In response to Samuel Cavazos letter to the VMS (8/16/17) who agrees with Antonio Castillo of Brownsville to have the Jefferson Davis boulder in Washington Park in Brownsville moved and the Robert E. Lee learning center renamed.
I would like to remind Samuel there were 2,550 Tejanos from Texas and Mexican Nationals that were a part of over 10,000 Hispanics from Arizona, New Mexico, California, Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Central and South America that prayed and hoped for the good health and wisdom of Jefferson Davis, their president of the Confederacy, and for General Robert E. Lee, their commander in chief of the army.
If you sincerely want the record to reflect true history like you stated, then I would like to inform you that the two highest generals in the Union, Gen. Ulysess Grant and Gen. William Sherman, each owned a slave before the Civil War, along with the highest ranking Hispanic in the Union navy, Admiral David Faragut, born in Spain. And the two highest ranking generals in the Confederacy, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Stonewall Jackson, did not believe in slavery.
Gen. Lee believed that slavery was an immoral institution in any civilized society.
Samuel also wrote that these particular individuals belonged in the textbooks along the likes of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, but you must have forgotten about the Scorched Earth policy of Gen. William Sherman in his March to the Sea, when he authorized his army to destroy anything of military use.
Unfortunately, his army did not just destroy railroads tracks and telegraphs, but farms, homes, buildings, farmland, crops, and livestock, as well as stealing money, jewelry, and clothing.
His Scorched Earth tactics totally terrorized the innocent civilian population of the South, and even Gen. Sherman remarked that if the South had won the war, he would have truly been judged a war criminal.
Samuel, there are those of us who want to remember history and learn from it, and there are those like you and Antonio Castillo, who want to erase the history that they just don’t like.
And FYI, there were four Cavazos in the Confederacy, privates, Antonio, Dimas, Lucas, and Sgt. Nepomuceno Cavazos.
Jack Ayoub Harlingen
