Good or Bad doesn’t enter into it.
The CFB simply was. And is.
Assigning a value to it is ridiculous.
War has a habit of putting people on sides they don’t want to be on.
There are moments when I only half-jokingly refer to the civil war as the North’s Irish immigrants VS. the south’s Irish immigrants. I also refer to the space race as America’s captured German scientists VS. The Soviet Union’s captured German scientists.
CC
The Confederacy was a brief experiment in a cobbled-together government offering more power to the states than the U.S. Constitution allowed,
LOL
There is some potential hilarity here.
You know how the left is filled to the brim with apologetic for Islam, “the religion of peace”, in that “most Muslims are peaceful”?
The same applies to southerners during the Confederacy.
The entire South had about 9 million people, and only 1 million fought for the South. The other 8 million southerners, the vast majority, were thus “peaceful”.
So, this gentleman is brushing broad-stroke assertions about the South and the Confederacy based on his narrow research on folks from Eastern Tennessee?
Uncle Remus and his tales of Br’er Rabbit, the whole “Song of the South” popularized in the Disney film, was something of a prettification and romantic gloss-over of the what made up much of “the rest of the story”, as it related to the daily lives of the “non-voting” residents of what was once known as “the Confederacy”.
The “South” had a pretty diverse population at the time, perhaps more so than any of the Northern states, as there was also a large and fairly well integrated Indian population (the Cherokee, the Creeks, the Choctaw, the Seminole, and the Chickasaw tribes), considered to be the “five civilized tribes”. And many of these contributed manpower to the war effort of the South, being excellent scouts and guerrilla fighters in the wilderness areas.
The North, on the other hand, treated many of the other Indian tribes rather shabbily, before and after the Civil War, relocating a number of tribes forcibly out of New York and Pennsylvania, and waging open warfare with almost every one of the Plains and Western tribes.
You know, the black slaves had it a lot less rough in most instances, even for the freed slaves after Reconstruction. While there may have been individual persecutions of blacks, there was nothing like the genocide that had been practiced against many of the Indians, as they were removed again and again to places remote from their ancestral homes.
And no, I am not Ward Churchill, or even Elizabeth Warren.
I think it’s likely that people in the states west of the Appalachians were less likely to view the state as their “country” than those in the original 13 colonies. They had after all moved from one state to another, often several times, and didn’t consider themselves to have changed “countries” when they did. I know that’s true of Northerners like Lincoln and Grant, and I suspect it was true of many Southerners too.
It’s in the past; we have to live in the now! My great-great grandfather was a Rebel at Shiloh; then, my Daddy, an AMERICAN, went off to N. Africa in WWII, fought in combat in Italy & Germany, was hot on Hitler’s hind-end even as Hitler took the coward’s way out & committed suicide in Berlin rather than stand & take responsibility for what he had done to the world. That is how history works; eventually God has the last word.
One of the things that is true of the Civil War- it was more divisive than people think. The region of the Appalachian Mountains in the South(East Tennessee, Western NC, and SW VA) was largely Union in its sympathies, and often resisted the Confederate draft of 1862 by evasion or joining the Union army. There was a lot of fighting between local groups who favored one side or the other, and toward the end of the war a lot of chaos by armed men who served no side save their own. The Hatfield-McCoy feud is said to have some of its roots in the Civil War, for example. In any case, other than a few articles and the movie “Cold Mountain” it is not a well-known matter- largely glossed over because it doesn’t match a perfect blue-gray dichotomy.
If øbama is against the Confederate Battle Flag, I’m for it.