Gaelic, fierce local justice and feuds, agriculturally backwards (same pointed stick “plow” used as in Mesopotamia 3000 years before), houses were 12X12 foot shacks without furniture, and people were mostly barefoot or wore animal skins as shoes. There were just 2 towns greater than 1000 people, no skilled labor and a barter economy. Did I mention they had no soap?  Common livelihood: raiding Yorkshire farmers to the south. A writer of the era called Scots, “A savage untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine and exceeding cruelty.” England had launched an invasion in 1292 over this lawless frontier but couldn’t fully integrate it until 1707.  But British law and order and technology was tempting.  Lowland (southern) Scots adopted all the new ideas they could. Protestant faith had a lot to do with it.  So did English learning.  The Scottish Presbyterian church eagerly adopted universal education so that Christians could grow.  As they came to America, the Scots were adapting like Brits.  The Ulster Scots (‘Scots-Irish’) who had been relocated to Northern Ireland, were somewhat more backward and became perfect American pioneers.  Close-knit and marshal, they settled the west indomitably against the Indians.  (A key group coming behind was the Germans who built the towns and started businesses.)  In the late 1700s the Scottish Enlightenment led to domination of English universities.

            Ireland was much like Scotland in 1500.  Of the 3 things Scotland and Wales used to assimilate with the English—language, Protestantism, free economy—Ireland chose only language.  Yet the wholly Catholic label is not quite so.  10% adopted Protestantism.  However, a tragic rebellion against Cromwell in 1649 became a watershed in Irish history.  40% of the population died during the English Puritan put-down.  Prior to that, Irish owned 3/5 of the land.  That shrank to 1/5 as Cromwell confiscated lands to give his supporters.  The Irish became people without rights on their own land, unable to hold public office and harshly taxed.  By the 1830s it was estimated that the expected Irish lifespan was 19.  It was 36 for American slaves of the time. The slaves of USA had a wider diet, more meat, while the Irish had potatoes.  Slaves slept in bigger houses on mattresses, instead of straw like the Irish.  Then came the 1842 potato blight and 2 million Irish fled to America, living in the worst slums, doing the most menial jobs, and people characterized them as dirty, feisty and dumb. While the Scots established themselves as bankers, Dublin had no banks prior to 1793.

            But come to America and you’ll sing a new song.  Scot-Irish established the Bible Belt and are the force behind Southern Gospel Music, Country and Western, NASCAR and Southern cooking. Welsh established coal mining in Appalachia and Iron in Michigan, without which USA would not have become an industrial power.  Irish were assimilated by language but early Catholicism had few schools, so they did not excel like Scots in STEM skills.  (Protestantism’s universal priesthood of believers = invitation to investigate everything and walk with God closely. Hence technical skills.)  But Irish clannishness became a political skill with union organization and urban precincts. “All politics is local”—Tip O’Neill.   The human relationship fields showed their talents—law, politics, writing, journalism. Today, USA’s universal education and religious tolerance, promotes as many Irish bankers as English or Scots.  And counting friends on my fingers, probably an equal number of scientists.