“... and why until this very day people in Georgia hate the names of Sherman and Lincoln...”
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Most people do not understand or will not admit to the southern hatred
that existed after the war
(and still exists now, but to a much lesser extent)
...of all things northern (yankees in general),
...of all things federal (we know what’s best for you),
...and of all things republican (the party of Lincoln).
Most people say,
“That was a long time ago, can’t we just get beyond that, now?”
And as time has passed, the hatred has faded, as the older ones have passed away.
But most people don’t seem to realize just how deep the hatred ran,
and that in the great scheme of things, is really wasn’t “a long time ago”.
My mama still lives at the age of 93.
She was orphaned at a young age, and raised by her grandfather.
He was the son of a wounded confederate veteran.
Oh, the stories she was told (and passed along to me)!
I was a boy during World War II. When I visited my grandmother in Mississippi, I would visit the battlefield at Vicksburg. It wa snothing like it is now, because the trees had no grown up to obscure so much, and one can still see the town on the crest of the river and see the depressions in the ground where the entrenchments were. My grandmother lived in a house along the road followed by Grant, differing from the road he us only in being covered by asphalt. My great-grandmother was still alive and remembered the siege; she stayed a while in the caves under the city. One of her uncles decapitated by a cannonball during the Union attack. No wonder that when old people spoke of “THE WAR,” they did not mean the war against Hitler.
“Oh, the stories she was told”
I must agree. The desolation left by Sherman and the abuses of Reconstruction were intolerable enough that great masses went GTT (Gone to Texas). They voted with their feet and moved 1/2 way across the nation to get away.
Those oral histories are very very common here. Only the complete take over of the Dem Party in the 1960’s broke the Southern Voting block. The Deep South, Texas and much of the West is Republican. (I have always been republican, never registered as Dem) The Dem Party has morphed into the ComDem Party.
Nor do northerners understand what reconstruction did to the South and we still feel the effects. You have to live and breath our air to understand it.
A lot of people don’t recall the hatred of Jeff Davis and Lee that existed in the south. People who knew them, knew them as prize bumblers. Lee was corrupt, paying himself for his slaves to build fortifications around Richmond. Davis was corrupt, refusing to appoint justices to the pretended counterpart to the supreme court, as that would have prevented him from the executive fiats that made his friends rich and powerful until his house of cards came crashing down.