Haley Barbour’s Fan Club
by digby
And speaking of Dixie …
During the Bosnian conflict I remember hearing many Americans snidely discussing their ancient grievances as if they were the obsessions of primitive tribes, something to which Americans, being so exceptional and all, aren’t subject. Who were these silly people who wouldn’t accept that they’d lost a war in the 1600s and still nursed their wounded pride centuries later? Why couldn’t they just let it go?
It turns out that we’re not so exceptional after all:
African-American leaders have reacted with shock at a plan to feature an early Ku Klux Klan leader on Mississippi license plates.
The proposal by the Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) asked that the state issue a series of license plates between now and 2015 to honor the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.
A 2014 plate would feature Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who became an important leader of the Klan after the war.
Forrest was most known for directing a massacre of black Union soldiers who had already laid down their arms at Fort Pillow in April 1864.
“It is in connection with one of the most atrocious and cold-blooded massacres that ever disgraced civilized warfare that his name will for ever be inseparably associated,” according to an obituary published in The New York Times at his death in 1877.
“The garrison was seized with a panic: the men threw down their arms and sought safety in flight toward the river, in the neighboring ravine, behind logs, bushes, trees, and in fact everywhere where there was a chance for concealment. It was in vain. The captured fort and its vicinity became a human shambles.”
“The news of the massacre aroused the whole country to a paroxysm of horror and fury,” the Times added.
Following the war, Forrest worked to bring disparate Klan groups under a centralized authority. He was eventually elected Grand Wizard.
“Forrest probably did not object to the violence, per se, as a means of restoring the pre-war hierarchy, but as a military man, he deplored the lack of discipline and structure that defined the growing KKK,” according to a biography by PBS’ Antiques Roadshow.
“I am not an enemy of the negro,” Forrest was quoted as saying. “We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have.”
This is certainly a man to celebrate today and a Real American.
People often think I’m silly for saying that this war is central to American life and that it has been going on for over two centuries, but these cultural fault lines are still there, slightly buried, but always ready to break open if the right tremor hits.
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