Being a bit of a furriner and all that, I feel comfortable in asking: Are you perchance thinking of the Fugitive Slave Act here, or are there other examples?
<Edited to fix spelling. So this comment is probably misspelled.>
Lee is seen as a traitor only because he lost. He was no more so than the original colonist who started this country in the first place.
And if only Washington had led an army fighting to keep black people enslaved, you’d have a really good point.
That was before George Lucas re-edited the Fort Sumter scenes so the North shot first.
It almost loooks like the OP is pitting the wikipedia article.
Hey, vibrotronica, a little context, please?
The OP mentions “a tour given by the Daughters of the Confederacy” so I assume that’s where the “history” lesson occurred.
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Robert E. Lee and Co. certainly levied war against the United States
It is of course true that George Washington was also a traitor to the Crown (or would have been if he had lost). Lots of people have been traitors, and lots of people have escaped being considered traitors only by winning. “None dare call it treason” and all that. Which also doesn’t mean that all those assorted treasons or would-have-been treasons are morally equivalent.
Of course you know those tour guides are using this term because they are in the Civil War business and that is the term the customers want to hear.
If there were no Civil War business, the war itself would be about as relevant as the War of Eastern Agression (which, you’ll remember, we waged to enforce better treatment by California of Chinese railway workers). And the Civil War business could not exist without tourists from the North.
Something you might want to read on this issue (well, actually listen to) is the course on tape Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fictions, and Lies in American History by James W. Loewen, which is available from a company called The Modern Scholar. Loewen points out several things. First, Southerners actually believed that they were the ones insisting on the Federal government enforcing laws and Northerners were for state’s rights. They wanted the Fugitive Slave Law enforced more strictly, for instance. Second, while I’m not sure about the name “The War of Northern Aggression,” it’s not true that Southerners called the war “The War between the States” during the war itself. This name was not used until after about 1890. Indeed, much of the romanticization of the pre-Civil War South happened post-1890 in an attempt to roll back what little integration there had been up to that point.
And there you have it. Did these ladies wear Scarlett O’Hara gowns and fan themselves when they got the vapors, too? And wear a little smirk the whole time?
It’s also worth remembering that the immorality of slavery was a fairly recent development in human thought, and one associated mainly with those radical America-hating liberals in Massachusetts until just a decade or few before the war. Even after the notion caught hold, there were many, many sympathizers in the North, perhaps more than there were abolitionists in the South. It may even be at least partly true that our current universal condemnation of slavery is the result of the Union winning the war, and the victors do write the histories.
If secession had been successful, and the Southern white elites had then held onto The Peculiar Institution longer than they might otherwise have, and otherwise have used their victory to retroactively enshrine slavery in their morality as much as the North did use its victory to establish its immorality, what would be our attitude toward it today? Would be tolerate it and look aside if it were to exist in such places as Sudan and Pakistan and China, for instance? No, of course not, I hear the crowd reply, slavery is absolutely immoral and we’ll go to war to end it anywhere. Of course.
Right. When we look at it through our current societal value system, and judge people from 150 years ago, it’s much easier to dismiss the entire population of a large chunk of the country as mean old racist revisionist rednecks.
So, of course, I, as a modern person, believe that slavery is unspeakably abhorent (as well as treatment of blacks in the subsequent century) and have a hard time thinking of there being people who didn’t think that way. But back then, that belief was not all that common yet; it was still formulating and catching on. Hard for us to conceive of the notion, but for them it was still debatable.
How could he have? He was dead. Lee surrendered at Appomattox courthouse on April 12, and Lincoln was shot in Ford’s theater on April 14th. Now, I have no reason to think that Lincoln would have hung Lee had he survived, but it’s a nonsensical statement, and one that casts a pall over the entire OP. Here you have an OP condemning what the author claims is historical inaccuracies that can’t even be bothered to get basic historical facts right. Historian, heal thyself!
I’ve heard the phrase “War of Northern Aggression” all my life, but always with a tongue-in-cheek flavor. I had no idea anybody used it seriously.
Small correction to the OP: Arlington wasn’t Robert E. Lee’s house (though he did live there). It was his father-in-law’s and then his son’s. Just as a sidenote, the legacy also included 150 slaves, all of whom were freed before the Emancipation Proclamation, concluding a liberation of slaves begun by Lee’s father-in-law’s adoptive father at Mt Vernon 60 years before.
The issue of whether Lee (or Davis or any rebel) was a traitor is open to serious debate. As a matter of fact that’s the reason Jefferson Davis was imprisoned for two years but never came to trial- lawyers were lined up around the block offering to defend the constitutionality of secession and not all of them were southern and the trial could have gone either way. As a matter of fact many northerners were incensed at his treatment. Pope Pius IX sent him a crown of thorns he made himself (how odd that I mention that in two posts within a few hours) while ardent abolitionist Horace Greeley offered to personally guarantee his bond, as did [my future husband Anderson Cooper’s ggg-grandfather] Cornelius Vanderbilt who pledged up to $500,000 to guarantee Davis’s good behavior. (The latter’s especially incredible, for in addition to being one of the stingiest millionaires who ever lived [he wouldn’t even pay for printed checks] the Commodore only loved one of his 13 children, that being his youngest son George Washington V., who was killed fighting for the Union in the Civil War and who he spent the rest of his life “contacting” through spiritualists [which is a really interesting story that in and of itself that changed American history and would be a great movie, but I’m way off track already].)
ALL of my great-great-grandfathers, literally ALL, fought or worked in some capacity (miner, doctor, etc.) for the Confederacy, a fact that I have neither pride nor embarassment about and that while I find interesting it doesn’t inform my views on the war at all. I feel the war was one of the stupidest and most arrogant campaigns in history and, while I know that it will get me into trouble for saying it I’ll say it anyway- I think slavery was wrong. Yes, you read that right, I’m an abolitionist and I don’t care who knows it. Let the flaming begin from the pro-slavery Dopers. Back to the OP, it was a war of Southern and not Northern aggression and the only people who would call it “WoNA” are deluded fanatics.
But treason… that’s way more GD than Pit.
You’re telling me that in two full days Lincoln couldn’t have found a rope somewhere in Washington D.C.? Hell, he was the “rail splitter”, he could have killed Lee with an ax. What’s that take: two, three strikes, tops? Less than one minute, and Lincoln had TWO DAYS.
Autolycus, if you research the Civil War, you’ll find that the North fought it largely to preserve the Union, and the South fought to preserve slavery (though any threat to end it was, as pointed out, remote at best).
The Daughters of the Confederacy are a joke.
I was in Savannah, Georgia recently. If there’s any place you’d expect monuments and markers to reflect a biased view of the Civil War that’s it - but they played it straight. There’s even apparent civic pride in displaying a home that served as Sherman’s headquarters just after the war.
This thread reminds me of the Bullwinkle cartoon where our intrepid moose is playing football for Wossamotta U. For some reason, Edward Everett Horton has to keep referring to the Civil War, and some Kentucky Colonel or something keeps correcting him “That’s ‘The War Between the States’, suh!”.
“Bullwinkle swivel-hips past the defenders, pardon, he warbetweenthestates-hips past …”
I hate the Daughters of the Confederacy for a different reason, incidentally. The UDC admits anybody who can prove a direct ancestor was involved in the conflict on the Confederacy (as, ironically, the DAR does for those who can prove an ancestor fought in the Revolution on the side of the united colonies and in Alabama the DAR and the UDC have almost identically the same membership). I’m among the “Chosen” of them and any daughter I had could do either as I’ve got the documentation both ways (though unfortunately that daughter like any other child of mine would have been drowned at birth to prevent the prophecies from being fulfilled.) My brother’s daughter is a member of one or the other as he’s a bit of a social climber/small town businessman/political aspirations and it helps with those. That’s about the only reason anybody today joins them.
Here’s why I hate 'em and this is a bona fide true story: my friend “Leah” has an impeccable ancestry for UDC or DAR. Her mother was a descendant of two Confederate generals (not two of the more famous ones though if you’ve studied the war you’d know the names and the family still has relics). Her mother was a Marion from South Carolina, same family as Francis Marion, and she not only was a descendant of Rev. War soldiers but had the damned oil portrait of one that had been in the family for 200 years! She (Leah’s mom) was very proud of this and very “hoity toity” socially and wanted Leah (who was always something of an embarassment to her parents- she just didn’t give a damn about small city Southern society) to join, and Leah did just strictly to please her parents. She was a teenager at the time and should have been a shoe in, right?
Nope. She was denied permission because, as the UDC woman who had known her mother her entire life explained, “I’m sorry honey, but we’re only open to biological descendants- now if you can prove you have blood ties to them we’ll gladly let you in.” And that’s how my friend Leah found out she was adopted.
True story.
PS- I should add that even Leah’s mother was livid over this and resigned from both organizations.
Well, Lincoln was the first Republican president.
For some interesting reading on this topic, you should read Lies My Teacher Told me. It is an incredibly interesting book that discusses how we were taught some rather incorrect things along the way & why.
Do they let you into the UDC if you’re a Grant? Like… one of those Grants?