I’m not a Civil War expert, and I’m not necessarily saying Sherman was wrong. Just that that was the general perception, that Sherman mainly attacked peoples’ homes, rather than military targets. (And it still is, among your, “THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN!!!” types)
War isn’t supposed to be pretty.
Even if you say the South were monsters you still must admit that most of the interesting stories would have come from the South, and that’s also a great opportunity to explore those monsters. I mean if you want to explore the horrors of slavery, well that was in the South and much more interesting than a freedman in the North, the life of camp prisoners in Andersonville and all the suffering that ensued, a very early submarine the Hunley, I mean that’s a whole story unto itself.
The South was in a state of chaos and rapid change which is always more interesting to see how people adapt.
The problem with the Lost Cause narrative is that it opens up some wider questions. If the Confederate cause was doomed to inevitable defeat due to the economic advantages of the United States, then why did the southern states secede? Southerners can’t claim it was a matter of principle and that they’d rather do down fighting rather than surrender - because as it turned out, they were willing to surrender and stop fighting.
If the south was truly led by geniuses, shouldn’t they have been saying in 1860, “Listen, we all agree this sucks. But we also agree we can’t win a war against the rest of the United States. They’ve just got too many guns. So we should buckle down and make the best deal we can. There’s no sense trying to fight a war we can’t win and getting three hundred thousand good southerners killed for no purpose.”
Some ex-Confederates specifically refuted this idea when the Lost Cause narrative was being formed. They argued that the war had been winnable. But if a winnable war was lost, then somebody has to be to blame. And a lot of finger pointing was the result. There were people who blamed Davis or Lee or Johnston or Bragg or Longstreet or Jackson or Stuart or Joe Brown.
Many southerners might and I’d guess probably did believe that they’d not be able to defeat the North in battle. But if they could hold on long enough, the Yankees would tire of things and let them be.
Right. The Confederacy didn’t really believe the Yankees would fight an actual war to keep them in the Union. From their perspective, the North didn’t have the martial culture of the South and was filled with immigrants who didn’t have any stake in a war. They also believed, with good cause, that the North would not fight for Negros or hurt themselves economically by cutting off their supplies of cotton, tobacco, and other crops that the North didn’t grow.
They weren’t so deluded that they thought no battles would be fought, but even there they thought they had the advantage. By seceding, they instantly captured all the federal forts and armories in their states. If the North were going to fight, it had to go all the way to the South and fight them on their turf, with long supply lines and no familiarity or support among the people. They were looking at the last war, the pre-industrial Mexican War, as their guideline, not a technological frenzy of industries, railroads, telegraphs, ironclads, and observation balloons. It would all be over by Christmas, in the cliche used in so many wars.
Lincoln was a complete unknown and totally untested. He didn’t have control of his own party, let alone the government and the people. He wasn’t expected to be a factor. If he had any sense at all, the South believed, he would just give up and let the fait accompli be. The South had right on their side, State’s Rights and all that malarky. They held the winning hand in every way.
And most of the people in the North thought exactly the same way, although a parallel set of short-sighted hotheads also believed that they could easily defeat the South without for one minute thinking the reality through. Reality didn’t set in until 1863, when it became obvious that the war would go on until the South was ground into pieces. By that time, the South was in full war mode and psychologically could not surrender and admit defeat. So they got ground into pieces, were extremely bitter that the North didn’t just give in and let them have their way, and were determined to recast reality so that they were the good guys. Lincoln had to become a villain. If he just let them go, all the horrors would have been avoided. The war was his fault; he spoiled everything. QED.
A Confederate nation never existed. No country recognized the states waging the War of Southern Treason, which (according to UK reporter WH Russell) was fomented by Carolinians anxious to return to rule from London. Leaders of the Confederacy were oath-breaking traitors. Life in the feudal South was brutal for about all but the very rich. Romanticizing antebellum ls pernicious mythology. Why do we let the losers write history?
Yeah! If we slaughter them all to the last literate man and woman they wouldn’t be able to write anything!
:smack:
Great Britain wrote history after losing the war another group of slave owning traitors started. Who was going to stop them?
Great Britain definitely wrote the definitive history on the revolutionary war; that’s why we all consider George Washington to be a traitorous rebel today. Oh, wait. No we don’t.
That song is definitely a masterpiece. I wouldn’t say it really glorifies either side, but tells the story from the point of view of a humble Confederate soldier. It has that rare quality of sounding a hundred years older than it is.
Interesting, it was written by a half-Jewish Canadian guy.
My favorite version:
Wrong answer. Reconstruction and its forced failure saw the losing traitors restored to power. And with gerrymandered districts and unpopular electoral-college wins, we install losers in power in the US. That works pretty good, sure-nuff. :eek:
Seriously? There was a right answer to “Why do we let the losers write history?”?
Oddly for a man who spent “the whole of his childhood in Richmond and Baltimore”, Poe was born in Boston and was in Scotland and England from 1815-1820, attending several different schools there.
Try this:
Because the winners eventually didn’t care that they’d won. Southern traitors seceded for slavery; that’s in the secession documents. The United States defaulted to fight to end slavery, and wrote that into the Constitution, but then quit enforcing rights for blacks. White northerners thus thought white traitors smelled better than black citizens.
The winners forgave the losers and didn’t bother truthifying; c.f the destruction of Reconstruction. The losers got to lie all they wanted. We see how well that’s worked out.
From the age of one to the age of 18, he spent five years in Britain, one in Charlottesville and pretty much the balance in Richmond. The North’s claim on his formative years is pretty tenuous.
Just as an outside data point, I associate Poe with Baltimore, Boston and New York. The last two are definitely not Southern, and the first one certainly wasn’t part of the *Confederate *South, and I don’t think, as an outsider, that it was part of what I’d call Southern “culture”, for want of a better word, either.
Oh, pre-Civil War Baltimore was quite South. The Union guns on Federal Hill were not all pointing outward.
And gotta agree with RioRico, political and business considerations among the Northern Establishment led to a policy of “reconciliation” with the Southern Establishment, that lasted into the mid-20th Century, and part of it was not pushing back against the Lost Cause mythos in order to “let them keep their dignity”.
One wonders, if the North may have looked the other way for a while longer if the South had just desisted from expanding slavery to new territories or seeking to enforce runaway laws in the free states (just as in our timeline for decades it did not care about Jim Crow as long as it stayed in the South).
Little Women was successful, and it was set in New England.
…Jerry Springer is more interesting than Mike Douglas.