You men gather round. I've been talking with, Pvt. Bucklin, he's told me about your problem. There's nothing I can do today. We'll be moving out in a few minutes, we'll be moving all day. I've been ordered to take you men with me. I'm told that, uh, that if you don't come, I can shoot you. Well, you know I won't do that. Maybe somebody else will, but I won't, so, that's that. Uh here's the, uh, situation. The whole Reb army is up that road a ways, waiting for us, so this is no time for an argument like this, I tell ya. We could surely use you fellas, we're now well below half strength. Whether you fight, or not, that's...that's up to you. Whether you come along is, is...well, you're comin'.
You know who we are and what we're doing here, but if you want to fight along side us, there's some things I want you to know. This regiment was formed last summer in Maine. There were a thousand of us then. There are less than three hundred of us now. All of us volunteered to fight for the Union, just as you did. Some came mainly because we were bored at home, thought this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die. This is a different kind of army. If you look back through history, you will see men fighting for pay, for women, for some other kind of loot. They fight for land, power, because a king leads them or, or just because they like killing. But we are here for something new. This has not happened much in the history of the world. We are an army out to set other men free.
America should be free ground - all of it. Not divided by a line between slave state and free, all the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here, we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here, you can be something. Here, is the place to build a home. But it's not the land. There's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value - you and me. What we're fighting for, in the end, we're fighting for each other. Sorry, I, uh, didn't mean to preach. You, uh, you go ahead. You talk for awhile. Uh, if you, uh, if you choose to join us, you want your muskets back, you can have 'em. Nothing more will be said by anybody anywhere. If you, uh, choose not to join us, well you can come along under guard, and when this is all over I will do what I can to see you get a fair treatment. But for now, we're moving out. Gentlemen, I think if we lose this fight, we lose the war. So if you choose to join us, I'll be personally very grateful. ~Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, from the film Gettysburg.
I just saw this.
It's the goddamned Fourth Of July.
Fuck The Confederate Flag.
Like I said before, Fuck The Confederate Flag.
I'm a United States Air Force Veteran.
For Mississippi, this question should have been settled for all time with the referendum in 2020 where a majority of the state's citizens voted for a new flag.
For America, this question was settled 160 years ago this week in the field at Gettysburg.
I'm from Michigan. When Virginia asked Michigan to send delegates to the Washington peace conference, the legislature responded that "Concessions and compromise are not to be entertained or offered to traitors."
Michigan's Civil War Governor Austin Blair, sworn in on January 2nd of 1861, immediately began raising companies of troops to support the war effort. When asked to stop at four regiments, he refused. Thirty regiments of infantry were raised including a regiment of Black soldiers, eleven cavalry regiments, artillery and engineer regiments and companies of sharpshooters and other specialists. Of Michigan's population of 800,000, there were 110,000 men deemed fit for military service. 90,000 of them, almost a quarter of the male population of the state, were mustered into Union regiments and nearly 15,000 of them died, with thousands more wounded.
One of those infantry regiments, the 24th Michigan Volunteer Infantry, reached the front just in time for the bloody Union defeat at Fredricksbug. The ancestor of a friend of mine fought in that battle, and his account of it, provided by my friend, formed the basis of a paper I wrote for my Civil War class at North Central Michigan College in 1998. The 24th, part of the Iron Brigade under John Gibbon and later Samuel Meredith, and itself commanded by Colonel Henry Andrew Morrow, was one of the first Infantry regiments into action at Gettysburg as part of II Corps, then commanded by former Brigade commander Gibbon. They came in right behind John Buford's cavalry, who were dismounted and fighting as infantry with their Sharps Carbines, on defense against twice their number of Confederate troops at McPherson's ridge, advance elements who, legend has it, were foraging and attempting to acquire a large quantity of shoes from a local factory.
The 24th Michigan and other Iron Brigade regiments and the lead units of I Corps defended the cavalry's flanks and the three elements stood and delivered such a volume of fire and such skilled musketry that Bobby Lee and his generals thought they'd run smack into a whole division. A couple days later, the Iron Brigade's units, fighting under Winfield Scott Hancock and John Gibbon, were part of the II Corps line that took the brunt of Pickett's Charge. The 24th Michigan went into action with 496 officers and men, suffering 89 killed and 218 wounded. Five color-bearers were shot out from under the regimental flag and all the Color Guard were killed or wounded. Colonel Morrow was shot in the head bearing the regiment's colors, but he survived.
Imagine, a line of men a mile long, advancing in silence with blood in their eyes across three quarters of a mile of open ground toward your lines, taking artillery fire, but still coming on in the hope that their resolute advance will throw off your nerve and cause you to falter in defense of your position. The line compacts gradually to about half that length as artillery blows holes in the line first with iron shot and explosive rounds, but then switching to canister shot as the range closes, whole regiments disintegrate under this fire. Further up the line, Union troops begin shouting "Fredricksburg! Fredricksburg! Fredricksburg!" as they recognize the Confederate strategy is the same that the Union employed in that disastrous defeat. In an initial exchange of fire a battalion of Ohio men, firing from a Defilade position, causes a regiment of Mississippi troops to break and run. But as the two armies close to musket range they let loose with deafening volumes of fire, the smoke over the battlefield becomes so thick that it obscures the view of field artillery, depriving the Army of fire support...but due to superior discipline and iron courage the line holds...
mostly.
But where it doesn't, things get even more bloody.
The 20th Maine Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, held the far-left end of the Union line at a place called Little Round Top, and repulsed multiple attacks by two Alabama regiments of the Confederate Army. Their ammunition was exhausted, and knowing,
knowing, that the Enemy was coming back and there was no way his spent troops could withstand another assault...he ordered his men to fix bayonets and, executing some complex maneuvering to get the regiment back in formation...he ordered a damned-near suicidal downhill bayonet charge straight into the face of the oncoming enemy. In the process, one Confederate regiment was overwhelmed and captured...and with the men, their powder and shot...and another was broken and picked apart by a company of Union sharpshooters from another regiment that were under Chamberlain's operational control. That takes balls, damned suicidal courage and nerves of steel to give an order like that. But more importantly, it takes bone-deep respect and trust...because those men went when and where they were ordered. That speaks to the character of the man himself, because
respect is earned. Every action, every day. No mistakes.
As a former Sergeant
myself, trust me. It's moments like that when you find out what you're made of.
Respect, either you have it or you don't.
Chamberlain's men? They didn't just
go down that hill, as ordered. By God, they went after it with sufficient ferocity that they
literally ripped victory from the jaws of certain defeat. They likely saved the Union.
Only at one point, called the Angle, do Confederate troops breach the Union lines, and up there is vicious hand-to-hand fighting, with fixed bayonets, rifle butts, improvised weapons and bare fists. Confederate troops attempt to turn captured artillery on the defenders, only to find that there is no ammunition, and the Rebels are thrown back, bloodily, as no one backed up Lewis Armistead's men to exploit the breach in time for it to matter, and he was mortally wounded, dying two days later.
Thunderous cheers erupted across the Union line as Confederate forces fell back in complete disarray, their army so severely mauled that nearly one half of the attackers do not return to their own lines. The high water mark of the Confederacy is eclipsed by Union discipline and skill, iron courage and superior logistics.
Right or wrong, the Confederate troops attacking those lines came on, because their cause may have been shit, but at least they understood things like Respect. And they were willing to die for their officers if not for their cause.
The Union troops held the line precisely because their officers had their respect, and every man on the line knew what was at stake.
I'm no longer sure that Conservatives understand the difference.
They don't care about respect, they only want or understand obedience.
Since last February, we've all watched an army based on fear and obedience smash itself against one founded on courage and respect. The Russian Army was supposedly going to quickly defeat the Ukrainian Army.
The "Conservatives" were so sure of it. But with iron courage, and some support, the Ukrainians held the line and have continued to do so, even if the lines have not changed that much in awhile.
I cannot understand why so many American "Conservatives" spend so much time wishing so hard that the media or military intelligence or such and so forth is
lying, or that the
Russians will somehow pull it out of the fire and turn things around.
Reagan Wept.
Don't you fuckers remember which side you're on?? You live here.
I suppose when you think in terms of buzzwords, feelings and memes, when you cannot even say why you follow your "leader" or worship your cult's fake "god" that's what you get.
A lot more people have fought under and died for this flag, for the Stars and Stripes. For the America we all have.
But that's not good enough for you fuckers, is it?
Literally anything other than "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." Eh?
I'm sick and tired of the goddamned Confederate Flag. You fuckers lost, get over it.
You either believe in freedom or you
don't.
Last week, a French kid of Algerian descent was shot over a traffic violation, and there were protests and riots and it seemed like half the country was on fire. The officer who did it is in jail awaiting trial. But still, the French government fucks up or does something somebody doesn't like...whether it's the Left or the Right...this is what happens.
It goes back to their Revolution same as much of our national character flows from ours.
The global authoritarian Right has been trying to spread disinformation and shit about it for days, even as the conflict itself has subsided.
Just like they did about the George Floyd protests, and BLM for years before that.
Some people are just that offended by the idea of equality.
Fuck them.
If we're not all free, none of us are.
Some people have simply chosen fascism, imperialism, irridentism, racism, you name it. There's no reasoning with this bullshit, We simply have to defeat it.
No one should have to live under the flag of slavers, no one should have to fear being shot for no good reason by those who wish Colonialism had never ended, no one should have to be afraid or subjugated because of their gender, their race, their religion, their sexual orientation or for any other reason, and the vote of the people for change must be respected.
No one should consider it a "Right" to hurt or oppress other people, or to be able to decide who qualifies as "People" either.
Being a better class of slave don't make you free, Conservatives.
And I thought that's what Independence Day was supposed to be about.
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Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.
And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.
They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them:
But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.
While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.
And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.
Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.
And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out.
But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.
And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.
Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.
But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.
Watch therefore, for Ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.
~Matthew 25:1-13
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