I had plenty of friends who refused to serve in an evil regime’s army. A couple even got jailed for it.
In fact the site of Hitler’s death is now a scruffy patch of weeds by a sidewalk. The nearest monument is the excellent Holocaust Museum by the Brandenburg Gate.
I’m Jewish, and my father fought the Germans in the war, and I have to admit the government has done an excellent job in this.
And, not to defend actual literal Nazis too far, but at least they weren’t a bunch of traitors.
As to divisions in Kentucky at the time of the Civil War, here’s an article describing attitudes toward slavery in different regions of the state.
Regarding “scholarship”, if there are good cites backing your claims, have at it.
Speaking of lack of scholarship:
I believe I have elsewhere commented to the effect that your allegation is ludicrous bile, so nothing further is required.
Sure, but there’s a difference between collective guilt and personal guilt. That’s where I was going- like @RickJay was saying, there were probably a lot of people who were drafted, or who volunteered out of misguided state pride, fervor, or just because they didn’t want to look wimpy in front of their communities.
Blaming them for the Civil War is indeed letting the real perpetrators off the hook, in the same way that blaming some nameless Wehrmacht personnel for German actions in WWII is doing so as well.
That’s not to say we ever should have glamorized it, or celebrated it- the whole Lost Cause thing is pretty damned odious. But blaming the rank and file isn’t correct either, and I think a lot of people perceive their distant forebears as being part of that more or less innocent rank and file, and rankle at the idea that they are some sort of monsters, traitors, etc…
I mean, if you’re Jefferson Davis’ great-great grandson, then you KNOW that your relative was one of the perpetrators. But if your great-great grandfather was a 17 year old private in the 5th Arkansas regiment, you might take it personal if people run around calling your relative a traitor, or a monster, or whatever.
And I showed you that you were wrong.
Kentucky became Confederate after the war, feeling more attachment and allegiance to the Lost Cause than to its own true place in the war’s history. It could be said that Kentucky seceded after the fighting was done.
even a book about it.
It would seem to me that those would be the most fervent of wanting to get rid of statues and other monuments to the leaders of the insurrection so that their relatives are no longer associated with them.
But, like many things in this vein, they choose to toss their dead relative on the grenade in order to take personal offense at the injury.
If we are talking about a monument to Lee, we aren’t talking about their relative. If we are talking about the southern states declared reasons for leaving the union, then we aren’t talking about their relative.
The only one talking about your relative is them. And they are dishonoring their memory by attempting to use them as a shield for people like Lee.
I can appreciate that some people who weirdly identify with a relative who died 150 years ago might take that kind of insult personally. But you have to ask yourself why, even if they don’t. And you certainly have to ask yourself why they insist on celebrating that heritage by retaining some of the worst symbolism available to them (confederate flag, statues, historical revisionism, etc.).
Except, and this was the point of my question to carnivorousplant upthread about the Arkansas legislature: it’s not like the secessionists executed coups in all the state governments and imposed secession on an unwilling (white) populace. There were state governors, and state legislatures, and state secessionist conventions, and then the Confederate government, all popularly elected on a white male franchise. And they had a lot of popular support for their actions. Yes, there were pockets of resistance, notably West Virginia and parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, but secession and the Confederacy had strong popular support amongst the white populace. Is it really possible to push all the blame onto the elected representatives, while the people who elected them and supported secession are not considered responsible?
The comparison to Nazi Germany is apt. Hitler never won a majority, but once in power his regime had a lot of popular support. That’s why the myth of the “good German” in the general populace, who opposed the Nazis, has gradually died off, starting in the 60s. Given the support Hitler had from the general populace, it wasn’t really possible to try to isolate all the blame on the Nazi regime itself.
I don’t think it’s quite the same as Nazi Germany, my understanding is the franchise was fairly broad in Weimar Germany, and very restricted in the antebellum South. White males to start with, and some states I believe still had minor qualifications above and beyond that in 1860.
I’ve often described the antebellum South as a “slaveocracy” and I use that term to basically mean an oligarchy of slaveowners. If you dig much into the politics of the states, I don’t even mean in terms of abolitionism vs slaveholding, I just mean the real day to day power politics, the State legislatures were dominated by slave owners who stacked the deck tremendously heavily in their favor. One reason that the western counties of Virginia had separatists in it had a lot more to do with historical disputes about power in Richmond. For example “Trans-Allegheny” Virginia (the Western counties–not all of which ultimately became part of modern day West Virginia) had a free white population approaching that of the eastern segments of the state where slavery was widely practiced. Due to geographic and agricultural conditions in Trans-Allegheny Virginia, slaveholding was not nearly as prominent.
However representation in the state legislature counted slaves as people for purposes of apportionment, and there were also property requirements on voting and other things that benefitted the East. In 1850-51, after years of dispute between East and West, the powers that be in the East drafted a new constitution for Virginia designed to calm the Western counties down. One of the things they implemented was universal male suffrage from age 21 onward, and only free whites would count for apportionment. These were real and genuine wins towards greater political equality for the Western counties, but the Easterners still put their thumbs on the scale. They arbitrarily stated that the eastern counties would receive 30 Senators and the western 20–but they also promised that by 1865 they would pass a bill re-apportioning Senators based on the Census or holding a referendum on the matter, so the Westerners at least saw a light at the end of the tunnel.
I only explain this because it’s an example I’m more familiar with–but the “slave power” in all of the South put its scales very heavily on democracy. In many ways there’s broad parallels with antebellum south’s democracy and the democracy of Britain before its reforms in the late 18th up through the end of the 19th century–landed interests held special privileges, chicanery was involved which magnified the powers and privileges of the few at the interests of the many. This was actually true broadly in the entire United States, but in basically all respects it was “more true” in the South.
Keep in mind that until the 14th Amendment started to be “incorporated” the various States were not even required to acknowledge the Federal Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech was not in fact genuine in the South. Many southern States actually banned the writings of anyone who criticized the slaveholding system, including even the writings of white economists who detailed the ways in which the slave power exploited and undermined the interests of free whites. This was an unfree society, in which the wealthy slaveholders had political power vastly beyond their enumeration, and in which they also controlled the free flow of information and used it to distort and mislead the lesser educated public.
There are serious historians who agree, but there are several factors to consider before labeling all Southerns as secessionists, or in many cases even necessarily pro-slavery. I’m njot sure that we really have a good handle on what the people of the South really thought about secession. Arguably they didn’t know themselves.
The Antebellum South had a very class-stratified culture, but this was often partly concealed and never acknowledged internally, given the idealization of Jacksonian Democracy. In general, education and opportunity often follow wealth to a degree everywhere in real life, but in the South these were much more prominently linked than anywhere else in the nation. Plus, it was a contracting elite, pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them and monopolizing political and economic opportunity. Even the urban middle class tended to have some kind of dependency on slavery, directly or indirectly, and a very high proportion of those in government were plantation owners themselves. In many cases there was a distinct lack of alternative political organizations at least at that moment.
Unless you lived in a region with few slaves, it was frequently dangerous to say anything about slavery too publicly, especially in the decade or so before the war. This only covered-over major divides in society, but they definitely did exist. We know that, for instance, in Tennessee a majority claimed to support secession, but this was after the legislature had already put its weight behind it, and there’s some question of how honest the referendum really was in practice. There’s also very significant questions about whether Secessionism for the majority was a constant going-forward belief, or if it was a temporary majority formed in a burst of enthusiasm for the “heroic”, romantic moment. Of course, once the decision was made and it becomes a matter of guns firing in the distance, it became mentally impossible for most people to turn back.
Finally, we can also point to the real experience in the Confederacy itself: our best information suggests that the upper classes served disproportionately in the early-war military, but that there was considerable passive resistance by the less-wealthy. This suggests that even under wartime conditions there was a lot of opposition which simply hadn’t been organized politically. The South resorted to the draft well before the Union, and in North Carolina a peace candidate mounted a serious challenge mid-war. My personal view tends to be that Secession went through at a critical stage and, although they did not acknowledge it, the Southern elites knew very well that internal political opposition would arise sooner or later which would diminish their political power, while slavery would inevitably diminish. Hence why, in the Antebellum years, they came up with increasingly-questionable schemes to expand it in some way.
After the war, it became quite useful to portray the North and South as being very unified politically, and not just to the Lost Cause-ers. Confederate myth-makers included a fair number of high-quality writers, and given a a couple of decades soldiers developed nostalgia for the war years as many humans often do. Many of the soldiers appear to have been proud of their military service regardless of whether they were particularly enthusiastic about the Confederacy or slavery. (Arguably true on the Union side under mirrored circumstances.) I don’t claim that this is necessarily logical, just that it seems to have been commonplace. And, unfortunately, postwar racial politics played directly into this as many of the more idealistic Abolitionists turned cynically against racial equality, or just lost power over time. Without slavery, the gap between North and South on racial issues looked a great deal smaller.
These are all good points, thank-you.
He’s engaging in the fallacy of the excluded middle. His ancestors* were neither monsters nor heroes. They were ignorant and deluded humans.
*Unless he’s descended from Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And as explained to you before, you’ve cited an opinion piece that says absolutely nothing about modern-day attitudes in Kentucky.
How some people in the state may have acted 120 years ago is irrelevant.
Thanks for the article, it’s good stuff. Regarding the federal government’s administration of Kentucky, I got that mostly from Embattled Freedom by Amy Murrell Taylor, p.180-1.
If I seem like I’m trying to win an Internet argument here, it’s largely with myself. I’m hoping to build a workable quantitative model for popular opinion in the Civil War, something that’s based on more than just my view of how things were. There’s not much hard data to go on - the election of 1860, secession convention elections and the like. Voting for state and even federal legislative seats can be more due to personalities or local issues, and returns often aren’t available.
So I’d really love to see the backup for the 3rd & 4th paragraphs in the “Slave or Free” section of the article - because I largely agree with the conclusions - but I’d like to know if there’s some way to put some numbers to them, and figure how to differentiate between staunch vs. conditional Unionism with respect to attitudes toward slavery and emancipation. No Gallup poll in the 1860s of course, but if I can draw (and justify) a correlation between economic factors shown in the census and political ideology, maybe there’s something I could use.
Excellent term there. Very true.
I should add that nothing in what I posted exonerates the CSA lower class, most of them were fairly nasty racist people. I think some people get a bit too “into” judging people from the past. I think we ought learn from the things they did wrong, and say we should not do those things and learn from the wrongness of it. But I think it’s very simplifying to condemn people raised with totally different values and information than we have. Like do people here really assume if any of us were transplanted at birth from our cradles to the cradles of a young German couple in 1905 Germany, or into the cradle of a slave owning family in 1830s South Carolina, we would turn out not as reflections of those realities but as our modern day selves? Fully self-aware and recognizing the right path? Seems doubtful to me.
I’m not convinced there is any “there there”, maybe I’m wrong, I’d love to see the data to if I am. But the concept of “public opinion” was in its infancy in the middle of the 19th century. I suspect good data on it is non-existent.
There’s a Fresh Air interview about this. The narrative that the US government basically threw the fight and let America lose was a major driving factor for some Vietnam vets to join militias and white nationalist movements.
The main reason that we hear more about the “Lost Cause” than that one is that the Lost Cause mythology is much less organic. Racists have realized it’s an extremely useful tool to spread to a very wide audience which wouldn’t accept a narrative that was more racist on it’s face and have been deliberately spreading it for a long time.
That’s not an uncommon myth to develop. That was a major thing that fed into German Nazism and extremist in general, the pervasive belief that the military had basically all but won the Great War, but the politicians “stabbed them in the back.” Why more energy wasn’t put into believing that the real sin by the politicians was sending them to a stupid and unnecessary piece of military adventurism is the big question.