Civil re-enactors plan to re-create Jefferson Davis’s Oath of Office on that event’s 150th anniversary. This is akin to a pack of Neo-Nazis in Germany planning to re-enact the Nuremburg Rallies or a re-enactment of Benedict Arnold’s betrayal of the Patriots in the American Revolution.
Jefferson Davis led a rebellion against the constitutionally-elected government of the United States. The moment he took the Confederate oath of office, he marked himself and all of his followers as illegitimate traitors to all that the United States of America stood for then, and stands for today. Re-enacting significant battles from American history is one thing, but Davis’ swearing in as the Confederate leader is re-enacting a political act; specifically a political act that sought to preserve the “right” of rich white men to own other human beings as property. Many Confederate apologists argue that the southern secession and the Civil War are about the legitimate political concept of States’ Rights, or the sanctity of property, or a response to the economic inequality between the North and the South.
The bare truth is that secession and war were about slavery, and that Jefferson Davis’ inauguration as the leader of an attempted country based on the blood and sweat of enslaved man and women was a ceremony as evil and malicious as Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies. Slavery was the American Holocaust, stretched out over hundreds of years rather than Hitler’s 12 years of tyranny.
Re-enacting the ultimate act of treason by America’s ultimate traitor is a political act (rightfully protected by the constitution Davis rejected), that will mark the re-enactors as ill-thinking racists who pine for an earlier era when African-Americans were subservient and without rights. Do you think these re-enactors voted for a black man to occupy the White House? I kinda doubt it.
Read the article from The Houston Chronicle, Dec. 22, 2010:
Hundreds of Civil War re-enactors will parade up Montgomery’s main street to the state Capitol on Feb. 19 to recreate the swearing-in of Confederate President Jefferson Davis 150 years ago.
African-American leaders might protest nearby with a message that the Confederacy should be remembered with shame for trying to keep blacks enslaved rather than with celebration.
Organizers say they are not trying to create controversy. Read the rest of the article from The Houston Chronicle,