But there are two things going on here. 1. People honoring their ancestors, whether cultural or familial and 2. people perpetuating/celebrating/excusing/glamorizing the very worst that America has to offer, or ever will have to offer.
I don’t see a problem with honoring the dead, their ‘valor’ and what-have-you. But these days, “Confederate” anything, whether it is a holiday or a flag or whatever, is hard not to be in the poorest of taste. The South needs to get over that ASAP and join the rest of us here in the 21st century.
It’s simply not. At bottom, our motives and drives aren’t much different than they were in pre-history. We organize ourselves into tribes and hierarchies, and our minds are inherently predisposed to interpret events so that we are the victim and others have wronged us, the Moralization Gap, and to display a self-serving bias that tells us we’re better than we actually are. There’s also the aforementioned tendency to venerate warriors. So, when the Northern tribe crushes the Southern tribe, the reaction of the Southern tribe is entirely predictable, and not the result of poor character, but instead the way our minds work.
Certainly, it is possible to use Confederate trappings to promote white supremacy and similar nonsense (though Nazi trappings seem equally popular for some reason).
But there is no way something like Confederate Memorial Day, or a monument like this one can be said to be in poor taste, unless one is looking to be offended.
This Southern woman agrees with you. We are not all alike. Someday a light will go on in anti-Southern brains and they will realize that they are not all that different from people in the South. We have more Red States, but they haven’t been that way for all of 150 years. I live in Nashville. You would think it is probably Red. It’s not. We voted for Obama both times. And Al Gore served our state for over 25 years. Our last governor was a Democrat. And I’ve lived through the Governorship of many other Democrats. The same is true with the Senate and the House.
I believe I’ve heard of a burning cross or two above the Mason-Dixon line. And does anyone remember what happened in Boston when schools integrated?
I do not condemn or slander all Northerners for those agregious acts. Some of you seem blind to the fact that you were slave states too. And it still has its residual effects.
Has anyone found out which states actually do have Confederate Memorial Days still? Do businesses, state offices and schools close? Wiki says their information has not been verified.
The rest of you are all liberals? Not quite. Try educating yourself about the 21st Century South and the crimes that still take place in the North against people of color. “Stop and Search” statistics in New York, for example.
How so? Didn’t they burn homes of non-Confederates too? Women? Children? The elderly? Your statement is very cruel. That is not like you.
Strange and interesting. Kentucky was not a Confederate State.
Monstro, Virginia is a beautiful and historic state. But the idea that they still go out of their way to honor Lee and even Jackson is just unthinkable. I’ve lived in Nashville for almost 50 years and I refuse to visit Jackson’s home, the Hermitage.
What percentage of confederate soldiers owned slaves?
I would have a hard time fighting for the sole purpose of helping some rich man in my state keep his slaves.
Were these types of soldiers that did not own slaves really fighting in their mind to resist federal imposition? Is that feasible?
Some Kentuckians joined the Confederate Army; fearing the loss of their slaves, believing the Union was the blame for the war, or out of Southern loyalty; and even elected a “shadow” Confederate government. Thus, Kentucky’s monument situation is as conflicted as the Commonwealth was during the war itself.
This source claims 20% of Southerners were slave owners, with 12% owning more than 20.
Their motives varied quite a bit, actually: white supremacy, loyalty to their home state, romantic militarism, and so on. Civil War Soldiers has a lot of good material about it.
You are right and that is true. It was a cruel and gratuituous (as it was entirely unnecessary for hyperbolic emphasis on the rant’s point) expression. There is no excuse can be made for the outburst.
For calling me out on it, my appreciation and public acknowledgment.
On reflection, I suppose it all does speak to this:
Which is something we should seek to overcome, not just work around it and let people get away with unchallenged.
I propose that we remove all “treasonous” “traitors” from our currency. The $1, $2, $10, $20, and $100 bills will need to be redesigned, along with the nickel and the quarter.
It was challenged. The ideas of secession and chattel slavery were challenged, defeated, and remain thoroughly discredited. I’d challenge you to find one person in a thousand who’s pro-slavery; the fact that Confederate apologists resort to claiming that the war wasn’t about slavery but rather tariffs or the right of states to control their own internal affairs or leave the Union, is proof enough that the South and pro-slavery Copperheads accepted in the course of time that it was in the wrong with slavery. That’s rather incredible if you think about it, a major institution of a large region of the nation just vanished through blood, toil, and shame. And it happened again, with the Civil Rights movement.
Taking things further, to declare that Confederate soldiers shouldn’t be honored because of the potential for revisionist propaganda or because it serves the Moralization Gap, is a bridge too far. Slavery and secession are wrong; honoring young men who faced enemy guns and died on behalf of others is not.
Veneration of a warrior caste is a sick, barbaric instinct that should be actively rooted out.
Actually, no, it wasn’t. They were sufficiently undevastated such that as soon as they got a chance, they re-established a brutal white supremacist regime that, even with slavery being barred in name, they continued to propagate their sick, disgusting society.
Actually, a much, much harsher, decisive, and thorough rooting out of the Confederate leadership and Southern institutions and traditions might have made the process faster. As it is, the issue has not gone away, and in its most insidious form it exists today as ancestor worship of the most disgusting sort, ancestors whose memory should be sent to the wastebin of history, remembered only historically and academically, not memorialized or honored in any way at all.
Yeah, I find that not at all persuasive or convincing. They’re wrong.
Have you looked at the number of people of color in the Senate lately? I believe that you are talking about some Americans and not just some] Southerners. Look at the entertainment industry. I’ll bet you can find other examples.
That would be true if one had any ancestor who was filled with contempt and hatred. I’m afraid that is likely to include all of us at some point. Let’s just throw them in the wastebin of history. Should I hold contempt for the teenager that fought at Stones River or should I revere the old man who was known for his knowledge of history, his service to the county in which he was a magistrate, and known for his kindness to all?
Draw your stereotype if you will. But it is just that. Southern culture is not about slavery. It is now about ethnic diversity for starters.
What have you done to make life better – really better on a personal level – for descendants of the slaves?
I suppose. I’m not 100% opposed to recognition of Confederate soldiers mainly because there are all these gaps in the family trees (on both sides). What happened? I don’t like to pretend, so being honest is going to lead one to confront history…
This is what bugs me. The Confederacy actually does have parallels to Nazi Germany, in that it was central to the whole society to enslave an entire race of people. The Confederacy was cruel cruel cruel, and to celebrate a culture built on a foundation of such historic cruelty seems simply inappropriate, if not an heroic act of denial. At the same time I can see that the young men who went to war did not run the system any more than the men who went to Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan or you-name-it.
Well no, that’s a tasteful graveyard. Hard to whine about most any graveyard IMHO.
There are Civil War monuments in Colorado too- I’ve seen them personally.
But, ‘you guys’- it is a weird trick of history. I don’t much identify as ‘Northern’, I’m just an American. Southerners seem to make an identity issue of it much more AFAICT. I do generally react with revulsion to the Confederacy though, which can come across as anti-Southern, which has been stoked by the government shutdown which I basically blame on Southern voters, which I have been ranting about all over this board lately. I’ve gone too far for sure, the South is not the Confederacy, and I’ll work it all out and play nice again soon enough.
I know. I get drawn in by all the incendiary counter-examples though. There are kind of a lot of them too, but I do recognize that any generalization is exactly that.
I’m not a liberal, I am a pragmatist. And, “stop and search”? Baaaaarf! I can’t tell you how upsetting that is to me!
Anyway, good thread. I’m going to do something else besides rant about the South now.
150 years after the fact? Yeah, I do. Except during something like a general purpose Memorial Day of course. But we don’t have special holidays for WWI, the Spanish-American War or the Mexican American War. Slaver Celebration Day therefore seems excessive to me.
You pretty much demonstrate my point. That’s an amateurish web page by a single individual that renders poorly. It contains links to Civil War monuments in the North, ones that I’m guessing may have been constructed over 100 years ago. You can find pictures of graveyard headstones on the internet as well, but I don’t see a big obsession with them. A lot of northerners have thought that southerners need to get over this stuff for decades…
…and such Northerners have all too often been over-generalizing. Great post Zoe. Lots of this stuff is more urban/rural than North/South. Also, a lot of so-called red counties might have 30% of their population voting for the Democratic Presidential candidate. Obama’s 2004 speech about there being no red states and no blue states was actually pretty accurate: a ten percentage point spread can make a state a safe one for one party or another, but it’s laughable as a basis to make broad statements about people.
Bit of a hijack, but I recently learned of a study which noted that areas of the South once dominated by Plantation economies are more likely to oppose affirmative action and vote Republican. Ok, so far that’s pretty boring. But here’s the kicker: remove that plantation effect statistically and the South ceases to be much different than the rest of the country – and there are plenty of counties in the South that did not have a lot of slave holding. Admittedly I’ve only read secondary accounts of that work.
Roll up your sleeves, then, there’s a large number of monuments to destroy, songs to abolish, holidays to repeal, and deeply ingrained aspect of culture to remove. Perhaps you could start with Memorial Day.
That wasn’t due to a lack of devastation, unless you mean that enough whites survived the war to still constitute a majority. The U.S. government betrayed the Southern black folks, again, by pulling out the troops and turning a blind eye to the oppression of Southern blacks. Killing more white Southerners wouldn’t have helped, any more that killing more Japanese people was needed to transform Japan from nationalist empire to liberal-ish democracy. It was the transition that was bungled, not the war.
Do you plan to offer a pocket guide as to which ancesters may be venerated? Considering how this nation was settled atop the graves of millions of Native Americans, Mexicans, and enslaved Africans, there aren’t many skeleton-free closets to be had in most family trees that go back far enough.
Right, so don’t celebrate the culture, or at least that aspect of it. Again, if people think that Southerners beyond a tiny lunatic fringe actually pine for the return of slavery, they are incredibly wrong. But the South does have a distinct and insular culture, and the Confederacy was part of the history that shaped that culture, so it’s bound up with it.
Yes, it’s not just a Southern thing, it’s an American thing and even a human thing.
That is indeed a result of history. If the North had been invaded and devastated by the South, and the South had continued to interfere in Northern states’ policies and look down and stereotype them right up to the present moment, there’d be a fierce sense of Northern pride, symbols associated with it, and so forth, while Southerners wished the North would just get over it. Now, as it happens the North was right to wage war on the CSA, and right to impose civil rights (though not with the crude stereotyping), but once again the Moralization Gap kicks in.
Southern voters in particular? May I ask why?
Well, as has been noted, the vast majority of monuments to the Confederate dead were built between 1869 and about 1920, and Confederate Memorial Day is a minor holiday that is barely celebrated. So, you’re getting your wish as time passes. Also note that Memorial Day as a national holiday only dates from 1967, by which time Confederate Memorial Days had already been enacted. Perhaps they could have been repealed and the ceremonies rolled over into Memorial Day, but that didn’t happen (though as said, Virginia’s CMD is the same day as Memorial Day). Oh well.
I do? That’s the first Google result for “New York civil war monuments” or something similar…monuments are one way of commemerating war dead, after all, which what was under discussion. Southern Civil War monuments are equally old. Another is holidays, such as Memorial Day, which began at the same time in both the North and the South to honor Civil War dead. The South has no monopoly on commemorating war dead, or Civil War dead.
More than a tiny lunatic fringe say things like “the South should have won”, or “it wasn’t about slavery”, and other such nonsense. They might not explicitly be saying “slavery was good”, but they’re getting close. There’s plenty of Southerners who disavow such crap (like me, for example), but the celebrators of the Confederacy deserve to be mocked and marginalized for their views.
Any Northern crimes against the South pale in comparison to Southern crimes against black folks. The Confederacy, and the Southern states in general before the Civil War (and, to a lesser extent, until the 1960s), along with isolated pockets in the North, were a truly monstrous and reprehensible regime, on the same level as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. This should be taught and recognized by all- that the Southern soldiers, however bravely they fought, fought for a cause as monstrous to humanity as Hitler’s Reich. Southerners should not feel guilty about the crimes of their ancestors- no one should. But they should feel guilty if they celebrate the war in support of those crimes. And Southern children should be taught that the Confederacy, and the South in general, was a blight on humanity for decades.
Defenders of the Confederacy and the old culture of the South should be in the same category as Nazi apologist and Holocaust deniers.
Few Germans today celebrate the valor of the Wehrmacht soldiers, though undoubtedly many fought bravely. This is because the cause they fought for was so monstrous that it goes beyond the pale, even when compared to other instances of human brutality. In the future I hope that the Southern cause is equally as reviled in the South.
