Andersonville you say? I am quite familiar with it. You do know about Camp Douglas, I presume?
I will look around for it but there was a good story of a modern American family that owned a slave and how the family struggled with it.
Basically they were from the Phillipines and were “gifted” this woman back in the 1940’s who was their “slave”. Over time the family moved to America and the kids finally realized what was going on and who this person was. This of course caused alot of grief and the kids later persuaded the parents to try 1. sending her home which didnt work out and 2. treating her as an employee and with respect.
So what I’m saying is many people who had and still have slaves, the problem is what to do with them.
James McPherson said it best in “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” When it came to treatment of POWs, neither side had anything to be proud of. You might also research why the system for exchanging POWs broke down.
The other poster is quite correct. A great many Southerners would have inflicted upon on the North everything Yankees inflicted on the South. Read Charles Royster’s “The Destructive War.”
All POW camps of the Civil War were rather vile places, but an officer’s wife is a civilian, not a captured soldier.
I have a book on Camp Douglas I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, I am sure it will get into that. I do appreciate the other book recommendations as well.
As to the “the other side would have done it”, well isn’t that the “whataboutism” I see decried so often on these boards? Because the fact is it happened the way it happened, to the people it happened to, not the other way around. And it is their complicated aftermath that I am interested in.
I am not here to fight with anybody, just have a discussion. I bring no antagonism, but will snark back if snarked on, ya know.
I only jumped in on this because I felt I had a perspective to offer. For the most part, I stay out of all but the fluffiest of fluff threads unless something is in my wheelhouse of interest, and this is. I have spent a good deal of time off and on through the years studying the various eras of Southern Society. I think I am fairly well-versed in why some things are the way they are. I read books most people consider boring. Admittedly I was not prepared to offer impeccable documentation, these are just impressions I have from reading so many first-hand accounts and I do understand, I think better than many people just how complicated The South is. Iit cannot be denied that The War had a much bigger impact on The South than The North, and resonated for much longer. I’ll bring it back and resurrect this as a zombie thread once I find it. I do recall reading somewhere about Sherman, while he was staying in Madison, GA writing something to his men about going into a nearby town and “shooting a few fools if necessary”, something like that, i am going to have to find it.
In trying to address the OP’s original question, I feel the “big deal with Robert E. Lee” is that he was romanticized as the quintessential Southern Gentleman, and I am pretty personally convinced The Ladies and their trauma played a part in that. Interpret “trauma” however you want.
And for those of you saying there is no evidence Sherman encouraged rape, I think we can’t really argue that, as “rape” wasn’t a word being used. Don’t look for it in writings of those days because you won’t find it. They wouldn’t have called it that anyway, and sexual violence wasn’t being openly discussed…Ladies didn’t (couldn’t) talk about such things openly. However, when your commander says “in war we have a perfect right to produce results in our own way, and should not scruple too much at the means, provided they are effectual.”, well I can take that to mean “Do what you gotta do, boys, I’ll be over here, um…looking the other way…”
And no, it didn’t have to be a penis-in-vagina thing. In a society with such strict social rules, to have a strange man in your personal space, touching your most intimate belongings, things you didn’t even let your husband handle, well that was indeed a violation! To have your chemise pulled out onto the porch for all to see and put under the horse’s saddle as a blanket was akin to a Muslim woman having her burka pulled off in public. I don’t think any of you would argue that would be traumatic for someone of that culture and something she would never forget, and it would become legend in her family, and she would probably stay bitter about it and she would very likely champion a Great Protector who would never allow such sacrilege to happen again. (I told you they were serious about this shit, ok?)
Every Southern family had a story of a female relative who was traumatized some kind of way…aren’t we supposed to “believe the women”?
I wholeheartedly agree if we are talking about monuments put up after say, 1920. It is the ones before that I was referring to, the early ones appear to be more about commemorating the dead and mourning. My point is that what these various ladies’ societies started morphed into the more grandiose Lost Cause Mythology, especially as those who lived through it died out and the next generations took it over and added lots of flourish.
You have to take into account that it happened in stages. It didn’t all just happen in one fell swoop and people of different unfolding decades had different motivations.
Savannah’s Confederate Monument is one i keep mentioning because it went up in 1875 and was changed later to reflect Lost Cause mythology, and it was the first and biggest of it’s kind in Georgia. All the other little towns later copied it (badly I must say) with lesser versions in the early 1900s, when they could afford it, and yes, to further that false narrative.
I have no issue with those commemorating the fallen.
Thankfully there are more scholars looking more closely at the “it was a low-rape war” philosophy, and hopefully this re-examination will revise this notion.
I have just been able to befriend someone at the Georgia Historical Society who is doing some serious research.
I’ll be sure and get back to you on that.
Great! So glad we agree on that point. What distresses me is that these days all of them are getting lumped in together, when there is a clear difference depending on the era it was erected. I have no issue at all if a community wants to take down a statue of some dude on a horse looking all gallant blowing in the wind. Especially if he never lived there or isn’t buried there. It may just merely be a pretty piece of art to some, but to others it is not. Vote and let the people decide, and folks who are not from that town should have no sayso in the matter.
However, let’s not remove grave markers, battlefield plaques or other kinds of commemorations that honor fallen soldiers. Anything with CSA on it should not be fair game for the “Take 'Em Down” crowd.
I agree.
But also let’s get rid of schools and army bases, etc named for traitors.
For those of you who have a JSTOR account, here is a nice piece from the Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol 82, No. 2, Summer 1998 about the Savannah Confederate Monument and the Ladies Memorial Association. It clearly states is was conceived as a “funereal” piece, and explains why it was changed. I read it as the men felt it was too girly and not masculine enough, so within a few years money was raised to change it to directly reflect soldiers.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40584060?newaccount=true&read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Of particular interest in that article to this discussion about early monuments being more about grief and mourning than oppression of black people is this:
“The selection of this design was typical of that adopted by most Southern cities between 1865 and 1885. Over 90% of the monuments erected during this period were funereal in either placement or design. There were, however, two differences that set the Savannah monument apart. First, 70% of the monuments from this period were placed in cemeteries, the “City of the Dead”, and many of the rest were placed in central town squares. The Savannah monument would be neither. Second, the design of the Savannah Monument had four soldiers on each corner, representing the four branches of the military, thus combining the funereal aspect with the soldier. Most monuments that included representations of soldiers did not appear until after 1885.”
The article has a good picture of the original Ladies Memorial Association (LMA) design and the redesign. To clarify, there was originally a a shrouded female figure called “Judgement” on the top, and another called “Silence” in a niche in the center. The soldiers at the four corners are nearer the base and are busts, not full statues. It was supposed to be a daily reminder to all who passed by of the men who fell in the “shock of battle”.
There is a good discussion about how the design and marble/granite came from Canada, and the piece came by ship to Savannah from Canada so as not to touch “Yankee soil”. Also, in the cornerstone is a time capsule containing “numerous coins and Confederate notes, newspapers, a bronze copy of the Seal of the Confederacy, a piece of the flagstaff from Fort Sumter, the muster roll of the Irish Volunteers at Fort Pulaski from Nov 1, 1861, Confederate sheet music, buttons from the uniform of Commodore Josiah Tattnall and General Joseph E. Johnson, a copy of the Ordinance of Succession of Georgia, and several pieces of flags.”
General Joseph E. Johnson lived in Savannah at the time, and to bring it back to Robert E. Lee, it happened in April of 1870, about months before his death, Lee visited Johnson in Savannah, and this article contains a photo taken in Johnson’s insurance office with Lee, one of the last photos taken of Lee.
The article goes on to say that the monument, once installed and dedicated, was quickly deemed to be “too elaborate” and did not “truly illustrate the Southern soldier”. So see, the original LMA design was quickly commandeered by the men and so they raised more money to change it and install a man on top (OMG, a woman can’t be on top!). The men determined that the period of “ceremonial bereavement” was over, and so the LMA design was deemed distasteful…to the men, that is.
And so, it began…
I think naming schools after people in general is problematic. People have frailties and are not perfect and few can stand up to the test of time. Schools should probably be named more for geography than anything else.
Lots of countries have had civil wars. Are they any others that have statues commemorating the losing side?
Maybe, maybe not, but I guarantee there are memorials to the dead on both sides in other countries. Maybe the USA is unique in this aspect of how those memorials grew into a whole other thing, but every Civil War is not the same. How the aftermath unfolds is determined by the culture of the people that lived through it.
Well Scotland has a lot of memorials to Scottish leaders against England. I’ve been to The Wallace Tower near Sterling. There are as many plaques for Queen Mary the Scot and Robert the Bruce as we have George Washington. I don’t know that much about the Jacobites and King James, but there was a fair amount of mention of them and Bonnie Prince Charles.
As I recall, What Exit?, Robert the Bruce won a major victory at Bannockburn, and at that time Scotland and England were separate countries.
Yes, and white supremacism dominated Southern culture (along with lots of non-Southern places) for a long, long time, to the point that in the early 20th century, in a backlash to potential civil rights advances by black people, they erected statues and imagery celebrating the Confederacy as a symbol of their support for white supremacism.
Victorian memorialisation of Scottish heroes was often more complicated than you probably assume. As it happens, the Wallace Monument at Stirling is the best example of those complexities, as it was actually built as much as a celebration of one specific strand of imperial Unionism as of Braveheart-style nationalism.
Nor is such weirdness confined to monuments erected in the nineteenth century. The most substantial monument to Bonnie Prince Charles, apart from that at Glenfinnan, is in England. That’s because its erection wasn’t an ideological statement at all, but instead just an excuse to mark an interesting bit of local history. It’s the same impulse that means that Leicester now has a Richard III Infants School! Which is not to deny that many other examples of memorialisation are indeed deeply ideological.
Every Northern family in areas temporarily occupied by Confederate troops or pillaged by raiding parties has a similar story of a female relative who was traumatized some kind of way. That kind of trauma was standard for warfare at that time and was not considered exceptional by either side. Everyone (well, everyone that had any common sense) knew going into the war that things like that and worse were going to happen. And of course, there’s also the sexual trauma enslaved women experienced which was no doubt the worst of all.