On which that genteel butcher Bobby Lee, surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant.
Grant’s terms have generally been regarded as generous, to the point that the military leaders of the rebellion were spared the threat of criminal trials for the actions in defiance of properly constituted Federal authority. Looking forward, not back, is no new trope in American politics.
In any event, my view of the Civil War echoes Sherman’s: “secession was treason, was war…”
Apologists for the Lost Cause trump up the usual counters — I’ve just been batting this around with a wistful mythologist on Twitter. The battle wasn’t for slavery, but state’s rights; the men under arms weren’t traitors — they were just soldiers fighting other men’s battles, or for a misguided but sort-of reasonable goal; and so on.
It is vital, I believe, to push back on that nonesense. That’s not how those at the time saw it, not when it got down to the nub. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was a slave holder’s army, and the documents with which the makers of the Confederacy declared their cause made the reason for secession clear. State’s rights were the means to the real end: the permanent power to hold other human beings as property:
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
That is: only reason secession occurred is because the South finally lost an election.
It is in that context that April 9 is a great day. Certainly, too much was left undone. Too much remains undone. But at Appomattox, the traitor Robert E. Lee’s surrender enshrined at least the possibility that Federal authority could remedy grievous wrong. And that’s cause for remembrance of a great hope kindled, and of the too-long wait, still ongoing, for its fulfillment — what Abraham Lincoln saw as the course forward from the moment of surrender:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Happy Appomattox Day, everyone.
Image: Montage of these two photographs:
Chris
Christ, it’s practically the entire history of U.S. politics in four words.
Eric U.
so when the Tea Partiers babble on about “the constitution,” they are probably talking about the one where blacks were not capable of full citizenship
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Too generous by far.
We’d be dealing with less of this crap now had things been handled a little less genteely.
dmsilev
‘Black votes don’t count.’ Sadly, some things don’t seem to change.
Cacti
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
Every confederate officer who had previously held a commission in the United States Army should have swung from a gallows for treason.
The biggest unofficial amnesty in US history was letting the secessionists escape the weight of the law for committing the highest crime against the Republic.
patrick II
From the articles of secession of three states of the confederacy.
Georgia
Mississippi
South Carolina
Texas
The state “right” being objected to was the right to own another human being.
Elizabelle
So CBS just ran its Appomattox package, with the newspaper that got it right, per them “Our Nation Redeemed.”
And they can’t give enough airtime to the neoconfederates and those who want to war first, think later.
Tommy
As I mentioned in the last thread my father’s PhD is in Civil War history. My summer vacations were spent on Civil War battlefields. That was just what we did. I’ve never seen my father really happy or sad. Never up or down. Most even tempered person I know. Well outside going on these trips. He was giddy to tell me what happened. How the battle broke down. Then he’d get really sad and tell me how many people died.
The only time I think I can recall my father crying was outside of the makeshift hospital at Gettysburg. Where on the second floor they were throwing out limbs as they were cut off. Eventually it got to the point they could no longer do it, because the heap of limbs reached above the second floor. As the Park Ranger told this my dad lost it.
Chris
Fine:
In defense of states’ rights, they opened fire on a U.S. Army fort, and a war followed.
So even if you take them at their word, the Confederacy is less “Scotland voting over independence” and more “IRA blowing shit up for independence.”
germy shoemangler
Last MLK day, wife & I went to our local library to see a documentary film by Katrina Browne about her ancestor’s involvement in the slave trade. The film was called “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North,” and James DeWolf Perry gave a lecture after the screening. (Perry was also a descendant and the film’s historical consultant.)
“First-time filmmaker Katrina Browne makes a troubling discovery — her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She and nine fellow descendants set off to retrace the Triangle Trade: from their old hometown in Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba. Step by step, they uncover the vast extent of Northern complicity in slavery while also stumbling through the minefield of contemporary race relations. In this bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade, Traces of the Trade offers powerful new perspectives on the black/white divide.”
I found the descendants interesting. Some of them wept when they visited the slave cells the Africans were confined to before being shipped to America, and some of them insisted they had nothing to apologize for, as it was ancient history. Interesting debates between them. Some were blind to the privilege they’d enjoyed.
Patricia Kayden
I think that anyone with common sense could figure out that the Civil War was about the South trying to maintain slavery given how badly the South treated its Black citizens well into the 20th Century. “State’s rights” = White Supremacy. And homophobia appears to be their last stand.
Chris
I agree.
Confederate nostalgia needs to be held in the same regard with which Nazi nostalgia is held in contemporary Germany. In the rest of the country (where Confederate flags proliferate among white conservatives pretty badly too) as well as the South.
Roger Moore
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
Color me unconvinced. I think the genteel handling was a symptom, not a cause, of the same things that undermined the success of Reconstruction. Not enough whites on either side of the Civil War cared enough about blacks as people to push through real and lasting reform. A lot of the anti-slavery sentiment in the North was a product of people who hated blacks and wanted to get rid of them, or who despised slavery because they didn’t like competition from slave labor. When the hard-core bigots in the South fought hard enough against equality, the North was perfectly willing to abandon blacks to their fate. Jim Crow may have been a result of Southern bigotry, but it was only implemented with Northern acquiescence.
Chris
@Cacti:
Truth.
germy shoemangler
@Tommy: Did he see Spielberg’s “LINCOLN”? That is shown in the film.
pseudonymous in nc
The War Nerd, writing last November on William T. Sherman:
Keith G
@Cacti:
I imagine Lincoln thought a great deal about this and chose his desired path carefully. Some of y’all here seem to think that stomping more shit out of the South would have achieved some blessed metaphysical perfection. Maybe so, but even our contemporary history tells us that defeated and subjugated people as a rule just don’t bend over and passively take in more.
Before folks get all chubbed up on fantasies of mass hangings consider the numerous ways such events can go massively astray.
I have a feeling Abe Lincoln was able to do that though experiment and chose an imperfect, but less troubling course of action..
rea
Lincoln explains war guilt, north and south:
Elizabelle
David Blight, in the Atlantic: Appomattox and the Ongoing Civil War.
Tommy
@Patricia Kayden: My father’s PhD is via T. Harry Williams (go Google it) as his major professor. I got almost a 1,000 page dissertation he wrote, more about the battles of the Civil War, but I tend to think he might have a clue about what he is talking about. My father will never be confused with a liberal, but he knows the war was about slaves. Try to reframe it and he will laugh if not mock you.
Platypus
In much the same way, Indiana didn’t just sanction discrimination against gays. Oh no, say its proponents, this is just about religious freedom. People who are determined to treat others poorly will always claim that their actions are driven by some higher principle, often harming the very cause they claim is theirs.
Patricia Kayden
@patrick II: They made their position quite clear. Not sure why their descendants and supporters are allowed to obfuscate the intent of Confederates, which was to hold onto slavery forever.
scav
They fought for the States Rights to Enforce, Uphold and Maintain the right of the few, the upper crust to enslave an entire group of people for cheap labor, often graced with the explanation that it was done in order to build a perfected Christian ideal society on earth, one in which those same upper crust and few others could fornicate with the cheap labor (those latter generally denied the sacrament of marriage, by the by) and breed up some more of their own blood and children to be the next generation of cheap labor. Luffly Luffly Gentility they’ve got going on that pedestal.
Tommy
@germy shoemangler: No he is not a movie guy.
JPL
When I moved to GA a few decades ago, my neighbor and I became friends. Although we were only neighbors for a few years, we remained friends and continue to enjoy each others companionship. She started listening to boortz and one day told me the civil war was about states rights. I simply said read the GA secession paper and then we will talk about it. She did and we did continue our conversation. BTW.. she is black.
Right wing radio and fox news does nothing more than sell a narrative that lines their pockets with cash. Some call it brain washing.
SoupCatcher
This seems as good a place as any to quote LTC Robert Bateman’s looking-for-a-barfight-rejoinder:
— from a post comparing the loyalty of George Thomas with that of Robert Lee.
Also, Tennessee Ernie Ford sings Marching Through Georgia.
pluege
wingnuts are always rationalizing their horrific behavior and outlook, their obscene indecency, and their sadism. They are indeed overall abominations as human beings.
cmorenc
@Tom Levenson
This one aspect of the Southern cause that is true – most of the actual fighting soldiers for the Confederacy were not from the elite classes of society with a huge stake hold in slave-powered enterprises, but were rather ordinary tradesmen and farmers who got suckered into passionately supporting and serving the cause by the powerful propaganda of the economic and social elite of the south. After the civil war, a similar dynamic would be used to misdirect the frustrations and resentments of ordinary working folk and yeomen against negroes and carpetbaggers, instead of the often semifeudal white economic and power structure.
The other aspect about die-hard supporters of the lost cause that is also true is that a significant part of the pre-war tension between the southern slaveholding states and the northern states is the southerners concern that the federal tariff system was becoming stacked against their agrarian economy in favor of the interests of the industrially developing northern non-slaveholding states.
OF COURSE it’s also irrefutably true that the other HUGE concern of slaveholding southern states was fear that abolitionist forces in the north were growing increasingly powerful, determined to not only limit any further spread of slavery to the territories, but to engineer eventual destruction of slavery in the south. It’s massively disingenuous or delusional to claim that the existence of other important factors contributing to southern secession and war were complete sufficient causes unto themselves, and that slaveholding itself was not a central fundamental issue in why the southern states seceded and fought the civil war. The declarations of secession made by the various states at the time make this crystal clear, even aside from abundant other irrefutable historical evidence.
Elizabelle
Eric Foner, recently, in the NY Times. Why Reconstruction Matters.
JustRuss
…which of course is meaningless unless one can name exactly which rights were being violated…which never seems to come up. And now in Indiana, we have a bill protecting religious freedom, but Governor Pence can’t specify the freedom to do what, exactly. I see a pattern here.
shell
Remember from the Ken Burns doc. Grant allowed the officers to keep their side arms (swords) and their horses. Lee was thankful, cause planting season was about to begin.
Tommy
@SoupCatcher: IMHO he should have been hung. But they did build Arlington National Cemetery in his front yard, so there is that FU. When I lived in DC I drove by Arlington every day on the way to work. Often visited it. That they built it in his front yard was the only thing that made me happy.
Patricia Kayden
@germy shoemangler: Reminds me of “Slaves in the Family”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Ball_%28American_author%29
jl
@Patricia Kayden:
” Not sure why their descendants and supporters are allowed to obfuscate the intent of Confederates, which was to hold onto slavery forever. ”
It’s a free country, so the Confederacy nostalgia and heritage buffs can say what they want. But what they say should not go unanswered.
No group of people has a completely clean history. And nothing wrong with celebrating what is good in the history of a culture.
Dealing with heritage, and nostalgia for antebellum South will go down easier when inequities inherited from that time are eliminated and the people most devoted to the nostalgia do not throw off signs that they are also the most devoted to maintaining the inherited inequities.
As long as I see pics of ‘plantation parties’ with white people dressed up as Confederate colonels and black people dressed up as happy house slaves, the nostalgia thing is very hard for me to swallow.
You can do alternative history nostalgia too. So I’d like to see pics of black Confederate colonels and happy white house slaves. See how well the nostalgia and heritage go down then. Newt would surely approve. He likes alternative history. Maybe will start a trend in Georgia.
Central Planning
Maybe I should put a picture of a white flag on facebook and say it’s the “Flag of the South”. I don’t have any wingnutty friends that would argue that with me though.
Here’s a picture of a white flag in case anyone else wants to try it
Elizabelle
It’s deplorable how Southern revisionism was allowed.
I was schooled in the 1960s and 70s, sometimes in Southern schools, sometimes not. Picked up the myth of gallant, noble Robert E. Lee and alcoholic U.S. Grant.
Gone with the Wind is not, in all parts, as “Moonlight and Magnolias” as the public perception.
It’s ridiculous that “state’s rights” doesn’t get smacked down more. I guess no one wanted to admit that gramps and great uncles died or were grievously maimed to keep black people enslaved.
Also: have you noticed how many Clint Eastwood (and other) movies are about former Confederates moving on down to Texas and the territories? And duplicitous Yankees? (The Outlaw Josey Wales.) Some of that was playing on Vietnam War angst — more people uprooted and defeated by a ridiculous war — but that can go over one’s head today …
Patricia Kayden
@Tommy: How does your Father react to people who claim that the Civil War wasn’t about maintaining slavery in the South?
Loviatar
Benjamin O. Davis, Jr.
And yet the traitor Robert E. Lee photo hangs at West Point. h/t LGM
Mike J
@JustRuss:
The “vice-president” of the rebellion said:
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cornerstone-speech/
Rekster
Having grown up in the South (Alabama) in the 50’s and 60’s this was the common trope that was spoken of. I don’t really remember is this was taught in schools though. I attended Catholic schools for 12 years and don’t believe the nuns, priests, and brothers who taught us would have would have taught this in history.
Although as I enter my mid 60’s and my memory is not as good as it was, anything was possible.
Patricia Kayden
@Elizabelle: The Outlaw Josey Wales was written by a racist so not surprising that it’s pro-Confederates. There’s a good PBS documentary about him.
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/20/151037079/the-artful-reinvention-of-klansman-asa-earl-carter
Keith G
@pseudonymous in nc:
No. Don’t think so. A bit too much poetic excess in that quote. Sherman’s inner demons led him to become a highly effective instrument of war. He had no issue with the war crimes (in our current view of the phrase) committed against Native Americans and he was unhappy with Grant when the President became to be influence by those who wanted moderation in our dealings with the “Indian problem”.
West of the Cascades
From Grant’s memoirs, about his feelings as he saw Lee enter the McLean House to surrender his army – a good summary of the war from a soldier’s perspective and a strong statement about the immorality of “the cause”:
Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter [proposing negotiations], were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.
ETA: Union soldiers going to battle singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic knew well what the war was about when they sang, “In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea … with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me … as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free … while God is marching on.” THAT’s a cause worth getting behind.
germy shoemangler
@Elizabelle: Very true. I went to school in the north, and I remember in history class, the nobel Lee and drunk Grant. And the word “carpetbaggers” again and again and again and again. Looking back, I have to assume the text books were written down south.
And although I’m not a big western movie fan, it seems in every one the “good guys” were southern, and the bad ones were crooked northerners and easterners. Of course “Gone With The Wind” is an extreme example, but even more obscure westerns followed this template. Buster Keaton’s hero in “The General” is southern.
Germany didn’t produce a million films showing ex-nazis as good guys. Hollywood went out of its way to romanticize traitors.
Davis X. Machina
@Chris:
It’s not an issue of regard. It’s an issue of Federal law. Strafgesetzbuch 86(a)
Mike J
@efgoldman:
If we were talking about the middle east and the proper way to handle troublemakers in post war Iraq, do you think the same sort of solution would have good effects or bad?
jl
@germy shoemangler:
Thanks for the information.
I did a search on youtube of “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North” and there are several interesting clips on it. Too many to link to, so people should look for themselves.
Many in the North were implicated in slavery, at least profited from it directly or indirectly.
People in other parts of the country have other crimes against other peoples in their heritage to be nostalgic over.
Dishonest celebration of one’s heritage as an excuse for maintaining the effects of past crimes is a dangerous and immoral thing and should be called out for what it is.
Tommy
@Patricia Kayden: As I said in my comment:
It was all about slaves. I don’t want to get into the weeds, but it is safe to say the south needed slaves for their economy. Free labor is nice. To break things down to the very basic the north won the war because they had industry. The south had agriculture based on slaves. Do the math.
JPL
@germy shoemangler: I might also mention that I don’t remember a picture of Grant looking that hot.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@JPL: I am so glad I’m not the only one who thinks Grant looks hot in that photo.
beltane
@efgoldman: Rebellions have been crushed by other powers in other places, crushed and pulverized and obliterated to such an extent that there was nothing left to offer hope of anything “rising again”. The United States didn’t have the stomach to do this and so we are cursed with the gangrenous limb of the confederacy pumping toxins into nation for all perpetuity.
geg6
@Elizabelle:
I want every print of “Gone With the Wind” buried and encased in one of those concrete bunkers where they store spent nuclear fuel rods. I hate, hate, hate that movie (and the even more heinous book). I first saw it at around age 9 or 10 and was just disgusted by it in every way. Read the book a few years later, just out of curiosity, and was just infuriated by the entire thing. Not just the mythology of the South and the Confederacy, but the abuse and sexual assault between the supposed love interests. Just disgusting in every way. That’s how Southerners who worship the Confederacy think, even today. This is what they find admirable. I never forget that. Ever.
AxelFoley
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
Yup. All Confederates should have been strung up.
JPL
@geg6: I tend to agree because the book created a myth about Sherman. A large part of Atlanta was destroyed when the confederates tried to destroy the ammunition factories and created wide spread fires.
jl
@Elizabelle: Interesting observation about ex-Confederates in Westerns.
A lot of blacks went West too, in order to escape racism of white dominated eastern US, in the South mostly, but sadly often also in North and Midwest. I read once that in the decades immediately after the Civil War, except for the Native population, the wild West was a bout a third Hispanic, a third black and a third white.
There is a California state historical park about one black settlement, named Allentown iIRC. When whites became populous enough, many of those black settlements were destroyed, and the blacks chased off. And one of the founders of the modern western Rodeo was a black cowboy, though I will have to look up the name.
Now, if you have a western with any blacks in it, ignorant punk film reviewers snark that all the blacks are as a sad and pathetic anachronistic gesture towards political correctness.
Probably not the right day to say this, but people in other parts of the country can show the way by honestly facing their own heritages, writing honest history and trying to correct the wrongs that were done.
Roger Moore
@jl:
My big complaint about the “Southern Heritage” argument in favor of celebrating the Confederacy is why they choose that particular heritage to celebrate. Southern history goes back quite a while, and there have been many admirable people who have exemplified the best the South has to offer. So why focus on Robert E. Lee rather than George Thomas or Chester Nimitz? Why Jefferson Davis rather than Jimmy Carter? Why fly the Confederate battle flag instead of the flag of your country and your state? Why spend so much time talking about the military in the first place instead of the South’s many artistic and cultural achievements?
beltane
@Mike J: The solution used in post-war Germany would have been adequate: the execution of the worst offenders, prison terms for lesser offenders, and a “hold your nose” reintegration into civil society of the rest, provided they have the good sense to shut up about their history of treason in the service of white supremacy.
Mike J
@efgoldman: People seem to understand that the more bloodthirsty the pursuit of “terrorists”, the more terrorists are created.
I think Beltane in the comment above yours got it right. I reject the “more rubble, less trouble” argument that you and powerline blog are fond of.
Mike in NC
Somebody made a poster (similar to the popular Demotivators posters) showing Lee signing the surrender document, with the caption: “Conservatives: Still Not Over It”.
geg6
@Mike J:
Sometimes it works. Witness Japan and Germany. And they what they did was little to no more heinous than everything Southern slavery’s defenders did.
jl
@Roger Moore: Good point.
I believe George Washington is from the South. One of the richest men ever in US politics, even down to this day. Washington freed every single slave he could in his will. He set up a private education and training program so that they could earn a good living HERE in the US.
John Laurens was from South Carolina, he formulated plan with Alexander Hamilton to free the slaves during revolutionary war.
One of the Pinckney family (Charles Cotesworth?) defended the franchise for the Muslim community in South Carolina. Yes there were apparently enough in Charleston to scare people even back then. I read that he said during the controversy he looked forward to the day when we had a Muslim president. Sadly, whatever Pinckney it was, was also an ardent defender of slavery.
There are a lot of Southern men and women who could be wrapped up in Southern Heritage who could be celebrated.
But the whole business revolves exclusively around the Civil War. And the states rights dodge is not really much of dodge because the ones who obsess over it are precisely the ones who want to use states rights doctrines to prevent effective civil rights policies. Funny coincidence, huh?
Betty Cracker
@Roger Moore: This.
Hal
Here’s what I don’t get. Even if you say the civil war was about state’s rights and not slavery, it was still the state fighting to own slaves. This argument always stuck me as a snake eating it’s own tail. In the end, you end right back at slavery.
Keith G
@efgoldman: And how many of their younger relatives would have become even more radicalized by such a “feel good in the short run” policy?
Have some of us learned nothing from the last 14 years?
@efgoldman: General O.O. Howard, to quickly name one. Note, that Howard did follow his orders and successfully concluded the mission given to him, but he was an advocate for better treatment of the Native tribes.
mikefromArlington
This must be where they get their anti union stance from. They need 100% control over cheep labor in order to operate as they know no other way.
Keith G
@geg6:
I’m thinking bus-loads of historians might want to debate that, as well as a several dozen nations/countries.
Chris
@geg6:
I credit Gone With The Wind with being the beginning of my loathing for Confederate nostalgia. Bad enough that the politics are horrific, bad enough that the main characters are pretty much all scum, bad enough that the damn thing drags on for four hours. The three of them in combination… wow!
The thing is, I saw a teenager when I first saw it, and didn’t have an especially strong opinion of the war or the nostalgia, though I was rooting for the North. I don’t think it would’ve triggered my outrage detector if it had just been your basic story about Average Joe Southerner joining the Army out of some misplaced loyalty to his state or his friends or whatever. The jarring thing is that the entire story is set on a slave plantation, centers around the “tragedy” of a family of super wealthy slave owners, and treats their way of life as entirely normal – and more than that, meritorious, noble, and something to be missed. Even at that age, it’s hard not to see the movie and go “what the fuck is wrong with the people who made this piece of garbage?”
I’ll say one nice thing for it – the scene towards the beginning with Rhett Butler facing the people who’re itching for war and going “you do know you’re about to get the crap kicked out of you, right?” is a joy. Even the worst movies have their moments.
Brachiator
@jl:
Let’s put this into some perspective.
“Despite having been an active slave holder for 56 years, George Washington struggled with the institution of slavery and spoke frequently of his desire to end the practice. At the end of this life Washington made the bold step to free his slaves in his 1799 will – the only slave-holding Founding Father to do so.”
So, Washington benefited from slave labor for a long time, and although he left instructions in his will to free the slaves, he legally could not free many of them (for example, the slaves that were inherited by his wife). Curiously, even though Madison owned slaves, he did not do much to try to free some who escaped.
And while it is good to remember this day’s importance to the Civil War, it is also important to note that the entire country was complicit in the enslavement and oppression of black people. Pointing a finger at the South is correct, but not sufficient.
NotMax
Lincoln’s intent, it is very clear, was to treat the defeated members of the Confederacy (with rare exception) as rebels, not traitors.
April 9 marks the surrender. May 5 (IIRC) is the date the government of the Confederacy was officially dissolved by Jefferson Davis and his cabinet (who were by then in Georgia).
tybee
it’s a lovely hate fest to read but if the union had hung all the confederate officers, do you really think the south would have simply said “sure, ok, we REALLY quit now”?
are you all so certain that it wouldn’t have ended up in something like iraq for generations?
the IRA for a hundred years? ISIS today?
and, if it’s all a southern racist thing, explain to me the racist laws and attitudes outside of the old confederacy. wisconsin? arizona? indiana? idaho? massachusetts during integration in the 70s? hmmm? the myriad of other racist crap that happens will outside of the south?
did the south secede on the slavery issue?
only an idiot would doubt it.
does prejudice still exist in all 50 states to this day?
only an idiot would doubt it.
is the confederacy responsible for all of it?
only an idiot would think so.
beltane
@Mike J: The problem with the post-war South is that justice was not served, not even in a symbolic fashion. Too many people in this country seem to think it’s OK to send their kids to the American equivalent of a “Henirich Himmler Middle School”. If this”heritage” is the only thing these people have to be proud of, the onus should be on them to show the rest of humanity they are capable of something a little better. But when a state like Mississippi doesn’t even get around to ratifying the 13th Amendment until 2013, it’s natural to wonder if white Southern culture is even capable of “a little better”.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
Exactly. It’s like if the North went through its entire history, picked out the Know-Nothing Party and the assorted ideology of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-semetic looniness and chose to make THAT the centerpiece of its “heritage” and “identity.” When, of all the fucking things in your history, you pick THAT, you’ve got an agenda that goes beyond mere nostalgia and “go team!”
Frankensteinbeck
The deja vu is terrifying.
boatboy_srq
@Eric U.: Tentherism in a nutshell, right there.
Chris
@germy shoemangler:
@jl:
As a fan of “old” TV shows, I had hopes for Wild Wild West when I found it on YouTube, since it does us the breath of fresh air of having main characters who are 1) Union veterans, 2) federal agents, 3) answering directly to Ulysses S. Grant 4) during the Reconstruction era.
A let down in practice, though. Not only do they spend most of their jobs just fighting mad scientists (that part’s fun in a campy sixties kind of way), but the couple of times they do go near Civil War/Reconstruction legacies, they don’t handle it very well.
beltane
@Chris: I actually enjoyed the book and the movie for the pure schadenfreude experience of it all.
raven
@tybee: Don’t rain on the hate parade.
tybee
@efgoldman:
did the allies hang every german officer? wonder how the population would have responded if that had been done?
Betty Cracker
@tybee: This too.
boatboy_srq
@Elizabelle: Interesting tidbit: I was up for a scholarship back in [mumble-mumble] when I started university. Part of the award process was an interview. I didn’t catch on at the time, but the endowment must have been from some proto-Teahadi: the questions were all “federalism” and “states’ right” way back then. Needless to say I did NOT get it – either the perspective or the scholarship.
jl
@Brachiator: Yes, that is why I included ‘that he could’ in my comment. And you are correct that he benefited greatly, his slaves made him one of the richest men in US politics ever.
So? Neither of those issues have anything to do with the point I was trying to make, which was that the South has a lot of interesting and worthwhile heritage that is never mentioned by the racist southern Confederate Heritage buffs.
” it is also important to note that the entire country was complicit in the enslavement and oppression of black people. Pointing a finger at the South is correct, but not sufficient. ”
That is true. I agree. it is the very point I made in comments above. Every region in the US needs to be honest with is history, and not only put it celebration of its heritage in honest perspective, but correct the wrongs that remain from the past. That will be difficult for everyone, in the South and elsewhere.
Elizabelle
@Patricia Kayden: Whoa. I remember reading the original Josey Wales book was by a white supremacist — which made me a little surprised that Eastwood’s people touched it — but hadn’t remembered the guy had a second act.
Got to say, story of Mr. Asa turned Forrest Carter makes me think it would make a great movie. Alas.
NYTimes from 1991:
… and the guy is now buried under a stone that says Asa Earl Carter. He was a distant relative of the professor who unmasked him (yet again).
beltane
@tybee: They hanged enough of them to make an impression, and they imprisoned many, many more. Sometimes, a message of “You people suck” is an act of kindness.
tybee
@raven:
yeah, i’m probably not doing any good but sometimes the so called liberals need to take a good look at the racist crap that occurs all around the nation and lay off the “if we’d just killed all them southerners everything would be rainbows and unicorns” bullshit.
Elizabelle
@boatboy_srq: What a genteel way to cloak one’s views, eh?
raven
@tybee: It makes them feel better being all badass. . . 150 years later.
scav
The polite fictions and accommodations or the pious whatevers it took the nation to get past those early post-war things is one thing. That was their fight and their makeup. But there’s no damn way I’m signing onto preserving the historical lies and the whitewashing and the pious nonsense they fed each other, nor do I have to respect those that polish the lies and hold them as idealized perfection and truth. It’s this generation of liars and enables I’ve no patience with or admiration for.
ETA: The Southern rebellions was about slavery. The existence of racism elsewhere, then or now, does not change, mitigate or alter.
germy shoemangler
@geg6: Throw “The Birth Of A Nation” in the same bunker.
boatboy_srq
@Elizabelle: Well, it WAS a SBC-sponsored school. We used to joke that they admitted one Other student per division, plus the basketball team. The student body ran the gamut, and the faculty were fairly decent, but Admissions and Admin were rabid.
tybee
@beltane:
so they hung ALL the german officers as was suggested above being done to all confederate officers? wanna guess how well that would have been received?
Chris
@geg6:
My impression of Germany is that the reason they worked so well is that while we stomped the ever-living shit out of Nazi ideology, we also invested very substantially in the rebuilding of Germany – economic reconstruction, new institutions, taking over the governance and security and everything for quite a long amount of time – so that Germans would have a reason to move on and believe in the future Germany.
In the South, despite the name of the era, I don’t think the “reconstruction” was anything like that (though to be fair the technology and capabilities of people in that era probably didn’t allow for Marshall Plan type things). And it didn’t help that within a decade or two, the federal government was completely under the thumb of robber barons who had absolutely no interest in the South being rebuilt as a functioning and democratic society (quite the opposite, in fact).
tybee
@efgoldman:
perhaps you need to re-read your own comment?
Hal
@tybee:
Yeesh. Lay of the butt hurt. Where are you even getting all of this? This is a story and thread about the civil war. I doubt anyone here thinks the south is some racist wasteland and the rest of America is a paradise.
tybee
@efgoldman:
so explain wisconsin and indiana to us again? we didn’t grasp that the first time around. perhaps you could enlighten us ignorant southerners as to how enlightened the states north of the mason-dixon line truly are?
boatboy_srq
@Chris: The Marshall Plan, I think you’ll find, was quite the historical anomaly. Normal postwar events follow the salting-the-fields, poisoning-the-well pattern. Look at Versailles 1918, Brest-Litovsk 1917 and most other treaties: where there’s a clear victor the vanquished get shafted (assuming they survive).
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore:
And even today, Northern white liberals like to fantasize about dealing with the South’s noxious politics by just ejecting it from the Union, and writing off the whole effort to get a better deal for its black citizens as a loss. (Sometimes they allow for letting them immigrate to the North as refugees.)
raven
@efgoldman: That’s right and I’m from Illinois where a whole bunch of racist teabagger motherfuckers are in office. Being surrounded by crackers is no worse that the fuckers in Chicago. And don’t get me started on the assholes in my unit from Providence.
PhilbertDesanex
Real question: Is there a petition to make this a Federal holiday? Where can I sign?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@jl:
Most Westerns — including the classic pre-WWII ones — have former Confederate soldiers as the heroes. “The Searchers” is one of the few films that sees it as a point against its hero, but you really have to look for it.
Part of the problem is that the most popular and influential school of thought about Reconstruction was the Dunning School (school of thought, not an actual school). They dominated thinking about the Civil War until the 1950s and that’s where a lot of the anti-Reconstruction and anti-“Carpetbagger” propaganda comes from.
raven
@Hal: It’s a post on a fucking blog.
Elizabelle
@efgoldman: I was reading a very good article about the last hours of the Confederacy and the fall of Richmond, in Richmond magazine, noticing the prominent local Rebels’ names, and realizing “damn, that’s a major artery. And that’s the bridge! And that’s an Army base …”
First time I realized General AP Hill (he of Fort AP Hill — a US Army facility near Bowling Green, VA) came perilously close to surviving the Civil War. He was shot in the last battle of Petersburg, on April 2, 1865.
He died once, was buried at least 3 times, and is now interred under his monument, which is surrounded by asphalt at a traffic intersection. No one lingers there.
tybee
@PhilbertDesanex:
Hell, i’d sign up for that. i’m all for another holiday. :)
i wish both sides would get the fuck over it but apparently neither side has forgotten and, like my great aunt concerning andrew jackson, will carry the feud on forever. (she’s the one who showed me that i should spit on every $20 i get and told me why i should).
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Keith G:
Lincoln chose his path carefully, but he was murdered before he could walk it, and Johnson fucked it up so badly he became the first president in US history to be impeached.
If Lincoln had not been murdered by a group of Confederate conspirators, history might have been very different, but you really can’t argue that Johnson was doing what Lincoln would have done.
It’s interesting to me that for decades, Booth was talked about as though he was just a lone nut and the fact that it was a conspiracy where several government officials were supposed to be assassinated all in the same night gets glossed over in the public mind. Booth was part of a frickin’ terrorist cell, but we don’t think of him that way.
NotMax
Several videos.
Civil Wat vets on film
The Rebel Yell
Black Confederates
Kropadope
Man, Grant was a dreamboat captain in his youth.
beltane
@efgoldman: While doing some genealogy work a couple of years ago, I learned one of my husband’s great-uncles was an SS obersturnfuher who spent 25 years in prison after the war. My husband had never met or heard of the guy, and my mother-in-law did not want to talk about him, saying that no one but her grandmother ever visited him in prison all those years. Having a relative like this was, and is, something to be ashamed of. Had the allies not conducted war crimes tribunals, and just taken the attitude of “it’s all cool”, they might not have been ashamed. There is a place for morality in this world. Glorifying men who committed treason in defense of slavery makes a mockery of all notions of morality and justice. It’s impossible to forgive people who feel no remorse.
germy shoemangler
@Patricia Kayden: Thanks for that link.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
His skin was too pale to be considered a terrorist. See also Peter King and the IRA.
SoupCatcher
@efgoldman: I’ve been keeping an eye out for Robert Bateman’s work to pop up, ever since his column went dark over at Esquire, but haven’t seen anything. I agree that he is a national treasure.
More from his post on oaths:
There were men who swore an oath to defend the United States, and then broke that oath and killed Americans.
NotMax
One more.
Eyewitness to Lincoln’s assassination. From TV in 1956!
germy shoemangler
@jl: The lecture the descendant gave after the film was fascinating. He’d had no idea his northern ancestor was so thoroughly involved in the slave trade. He’d been raised to believe it was a southern thing exclusively.
Some family members were pissed that the film was being made. Others were grateful.
Atticus Dogsbody
The biggest unofficial amnesty in US history
Tell that to Mac and the Japanese who tested live, human subjects.
Actually, to be fair, it was official amnesty, but was never talked about.
germy shoemangler
@NotMax: Yeah! I remember that clip! My father was born in 1917, and he remembered seeing civil war veterans with their long beards when he was a boy.
It isn’t ANCIENT history.
Tree With Water
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it”. W.T. Sherman, to the mayor and city council of Atlanta, 1864.
“The Confederate and Federal dead, wounded, and dying were everywhere scattered over the battlefield. Men were lying where they fell, shot in every conceivable part of the body. Some with their entrails torn out and still hanging to them and piled up on the ground beside them, and they still alive. Some with their under jaw torn off, and hanging by a fragment of skin to their cheeks, with their tongues lolling from their mouth, and they trying to talk. Some with both eyes shot out, with one eye hanging down on their cheek…And then to see all those dead, wounded, and dying horses, their heads and tails drooping, and they seeming to be so intelligent as if they comprehended everything…”.
Excerpt from the eyewitness testimony of private Sam Watkins (CSA) of the Chickamauga battlefield.
(This Terrible Sound; Peter Cozzens; University of Illinois Press; pg. 514).
boatboy_srq
@SoupCatcher: Speaking as a NoVA resident and a Navy brat, the only redeeming feature to retaining Lee Highway by that name is that I get to run over it twice daily.
NotMax
@Atticus Dogsbody
A. Johnson did proclaim and sign a blanket amnesty.
tybee
@SoupCatcher:
so explain why you aren’t out raising hell about dick cheney and boy george bush?
tybee
@efgoldman:
so reagan and bush just avoid all the “traitor” crap that others deserve? funny way you have of looking at who should be punished or not.
if you had the chance back in 1865, would you be out demonstrating that R.E.Lee should be hung as a traitor?
drkrick
Another nominee for worthwhile Southern heritage:
Robert Carter III, a contemporary of Washington’s and scion of the most elite Virginia family of the colonial era, who freed his slaves in his lifetime over the objections and the obstruction of his sons, and who contentedly died in genteel poverty as a result. An interesting character that history has worked hard to forget.
Zinsky
@Tommy: Sounds like Dad needed to take up coin collecting.
Kropadope
@NotMax: Hilarious that the prize for being on the show were $80 and a large unit of tobacco.
Irony Abounds
@Atticus Dogsbody: Hard to get too upset about the North going easy on the South after the Civil War when you consider West Germany was an ally three years after Hitler was defeated and Japan became an ally within a relatively short period of time after committing horrific war crimes against American prisoners (not to mentions Chinese and other Asians). When it is in the country’s economic interest to forgive and forget, it does so with amazing alacrity.
NotMax
Dunno if there’s an e-book version, but the Mary Chestnut diary is well worth a look as it is a contemporary account by an accomplished writer, covering 1861 – 1865 as she experienced it.
She was married to a Confederate officer, but herself was anti-slavery.
drkrick
I’ve been led to believe that one reason the Hollywood westerns tended to feature former Confederates as heroes was that Southerners often objected to stories that reflected badly on the Lost Cause while Northerners, who as victors had largely gotten over it, didn’t. Path of least resistance.
Keith G
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): You are arguing about a point that I did not bring up (Go figure). The peace terms at Appomattox were in harmony with Lincoln’s ideas and they were abundantly generous.
Abe wanted the post-war period over the day before. He wanted Southern officers only temporarily removed from civil power, and when one tenth of the number of voter turnout of each state’s 1860 election had sworn a loyalty oath, that state could reform it’s government and elect federal representation.
Personally, given all the historical forces at play, I do not think that there was an “ironclad” solution to the phenomenal issues left unsolved by, and originating with, the Civil War.
Human social-psychology if just too fucking complex and unpredictable to so easily be bent to the will of some of the comments above.
Mike J
@NotMax: https://archive.org/details/diaryfromdixie00chesrich
Keith G
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
So was Paul Revere.
NotMax
@drkrick
And profit reasons.
Roughly put, “In the North theaters won’t much care (the North won); in the South they won’t book and show films overtly denigrating Dixie.”
Roger Moore
@drkrick:
I nominate Cassius Marcellus Clay. He was a loudly public abolitionist in a slave state, and had to defend himself against attempted murder to keep it up. He served as ambassador to Russia, where he helped to convince the Russian government to threaten war against France and Britain if they backed the Confederacy, and later worked on the purchase of Alaska. He donated the land on which Berea College- the first integrated, coeducational college in the South- was built. He seems like a great advertizement for Southern culture.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Keith G:
I forget, who did Paul Revere assassinate?
Keith G
@Mnemosyne (tablet): So….terrorists are only assassins?
PaulW
Totally agree, and even agree with Beutler we need to make this a national holiday.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Keith G:
You said that Paul Revere was part of a terrorist cell. What do you think a terrorist cell is for, helping little old ladies across the street?
Tripod
They ought to rename those US army bases named after traitors.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Keith G:
Booth’s group tried and failed to assassinate Seward the same night as Lincoln’s assassination, which is obviously the exact same thing as alerting militia troops that they needed to gather in the town square.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_assassination#Powell_attacks_Secretary_of_State_William_Seward
NotMax
@Keith G
So far as am aware, Revere never advocated the killing of civilians in pursuit of political aims.
SiubhanDuinne
@germy shoemangler:
No, it isn’t. My great-grandfather died when I was about four or five years old. I remember him in a fuzzy-snapshot kind of way. He was a Civil War veteran (Union), who had lied about his age in order to enlist. (Decades later, according to family lore, he lied about his age the other direction in order to enlist for the Spanish-American War.) He didn’t have a long beard, but every year until the end of his life he marched or rode in Decoration Day (Memorial Day) and Armistice Day (Veterans’ Day) parades.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Hiram (H.U.G.) done good.
Cheers,
Scott.
Keith G
@NotMax: Is that the definition that we use for terrorist? Seems bit narrow. Let’s see what our friends at Wikipedia say:
Dictionary.com:
NotMax
@Keith G
Yes, that is the classical definition.
Nowadays, the word has become so elastically overstretched as to be practically meaningless.
Applying the modern term to Revere is, frankly, ludicrous.
redshirt
Seriously, perhaps the best “What if” universe ever is the one where Lincoln serves 4 terms and thoroughly reforms the south during a long and wise Reconstruction.
I’d be posting this from the USS Grant, currently in orbit around Delta Sig 5.
Keith G
@NotMax: The definition given is the definition used today….apparently not by you, but certainly by our current Justice Department and Pentagon. Hmmm.
Edit:
Revere was a member of a group (some might say a cell) in Boston that used violence and threats of violence to intimidate political opponents. We celebrate them, but it does not change what their behavior was.
SFAW
@Keith G:
I guess I missed the part where Revere used or threatened violence. Or is warning the militia (etc.) exactly the same as that, and I missed that English class?
SFAW
@Keith G:
Which group was that, and what violence (threatened or performed) was visited upon the Loyalists? Prior to Lexington and Concord, that is.
SFAW
@Kropadope:
Perhaps so, but he wasn’t a captain in the picture at the top of the post. Or are you referring to some other photo?
J R in WV
Well, of my 4 grandparents, one was from a Virginia family that I feel certain were solid defenders of Dixie. My paternal Grandma was an artist, and had a piece she duplicated over and over, with battle flags of southern regiments crossed over a little poem, and a fan of CSA currency, curios back then, as save your Confederate money, the south will rise again.
As a kid, I didn’t understand what the painting stood for. She gave one of them to Mom and Dad, and it lived in the back of a closet, and when we were cleaning out the house after Dad died, the last member of our family to live in the hometown, wife and I were delighted to give it to my sister-in-law from Georgia, who thought it was by far the most attractive family keepsake in the whole giant house.
Her husband (my paternal Grandfather) was born in NE Ohio of Swiss immigrants who arrived in the US in the 1890s, so he’s clean as far as the American Civil war goes.
My maternal grandfather was Pennsylvania Dutch, and likely had his ancestors who fought in various PA regiments for the Union Army. My Grandma (Mom’s mother) was from Louisa KY, and her grandfather may have been in either army. But they were essentially southern river people, who got everything from away via a sternwheeler. They lived in town, but had a tiny farm where they raised all they ate, and much of what they drank.
I’m in favor of having hanged all the CSA officers who swore an oath to the Union army before joining the CSA. Jailing all of the rest of the officer corps. The elected members of the government should have been hung if they had been part of the government prior to seccession, perhaps some of them commuted to jail sentences if they were willing to swear a loyalty oath, though why anyone would expect that oath to be any better than the previous forsworn oaths I dunno.
Nothing should be named for a traitor, and the Federal government should make it part of routine business to change that yesterday. The display of any treasonous flags should be cause for some penalty, perhaps not being eligible for government work, or military service.
I’m just venting, here, but I really do despise the cult of southern honor, which was really southern treason for money making from slave labor.
Nothing honorable about any of that.
Keith G
@SFAW: Some time around 1765 (IIRC) Sons of Liberty in Boston became very active at “convincing’ tax collectors to give up their career and exit stage right PDQ.
Cervantes
@Keith G:
A contemporary polemic illustration, 1774, complete with tax collector tarred and feathered, a pot of boiling tea forced down his throat.
Tenar Darell
Never thought I’d recommend this, but in Politico today there was actually a good essay by Euan Hague about the spread of Confederacy worship as a marker of conservative, reactionary politics Why the Confederacy Lives.
Viva BrisVegas
The day after Appomattox was the first day of a war that the North finally lost in 1877.
Aleta
@Patricia Kayden: perhaps because the distortion is so useful to the cause of absolute property rights above all else?
LifeOnTheFallLine
@efgoldman: While the local school is definitely a county issue, part of the problem with renaming Jefferson Davis Highway (if we’re talking about US 1 in Virginia, which I think you are) is that it was so named by the General Assembly and as such renaming it would have to pass through the General Assembly. If you’re talking about Route 110, the county would still need to get approval from the Commonwealth Transportation Board and pay for the resigning (the former would probably prove more of a burden than the latter).
Sherparick
@Eric U.: Roger that. Limbaugh’s, Levine’s, and Savage’s ideal America is the antebellum South. The 9th of April is a great day, as great a day really as the 4th of July. The “Union Forever” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DJR6yUulro
danielx
Classic example of the Washington Post’s conventional wisdom/foreign policy establishments exceedingly blinkered view:
One does wonder what the Post’s editorial reaction would be if Russia was publicly debating the worthiness of shipping arms to the one of the factions involved in Mexico’s ongoing….unpleasantry? Internal disorder? Civil war?
Elizabelle
@Tenar Darell: Thank you.
@Viva BrisVegas: It seems that way a lot! Still, it’s a minority of people dragging their region (and us) down. They’re vocal and have too much power, though.
Sherparick
@redshirt: Lincoln would not have run for reelection in 1868, but I am pretty certain he would backed Grant to have replaced him. Grant really tried to make reconstruction work, but given the really intense racism of mid-19th century America, he was swimming against a heavy current. Both Lincoln and Grant (who before the Civil War while living in Missouri actually owned slaves) changed immensely, mostly because the war brought then both into close personal contact with African-Americans and through that contact, and the valor of African-Americans in the Civil War. But that passion and belief in equality had faded for most white Republicans by 1876.
SFAW
@Sherparick:
Fortunately, they’ve rediscovered that. Because Robert Byrd! And other Southern Democrats.
Because the Dems are the real racists.
As are blacks.
And Jews are the real anti-Semites.
Ad infinitum …
Tripod
Having the careerists clear out and head south was probably a net positive for the Union army.
Rafer Janders
@SFAW:
Which group was that, and what violence (threatened or performed) was visited upon the Loyalists? Prior to Lexington and Concord, that is.
Darkrose
@Mike J: The bloodthirsty terrorism in the aftermath of the Civil War would have been prevented if the terrorists like Nathan Bedford Forrest had received the appropriate reward for their treason. Of course, since the victims of their terrorism were black, they don’t count in the equation.
John M. Burt
When I have finished my second novel (within the next few weeks — “principle photography” has already wrapped), I will commence my third, which takes place on no fewer than three alternate timelines, centered around three different versions of the American South. In one of them, the defeated rebels were dealt with in a way which strikes me as sensible: the eleven secessionist states dissolved and reconstituted as four new territories to be eventually admitted to the Union as four states (as specified by the New Territories Act), anyone who held a military commission or other office of trust under the Confederacy* to lose his citizenship for life and to never again be permitted to own land or bear arms (as specified by the Amnesty Act). I think that would have done the job.
*Actually, none of the timelines feature the Confederacy of 1861-1865 — they will be the Foederal Republic of America (founded 1788), the Republic of Washington (founded 1851) and the Commonwealth of Columbia (1868-1871).
m.c. simon milligan
Most Westerns — including the classic pre-WWII ones — have former Confederate soldiers as the heroes. “The Searchers” is one of the few films that sees it as a point against its hero, but you really have to look for it.
I’d like to see some evidence to back that up. Seems to me like that was an artifact of the ‘edgier’ westerns of the 60s and 70s. John Wayne usually played former Union soldiers (“The Horse Soldiers”, “The Undefeated”, “Rio Lobo” and John Ford’s Cavalry trilogy for example) including two portrayals of William T. Sherman. “The Searchers” and the two Rooster Cogburn films were notable exceptions and they weren’t exactly examples of shining nobility. In “The Lonely Trail” he plays a Union veteran fighting carpetbaggers!
catatonia
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Think that just before the War, Grant was middle-aged (for then, at least) working for his father-in-law, going nowhere. Selling firewood on the streets of St. Louis to make ends meet. Pawning personal possession to buy his kids Christmas presents. Most everyone he met seemed to regard him as a tower of mediocrity. Four years later, he was leading the most powerful army in history up until that time. Part of the reason why he wasn’t afraid to take risks was because he knew what failure was like. And part of the reason why he was generally so mild-mannered and considerate (usually) toward his subordinates, what that he knew what humiliation was like. At the beginning of the War, for instance, the bastard McClellan wouldn’t promote Grant because, years earlier in California, McClellan — the inverse of Grant in so many ways — had seen Grant drunk while in performance of duty. (Later, Lincoln had the right response: “Find out what he’s drinking, and give it to my other officers.”)
In great physical pain from the throat cancer that would shortly kill him, and nearly destitute, Grant wrote his memoirs — a justly renowned work, full of sharp insights and understated humor — so that his beloved wife of 30-odd years, Julia, would be well provided for after he died.
Grant loved horses and, evidently, could not abide cruelty to animals. He was sickened by the spectacle of the bullfight when, after the Mexican War was over, he attended with some other officers.
His loyalty and friendship to Sherman, among others, is well known. (He did somewhat shortchange George Thomas in his memoirs, but no one’s perfect.)
He was a better president than given credit for. (Curiously, given the wingnut hatred of him, the Republican Party started becoming the party of big business during Grant’s two terms.) His opinions of Native Americans and African Americans were pretty advanced, given the times he lived in.
Even the unforgiving and cynical Gore Vidal thought Grant was a man of first-rate intelligence.
There’s so much more to old Sam than the guy who whipped Lee.
Yeah, I admire the shit out of Grant.
SFAW
@Rafer Janders:
OK, but I guess I don’t necessarily see Revere terrorism in what you posted. Also, it becomes a philosophical discussion of “terrorism” vs “insurrection” or “revolution.” There’s also the discussion to be had re: is it terrorism if it’s only/mainly aimed at government officials, and not “civilians”? Because terrorism in a modern context is primarily aimed at civilians, or at least the terrorists don’t give a shit if there’s lots of collateral damage.
I guess I’m saying that I don’t yet see the Sons of Liberty as terrorists, primarily because they were trying to deal with the “oppressors,” rather than establish a figurative Caliphate.
ETA: And, yes, I realize that one man’s “terrorists” are another’s “freedom fighters” and all that, but someone would be hard-pressed to make a valid case that ISIS are freedom fighters.
SFAW
@catatonia:
I grew up with the “Grant was a drunk” meme firmly implanted in my tiny head. It took me a long time to realize just how important he was in any number of ways.
Tripod
Lee was a bumbling idiot. His ascension to granite man was largely a function of him not mouthing off about Jeff Davis and the Confederate political leadership during, and after, the war.
His strategic operations (WV, MD, PA) all ended disastrously, he had bled his army white long before Grant showed up, and his refusal to work outside Virginia marked him wholly unsuited for command.
Which Confederate generals had their commands destroyed in detail while in the field? John Bell Hood and Bobby Lee.