Black activists cannot tolerate the fact that slavery ended because of white sacrifices. This wasn’t the fault of the slaves. They were scarcely in a position to help themselves, but the reality is that whites ended slavery, and gratitude has been replaced with erasure.
By the end of the Civil War, 2,128,948 men had passed through the Union Army in the fight against slavery, with slightly fewer than 22,000 being regulars. The rest were volunteers. And, significantly, those soldiers were white:
Most of the Union Army was made up of young white men born in North America. Although soldiers generally ranged in age from 18 to 45, boys as young as 12 often served as cavalry buglers or drummer boys, and some men in their fifties and sixties enlisted as privates. Most of the Union soldiers were under 30.
The ones who were not American-born were still mostly white, having come from Germany, Ireland, Canada, and England, although other Europeans and Latin Americans showed up in the rolls, too.
Image: Union NCOs from the 93rd New York Infantry Regiment in Bealeton, VA, August 1863. Public domain.
Part of their whiteness was the fact that the War Department hadn’t even contemplated black troops, although they accounted for 8.4% of the total number of troops when the war ended:
It was not until May 22, 1863 that the U.S. War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops enabling black men to serve as soldiers. (Black men had been assisting the army in other official capacities such as constructing entrenchments or performing camp duty or other labor since the Second Confiscation and Militia Act of July 17, 1862.) By the end of the war, 178,975 enlisted men served in the U.S. Army as members of the U.S. Colored Troops. In addition, three regiments of Native Americans, the Indian Home Guard, fought for the Union in the western theater of the war.
Most blacks, though, were not able to serve, irrespective of whether the War Department recognized them. They were trapped behind enemy lines in the Deep South, lived on faraway plantations that prevented organizing and assembling, were hunted down when they tried to run, and were brutally punished when they were caught. The consequences of slave revolts weren’t on the Spartacus level (when 6,000 slaves were crucified), but they were still terrible. And, of course, many of the slaves were women and children.
Those facts are not an indictment. They’re just facts. If it weren’t for white men volunteering to end a terrible scourge and an offensive against liberty, slavery would not have ended in 1865 in America.
These white men paid a high price for this moral victory. In four years, almost 600,000 Union soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or missing. (Between both the North and South, roughly 2% of the total American population died from disease or battle wounds.) The Civil War was far and away America’s most deadly war, and it was whites who died.
But to the activists, none of that matters. While modern blacks are desperate for the government to be their mentor, father figure, employer, and anything else, when they look back on history, they want to be viewed as completely self-sufficient and self-actualized.
That’s how you get this inanity from an essay about an upcoming Juneteenth celebration planned in South Carolina’s Low Country (emphasis mine):
This weekend an organization will celebrate ahead of the holiday with the Fourth Annual Juneteenth Family Fest.
[snip]
One of the event organizers, Joselyn Johnson, said they do this because of the meaning of the holiday.
“This is the true celebration of freedom from slavery for all. It just represents the struggle of our ancestors and even those allies that supported the mission too,” Johnson said.
I don’t mean to pick on Ms. Johnson. She’s not the leader of this worldview. She’s simply one of the acolytes.
Moreover, the “erase whites” mentality isn’t limited to America. In Wales, which is still an extraordinarily white country and which, a mere 40 years ago, was almost 100% white, the woke government is doing its bit to erase whites from the nation’s history.
This madness might be ending in Wales, though. A British friend notified me that the hard-left, half-Zambian First Minister of Wales, Vaughn Gethin, just lost a vote of confidence in the Welsh Parliament, at which point he started to cry.
White men created the modern world. For all its faults, it’s a better world for more people than any other system in history—and leftists can’t stand that. They want to destroy everything good, and that starts with demonizing and erasing the good people who made it happen.