An early Confederate rallying cry
Ok that email that Trump’s lawyer forwarded to like-minded right wing assholes – that’s what it was – a “hey guys looka this” among the prosperous conservative quisling set.
President Trump’s personal lawyer on Wednesday forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter “has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.”
The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in glowing terms and equated the South’s rebellion to that of the American Revolution against England. Its subject line — “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville” — was a reference to comments Mr. Trump made earlier this week in the aftermath of protests in the Virginia college town.
In one way the South’s rebellion is comparable to that of the American Revolution against Britain: in both cases it was a slave state rebelling against a non-slave state*. That’s a shameful fact about US history that should never be ignored or brushed aside.
But other than that, it’s not. Britain wasn’t meddling with slavery in America in 1776 and the rebellion was not about slavery. The South’s, of course, was. There’s no equivalent of the Declaration of Independence to accompany the South’s rebellion. There’s no invocation of the self-evident truth that all humans are created equal, as there couldn’t be, because it would cut the legs out from under slavery.
“You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington,” the email reads, “there literally is no difference between the two men.”
Goodness, what a ludicrous claim. That’s not true of identical twins, and it’s sure as hell not true of two guys who lived a century apart. If that’s a ridiculously sloppy way of claiming that there ideas were identical or that they led their respective armies for identical reasons…that’s not true either.
Mr. Dowd received the email on Tuesday night and forwarded it on Wednesday morning to more than two dozen recipients, including a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and journalists at Fox News and The Washington Times. There is no evidence that any of the journalists used the contents of the email in their coverage. One of the recipients provided a copy to The New York Times.
“You’re sticking your nose in my personal email?” Mr. Dowd told The Times in a brief telephone interview. “People send me things. I forward them.” He then hung up.
The email’s author, Jerome Almon, runs several websites alleging government conspiracies and arguing that the F.B.I. has been infiltrated by Islamic terrorists. He once unsuccessfully sued the State Department for $900 million over claims of discrimination.
Mr. Almon’s email said that Black Lives Matter, a group that formed to protest the use of force by police against African-Americans, is being directed by terrorists. Mr. Almon blamed the group for deadly violence against police last year in Texas and Louisiana.
The email’s comparison of secessionists to the nation’s Founding Fathers echoes an early Confederate rallying cry, said Judith Giesberg, a Villanova University historian and editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Washington’s face appeared on Confederate money, she said, and secessionists were eager to place their rebellion in the context of the American Revolution.
“The first states to secede drew a straight line back to the Revolution,” she said in a telephone interview. “They said they were the inheritors of this revolutionary tradition that traces back to Washington.”
They would, wouldn’t they.
Mr. Almon listed several reasons Lee is no different from Washington. “Both rebelled against the ruling government,” the email reads, adding, “Both saved America.”
Say what? Lee saved America? How does that work?
Then comes a jolt.
Mr. Almon, who is black, said in his email to Mr. Dowd that the protesters should “go back to the ghettos and do raise their children and rebuild places like Detroit.”
He’s black? He’s black and he’s a fan of the Confederacy? That’s…depressing.
We do get the explanation of how Lee “saved America.”
The email that Mr. Dowd forwarded, however, issues a full-throated endorsement of those comments. It declared that Lee “saved America” by opting to surrender rather than launch guerrilla attacks in the final days of the Civil War.
Professor Giesberg said it is true that Lee rejected such tactics, but his decision did not save America.
“It’s like a history I don’t even recognize,” she said.
In an interview, Mr. Almon said he is not a Republican and that he does not reflexively support Mr. Trump.
“I’m against racism,” he said.
But not a system in which white people held black people in chattel slavery. Ok…
*Updating to add: a reader tweeted me to point out that one can hardly call 18th century Britain a non-slave state. True enough. I meant non-domestically slave-owning state, but that’s a quibble. The slave trade wasn’t abolished until 1807 and it continued illegally after that.
Mr. Almon listed several reasons Lee is no different from Washington. “Both rebelled against the ruling government,” the email reads…
Hmmm… how many statues of Washington are there in Britain? Other than the one outside the National Gallery that was a gift from the state of Virginia, I can’t think of any. So the statue of Lee at Gettysburg ought to do, and the rest of the dreck can go.
It’s just about ethics in statuary.
Sam Day, and another question – how many statues of Benedict Arnold have we erected in the US?
It’s always said that history is written by the winners, but in the case of Civil War, I would argue that much of the history was written by the losers, and that the losers seem to continue dictating the terms of surrender 150 years later.
Truth – and with a lot of help from Hollywood. Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.
Trump probably thinks they were documentaries.
Iknklast, to answer your question, one. There’s a statue of Benedict Arnold’s boot at Saratoga, NY, where he led the Continental forces in a victory over the British. The plaque on it pointedly avoids mentioning Benedict Arnold’s name, making the monument a damnatio memoriae.
Yes, but that statue is dedicated to the spot where he operated when he was not yet a traitor; it is sort of different in a way. And I love that damnatio memoriae – I hadn’t heard that term before. Thanks for that.
If you go to Gettysburg, they have a driving trail that you go along, through the fields. Dotted throughout are the usual monuments describing key battles, but there’s also a host of monuments built declaring when individual units first arrived (typically on the spot of their original location), the unit’s composition and then listing the casualties suffered by the unit.
These monuments appear to have been individually funded by different organizations dedicated to the memory of the units–which means that the Daughters of the Confederacy have been able to inscribe the Confederate memorials with phrases like, “The brave souls from Alabama.” My father-in-law lives in Baltimore, after growing up in the Midwest and spending much of his life in California. When we went to Gettysburg with him during a visit, he was utterly flabbergasted by the way traitors to the country were so heavily ennobled.
My best friend’s wife, OTOH, is from Alabama. She long ago disabused me of the notion that real history is taught down South (she got out for a reason, and is generally quite happy to have done so).
I almost wish we didn’t have the internet. It would be so much easier to practice effective damnatio memoriae against Trump after he’s cast from office. That would burn him far more than anything else ever could.
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I thought I’d read once that the Arnold monument was just his boots because that’s where the documents that proved his treason were discovered when he was captured and searched. I guess the fact that it predates his treachery puts paid to that.
However, I was reading* about the Civil War recently** and it is possible that Lee saved America, though not by surrendering. It is argued (and supported by original documents) that had Lee taken the advice of Jackson, the superior tactician of the two, rather than stubbornly stick to his own, out-dated tactics, he could have taken advantage of any one of several excellent opportunities to overcome the poorly organised Union armies and force the surrender of the North. So, yes, it could be said he saved America – by being largely responsible for the loss of the war.
How deliciously ironic that the good old boys still revere the man who arguably harmed the cause of the Confederacy more than the Union armies ever did.
*How The South Could Have Won The Civil War. Bevin Alexander.
**Inspired to do so after conflating the Jacksons, mistaking the General for the President on a thread here a couple of months ago. After being corrected by iknklast I decided to learn a bit more about American history.
Glad to help, Acolyte.
It’s greatly appreciated, iknklast. Thank you.
The book I mentioned is a thoroughly researched and heavily referenced, rather scholarly work which nonetheless reads almost like a gripping novel.
I’m not American but even I got a chill when I realised how close the South came to victory. The war could have been over within a year had Lee and Grant listened to Jackson, and they had many more chances to finish it but, despite Jackson’s tactics working for him time and again, often against vastly superior numbers, Lee and Grant refused to extend his methods to the army as a whole.
I had just moved to Alabama when the sesquicentennial commemoration of the start of the Civil War was approaching, and it is a much bigger deal in Alabama than it was in my former home of Massachusetts, so I thought I’d read up on it, and I sought out a good book. I found “The Battle Cry of Freedom”, by James McPherson, and I looked at reviews. Some of them complained that half the book was about the “boring” politics, but the other half about the conduct of the war was good. I had the exact opposite impression. The first half, about the politics leading up to the war, was absolutely fascinating. I am, however, generally uninterested in military stories, and I found the second half, with its descriptions of battles and strategies, as boring as any other such tale.