[x]

But the social ostracization of pro-Confederates, to me, violates both the spirit of 1776, and the Constitution. as well as any sense of elemental fairness. It also illustrates the hubris always present when one generation assumes the right to pass judgment on others who walked in different times, in ways that reflected their own experiences, not the shallow & myopic experiences of their later critics.

I don't see anybody "ostracizing pro-Confederates." It seems like the accursed varmints run rampant here.

"Hubris" cuts both ways. People attacking Lincoln and the Union troops here are also the ignoring the ideas and conditions of the time and judging 19th century people by a (faulty) late 20th century version of libertarianism. If you don't see hubris in neo-Confederate writers like DiLorenzo, you've missed an awful lot of what they're saying.

[Ohioan]

I don't see anybody "ostracizing pro-Confederates."

The pro-Confederates, I refer to are long since dead. Slandering Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or Jefferson Davis, because they fought for their homeland--or disagreed with someone hereabouts' theories of what should or should not have been done over a century and a half ago, is a form of ostracization.

The writers, to whom I refer, would deny these long honored men, their previously accepted place in history.

Curiously, one does not read where the self-righteous detractors of Robert E. Lee, who did not own slaves, have the consistency to denounce the Patriarchs in the Bible, who did. (A minor point, perhaps. Personally, I agree with the way Douglas MacArthur paid tribute to both the Blue & Gray in his classic address: Duty, Honor, Country.)