Florida’s general who? Time to replace obscure Confederate honoree
FRED GRIMM
Thinking of great Floridians, Edmund Kirby Smith hardly comes to mind ...
But there he is, in all his obscurity, sharing the same exalted historic status as George Washington, Ethan Allen, William Jennings Bryan, Sam Adams, Helen Keller, John C. Calhoun, Will Rogers, Dwight Eisenhower, Sam Houston, Brigham Young, Andrew Jackson, Robert Fulton, Sakakawea, Ronald Reagan, Roger Williams. All of them apt to pop up on a middle school history quiz. All but Edmund Kirby Smith.
Smith’s not the only Confederate honored in the Capitol. Florida’s fellow secessionist states have erected statutes to Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Gen. Joe Wheeler, Alexander Stephens. South Carolina honors the deplorable racist Wade Hampton, who headed up the murderous Red Shirts after the Civil War, a paramilitary terrorist outfit dedicated to undoing the democratic rights afforded blacks during Reconstruction ...
Each state is allotted two historic figures to be honored in the National Statuary Hall. In a sense, our other home boy in the Capitol, Dr. John Gorrie, was the guy responsible for undoing Florida’s former status as a sleepy Old South backwater. The Apalachicola doctor invented a device that created both air conditioning and manufactured ice ...
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