Carole Hornsby Haynes loves spreading misinformation about education, but she also spreads historical misinformation as well. She spent her June 19 WorldNetDaily column playing the revisionism card about the Civil War. She started by complaining that the Juneteenth holiday is being described as a “national independence day” — though it clearly was for the slaves freed under the Emancipation Proclamation — then nitpicking dates involving it: “Juneteenth is a reference to June 19, 1865 when Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas and informed the slaves of their freedom. Yet slavery did not legally end on June 19, 1865 but with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on Dec. 6, 1865.” Then came the historical revisionism:
Many Americans today believe the historical myth that the War Between the States was fought to abolish slavery. Clear thinkers have to ask: If the war was waged to end slavery, why was the Emancipation Proclamation issued a year and a half into the war? Since 90% of Southerners did not own slaves, why would hundreds of thousands of Confederate soldiers risk their lives to end slavery? Why did the Union army invade only those slave holding states that seceded from the Union but not those slave holding states that did not secede from the Union? Why did Lincoln send 75,000 volunteers to Fort Sumter to enforce the tariff in the South yet did not call for an invasion to free any slaves?
In reality, the war was fought, not over slavery, but whether the Southern states had the right to secede from the Union. The fact is that the North was just as intertwined with slavery as the South. The agrarian South had no ships. It was Northern ships that sailed out to buy African slaves from other black Africans – for settlement in both the North and South.
In fact, even the right-wing PragerU admits that slavery was the core issue behind the Civil War, with the secession documents of every Confederate state stating a desire to preserve slavery was a reason for leaving the Union. Haynes then played more date nitpicking:
Juneteenth, initially celebrated in Texas, is now is a federal holiday that celebrates nothing. The fact is that Dec. 6 conflicts with the Marxist agenda to keep the slavery propaganda at the forefront and suck in more government dependents.
She did not further explain exactly what relevance Dec. 6 has to any purported “Marxist agenda.” Then she concuded with a huge whinefest:
American taxpayers are now on the hook for more than $600 million every year to give federal workers another paid holiday. Confederate hysteria will be stoked to rally national demonization of the Christian South, while obscuring the fact that slaves were held in Northern states that imported slaves and sold them to Southerners.
According to some estimates, 80 to 100 million Americans are descended from Confederate soldiers. With a population of approximately 330 million, 1 out of 4 of the U.S. population is genetically linked to the old Confederacy. Canceling all mention of the Confederacy effectively cancels the heritage of 25 percent of all Americans.
Destroying Confederate monuments, presumably because they evoked memories of slavery, was the Cultural Marxist justification to lay siege to America’s heritage with final annihilation of every vestige of our founding ideals and culture. With a second federal holiday for independence, it appears that July 4th is next on their cancel culture calendar.
It’s time for all Americans to rise up against the satanic fringe that displays a pathological hatred of all things Southern and Christian. Most importantly, we must return to calling July 4 Independence Day and educate Americans about its significance.
Lots to unpack here. Haynes’ complaint that Northerners are really to blame for slavery falls flat because she also admitted that the slaves were “sold … to Southerners.” Those same Southerners had the choice not to buy slaves, and that would have gone a long way toward ending the practice; instead, again, they bought those slaves and cited the right to do so as a reason to secede from the Union.
Haynes also elides the main implication of the fact that “1 out of 4 of the U.S. population is genetically linked to the old Confederacy” — that their ancestors were effectively traitors against their country and lost their war against it. That seems like a “heritage” that perhaps ought to be “canceled.” And nobody’s “canceling all mention of the Confederacy” — they just want it made clear what the Confederacy really was, something Haynes clearly doesn’t want to honestly discuss.
Haynes’ suggestion that taking down Confederate statues means destroying “our founding ideals and culture” is laughable given the Confederacy, by seceding from the U.S., was all about rejecting the country’s “founding ideals and culture.” (Also, those statues were erected in no small part to help enforce white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.) And her reference to “the satanic fringe that displays a pathological hatred of all things Southern and Christian” is even more nonsensical; some Christians, especially in the South, invoked the Bible to justify slavery, which certainly seems more “satanic” than anything she’s citing.
Finally, Haynes forgets that no slave was freed by the Declaration of Independence, making her insistence that July 4 is the true “Independence Day” something of a misnomer.