Pretty much the r****ded logic to this thread. Most people have no idea who dowling was. It just seems logical to rename it to something that will remind us of the Civil War everyday.
Yes, and so was George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Yet you don't see a mainstream movement to rename things named for them Why is this? It's actually pretty damn simple. They are well known historical figures for events whose primary significance have nothing to do with secessionfrom the Union or slavery This is not true of Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, or any of the other confederate "heroes" for whom so many goddam things were named.
Because what is seen now as some kind of horrifying thing, it wasn't necessarily back then. What you want to do is erase all of the good a citizen of the state of Texas or any other state did because of something you deem as bad. It's bad when you compare it to today's standards... but back then people did not have the same understanding of things that we have now.
You have been brainwashed to believe that the Confederacy = bad and Union = good. It wasn't good guys vs. bad guys back then. To act like Confederate soldiers were evil is just wrong and ignorant of history.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned, raped and abused other human beings. They then fought for a nation and helped set up a nation that embraced the practice of torturing and raping an entire race of people. There doesn't need to be any monuments, everything about them needs to be erased and stuffed in a museum. I cannot believe they are on money. Let us not even discuss what was done to the native Americans. They are genocidal, classist racists that we don't need to have government buildings or schools named after.
Were you home schooled on a compound somewhere? Slavery was regarded as horrible back then, because it was. Also horrible - armed insurrection and wholesale slaughter because you love slavery so much. This was true then and is true now. Nice Nuremberg defense do
If you read the thread you'd realize that this argument has already been shown to be invalid. Think of all the pubic hairs you could have scratched in the time you wasted. It's very sad.
Because it is the truth. Garbage like this is why negros down south spent most of the 20th c trying to not get lynched. Embarrassing
They also built a set of laws, principles and legislative mechanisms that made eventual emancipation and enfranchisement possible. The Confederacy was built and waged a bloody war to preempt that, and very explicitly and vocally positioned themselves as guardians of white supremacy vis-a-vis Alexander Stephens' Cornerstone Speech at their inauguration. And whatever honor or patriotism white soldiers exerted defending their land dissipated when they formed and peopled the Klan, Red Shirts, murdered thousands of Republican and freedmen voters and abused their legal apparatus to antagonize and disenfranchise blacks for another century.
I don't know if your political or historical scope goes back before Clinton, but Southern conservatives monopolized the Democratic Party and tried to ruin it sixty years ago like they did the South a century prior, because a popular President gave lip service to racial equity, then they ran like bitter cowards once the Voting Rights Act passed and they couldn't win segregated, white primaries. The most glaring omission from the Dewey Defeats Truman meme is that white voters doubled down on another twenty years of Jim Crow when they lobbied against the first pro-integration governor to win a major party nomination.
Slavery was abolished in the northern states what, 60 years before the civil war? People realized at the time that slavery was a completely f***ed up institution, or the abolitionist movement never would have started when it did. So the whole argument of these decent people just being a product of their time really doesn't hold any water for me. This is one of those cases where there's just no excuse to be on the wrong side of history, and it's pathetic that people try to defend it.
It's pretty amazing. I think the problem is that they confuse the ease with which people get into groupthink/mob action and participate reprehensible activities and then use it post-hoc to justify remembering them as heroes....those are two different things. With that kind of logic all manner of things can be treated sympathetically - any atrocity you can imagine, Slavery, the Holocaust, the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the Indian wars, the Cultural Revolution, the Indian Partition - I mean "at the time" otherwise normal people, with normal attitudes, found themselves acting and carrying out horrific crimes against humanity, or at least being complicit with them, that horrified people at the time and rightly horrify us now. The difference is that we don't name highways or high schools after Erwin Rommel or Torquemada. Yet we still tolerate it for Lee, Jeff Davis, and real pieces of sh-t like John C. Calhoun. **** all those guys. For real.
I'm closer to bmd's point on this one. That's something that isn't very common on these political boards. The South absolutely fought the civil war in order to keep slavery. It wasn't about states right or any of that other garbage that some folks try and peddle today. However, not every person for the South including Robert E. Lee, and Dowling were slave owners even though they had opportunity to be slave owners. They made a choice and chose to fight for the side that was fighting for slavery. There shouldn't be any doubting that. Sam Houston strongly supported the Union. But for many of the soldiers who fought for the South, it was a matter of believing they should be more loyal to their state than to the union of states. They had more connection to the state than to the Union. While the South did fight for slavery, there was more of a difference between the South and the Union than just slavery. The South had a culture and genteelness that was honored and adopted as a way of life that was very different than the North. It has been talked about by such heroic civil rights leaders as Andrew Young. He described how when he was the ambassador to the UN, and he and his wife first moved to NY, his wife went shopping, and came home in tears, and hated it, because the southern culture of politeness wasn't present, and she hated it. They appreciated the aspects of Southern culture that weren't about racism or slavery. It's okay to honor that culture and still hate racism and slavery. It's not okay to pretend the civil war wasn't fought over the issue of slavery, because it was.
