John Hood: Take down confederate monuments, but be NICE about it.
(I call this continued-cocktail-party-invitation-insurance.) 
“Mr. Conservative” has been tap-dancing around for months now babbling about “civility” in politics. Here he is begging for some of that “civility” in the fight to wipe all traces of Confederate history from the face of the planet:
If critics of Confederate monuments truly want to accomplish their goal of removing such objects from the public square, I’m a good example of the kind of person they ought to be trying to persuade.
I’m a native North Carolinian. While I have relatives who fought and died on both sides of the War, most wore gray, not blue. Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood was a cousin of my great-great grandfather and has always been a subject of great personal interest to me.
On the other hand, I’m no devotee of the Lost Cause. Although my love of state history is broad and deep, it does not extend to the Confederacy itself, the founding principles of which I view with
contempt. Not only do I celebrate the abolition of slavery, the destruction of Jim Crow, and the expansion of freedom, but I also believe these events deserve far more official commemoration than North Carolina has yet erected. […]
How mighty dishonest of you there, John-boy. Regurgitating the faculty lounge / Fitzsimon-Schofield version of history.
Wait, there’s more:
[…] I admire the planned North Carolina Freedom Park, for example. To be constructed in Raleigh on land between the General Assembly complex and the Executive Mansion, the park would “celebrate the enduring contributions of African Americans in North Carolina who struggled to gain freedom and enjoy full citizenship.”
Similarly, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation has just announced its Inclusive Public Arts Initiative, which will fund up to 10 new projects across the state with grants of up to $50,000 each. The intent is to “share stories of diversity, equality, inclusion and equity as they relate to the people and places of North Carolina, especially those whose stories have not been or are often untold,” the Foundation stated.[…]
To lefties like the Z. Smith crowd, “diversity” means NONE of the straight, white, male, church-going, gun-toting Republican-Voting crowd.
Equity? That’s straight out of Karl Marx’s manifesto. The libertarian / conservative viewpoint is that we’re all born equal — as defenseless babies — and should be treated the same by government. Marx believed it was government AND society’s job to make us ALL “equal.” MORE:
[…] Why not erect more monuments and public art to commemorate a broader range of individuals, movements, and events?[…]
Is this a hint that he wants a monument to himself? If he can wait a little bit longer — maybe a week or so — I can have that ice sculpture I’ve been working on of John-boy sitting on Mr. Pope’s lap á là Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen ready to deploy.
MORE:
[…] That’s a noble enterprise that could unify North Carolinians across the political spectrum. Indeed, the grantmaker for which I serve as president, the John William Pope Foundation, helped pay for a mural painted several years ago at North Carolina Central University’s law school. It celebrates the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the post-Civil War amendments that abolished slavery, expanded the franchise, and promised due process and equal protection of the laws.[…]
That Revolutionary War remembrance is great. Unfortunately, too much of the political left and their allies in the faculty lounge think American history began 
with MLK and Kent State. You’d be shocked to learn how little our young people know about the Revolution and The Founding Fathers.
There’s a popular saying about how those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
It took Lincoln and the Union three to four years to come around to the whole abolish-slavery argument. To many up north, it was viewed more as a method for de-stabilizing the rebellion to the south than a kind-hearted act of freedom. Even in a southern-less Congress, it was like pulling teeth to get a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery passed.
An honest look at The War Between The States will find a credible argument by Southern states against an oppressive central government. (Something many of us continue to gripe about to this very day.)
Leaving those monuments where they are as-is can generate discussion to help us understand the turmoil that rocked our nation 150 years ago and hopefully avoid something like that happening again.
MORE:
[…] So, given these views, why am I dismayed by the attacks on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s memorial to Confederate soldiers (“Silent Sam”), the Civil War monuments on the State Capitol grounds, and other statutes and memorials across the state? Why do most North Carolinians — by a two-to-one margin, according to an Elon University poll last year — oppose the removal of the monuments in question?
Some defend the historicity of the objects themselves. Others would prefer to add context to the monuments rather than tear them down or move them to remote locations, which feels like flushing them down a memory hole. Still others make a distinction between memorializing those who fought or died and celebrating the politicians who provoked or carried out secession.
For me, however — and I know I’m not alone — the most compelling reason for objection is that the monuments aren’t just being attacked rhetorically. They’re being attacked physically. Silent Sam has been defaced and is now under constant and costly surveillance. In Durham, activists tore down a Confederate monument on camera, then got away with it, and are now threatening to tear down any replacement that may be erected.
Mob rule is inconsistent with the principles of a free society. We simply can’t have people defacing or destroying public property because legal attempts to redress their grievances haven’t yet succeeded, or attempting to coerce government agencies to comply by threatening criminal action and running up the security tab.
To yield to such extortion would set a horrible precedent and outrage most North Carolinians. Every time someone cracks open a can of spray paint or threatens to pull down a statue, the movement to remove Confederate monuments loses public support instead of gaining it.
There has to be a better way.
Just more insanity from the stooges at the John Pope Foundation- President Eisenhower kept a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee on his desk his entire life as did Gen Marshall. To remove statues of these fine men from the grounds their statues reside is the height of insanity and revisionist history.
I don’t expect much from cowards.
For a supposed intellectual, John Hood is either ignorant or dishonest.
Hood seems to know more about long dead English political philosophers than he does about contemporary conservative politics. I am sure he is familiar with the 19th century English political philosopher Lord Acton, best known for his famous observation that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Lord Acton commented on the founding principles of the Confederate States of America in a November 1866 letter to General Robert E. Lee:
“Without presuming to decide the purely legal question, on which it seems evident to me from Madison’s and Hamilton’s papers that the Fathers of the Constitution were not agreed, I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic [the United States] have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.” – Lord Acton, November 1866
Hood should also consider the writings of the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, Sir Winston Churchill, who in the history of the United States he wrote entitled “The Great Republic” writes of the primary cause of secession, which he states was a final rupture between two political philosophies that had been in conflict since the country was created, the philosophy of a powerful central government, originally advocated by Alexander Hamilton and represented in 1860 by Lincoln and the north, on one hand, and Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of limited government on the other, represented in 1860 by Jefferson Davis and the South,.
In attacking the Jeffersonian limited government principles of the south, John Hood outs himself as a fake conservative and a 5th Columnist within the conservative movement. No wonder Hood repeatedly backs liberal big government policies within our state. John Hood is a progressive big government hack masquerading as a conservative. He also shares the War on History with the likes of ISIS, the Taliban, and the Nazi bookburners. Shame on John Hood.
Fifth Columnists are alive and well. John Hood seems to be North Carolina’s own David Brooks.
Why don’t we push an exhibit of world-view of slavery and how peoples from the Chinese to the Africans practiced enslavement of their own people. It was the beliefs of Christianity that freed them all, but it took wars and generations of persistent Christian servants of the Lord to liberate us ! Today slavery still exists but in forms not often thought of as enslavement: ignorance (of God’s perfect plan for every person), drugs, sex and power.
North Carolina’s secession documents do NOT cite slavery as a reason for our secession, so why regurgitate the talking points of the progressives?
Speaking of the causes of the war and the north’s spin later in the war that it was about slavery, one of the top leaders of England’s anti-slavery movement, novelist Charles Dickens wrote: “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”
Why would a top anti-slavery leader, who devoted an entire chapter in his book on his travels in America to a fierce denunciation of slavery and slave owners, call out the North for using slavery as a false facade for their war against the south? One has to look at the context of the period that has been airbrushed out of US history as it is taught today.
The key to the real war aims of the North can be seen from the two major pieces of legislation passed in March 1861, weeks before the war started, by a Congress that after the departure of 7 southern states was both northern controlled and Republican controlled. One was the Morrill Tariff which more than doubled the rate of tariffs. In 1860, tariffs provided over 90% of the revenue of the federal government and were disproportionately paid by the southern states. Lincoln and the Republicans had advocated a massive increase in the tariffs in the 1860 campaign, and that increase would be economically devastating to the south.
The second piece of legislation passed in March 1861 by the northern and Republican controlled Congress was the Corwin Amendment to the US Constitution, which passed by the required supermajorities and was submitted to the states for ratification. The Corwin Amendment would have enshrined slavery into the US Constitution and made it impossible to abolish on a national level. In his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln specifically endorsed the Corwin Amendment and urged its ratification by the states.
Dickens was hardly the only European who recognized that the war was about economics, not slavery. Even Karl Marx wrote while the war was in progress that “the war is not about slavery; it is a war of economic subjugation by the north against the south”.
If slavery was a genuine defining issue in the war, one would expect it to be reflected in the leading generals, but the reverse was true. The top Union general, U.S. Grant was a slave owner up until December 1865, months after the war was over and ratification of the 13th amendment finally freed his slaves. The top Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, voluntarily freed hundreds of slaves inherited from his wife’s family a decade before the war, and wrote in 1859 that “slavery is an institution of moral and political evil”.. Yet the “social justice warriors” of today’s far left want to tear down Lee statues and leave those of Grant standing.
LOL! “North Carolina’s secession documents do NOT cite slavery as a reason for our secession…”
North Carolina’s sucession document does not cite ANY reason for leaving the Union. That is practically as bad. I guess NC followed other states blindly into the war.
If Lee was so against slavery, why didn’t he free all of his slaves?
Read the circumstances of North Carolina’s secession in the post below. The reasons for its secession are very clear and did not involve slavery.
Lee did free all of his slaves a decade before the war. The black man who was his personal attendant throughout the war was a free black to whom Lee paid wages. That is well documented.
While we are talking about generals, did you know that Stonewall Jackson ran what was probably the first black literacy program in Virginia while he was a professor at VMI? It was run through his church, and Jackson personally instructed his free and slave black pupils in reading and writing. On the other hand, did you know that the north’s General Sherman, who could not afford to buy a slave, is known to have rented one while stationed at Fort Moultrie, and later when he took a post as head of Louisiana’s military school, wrote to his richer wife that when she joined him, she should buy a slave? Obviously, slavery was okay with Sherman.
Then there was Union General John A. Logan, for whom Logan Circle, with a statue of him on a horse, is named in Washington, DC. As a Illinois state legislator before the war, Logan sponsored a bill which passed and became law that prohibited black people, free or slave, from living in the state. That law was on the books during the War Between the States. The reason for the law is interesting. While Illinois was part of the Northwest Territory, it was subject to the Northwest Ordinance, written by Thomas Jefferson, which prohibited slavery, the first federal law to ever do so. When Illinois became a state, however, its state constitution was silent on slavery, neither allowing it nor prohibiting it. Its statutes also were silent on slavery. Southern Illinois was largely settled from Kentucky, and some settlers from there brought slaves with them. Farmers also had a practice of renting slaves from across the river in Kentucky when they needed work done. By 1850, there were hundreds of slaves living year round in Illinois. When the state finally decided to do something, that something was not banning slavery. It was Logan’s bill to ban all black people from living in the state. Do you think Logan deserves a statue and circle more than Lee?
No Lee still had slaves until one day after the effective date of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Documentation:
https://americancivilwar.com/authors/Joseph_Ryan/Articles/General-Lee-Slaves/General-Lee-Family-Slaves.html
You are referring to the slaves owned by an estate of which Lee was executor and were tied up by other conditions in the will for a period of time. When those conditions were resolved, Lee manumitted them.
Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” did not free slaves in the four slave states in the Union nor in Confederate territory then occupied by the Union army. It just purported to free slaves in territory controlled by a foreign government, the Confederate States of America. General Grant’s slaves, for example, were in Kentucky, which was not covered by the Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A fifth slave state was admitted to the Union in 1863.
Before John Hood goes maligning North Carolina’s motives for secession, maybe he ought to learn something about our state’s secession.
In the period of January-February 1861 when the first seven southern states were secedin, North Carolina also took a vote on that subject. Led by the old Whigs under Zeb Vance, the unionists prevailed and North Carolina did not secede. What changed that was Lincoln’s demand in April that states furnish troops to invade our fellow southern states. “You will get no troops from North Carolina” Governor Vance told Lincoln and he called a secession convention. Faced with Lincoln’s aggression, Vance and the Unionists changed sides and this time the vote to secede was unanimous. North Carolina seceded to resist northern aggression against our region. The delegate who made the motion to secede had been a Unionist firebrand the first time around, but not when Lincoln was demanding troops to invade our neighbors. In fact, Vance, himself, was in the middle of a pro-union speech when he was handed a note about Lincoln’s demand for troops, and he immediately switched sides and ended the speech advocating secession.
John Hood ought to do a bit of research before taking the “politically correct”: viewpoint. “Political correctness” is often not factual correct. he should apologize to all of us whose ancestors fought to defend our state and region from Lincoln’s aggression.
Oops, that was Governor Ellis who told Lincoln he would get no troops from North Carolina. Zeb Vance became governor late.
There was no war between the states in1862, IT WAS A WAR BETWEEN TWO SEPARATE AND SOVEREIGN NATIONS. The USA and The CSA. Let’s get it straight. Secession doesn’t have to involve war unless caused ny the powers that exist that are unwilling to give up some of their power. If you want a more accurate view of this war, read the journals and diaries of those involved.
I guess John Hood is the new “social justice warrior” tilting at all the identity politics windmills that the far left does. He is Anita Earls in drag. In doing so, Hood is also the regular apologist for the left wing policies of Roy Cooper. First it was supporting the LGBT activists and their demand that anyone can use any restroom or shower room they wish. Now it is making common cause with the communists who tore down the southern war memorial in Durham in their despicable attacks on our history.
in between, John Hood is backing the establishment Republican swamp against grassroots conservatives on things like watering down our ability to influence GOP nominations in primaries with his destructive 30% “majority”, working to allow Democrats to control redistricting, and taking away our right to elect our judges.
How does John Hood have the gall to pretend to be a conservative? It is a long time since I can remember Hood taking a conservative position on any issue.
More so out of courtesy, I guess, I purchased John Hood’s book from him at a gathering back a couple of years or so ago. Have not read it. Not going to now, FOR SURE! My DNA won’t let me.
John Hood is, of course, wrong. Nonetheless, the UDC and SCV have given up the fight. They have surrendered to Cooper on this issue. Why should anyone else fight on their behalf? If the UDC and SCV aren’t going to fight for their heritage, why should anyone else?
This is about far more than just the Confederate monuments. The War on History by the far left is also going after monuments to our founding fathers and great explores, already, and it is even moving beyond them. In Maryland, the leftists are trying to remove a World War I memorial, in California a monument to assassinated President McKinley, and in New Orleans a monument to Joan of Arc. This is a broad scale attack on our heritage, our culture, and our civilization by the far left. Indirectly it is also an attack on free speech. For all of those reasons, we do not need to give these extremists an inch on ANY monuments.
Those who want to divide our country are the ones behind the War on History, and they represent only a small minority in our society. There is absolutely no reason to give in to them. A common denominator of those heading the War on History is funding by George Soros, and yes, that includes Roy Cooper, to whom the radical Soros maxed out in the 2016 campaign. Soros has been called a threat to democracy by the Prime Minister of Hungary and the Foreign Minister of Israel. We need to stop Soros and his extremists, not surrender to them. Confederate monuments are only the first wave of their attack..
To see just how off in left field, and I mean really LEFT field, John Hood is on this issue, one only has to look at the poll commissioned by National Public Radio on the subject. Not only do an overwhelming majority of Americans feel that the statues should stay, but that includes majorities in every region of the country, of every age group, and of both men and women. Among ideological groupings, it includes every one but the self described “very liberal” (hint, John, you may be one of those!). It includes a plurality of black Americans, and a solid majority of all other ethnic groups. More black Americans want the statues to stay than want them taken down.
So why is it that John Hood throws in with the radical left ideologues on destroying our heritage? Maybe he needs to look for a new job with Bill Barber, George Soros, or the Southern Poverty Law Center.
He would be a much better fit for any one of those..
Maybe he is jockeying for one of those positions.
Being a remnant son of the American Revolution I concur with Raphaels concern that all Of American History is under attack. How can one know where they are if they don’t even know where they came from? Ignorance is bliss, so it is said. That’s the Socialists goal. A society of fools is a lot more favorable to Socialist management and CONTROL than those of us that are buckled up on the Trump Train. “ALL ABOARD”. You are either with us or you are not. There is no gray area.
Browny Douglas
We should remember that John Hood was a “Never Trumper” and that keeps on showing every day in his liberal positions on policy..
I am proudly NOT on the “Trump Train”. I value America and Truth.
I’m not involved with either the SCV or the UDC, but I sure wish they would wake up and get busy defending our monuments and southern heritage. Why won’t they call Cooper’s hand on this nonsense? Why won’t they stand up to John Hood? Why won’t they go after the communists who tore down the monument in Durham? These groups are providing no leadership in this fight. Very sad.
There may have been a small number of socialists at the Durham monument topple. Most who took part in that event were Americans who saw the injustice of having a tribute to those who fought to preserve slavery in front of a County Courthouse where all races go to seek justice.
“Small number of socialists”???? Is that just ignorance or a deliberate lie?
The lynching of that war memorial statue in Durham was orchestrated by the Workers World Party, and the ringleader of the assault was a leader of the Workers World Party. The Workers World Party are hardcore communists who view North Korea as the ideal society, according to their party newspaper.
Academic research based on studies of letters of those who actually fought on both sides found that very few soldiers on either side were fighting about slavery, either for or against it. Most southern soldiers were not slave owners. They fought to defend their homes from foreign invasion,. Sherman’s March to the Sea (a war crime under the Geneva Convention of 1863 and under the Common Law of War that preceded it) with its looting, arson, rape, and murder against southern civilians is but one example of why southerners would want to defend their homes against yankee invasion.
Only 3% of southern whites and 2% of southern blacks were slave owners. I have never seen the statistic for southern Indians but all five of the “civilized tribes” in the Indian territory (now Oklahoma) had slaves.
Black folks used to name their children after Confederate generals. The whole slavery uproar over war memorials has been manufactured by the extreme left in recent decades to try to divide America..
What a ridiculously misinformed statement. In truth it’s just a damned lie. It’s common knowledge that many of the vandals participating in the destruction of a memorial in Durham were communists. They bragged about it.