Once again, for all of you people who continue to parrot the same incorrect “history:”

An 1871 Congressional investigation of the KKK by the Radical Republicans concluded that Forrest did not found the Klan, did not lead the Klan, did not participate in the Klan and worked only to have it disband.

Is there something there that is too complex for your limited perceptions?

Now…why were Davis, Lee and other spared charges and trials for treason? It had NOTHING to do with any “benevolance of the Union” - it had to do with the fact that the Federal government could find no lawyer who thought they could win the case. Davis formally requested twice, in writing, that he be tried for treason because he knew that he would prevail and that the Federal government would condemn itself.

“Among the unconstitutional and dictatorial acts performed by Lincoln were initiating and conducting a war by decree for months without the consent or advice of Congress; declaring martial law; confiscating private property; suspending habeas corpus; conscripting the railroads and censoring telegraph lines; imprisoning as many as 30,000 Northern citizens without trial; deporting a member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, after Vallandigham - a fierce opponent of the Morrill tariff — protested imposition of an income tax at a Democratic Party meeting in Ohio; and shutting down hundreds of Northern newspapers.”

- “Constitutional Problems under Lincoln,” James G. Randall, 1951, Urbana: University of Illinois Press

I will be happy to offer an itemized list of Lincoln’s crimes against the Constitution if anyone out there would like it.

As for “the fortitude to perservere until the war was won, the union preserved and the slaves freed” this continues the tired old fable that the war was fought over slavery with the gallant, free North fighting against the evil all-slave South. Now that that lie has been listed let us deal with the facts of history.

The 1860 U.S. Census showed that there were just shy of a quarter-million Free Blacks and Free People of Color in what would become the Confederate States, more than in the future Union states. Of the Free Blacks and Free People of Color in the South more than 25,000 were themselves slaveowners.

The status of Blacks in the South was different from your stereotyped, Ken Burns garbage suppositions:

“Almost fifty years before the (Civil) War, the South was already enlisting and utilizing Black manpower, including Black commissioned officers, for the defense of their respective states. Therefore, the fact that Free and slave Black Southerners served and fought for their states in the Confederacy cannot be considered an unusual instance, rather continuation of an established practice with verifiable historical precedence.”

- “The African-American Soldier: From Crispus Attucks to Colin Powell” by Lt. Col [Ret.] Michael Lee Lanning, Birch Lane Press (June 1997)

Incidentally, the first all-Black regiment of the War was the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, CSA, from New Orleans.

What about the issue of slavery? Lincoln tried to permanently preserve slavery with his support of the Corwin Amendment in 1861 when he was President-Elect. He sent letters to the state Governors urging their support and five of those letters still exist.

“Article Thirteen: No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.”

- Submitted to the Senate by Corwin and supported by President-Elect Lincoln as the proposed 13th Amendment to the Constitution as voted on by that body on February 28th, 1861. The Senate voted 39 to 5 to approve this section passed by the House 133-65 on March 2, 1861. Two State legislatures ratified it: Ohio on May 13, 1861; and followed by Maryland on January 10, 1862. Illinois bungled its ratification by holding a convention.

Interestingly, the Southern states - which could have returned to the Union and helped ratify permanent Constitutional protection of slavery - did not leap to the task to protect slavery. Nor did they accept Lincoln’s December, 1862, offer of gradual compensated abolition with slavery lasting until 1900.

If the South was really fighting to preserve slavery why not take steps which could have preserved slavery without war? The answer is simple - it was not about slavery or even states’ rights - it was about money.

“The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole…we have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty persent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually.”

- Daily Chicago Times, December 10, 1860

“They (the South) know that it is their import trade that draws from the people’s pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interest…. These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union. They (the North) are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They are as mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it.”

~ New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 21, 1861

“…the Union must obtain full victory as essential to preserve the economy of the country. Concessions to the South would lead to a new nation founded on slavery expansion which would destroy the U.S. Economy.”

- Pamphlet No 14. “The Preservation of the Union A National Economic Necessity,” The Loyal Publication Society, printed in New York, May 1863, by Wm. C. Bryant & Co. Printers.

Now let us consider that the Union - which was, in this left-wing fantasy world - was supposedly fighting to end slavery while there were slave states in the Union throughout the war and AFTER the war ended. Slavery ended in the Confederacy in April, 1865, but continued as a legal institution in Delaware and Kentucky - Union states - until December, 1865, some eight months later.

Understand? The United States of America - NOT the Confederate States of America - was the last slave nation in North America.

Want to talk about Lincoln’s character and the conduct of the Union? The only person tried or convicted of “war crimes” during the Civil War was a Union Colonel named Turchin. He was tried by Union Court Martial for ordering his troops to savage Athens, Alabama. Turchin and one of his regimental commanders, Col. Gazlay, were found guilty and dismissed from the Army.

Within a few days of the court martial, President Lincoln reinstated Turchin and promoted him to the rank of Brigadier General. A few months later Lincoln would make a similar promotion. In November Lincoln promoted Col. John McNeil, one of the senior officers responsible for the October 1862 Palmyra Massacre in Missouri, to Brigadier General.

So much for Lincoln’s “morality.”

What about the kind and compassionate Union military and their treatment of captive and wounded Confederate soldiers?

“As Hansen and Nicolson note, ‘Fort Pillow’ became the battle cry of the black troops, and one of the U.S.C.T. (U.S. Colored Troops) commanders, Brigadier General William A. Pile, brought his outspoken abolitionist views into the field with him, ‘advocating death to all supporters of the South, past and present.’ They write that while there was no general massacre, many of the union black troops did attack the Confederate whites after surrendering, and even shot two of their own officers trying to stop them. One white sergeant who was commissioned an officer the day after the assault wrote home and stated his regiment took no live prisoners, they killed all they took to a man.”

- “The Siege of Blakeley and the Campaign of Mobile,” by Roger B. Hansen & Norman A. Nicolson, 1995, Nall Printing co., Mobile AL, with an introduction by Mary Y. Grice, Executive Director, Historic Blakeley Foundation.

And for you lovers of the truly grusome:

“Lincoln Hospital, Aug. 14, 63…If a wounded Reb should come in to our ward I would hardly dress his wound…the Drs cut the Rebs up when they die. They are…taken to pieces. I see one the…day after he died…he was…cut up and put in a tub. It was an awful sight. But I could stand it very well knowing that it was a Reb.”

- Letter of Pvt. James Morrison, Co. E, 149th N. Y. V. I.

I note with amusement that the folks leaning left who post here never seem to back up their postings with something called FACT. Note that their posts are filled with opinion and conjecture and lack the substance of any sort of historical research.

Perhaps Irish-born Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne both explained the purpose of the war and predicted why the left-wnigers keep repeating old lies when he wrote his January, 1864, letter which proposed the mass emancipation and enlistment of Black Southerners into the Confederate Army:

“Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late…It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision…The conqueror’s policy is to divide the conquered into factions and stir up animosity among them…It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”

It should be a greater insult to quote Lincoln than to quote Forrest.

Your Obedient Servant,

Colonel Michael Kelley, CSA
Commanding, 37th Texas Cavalry (Terrell’s)
http://www.37thtexas.org
“We are a band of brothers!”

“I came here as a friend…let us stand together. Although we differ in color, we should not differ in sentiment.” - LT Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA, Memphis Daily Avalanche, July 6, 1875