OPINION:
In a discussion on Fox News about the tear-down of America’s monuments and statues taking place in hot spots around the nation right now, liberal pundit Marie Harf, who served as a national security adviser for Barack Obama, said that “process,” not mob violence, should dictate the outcomes of these structures. She said, in the end, the Confederate statutes should be removed because the Confederates were “traitors” to the country.
Spoken like a true elitist.
Spoken like a true-blue “The Federal Government Knows Best,” anti-states’ rights elitist.
Spoken like an elitist who’s forgotten or worse, dismissed, historical truths.
The rise of the South, the establishment of the Confederacy was not an overnight, emotionally charged anarchist attempt to overthrow the federal government. It involved a process.
The Confederacy came as a result of meetings and discussions and expressions of dissatisfaction and petitions and votes over disputes with the North. In 1861, delegates representing a handful of southern states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish the Confederate States of America.
The decision didn’t come lightly.
And as the months wore on, and other states considered which side to support, North or South, the decision didn’t get any easier.
Conventions were held. Discussions grew heated.
The process took much time.
And even in states that seceded, not all were on board with seceding.
“Jubal Anderson Early, a profane army officer-turned-lawyer, argued strongly against disunion at Virginia’s 1861 convention, and even after Lincoln’s call for troops, he was among fifty-five delegates who voted against disunion,” the Virginia Museum of History & Culture wrote. “[So] why is he wearing a Confederate uniform? Many Virginians shifted allegiance once the state convention voted to secede. Others shifted when the state’s voters ratified the ordinance of secession.”
The point?
The point is slamming a whole section of the country as traitorous — then, as well as now — is slanderous. It doesn’t take into account the fact that the creation of America’s government was contingent upon states maintaining their rights, their independence, their freedom to run counter to the federal body.
That was a particular concern of some staunch patriot types during the creation of the Constitution.
It was why the Tenth Amendment was ultimately inserted.
States’ rights, remember?
This is what Harf said on Fox’s “Outnumbered” panel: “People who tear down Ulysses S. Grant statues, or abolitionist statues, are stupid and are not part of this broader conversation and are only trying to hijack it for their own purposes. [However], we need a process for the Confederate statues — they were traitors and fought against this country. They should not be honored with these positions, with these statues.”
Wrong.
The Confederates may have been traitors in Abraham Lincoln’s eyes. The establishment of the Confederacy may have been an act of treason to the Northern elites who delighted in cutting off the South’s access to supplies, as punishment, as a means of control, as a chokehold to compel obedience.
But to the South, the North was behaving as a tyrant and to the South, it was patriotic duty — not treason — to resist tyranny.
“Jefferson Davis and the Southern people were not traitors, nor rebels: They were patriots who loved the Constitution and obeyed the laws made for the protection of all American citizens,” John Ogden Murray wrote, in a short historical book that’s part of the general collections in the Library of Congress.
And only people who are stupid or who are trying to hijack the broader conversation about the fate of America’s monuments and statues would disagree.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
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