>>BroJoeK wrote: "Americans in 1861 had only two choices -- were they going to accept Confederate aggressions against the United States or not? Their decision to resist Confederate aggression had nothing to do with their own "perfection" or not, and everything to do with their perception of existential threats Confederates posed."
That is the most insane thing I have read from you, Joey. Every historian of that era knows the South seceded to get away from the greedy, radical, and even blood-thirsty Northern leadership in order to pursue their own economic interests.
Did I tell you that I didn't fully understand the concept of "Damn Yankee" until I started studying Antebellum and Civil War History. I was blessed to have studied Constitutional history -- the history of our founding, beforehand; but nothing could have prepared me for the shock of finding out that Pennsylvania's Thaddeus Stevens was a scheming psychopath, while Buchanan (whose historic home was about an hour away from mine) was not such a bad President, after all. I also learned that Andrew Johnson was both honorable and a sound leader who was possibly trying to recover Lincoln's legacy from the rabid psychopaths, like Stevens and Charles Sumner. The late Historian and Lincolnite James Truslow Adams left us this analysis:
"Two men of considerable contemporary importance had already, before Lincoln's death, given the keynote to the policies which the Republicans were to follow —Thaddeus Stevens, the vindictive fanatic born in Vermont whose ironworks in Pennsylvania had been burned by the Confederates, member of the lower House of Congress, and Charles Sumner, Senator from Massachusetts. Sumner had claimed that secession had deprived the South of every right under the Constitution, and that it lay absolutely at the mercy of Congress, which was another way of naming the Republican Party. Stevens had declared that Congress must treat the Southern States as "conquered provinces, and settle them with new men, and drive the present exiles as rebels from this country." Under such leadership, Congress undertook the task of punishing the South, making places and spoils for its henchmen, and ensuring for a generation the national domination of the Republicans. The vindictiveness of Stevens and the fanaticism and egotism of Sumner combined to despoil the nation of that peace which Lincoln would have brought. The electorate gave them all-too-ready backing. For the next decade the South lived under a military despotism from which almost every trace of self-government was obliterated."
"In only six of the Northern or Western States did the negroes, whose numbers there were small, possess the franchise, and in 1865 Connecticut, Minnesota, and Wisconsin voted against granting it in their own domains. The next year Congress, as part of its plan to Republicanize the South, drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, heavily reducing the basis of representation in Congress of such States as did not allow the negro to vote. This was adopted two years later. The Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1870, forcibly enfranchised, without the slightest preparation, the slaves, who formed about 70 per cent of the Southern population. Just as both political parties in the North had debauched the immigrant voters and led them to the polls in shoals, so the Southern black was now to be debauched."
"In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act, which divided the South into five districts to be administered by Generals of the Federal army. It also provided for the holding of elections, in which the ex-slaves should vote, for delegates to constitutional conventions which should adopt constitutions providing for negro suffrage. These had to be submitted to the blacks as well as the whites for adoption. Until these constitutions had been drafted, approved by Congress, and the Fourteenth Amendment adopted, the Southern States were to continue to be ruled by the army under supervision of Congress. [President Andrew] Johnson vetoed the Act, but it was passed over his veto, and when he had proved himself sufficiently a defender of the Federal Constitution and of Lincoln's policy against the radicals in Congress, that body undertook to disgrace the nation and itself by impeaching him on a trumpery charge. The impeachment, under the lead of Stevens, broke down, but Congress continued its mad course."
"In the South, conditions developed as might have been expected. A disgraceful horde of office and spoils seekers from the North, known as "carpetbaggers," swarmed over it. Combining with the riffraff of Southern whites, known as "scalawags," and the utterly ignorant negroes, they formed parties, elected the legislatures, and stole with the complete abandon of Boss Tweed and his gang in New York. The taxes rose tenfold and fifteenfold, and debts were created, not for improvements or other legitimate purposes, but to line the pockets of these political shysters. Rhodes, who made as good a case as he could for the North, notes, for example, that in four years of Republican rule in Louisiana the State tax rose 400 per cent and the State debt from $14,000,000 postwar to an indeterminate amount estimated anywhere from $24,000,000 to $50,000,000 post-Republican. Of the $22,000,000 debt of the city of New Orleans, $17,000,000 had been issued at 35 cents on the dollar. One estate in that city which even after the war, in 1867, was bringing in $70,000 income, could not be rented five years later for enough to pay taxes, insurance, and repairs."
"Scenes in the legislative halls of all the States would have been laughable had they not been tragic. Crowds of Northern muckers, and blacks who had been slaves a short time since, swaggered about, smoking and drinking at the States' expense, ruling the South. There is no parallel for the situation in the history of modern civilized nations, and it is almost incredible that it occurred within our own country. No civilized victor was ever more ungenerous. The war had left the South prostrate; Reconstruction left it maddened."
"Little by little, however, the South began to pick itself up. The new constitutions and the Fourteenth Amendment were ratified, and one by one, from Tennessee in 1866 to Virginia in 1870, the Southern States again became members of the Union."
[James Truslow Adams, "The Epic of America." 3rd Ed, 1938, pp.284-286]
For the record, the reason Lee singled out the ironworks of Thaddeus Stevens was probably because of his sub-human pre- and early-war rhetoric:
"In the Congress, there was a significant group of South haters, with murderous demands. The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives, Thaddeus Stevens, was willing that the South "be laid waste, and made a desert, in order to save this Union from [economic] destruction." Before a Republican state convention in September 1862, he urged the government to "slay every traitor-bum every Rebel Mansion.... unless we do this, we cannot conquer them."
"The New York Times wrote in March 1861 that the North should "destroy its commerce, and bring utter ruin on the Confederate states," and this was BEFORE the bombardment at Fort Sumter."
"Congressman Zachariah Chandler expressed the spirit of so many in the Congress: "A rebel has sacrificed all his rights. He has no right to life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. Everything you give him, even life itself, is a boon which he has forfeited."
"Such sentiments found their way to the European observers of the war, who found them hard to believe from a civilized people. A correspondent for the pro-Northern Macmillan Magazine, in December 1863, wrote, "How can you subjugate such a people as this? And even supposing that their extermination were a feasible plan, as some Northerners suggested, I never can believe that in the nineteenth century the civilized world will be condemned to witness the destruction of such a gallant race."
"On 5 May 1861, this genocidal passion against the South found analysis in the New York Herald. It quoted the views of the abolitionists: "When the rebellious traitors are overwhelmed in the field, and scattered like leaves before an angry wind, it must not be to return to peaceful and contented homes. They must find poverty at their firesides, and see privation in the anxious eyes of mothers, and the rags of children."
"Another radical editor noted that the New York Herald called "for the punishment of all individuals in the South by hanging, and the confiscation of everybody's property in the seceding States." "Richmond," said another, "must be laid in ashes," and as for Baltimore, "it must become a heap of cinders and ashes, and its inhabitants ought either to be slaughtered, or scattered to the winds." Virginia and Maryland deserve to be "laid waste and made desolate" and 500,000 troops should "pour down from the North, leaving a desert track behind them." "The editor responded, "Submission on the part of the South would not satisfy these bloody journalists of the Republican party. Far from it. They cry out: 'We mean not merely to conquer, but to subjugate.'" The editor then adds, "The people of the North are prepared for no such extremities as the brutal, bloodthirsty journals of the abolitionist school suggest."
"On 24 May 1861, the Daily Herald in Newburyport, Massachusetts, said that "if it were necessary, we could clear off the thousand millions of square miles so that not a city or cultivated field would remain; we could exterminate nine millions of white people and re-settle-re-people the lands. There is no want of ability; and if such a work is demanded, there would be no want of a will." "It is no wonder that the Civil War generated hatred for the North and the Republican party among Southerners for well over a hundred years the bloodthirsty rhetoric of the radicals in the North in time found expression in the devastation of civilians and civilian property by Sherman, Sheridan, Grant, and the commander in chief-Lincoln. It didn't end with the war, for it was then carried on in a less violent form in the Reconstruction laws for the South by the radicals. The object was to exterminate the culture of the Southerners, and to subjugate then destroy the political force of the Southern establishment, and not just the planter-slave owner class. There was to be a new order in the South, excluding the established Southerners of all classes. The radicals succeeded for a while and then moved on, leaving a wasteland in which secret societies and lawlessness prevailed. Thus, in a sense, the Northerners did exterminate a society in every way except genocide. By contrast, no such genocidal threats were made by Southerners against the North."
[Charles W. Adams, "When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession." Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp.54-56]
And now you know why the terms "Damn Yankees" and "Southern Gentlemen" stuck! But, frankly, the label "Damn Yankee" is much too kind. My Pennsylvania ancestors would be rolling in their graves.
Mr. Kalamata