Mr. Cunniffe:

I read with interest, then pity, of your proposal to remove a local monument honoring your native son Dick Dowling, who had fought for the Confederate States of America. Your knee-jerk proposal, based upon your ignorance (not meant in the pejorative, but literal) of a war you obviously know little about that occurred over 250 years ago in a nation thousands of miles away from you, is unfortunate.

The very premise of your proposal, “The whole point of the Confederate war was to support slavery in the South,” is WRONG! You claim that Dowling “fought to enslave other people.” WRONG again!

I found your quotes, above, in The Washington Times, in an article I am providing the full text of below. Following that article, I have provided a link to an article I wrote explaining the TRUE cause of the US Civil War. There are many millions of Americans who are ignorant of the true cause of that terrible war. I blame the American third-world public education system and liberal revisionist history, which does not change the fact that all of them and you are wrong.

From The Washington Times….

A local lawmaker in Galway County, Ireland is lobbying for the removal of a monument honoring a native son who fought for the Confederacy as similar tributes continue to come down across the pond in the old South and beyond.

Councillor Shaun Cunniffe this week said he’ll use an upcoming municipal meeting in the town of Tuam to discuss the future of a plaque commemorating Richard ‘Dick’ Dowling, Ireland’s only Confederate memorial, according to The Irish Post.

Dowling was born near Tuam in 1837 but fled to the U.S. as a kid when his family emigrated during the Great Famine. He eventually settled in Houston, Texas, and a plaque currently inside Tuam Town Hall recognizes him as a “business and civic leader” credited with starting the Lone Star State’s first-ever oil company.

The monument only hints at Dowling’s involvement as a Confederate lieutenant, however, and Mr. Cunniffe said he wants it gone given the current controversy unfolding in the U.S. surrounding similar monuments.

“Having thought about it, I think it’s fair to say that even though he was a great businessman and civic leader, [he was] a successful Confederate in the army. The whole point of the Confederate war was to support slavery in the South,” Mr. Cunniffetold The Journal, a Dublin-based news site.

“It is extraordinary that his family were evicted in 1845, he did very well in America, yet fought to enslave other people,” he said in an interview with The Irish Times.

The plaque acknowledges Dowling’s involvement in the American Civil War and says he foiled an attempted invasion by federal troops in 1863, but doesn’t explicitly mention he was a member of the Confederate Army.

“It celebrated that a person from our area did so well in business and was a civic leader and unfortunately really we didn’t consciously clearly [think] that the civil war was about one of the most fundamental rights of freedom. It didn’t seem for one reason or another to be discussed,” Mr. Cunniffe said of the plaque.

“It is important that it is remembered from there, but I would like to see it put somewhere where it can be viewed in context and maybe used as a discursive piece,” he told The Journal.

The councilor hopes to discuss his plans before the Municipal Authority of Tuam on Sept. 11, he said.

“It will be interesting to hear all views and historical input” on the issue, he told The Journal.

Efforts to remove Confederate monuments in the U.S. have ramped-up in recent weeks after a woman was killed in Charlottesville, Virginia, this month while protesting a rally held by individuals opposed to the city’s decision to remove a statue honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Monuments honoring the likes of Lee and others have attracted significant scrutiny ever since, and a Houston man was arrested last weekend for allegedly attempting to blow up a statue there of Dowling because he “did not like that guy,” according to police.

VIDEO: Newsflash, liberal weenies, the Civil War was not fought over slavery! The slippery slope of destroying our history (a Powdered Wig article from August 24, 2017)

Tucker’s Thoughts: Slavery in undoubtedly evil. But remember George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and 41 of the 56 people who signed the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Should we no longer preserve our institutions and just dismiss them as evil?

Yes, slavery is evil…. TODAY! 200 years ago our culture was much different. What is abhorrent today was accepted as commonplace then. Smoking, for example. Way taboo today for a variety of reasons, most notably health, but the push against smoking didn’t start in earnest until a few decades ago.

What we do today may be considered abhorrent in 200 years, and the politically correct will condemn our behavior and culture because they can’t understand it in juxtaposition to their own.

Take, for example, the advancing agenda of animal rights. Many of us today, including most leftists, love a great steak or cheeseburger. In 200 years, Colonel Sanders may be the Robert E. Lee of today. Ridiculous? I can see it happening just as easily as today’s stupidity over Civil War monuments and statues.

Let’s take the stupidity a step further. Many leftists own dogs and cats. Heck, some own horses or exotic animals. The word “own” may be generally sickening in 200 years. Fences and leashes may be outlawed. “No less than humans, all animals deserve to be freed from their slavery” may be the popular mantra of that future culture. Imagine cattle roaming freely in your yard (you are going to need a bigger pooper scooper for that). Imagine being attacked by a dog, and if you fight back and kill it, being arrested, charged with “voluntary slaughter” (there will be no such charge as “manslaughter,” as we will have advanced well beyond species identity), convicted, and sent to prison.

Sounds like a swell world, right? Well, it could certainly happen. My point is that what is seen as perfectly acceptable by one culture, may be abhorrent in 200 years. To judge those who lived 200 years ago through the lens of today’s culture is wrong.

How about medicine? Ever hear of Hirudotherapy? It is the practice of using leeches to suck the blood out of patients in an effort to cure them of all sorts of physical and mental disorders. What is thought of the practice in today’s medical world? It is ridiculous, stupid, sickening. Saturday Night Live wrote comedy skits around the medieval medicinal practice of bloodletting. But, in its day, it was cutting edge technology, considered the best method of curing people of serious illnesses. My point: What was considered perfectly acceptable 200 years ago is considered abhorrent today. We should not condemn those who practiced it. Without their contributions to medical science, we would not have advanced as far as we have in the field of medicine.

Now, the toxic topic of slavery and the American Civil War, which was not begun over slavery at all. It was begun over money, taxes. The Confederates were not fighting to preserve slavery. They were fighting for the right to govern themselves. Lincoln couldn’t allow it as he desperately needed the South’s tax money and was willing to lose 600,000 American lives to get it, all explained in greater detail beneath the video, below.

The entire cause du jour of attacking all things Confederate is the result of revisionist history and its resulting mass ignorance.

Two years ago, leftists were goose-stepping through the door of political correctness, demanding the banning of what they believed was THE Confederate flag. It wasn’t, as I explained here. The flag they believe was THE Confederate flag was actually a battle flag of the Army of Tennessee. There is a reason that that particular flag has become the symbol they hate so much, but I will bet that you can’t find one foaming-at-the-mouth leftist hater who can tell you where their hatred for that particular flag came from. They don’t know, they don’t care. They just HATE without knowing exactly what they are hating or why.

The fact is the banner they hate so much is connected to the DEMOCRATS who began the Ku Klux Klan as an enforcement branch of the DEMOCRAT Party to oppress blacks and prevent them from voting. But, let’s not allow facts to get in the way of a good lynching.

In a June, 2015 Powdered Wig article, I described the REAL cause of the Civil War. It wasn’t slavery. Here are the Cliff Notes….

  1. The Civil War was begun over the Morrill Tariff of 1861, not slavery.
  2. The federal government could not operate without the South’s massive tax (tariff) contribution. Thus, Lincoln had no choice, in his opinion, but to FORCE the southern states to remain in the Union.
  3.  The southern states were responsible for the vast majority of tax revenue used to keep the federal government operating. Most of that revenue was used to build infrastructure in the industrial north, certainly an iniquitous tax situation and the cause for war.
  4. Lincoln had promised to not interfere with slavery in states where it already existed, like all southern states. Why would the South go to war over a non-issue?
  5. Slavery was not an issue until 1863 when the North was losing the war badly, morale was in the toilet, desertion in the Army was rampant, and support for the war was waning rapidly. Many northerners were demanding Lincoln allow the South to separate, bringing an end to the war.
  6. Lincoln’s last ditch effort was the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, freeing all southern slaves. He did this to fire up the abolitionists, gin up civilian support for the war, and draw hundreds of thousands more young men into the Army. It worked.

Link to an earlier article with more detail…. Slavery was NOT the cause of the US Civil War