Happy Texas Confederate Heroes Day (Jan. 19th) (Mart, Jefferson: schools, living)

[Dopo]

Happy Texas Confederate Heroes Day


Why Texas Still Celebrates Confederate Heroes Day

Confederate Heroes Day has its origins in another Confederacy-celebrating holiday. In 1931, during the depths of the Jim Crow era, the Texas Legislature made Robert E. Lee’s birthday, January 19, a state holiday, adding it to the calendar along with former Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s birthday, June 3, which had been an official state holiday since 1905.

On January 23, 1973, the day after former president Lyndon Johnson died of a heart attack, a bill was introduced in the Texas Senate to make his birthday, August 27, an official state holiday. Because holidays cost Texas money (the state gives employees paid time off), tight-fisted lawmakers decided to consolidate the Davis and Lee birthdays into a new Confederate Heroes Day on January 19, four days after the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

[As Above So Below...]

Happy Traitors and Losers Day I guess.

[Arkay66]

It's not a true state holiday. All state offices remain open, albeit with skeleton crews. Same applies to Texas Independence Day and San Jacinto Day.

[Dopo]

Originally Posted by Arkay66

It's not a true state holiday. All state offices remain open, albeit with skeleton crews. Same applies to Texas Independence Day and San Jacinto Day.

It's a holiday because the state of Texas has designated it to be a holiday.
Whether or not "skeleton crews" are required. That's a different subject.
LBJ Day is a state holiday and everybody has to work on that day.

[texasdiver]

We can always talk about what these "Confederate Heroes" stood for and what the were fighting for. The told us as much. Here, for example, is one "Confederate Hero" Alexander Stevens who was Vice President of the Confederacy and therefore the #2 Confederate Hero in the land. In his famous Cornerstone Speech he told us exactly what the Confederacy was about and why we are celebrating these heroes today. You can read the entire speech here https://www.battlefields.org/learn/p...erstone-speech but here are a few highlights so that we know the principles that the State of Texas is celebrating today:

First he told us the REAL reason for secession and the Civil War:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. [...] Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell.

and then told us the real principles upon which the Confederacy was founded:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.

"Heroes" indeed. That is the legacy that the State of Texas is honoring today.

[Thoreau424]

That'd be so redneck.

Real heroes would have been associated with the Texas Revolution, that created Texas as a nation and then a state.

Three decades later, the country was in sorry shape. That's a chapter to cringe upon; not celebrate or be happy with.

[Dopo]

Originally Posted by texasdiver

First he told us the REAL reason for secession and the Civil War:

I'm aware of that
I read all the declaration of secessions .... my favorite one is Mississippi, they said it as clear as they could.


A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

Continues

Spoiler

The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.
The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.
It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.
It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.
It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.
It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.
It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.
It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.
Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by Thoreau424

That'd be so redneck.

Real heroes would have been associated with the Texas Revolution, that created Texas as a nation and then a state.

Three decades later, the country was in sorry shape. That's a chapter to cringe upon; not celebrate or be happy with.

But it isn't "Texas Hero's Day" It is "Confederate Hero's Day" most of whom were not Texans at all.

[Thoreau424]

^ Did you bother to even read the title of this thread, and/or the opening post?

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by Dopo

I'm aware of that
I read all the declaration of secessions .... my favorite one is Mississippi, they said it as clear as they could.

Yes of course. I was just trying to quote directly from one of these "heroes" rather than from the states themselves. Texas itself has its own declaration of secession: https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/aboutt.../2feb1861.html

Which states among other things:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.