Comments on: A Glorious Day in Sharpsburg and Shepherdstown

By: Military History Carnival 22 - Thompson-Werk

Military History Carnival 22 - Thompson-Werk — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:36:36 +0000

[...] Civil War Memory takes readers to the Antietam battlefield and discusses the value of blogging and confirms the existence of the Lost Cause in Sharpsburg, Maryland. [...]

By: margaretdblough

margaretdblough — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:00:21 +0000

Thanks. I thought he was the one.

By: Bob_Pollock

Bob_Pollock — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:38:09 +0000

“the universal right of every people to self-determination”

It never ceases to amaze me how duplicitous the Confederate argument was and the Lost Cause argument continues to be.

By: bobhuddleston

bobhuddleston — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:14:54 +0000

Margaret,

That was the chap who wanted to have Heroic Statues of the Great Confederate Leaders, Lee, Jackson and Stuart so everyone would know they were There — except, of course, they were never “there,” unless they went past on the way to Sharpesburg.

By: margaretdblough

margaretdblough — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:22:39 +0000

Harry-Was the guy who put the statue there the one who wanted to erect multiple outsized statues of Confederates?

By: Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:38:17 +0000

Thanks Harry. That definitely helps us to better understand the background to all of this. I can't believe they made that mistake. I tell my students that I will immediately stop reading their papers if I see the word “succession”.

By: Harry

Harry — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:23:37 +0000

It's important to remember a few things about Antietam National Battlefield, one of them being that it was not st up as a park with boundaries like, say, Gettysburg. Over the years, the park has acquired land. the site on which the Lee statue sits was not, until recently, NPS property. The gentleman who placed the statue there owned the property. While that's no longer the case, the statue is still there (having corrected the word “succession” to secession”). The biggest argument against the siting of the statue is, of course, that Lee was never there. So far, the park has not formulated any plan to move or remove the statue. There is a longstanding moratorium on the installation of new monuments on the battlefield.

By: Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:07:18 +0000

Thankfully it's not in an easily accessible place. Most visitors won't even notice it which is actually pretty funny given that it is Lee. I'm sure Tom Clemens can fill us in on the story behind it.

Tom, are you there?

By: Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:05:49 +0000

As far as I know there are no plans to have it removed, but I could be wrong.

By: margaretdblough

margaretdblough — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:01:03 +0000

How did that plaque get up in the first place? That's as big a piece of propaganda as the infamous plaque in New Orleans regarding the White League Riots. As for Lee's genius at Antietam, it was far more George McClellan's awe-inspiring lack of aggressivenes. I participated in a monitored online war game on Antietam and the player doing McClellan was actually assigned “McClellan points” which penalized him to doing anything aggressive to try to approximate how the battle developed.

By: mariannedavis

mariannedavis — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:13:24 +0000

Is it possible that the Park Service will allow that plaque to remain? Some may argue the need for “balance” in the number of commemorative statues, but I don't think we have to balance historically verifiable facts with quite so many lies.

By: Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:12:33 +0000

Thanks Mark. I look much too serious in that first photograph. Talk to you soon.