Tag Archives: Phil Leigh

Leave Arlington’s Confederate Memorial Intact

Posted on January 19, 2023 by | 52 comments

Cherry trees bloom in Jackson Circle around the Confederate Monument in Section 16 of Arlington National Cemetery, April 7, 2015, in Arlington, Va. The Confederate Monument was unveiled June 4, 1914, according to the ANC website. (Arlington National Cemetery photo by Rachel Larue)

by Phil Leigh

Arlington National Cemetery’s Confederate Memorial should remain intact. Although four of the first seven cotton states arguably seceded from the union over slavery, they did not cause the Civil War. They had no purpose to overthrow the federal government. After forming the seven state Confederacy in February 1861, they promptly sent commissioners to Washington to “preserve the most friendly relations” with the truncated Union. Instead of letting the cotton states depart in peace, the North’s resolve to force them back into the Union caused the war.

With half of the military-aged white men of the eventual 11-state Confederacy, the four states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas only joined the original seven after President Lincoln called upon them to provide volunteers to force the first seven back into the Union. In response to a telegram from Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton directing that Virginia provide her quota of such volunteers, Governor John Letcher replied that his state would not comply and concluded: “You have chosen to inaugurate Civil War….”

On the eve of the war, Northerners and Southerners differed on their relative loyalties to the federal and state governments. According to historians Edward Channing and Eva Moore, Northerners had

the general opinion that the Union was sovereign, and the states were part of it…. The idea that the people of the United States formed one nation had been reinforced by the coming of immigrants from abroad. These people had no conception of a ‘state’ or a sentimental attachment to a ‘state.’ They had come to America to better their condition….

By mostly settling in the North, they reinforced the Northerners’ belief that they owed their loyalty to the Union first and only secondarily to the state. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Government Oversight, Political Influence, Race and race relations, Transparency, Uncategorized, Virginia history, Virginians at War

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Virginia as Bellwether on Wokeism

Posted on June 26, 2022 by | 12 comments

Bellwether

by Phil Leigh

Like during the Civil War, Virginia is becoming a key battleground state in the present conflict between the Woke Agenda and Traditionalists. Since the state’s Traditionalists were among the Americans most committed to settling differences with mutual respect and compromise, racists and feminist demagogues initially ran roughshod over them with tyrannical, hasty, and inflexible demands.

It took no more than a simple majority in the legislative body and a sympathetic Ralph Northam governor to irrevocably destroy many of the most prominent statues memorializing our Confederate ancestors. Wherever possible the Woke Crowd deliberately rejected suggestions that the future of the statues be decided by referendums because they realized that the public would likely vote to keep the statues. They also rejected any suggestion that the Confederate monuments could share public spaces with statues of deserving ex-slaves and civil rights leaders. Their hearts were filled with irrevocable vengeance, not social justice. Continue reading →

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Comparing Freeman and Lincoln on Race

Posted on April 19, 2022 by | 75 comments

Douglas Southall Freeman

by Phil Leigh

Based upon a background report on Douglas Southall Freeman (1886-1953) by Dr. Lauranett L. Lee, the University of Richmond removed his name from Mitchell-Freeman Hall owing to his alleged racism. All the good that he had done for the school’s funding and academic reputation as a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Board of Trustees Member and Rector counted for nothing. Even though the midpoint of his adult career was 1930, the university administrators are holding him to today’s racial standards without any allowance for being part of a different era when his racial attitudes were judged moderate and often sympathetic to blacks. Despite their similarity to those of Abraham Lincoln, the University of Richmond demonizes Freeman for his racial beliefs while its leading historian and former president, Edward Ayers, glorifies Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln

In contrast, the university administrators extend Freeman’s critics special allowances concerning time, place, and race. They fault Freeman for opposing interracial marriage, even though 75% of whites and 73% of blacks opposed it in 1968, fifteen years after Freeman’s death. Additionally, when Freeman referred to blacks in his writing he normally did so with the then-respectful term “Negro” as opposed to “colored” or the unmentionable “N-word.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Race and race relations, Virginia history

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Monumental Lies

Posted on March 27, 2022 by | 22 comments

Emancipation Day Parade, April 1905, Richmond

by Phil Leigh

(March 25, 2022) In this morning’s Richmond Times podcast, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Michael Paul Williams asserts that the reason there were no Confederate monuments in the city until the 1890s and afterward was because whites wanted them to symbolize the return of white supremacy after the end of Reconstruction. He implies that if the statues were intended to honor the fallen soldiers they would have been erected when the war ended in 1865. He further opines that the statues erected as late as the mid-1920s were chiefly intended to reinforce the symbolism of white supremacy while black voices were progressively silenced. He is wrong for two reasons.

First, penniless Southerners were unable to pay for monuments for many years after the war ended. They instead had to content themselves with laying flowers of the graves of the fallen, which sometimes also included Northern soldiers who died while in the South. According to professors William Cooper and Thomas Terrill in their textbook, The American South, as late as 1900 the per capita income percentile ranking in the South was half that of the national average. Even in 1930 it was only 55% of the national average. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Virginia history

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The Road to Hell…

Posted on March 21, 2022 by | 27 comments

by Phil Leigh

About eighteen months ago Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney remarked that the removal of Confederate statues would not cost the city’s taxpayers any money because non-profit donors would provide the funds. About the same time the Mellon Foundation announced a $250 million grantmaking effort “to reimagine and transform commemorative spaces to celebrate America’s diverse history.” Translated to plain English, the Foundation was giving Stoney and others the money they want to destroy Confederate monuments and promote cultural genocide against the south.

According to Luke Rosiak other “charitable” foundations—Kellogg, Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie—are the chief donors to Democrat school board election candidates seeking to disseminate Critical Race Theory throughout America’s educational system. Although such foundations are supposed to be do-gooders, they were typically organized to avoid inheritance taxes for family decedents. They are staffed by cultural elites whose conduct underscores the ancient wisdom: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Race and race relations

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Slave-Holder Jefferson Paved the Way for Ending Slavery

Posted on March 18, 2022 by | 48 comments

by Phil Leigh

Critical Race Theory and Identity Politics advocates have gained enough influence to cause many Americans to despise some of our country’s most significant founders. Chief among such founders has been Thomas Jefferson. New York City, for example, removed a 200-year-old statue of Jefferson from its city hall last year.

When race hustlers can persuade us to despise Jefferson, they’re well on their way to transforming America into a country that hates our traditional values. Unlike other countries, America was not founded because her people were of a common race. The nation was founded on ideals that united us. It was organized as a constitutional republic with no ruling family, thereby proclaiming the political equality of all her citizens whom she invested with the freedom to pursue their own interests with minimal government interference. Present attacks on founders focus on what they did not do as opposed to what they did accomplish. Although they didn’t abolish slavery, they did indeed organize the freest country in history. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Uncategorized, Virginia history

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We See Their Lies

Posted on December 15, 2021 by | 24 comments

Former Lee statue in Charlottesville.

by Phil Leigh

Confederate Heritage defenders see the truth. Statue destruction is not about a racial reckoning promoted by justice-seeking blacks and their awakened white allies among the social elite. It is all about Southern cultural genocide.

Consider the recent vote by Charlottesville City Council to donate an equestrian bronze statue of Robert E. Lee to a black group that will melt it down to create a new “racial reckoning” sculpture. By giving the statue away, the city is probably foregoing over a million dollars that it could have received by putting the statue up for auction. A similar statue in Dallas was sold for $1.4 million.

By forfeiting such funds, councilmen are deliberately trying to anger anyone who wishes to honor the memory of General Lee. Foregoing the auction opportunity is merely another form of looting taxpayers like the looting in the summer of 2020 or the flash looting more recently on the West Coast. Given the civic responsibilities of the councilors, their looting is even more immoral than that of the thugs I saw going from store-to-store on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue last year. Continue reading →

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Robert E. Lee and the Race Obsession

Posted on September 3, 2021 by | 18 comments

by Phil Leigh

Richmond’s Monument Avenue is the latest consequence of a culture obsessed with imaginary systemic racism. Presently, the only legal systemic racism is fifty years of Affirmative Action, which benefits minority races. According to black Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Shelby Steele, Affirmative Action was the first of a long chain of futile initiatives prompted by white guilt to lift blacks out of poverty. All failed because their true motivation was to provide the ruling white elites the moral authority to continue governing.

Affirmative Action never closed the academic performance gap, and government housing forced black fathers out of the home. Instead of promoting self-reliance in the black community, these policies discouraged it. They were, however, habit forming bribes for black votes. Confederate statue destruction is merely the latest bribe. Although chiefly a symbolic gesture, it is vote and donor magnet for race-hustling politicians and “activists.” Razing Monument Avenue statues will do nothing to lift black self-esteem, but it may deepen the racial divide with those who admire Robert E. Lee’s leadership qualities. Continue reading →

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