"Southern recruits waxed more eloquent about their intention to fight against slavery than for it— that is, against their own enslavement by the North. “Sooner than submit to Northern slavery I prefer death,” wrote a slaveowning officer in the 20th South Carolina. The son of a Mississippi planter dashed off a letter to his father as he rushed to enlist: “No alternative is left but war or slavery.” Subjugation was the favorite word of Confederate recruits to describe their fate if the South remained in the Union or was forced back into it. “If we should suffer ourselves to be subjugated by the tyrannical government of the North,” wrote a private in the 56th Virginia to his wife, “our property would all be confuscated ... & our people reduced to the most abject bondage & utter degradation.” Thus “every Southern heart” must “respond to the language of the great Patrick Henry in the days of ’76 & say give me Liberty or give me death.” He met death at Gettysburg. This invocation of the Founding Fathers was as common among Confederate volunteers as among their Union counterparts—for an opposite purpose. Just as the American Patriots of 1776 had seceded from the tyrannical British empire, so the Southern Patriots of 1861 seceded from the tyrannical Yankee empire. Our Fathers “severed the bonds of oppression once,” wrote a twenty-year-old South Carolina recruit, “now [we] for the second time throw off the yoke and be freemen still.” The American Revolution established “Liberty and freedom in this western world,” wrote a Texas cavalryman in 1861, and we are “now enlisted in ‘The Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence’ again. -Prof James McPherson (Pulitzer Prize-winning Princeton Professor) (Staff Note: "Historians" often mix the facts (southerners wrote about fighting against slavery) with their opinion that slavery was core to the South, so it was not necessary to speak about it explicitly. McPherson at times moves into the latter category, and that is due to an ideological bias)

“One of my boys was in the Spanish-American War, a colonel in the United States Army. Some of my boys today are fighting to help preserve our liberty. One of them is in Italy. Another is in New Guinea. New Guinea is away over yonder somewhere..in the Pacific Ocean.” #OTD 1944

Another Republican Insults American Heritage In the latest act of historical erasure masquerading as patriotism, Rep. Bacon (R-NE) and his stenographers at Military Times have teamed up to ram through a House panel vote reinstating the Naming Commission’s sanitized, non-Confederate base names while pretending the 1917 christening of those installations never happened. Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general who should know better, whined to the outlet that his Union ancestor would be “rolling in his grave” over Confederate-named bases, as if the entire post-Civil War reconciliation era was some fever dream invented by Southern cranks. Military Times dutifully amplified this tripe without a shred of pushback, framing the vote as a righteous rebuke to Trump’s “stunt” reversals rather than the latest chapter in a deliberate campaign to airbrush away any reminder that Union and Confederate veterans once shook hands as Americans. This isn’t journalism or oversight—it’s propaganda with a Pentagon byline, peddling the fiction that 1917’s base-naming was some Jim Crow plot instead of a bipartisan embrace of shared valor. The facts Bacon and Military Times are so desperate to bury are damning precisely because they’re irrefutable. In 1917, the very year those bases were named after leaders from both sides, the U.S. Senate adjourned out of respect for a Confederate veterans’ reunion in Washington. The Grand Army of the Republic’s own chief praised the “man’s fight” of his former foes and called modern pacifists the real traitors. Teddy Roosevelt had already demanded a Lee monument, and President Taft extolled the “bravery and valor of both sides” at a Union monument dedication. Union and Confederate old soldiers mingled at the Reconciliation Memorial unveiling just three years earlier, their shared heritage celebrated in the Washington Post. None of this is obscure; it’s documented history that any serious lawmaker or reporter could verify in minutes. Yet Bacon and Military Times treat it like classified intel that might offend the wrong voters, preferring instead to let the Naming Commission’s ideological hit list stand as gospel. What makes Bacon’s performance especially nauseating is the proof he already knows he’s peddling garbage. He personally replied to this account on X last year, sneering “You lost their Davis. No rebel base names” in response to a detailed thread laying out the NDAA’s narrow legal limits and the Commission’s blatant overreach. That exchange alone confirms he’s familiar with the 1917 reconciliation record, the state-rights context of Confederate service, and even the fact that men like Dwight D. Eisenhower—hardly a “Lost Causer” by modern standards—kept a Robert E. Lee painting in his office and openly admired Lee and Jackson as exemplars of American military genius. Bacon’s ancestor might roll in his grave, but Ike would be spinning at the sight of a Republican congressman whitewashing the very history that allowed Union and Confederate veterans to heal a fractured nation. The man has no excuse; he simply chooses the convenient lie. This isn’t about base names or military tradition; it’s about political gain dressed up as moral hygiene. Bacon and Military Times understand that acknowledging the 1917 spirit of fraternity would expose the entire Naming Commission charade as the partisan hack job it always was—illegal overreach cheered on by the same crowd that now needs Republican cover to keep the erasure rolling. Hiding these facts lets them posture as the adults in the room while they torch the shared heritage that actually built the U.S. Army. The rest of us are left with sterile, focus-grouped installations and a military increasingly allergic to its own past. If Bacon truly respected his Union forebear, he’d stop lying about history and start defending it. Instead, he and Military Times have chosen the low road of selective amnesia, proving once again that some “conservatives” are every bit as eager as the left to memory-hole inconvenient truths for a few poll points and media pats on the head. Pathetic.