George Washington (as an officer in the Virginia militia, member of the Virginia assembly, and aide de camp to British General Braddock) would have sworn an oath, as would Benjamin Franklin (colonial representative for Pennsylvania/Georgia/New Jersey and several other colonies at the Court of St. James) and many other revolutionaries. Should they be dismissed as traitors for causing the deaths of many English and Canadian and even homegrown loyalists who were against secession?
For the first year of the war Lee never took the field against the north. He declined general’s commission, and wore a colonel’s insignia (his U.S. military rank) even when the general’s rank was forced on him. He took only non-combat assignments in North and South Carolina for 11 months overseeing infrastructure assignments and serving in advisory capacities in Richmond, hopeful that one way or the other the war would end in that time- that’s how torn he was. Finally by March 1862 (by which time he had freed all but a few of his father-in-law’s 150+ slaves- the last had to wait until that winter due to the liens on them) when it was clear that not only was the war not near an end but Virginia was having the shite kicked out of it, he could no longer not defend her. I’m not saying I agree with his decision, but it’s certainly understandable. (Do you greatly care who’s got the ethical upper hand when they’re destroying your fields and those of your family and neighbors?)
Lee was not in the league of the egomaniacal arrogant snob Davis. That said, Davis himself was far from one-dimensional; he was an ardent white supremacist even by 1860 standards, a man who ordered the murder of any black soldier in Federal uniform (an order many of his generals flatly refused to carry out), and yet Davis himself broke the law of Mississippi before the war to teach many of his slaves to read and later sold his plantation to a former slave on credit; the man was so beloved in the Davis family that when their oldest son son, Jeff Jr., died [he was about 20] he called for two people on his deathbed, the first being his mother and the second being that former slave cum plantation owner.
Joseph E. Johnston, the commander of the Army of Tennessee and one of the most powerful men in the Confederacy, was never once in his life a slaveowner. His head of cavalry, General Joseph Wheeler, grew up in Connecticut and Brooklyn and also never owned a slave. Their adversary in Tennessee and Atlanta was the Union General George Henry Thomas, a slaveowner, as was Major Robert Anderson who surrendered Fort Sumter in the first battle of the war and was brought back for its recapture as a Union high officer (and of course U.S. Grant was a slaveowner). Nathan B. Forrest- the only self-made millionaire among Confederate generals, earned fortunes from slavetrading and his actions at Fort Pillow are still heatedly debated and after the war he was head of the KKK, yet he also renounced the KKK in strongest terms soon after and worked himself half to death assisting the Freedmen’s Bureaus and other organizations seeking to educate and financially prepare blacks for freedom in Tennessee and Alabama after the war.
My reason for mentioning these things isn’t to say that slavery wasn’t the great reason why the south declared war- I believe it was- or to whitewash Davis- I can’t stand him- or Forrest- he was a [brilliant] bastard- but to show that the War and that the loyalties of the war and what the war was about to any given person on the individual level and even the mechanics of a large plantation built on slave labor and the racial views of these people- these were all just incredibly complex systems and incredibly complex people. There was nothing then and is nothing now remotely simple about war or the South or race relations anywhere. When people try to paint all southerners, even all Confederates, with “racist dumbass” brushes it is a major insult and it actually does much to explain much of why Southerners still resent being told to put the rebel flag away.
And again, it’s a goddamned paid off-day. Sheez.
