WHY NOT BENEDICT ARNOLD?

Speaking at the dedication of a Robert E. Lee-Stonewall Jackson monument in Baltimore a week ago, Gov, William Preston Lane said that the scars of the Civil War have long since been healed. What does he mean, “healed””?

The governor is president of a conference of governors of 17 Southern States whose chief goal now is to keep all existing college, university, and professional schools “for white only” and, in general, to oppose President Truman’s program of civil rights for all.

Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro of Baltimore said, “we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions.”

The “sacred institution” which Lee and Jackson sought to wreck was this Federal union of ours.

The “sacred institution” they sought to preserve was slavery.

Actually, both Lee and Jackson were an example of small town rebels who walked roughshod over humble people in an attempt to build a State on the foundation of slave labor.

Hitler killed Jews. Lee and Jackson exploited colored people as animals and property.

If we do right today to try the Nazi gang for crimes against humanity in World War I1, then Abe Lincoln was a sissy in not hanging Jeff Davis, Lee, Jackson, Stevens, and the whole caboodle of Confederate government leaders and military commanders:

First, for violating their oaths of office and their sworn allegiance to the flag.

Second, for making war against the government of the United States and treasonably conspiring with foreign powers for its destruction.

Third, for willfully dishonoring flags of truce, for murdering in cold blood captured colored troops and their white officers, for the horrible conditions imposed upon colored Union soldiers which caused the death of thousands in Southern prison camps.

To the Confederates, President Lincoln was a “baboon,” a “low-bred obscure clown,” “a Black Republican,” a “gorilla.”

Newspapers of that day accused the rebels of cutting off the heads of dead Union troops at Manassas, of burying officers with their faces downward, nailing white officers of colored troops to trees.

General U.S. Grant, looking at Lee’s 55,000 troops before Richmond, declared: “These men (including Lee) we must kill before we can have peace.”

Actually, the whole Civil War, provoked and begun by the Confederacy, was recklessly conceived and stupidly executed.

Here were eleven Southern States dictating to the whole United States, much as the Conference of Southern Governors of this day seeks to do.

These States had only half the population and less than a fourth of the matter and intelligence of the North.

Next to slavery their fatal and misguided belief in States’ rights caused their own destruction.

Every Southern State was believed to be an independent| republic. Troops raised in one State could not be moved to another without its consent. Some rebels never could be persuaded to cross the Mississippi River. They said they never enlisted to fight on this side.

Lincoln thus ridiculed Lee’s claim that his rebellion against the United States was founded on principle:

Said Lincoln,

“He (Lee) says he has wept tears of blood over this terrible Rebellion (note Lincoln used no silly term like “war between the States”), but he could not fight against the State in which he was born.

“That’s all bosh – , fight against his State. If a man is born in a bad State, the best thing to do is to get out of it as soon as possible.”

Of Stonewall Jackson let this be said: He was deluded by the States’ rights theories of his day.

He was a West Point graduate who violated his trust by turning his sword against his commander-in-chief.

He was a religious man who said he “hated slavery,” but could do nothing about it.

Jackson and Lee, rebels, conspirators, were responsible for the sacrifice of a million lives and the outpouring of the nation’s wealth to fight a four-year war.

They helped to impoverish millions of innocent people.

These traitors are today held up before us by the Governor of the State, the Mayor of the city, and Bishop Noble C. Powell of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, and Brother Douglass Freeman of Richmond, Va, editor of the News Leader, as characters to whom we can look for “inspiration”(?)

This is pure drivel and tommyrot.

So far as the mayor is concerned, we know he was merely making a speech. He doesn’t believe in the confederacy stuff.

As for Governor Lane and Bishop Powell, we wonder?

If some crack-pot with a diseased brain should leave the city a few thousand dollars with which to erect a memorial to Benedict Arnold, there are probably some church, city and State officials, who could be persuaded by the Daughters of the American Revolution to build it, and to orate at its dedication.

In Washington this past week the House of Representatives voted to pay the Tampa, Fla., chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy $1000 for damage done to a confederate monument by U.S. sailors on shore leave. The boys didn’t like tie rebel statue and toppled it over.