Va Flaggers: Lexington Update

As we prepare to take to the sidewalks of Lexington January 17-18, the local media once again gets it ALL WRONG...

http://m.newsadvance.com/opinion/editorials/battle-flag-still-an-issue-in-lexington/article_84472282-77dd-11e3-93be-0019bb30f31a.html?mode=jqm

"Battle Flag Still an Issue in Lexington

A group that was denied permission to fly the Confederate battle flag from utility poles in Lexington has all but guaranteed that no other flag, aside from the American flag and Virginia flag, will be flown in the city.

It's one more example of the narrow-minded approach to civic life by the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. They refuse to understand that the battle flag is a polarizing image to many people, including African-Americans for whom it is a symbol of racism and oppression and that it stands for a defense of slavery."

No, this is actually one more example of the ignorance of the editorial board of the News-Advance, since the Confederate Battle Flag WAS NOT among those displayed from City Light Pole flag stands the week leading up to the State Holiday!

(See our LTTE response below)

CALL TO ACTION!

Join the Va Flaggers as we take to the streets of Lexington on the Lee-Jackson Holiday - Friday, January 17th and Lee-Jackson Day, Saturday, January 18th- to celebrate the Lee-Jackson State Holiday, honor our heroes, and protest the Lexington City Council's discriminatory flag ban, which was passed to prohibit the display of Confederate Flags from flag stands on City light poles to honor Lee and Jackson during the Holiday.

We will meet at Stonewall Jackson Cemetery Friday, January 17th at 10:00 a.m. to receive literature, instruction, and maps.  Lunch on your own (OUTSIDE of Lexington*).  Flag all day.  Dinner at 5:30 (Berky's restaurant) and back to town for a Confederate Picture show after dark. ;)  We will be on Main Street flagging all day, so join us any time you can, for as long as you can. 

Saturday, we will attend the memorial service at Stonewall Jackson Cemetery (meet at Cemetery at 10:00 a.m.) and then march as a unit in the parade (11:15 a.m.), and attend the RE Lee Memorial Service (12:00 p.m.). Lunch (OUTSIDE of Lexington*) on your own,and then back to town for MORE FLAGGING! ALL Confederates are welcome to join us in the parade or ANY or all of the activities! All that is required is a Confederate flag, a desire to honor our ancestors, and a smile!

*We support and a TOTAL BOYCOTT OF LEXINGTON, encourage all to do the same, and ask that everyone let the merchants and civic officials know why you will not be spending a dime while there. 

The countdown is on!  Will you STAND and be counted?!?!?!

RETURN the flags!

RESTORE the honor!

Susan Hathaway
Va Flaggers

1-8-2014

Dear Editor,

Three flags were the cause of dispute in Lexington, which resulted in the much contested Flag Ban law instituted on September 1st, 2011:   the General Lee's Headquarters flag, the 2nd National Confederate Banner, and the Virginia State Flag of 1861.

Your editorial incorrectly ascribes the Battle Flag as the sole cause.

The Virginia State flag was born in April, 1861, and her first 4 years were used to guide Virginia troops to defend Virginia soil.

The Lee's HQ flag was used to designate the command center of Lee, and very closely resembles the current Georgia State flag. Washington and Lee University bears his name, as does Lee Chapel.

The 2nd National Banner was first used to drape the casket of General Stonewall Jackson. He made VMI famous.

Lexington was the final home for both Lee and Jackson.  They made Lexington what it is today, and the Commonwealth of Virginia recognizes both of these great men with the annual Lee-Jackson State Holiday. The use of those three flags are most appropriate to celebrate the holiday, as was the original intent in January 2011.

Folks may disagree over the Battle Flag, but it was a great disservice to the readers of your newspaper to attempt to heighten passions where none should exist, by claiming the Battle Flag was an issue in Lexington City Council's flag ban ordinance.  

Thanks and God Bless
Billy Bearden

Va Flaggers Upcoming Events:

Friday, January 17th - Saturday, January 18th, 2014:  Lee-Jackson State Holiday/Flagging/Memorial Events, Lexington, Va.  The Va Flaggers will be flagging Lexington all day Friday, for the Lee-Jackson State Holiday, and participating in the Memorial Services and parade on Saturday, with more flagging Saturday afternoon.  We invite all to join us!  More details soon. Event Page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/227559140750614/  Info from the Stonewall Brigade here:   http://leejacksonday.webs.com/

Saturday, February 1st, 2014:  Susan will travel to Statesboro, GA to speak at the Lee-Jackson Banquet, held by the Ogeechee Rifles, Camp #941, SCV.  RJ's Restaurant, 454 South Main St. (US 301 S.) @ 6 pm for the meal, preliminaries @ 7 pm and the program immediately following.  Seating limited to 125.  Ticket information forthcoming at a later date.

Saturday, February 22nd, 2014:  Susan will be speaking at the February meeting of the Rev. Beverly Tucker Lacy Camp #2141, SCV, Fredericksburg, VA.  4:00 p.m., Perkins Restaurant, 10 Simpson Rd.

Tuesday, March 4th, 2014:  Susan will be speaking at the March meeting of the R.E Lee Camp #1589, SCV.   Dolce Vita Italian Restaurant, 2401 Colony Crossing Place, Midlothian, VA 23112. Dinner at 6:00 p.m. and meeting at 7:00 p.m.

Thursday, March 20th, 2014:  Susan will be traveling to Columbia, SC to speak at the March meeting of the Lt. Gen. Wade Hampton Camp #273, SCV, Columbia SC. Seawell's Banquet Hall, 1125 Rosewood DR. Dinner at 6:00, Meeting at 7:00.

April 19, 2014, 2014:  Susan will be traveling to Quincy, FL to speak at the Confederate Memorial Day Service at the Soldier's Cemetery, sponsored by the Finley's Brigade, SCV.

Saturday, April 26th, 2014: Susan will be speaking at the Delaware Confederate Memorial Ceremony, Marvel Carriage Museum, 510 South Bedford Street, Georgetown, Delaware, Time: 11AM - 2PM

Liberian Slave-Traders

The following is a brief excerpt (via WSJ) of a recent book review regarding Liberia, "Another America," by James Ciment.  Like slave-leader Cinque of Amistad fame, the emancipated blacks of the US returned to Africa and the indigenous practice of what propelled them or their ancestors to the New World.


BT
bernhard1848@att.net

"[Liberian]Settlers and their "Americo" descendants identified with the U.S. and viewed natives as savages. Natives considered Americoes rapacious and arrogant. Indeed they called them "whites," or "black-white" men, since settlers spoke English and dressed like Victorians.

One source of antagonism was the slave trade. Native tribes traded slaves among themselves and illegally with Europeans. It was a business for them, as Ciment notes, "but an abomination to the settlers, who were determined to wipe it out as soon as they had the means to do so."

And yet settlers and their Americo descendants practiced forms of exploitation that closely resembled slavery. They took native women as concubines. They adopted native children and provided them with food, shelter and schooling in exchange for work without pay. To some observers, this "ward system," as it was called, was another form of slavery. "These pawns are as much slaves as their sable prototypes in the parent states of America," wrote one white physician.

In the 1920s, Americo-Liberians were widely accused of trafficking in slaves. They leased out natives to Fernando Pó, in the Gulf of Guinea, to plant and harvest cocoa. Many died before their contracts were up, and others were never paid. The Liberian constitution prohibited slavery, but it also denied citizenship and suffrage to natives, who constituted more than 90% of Liberia's population.  In essence, Americoes tried to re-create a social order that resembled the antebellum South, with themselves as the master class."

http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324094704579068902901092472?mobile=y

Black Confederates--our friends!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF-QIJyLhKQ

If the north had lost we would have treated them with fairness and justice.  Lee's way and not Grant & Sherman's and the Marxist Republican leaders who had insisted that the Republican controlled U.S. Congress voted —and mandate TORTURE of the most hideous types (not merely water bucket stuff) to be forced on Confederate soldiers held captive in Union prisons.  As a direct result, no matter how many high sounding excuses the brainwashed by the Marxists historian give us, our young kids, some even 12 years old= were DELIBERATELY frozen, forced to RIDE THE MULE (a major torture machine promising to ruin testicles, etc.) and to STARVE, die from deliberate exposure to typhoid, die from polluted water.  Even two former Chicago mayors were so revolted by the Congress's act that they attempted to give some food to the starving boys and, as a result, were themselves imprisoned.  The rest of the Chicago citizens, however, were not very Christian---they paid their money, climbed up in watch towers and enjoyed being entertained by all of the tortures and even by watching the captives go to the bathroom in the dug ditches.

I do love Yankees.  They are so sweet and so noble!

Maryland was a Southern State.  Lincoln had the legislature locked up and the Governor so they couldn't vote to secede.

They missed an opportunity when the Yankees were talking about our flag---they failed to say that only the USA flag ever flew over a slave ship.

Unreconstructed Joan

johough@swbell.net

Privations, Suffering and Deliberate Cruelties

From: bernhard1848@att.net

The official figures given by Secretary Stanton record nearly 26,500 Southern men who died in Northern prisons, and 22,576 Northern men died in Southern prisons.  The former died amid an abundance of food and shelter; the latter died surrounded by wretched poverty and starvation -- many expired due to Grant's suspension of prisoner exchanges.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman

North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission

"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"

www.ncwbts150.com

"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Privations, Suffering and Deliberate Cruelties

"Starvation, literal starvation, was doing its deadly work. So depleted and poisoned was the blood of many of Lee's men from insufficient and unsound food that a slight wound which would probably not have been reported at the beginning of the war would often cause blood-poison, gangrene, and death.

Yet the spirits of these brave men seemed to rise as their condition grew more desperate . . . it was a harrowing but not uncommon sight to see those hungry men gather the wasted corn from under the feet of half-fed horses, and wash and parch and eat it to satisfy in some measure their craving for food."  General John B. Gordon, "Reminiscences of the Civil War."

"Winter poured down its snows and its sleets upon Lee's shelterless men in the trenches. Some of them burrowed into the earth.  Most of them shivered over the feeble fires kept burning along the lines. Scanty and thin were the garments of these heroes.  Most of them were clad in mere rags.

Gaunt famine oppressed them every hour. One quarter of a pound of rancid bacon and a little meal was the daily portion assigned to each man by the rules of the War Department. But even this allowance failed when the railroads broke down and left the bacon and the flour and the mean piled up beside the track in Georgia and the Carolinas.  One-sixth of the daily ration was the allotment for a considerable time, and very often the supply of bacon failed entirely.

At the close of the year, Grant had one hundred and ten thousand men. Lee had sixty-six thousand on his rolls, but this included men on detached duty, leaving him barely forty thousand soldiers to defend the trenches that were then stretched out forty miles in length from the Chickahominy to Hatcher's Run." Henry Alexander White, "Life of Robert E. Lee."

"When their own soldiers were suffering such hardships as these in the field, the Confederate leaders made every effort to exchange men so that helpless prisoners of war would not suffer in anything like equal measure, offering even to send back prisoners without requiring an equivalent.  Hence, the charges brought against the Confederate government of intentional ill-treatment of prisoners of war are not supported by the facts.

[In the South] the same quantity and quality of rations were given to prisoners and guards; but that variety in food could not be had or transported on the broken-down railway system of a non-manufacturing country, which system could not or did not provide sufficient clothes and food even for the Confederate soldiers in the field.

[The] control of the prisons in the North was turned over by Secretary Stanton and the vindictive and partisan men (who were later responsible also for the crimes of Reconstruction) to the lowest element of an alien population and to Negro guards of a criminal type, and such men as President Lincoln, Seward, McClellan, and the best people in the North were intentionally kept in ignorance of conditions in Northern prisons while officially furnished with stories as to "the deliberate cruelties" practiced in the South."

(The Women of the South in War Times, Matthew Page Andrews, Norman, Remington Company, 1920, pp. 399-406)

Va Flaggers Museum of the Confederacy Update: New "Temporary" Name

From: info@vaflaggers.com

For those of us who have been following the antics of Museum of the Confederacy President and CEO Waite Rawls since he assumed the reigns at the museum, and have repeatedly called for his removal, the sell-out of the museum to the ultra PC "American Civil War Center at Tredegar" comes as no surprise.

In 2007, Rawls made it clear that he was willing to sacrifice even the name of the institution when he announced that along with a proposed move, the name "Confederacy" was likely to disappear from the museum's title...  http://www.civilwarnews.com/archive/articles/07/museumconfed.htm

"Museum President and CEO S. Waite Rawls III suggested that the name was negotiable. He told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The repositioning we've done over the past 30 years is to be more of a modern education institution and less of a memorial to the Confederacy."

Although the name change was delayed a few years, it appears as if he will finally get his wish to change the name...as well as the Museum's original intent... with the recent liquidation. 

From the Museum of the Confederacy's website:

"Civil War Holdings, Inc. is the temporary name of the joint partnership between the American Civil War Center and the Museum of the Confederacy. When the two institutions joined forces in the fall of 2013, a new Board of Directors was created, comprising members of both former boards."  Complete list here:  http://www.moc.org/about-us/board-trustees

Those of us in Richmond easily recognize the name of the Chairman of the new board, Dr. Edward L. Ayers, as one who has, as a close personal friend and associate of Mr. Rawls, been allowed unrestricted access and influence at the museum. 

In November of this year, Dr. Ayers was a featured speaker at the "Loving RVA" gathering in Richmond:

The main focus of this gathering was to introduce a plan to "revitalize RVA".  Details of the plan are available here...  http://lovingrva.com/index.html and include a "slavery and freedom heritage site" http://lovingrva.com/HeritageSite.html , but not surprisingly, NOT ONE MENTION of Richmond's rich Confederate history and heritage:

"The Revitalize RVA Plan includes a very important historical component. The Slavery and Freedom Heritage Site will be on the site of the Lumpkins Slave Jail, which is across the train trestle from the proposed commercial and residential development."

Ayers' public support of this project, which COMPLETELY EXCLUDES any reference to Confederate history and heritage in Richmond, is just ONE example of many, that leaves little doubt as to the direction of this "new museum", under the leadership of Dr. Ayers, Mr. Rawls, and Ms. Coleman.

**Catalog of the Confederate MEMORIAL Literary Society:  http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x000889186;view=1up;seq=1  Each item collected and lovingly donated by Veterans and their families "In Memoriam Sempiternam". 

"In Memoriam Sempiternam"...or "In Eternal Memory"    God help us when we stand before these men and women one day and have to explain why WE, their sons and daughters, stood quietly by and let this happen.

LEST WE FORGET!

Grayson  Jennings

Va Flaggers



Va Flaggers Upcoming Events:

Friday, January 17th - Saturday, January 18th, 2014:  Lee-Jackson State Holiday/Flagging/Memorial Events, Lexington, Va.  The Va Flaggers will be flagging Lexington all day Friday, for the Lee-Jackson State Holiday, and participating in the Memorial Services and parade on Saturday, with more flagging Saturday afternoon.  We invite all to join us!  More details soon. Event Page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/227559140750614/  Info from the Stonewall Brigade here:   http://leejacksonday.webs.com/

Saturday, February 1st, 2014:  Susan will travel to Statesboro, GA to speak at the Lee-Jackson Banquet, held by the Ogeechee Rifles, Camp #941, SCV.  RJ's Restaurant, 454 South Main St. (US 301 S.) @ 6 pm for the meal, preliminaries @ 7 pm and the program immediately following.  Seating limited to 125.  Ticket information forthcoming at a later date.

Saturday, February 22nd, 2014:  Susan will be speaking at the February meeting of the Rev. Beverly Tucker Lacy Camp #2141, SCV, Fredericksburg, VA.  4:00 p.m., Perkins Restaurant, 10 Simpson Rd.

Tuesday, March 4th, 2014:  Susan will be speaking at the March meeting of the R.E Lee Camp #1589, SCV.   Dolce Vita Italian Restaurant, 2401 Colony Crossing Place, Midlothian, VA 23112. Dinner at 6:00 p.m. and meeting at 7:00 p.m.

Thursday, March 20th, 2014:  Susan will be traveling to Columbia, SC to speak at the March meeting of the Lt. Gen. Wade Hampton Camp #273, SCV, Columbia SC. Seawell's Banquet Hall, 1125 Rosewood DR. Dinner at 6:00, Meeting at 7:00.

April 19, 2014, 2014:  Susan will be traveling to Quincy, FL to speak at the Confederate Memorial Day Service at the Soldier's Cemetery, sponsored by the Finley's Brigade, SCV.

Saturday, April 26th, 2014: Susan will be speaking at the Delaware Confederate Memorial Ceremony, Marvel Carriage Museum, 510 South Bedford Street, Georgetown, Delaware, Time: 11AM - 2PM

Folio Weekly: Debate over Nathan B. Forrest High School

FYI, The Folio Weekly (Dec 25-31, 2013), weighs in with an article concerning the renaming of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, Jacksonville, Fl.

The Folio Weekly is known for its very liberal left wing political views and the writer for this story is a Susan Cooper Eastman.  She begins her story: "I saw it Halloween night, this maw of racial animus that seems to be the putrid compost of Jacksonville's magnolia blossom gentility."

I believe that her story is extremely offensive to southern people and to our southern heritage roots and would encourage everyone to send emails to Folio Weekly (info@folioweekly.com) expressing your comments and concerns.  The snail mail address for Folio Weekly is 9456 Phillips Highway, Suite 11, Jacksonville, Fl  32256 Phone (904.260.9770) FAX  (904.260.9773).

Also, FYI, The writer, Susan Cooper Eastman is not listed on the Folio Weekly Staff of  (26) listed writers, but signs her name & (themail@folioweekly.com).

Her story is not written as a true investigative (fair and balanced reporter) but appears to be her own opinion and editorial.

Folio Weekly Article:  What the Debate over Nathan B. Forrest High School Says About Us
http://folioweekly.com/detail.html?sub_id=8558

Please forward to friends and family!

American Revolution Descendants

http://www.knowsouthernhistory.net/Articles/History/WSI/confederate_connections.html

I may have sent some of you this before.  This is a great reminder that our Confederate/Southern ancestors' grandfathers fought in the 1st American Revolution. Never forget the men that fought in our 2nd War of Independence were the grandsons of the men that fought in our 1st War of Independence.

My family - John Robert Burks was the great grandson of Edmund Roberts who was at the early Battle of Moores Creek Bridge in Feb 1776.

Alfred Wallace was the grandson of John Wallace, an Ensign in Rockbridge Militia during the American Revolution. John's father Peter Wallace provided supplies and 6 sons fought with 4 perishing in the War.

William Gabbert was the Grandson of Charles DePauw who landed in 1780  with Rochambeau and was one of 220 Hussars in Lauzan's Legion. His other grandfather was George Gabbert in the Virginia Militia and George's father Mathias provided supplies to the United States Army.

There are more but this illustrates that the descendants of the 1st Patriots were involved in the 2nd War for Independence and it wasn't over slavery. I believe the link is educational.

Regards,   

Bob Capps