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Bodleian_Girl: "I’m having to re-think it.
I mean, do Germans have monuments to Hitler?"

It's sometimes tempting to compare Confederates to Nazis, after all, both the Confederacy and Nazi Germany declared war on the United States and both suffered unconditional surrender.
Indeed, both still have US military forces stationed on their lands.

Further, such comparisons as Confederates = Nazis are the Left's stock in trade, they make their livings off of it.
But we must always resist such temptations and never make the comparison, because in every important sense, it does not apply.
Here's why:

Yes, both Nazis and Confederates wished to establish a slavocracy, with their own "race" ruling.
But the huge difference is that whereas the Confederacy merely extended a millenniums'-long cultural & legal tradition, the Nazis intended to re-impose slavery or serfdom on European "untermenschen" who had already been freed for centuries.
Nazis were largely insane homicidal maniacs, bent not merely on dominating Europe, but also on general destruction of those deemed by themselves "life unworthy of life".
Nothing remotely resembling such insanity afflicted the Confederate slavocracy.
The WWII death toll of European civilians was at least 25 million, of American civilians during the Civil War a few score, perhaps hundreds, confirmed.
Nothing in the Confederacy's history remotely resembled the Nazi Holocaust of Jews.
Indeed, it's important to remember that Northern leaders like Abraham Lincoln just assumed that Southern whites and blacks could never live side-by-side without slavery, and so they hoped to arrange for black resettlement in Africa or the Caribbean.
And yet, as it turned out, given the choice, nearly all freed African Americans preferred to live in America rather than return to the Africa of their ancestors.
By sharp contrast, every Jew who could escape Europe under the Nazis did so.

The fact is that Confederates fought honorably for a cause they believed was just, and indeed, many argue on Free Republic that Confederate troops were much better behaved on Northern soil than were Northern troops marching through the South.

Of course today no Conservative suggests returning to slavery, though the Left seems determined to impose a modern form of slavery on all of us.
But we should not condemn our ancestors for doing what they believed was right, even though history showed them to be sadly mistaken.

During WWII, my Pennsylvania born Dad took military training at Camp Forrest (named after Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest), Tennessee and after the war married a pretty North Carolina girl, my Mom.
They are recently deceased and lie side by side in a Pennsylvania cemetery, which is where also such old North-South animosities should be buried.

According to Lincoln there was no Confederacy. There were only American citizens in rebellion. He wasn’t waging war against another nation. He sent his army against Americans to force them to submit.

Thank you for that very thoughtful reply. I’m going to read it again when I get off my phone and digest it.

My you get and I are currently listening to “With Lee in Virginia” and it’s been great.

Also just finished an I depth study on the Sally Hemming issue. So it’s a topic that’s on my mind a lot these days.