To the Chicora Foundation:
Your criticism of Confederate heritage is written in a rather benign manner, but the hate toward Confederate Southerners that you evidently feel, and that you're plainly trying to incite in others, comes through loud and clear.  Hypocrisy abounds everywhere, but the "Let's All Hate Confederates!" bandwagon has the worst hypocrits and haters in the country.

C. Ward

First, for the record, I'm a Southerner, born, breed, and educated. So cut the nonsense about how Southerners are hated -- that is just so much blather to try to convince yourself or others that the South is being prosecuted. Rubbish. The South has done what has been done to itself and has no one else to blame.

Second, you respond to our web pages only in anger, offering not one single factual item that is wrong. Of course that's because you can't. It's all well researched and completely factual. So, come out from the dark, read some real history, open your mind, and learn. Stop living this lie, this myth, that has been created by angry, ignorant individuals.

Best,

Michael Trinkley, Ph.D.
Director
Chicora Foundation, Inc.

Ph.D. indeed. 

Formally, I have a high school education, but the self-education I've continuously engaged in since 1967 has proved to be of better quality in many respects than that received by some degree-holders I've worked for and with over the years.  Moreover, I've been personally involved in politics at the federal (Congressional) level for most of the last decade -- and I've therefore been practically educated about propaganda.  I know propaganda when I see it and your website reeks of it.. 

I wrote the following about the NAACP's current campaign to totally demonize Confederate heritage in preparation for eradicating it -- but my observations certainly fit the anti-Southern, anti-Confederate sentiments coming from others, including your website: 

"Everytime NAACP spokesmen get in front of the media and single out the Confederate flag as a symbol of 'slavery and racism,' they are -- by deliberately leaving out the rest of the truth about African slavery, including the culpability of their own race --  attempting to pin total, unique and irrevocable guilt for 400 years of transnational, intercontinental slavery on the relatively small population of white people (6 million) living in the South during the 4 years the Confederacy existed -- most of whom did not own slaves.  They are saying that anyone today who honors the flag and their Confederate ancestors is the equivalent of a Klansman..." (witness the totally fabricated "klan photo" used in Columbia, S.C.) 

Leftwing organizations and their followers are using extreme and inflammatory language designed solely for its effect in creating loathing for Confederate history, heritage, and descendants, and your scholarly but very biased website sentiments are assisting them.  Maybe your website is "well researched and completely factual" -- but it isn't factually complete.  In other words, it's not the whole truth and as such, it has the same impact as a dangerous lie. 

Yes, I know what Alexander Stephens said in his Cornerstone speech, and I've read the writings of other Old South leaders.  Your "proof" of your version or interpretation of  the war (including cut-and-paste quotations) has been tried by others, and a group of professors who support the flag in South Carolina recently had this to say about such attempts by antiflag scholars: 
 

"The scholars we contradict violate another elementary rule of scholarship by asserting that sweeping historical judgments may be established by cutting and pasting snippets of quotations. To the contrary, such judgments are justified only by deep knowledge of the context. They quote some Confederate statements that secession was undertaken solely for the defense of slavery. Yes, Confederate leaders said some of the words attributed to them. They also said a great many other things during the course of the war and the years of political strife that preceded it. We have attached to our statement, to show how the game is played, our own collection of snipped quotations on the causes of the war." 

If you haven't read the entire statement from these professors, you ought to, especially their examples of how cut-and-paste quotes (like yours from Stephens and Davis) can "prove" anything. Later in this email, I'll do a little of this myself.  See how you like it.. 

One reason I'm in this fight is to point out the blatant, mendacious attempt by some (who seem to get the lion's share of PR) to define the entire South by a partial, negative element and ignore (or lie about) the good and positive elements. These are people who focus solely on that negative element and magnify it to such gargantuan proportions, it blots out the good and positive aspects of the South and our Confederate history, so that Dixie becomes total evil.  This is like trying to define all Milwaukeans by Jeffrey Dahmer. 

The other main reason I'm in this fight is to point out that the vast majority of the people who single out the South's "sins" virtually always purposely ignore the same sins in other countries, nations, peoples, cultures and regions -- and even go so far as to magnify their "virtues" to the level of mendacity and bizarre fantasy.  The point, of course, is to compare these "paragons of virtue" to the barbaric slaveowners and racists of the South and thus "prove" that Southerners are evil. 

Here's an example.  Recently, a woman wrote a Washington Post editorial that said Confederate soldiers were fighting so Southern slaveowners could keep their "right" to  "kill their slaves on a whim." 

How many millions of Americans read that lie?  How many believed it?  They're too apathetic and dumbed-down to check it out on their own, so they likely don't know about  these words of a man who lived back then that contradict this lie. 
 

 "...the negro slave in every southern State was still a person, protected by all the laws which punish crime in other persons...  ... no master could take the life of or maim his slave without being held responsible under the criminal laws of any southern State, and held to a responsibility as rigid as though that negro had been a white man...  How, then, is it asserted that these are not persons in the eye of the law, not protected by the law as person. The venerable Senator from Kentucky knows very well that this is not the law in any State of the Union where slaves are held, but that everywhere they are protected; that the criminal law covers them as perfectly as  it covers the white men."  Jefferson Davis, from a speech on the Senate floor, 1860. 

You tell me to come out of the dark.  I'm not in the dark and I suggest that you climb down out of your left-leaning ivory tower and take a quick peek at the truth: there is an effort afoot to wipe out not just Confederate heritage but the South's distinctiveness as a region.  If that's what you support, then consider me an adversary. 

Understand something.  Our Confederate ancestors were most assuredly no worse than any other human beings in this world, and they were probably a lot better than many.  We aren't going to hate them because some people wish it, and try to force us to with egregious half-truths and outright lies. 

Connie Ward 

I've given you a fair shot at saying something worth listening to, but you simply drone on and say nothing.

Please, no more tripe, it will simply be deleted.

Best,

Michael Trinkley, Ph.D.

I said plenty.   I'm right and you know it.  You can't take the truth, so you're going to delete it.  How pusillanimous of you!