Well of course the individual soldiers of the Confederacy fought for all kinds of reasons; base, noble, or somewhere in between. This is probably true of every side in every war the human race has ever fought. It’s certainly possible to memorialize the dead who fought in a very bad cause; it helps a lot if those doing the memorializing of the dead don’t try to whitewash the cause for which they died.
I don’t demonize every man who fought for the Confederacy, and I’m sure some of those men were my ancestors, but I have no problem with completely and unreservedly repudiating the Confederate cause.
In Vietnam whole villages were wiped out and children had their skins seared off with napalm by American troops. Do you feel the same contempt for American veterans of Vietnam? Or feel that they should feel disgust at themselves (not saying that many of them don’t already)?
The vast majority of soldiers in the Civil War fought because there was a war on and that’s what young men do when there’s a war on. By law all able bodied men 18-45 in the seceded states HAD to serve in the military- they had little choice (some opted to serve in the Union as a rebellion to the rebellion). As for racism, some of the most racist generals on either side fought for the Union (McLellan and Sherman and [the Union general]Jefferson C. Davis were all very outspoken on their opinions of blacks).
That slavery was evil doesn’t mean the Civil War was all Good v. Evil. Lots of gray and not just on the uniforms. Also it’s still a hot debate among constitutional scholars as to whether the South had the right to secede; that [the Confederate president] Jefferson Davis was imprisoned for two years and released without ever being tried was largely because the odds were excellent he’d have been found Not Guilty of treason.*
Plus it made such an incredible impact on the South that it was kept alive in memories for 80 years and still resides in living memory (though as mentioned that will change soon). I seriously doubt that there’s a recorded instance in history of a whole people feeling enormous shame of their immediate ancestors, even in Germany; I’m sure most Germans concede without argument that Hitler and Himmler were evil, but grandpa wasn’t. Same down here, but tack on 80 years.
*Admittedly it was largely due to the fact the trial would have been held in Virginia and the jurors would have come from there as well, but many of the North’s top lawyers were anxious to take the case.
Everyone knows slavery is bad, but I still honestly feel that it wouldn’t have lasted long after the conclusion of the US Civil War even if the CSA had “won”.
It’s akin to how it’s OK to romanticize al-Qaeda, while still strongly disagreeing with their cause. A bunch of nobodies striking a blow against the strongest nation on Earth. A real David versus Goliath type of story. Sure, 9/11 was a tragic event, but it’s also a tale of a few men banding together against all odds.
Not as much. Their cause was not as blatantly, one sidedly evil. However badly it actually went down in real life, fighting against the spread of Communism is a lot easier to justify than fighting for slavery.
War is romanticized in general or we’d never get our lovely lads to raise their fists and swear to “defend our country” and go off to battle. And no part of the country has more of a military tradition than the South. I don’t write that with particular pride.
It’s amazing how human beings can compartmentalize when it’s needed. The very notion of romantizing a period which was founded on the backs of human slaves, dead family, blood-soaked fields, burned out homesteads, and grinding poverty is indicative of what must have been a stuptifying kind of insanity.
Yes, there were people who thought nothing of having slaves. They didn’t see anything immoral about it. It’s hard to understand now how people could have that mindset. But the list included George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. For two hundred years it included New York City. And at one point, one in every ten Philadelphians owned a slave. Most of the South was settled later and thus came to slavery later.
So it’s not as if the Union represented “good stock” and the Confederates “bad stock.” The North had developed an economy that did not depend on the use of slaves and they had had more of a chance to rethink the error of their ways. Although there were abolitionists in the South, the economy was more agricultural and slaves were still needed. People rationalized and compartmentalized and didn’t allow themselves to think about their slaves as full human beings. (People have a way of lying to themselves.)
Then like men in every country, when the war started, the men wanted to go and fight because “that’s where the war was.” Sometimes it doesn’t matter what it’s about.
My grandfather wanted to fight with his brothers and so he left home to be with them before he was old enough. He was at Shiloh, but he was too sick to fight. He did fight at the Battle of Stones River at Murfreesboro. He probably marched within a mile or so of the house where I live now even though that is far away from where he lived.
His age was discovered and he was sent back home until he came of age. He was on his way back to rejoin his brothers when he was captured and sent to Fort Douglas Prison Camp. It was located approximately where the University of Chicago is. (I think that’s correct.) He never recovered his health from that experience although he lived to be about 80. My father, born when granddaddy was 61, did hear him say that it would never have done for the South to have won the war.
I don’t hear white Southerns today going about bemoaning the fact that we lost our slaves or that we lost the war. We don’t romanticize the war so much as study it and educate ourselves. Often it’s about the land that we live on. We make a big deal about the old plantation homes because there are so few of them that weren’t burned.
There are some people who talk about the South rising again. They wear shirts made out of Confederate battle flags and they fit a lot of stereotypes. They are not typical of the South, but television certainly makes them seem that way. If you drive through the South, you will not automatically hear fiddle and banjo music coming out of the hills around you.
I have since I last wrote about all of this come across someone at my Club who is stone cold prejudiced. Well, two people actually. They looked like normal educated people and I had enjoyed their company for months. It has been a long time since I have been aware that such coldness existed.
I agree with all of this, but I wanted to add my own thoughts – The Confederacy lost!! It doesn’t matter how outmatched or whatever they were, at the end of the day, they lost! Even if we ignore the question about whether one can separate the validity of honoring one’s ancestors from the issue of slavery, when you’re proudly flying your Stars and Bars, you’re essentially saying, “Hooray for the losers!”
I mean, really. I don’t see a whole lot of people walking around in T-Shirts that proclaim “2007 New England Patriots – 16-0 baby!” because they lost the Super Bowl that year. And yet, people have absolutely no problem doing essentially just that with the Confederate flag.
I don’t dispute for a second that slavery was a major cause of the war, but not at all THE only cause and some of them were quite sound.
How about fighting for the fact that northern economic policies were blatantly unfair to the south. The high tariffs were the big one- the one which I had threatened secession twice- they benefited the north but were terrible for the south who had to suffer reciprocal tariffs on their cotton to England and their imports that could make the difference in a good year and a bad year- this was not a trivial thing at all.
It had already become clear that there was no compromise on the issue of taxes and the Senate and the House were stacked against the south. In spite of this the South is vital to the economy due to the wealth here: there were more millionaires in Natchez Mississippi alone than there were in New York City; there were more millionaires in Natchez, New Orleans and Charleston than in the entire rest of the nation combined, and they were being heavily taxed, and yet when Abraham Lincoln (who was not an abolitionist and in fact said many times he had no desire to end slavery) was elected it was without even being on the ballot in many southern states and without a single electoral vote from any southern state. (He only got 12 in his native Kentucky- 12 votes, not 12 electoral votes.)
The outrage over Lincoln’s election was not so much about him personally- most southerners like most northerners had only a slim notion who he was- but the symbolism of his election. It meant that the north and the western states had the electoral votes and the representation to dictate any policy they damned well liked to the South and to elect any president they chose.
This made it very clear that hereinout the North and the West will dictate policy and the South will do what they’re told. The South, to some extent understandably, said “Like Hell we will.” To many southerners this “taxation without representation” seemed like deja vu all over again; remember that there were still Revolutionary veterans (aka traitors against England) alive and most of the nation who had been here long enough could remember the Revolutionary veterans in their own family, and the Revolution was fought because Americans did not wish to be dictated to without being appropriately represented.
Jefferson Davis was in D.C. in 1848 so he may or may not have overheard the speech at top*, a philippic against the Mexican War, but he certainly echoed its sentiments in 1861 (when he was actually very against disunion- had preached against it in Maine and Mississippi and many points in between). However many southerners felt- and were at least somewhat justified in that feeling- that they were putting in more than they were getting out of the system, and like their fathers and grandfathers with England they wanted out.
As for slavery: evil, yes, but like the Mafia how do you get out once you’re in? A middle aged slave of no particular skills sold for more than a good sized farm or a good race horse; they represented a major part of the wealth of any slaveowner. Who could afford to free them? It took Lee and before him his [adoptive] grandfather-in-law Washington many years of enormous work to free up the estates enough to manumit them, and most never had that liberty. They were mortgaged, and once freed how kind to them was it? They couldn’t remain in most states, they had no money, they could not read, they had been kept deliberately ignorant, and they were going to be hated by those around them in the south and the north. I’m not saying they should not have been freed obviously, but that there was no quick way of doing it peacefully or without destroying the economy: only a gradual transition would have worked, and it’s doubtful this could ever have been affected.
But while perpetuating slavery was very much an issue for the South (and they lived in terror not of Lincoln himself so much as the notion that if a bill was ever introduced into the House or the Senate that ordered abolition it could easily pass with every single Southerner in Congress voting against it) ending slavery had next to nothing to do with the North’s decision to fight the South’s secession. For most it had absolutely nothing; when the Emancipation Proclamation was announced far from rejoicing many Union regiments were furious and threatened to go home if this war was about freeing the slaves. McLellan, who traveled with his own printing press when he was general, issued screeds on the subject (even saying he couldn’t stand the smell of “goats or n*ggers”), while the northerners were terrified that if free the slaves were going to come up there.
So why did the North want the South to remain when they longed to go? Constitutional reasons were a part, defense was a part, and the other 95% of the reason was money. They needed the southern economy.
And I mention because to me it’s extremely relevant: the only reason the North and the Midwest and the West didn’t have slavery was because it really wasn’t profitable or practical. They didn’t have agriculture based economies, and the factories worked much better with the neverending stream of immigrants who would work for next to nothing, and before the immigrants they DID have slavery and within living memory of this time. New York City alone had more slaves than any city in the south at one time- slave cemeteries had to be exhumed and moved to build Central Park just before the War; Benjamin Franklin is remembered today as an abolitionist when in fact he owned several slaves in his lifetime. Ulysses Grant- slaveowner for a time (manumitted them by the war, but a willing slaveowner nonetheless). The North had no moral highground; true there were abolitionists there, but they were usually hated and despised as zealots while most were of the “it doesn’t really affect me and I’ve more than enough problems that do” mindset; they were not fighting to free slaves.
Points:
1- The South had many very valid reasons to want to go its own way (though it’s also worth remembering that those opposed to secession were a very large faction in every state- some states rode neck in neck at the vote)
2- Slavery- reprehensible by today’s standards- had been in existence so long that most slaves were more likely to be the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of Africans brought here in ships than to be Africans themselves and had only been out of the north for a generation and that for financial rather than ethical reasons
3- Even Lincoln had spoken in defense of secession and self determination as an American ideal
4- It was impossible for slavery to be ended without collapsing the southern economy and yet the 1860 election made it very clear that the other states had the power to end it if they so desired
5- The South was suffering from trade policies that could not be repealed (and this had been a problem since even before 1820 but was getting worse- one of the first things Lincoln did do was more than double the tariffs they were already paying on imported goods [which made Europe reciprocate by taxing cotton more])
*delivered by Abraham Lincoln (W-IL), January 12, 1848, in the House of Reps., in the unlikely event anybody doesn’t know
Except the U.S. had mostly had relatively low tariffs during the thirty years before the war. The last major pre-war change was in 1857, when tariffs were lowered. Tariffs were only raised in 1861, after seven states had already seceded.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist in the sense of wanting direct federal action to end slavery in South Carolina or Mississippi (at least not in 1860), but it was no secret he was an anti-slavery man–as he wrote to Alexander Stephens “you think slavery is right and ought to be extended, while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted”.
Well slavery couldn’t be ended quickly, it would have destroyed the South’s economy. But it couldn’t be ended gradually either (as it had been in much of the North), since the South was ready to go to war at even the threat of restricting slavery’s spread. I guess it’s a good thing the Slave Power forced the issue at Fort Sumter and eventually gifted us with the Thirteenth Amendment (not to mention the Fourteenth).
Let’s not exaggerate here; Iowa and Illinois were no more industrial powerhouses than Alabama or Florida were. Parts of “the North” were cleary industrializing, but much of the Midwest was still a region of farms, not factories, yet the Midwest united with the Northeastern manufactured-goods-producing free-labor-using factory industrialists, not with the Southern agricultural-commodity-producing slave-labor-using plantation industrialists.
I don’t see how anyone can have an axe to grind against all the Southern soldiers who fought in the CSA. Most of them were just dirt-poor Scots-Irish farmers who didn’t know or care about the issue of slavery. As in most wars the people doing the actual fighting and killing are totally removed from the decision-makers at the top.
The Morrill Tariff Actpassed the House in March 1860, 8 months before Lincoln was elected and a full year before Sumter. Every Southern rep but one voted against it; it still passed. It bumped taxes from 19% to 26% on some items, up from 21% to 36% on dutiable. The South was already paying 80% of all import taxes, now they would be paying closer to 90%. They were absolutely right to be pissed off.
Rather like saying "he was pot legalization in the sense that he wanted to legalize pot. “Wanting direct federal action to end slavery” is what abolition was. Lincoln was, as you say, anti-expansionist- a very big difference and one recognized in the South. There were Southerners (Robert E. Lee among them) who were anti-expansionists. The Confederate Constitution in fact leaves slavery as a state level issue, something the US Constitution did not do.
And over tariffs. And over being overtaxed and having no representational redress. And over many other factors.
The Midwest was largely settled by immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany and small farmers from Illinois and the border states and the South who moved there to get away from slavery (usually not for ethical reasons so much as small business owners wanting to relocate where there’s no WalMart, one of the major reasons Tom Lincoln left Kentucky a generation before). The cash crops of Iowa and Nebraska were corn, potatoes, and other items that were not as high maintenance as cotton and could far more easily be managed on a family farm level. Missouri did grow cotton as well as some tobacco and rice and consequently had a lot more slaves and was a lot more divided.
I’m not sure I’d call losing votes in the house/senate as ‘no representational redress’. I’d call that ‘part of democracy’.
And excuse this Canadian’s foggy memories of US history, but didn’t voting southerners have their voting power magnified by all the non-voting slaves that counted (partially) towards drawing district lines?
Thousands of people wear Chicago Cubs gear with no recent success to fall back upon. There were probably vets of the Civil War ALIVE the last time that the Cubs won a world series. Not everyone is a band wagon jumper.
Uh, no. While both Washington and Jefferson owned slaves to characterize them as people who “thought nothing of having slaves” is wholly inaccurate.
Odesio
Well, not quite all able bodied men 18-45. I seem to remember certain professions were exempt as required for the war effort. And also those who owned 20 or more slaves didn’t have to fight to preserve the right to keep them. That specific exemption says rather a lot about the motivation behind the continued rebellion.
The war was originally about secession, not slavery. The southern states wanted to leave the union, which theoretically should have been constitutionally possible.
thoughts – The Confederacy lost!! It doesn’t matter how outmatched or whatever they were, at the end of the day, they lost! Even if we ignore the question about whether one can separate the validity of honoring one’s ancestors from the issue of slavery, when you’re proudly flying your Stars and Bars, you’re essentially saying, “Hooray for the losers!”