Well there is this %-age Freeper who has family understanding of Reconstruction. That’s why true Southerners have an excellent understanding of the abuses of Statists and overbearing central federal govt, regardless of party.
“Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late… It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision… It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”
Maj. General Patrick R. Cleburne, CSA, January 1864
You and me and wardaddy for the same reason.
George Marshall was a Virginian, as was Patton’s family, and I’ve always suspected that in part the Marshall Plan was a result of his knowledge of the famine and decades of ruin inflicted on the southern people by the war.
I don’t think that most appreciate that in the view of Lincoln the people and lands he was waging war upon had never ceased being parts of the USA. These weren’t citizens of another country. Imaginations might be made to focus differently if our current Illinois President called up an army to use against some recalcitrant American states that opposed one of his progressive programs. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was passed to prevent the future militarily occupation of the states by the national government as was done during Reconstruction, not that that would stop him.