This is Washington's birthday and is being celebrated very generally. We have heard cannon. This is the day that Jeff Davis is to be inaugurated President of the Southern Confederacy. Present appearances indicate that it will be a short lived honor.
Peggy's comments:
It was no accident that Jefferson Davis' second inaugural was held on George Washington's birthday--the Southern Confederacy was doing what they could to assert their legitimacy. Here is a link to his second inaugural address.
Wow, very interesting! Thank you, I will have to come back and read more.
ReplyDeleteThere is another diary you may know about, or at least a group of letters that are much like a diary. I read the book about a year ago -- believe the title was "Rebel Wife in Texas"
Really fascinating -- and horrifying at the same time.
I stumbled onto Google Books a few years back, and just for fun really, I started reading old Southern Books from before Civil War. Mind blowing really, no one ever taught me that stuff in high school or college.
Google and others have digitized millions of pages of newspapers, and much of that is ante bellum. There again, I was blown away by how much we are NOT taught. The horrible torture of slaves, the sermons about God ordained not only slavery but the torture of slave women!
The idea that slaves owed their masters sexual obedience! That's in a book called "Slavery - Ordained of God" by Pastor Ross. Parts of that book end up almost verbatum in Jefferson Davis' speeches -- not the sex and turture parts, but much of the rest.
Babies sold, cattle drives, only instead of cattle, they drove young slaves from the upper South to the deep South, including children force to walk 400-800 miles.
Southern leaders bragging that God delivered the Negro to whites to enrich the whites, that slavery was the most prosperous way God ever granted a people to become rich. Also, the strong oppression of free speech, even the oppression of religion, because religions were banned from preaching anything against slavery.
Those who disagreed were chased out of the South, or otherwise "corrected".
Maybe the most basic surprise was the totalitarian and extreme control of life by the government. What you could read -- controlled. What you could write - controlled. What you could preach or hear in church -- controlled.
It goes on and on and on. Men arrested for speaking against slavery! Preachers arrested for questioning slavery!
Some businessmen raised dogs especially trained to attack blacks -- in order to guard large number of slaves.
This wasn't some writer compiling a bunch of scary stories -- this was the newspapers and books of the South essentially bragging about it!
So I like to read the original stuff, the diaries, the newspapers, the letters, the books of the time -- and the sermons.
For whatever reason, we are not taught many of these horrors, nor do we learn about the brave men in the South who tried -- in vain -- to fight against the horrors.
So going to the orginal stuff is the only real way to find out