Thank you for posting this, although as an Ohioan I cringe at my fellow Ohioan Sherman's methods, which tended to reverse the benefits of two or three centuries of civilizing influences on Western Man.
My original comments on the Hansen thread were provoked because he seemed to be trying to suggest that Ohio farm boys of that era had Communist values. That is simply not true. Most were fighting to preserve the Union, though doubtless some were in it, in the mistaken notion that often pops into young minds, that war could be fun and adventure; very few were involved in Quixotic notions of social equality.
Hansen would not have written the piece in the earlier thread if he did not have an agenda other than the pursuit of history for its own sake. He is no isolated case, of course. Two generations of American College graduates have been educated in a stilted curriculum which suggests not only a form of class warfare, but the active pursuit of unreality (the social equality of man) as a primary goal justifying collective action. Now admittedly, American Leftists did not invent such an agenda; evidence of the compulsion predates them. But they certainly do illustrate that compulsion to a very marked degree. (See Compulsion For Uniformity, for an historic perspective.)
It is perhaps a tad less relevant to the Cult of Equality, but not to some of Hansen's implied errors, to read what the great, self-taught, Negro educator, Booker T. Washington, had to say about the relations of the races in the Old South--particularly between the Negro and the Southern Planter class, whom Hansen appears to disparage: Address To Atlanta Exposition, 1895. Washington was a voice for constructive progress. Hansen? He is playing the Leftist game.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site