Growing up in the 1960's and preparing to go to West Point, my hero was my Great grandfather, William Fox Burke, a staunch abolitionist who helped raise a company of volunteers and led them in General Sherman's "March to the Sea", a war crime that was essential to breaking the will of the South to resist, thus ending the rebellion and en…
Growing up in the 1960's and preparing to go to West Point, my hero was my Great grandfather, William Fox Burke, a staunch abolitionist who helped raise a company of volunteers and led them in General Sherman's "March to the Sea", a war crime that was essential to breaking the will of the South to resist, thus ending the rebellion and ending slavery in America.
If i was an escaped slave and had the opportunity to take up arms to fight against slave owners and free my people, of course i would! But why would 2 million Northern white men serve in the army, and why would perhaps 400,000 of them die, in the most ghastly conditions, to free the slaves?
Because it was the right thing to do, because slavery was evil.
A Harvard historian told the New York Times that northerners were almost as racist as southerners. So their sacrifices could be safely ignored.
Juneteenth is the ONLY Federal commemoration of the Great Civil War, and it allows us to celebrate the freeing of the slaves without having to mention those "racist" northen white men who made it possible.
If those men had known what their descendants would think of them, do you think they would have made such massive sacrifices?
Growing up in the 1960's and preparing to go to West Point, my hero was my Great grandfather, William Fox Burke, a staunch abolitionist who helped raise a company of volunteers and led them in General Sherman's "March to the Sea", a war crime that was essential to breaking the will of the South to resist, thus ending the rebellion and ending slavery in America.
If i was an escaped slave and had the opportunity to take up arms to fight against slave owners and free my people, of course i would! But why would 2 million Northern white men serve in the army, and why would perhaps 400,000 of them die, in the most ghastly conditions, to free the slaves?
Because it was the right thing to do, because slavery was evil.
A Harvard historian told the New York Times that northerners were almost as racist as southerners. So their sacrifices could be safely ignored.
Juneteenth is the ONLY Federal commemoration of the Great Civil War, and it allows us to celebrate the freeing of the slaves without having to mention those "racist" northen white men who made it possible.
If those men had known what their descendants would think of them, do you think they would have made such massive sacrifices?