Has Texas already seceded? First a border clash and now, it’s Confederate Heroes Day | Opinion

Days before a holiday honoring a pastor who preached love and fellowship, Texas’ governor talked about not shooting border crossers.

Now, in the same week, Texas will honor Gen. Robert E. Lee and rebel President Jefferson Davis on “Confederate Heroes Day.”

I know what our money and postage stamps say. But I’m not sure the U.S. ever fully occupied Texas.

State troopers recently fenced federal officers out of a border intake center in an Eagle Pass city park.

The Republican Party ballot for the March primary includes candidates who have openly supported Texas seceding from the U.S., such as Wise County activist Andy Hopper.

Texas’ leaders have removed Black history lessons from textbooks that might in any way embarrass or shame white children.

The very American principles of inclusion, pluralism and unity — e pluribus unum — are under attack in Texas along with the more politically defined goal of equity.

Is Texas just in a slow secession?

I’ll ask it this way: When was the last time you heard a Texas Republican brag about President Abraham Lincoln?

And if Republicans are proud of Lincoln, why do we have a holiday for Lee and Davis?

“It’s an embarrassment,” said Jacob Hale of Austin, now a Vanderbilt University law student and for two years the young voice for a bipartisan effort to do away with the state Confederate Heroes holiday.

On his way to his undergraduate degree at the school in Nashville, Tennesssee, Hale studied Civil War military strategy and the Battle of Nashville, where the Confederate Army was led by Texas resident Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood.

Hood’s motive was clear.

The Union’s goal was to “make negroes your allies, and desire to place over us an inferior race. ... Better die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your Government and your Negro allies,” Hood wrote in a letter to Union Gen. William Sherman.

“In all the discussions, with historians who studied both sides, it’s notable how strong the consensus was that the Civil War was about slavery,” Hale said by phone Friday from Nashville.

Yes. Now we celebrate that with a state holiday on Jan. 19.

It wasn’t even created around the time of the war. The Legislature approved the “Lee’s Birthday” holiday in 1931 on a proposal by a Dallas state representative, Charles McCombs, at the urging of Dallas supporters. It was later merged with a Davis’ Birthday holiday that was created in 1905.

Oh — one more thing.

Neither Lee nor Davis was even from Texas.

Hale’s effort began in 2015, when he was an eighth-grader speaking at a House hearing where a cadre of Confederate lineage society leaders showed up to argue that the celebration is fine because it’s “open to anybody” and “we were not a Yankee state.”

In 2021, Hale came back with more Republican support, but a national backlash had risen against removing Confederate statues and monuments.

He was turned away by then-state Rep, Chris Paddie, the committee chairman who refused to even consider the bill.

Paddie is from Marshall. That city was the seat of the Confederate government in Texas and a center of East Texas farming — and also the state’s largest population of slaves.

I asked Hale if any of those arguing for the holiday had told him anything hateful or racist.

“Where do I begin?” he said. “People said just about anything that would minimize the horror of slavery or make it sound OK.”

Today, any argument against Confederate Heroes Day is immediately labeled “woke.”

And in TV and radio talk show code, “woke” equals “Democrats.”

Yet campaigning for Texas secession is fine.

“If you correctly laugh at and dismiss these Texas secessionists, then you should also oppose Confederate Heroes Day,” Hale said.

“No one would say these Texas secession people today are heroes. The idea of seceding from the U.S. is not heroic.”

So, why keep it a holiday?

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