There is a well know notion (and yet potentially embellished quote from Shelby Foote among others) that the city of Vicksburg didn’t celebrate the fourth of July until 1945. This and the WWI thread had me wondering how that underlying feeling would jive with the patriotism of WWI? More specifically:
How long did the anti-union feeling last in the south?
If it lasted well into the 20th century, did the patriotism of WWI put an end to any lingering issues?
Did the south support WWI less than the rest of the nation?
There is more of a military tradition in the south than in the rest of the country. I believe that the southern states have more men and women in the military per capita than the rest of the states. If that is correct, was it so during WWI? How did any anti-union feeling square with that?
I understand that “the south” isn’t a solid uniform block, and that resentment and emotions are not the same throughout. But I don’t have even a feel about this. The time period from America’s entry into WWI to the end of the civil war is roughly that from now to the Vietnam war (I wrote roughly people) and that war still has repercussions now. And I’m thinking the Civil War much more greatly affected the South more than the Vietnam Affected the nation as a whole.
Regardless of Southern antipathy to the North or the suppression of the Confederacy, it would seem that their fervor for the military never flagged, regardless of the banner under which they marched.
There was a very large contingent of Southern volunteers for the Spanish American War which was only 33 years after Appomattox Court House. (Several of the U.S. generals had served in the Confederacy, with Joseph Wheeler actually serving as a Major General twice, first for the Confederacy and later for the U.S.)
Similarly, when a Massachusetts regiment that had been met with rioting in 1861 was scheduled to pass through Baltimore, they were invited to detrain and march through the city, met with banners that said “Bullets in '61, Bouquets in '98.”
The 42d Division was known as the Rainbow Division because it incorporated National Guard Units from 26 states, with the core units drawn from New York, Ohio, Alabama and Iowa. (This is not to claim there was never regional hostility within the unit, but they fought together well enough to earn a good reputation for fighting together.)
Many historians do indeed date the revival of Southern patriotism to the Spanish-American War. In the SAW, for the first time since the Civil War, Northerners and Southerners fought together against a common enemy. It was around this time that aging Civil War veterans began holding reunions on CW battlefields, and remembering the war in a less negative light.
On the down side, it’s also sadly true that it was during the 1890’s that tne North abandoned all hope of imposing racial equality on the South–it was the decade of Plessy v. Ferguson and constitutional disenfranchisement in several Southern states–and this played a part in white Southern reconciliation.
Opposition to American entry into WWI centered among progressives in the upper Midwest and ethnic Germans and Irish, and wasn’t pronounced in the South. The ultra-segregationist Senator James K. Vardman (D-MS) voted against declaring war, but his was not a majority position within his region.
I don’t know. I’ve never seen figures for the officer corps or for volunteers during that era. The WWI draft, of course, took people more or less randomly regardless of region.
It’s worth mentioning that both just before and during the US Civil War, there were proposals to invade Cuba, with the dual objective of making it US territory, and very explicitly, “uniting” North and South against a common enemy. In the Spanish-American War, Norther and Southern boys did wind up fighting together in Cuba (ostensibly to “liberate” it, not conquer it) – and apparently it indeed worked to some degree to overcome the old antipathies from the US Civil War.
My understanding is there was less support for World War I in areas with high numbers of German and Irish populations. I don’t think that the South was very high in either. Robert LaFollette Sr was one of the leading opponents of entry into the war (and later opposed the League of Nations) and he was a U S Senator from Wisconsin.
K Vicksburg surrendered to Grant and the Union forces on July 4th, 1863-one day after Meade and the Union forces held off Lee and the Confederates at Gettysburg. The city fathers probably thought it would be in poor taste to shoot off fireworks on a day that was a major blow to the Confederacy, even if it was for another holiday.