April 18, 2009 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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Welcome to the Political Cesspool, known worldwide as the South's foremost conservative populist radio program.
April is Confederate Heritage and History Month, and here at the Political Cesspool, we're doing our part to bring you the best guests and interviews to raise the public's awareness.
Stand by now for another great installment of the Political Cesspool.
And here's your host, James Edwards.
And welcome back to the third and final hour of tonight's installment of the Political Threshold radio program.
I'm your host, James Edwards, joined by Bill Rowland, as I have been for the past two hours.
It is Saturday evening, April 18th.
We are red hot and rolling live and uncensored here on AM 1380 WLRM Radio and going out to our affiliates and satellite and internet.
Any way you can catch us, we're going out that way, thanks to the Liberty News Radio Network.
I hope you enjoyed our commentary and analysis of the Tea Party movement there in the second hour.
We really invested in some extended coverage on that issue because of its significance, both as a folk uprising and therefore because of its rarity and because of its size and magnitude, wanted to really weigh in quite extensively on the pros and cons that we saw in the Tea Party movement.
If you agreed with us, disagreed with us, send us an email.
We want to hear from you.
We love hearing from our listening audience who is very responsive.
And you can, of course, contact us by going to our website, thepoliticalcesspool.org.
In addition to discussing the Tea Party movement, we covered quite a few contemporary issues during the first hour of the show.
But now, continuing on into the third hour of tonight's program, we shift our gaze a little bit into the direction of the past as we continue our annual series on Confederate History Month.
We've been doing this for the past couple of weeks.
It will continue and in fact conclude next week.
But for the entire month of April, during each of our weekly broadcasts, we have dedicated the third and final hour of our show to discussing things southern in nature, our little part here on the Political Festival to pay tribute to those who wore gray during the war between the states.
And you know, it's something we've done for the last, well, every year, since 2004, we've always made April Confederate History Month here in the Political Festival, as it is officially recognized across the South as Confederate History Month.
That isn't something we've made up.
And we have been joined by some real luminaries in the Southern movement.
Just this month, of course, you've heard from Dr. Michael Hill, the president of the League of the South.
Last week, we had a great in-depth profile of Nathan Bedford Forrest from Steve McIntyre over the course of some of our previous years in doing this series.
We have heard from musicians, southern authors, PhDs directors of different battlefield sites.
We've heard from Senator Glenn McConnell from South Carolina about the H.L. Hundley, Richard Flowers, the curator of Beauvoir, which is the presidential home and library of Jefferson Davis.
We've heard from S. Waite Rawls, the executive director of the Museum of the Confederacy, Dr. Thomas DeLorenzo, who has written some incredible books about the real Abraham Lincoln, Sam Dixon.
The list goes on and on and on.
If you really want to invest yourself in the Confederate experience, go to thepolitical setful.org and access our broadcast archives from years past during the month of April.
You'll really be in for a treat.
And you're in for a treat tonight, too, to be sure.
We've got a great guest coming up during the final half hour of tonight's program.
And Bill, can you tell us a little bit about him?
Yes, James, I can.
Can you hear me loud and clear?
You're loud and clear, as always.
Great.
Well, good.
We had a little technical difficulty, and I was off the line for a while.
But our guest in the last half hour will be Gene Dressel.
He is the past commander of the Missouri Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
And he'll be talking to us about the great Robert E. Lee, one of the great heroes of the United States, and certainly my personal great hero, a man whom I've always said, you know, James, I don't want my son to grow up to be like me.
I want my son to grow up to be like Lee.
So, you know, that's how much high regard I hold Robert E. Lee.
But Gene will be talking to us, particularly, James, he'll be talking about Lee's racial views.
And these views have been seriously distorted by politically correct historians and by people who are interested in really, should we say, reinventing Robert E. Lee or reforming Robert E. Lee to fit into a politically correct historical frame.
And that's exactly what we want to talk about here during the next few minutes before we bring on our featured guest of the evening is in addition to all of the Confederate heavyweights, the historians, the authors, the PhDs that we've had on during this month in the past to talk about these issues, what exactly did the Confederates say for themselves?
What was their exact thoughts on some of the salient issues of their time, which of course are the contemporary issues of our time?
We're still fighting the same battle.
A lot of it has been whitewashed, as we said, with the Minutemen Project and the Tea Parties.
It seems as though we have to make sure that everything's politically correct and diverse before it can be accepted.
And it doesn't have to be that way.
It doesn't have to be that way at all.
And unfortunately, even in the realm of Confederate history and heritage, we find neo-Confederates who want to kind of rewrite history to prove that the Confederates were, in fact, a diverse, multicultural society.
And they were basically, you know, good liberals.
They were the New England, you know, abolitionist types, but they just wanted to free South.
It wasn't that way, nor should it have been.
And you speak of Lee, Bill.
It's amazing that, you know, I know obviously Mr. Dressel is going to be on to address that issue, but I had highlighted a passage from a book that I'd like to share with our audience right now.
And it comes from Robert E. Lee himself.
Seven weeks after the election of 1856, in which the Republican Party offered its first candidate for the United States presidency, Robert E. Lee expressed his views on slavery.
We always hear about how the war was fought solely over slavery.
The South wanted to keep the slaves.
The North wanted to free them.
That was the only reason the war was fought about, so we are told.
This is what Robert E. Lee had to say about the issue of slavery in a letter to his wife.
And I quote Lee himself, who, again, not wanting to sound blasphemous, is as close to Jesus Christ as a mortal is going to get.
He was that righteous of a man, a strong Christian soldier.
If you ever learn about one figure of antiquity, you learn about Robert E. Lee, the way he lived his life, we would only be so lucky to be about a tenth of the man of Robert E. Lee.
But anyway, this is what he said.
In this enlightened age, there are few, I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.
It is useless to be useless with many disadvantages.
Listen to what he says here.
I think it, however, a greater evil to the white man than to the black race.
And while my feelings are strongly enlisted on the behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former, with emphasis added.
What makes Lee's statement most noteworthy there is that while he sympathizes with other races, he quite sensibly states that his first and foremost concern in weighing the merits of slavery is whether or not it's good for white people.
Today, the media would absolutely annihilate anyone making such a remark.
Such is the strength of the liberal and Marxist grip on our society.
So narrow are the parameters of permissible public discussion in modern, quote-unquote, free America that no matter, no matter of public policy may be evaluated on the basis of whether it is good or harmful to white people.
Now, I say this, Bill, and then I'll turn it over to you.
If Robert E. Lee were to return today and make those same remarks that I just read in a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans or similar organizations, he would be met with, at best, a very chilly reception.
It's almost certain that his views would be publicly repudiated by persons in leadership positions of the SCV.
Indeed, it's quite conceivable that someone holding the racial views of Lee or Jefferson Davis would be requested to leave or even be formally expelled from most Southern Heritage organizations today.
Again, this is something we have got to change.
Bill, your thoughts.
Well, the Sons of Confederate Veterans is a, and I use this description, it's actually from a past commander of the national organization, is a commemorative and decorative organization.
It was never intended to be political or activist in any sense of the word.
So when the controversy arose over the various state flags and commemoratives to the Confederacy in southern states around the country, usually at the capital, capitals of the various states, then really the Sons of Confederate Veterans was not equipped emotionally, intellectually, or functionally to deal with this situation.
Now, having said that, what really amazed me, and I watched the evolution of this process, was the desperate attempt, not only by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but by even ordinary Southerners and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, for instance, to normalize the Confederacy in politically correct terms.
We're going to pick it up with Bill Rowland right there when the political festival continues.
Don't go away, the political cesspool, guys.
We'll be back right after these messages.
Jump in, the political says, pull with James and the game.
Call us tonight at 1-866-986-6397.
And here's the host of the political cesspool, James Edwards.
Thank you, Art.
And yes, we are going to try to open up the phone lines here.
We haven't done so in the last couple of weeks for a couple of reasons, technical issues, but we are going to open up the phones now.
And if you'd like to call in and weigh in on this discussion of the Confederacy that we're having right now, the number is, as Art just mentioned, 1-866-986-6397 or 1-866-986-News.
So give us a call.
We'll be on the line with James Edwards and Bill Rowland.
Bill, I read a passage that Robert E. Lee had written to his wife earlier and kind of concluded my remarks by saying if Lee were to return today and make those similar remarks at an SCV meeting or some other meeting of some politically correct Southern advocates that he would be shouted down.
It's the same as if Jesus Christ were to return to a regular church in this day and age and make similar comments that he did about the Jews in his time.
He would be probably booted out of his own church.
But what I'm specifically focusing on right now is the whitewash.
And this gets back to what we're talking about with regards to the Tea Party, is the whitewash of things that were good and decent and healthy and normal and righteous to just basically make them politically correct.
And the neo-Confederates are determined to sanitize the history of the Confederacy and of the South in general by depicting their forebears as conforming to modern liberal standards of racial equality.
And Bill, I know you've seen it in books and in periodicals and on the internet everywhere, really.
Wild statements are made, for instance, about the role of blacks in the Confederacy.
For example, the claim of J.H. Seegers that by the most conservative estimates, 50,000 to 60,000 blacks served as soldiers in the Confederate units, which is, of course, just fantasy.
But this is what we're getting from the so-called, I mean, the people who are supposed to be on our side in preserving Confederate culture.
And, you know, if there is an afterlife, and if there is an afterlife for racial egalitarians like William Lloyd Garrison and Thaddeus Stevens, I hope it's a hot one.
But could there be any victory more complete for these guys than to have the descendants of Lee's soldiers, of one's defeated foes, embrace the victor's principles and repudiate those of their ancestors?
And that's what we've got going on right now in some circles in this movement.
James S.A. Cunningham, who is the editor of Confederate Veteran, which was the magazine devoted to the Confederate soldier and all about the Confederate soldier, which was in its early years written by, the articles were written by Confederate soldiers, and all of the material concerned Confederate soldiers.
And S.A. Cunningham, the editor of the Confederate Veteran, who still figures on the masthead of the current Confederate Veteran published by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said emphatically, there were no Negro Confederate soldiers.
Now, he is the primary authority for all things Confederate with regards to post-war history.
In fact, the black Confederate phenomenon didn't even arise until about 1991 with the publication of some really poorly researched books on the subject, which simply invented Confederate soldiers based on anecdotal reminiscences of real Confederate soldiers.
And I could cite some examples of that.
But there were a number, again, the phenomenon took place, and it was really nauseating that any black who came forward and said, oh, I had a Confederate ancestor, became within the SCV an immediate celebrity, an immediate leader, an immediate instant success.
Didn't have to prove anything, had no scholarship, but became an immediate high-profile individual within the organization.
One of these black so-called scholars was a black reverend who preached and I guess teached down at a university in Louisiana, a black university, named Leonard Haynes.
And Leonard Haynes made the claim that 70,000, at least 70,000 blacks served in the Confederate Army.
Well, I had the opportunity to actually confront Reverend Dr. Haynes over this claim.
And I said, tell me, Dr. Haynes, where do you get this figure?
Well, there's stories all over about Confederate soldiers and this and that.
And it's very evasive.
And I said, but what documentation do you have for making a claim that 70,000 blacks served in the Confederate Army?
And his exact response was, documentation, documentation, why, all of our history is from word of mouth, is from handed down, word of mouth.
And I said, well, that's not historical evidence.
Historical evidence is documentation.
At that point, he got very angry and broke into me and said, history is what you say it is.
So that's what's really going on here.
History is what they say it is, rather than what you or I or any scholar could prove about history.
I think to get to the bottom line of all this, and of course you're right about all of that.
I think if I am right in my research, it was September 12, 1864, which was 40 months after Fort Sumter and less than seven months before the surrender of Appomattox, Lee had written to Davis advising that due to the extremities of the situation that blacks should be considered to be used in support services in the Confederate Army so as to free whites for combat.
And it wasn't even until March 13th, 1865 that that was even enacted.
But even then they were never in combat, never in combat.
And why are we even talking about this?
The reason we're talking about it is that, listen, facts speak for themselves.
There was nothing wrong with that.
And essentially, we're sick of those who would try to qualify righteous movements by making them politically correct.
I mean, the last half of the 20th century has been a discouraging time for those who desire to see the preservation and survival of our people.
It almost seems as if resistance is futilist sometimes.
But there's nothing more demoralizing to people like me and you, Bill, to see folks like the Neo-Confederates who are ashamed to fight for our survival and who indeed accept the enemy propaganda, that anyone who desires the survival of our race is immoral.
But as dark as the present situation may be, and as Sam Dixon has said, it's just hard for me to believe that 100 million British Americans and their cousins are going to, I think as Sam says, walk off the stage of history with nothing more than a curtain call.
We'll see how it happens, and we'll see if people stand.
I think Rhett Butler said it in the Gone with the Wind, watching the Confederates retreat from Atlanta, that they will still turn and make a stand.
And when they do, he'll stand and fight with them.
We'll see if we're going to turn collectively and make a stand.
But God knows if we do, me and you are going to be there, Bill, to stand with our friends and our brothers.
Hallelujah.
But that being said, the focus still on this program tonight with regard to this final hour is Robert E. Lee.
And I can't wait to learn more about him or to be reminded about some of the things we've learned about him.
We talked about Nathan Bedford Forest last week.
This is a guy that's almost mythological in nature, that the fact, well, again, it's all in the archives last week, that he was born impoverished, became a self-made millionaire, then joined as a soldier of the lowest rank and worked his way up to a general with no form of military training.
An unbelievable, really unbelievable story, but it's true.
Well, Robert E. Lee is equally amazing, if not more so, just by the sheer fact of what a righteous man he was.
This is stuff that just isn't humanly possible.
But that's who Robert E. Lee was, you know, a man who, based upon, could you imagine, Bill, a soldier today with political and mainstream ambitions not accepting the role to be commander of the Union Army because he wants to fight for something on principle that he's pretty sure will be a failing cause.
Could you imagine anyone in Robert E. Lee's position doing that in this day and age?
James, I'd like to answer your question.
We only have 15 seconds to break, and we do have Gene Dressel on the phone.
And after the break, he'll be back with us to talk about the great General Lee.
Then don't go away.
The Political Cesspool, guys, will be back right after these messages.
On the show and express your opinion in the Political Cesspool, call us toll-free at 1-866-986-6397.
We gotta get out of this place.
If it's the last thing we ever do, we gotta get out of here.
And welcome back to the program.
James Edwards and Bill Rowland here with you as we continue tonight's installment.
Most specifically, our salute to the Confederate South in this Confederate History Month.
Bill, I know our featured and special guest for the evening is on the line with us now.
I'd like to afford you the opportunity to introduce him.
Yes, tonight we have with us to discuss Robert E. Lee, Gene Dressel, who lives in Missouri and is the past Missouri commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Gene, can you hear me?
Are you on the line with us?
Yes, you can, Bill.
Thank you.
Well, it's good to have you on, and we are familiar with each other through the Council of Conservative Citizens as well.
Yes, sir.
And so we're proud to have you on the show.
Gene, let me ask you, say a few things first about General Lee, Virginia aristocrat, one of the highest scoring cadets at West Point, and one of the few, if not the only, cadet at West Point to never earn a demerit.
A man who had absolutely unimpeachable, sterling character.
And I would think that a man like this, whatever he said and did, he meant it and he did it in, or whatever he believed, he believed with a thoroughly clear mind and a thoroughly true heart.
I mean, I think you'd agree to that.
Right.
And what I think in recent times, in the last 15 years or so anyway, there's been an attempt to, I would say, sort of give Lee a very liberal Coating a sugar coating of liberalism to make him appear to be someone who would, for instance, accept some of the egalitarian views we have today.
Yeah, that's exactly the objection I had to the recent reinventing of Robert E. Lee, that the person that they're kind of pushing now is not the real Robert E. Lee.
What kind of brought this to my mind was a recent issue of the Civil War Times illustrated.
I don't get it because I don't like their bias, but I picked that one up because it had the feature story was Robert E. Lee, and it was Lee and Slavery and why he fought like hell to save it.
And I thought, well, now wait a minute, that's not what I had heard.
Slavery was not General Lee's primary reason for going to war.
And there were a lot of things that we all agree on, that Lee was an intelligent, aristocrat, and that he was an honorable, reserved Christian gentleman, but he had kind of an unapproachable marble man image that went along with being an honorable, reserved Christian gentleman.
Well, this lady at Elizabeth Pryor Brown had written the article, and she did a book called Reading the Man, a portrait of Robert E. Lee through his private letters.
She was a National Park Service employee, so you pretty well figure there'd be some bias there on her part.
But what I got out of reading her book was that the Lee that they're trying to make out as being a multicultural liberal who was not racially aware is not true.
There were a lot of things that have popped up about Lee in the last 15 or 20 years.
I kind of refer to them as mystery rather than history.
And there are several quotations from Lee that actually seem to back up what people with the liberal bent are seeming to say.
Like in an 1856 letter, Lee said that slavery is a moral and political evil.
Well, that would make it sound like that Lee was opposed to slavery.
And it's also believed that Lee never owned slaves himself.
You know, as a military man, he didn't need slaves.
He had arteries or soldiers to perform any kind of manual labor he might have.
The only slaves that Lee actually came in contact with managing were the ones that were inherited through his wife from George Washington Park Custis left 196 slaves, and Lee was the executor of the estate.
And it's believed that that was the only contact he had with him.
Are you still there, Bill?
I'm still here, Anna.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I was listening to myself, so listening to the show.
Well, it's also believed that Lee was in favor of putting slaves into the Army, and when Patrick Claiborne made that suggestion in 63, it was said that Lee was the only one that was in favor of it and that it was Davis that disapproved it, which fit into the liberal program.
It was also believed that Lee had no enmity toward Freedmen after the war.
And as a matter of fact, he even took communion with an old black gentleman at St. Paul's Church in Richmond after the war.
Well, the rest of the congregation was aghast at that.
What Lee revealed in his letters to his friends and family was a lot more candid than what Lee, the gentleman, would say.
And he was glad to put in his letters his exact feelings about race and slavery and everything else.
One of the quotes from one of his letters is that he thought that slavery was an unfortunate historical legacy, which ties in with that 1856 letter, but it was not an unfortunate historical legacy for what it did to the slave, but for the indolent attitude it created in the white race is what Lee was opposed to.
Gene, let me ask you to talk into the phone a little closer.
You need to in Loudon.
Let me get a $2 phone here and try this one, see if it works.
I'll make a comment while you're changing phones there.
I've heard the tale about Lee and the old black man at the altar, and there are actually several versions of that.
One was that a fairly creditable version was that, in fact, this was an attempt to disrupt the service and to discredit Lee, that there were abolitionists and radicals who were counting on this event to discredit Lee or to create a scandal, and that, in fact, the congregation did get very angry because apparently this individual sort of forced his way down to the altar to take communion.
And Lee, in order to sort of calm things down, stood up and immediately took control of the situation before it got out of hand.
That's one version I've heard.
Yeah.
Well, that was pretty much the way that the letters afterward expressed that he went up to the altar.
He didn't take communion with the black gentleman.
He took communion at the other end of the altar and just completely ignored the other fellow's presence.
And what I would take from that was that Lee was showing that this new order that the federal government was going to kind of cram down the throat wouldn't sway him from his faith.
In other words, it was an act of defiance that Lee went up there and let them know that they weren't going to steal his faith from him, that he would take communion no matter who was up there.
Right.
Is this phone a little bit better?
Much better.
You sound better.
Now, Lee, I would say that Lee, of all of the generals after the war, had a clearer vision and a better understanding of race than almost any of the other generals who somehow believed that the old system was going to remain in place, except that you wouldn't own the labor anymore.
That the South would just kind of continue on with the labor system as it was, and that really only the technicality of slavery would cease to exist.
But Lee saw it very differently, didn't he?
Well, he did.
He did not like the slave system.
He didn't like the inefficiency of it.
He didn't like the interracial relationships that it created.
And he didn't like the burden that it put on the whites for the welfare of the slave property that they would have.
When they got older, they were just being cared for.
But that didn't mean that he was a multiculturalist because he had not a dislike for other races, but he had a love for his own race that transcended all of that.
He was talking about after the war, he is, they called him in to give.
Gene, hold that thought one second.
We're going to go to break, and when we come back, we'll pick it up again.
We're on the air with Gene Dressel talking about Lee.
Don't go away.
The political cesspool, guys, we'll be back right after these messages.
We gotta get out of this place.
Welcome back.
To get on the political cesspool, call us on James's Dime, toll-free, at 1-866-986-6397.
And here's the host of the Political Cesspool, James Edwards.
Another three hours gone by in the blink of an eye.
Well, almost.
We got a few minutes left.
One more segment remaining in tonight's installment.
And with that being said, I want to go back over to the very interesting discussion we're having right now with my co-host, Bill Rowland, and our guest, Gene Drethel.
Bill, take it away.
Gene, we were talking just before the break about Robert E. Lee and his racial views.
And really, Lee was far more far-sighted in terms of the impact of race on this country than really any of his contemporaries in either the North or the South.
All right.
There are a couple of quotes out of his letters that I hope I can get in here real quick that pretty much sum up Lee's opinion of what was going on.
After the war, he wrote, and this is a quote from one of his letters, immediate universal emancipation was the height of folly and danger that would lead to an insupportable class of beggars and ruffians and possibly to anarchy.
Well, he's kind of a fortune teller right there.
He got it pretty much right.
It sounds like he's describing Detroit.
That's right.
Profit in his own time.
Well, Lee, after the war, shunned the use of ex-slaves while there were white men who were out there looking for work.
And they called him in to give congressional testimony after the war.
And this is on the congressional record.
And Lee said, and this is a quote, that blacks are less able than whites to acquire the knowledge necessary to do a job.
They like their ease and comfort and will only work sporadically and on very short jobs.
Wherever you find the Negro, everything is going down around him.
And wherever you see the white man, everything around him is improving.
I don't think that you can equivocate any way on that to make that sound as if Lee was a multiculturalist who wasn't racially aware.
Well, he also said that the war had settled nothing.
The South fought in defense of enduring constitutional principles and the right of independence.
Now, that's on our Confederate memorial here in St. Louis in Forest Park.
It's a beautiful thing.
He also said that to trivialize the conflict by saying it was fought over slavery is absurd.
was a lot bigger than that.
There's a big dividing line between slavery and white supremacy.
And I think Lee, as most people were back then, it was an accepted fact that there were racial, there was racial stratification in this country by intelligence.
It's kind of, you know, it's really ironic that there is a historical, really a historical revisionist view.
I'll call it that, for lack of a better expression.
But that Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, is now portrayed particularly by the left-wing academia as being an incorrigible racist and really a vicious racist.
And, you know, when it wasn't too many years ago, that he was a hero of the left, you know, an absolute hero of the left.
It's funny how things have changed him, but Lee still seems to be impervious to that kind of criticism, which I think says more for his character than it would for Lincoln's.
Yes.
Well, I found it very difficult to believe that somebody with that intelligence could not be racially aware.
And it wasn't against blacks.
I believe, I think, from what I've read over the years, felt that there were only two races, white people and others.
Well, you know, Gene, I brought this up on the show several times.
But actually during the 19th century, the term race was used in a much more prolifically than it is now.
For instance, Americans would talk about the German race or the French race or the Italian race rather than speaking of those countries as government entities or nationalities.
They would talk about those people as being of a specific race.
And I think Robert E. Lee had even suggested that some of the mountainous areas of Virginia be populated with Scotsmen to improve the land there.
He actually saw races being attached to specific topographies and specific climates to improve different parts of Virginia.
So, I mean, do you see that view also, that he really saw races more biologically specific than we do?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I was just going over one statement he made when he came back from the Mexican war that he got a good taste of what the Mexican natives were like, and he termed them as cowardly as well as idle, worthless, and vicious.
And after the war, he recommended opening the Mexican ports to culturally superior European immigration in order to improve the racial stock of the country.
That sounds like what the French did when they installed their own king there, which unfortunately was not a success.
Well, the whole Hapsburg dynasty was on its way down by that time.
Maximilian took Lee very, very literally.
But nevertheless, I think that, as you said, that view was the prevailing view at the time.
I mean, I think it would have been considered almost perverse to think any other way.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It was a wiser time, I think.
Well, did Lee ever mention anything about other, you know, the people who, or did he discuss at any time other people and their views, for instance, you know, his opinion of the Yankees after the war versus during the war or any matters like that?
I didn't pick up on any of his opinions of what the people in the North said, although there was a quotation that if he knew then what he knew now, which was after the war, that he would not have surrendered Appomattox.
That was a conversation I think he had with the governor of Texas, Stockdale, I believe, who was governor at the time.
I think it was 1870.
He did say that he would have died with his sword in his right hand.
So, you know, that's a pretty, I guess he had some regrets about giving up at Appomattox, even though it appeared that he was in a hopeless position.
So I think we salute him for that.
How would you compare Lee to someone like Nathan Bedford Forrest?
Two men from very different classes and from very different backgrounds.
I think it would probably be apples and oranges to try to compare the two.
But they were both brilliant in their own areas of expertise.
I did read in the, there's a history of the Ku Klux Klan by Susan Davis that it was General Lee who recommended Nathan Bedford Forrest, said he would be the only one that could lead so large a body of men successfully.
Interesting.
Well, I think we've been asking this question during our Confederate history month.
Who is your favorite Confederate besides General Lee?
Someone who is not famous, not a big name, but your favorite Confederate?
Well, to me, he's a big name.
I would say Joe Shelby.
Joe Shelby, I think.
That's just my Missouri opinion.
For those who don't know, he was the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Trans-Mississippi, the fighting in Texas and Missouri, right, right.
Cross-up between Joe Shelby and Quantrill.
I mean, Quantrill was our Sherman.
Our version of Nav it comes to Sherman.
Well, he certainly didn't withhold neither bayonet nor sword against his enemy.
I think we can say that he did conduct war, total war at the time.
And I wish he had been able to confront General Sherman at the right place or right time and shown General Sherman just how bad things could get.
But unfortunately, that opportunity did not arise.
Well, Gene, just one more question.
What do you think General Lee would say about conditions today in this country and in the South in particular?
The only thing I could compare that to would be the shortest passage in the Bible.
Jesus Wept.
Well, I would have to agree with that.
I would have to agree.
I think General Lee would certainly be in tears over the conditions in this country and in the South today.
But, Gene, we want to thank you so much for coming on.
A very interesting topic and a very interesting discussion about my personal hero, General Robert E. Lee.
And thank you so much for coming on, and we'll have you back.
Okay.
Good night.
Gene Drestle, everybody.
Discussing.
Robert E. Lake.
Thanks for joining us tonight in the Political Cesspool.