Confederate monuments and statues continue to trigger anger, hatred, and rage in America 159 years after the Civil War guns fell silent in 1865. Veteran headstone cleaning advocate Trae Zipperer, founder of By Memorial Day, Inc., wades into this old national debate with a new perspective. Trae humanizes the Southerners who built these imposing monuments by providing insights as to why survivors of the War Between the States may have felt compelled to honor Confederate soldiers.
Visit most any courthouse square in the Bible Belt South and you will likely see a massive memorial of granite and bronze rising to an imposing height. Atop many of these polished stone pedestals is a figure of an American fighting man of the 1860’s. In the downtown square, nearby these monuments to Confederate soldiers, is most always a smaller separate monument dedicated to members of the Armed Forces who served during all other wars including the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and now the War on Terror. These second monuments are literally a third of the size of the Confederate memorial statue. But why? Why are the monuments to all other wars so much smaller than the Confederate soldier memorials?
How much do you really know about the Civil War? Would you consider yourself an authority on the Civil War? No? Well then why do you accept at face value the dumbed down version of the Civil War told by those with an agenda?
Did you know Abraham Lincoln sent a resupply armada to Fort Sumter to force the South into firing the first shots? Did you know Lincoln knew the ship Star of the West had already been fired upon three months earlier while attempting to resupply Fort Sumter? Did you know there were no casualties in Fort Sumter? Not a single soldier was wounded. Not a single soldier was killed.
Did you know Abraham Lincoln immediately called for 75,000 troops to invade the South to avenge Fort Sumter? How many soldiers in Fort Sumter did Lincoln think his resupply armada would end up killing? How many Southerners do you think Abraham Lincoln intended to kill by ordering 75,000 armed men into Virginia from Washington D.C.? Did you know the standing army in the United States on the day Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers was only 17,500 soldiers? That’s more than 4X the standing United States Army!
Did you know Virginia voted to remain in the Union before Lincoln announced his invasion plans? Did you know Virginia reconvened and voted to secede in response to Lincoln’s call for 75,000 soldiers to kill Southerners?
You’ve heard time and again about Southern people being responsible for slavery, white supremacy, Jim Crow, segregation, and racial oppression. You’ve listened to people like Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. on his hit tv show Finding Your Roots shame guests for descending from a Confederate soldier. But what if there was more to the story than simply white Southern people bad, all other groups of people good?
Did you know Abraham Lincoln excluded 800,000 enslaved African Americans from freedom in his famous Emancipation Proclamation? Did you know the Northern people, the United States of America during the Civil War, held 800,000 slaves in the Lower North states of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri? Did you know Lincoln denied freedom to slaves who happened to be within areas of the South occupied by Union forces such as New Orleans, LA and Norfolk, VA?
Did you know not a single Southerner was a member of the United States House of Representatives when the Northern people voted NOT TO END slavery in America, in the Northern states, when they failed to pass the 13th Amendment on June 15, 1864 by a vote of 93 for, 65 against, with another 23 Congressmen of the North choosing not to vote?
Did you know the United States of America, the North, the Union, the supposed good guys fighting to end slavery refused to allow black Union Civil War soldiers from being buried in Gettysburg National Cemetery in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania? Did you know the good guys of the North dug up 187 white Union soldiers in the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg, VA for reburial in a national cemetery, but left behind Talbot, United States Colored Troops [U.S.C.T.]?
Watch this video and read Trae Zipperer’s new book They Face East: A Memoir of Confederates in My Tree. Visit TheyFaceEast.com to learn more.