You're quite right in your well considered reply but as an unreconstructed lost cause-ER I am quite ready to defend the virtues not only of the cause itself but of those who sacrificed so much on its behalf.
Those virtues include a Christian faith, a rooted belief in the virtues of federalism, of home rule and local democracy, a code of honor, defense of homeland and home and a degree of fortitude unimaginable today.
That is not to say that in the sweep of history the defeat of the Confederate cause was not only to be desired but indispensable for the nurturing of the role The United States was destined to render to the whole world in the succeeding centuries in behalf of much of the same virtues that animated "Virgil Caine." If the democracy of the South excluded African-Americans, even enslaved them, the democracy of the North excluded women and virtually enslaved those Indians it did not exterminate, but we do not despise the northern cause for that.
Woke-ness comes from a hubristic attitude that heroes of previous centuries should be judged by our freshly enshrined cultural mores of today.
Finally, I would like to observe that the song was not a genuine folk song that emerged naturally from the cauldron of a devastating Civil War, it is a 20th-century construct-but it is good music. "Virgil Caine" is himself a fictional character, he did not exist. We should no more submit to cloying sentimentality than we should submit to woke-ness
