It’s Only Bad If You’re A Republican
May 9, 2007 by Cato
Filed under Culture, Media, National Politics, Race
Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) made the huge mistake of quoting Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA in a speech on the floor of the U.S. House. You would have thought that Congressman Poe had performed a human sacrifice in the well of the House. You see Gen. Forrest, besides being one of the Conferacy’s great calvary commanders was also one of the founders of the Klan.
Of course you don’t need to listen to quotes of the long-deceased General to hear the words of a Klansman, you need only walk to the other side of the capitol and listen to Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV). Since Sen. Byrd (like Gen. Forrest) is a Democrat, it’s perfectly OK. If Sen. Byrd belonged to the GOP the media would have long since run him out of town on a rail.
As we all know, being a Democrat hides a multitude of sins.
Technorati Tags: RobertByrd, KKK, Klan, TedPoe, race, Democrat
Sphere: Related Content
I hope no one will accuse me of supporting the Klan (I don’t), but the organization that Bedford helped to found was FAR different from what the Klan became. Forrest actually left the Klan not longer after founding it because it had become too violent in its attitudes and tactics.
If one really wants to be offended by Forrest, they should recall the massacre at Fort Pillow by his troops. Forrest was never tried for the war crimes committed by his troops and condoned by him. After the massacre (of mostly black troops), Lincoln demanded that the CSA treat captured blacks as prisoners of war. The Confederate Government responded by issuing a policy that any black soldier captured would be “returned to a state of servitude” and any white officers of said troops captured would be shot for inciting slave insurrection.
It was that policy — and ultimately Fort Pillow — that spelled the death of the Confederate Army, as the Union ended the policy of prisoner exchange, thereby depriving the Confederacy of an ability to replenish its ranks. Ironically, it is also the spark that created the horror of Andersonville, Elmira, Camp Douglass, Point Lookup, Salisbury (NC), and many more– all caused by drastic overcrowding.
Oh– and you left off your list that paragon of Democrat virtue, and former President of Princeton University– President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was a massive racist, a Klan member, and a huge fan of “Birth of a Nation”.
People these days can’t handle complexity. Better to roar and scream in self-righteous indignation, over a quote from a flawed human being, than to take the good and reject the bad that he did and said.
Almost everyone was ‘racist’ in those days, north and south, with the exception of some Quakers, abolitionists and a few enlightened others. Frederick Douglass couldn’t find work in the north as a ship’s caulker (his trade) because white caulkers walked off the job when they thought they’d have to work with African-Americans. This refusal to accept blacks as co-workers was repeated all over the supposedly enlightened northern states, and is why many skilled former slaves lost their livelihood and were forced into poverty. There were also riots in Philadelphia during the Civil War, in which blacks were killed in the streets, because of white outrage over the number of (presumably white) casualties in the war. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a product of his times. It was the exceptional man who realized the evil being perpetrated in slavery and, after the war, in discrimination against blacks.
… and yet the U.S. Army thought it was a good thing to honor him by naming a training facility after him… it is/was in Tullahoma, Tenn.
Harry Truman, Hugo Black, and let’s not forget that grand institution of senility, Robert Byrd. All were KuKluxers