This is really more Dennis G’s bag, but….
At South Carolina’s Secession Gala, men in frock coats and militia uniforms and women in hoopskirts will sip mint juleps as a band called Unreconstructed plays “Dixie.” In Georgia, they will re-enact the state’s 1861 secession convention. And Alabama will hold a mock swearing-in of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
[….]“The interesting thing about the Civil War, unlike almost any other war, is generally the victor is the one who controls the story,” Sutton said. “The Civil War is different in that the Lost Cause really was the message about the Civil War well into the 20th century.”
An honest question: does the Civil War dominate American politics today? I don’t just mean that American politics is mostly about race — although it obviously is — I also mean that the mining of lost causes for political gold is an outgrowth of the fixation with the ultimate lost cause, the southern side in the Civil War. I’m sure every society has a hankering for the good old days, when teh gay took place on the DL and so on, but I wonder if this hankering is especially politically powerful in the US because a whole quarter of the country has romantic notions of what brave southern gentlemen did when they fought in the war of northern aggression.
eemom
Virgil Kane warn’t no rich ass slaveowner.
Like his father before him, he was a working man.
And like his brother before him, he took a rebel stand.
Dollared
No. I still think it comes down to the war between capital and labor. Up north, that is.
Down south, they still don’t have an industrial economy. And they are totally still sucking the federal teat.
But what they do have is the swing vote between Capital and Labor. So their bigotry and backwardness is what determines what gets done in this pathetic country.
Mike Kay (Team America)
OMFG!
NOT BILL CLINTON – NOT HISTORY’S WORST MONSTER! NOT HIM!
Johannes
@eemom: In other words, Virgil was a schmuck.
charlie
The most bizarre thing about the South is that they are living a lie–that the Civil War was about anything other than the ability to buy and sell people. The myths about the Civil War are an example of a mass delusion. Someone needs to study this and understand how it is possible.
Southern Beale
In the South? Yeah.
Ya know, back when I was a baby newspaper reporter I got sent to cover the Georgia Assn. of Fairs & Expositions meeting (for real) and on their final night they have a banquet where musical artists wanting to perform at fairs all across the state do showcases. 2-3 songs per act. These are not big name acts, mind you, but the little wannabe regional gospel and country acts whose bread and butter is playing podunk fairs and festivals until they can make it big.
So anyway, here I am newly arrived from California and along comes one country band to play “Dixie.” And damn if every person in the room didn’t stop what they were doing and stand at attention, like it was the fucking national anthem or something. Some people had their hands over their hearts. And when the band was done playing “Dixie” everyone sat down and went back to eating their rubber chicken and overcooked green beans.
Swear to God. I was like, WTF?
But that’s not the weird part. The weird part is about 2 acts later, another band played “Dixie.” And damn if every single person in the room didn’t stand at attention again!
Weirdest fucking thing I’d seen in my life. Welcome to the South.
The Pale Scot
I believe one of the fellows over at Obsidian Wings? did a series that did this topic justice, I’m sure the hive mind will arrive shortly and correct me. I’ll look for it ‘morrow if not.
Short answer, yes.
South’s Succession Commemoration
The Pale Scot
Or maybe it was here back in the day?
Southern Beale
Also, don’t know if anyone here reads Pat Conroy but I just finished his “My Reading Life,” his memoir of books that were important to him. The chapter on “Gone With The Wind” was quite an eye-opener. It gives great insight into what Southerners, 100+ years later, think of the Civil War and what the rest of the nation thinks of the Civil War.
eemom
@Johannes:
he was a low-information voter.
General Stuck
The civil war was more than just about slavery, though that was the proximate cause. It was about a beloved way of life, that often came into stark contrast with the founding principles of the union, and still does in many ways, not that far below the surface. A contrast that ran the gambit starting with the whole equality thingy, religion and it’s place in society, regressive taxation etc… A way of life so beloved, the denizens of the south were willing to sacrifice their blood and treasure nearly to the last drop to preserve/ That kind of commitment to a cherished thing doesn’t die easy.
BGinCHI
There’s a hell of a big difference between being interested in the Civil War and treating it as though you were its lingering victim. My experiences of living in the south have been that this breaks down along somewhat predictable lines.
Those who live in a fantasy land (right wingers) where everything is everyone else’s fault and you cling to nostalgia for the golden age.
And those for whom history is a complex, mixed bag (the left, mostly) where events have left a mark worth thinking about. There are lots of stories for this group and they need sorting out. This is where the great novelists and historians live and breathe.
And if you need reminding that Southern Culture is not on the skids, just pick up an Oxford American.
DougJ
@BGinCHI:
Hey, I still haven’t used Southern Culture on the Skids as a post title. Don’t spoil it.
cmorenc
For many native white southerners, the Civil War on the southern side is the noble lost cause.
However, for a far larger number of Americans (and Tea Partiers, for that matter) the key mythical era was that of the old American West, western-migrating whites edition, including the cowboys and pioneers who could stake their claim on land resources with minimal interference from government, and be self-sufficient. What do you think the Sarah Palin myth is all about (including in her own mind?) Self-made, self-sufficient, free-living murkans. To some extent the era between about 1800 and 1900 lived up to this ideal for some people, but much of it is a myth for a great many other people, and such truth as it had has become watered down in the reality that the modern west is heavily dependent on federal subsidy and support on a variety of fronts, most especially Alaska. It also papers over how railroads and big corporate interests (local big landowners and business interests too) often ran roughshod over smaller people back in pioneer and early post-pioneer days, just like today’s post-industrial America.
General Stuck
And btw, am about halfway through US Grants memoirs. I thought it would be tough reading, but turns out to be one of the best and most easily read works I’ve ever encountered.
Southern Beale
@eemom:
I heard that from this day on, Virgil owned his father’s gun, took his horse and rode the northern plain.
Or maybe that’s another song.
BGinCHI
@DougJ: I used it in an actual sentence and I’m deep in the red wine.
High five across the Great Lakes.
BGinCHI
@General Stuck: There’s been an interesting reappraisal of his presidency, too. I need to have a look at the memoirs. Thanks for the reminder.
Now, I just need to finish writing a piece on Venus & Adonis and then have a look at that Twain autobiography….
Cacti
So, when’s the reenactment of Sherman’s march to the sea?
Or the surrender at Appomattox?
ogliberal
@Johannes: That song is just some damned hippie socialist Canadian trying to make Southern heroic men look like a bunch of whiny crybabies, fighting in vain for the Lost Cause.
Southern Beale
Also when I worked at a National Recreation Area I had to help out at the Civil War Reenactment they had every year, directing cars and stuff. It was completely surreal. I just don’t get it, getting all dressed up to recreate a shitty war no one wanted to be in anyway. I’m thinking, “y’all know how this ends, right?”
I’ve lived in Tennessee 24 years and it still baffles the hell out of me.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@General Stuck: It was pretty much all about slavery. Everything else was just an excuse: From the Texas Declaration of Secession:
Andy K
@General Stuck:
Dude, if you bring this over to TNC’s place, be prepared to get called out on it pronto. This has been hashed and rehashed over there for the last 8 months, and the conclusion is always ‘Dress it up any way you want, but it was about slavery’.
asiangrrlMN
@The Pale Scot: Both Dennis G. here and Ta-nehisi Coates have done excellent work on this subject. It boggles my mind that this is even up for debate (what the reason for the war was and who attacked and who, I don’t know, won), but apparently, it is. Over at TNC, we’ve floated an idea of having a Miscegenation Ball at the same time as the Secession Gala/Ball. I would be down with that.
@Andy K: Yeppers. He and the commentariat dismantle it every which way of Sunday.
ETA: Even going with the ‘preserve the way of life’ meme, that way of life was predicated on having slaves do the hard manual labor.
mclaren
I like this historical re-enactment thing. Let’s send some army troops down there to re-enact arresting all those scumbags for treason. Then let’s have a pretend re-enactment of General Sherman burning Atlanta to the ground.
Wanna play pretend, motherfuckers? Let’s play pretend.
Andy K
@General Stuck:
Great style, but he lies about Thomas. So did Sherman and Schofield in their memoirs. Always remember that.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Southern Beale: Remember, according to some people, the Civil War hasn’t ended. One guy that John posted about a while back said that it couldn’t have ended because God doesn’t lose.
Corner Stone
“One book, “Swedish-made Pen!s Enlargers And Me: This Sort of Thing Is My Bag Baby”, by Austin Powers. “
Andy K
@asiangrrlMN:
Got a date for that yet?
Jamie
It’s hard to believe this discussion is still going on. A significant portion of this country has gone nuts.
asiangrrlMN
@Andy K: Nope. You wanna be my date? I’m just not sure if I’m considered white or non-white according to the ethos of the time. There weren’t many Asians around.
@Southern Beale: YOU LIE! That has to be photoshopped. That thing is freaking ugly and scary–and just plain wrong.
I think we should reenact the Slave Rebellion/Uprising, too.
Davis X. Machina
@General Stuck: I felt, immediately, on first reading Grant’s Memoirs, in my middle age, that here was the first modern American. It’s as if the book came from a different, but English-speaking, country from the Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville of my youth.
A palpable ‘click’. Was it Twain’s editing? There’s a controversy on that, IIRC, how much was Grant’s authentic voice, etc. I suspect that’s part of the systematic attack on Grant from Reconstruction on….
General Stuck
@Andy K:
Why would I get called out on that? I said it was the proximate cause, which means the primary one. Slavery was the most important element of that way of life, that the entire economy was based on, but there were other parts of that way of life based on an aristocracy and caste system that didn’t much allow for anything like middle class, but more like rich whites and poor whites. Among other stuff. I don’t think the south would have been willing to sacrifice to the degree they did, on anything other than the right to own slaves, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t other cultural elements as well.
Southern Beale
@mclaren:
Yeah, not quite so glamorous when someone slips dysentery into your canteen now is it?
LOL
So, speaking of the Civil War, y’all have to click on this link to see the most hideous statue ever known to man. It’s in Nashville, right on I-65, a horrible eyesore to anyone traveling into the city. Unfortunately it’s on private land, built with private money, so it’s not like anyone could stop it or anything. It created a huge uproar when the guy built it, not only because it’s a memorial to Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Confederacy, but it’s also hilariously ugly.
To get a better idea of how ugly, there’s a close-up photo here.
MikeJ
@mclaren:
You can’t reënact what didn’t happen the first time. They decided to look forward, not back.
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@cmorenc:
Agree.
And I’d add that what’s often overlooked is that all those self-reliant Western pioneers relied on the military to clear that new found land of Native Americans.
Regarding corporations, The Octopus by Frank Norris is a good story of the brutality of the Southern Pacific in California. It was required reading when I was in high school because the “Battle of Mussel Slough” happened less than 20 miles from my hometown.
Andy K
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Heh.
The way it worked out, the white men who lived in congressional districts with a lot of slaves had a lot more political rights than those who lived in districts with low slave populations- not only in Washington, but in their state capitals, too. No wonder that Appalachia was very pro-Union.
Southern Beale
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Umm .. I missed that.
Thankfully.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Southern Beale: That’s funny. I like how the owner is careful not to fly the confederate flag as high as the US flag.
Southern Beale
@asiangrrlMN:
Sadly this is not a lie. You can see it yourself on I-65 just south of downtown Nashville. And believe it or not some assholes spent THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS making that thing. Can you believe it?
mclaren
@General Stuck:
Ulysses S. Grant is by far the best writer among the presidents. His autobiography is far and away the best book by any president, unless you count JFK’s Profiles In Courage…which was actually written by Ted Sorenson.
Southern Beale
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Apparently in the lexicon of statues (I’m sure there’s a term for it but I don’t know what it is), the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue is also grossly incorrect. Something about both horse’s legs being off the ground, which is supposed to mean the rider died in battle or some such.
AnotherBruce
@Dollared:
I don’t mean to pick on you but “Bullshit” the south does indeed have an industrial economy. What they don’t have is a union workforce. That’s why they have an industrial economy.
If you don’t understand how the modern Captains of Industry operate, you won’t understand why the south has stolen industry from the north. It’s not merely for cheap labor, they can get that anywhere. These captains have found an interesting way of converting labor from union to non-union while still getting enough votes out of the south to pretend that we are still a democracy. They won’t have to pretend much longer.
We are being ruled by a number of people who know how to manipulate hatred. Given very recent history, that’s not a very comforting thought.
Andy K
@asiangrrlMN:
Yeah, you’re on!
@General Stuck:
Because every last other cause you might raise either goes directly back to slavery or is a cause invented in the aftermath of the war. Slavery wasn’t very near the cause of the war, or the primary cause: It was THE cause.
asiangrrlMN
@Southern Beale: That is really fucking ugly and creepy. That alone should be grounds for razing the thing.
@Andy K: Hey. I was thinking of wearing this, but in black. What do you think?
Suffern ACE
@asiangrrlMN: It is after Labor Day so white is out, but in black, you might be mistaken for a mourner. Tough call.
Andy K
@Southern Beale:
Oh, for Christ’s sake….
I used to work with a guy who was Nashville born and bred, and asked him if there was anything there commemorating Thomas’ and the Army of the Cumberland’s annihilation of Hood and the Army of Tennessee there…Trevor looked and me funny and asked, seriously, “There was a big battle around Nashville?”
Southern Beale
@AnotherBruce:
We do have unions here but it’s fucking hard to get them going.
UAW has been trying to unionize the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee for over 10 years, finally gave up in September. Would have been the first foreign-owned plant for the UAW to organize.
The UAW was in the Saturn plant here, but of course Saturn went kaput when GM went kaput.
People here don’t trust unions, which I don’t understand. There were some really big union actions here back in the day. The coal mines and whatnot … but people have been fed anti-union propaganda on talk radio and all that … only when they are paid in chewing gum wrappers will they suddenly decide that maybe unions aren’t such a bad thing after all.
Andy K
@asiangrrlMN:
That works for me.
I was thinking tuxedo t-shirt and stovepipe hat for myself.
Southern Beale
@Andy K:
Well your friend must be on crack, because there are TONS of signs all around Nashville commemorating the Battle of Nashville and Hood’s Retreat and all that. Historic markers, statues, historic sites. Hell, there’s a redoubt up the street from me, with a Civil War canon and big signs and everything, maintained by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans or some such. Ask your friend if he knows where Fort Negley is (it’s next to our baseball stadium). He probably doesn’t know it’s related to the Civil War.
Oh no, the Civil War is VERY present in Nashville.
The Pale Scot
@The Pale Scot:
The link in my note up top is to a Daily Show bit from this week “Saying slavery was the cause of the South’s secession during the Civil War isn’t politically correct — it’s correct correct.” The bit covers a Sons of the Confederacy TV ad, and the comments there are telling.
“We must recognize the grave consequences that freeing the slaves would have had on the south. First and foremost, whites were significantly outnumbered by slaves and for that reason alone had no reason to want emancipation.”
Yea Right.
All but one of the Confederate states had protecting slavery in the boilerplate of their declaration of succession.
asiangrrlMN
@Suffern ACE: Hm. This is true. Maybe red, then. I like red.
@Andy K: Cool! Of course, if I wanted to be more formal, I could wear this (in black. I don’t wear pink/puke green, either) with the parasol. I have the lace gloves to match. Snicker.
Pale Scot, correct correct. I like that. I will have to use that.
Redshift
@Southern Beale: Yeah, I still remember the stories from a friend of mine who was a page in the Virginia Legislature in the late 70s. (We were both from northernmost Northern Virginia, which hasn’t been “the South” for quite a long time.) After getting back, he told us, “It’s a different world down there. When they play ‘Dixie’, everybody stands up.”
dcdl
Being from the west coast most people are like ‘huh’ with the South’s fixation with the Civil War and could care less. What is the South’s fixation with the Civil War and religion. Do they have nothing better to do with their lives? Do they have nothing else to talk about? Because over here from the West Coast looking towards the South it just looks sad and pathetic that they can’t move on and try and make something of their lives. Maybe I’m overgeneralizing, but the few times I was south it was Confederate flags, churches everywhere (kind of like how drive thru espresso stands are everywhere where I’m from), and grits.
Andy K
@Southern Beale:
Heehee…Okay, he was simply simple about it. Too late to call him on it now- he moved to N.C. 10 years ago, and I lost track of him.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN:
In the East you would have been very exotic. Out West you would have been Chinese no matter where you were actually from and regarded as better than a slave but not by much. The closest parallel I can think of is being Indian in South Africa under apartheid. Better than being a native African but still not as equal as the white folk.
Comrade Luke
@General Stuck:
What’s the name of the Grant’s memoirs book?
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: So for the ball would I be white or black? And, you better come. I wanna dance with you (I bet you’re a good dancer). Hi! How you be. One more morning shift, right?
ETA: If I was considered white, then I couldn’t bring Andy K. as my date. Then I’m taking ABL!
@Andy K: ::Looks askance at you:: I was KIDDING. I am not a frilly lace kinda gal. But, then again, it is the South. And, DUH. Of course I would wear the other underneath.
General Stuck
@Andy K:
Must be pedant night. I didn’t say “one of the causes” or that there were other proximate causes. I said slavery was the proximate cause for the war.
And it was the “legal cause” used by southern states to secede from the union.
MikeJ
@Comrade Luke: Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. Grant, available in all your favorite ebook formats.
Andy K
@asiangrrlMN:
Well, you could wear that, but only if you’re wearing the other choice beneath it. It’s very pretty, though.
JWL
The victors post-war narrative of the lost cause did much to re-unite the country.
“They fought honorably for a misguided purpose”.
But that narrative contained repercussions that the historically illiterate exploit to this day.
General Stuck
@Comrade Luke:
Here it is. I’m reading it off my desktop version of Kindle.
Comrade Luke
@MikeJ:
LOL. Good one. Stupid me for thinking it would called something different.
Andy K
@General Stuck:
My bad, Stuck. I was thinking of the first couple of definitions found here. Je suis un imbecile.
General Stuck
@Andy K:
no problemo :)
AnotherBruce
@Southern Beale:
Maybe Southerners hate the word “union” for obvious associative reasons. I don’t know, I don’t live there. There has to be a lot of resentment amongst any people that have been defeated.
But every time I hear the many variations of “we should have let the south secede” I try to remember that there are a lot of good people, brown and white, in the south.
asiangrrlMN
@AnotherBruce: Yes. There are. And, there are many assholes of all colors up in the north. Plus, the secession mentality is no longer strictly held in the south. We have some batshitcrazies (Michele Bachmann) in MN, too. We narrowly escaped having a batshitcrazy rightwinger as governor. So, we don’t have much room to talk.
hamletta
@Southern Beale: My neighbor was a union organizer who had her car torched while it was sitting in the driveway. Coulda set off the whole neighborhood.
That whole block of rednecks near me is union strong Democrats. They’re some of the last holdouts, I guess.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: One more fucking morning of getting up at o dark thirty then night shift bliss is mine once again. I’m rather excited and fucking exhausted right now. I fell asleep at the computer earlier, but I’m a bit more alert now.
And nothing says teh hawt like a classic Victorian tux. If I ever get married (you can stop giggling now) I’d be wearing this. But mine would be white.
ETA: PETTICOATS!! At least twenty underneath. Or the Scarlett O’Hara bloom dress wider than a semi truck.
Andy K
@asiangrrlMN:
We got a lot of southerners up here in Michigan when the assembly lines needed manning. Flint has a suburb named Burton, Detroit has Ferndale. They’re known as Burtucky and Ferntucky (sorry again, Stuck).
In Wyoming- a suburb of my own Grand Rapids- there’s a neighborhood that popped up around the old Kelvinator plant last century that’s called Lee. The high school’s mascot? The Rebels, of course.
AnotherBruce
@asiangrrlMN:
Hell I’ve got them in my own family. I can’t scream at them for this, all I can do is make them question what they hear on Fox News. Believe it or not, they listen. The problem is those family members live closer to their TVs than they do to me and so hear it from those unreconstructed assholes more often. So I don’t get their attention as much as I would like. Forget writing letters to my congressman, I’m starting to think that writing letters to my mother would be more effective.
asiangrrlMN
Two links and one reply! Why can’t I do that any more?
FYWP!
@Yutsano: If I ever get married (you may stop guffawing now), then I would wear black–or red. You would be dashing in that. Oooooh! I like this dress. It’d be in winter, outside.
I’m glad you’re moving back to the second shift.
P.S. I know petticoats. Sigh. Sex-deterrent!
asiangrrlMN
@Andy K: Yeah. The mentality is everywhere, I bet. Well, maybe not San Francisco and NYC, but that’s about it. Oh, and Boston.
@AnotherBruce: I feel for you. I do not have any immediate relatives who are flaming rightwingers. My bro, though, voted for W. twice for moral reasons (read, religious). It’s taken eight years, but I’m moved him to independent. But, to be fair to him, he is pretty much a lefty except for moral issues.
@freelancer: That’s sick and wrong and very funny.
freelancer
@Yutsano:
She’s pretty for a Chinese.
Chuck Butcher
I live in Baker City, Baker County, Oregon. Named for Senator (Col.) Edward D Baker (R-OR) killed in the Civil War and the only sitting US Senator to die in a military engagement. Oh, we do remember – Lee and Grant were classmates and Lee didn’t even know who he was. Sure, it’s easy to be the ass-kicker and not have to make a sad pathetic deal out of it.
Sherman didn’t burn Atlanta, there is some question how exactly the fire started, possibly looters (Union or locals), but it was not Sherman’s doing.
Angry Black Lady
@asiangrrlMN: i’m in!
asiangrrlMN
@Angry Black Lady: Cool. If I’m considered black, then you’ll have to find another date.
I could just do a Morticia for my wedding dress (STOP laughing, Yutsy!).
ETA: The other thing is most Asian women in the states at that time (read, Chinese in SF) were prostitutes.
Yutsano
@freelancer: Am I wrong for thinking every clown from the AEI deserves to be treated just like that in every interview? I wonder how he got
connedtalked into that. It was pretty priceless.@Angry Black Lady: And it didn’t even involve beer!!
JWL
Chuck Butcher: “Lee and Grant were classmates”.
No, Chuck, they weren’t.
Both were graduates of West Point, however.
Angry Black Lady
@Yutsano: wait, no beer? i’m out!
Andy K
@Chuck Butcher:
No, they were years- if not decades- apart.
IIRC, the story is that they crossed paths very briefly during the Mexican-American War. Grant brought this up at the surrender parlay, and Lee didn’t recall meeting Grant.
(Lee was a Major or Colonel at the time of the M-A War, and was very well known for his lineage as well as his legend while a cadet at West Point. The entire officer corps knew of him. Grant was a 2nd Lieutenant at the time, and a very middling cadet. And they weren’t in the same unit during the war, so…)
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I thought he was a fake.
@Angry Black Lady: Come back! I’ll supply the beer!
@Yutsano: Oooooh, rum. I like rum.
Yutsano
@Angry Black Lady: I think you shall have to settle for mint juleps and fine rum punch. There will at the very least be liquor, but beer didn’t really catch on in the US until after the second German immigrant wave right before the Civil War. And it didn’t percolate south until well after.
@asiangrrlMN: Possibly. But I’m pretty sure there’s a douchenozzle from AEI by that name. Who I think looks like that. It wouldn’t shock me if the Onion suckered him into it.
Andy K
@asiangrrlMN:
So was I. I think we should do a John and Yoko thing.
And I’m down for ABL joining in on the fun, too. SWING, BABY!
J. Michael Neal
In four years, we get to celebrate Sherman’s March to the Sea. I say we do it up all formal and proper.
asiangrrlMN
@Andy K: That would be excellent. Three is better than two. Ebony, ivory, and jade.
And, we have snow. Supposed to get one-two feet. I haz a happy.
James E. Powell
@cmorenc:
the key mythical era was that of the old American West, western-migrating whites edition, including the cowboys and pioneers who could stake their claim on land resources with minimal interference from government, and be self-sufficient.
Wait a minute. Wasn’t it the government interference, that is the U.S. Army, that killed all those Native Americans and moved them off of that land so that those hardy, independent settlers could stake their claims? Wasn’t it the government that gave the land and monopolies to the railroads so they could control the economies of all those independent towns?
Andy K
@James E. Powell:
Kinda, sorta…But not quite.
The government gave the railroads the land and the right of way. Then, as the railroads were catching shit from the Native Americans for killing off the bison (which were interfering with the right of way), the government sent in the army to “protect” the railroad. Then the towns and farms started sprouting up along the rail lines.
GregB
Any chance some of us Northerners can head down and re-enact Sherman’s March?
Yutsano
@GregB: I hope so. I’ll make farfalle for the wonderful symbiology.
J. Michael Neal
@AnotherBruce:
I don’t think we should have let them secede. I think we should have treated them as the traitors they were, occupy their land, ban their previous political parties, deconfederate the place, and maybe make them send their industry to Russia as reparations. We should have gone all Germany 1945 on them. If that required a strategic bombing campaign, then do that, too.
I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t successfully conquer somewhere (by which I mean remake it’s society and polity as you want it) without battering the populace into utter submission. The conquests of Germany and Japan weren’t successful despite us flattening the countries; they were successful because we flattened them.
It’s ugly. It’s inhumane. In fact, it’s criminal. It’s also the only way to do the job. If you aren’t prepared to commit massive war crimes, then don’t fight a war of conquest. That’s why they should be really fucking rare. But you can’t really get rid of the Nazis, or the Confederacy, if you aren’t. At best, you’ll get a half assed victory that doesn’t really solve the problems, like in 1865 or 1918. Either do it right, or don’t even try to do it, and live with those sorts of regimes.
J. Michael Neal
@James E. Powell: Pfft. Next you’ll be telling me that the civil war was about slavery.
freelancer
@GregB:
Sign me up. I’ll re-enact my grandfather’s grandfather, who was a soldier who got injured just outside of Atlanta. But before that, he killed him some traitors with Sherman on the March.
JWL
I wonder: Does the President believe that there is such a thing as the “peoples airwaves”? Or will he acknowledge that the airwaves are corporate owned?
DPirate
@charlie: I wouldn’t say they are “living a lie” any more than any descendant of a vietnam veteran is. They are entitled to honor their soldiers who, I feel safe in saying, were no more informed about economic root causes than any other foot soldier throughout history. They fought according to their allegiances, as they saw them.
These celebrations, as well as American politics as a whole, are not “mostly about race”, except, it seems, to those who keep insisting.
@Andy K: Wrong. It was money. Slaves made money. That is the root. If they had robots that ran on gruel, they’d have used them instead.
Yutsano
@DPirate: Slaves also kept down the cost of white labor so that there was always an underclass regardless of race. So really only the rich benefited from actually owning humans.
Andy K
@GregB:
Okay, George-Thomas-related rant here….
The March to the Sea was highly overrated. Not only that, it was a stupid move that could have cost the Union the war.
It was overrated because once Sherman took and held Atlanta, major rail hub between the east and the west, he had effectively cut the supplies moving from the west to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Yes, Sherman made a wide swath of Georgia start a-howlin’, but he also helped make the Lost Cause as deeply ingrained as we now know it.
The stupidity came in the way he divided up his forces as he left for Savannah. He not only took the majority of the soldiers of three armies (of the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Cumberland), and most of the horses, but he took the most experienced soldiers…For a campaign during which he knew he’d face minimal opposition!
So he left Thomas with the rest of the command, and much of that was spread out all the way from Atlanta back to Nashville, guarding the supply lines. He left Thomas with fewer men than Hood, and far, far fewer cavalry mounts. He left Thomas at Atlanta after Hood had already begun to move towards Atlanta.
It’s only by the grace of the FSM that Hood stopped at Florence for three whole weeks to resupply and rest. It’s that same bit of grace that allows Thomas’ force, under that political dolt, Schofield, to sneak by Hood after Spring Hill, the Union men passing by the Rebs by just yards in the dead of night. Meanwhile, Thomas is in Nashville, scrambling to patch together an army that can stop Hood from getting into Kentucky and on to the Ohio River. And then, not by the grace of any deity, but by the brilliance of Thomas, the Army of the Cumberland absolutely hammers Hood at Nashville, destroying the Army of Tennessee fo good.
But if Thomas doesn’t stop Hood, we wouldn’t be talking about the March to the Sea, Sherman and Grant in anything other than the most derogatory terms today.
Just. Sayin’.
Angry Black Lady
@Yutsano: I’m back in!
Odie Hugh Manatee
I am not interested in war re-enacting, not in the least. I am all for learning about war, it’s causes, it’s outcomes and the horrors of it though. I have no problem with monuments to fallen heroes, as long as they are of the victors. For some reason, the south has this unending fascination with the Civil War, much more so than their northern counterparts. With all of the flags and monuments they have to their various fallen “heroes” in the south, you would think that they won the war or at least fought it to a draw.
They lost. They haven’t gotten over it either.
I saw one of the more recent attempts of one southern organization to rewrite the history of the civil war, placing the blame for the war squarely on the shoulders of the north. The north is portrayed as having long been sucking the economic life out of the south, with the resulting secession being a patriotic attempt to keep the south free from the tyranny of the north and to return to the principles of government that the founding fathers believed in (sound familiar?). That this is complete bullshit is not important to the southern revisionists, they have their story and they are sticking to it come hell or high water. Unfortunately, too many stupid and bigoted people will wrap their arms around this story and embrace it as the Holy Truth.
I would be perfectly happy to see all war re-enactments stopped, all memorials that glorify the “heroes” of the losing side destroyed and all of their flags burned and banned (or at least publicly scorned). The history of the south is full of death, injury, hate, divisiveness, bigotry, suffering and bitterness, most of it related to their past practices of slavery, their fight to keep it and how they ended up dealing with losing it.
Allowing them to glorify the symbols and people who divided the nation in a selfish attempt to continue the enslavement of people is just wrong.
Andy K
@DPirate:
Money or power?
3/5 Clause gave each and every voter in a district with slaves more power in the House than his counterparts in non-slave districts anywhere in the nation. That is, the slaveholding South could control the government – taxes, purchases, economic policy, whatnot- because of over-representation predicated on slavery.
Missouri Compromise or Kansas-Nebraska Act ringing any bells? To keep pace in the House with free states that saw their own populations exploding, the slaveholding states had to spread slavery to new states.
Money, based on power, based on slavery.
freelancer
@Angry Black Lady:
Lawdy! Where da shindig at?
Ija
@DPirate:
I don’t think people have a problem with honoring the soldiers. It’s the honoring of the Lost Cause that people have a problem with. Honoring the secession, honoring what is essentially a traitorous cause.
Ija
And it would be great while they are honoring the soldiers, they could maybe admit that slavery is after all related to the war. Is that too much to ask?
Yutsano
@freelancer: Somewhere, but I’ll bring the mint and the bourbon.
Ija
And what does this have to do with honoring the soldiers? Honoring the soldiers is just a canard, they want to honor something else.
freelancer
@Yutsano:
The bourbon will do just fine. I’m low maintenance. Though, what are your thoughts on meta-ironic-blackface?
I’m of the opinion that it’s still fucked up.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Ija:
We’ll see just how they commemorate the start of the war with these celebrations, which will probably be quite loudly and cheerfully.
Let’s see if they do similar justice to commemorating the end of the war as well…lol!
Yutsano
@freelancer:
I would have accepted uncreative and stupid as correct answers as well.
Andy K
Yeah, I think so, Doug.
There’s really no difference between the “Damned Yankees staring down their noses at us!” sentiment and the “Brie-eating, Ivy League Liberal Elites!” sentiment. Nullification is still nullification. And holding the hard line on the Missouri Compromise/Kansas-Nebraska Act, hinting and/or threatening to take the ball and go home, and gumming up the legislative process in the mean time? That’s happening with damned near every piece of legislation proposed by Democrats, isn’t it?
So even if it isn’t about slavery or racism (and there is racism in a lot of it), it’s still the same tactics.
freelancer
@Yutsano:
But what if I could find a black friend to do it, y’know, go the full Al Jolson route? I have tons of black friends!
How’s that for meta?
annamissed
More than anything what the civil war was the first real clash between the old agrarian tribal system and the emerging industrial revolution modernity. Typical of this cultural clash was the fact that the antebellum south was so invested in the static and uncreative ideological model of society that it produced no significant invention. While in the north, modernity was embraced with great vigor and enthusiasm and literally exploded with creative invention, like the steamboat, anesthesia, the sewing machine, electric motor, mass production, interchangeable parts, the revolver, vulcanized rubber, and last but not least the cotton gin .
For some reason we continue still, to allow this backward fever dream of America to trace out its narrative onto the body politic like a death wish.
J. Michael Neal
@Andy K:
I disagree. I think the Lost Cause would have been every bit as deeply embedded in the South, March to the Sea or not. It may have given them a particular focal point, but they’d have found something else if they’d had to.
I agree with Sherman that he was demonstrating the only way possible to really, truly, make the South understand that they were beaten. Simply defeating the armies of a modern nation (and the Confederacy was a nation, if an illegitimate state) will not, ever, be enough to convince them that they really lost. For fuck’s sake, to give a partially pre-modern example, the Serbs got their asses kicked six ways to Sunday by the Turks, and they still didn’t accept that they had lost.
If you do not bring a war home to the civilian population, you can’t conquer them. I’ve tried thinking of an example in which it has been done, and I can’t come up with one. It certainly didn’t happen to the French in 1815; the ideals of the revolution never died out, and came back to take the country over again. (I happen to think that this was a good thing, but opinions may differ.) It didn’t work in the Confederacy. A second world war was necessary to do it to the Germans.
You cannot force a society to remodel itself through military victories.
Dennis SGMM
I remember seeing “Forget Hell” license plates when I was down South years ago. So I did a Google image search…
Pretty much says it all.
Yutsano
@freelancer: Ha! You can’t fool me! There are no black people in Nebraska! Well, besides those on the Nebraska football team, but they’re not exactly there by choice! So I ain’t buying your meta!
freelancer
@Yutsano:
Nebraska is drive through country, but Omaha’s pretty diverse.
Yutsano
@freelancer: That’s true of a lot of the more urban areas in the Midwest these days. Hell even Cheyenne has a synagogue now.
Calouste
@cmorenc:
The Old West was also about stealing from colored people, Native Americans in this case, with a dash of Asians thrown in for forced labor.
Come to think of it, when has the USA not been about stealing from and exploiting colored people? It started with slavery, then the Old West, then they stole Hawai’i from the natives and occupied a number of Central American countries for the fruit companies and after that they moved to the Middle East for oil.
Andy K
@J. Michael Neal:
Yeah, I understand what you’re saying, but take a look at, say, the Shenendoah Valley, where the shooting war raged for years…Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the bitterness isn’t there, was never there, like it was in Georgia, the difference being that the people of the Valley saw two armies waging the battles that ruined their homes, while those Georgians watched Sherman’s army march almost completely unopposed, pillaging the homes occupied by women, old men, children and slaves. The bile down there in Georgia, I think, comes from a sense that Sherman didn’t win honorably- and honor goes a long way in that culture inherited from the Borderlanders of Scotland.
Again, I’ll return to Thomas (I tend to whenever I can). He routed a large Confederate force at Mill Springs in 1862. After his defensive stand at Chickamauga, he wanted to press the offensive, but Rosecrans had, unfortunately, lost control of the AotC. He wouldn’t take credit for it, but, Thomas was completely responsible for the rout of Bragg at Chattanooga. Had he been allowed to take the AotC through Snake Creek Gap while Sherman was rehearsing the March to the Sea in Mississippi, Thomas very well could have cut off Johnston and the Army of Tennessee at Dalton, and the whole Atlanta campaign, with it’s Stone Mountain and Peachtree Creek, wouldn’t have been necessary. Andersonville would have been taken, and nearly the entire force that Sherman split up at Atlanta could have slashed through the Carolinas and into Virginia before Christmas of 1864. And no amount of unopposed marches through Georgia would have crushed the secessionist spirit in the south like seeing their “superior” armies crushed by the son of the South who couldn’t come to side with their cause.
Sorry for going all Harry Turtledove on you, but I’ve read a lot on Thomas, and I swear this is the way it would have worked out.
freelancer
@Yutsano:
Oh, but we’re unique. We started our town on the grave sites of dumbass Mormons who couldn’t anticipate a tough winter.
My maternal and paternal grandparents each have houses a block away from the historic cemetery and the future Mormon Temple in Florence.
TuiMel
@J. Michael Neal:
War is hell. You cannot refine it.
Sherman understood your point.
JWL
@TuiMel:
Not quite.
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it”.
matoko_chan
No. Only half. the other half is stratification on cognitive ability and anti-intellectualism. i think….that is because of Luther and the protestant tradition of anti-intellectualism. America is a protestant nation. Luther only wanted the state separated from t’other guys church, you know. He was no enlightenment scholar.
Freddie de Boer has a fucking book club up to discuss the Name of the Rose….he should be discussing Thirteen/Blackman.
Because that is exactly where we are headed.
TuiMel
@JWL:
Thank you.
DPirate
@Yutsano: Yes, I agree.
@Ija: Maybe so, but what one person means by “the lost cause” may not be what you or I understand by it. Sure, some wish for a return to a white, agrarian society fueled by slavery (and some desire an industrial society fueled by {wage} slavery). Yet I doubt that the majority of people who like the re-enactments or descry the failures of the south really want to own black people.
To me, the lost cause is decentralization. States rights’, in essence. I was surfing the web after posting the earlier comment and came across this:
from How To Save The World
Interesting site, but what caught my eye was this:
I think this holds true for all sets, from the individual on up. This is not to say that slaves ought not be freed, but simply that the triumph of federal authority over individual states was and is a defeat for all of us in the long run. (Just as state authority over the individual or any set of individuals, as in slavery, is or at least can be a very bad thing.)
freelancer
@matoko_chan:
Fall asleep to V for Vendetta, jackoff to Hyperion, and otherwise, piss up a rope.
J. Michael Neal
@Andy K: I don’t disagree with you on the value of George Thomas at all, though I think you are underrating both Grant and Sherman in your attempt to praise him. Both had a strategic sense that Thomas may or may not have had, but was never called upon to display. Grant and Sherman were the first truly modern generals.
The comparison between Georgia and the Shenandoah is pointless. They were completely different cultures. Of course there wasn’t the same kind of bitterness and resistance in the latter than in the former. That’s because the Shenandoah was much more closely aligned, culturally, with the North than Georgia was to begin with. There wasn’t all that much to make over, and so it went fairly smoothly.
To me, the continued resistance in Georgia, and elsewhere, stems not from the pursuit of Sherman’s campaign, but from its vast incompleteness. Sherman recognized the problem, though he was focused primarily upon the prospect of an immediate partisan campaign rather than the long term. However, it wasn’t within his power to do it on the necessary scale. He was, really, the only one who saw the truth.
One can see this by looking at his later career. I forget the exact quote, but when Grant, as president, asked him to take charge of the campaigns against the Indians in the west, he gave an absolutely horrifying reply as to what he’d do if put in command. People have had a tendency to use this to portray him as a bigot who bore a large animus towards the Indians. He may or may not have been such a bigot, but that wasn’t his point.
What he was saying was that, *if* you are going to wage a war against the Indians to take their land, you can’t do it by half measures. It will involve slaughtering their women and children, and starving them into submission. He was right, too. Of course, no one else in Washington was prepared to admit that, and they did their best to pretend that it wouldn’t come to that. It did, of course.
I think most of us here will readily admit that waging such a war against the Indians was morally appalling and should never have been done. Which gets to my point that, if you are going to wage such a war, you had better be damned sure your goals can justify it, and you had better make sure that you understand what it is you will have to do.
In my mind, defeating the Confederacy, defeating the Nazis, and defeating Imperial Japan were sufficiently important to justify those methods. In hindsight, defeating Wilhelmine Germany in 1918 would have justified it, but that was harder to see at the time. Defeating the Soviet Union probably would have justified it had it been necessary, except that nuclear weapons change the equation so drastically that it needs to be rethought.
Overthrowing Saddam Hussein did not justify it, and therefore we should never have tried. “Shock and awe” was a naive belief that spectacle can replace bloodshed in accomplishing the task of defeating a nation.
There are some other cases where such action was justified (some that were engaged in, others that were not). I’m becoming increasingly convinced that there is no longer any solution to the Israel/Palestine crisis that won’t involve this, though that would be so ugly that I’m all for trying everything possible to prove that I’m wrong.
J. Michael Neal
@TuiMel:
It’s more the other way around. It was Sherman’s views on the necessity of such action, which I initially rejected, that started my examination of the question. Years later, I decided he was right.
Xenos
@freelancer:
No, no. Point her to Iain Banks. She won’t make more sense, but maybe she will become wittier.
urizon
Oh, just fucking secede already, you bunch of chickenshits. All they do is yammer on and on about how the South shall rise again, etc. But do they have the courage of their warped convictions? Fuck the south.
soonergrunt
@Southern Beale: I think the sculptor fucked him. NBF looks like the “tragedy” mask from a junior-high school Theatre Arts classroom pasted on a female manikin from Sears.
And mclaraen–you’re so hardcore about sending the Army to go fight somewhere–join up, and put your ass where your mouth is, fuckwit.
Oh, right. Never mind. Internet bravery isn’t very useful on a modern battlefield.
soonergrunt
@asiangrrlMN: If that’s your picture, I can only say that you don’t look mexican.
[/Sharron Angle]
soonergrunt
@Chuck Butcher: The confederate garrison burned Atlanta. They set fires on the cotton bales and other war materiel at the stockyard warehouses to keep it from falling into enemy hands. The fire spread out of control. Most of the city had already burned before Sherman and his army got there.
That’s not to say that Sherman wouldn’t have burned Atlanta. He probably would have, given that the primary goal of his mission was the destruction of Southern war-marking capacity.
agrippa
There was a period after the Civil War, Reconstruction – 1865 to 1876. Lincoln did not advocate a hard peace; and, if he had lived, the radicals in Congress would have had a harder time getting their hard peace.
After ten years, reconstruction was given up after the election of 1876, which nearly reignited the war.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=139 is a short rundown on this election.
My view is that, ultimately, the North did not have the staying power – the political will – to reconstruct the South. They cared little for blacks and it would take too long to do what they did not really want to do.
And, yes we are living with the consequences of that terrible war – 650,000 soldiers died in that war – and the consequences of Reconstruction. The South is a very different place; and, will be that way after our great grandchildren are dead.
Michael
@cmorenc:
Of course, it kind of helped those bootstrapping real white lowerclass ‘Murkans of the 1800s to get free land.
Renting it at rates adjusted to today’s income percentage would have created a buttload of butthurt.
Michael
@mclaren:
Dude, Atlanta has flipped, but I wouldn’t be adverse to the idea of burning Columbia again.
El Cid
@mclaren:
First, your actual neo-Confederate types would be more than happy to see the filthy, urban, non-racist Atlanta — with its succession of black mayors — burn to the ground and institute Macon or some other tiny, rural white stronghold as the Georgia capital.
Second, we’d lose yet another one of the few cities in the country in which there is a black community established enough to have both an upper-middle and upper class.
You’d need to pick a target actually dear to the Redeemers (those white supremacists reversing the gains of Reconstruction) to burn down.
Maybe dynamiting the stupid ass relief sculpture on Stone Mountain (Georgia) of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee (hallowed be his name), and Stonewall Jackson, also as a ‘fuck you’ to the place where the Klan was ‘refounded’ in 1915.
It’s an amazing geological feature, but this shitty remembrance of Southern treason and white Supremacy would be much more valued by the Lost Causers than the filthy mongrel mixed race city of Atlanta.
SFAW
What a coincidence! Some of my best friends are Colored! (Or should it be “darkies”?)
Woodrowfan
I grew up in Dayton, OH. Local joke: What’s the definition of a Daytonian? A “(Kentuckian) who ran out of gas on his way to Detroit. (rim shot) There was a similar joke about why Cincinnati had so many African-Americans and Dayton had so many Kentuckians and the short answer was that Cincy picked first…
When I hear the song “The Night They Drove” I prefer to sing along “The night WE drove ol Dixie down!”
M-Pop
Just got through an entire semester reading fugitive slave narratives from this time period – if you want a perspective on what the southern plantations and the people who owned them were like, read some of those stories. You’ll find a culture degraded by the institution of slavery and reduced to facades of gentility behind brutal and violent social mores.
Woodrowfan
My mom’s family is southern and included CSA vets. A great-great etc uncle died in front of the Gin House at Franklin. I love (most of) my southern relatives, and I go visit my Mom in western NC as often as I can, but I gotta tell you, I just don’t like the south. I identify much more with my Dad’s family from the industrial Midwest and even with my wife’s family from New England.
I live in Virginia but I’ll be dammed if I move further south or west than Fairfax county. And if I retire I’ll retire to New England where the local soldier’s memorial was raised to men who fought to create or protect this country, not to preserve a slave-based aristocracy; where they decorate graves on memorial day for soldiers who fought in the American Revolution and not the graves of men who died trying to destroy the US; where colleges don’t all seem to have “Bible” in their name and small towns have book stores that don’t all have the word “Christian” in their name. And where they don’t put a pound of damn sugar in the iced tea.
Most importantly, I want to live somewhere where political candidates outside of big cities don’t all have to prove how right-wing they are and how much they love them sum Jeezus to get elected and then turn around and pass laws that hurt the poor, the exact damn opposite of what Christ told us to do!
sorry, rant over. My apologies to those BJers who live in the former CSA. I’m just so damn frustrated at what the neo-confederate teatards have done to our country. If we have a re-enactment I volunteer to play John Brown and this time he’ll do it right!
Scott P.
I wish a crowd of Union re-enactors would show up and crash the secession ball.
soonergrunt
@M-Pop: It was the fact that the slaves were mere chattel that allowed their masters and owners to abuse them in so many ways.
The ability to act out one’s lower impulses upon people who were essentially invisible to society is what allowed them to create the special facade of gentility towards each other overlaid upon their culture.
Look at the internet today–there is no overlay of gentility. We are absolutely brutal to each other at the slightest provocation, that brutality made easier by the fact that one cannot see the emotional damage one does to the other person. If we actually had to share the same room, most of us (who are more or less rightly contructed personalities) couldn’t behave the way we do online every single day. Brutality and viciousness towards each other is mankind’s natural state. Everything else is a facade. Society and all of its’ trappings are the creation of an evolutionary impulse to minimize those effects and by so doing enable the survival and growth of the species.
AxelFoley
@Southern Beale:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Shit’s sad, but funny at the same time.
AxelFoley
@General Stuck:
The thing that gets me, though, is the poor, broke ass whites who fought for the rich assholes. This was THEIR war, fighting for THEIR right to free labor. Shit the poor whites coulda been getting paid to do.
And they fought for those bastards.
And they still do to this day.
AxelFoley
@Cacti:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This, so much, this.
AxelFoley
@asiangrrlMN:
HAHAHAHA. Win.
AxelFoley
@asiangrrlMN:
Y’know, I’ve always wondered about back during Jim Crow in the South, where they had “White” and “Colored” restrooms and water fountains, which restrooms and water fountains did Asians and Latinos use?
vtr
Back in the 90s, in the region “formerly known as Yugoslavia,” people of various ethnicities were shooting and bombing each other for semi-remembered atrocities that occurred somewhere around 1100 AD. It’s not just the South.
Also, we New Englanders know for certain that the Red Sox won that 1978 playoff game against the Evil Yankees. The umpire called a strike on Yaz that must have been 8″ outside. And it bounced two feet in front of the plate. And Steinbrenner paid the umpires.
cmorenc
@James E. Powell:
I was describing the mythical idea a great many people have of that place and era, the key symbolic images they keep in their head, rather than any accurate analysis of the extent to which it was actually true, false, or heavily qualified in important respects, nor the extent to which any nobility in the enterprise was counterbalanced by amorality, genocide, etc. That’s why I described the concept as “mythical”, and being mainly a myth through the lens of people of European ethnic background.
Tom M
Oh, dear, I’ll retire to New England where the local soldier’s memorial was raised to men who fought to create or protect this country, not to preserve a slave-based aristocracy;
I hate to tell you this but the New England economy was dependent on what? Cotton. The NYT has been running the series called Disunion and this piece about Frederick Douglas being prevented from gib=ving a speech in Boston might show you that things weren’t quite so clear cut.
In New England, grown rich on the profits of its textile mills, all sorts of people were anxious to stave off conflict with the cotton-growing states.
cleek
no.
James E. Powell
@Ija:
But honoring soldiers is never really about honoring soldiers. It’s about waving the bloody shirt to justify a war or another war or the idea of war as a good thing.
fasteddie9318
I’ve got a hankering for the good old days too, in a pro-Yankee, “let’s finish what we started” kind of way.
Michael
My dad is an antique collector (which is a polite term for “hoarder with a few more resources”). Some of what he’s bought over the years is pretty nice, but a lot of it consists of copies or items which just aren’t great.
One of the items that I suspect may be a little better is a painting of Robert E Lee in all his traitorious blingage. Being southern wingnuts, they ensured that my childhood/teenaged bedroom was filled with authentic true ‘Murkan historicalness, and included that tribute to the traitor.
As an only child, it is my intention to survive them and have the items appraised. If I don’t really feel like the painting will do much for my financial bottom line, I’m going to hold a public burning in front of a crowd, making sure I invite the local SCV chapter.
gnomedad
@J. Michael Neal:
This can’t be said enough. It sometimes seems as if the debate is dominated by those who are suprised by the bloodshed and those who don’t mind it as long as it’s someone else doing the bleeding.
aimai
@M-Pop:
Absolutely. I would also recommend “Modern Medea” the story of the slave mother who was forced to murder her own child to prevent the child from being recaptured and living as a slave and Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family which, while describing his family’s history going back to its founding, reveals a totally inglorious moral and intellectual tradition of wealth without wisdom, generosity, or humanity.
aimai
Andy K
@J. Michael Neal:
If so, then only in the strategic sense. In the tactical sense, it would be Thomas, whose innovations (rolling hospitals, telegraphy from the front lines to hq, intel units, dismounted cavalry) had it all over Grant and Sherman.
Yes, I get that it wasn’t the point, but he was a bigot. We’ve had this discussion at TNC’s blog. It wasn’t just Native Americans, but African-Americans, too, and probably even more so.
Big difference between the Confederates and Wilhelmine Germany being that the former didn’t fight outside of their borders often, and the latter barely fought inside of theirs. And Germany folded when they did mainly because of internal strife, not because they were whupped in the field. The Confederacy, as bad as the economic situation was, went down only after its armies were ground down. I get what you’re saying, because, yeah, there seem to be parallels, but…
BTW, have you ever thought about who really won Kaiser Bill’s war? In the end, it was Germany, who finally got past what was an effective blockade of their overseas trade. Yeah, it took two horrible wars which, technically, they lost, but the victories for France and the UK were so pyrrhic and effected their populations and economies so much that they had to accept another economic powerhouse in the neighborhood. The better part of a century that it took to happen might seem to Americans such a long time that most of us tend to see the two World Wars as two separate struggles, but it was really one struggle with two phases- and not such a long time, if you take into account German history, the span of time between the first and second Reichs, ya know?
Or maybe I’m trying too hard to challenge the conventional wisdom…I dunno…
grumpy realist
Which is why Bronson Alcott and his family and entourage wore linen, rather than cotton, on their misguided attempt at Utopian farming.
Me, I think a lot of the nostalgic stampede to the Civil War is also because of fear. Fear of complexity, fear of globalization, fear of new technology. It’s so much easier to lounge back into a warm bath of weren’t-things-so-much-better-in-the-old-days-where-things-didn’t-change. Plus, who of us wouldn’t want a collection of minions a.k.a. slaves to order around and send scurrying to carry out our every wish?
The fact that going back to Ye Good Olde Dayes would also bring with it lack of sanitation, no electricity, dysentery, cholera, smallpox, and a high probability of dying in childbirth is conveniently forgotten. Let alone what would have actually happened to anyone wounded. Which is why the so-called re-enactors have about as much link to reality as Disneyland has to real life.
Shawntos
@Southern Beale: I drive to Nashville all the time is that ugly ass thing North or South of the city.
matoko_chan
@freelancer: haha. but im right.
and you know it in yur wizened, atrophied, crotch-sniffing old person cudlip soul.
:)
aimai
@grumpy realist:
Yes, a certain small percentage of these people would, in other countries, be re-enacting “Upstairs Downstairs” with enthusiasm for the romance of gaslight and fine clothing. But it can’t be denied that re-enacting the Civil War in a country still divided racially is an ugly, ugly, version. There’s a difference between re-enacting Cavaliers vs. Roundheads or the battle of Culloden–now a really long time ago and not relevant politically–and re-enacting Nazi SS stuff. The past isn’t dead. Its not even past.
aimai
Cain
@Yutsano:
Or maybe Indian in India with the British? That’s some bullshit when you get treated like the lowest of the low in your own country. I can well understand how the native indians felt. Maybe to the lesser extent how the south felt. In India, for middle class most of the hard labor is done by lower castes. Most people there don’t do anything by themselves. While over here, we love doing stuff ourselves. Home Depot would be a foreign concept over there. :-) I suspect that is changing though thanks to more free movement between India and the West.
cain
J. Michael Neal
@Andy K:
What we have here is a Thomas fanboy talking, rather than someone who has really looked at this carefully. Do you want to put that up against Grant and Dixon basically inventing modern Army/Navy cooperation at Vicksburg? And saying that Thomas invented dismounted cavalry is just idiotic. Cavalry fought that way during the whole war, on both sides. Go back and look at how Devin’s and Buford’s cavalry divisions fought on the first day of Gettysburg.
Absolute complete and utter bullshit. This bears no resemblance to the truth. The British and French defeated the Germans. Without US assistance, it likely would have taken an additional year to finish the war, but it was a victory in the field. Contrary to their later claims, it was von Hindenburg and Ludendorff who insisted on making peace. By the end of the Hundred Days, the Reichswehr has lost the ability to hold its ground anywhere. Collapse at home followed collapse at the front.
Yes, I have, and it depends entirely what you mean by “victory.” Looking at WWI specifically, Germany got its ass kicked in battle, but emerged from the war without any damage to its industrial base, whereas France’s was devastated because that’s where all of the Western Front fighting had been. Which is why the French were justified in demanding large scale reparations.
What blockade? The only times Germany faced any sort of blockade was when they decided to pout and go to war. Other than that, their trade was pretty much unrestricted. It is true that the British wouldn’t allow free trade with their colonies, but that hurt the colonies, not the Germans. India wouldn’t have been much of a consumer of what the Germans were selling. From an economic standpoint, preventing Germany from forming a colonial empire did them a giant favor, as, outside of India, they were nothing but a drain on the home countries’ resources.
Which they would have had to do anyway. The world wars may have accelerated American economic dominance, but it didn’t create it. In fact, the world wars probably prevented the British and French from falling even farther down the slope, if such a thing really gets you going. If you posit a Russia that isn’t wrecked by the wars and is spared the Bolshevik Revolution by not fighting the first one, and you’d have another powerhouse.
This is too facile by half. World War II wasn’t any more of a continuation of World War I than the latter was a continuation of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which was a continuation of the Napoleonic Wars, which was a continuation of . . .
Either you see European history as a seamless whole, and succeeding events as a continuation of previous ones, or you break it down into its discreet elements. Either one is a perfectly valid way to look at it, but there was nothing special about the two world wars in this regard.
It’s not that you’re trying too hard to challenge the conventional wisdom. It’s that I don’t think you really know what you are talking about.
asiangrrlMN
@soonergrunt: Ha! Ba-dum-dum.
@AxelFoley: I have wondered, too. I have no idea. I’m guessing colored, but I know many Asians consider themselves honorary whites as do some of the majority, so I have no clue. I will do some research and get back to you. See you at the Miscegenation Ball!
Woodrowfan
@Tom M:
But when push came to shove one side decided to fight to destroy the union to preserve slavery and the other fought to preserve that union, and many of them also fought to end slavery. Maybe nobody was really “right” in that war (aside from the USCT) but one side was a hell of a lot more wrong than the other…
To put it another way, people throughout the nation profited from slavery, but it was the Confederates* that defended it as a positive good.
** note, I did not say “southerners.” I am well aware there was pro-Union sentiment in the south.
SFAW
Although it wasn’t as great as beating Teh Yankees, a mere eight years later, the Sox won the World Series by beating that other hated NY team. So they got their revenge, albeit a little late.
BombIranForChrist
As someone who grew up in the South, and as a descendant of Confederate war veterans myself, I can tell you without reservation that the Civil War still dominates southern politics. You hear all kinds of fun things when you are a member of the tribe, so to speak, even if you personally do not believe in The Cause. My wife and I just laugh and laugh and laugh when we hear Southern politicians try to pretend they are anything but what they are: Lost Cause racists struggling to operate in a world that left then behind long ago, except in one certain area of the country. George Allen’s macaca statement wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.
vtr
@SFAW: Stay tuned for my mis-remembrances of the 2009 NBA finals.
SFAW
Yeah, it was amazing how the Knicks beat the Lakers 4-0.
AxelFoley
@asiangrrlMN:
Sho’ nuff. Save a dance for me. ;)
phoebes-in-santa fe
@Andy K: Andy, “Thomas” who?
phoebes-in-santa fe
Okay, here it is. One of the all-time great Onion pieces on why the South will rise again. Get ready to LOL.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/south-postpones-rising-again-for-yet-another-year,377/
phoebes-in-santa fe
@Andy K: Thanks, now I know.
celticdragonchick
@aimai:
Um, Culloden still comes up in some dealings betwen Scotland and England, and it isn’t in a good way.
Some scholars are pointing to Culloden as one of the first verified uses of mass rape as a tool of genocide.
Andy K
@J. Michael Neal:
From Catton’s review of McKinney’s “Education In Violence, The Life of George H. Thomas and the History of the Army of the Cumberland” :
“Thomas was perhaps the one top-ranking Federal officer who knew just what to do with his cavalry. Even Sheridan did not come up to him there. Thomas, incidentally, was a trained cavalryman himself, and he saw cavalry in much the same ultramodern, nontraditional way as Confederate Bedford Forrest saw it—as a striking force which used horses simply because the horses gave men greater mobility but which did its fighting on foot. In the final months of the war Thomas put together (at the cost of an unending struggle with the War Department) a cavalry corps under young James H. Wilson which carried repeating rifles and could move through the South irresistibly, a force wholly outside of the tradition of Jeb Stuart and John Hunt Morgan: mechanized infantry, in substance, able to move faster than anyone else and also able to hit harder, one which ignored “brilliant” raids and struck at the enemy’s main forces with devastating power.”
Bruce Catton: Fuckin’ Thomas fanboy, huh?
Buford and the rest dismounted to skirmish, not to act as effective strike forces.
Been reading nothing but the Brits’ histories on that war, right? Check out Mosier’s “The Myth of the Great War”. Or read the French revisionists from later in the 20th Century (had the Brits a Petain of their own, they, too, may have revised their history by now). The Doughboys were pretty key in checking the German Spring Offensive of 1918; it was the AEF advances on the German rail lines during the Meuse-Argonne offensive that caused the Reichswehr to de-trench for a better defensive position. Once out of those trenches, the Brits and French could finally fight the Germans on more equal terms.
Dude…The German people had been starving for much more than 100 days. The retreat of the army was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was the blockade that did the most damage, not the Tommies, the Poilu and the Doughboys. The Confederacy, otoh, was undone almost wholly in the field.
Sure, if Napoleon (the First) or anyone else was fighting a war for German reunification, as was Bismarck.
And that was Bismarck’s goal. He wasn’t big on expanding overseas, or even trading there much. That’s why Willy shunted him off to the side. Now Willy’s plans were Napoleonic in scope: Control the Continent, and then…
Why that rush to build dreadnoughts in the run-up to WWI? Water skiing in the Baltic? Gotta look at this in the context of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theories. Willy and Adolph both knew that they’d still be S.O.L. even if they controlled the Continent but were bottled up by the Royal Navy.
Marc with a C
The irony is that Sherman gets blamed for burning down Atlanta when in fact that was a combination of accidental fires and the Confederates setting fire to the warehouses to keep them from falling into Union hands.
Columbia, SC, on the other hand? Oh yeah, that was us.
Big time.