I think you’re overstating this. Northern states practiced slavery until as late as 1840. The UK had abolished it in 1833. Russia abolished it in 1866. Brazil didn’t abolish it until 1888. Sweden abolished it in 1847, Denmark in 1835. If it was so self-evident that slavery is wrong, why did it endure so long?
They weren’t ancient Romans or stone age barbarians, but just like those people, they lived at a time when slavery was practiced. Other nations were moving to abandon the practice, yes, but the Confederacy was just amongst the last to do so (and by force), they weren’t the inventors or the only ones in the 19th century to practice it. Singling them out as uniquely evil slavers is akin to claiming that America was evil for giving women the right to vote in 1920, when much of Europe had done so by 1915.
Good thing it isn’t my position, then. “It’s always been around, so there’s nothing unique about any one nation that practiced it” is. The view that everyone should have realized at the same moment that slavery was unacceptable and uniformly moved to end it is pie-in-the-sky idealism utterly disconnected from how humans actually think and act.
No. Nor should we decry the level of murder practiced by ancient peoples and curse their names.
I’d like to change my vote again, but this time, I can’t say what it is because we aren’t in the pit, and even if we were in the pit, I still probably couldn’t say it.
I don’t think this is important, but if it is, I’d like you to cite the specific passages you find objectionable, and to the extent you can, talk about the context in which she said or wrote them.
But again, it’s not important, because I’m looking at what people did with their lives, not at individual statements they made.
Consider two people: one of them a total egalitarian who decided, for whatever reason, to fight on behalf of a nation that existed solely to maintain the enslavement of millions of people. The other one was a total racist who decided, for whatever reason, to fight to end that nation. I’m much more interested in honoring the second one, the one who might have thought horrible things but didn’t do horrible things.
This sort of cultural relativism is a terrible thing, in my opinion. If we’re going to judge historical figures at all (not really that interesting an exercise for the most part, but if you’re honoring people you’re judging them), what standards should we use to judge them? Whose standards? If we’re going t use the standards of their contemporaries, aren’t Frederick Douglass’s standards good enough for you?
Being on Jackass requires great physical courage. I don’t admire it.
If it’s not important, then I won’t spend the time on it. We can settle on your assessment, which was “she had some opinions that aren’t going to stand up to 21st-century standards”. That suffices for the point I was making.
I think individual motivations are equally important, but reasonable minds can disagree on their relative value.
The only standard is whatever you choose for yourself. As said, using a standard that celebrates bravery and honor, the Confederate soldiers make the cut.
I do, and it’s the traits of courage and honor that are worth celebrating, not the cause for which they were employed. That could be a source of disagreement, based on your posts and some of the replies:
If you see no inherent value in soldiering, bravery, or honor in combat, then it only follows that you’d decline to honor the Confederate soldiers.
We clearly have different baseline criteria for what is deserving of honors. Serving the country is worthy to me, but so is bravery and honor in battle.
A traditional law professor’s quip is something along the lines of: "The word ‘clearly’ is a signal for ‘what follows was pulled completely put of my ass and has no support in precedent or in the factual record.’ "
What makes you think that it is “clear” that the majority of people in uniform displayed bravery and honor in battle?
Well, as for bravery, you know that they were fighting in battles, right? Marching into withering rifle fire requires no small amount of bravery.
Per this and this, the Confederate Army suffered 103,000 to 104,000 deserters, though these figures are muddled by differing interpretations of who was a deserter and the limits of record keeping:
But, assuming that all 104,000 were deserters, that leaves over 1.9 million who weren’t.
As for honor, the Confederates followed the laws of war at the time. They took prisoners, and conducted prisoner exchanges until the Union stopped participating. They weren’t particularly rapacious or cruel to the civilian population.
Yes, Andersonville was a horror, but so was Camp Douglas. The decision by Jefferson Davis to treat captured black Union soldiers as criminals instead of POWs was also wrong, though he later backed off on this policy, some executions were carried out.
You know what would have been brave and honorable for those confederate soldiers to do? Hand their weapons over to the slaves and ask them to fight for the confederacy.
Otherwise, no. There is no evidence that they were brave or honorable. The 1.9 million who fought and didn’t desert were good at following orders, and that’s all.
Just to throw some historical perspective in here apart from the venom…
Desertion was a plague in the Confederate armies. It’s doubtful your ancestors had much of an idea at all beyond either “I don’t want to fight anymore” or “The crops have to get harvested.” It was not unknown for Confederate soldiers to abandon their duties to go home and help with seasonal tasks like planting or harvest, and then make their way back. Soldiers who were captured and then “paroled” - basically, just let go - would often simply go home. Almost the entire Vicksburg garrison was paroled after its surrender and rather than regrouping, most of the soldiers decided they were done with war. Total desertion was extremely common, especially later in the war, and it was nearly impossible to do anything about it on a systemic level. A particularly determined man could disappear, after all, in a country of unimaginable size, patchy record keeping, and no photo ID; if you could find your way to California and called yourself Bill Johnson, well, who would know?
Even if you were caught, it often didn’t matter. They’d just send you back. Actual hangings for desertion were rare because there wasn’t that much rope. John Keegan notes a Mississippi judge who complained that he was seeing men in his courtroom for the fifth or sixth time for desertion and nobody ever did anything about it. When the Union started paying signing bonuses to get soldiers, some people would sign up, desert, and then sign up again to get another bonus.
That was done, late in the war,, by an act of the Confederate Congress.
Of course, individual Confederate soldiers couldn’t give away their weapons to anyone, any more than Union soldiers could.
It requires bravery to fight in battle, especially one so bloody, and with medical are so primitive, as the Civil War. It requires honor to take prisoners, and respect the rules of war.
It was a plague on the Union armies as well, they suffered twice the desertions, while being between two and three times larger than the Confederate army.
But there are soldiers all over the world who have served their country with bravery and honor in battle. I don’t think we’re honoring the fallen Hungarians on Memorial day, however. I think we’re honoring US soldiers. That’s not to say the Hungarian dead or the CSA dead didn’t fight with bravery and honor, it’s just that Memorial Day is not for them. IMO, that is especially true since the Confederate soldiers, unlike the Hungarians, fought *against *our brave and honorable fighting men.
I see your point, but I think the CSA dead are a special case because a) they were Americans, fighting in America, and b) the holiday’s origin is in regional holidays that honored the fallen on both sides of the war. So, it’s certainly consistent with Memorial Day to honor the CSA dead if one so chooses.
I understand that, to a lot of southerners at the time, slavery and states rights were more or less the same thing, and that they felt that the U.S. had fallen away from it’s core values of limited government (limits to Federal authority as defined in the Constitution).
However, by their own words, they were fighting a second war of independence.
I voted “no”. (Plus, I can’t get past the slavery thing with my 21st century eyes. If they were fighting over taxes, or sumthin’, maybe. But not slavery. They were just plain wrong on that.)
Two war movies that work okay as drama but that are terrible history come to mind from this. The first is Shenandoah, in which Jimmy Stewart is a north Virginia farmer who is a neutral and who won’t allow any of his many (seven?) sons to serve in either army because it doesn’t concern them; neither will he allow either army to buy his horses.
This man would not have existed. However neutral his politics, his sons wouldn’t have had any choice but to enlist after the Confederate Conscription Act in 1862; if they didn’t, there’d have been hell to pay. Now, there’s a high probability that the sons might have deserted and come back home, but they would have either served or been jailed and the family farm confiscated in the early part of the war.
The scene where the boys fight off Union soldiers who try to requisition horses is also ridiculous: they might could have fought off a very small requisition party, but the troops would have come right back with friends and stripped that farm down to the hinges, IF the Confederacy didn’t strip it first. (I always liked one former slave’s description of the plantation in Georgia at the end of the war: “The Yankees left us with nothing but shit and gristle, then the Rebs come and took the gristle.”)
Cold Mountain is okay as a melodrama, but it’s laughably bad as history. For those who haven’t seen the movie, the Home Guard are the evil villains who track down and kill the deserters, and poor Inman (Jude Law), who has deserted and is living like an animal as he skulks homeward, just wants to go home to his beloved Ada (Nicole Kidman) but they are the thorns that keep them apart.
The movie takes place in the final winter of the war and in the mountains. The mountains weren’t that rabidly pro-Confederate to begin with, but there are reports of deserters by this time walking around on roads and streets in broad daylight; half the time they outnumbered the Home Guard, and pretty much all the time they could outfight them.
One of my own ancestors was a Confederate deserter who “took his leave” sometime in 1863 (not sure when exactly as his records are very scarce) and lived under his mother’s porch for a time. Per oral accounts from two family lines, when the Home Guard came for him he came out from under the porch with his gun, basically told them “Whatever happens today, I’m taking at least of you with me”, and the HG- which was a small group of middle aged and old men who hadn’t “saw the elephant” like the soldiers had, basically left with their tails between their legs.
After that this ancestor began openly plowing his mother’s field and even married a neighbor girl before the war’s end. He returned to service in the final months of the war, in part to take advantage of an amnesty probably and probably in part because by then the Yankees were marching through Alabama very close to where he lived- it concerned him again.
It caused problems when his two sons began courting the daughters of one of the men in the Home Guard, but that was ultimately worked out. It caused problems again in 1918 when his wife died of the Spanish Flu and was denied burial in a Confederate cemetery due to his desertion. Generally, though, there were too many deserters for it to carry an enormous amount of stigma, especially for those who deserted and went back.
One of the great ironies of the veneration of the war is how much more enthusiastic southerners were for the Confederacy in 1964 versus 1864, and how much more cohesive they were. During the actual conflicts there were states considering filing their own return-to-the-union motions with the Federal government and many who absolutely despised Davis very openly and it was next to impossible to get the states to work together for anything.