re: #214 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I love posting this quote from Virginia-born Union General Henry “The Rock of Chickamauga” Thomas from a letter he wrote to General Grant in 1868. I pull it out whenever people start waxing too poetically about the Confederacy:

“[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them.”

I hate that we celebrate Lee and Jackson here in Va but not Thomas. We have highways, schools, neighborhoods, etc named after then but G.H Thomas is forgotten and that’s a shame, he’s up there with Washington and Marshall as great Virginians.