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Jim Goad has produced a short film to accompany his latest essay, “Juneteenth: It’s All So Junetiresome,” on this year’s round of Juneteenth-related violence, and why Juneteenth is growing to be so Junetiresome. (more…)
1,357 words / 9:57
Imagine existing as a distinct racial group on a continent for 400 years. Now imagine that your group’s greatest collective “achievement” is being freed from slavery — not rebelling against your slaveowners and freeing yourselves, but walking into freedom atop a red carpet of 600,000 or so bloody cracker corpses that reputedly died in the service of either freeing you or keeping you enslaved. (more…)
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Kirkpatrick Sale
Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
Columbia, S. C.: Shotwell Publishing, 2015
The emancipation of African slaves following the War Between the States is almost universally perceived as a great moral triumph, hence the enshrinement of Juneteenth as America’s newest federal holiday. While one will occasionally hear objections voiced to the way that then-President Abraham Lincoln conducted the war itself, the presumed righteousness of emancipation is rarely subjected to serious scrutiny. (more…)
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Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads. — Shelby Foote (more…)