Posted on 09/30/2014 12:29:23 PM PDT by 11th_VA
Also remember, Sherman and Sheridan did the same trick to the American Indians. These two were war criminals with authority.
He also won. He latched on to Lee, forced him to retreat until he was bottled up in Petersburg. And then when Lee tried to break out in desperation, Grant tracked him down and forced him to surrender. I think that was the whole purpose behind the exercise, wasn't it?
So...then this movie was made by liberals?
Most southerners did not own slaves. It was only the “crony capitalist” plantation owners who supported slavery.
Once the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered, Grant’s terms were not those of a cruel conqueror.
For example, any Confederate who claimed to own a horse or mule could take it home once paroled. Lee himself remarked that this “would have a happy effect” upon his army.
I think most would agree that it was Wilson, Roosevelt, and LBJ who made this government what it is today and not Lincoln. Two of those were Southerners by the way.
I guess you might say Confederates weren’t “racists” in their day. There wasn’t much by way of any concept of “racism” at that time. Even many abolitionists who felt that slavery should be abolished truly thought that blacks weren’t smart enough to compete in a white society and felt they were inferior. So, often times, in those days even the white people who were on the blacks’ side would today be considered racists.
I have long argued that the War of 1861 was a transitional war in terms of strategy and tactics. It started out Napoleonic and ended up like World War I. General Lee was brilliant in terms of Napoleonic warfare while General Grant had more in common with General Pershing.
Not that we could have expected to see it, but of course there wasn’t a mention of the fact that the Confederates were Democrats fighting to keep Blacks on their plantation - hey come to think of it things haven’t changed very much. Today’s Democrats are doing the same thing.
And in a war that had gone on for three years at that point, Grant took just seven weeks to put it into an endgame that left Lee trapped and able to do no more than delay the inevitable. And once that inevitability became apparent, who becomes the butcher then?
They were hardly war criminals. They did their jobs with grim efficiency, that’s for sure. But that is the nature of war. There were predations enough on both sides, just as there was nobility. The South did not have any corner on that, romantic myths of chivalry notwithstanding.
Rah Virginia Mil!
So was Pershing. So was Patton. So was Halsey. So was Curtis LeMay.
You win a war by slaughter, destruction, and terror that destroys the enemy's will to continue. That's why reasonable people do not start wars they do not have the stomach to finish. When we find our Grant, we will win the present war, and not before. It is unfortunate, but history requires it to not be otherwise.
Yep. And Lincoln advocated having all the slaves shipped back to Africa. His Emancipation Proclamation was just a war ploy to create a Fifth Column of blacks in the South. It didn’t free a single northern slave, and there were many. That didn’t happen till the end of the war.
There was racism on all sides and throughout the country to including Lincoln himself. I fault no side for the racism of the day. Many of the feelings then also exist today.
Now maybe the other side of the story will finally get told. While some southerners were certainly pro-slavery, it certainly wasn’t the driving issue for most, as about 70-80% of southern soldiers didn’t even own slaves. Some slaves and free blacks even served in the confederate army, many fighting for the same reasons that their white counterparts fought: to protect their homes from invaders who were pillaging and destroying. After the war, one Jewish confederate veteran, Moses Ezekiel (who was one of the VMI cadets at New Market) became a sculptor and included a black confederate marching in the ranks of the confederate army on the Confederate monument at Arlington.
I know right. His emancipation proclamation claimed to free blacks in southern states (over whom he had absolutely no control), and yet specifically stated that those in northern states would remain slaves. It was all about cloaking his cause in pretended righteousness so that Britain and France wouldn’t come in on the side of the South, like many southerners hoped.
When you look at the way Sheridan and Sherman treated civilians in their paths,....all the burning, raping, pillaging and etc....it was awful. Southern civilians in the Civil War were treated way worse than Nazi German civilians in WWII...
I call this the "Lincoln was a tyrant, so why didn't he act more tyrannically?" argument of Lost Causism. The Emanicpation Proclamation was issued in Lincoln's capacity as Commander in Chief, and only applied to areas in rebellion. For those slave states not in rebellion, Lincoln knew that he had no authority, something he repeatedly said. Those states would have to do it themselves (as several did) or that it would require a constitutional amendment, something he worked for but which was blocked by Democrats in the House until the election of 1864 gave Lincoln the needed majority. That's when a number of lame duck Dems switched their votes to allow the amendment to pass.
He also included a bare-breasted, sword-swinging warrior angel. Doesn't mean that there were large numbers of them on the battlefield.
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