I know where the idea comes from, i.e. the few servant/slaves who followed young Marster to the Rebel army and occasionally fired a musket at the enemy either to protect young Marster or just for the hell of it in the general excitement of battle.  And I can imagine why it’s being pushed nowadays: because it has become fashionable among so-called historians to insist that the Rebels were “fighting for slavery,” primarily because Confederate politicians and some generals said (and wrote) that they were doing so.

But I’m finally joining the pile-on now that there is an elementary school textbook, no less, being issued to Virginia fourth graders that claims: “Thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.”

This is a pathetic lie which will delude the white kids and hurt the feelings of the black ones and it’s being perpetrated by a Virginia women, Joy Masoff,  who ought to (but probably doesn’t) know better who uses the excuse that she found it on the Web.

The Web is a wonderful research tool used by scholars as well as buffs of all political persuasions, but like just about everything else in the world, it has a lot of crap in it, and needs to be sifted intelligently. Never, ever taken at face value. (My own stuff included.)

Especially not when it involves the War (as I prefer to call it) of Northern Aggression. Interestingly, with a very little digging, you will find just how complex that awful war really was.

To name but one intricacy, consider the contradictions of the notion that the popular movie Glory, about a fighting black Union regiment, was the common fare of the United States Colored Troops, as they were called.

In fact many of them were confined to provost marshal duty (i.e. guarding Confederate prisoners) and all of them were, in fact, denied the right to march in the Union victory parade a few weeks after the remnant pittance of the white Virginia Rebel army surrendered. There was, in short, more than enough racism to go around.

Via TOCWOC.

The Sesquicentennial isn’t until next year, but some have already started fretting about it. And not very accurately, either.

Via Instapundit.

Four days from now, with the fall of the Alamo, and not long afterward with the horrific massacre at Goliad, the prospect of hanging would fix all their minds remarkably on their country-making goals. The victory at San Jacinto would follow and Texas would be a newly independent Republic.

More Dionysian than his late grandfather’s (which he has never seen) which was rather severe. Moreso even than mine ever was, even at his age. (Years ago I lost the flourish and went with a quick, neat signature that could be done in a hurry.) Interesting development, this. Or maybe it’s just that the Y on the end of the surname encourages a loop and a swoop.

Mann makes it clear when he introduces the subject that the Europeans didn’t spread the diseases on purpose (they had developed immunity to them, partly by living with the animals that carried them, whereas Native Americans hunted but apparently did not raise animals), but he neglects to remind the reader of it as he belabors the point again and again. It also contradicts the title, since the diseases all arrived after Columbus did. But this is the politically-correct version of history, after all.

Nevertheless, it’s an fascinating look at research indicating that what is now the continental United States was thickly populated by a variety of sometimes warring peoples who were practiced at building cities and landscaping their world long before European colonists arrived. After most of the Indians died of European diseases spread by Spanish and English explorers, however, the landscape reverted to the wilderness which the colonists found on arrival and understandably decided had been there all along. Kids books are introductions not exhaustive treatments and, in that sense, this is a good one.

UPDATE:  A good (if dizzying) photograph exhibit of Mohawk ironworkers on the WTC and others: "There’s pride in walking iron."

In other words, I was to steel myself psychologically for being in harness until I finally collapsed in the traces, good for only one thing: endless, muleish toil to provide the wherewithall for some woman to take it easy.

Poor mother, her zeitgeist was already on the way out. Today it is long gone and we who once could look forward only to continuous labor on behalf of some nail-polishing parasite have been liberated beyond common understanding. But at least one of us gets it. Haw.

Born in Wales, he helped recruit some of the thousands of Welsh converts who emigrated to Utah in the 1850s. He returned to Wales in the 1870s to recruit scores more. So far so good. He even has a nice journal with daily entries to read. Then we found that, by the time he died in 1892, he had accumulated four wives. At the same time. Understandably, some of them didn’t get along, so they didn’t all live together. Still…