Christie: Unlike Trump ‘the President of the Confederacy Had Some Class’

[mystery-ak]

Christie: Unlike Trump ‘the President of the Confederacy Had Some Class’

Pam Key 3 Jan 2024

Former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View” that the Confederate President Jefferson Davis “had some class” because he didn’t attempt to run for office again unlike former President Donald Trump.

Partial transcript as follows:

    WHOOPI GOLDBERG: I mean, you’ve seen what the lengths that the people have gone through to make sure his feet don’t touch the ground. Do you think that letting him get away with being an insurrectionist is the right way for us to let the country know how we — what are going to do it next time we get another one?

    CHRISTIE: I think they should try him and convict him in Washington, D.C. and send him to jail for it. And I think that’s the way to do it.

    SUNNY HOSTIN: Jefferson Davis wasn’t convicted.

    GOLDBERG: Did he break the law, though? Did he do what he, what he’s been accused?

    CHRISTIE: I think he’s going to be convicted of it.

    GOLDBERG: No, no, that’s not what, that’s not my question.

    HOSTIN: She’s talking about the 14th, section 3 of the 14th Amendment —

    CHRISTIE: I know what she’s talking about.

    HOSTIN: Jefferson Davis wasn’t convicted.

    CHRISTIE: I understand but Jefferson Da —

    HOSTIN: He wasn’t allowed to hold office again.

    CHRISTIE: But he never tried to again. OK. So we never tested that, Sunny, right? It was never tested.

    HOSTIN: There was precedent.

    CHRISTIE: It was never tested because Jefferson Davis, if I you imagine saying this, the president of the Confederacy had some class. And decided never to run for office in the United States again.

    ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN: At least more than Trump!

    CHRISTIE: That’s the point, right? Well, this has never been tested —

    HOSTIN: The point is the Constitution, and there is a Constitution and there’s precedent. He needs to be taken out by the Constitution!

    CHRISTIE: I understand. I understand that —

    HOSTIN: The law applies to him like it applies to every single person.

    CHRISTIE: It absolutely should. But the question I was asked was why I said what I said. And I, and I’m trying to be practical about this, Sunny. If, in fact, we take him off the ballot and he doesn’t have a chance to run, I think it’s going to cause conflict in this country well beyond what we have now.

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/01/03/christie-unlike-trump-the-president-of-the-confederacy-had-some-class/

[Timber Rattler]

Historical ignoramuses...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amnesty_Act

The Amnesty Act of 1872 is a United States federal law passed on May 22, 1872, which removed most of the penalties imposed on former Confederates by the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted on July 9, 1868. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the election or appointment to any federal or state office of any person who had held any of certain offices and then engaged in insurrection, rebellion, or treason. However, the section provides that a two-thirds vote by each House of the Congress could override this limitation. The 1872 act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and the original restrictive Act was passed by the United States Congress in May 1866.[4]

Specifically, the 1872 Act removed office-holding disqualifications against most of the secessionists who rebelled in the American Civil War, except for "Senators and Representatives of the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh Congresses, officers in the judicial, military, and naval service of the United States, heads of departments, and foreign ministers of the United States."[5]

In the spirit of the act, then United States President Ulysses S. Grant, by proclamation dated June 1, 1872, directed all district attorneys having charge of proceedings and prosecutions against those who had been disqualified by the Fourteenth Amendment to dismiss and discontinue them, except as to persons who fall within the exceptions named in the act.[5] President Grant also pardoned all but 500 former top Confederate leaders.

The 1872 law cleared over 150,000 former Confederate troops who had taken part in the American Civil War.

[mountaineer]

"The View" shrews have an uneasy relationship with, you know, facts. More like no relationship whatsoever.

[Cyber Liberty]

Didn't the former President of the Confederacy attempt to escape Union forces by dressing as a woman?

(DUCKING!!)

[Timber Rattler]

Didn't the former President of the Confederacy attempt to escape Union forces by dressing as a woman?

(DUCKING!!)

No, that's a myth propagated by northern newspapers.  When Union cavalrymen discovered his campsite in Georgia, Varina threw her shaw around him as they ran for the woods, but Davis had no chance to get away at that point.

Was Jefferson Davis Captured In A Dress?

https://www.americanheritage.com/was-jefferson-davis-captured-dress

On May 9 Davis decided to make camp for the night with Varina’s wagon train near Irwinville. They pulled off the road, and the pine trees helped conceal their position. President Davis’s escort did not circle their wagons. If the Federals were able to surround a small camp drawn up in a tight circle, it would be difficult for Davis to take advantage of the confusion of battle and escape. Instead Davis’s party pitched camp with an open plan, scattering the tents and wagons over an area of about 100 yards.

For reasons unknown, the camp posted no guards that night, even though they faced a genuine threat of attack from either ex-Confederate soldiers—ruthless, war-weary bandits bent on plunder—or Union cavalry on the hunt for Davis. It was no secret that bandits had been shadowing Varina Davis’s wagon train for several days, and they could strike anytime without warning. That was the reason Davis had reunited with Varina, instead of pushing on alone.

Davis had not planned on spending the night of May 9 camped with his wife and children near Irwinville. Unless he abandoned the wagon train and moved fast on horseback, accompanied by no more than three or four men, he had little chance of escape. By this time the Union was flooding Georgia with soldiers and canvassing every crossroads, guarding every river crossing, and searching every town. Furthermore, the Federals had recruited local blacks, with their expert knowledge of back roads and hiding places, to help in the manhunt for the fugitive president.

Davis told his aides that he would leave the camp sometime during the night. He was dressed for the road: a dark, wide-brimmed felt hat; a signature wool frock coat of Confederate gray; gray trousers; high black leather riding boots, and spurs. His horse, tied near Varina’s tent, was already saddled and ready to ride, its saddle holsters loaded with Davis’s pistols.

Several of the men stayed up late talking, waiting for the order to depart. It never came. Unbeknownst to the inhabitants of Davis’s camp, a mounted Union patrol of 128 men and seven officers—a detachment from the 4th Michigan Cavalry regiment—led by regimental commander Lt. Col. B. D. Pritchard, was closing in on Irwinville.

When they got close, Pritchard and a few of his men rode into town, posed as Confederate cavalrymen, and questioned some villagers. “I learned from the inhabitants,” Pritchard later recounted, “that a train and party meeting the description of the one reported to me at Abbeville had encamped at dark the night previous one mile and a half out on the Abbeville road.”

Pritchard left Abbeville and positioned his men about half a mile from the mysterious encampment. “Impressing a negro as a guide,” Pritchard recalled, “I halted the command under cover of a small eminence and dismounted twenty-five men and sent them under command of Lieutenant Purington to make a circuit of the camp and gain a position in the rear for the purpose of cutting off all possibility of escape in that direction.”

Pritchard told Purington to keep his men “perfectly quiet” until the main body attacked the camp from the front. Although, tempted to charge the camp at once, Pritchard decided to wait until daylight: “The moon was getting low, and the deep shadows of the forest were falling heavily, rendering it easy for persons to escape undiscovered to the woods and swamps in the darkness.”

At 3:30 a.m., Pritchard ordered his men to ride forward: “Just as the earliest dawn appeared, I put the column in motion, and we were enabled to approach within four or five rods of the camp undiscovered, when a dash was ordered, and in an instant the whole camp, with its inmates, was ours.”

Still inside Varina’s tent, Davis heard the gunfire and the horses in the camp and assumed these were the same Confederate stragglers or deserters who had been planning to rob Mrs. Davis’s wagon train for several days. “Those men have attacked us at last,” he warned his wife. “I will go out and see if I cannot stop the firing; surely I still have some authority with the Confederates.” He opened the tent flap, saw the bluecoats, and turned to Varina: “The Federal cavalry are upon us.”

Davis had not undressed this night, so he was still wearing his gray frock coat, trousers, riding boots, and spurs. He was ready to leave now, but he was unarmed. His pistols and saddled horse were within sight of the tent. He was a superb equestrian and certain that he could outrace any Yankee cavalryman half his age if he could just get to a horse. Seconds, not minutes, counted now.

Before he left, Varina asked him to wear an unadorned raglan overcoat, also known as a “waterproof.” She hoped the raglan might camouflage his fine suit of clothes, which resembled a Confederate officer’s uniform. “Knowing he would be recognized,” Varina later explained, “I pleaded with him to let me throw over him a large waterproof which had often served him in sickness during the summer as a dressing gown, and which I hoped might so cover his person that in the grey of the morning he would not be recognized. As he strode off I threw over his head a little black shawl which was round my own shoulders, seeing that he could not find his hat and after he started sent the colored woman after him with a bucket for water, hoping he would pass unobserved.”

 “I had gone perhaps between fifteen or twenty yards,” Davis recalled, “when a trooper galloped up and ordered me to halt and surrender, to which I gave a defiant answer, and, dropping the shawl and the raglan from my shoulders, advanced toward him; he leveled his carbine at me, but I expected, if he fired, he would miss me, and my intention was in that event to put my hand under his foot, tumble him off on the other side, spring into the saddle, and attempt to escape. My wife, who had been watching me, when she saw the soldier aim his carbine at me, ran forward and threw her arms around me. . . . I turned back, and, the morning being damp and chilly, passed on to a fire beyond the tent.”

[Cyber Liberty]

I knew you would set me straight!  That's why the (Ducking!).

[Maj. Bill Martin]

“I had gone perhaps between fifteen or twenty yards,” Davis recalled, “when a trooper galloped up and ordered me to halt and surrender, to which I gave a defiant answer, and, dropping the shawl and the raglan from my shoulders, advanced toward him; he leveled his carbine at me, but I expected, if he fired, he would miss me, and my intention was in that event to put my hand under his foot, tumble him off on the other side, spring into the saddle, and attempt to escape.

I honestly wasn't familiar with this story before this thread, but it reads to me like Davis knowingly kept wearing that shawl and raglan while walking 15-20 yards, and only took it off after he was busted by a Union trooper.

Just sayin'.....

[Right_in_Virginia]

It's quite funny to hear Chris Christie preach about class.  He sure is reliable comic relief. 

[Timber Rattler]

I honestly wasn't familiar with this story before this thread, but it reads to me like Davis knowingly kept wearing that shawl and raglan while walking 15-20 yards, and only took it off after he was busted by a Union trooper.

Just sayin'.....

Probably.  But he wasn't wearing a dress or was deliberately disguised as a woman.  he was probably in a state of panic and/or shock, and using those seconds to try and figure out what to do before realizing that it was over and surrendering.

Most modern people and pundits know little about Davis, but he was no coward.  He was a West Pointer who had fought in the Mexican War and was wounded in battle and then served as both Secretary of War for four years in the Pierce Administration, and then U.S. Senator from Mississippi. 

In 1860, he was probably the most qualified man in the U.S. to be president of either the Union or the Confederacy, even more so that William Seward and certainly Abraham Lincoln.

[Fishrrman]

Interesting topic.

Having just finished Joel C. Rosenberg's "The Persian Gamble" yesterday, I was looking for a new book to start this afternoon.

So... went to the digital library and picked out "The South Was Right" by Walter D. Kennedy and James R. Kennedy...