> They died every bit as American as you will ever be....
How about the black former slaves? If it was not shameful to enslave the blacks, why woudl it have been shameful to enslave the southern white aristocracy?
> Sherman shouldn't have led a pillaging mob through the South. That wasn't necessary to win.
Argueable. Necessary to bring the South to the surrender table? Possibly not. But necessary to *beat* the south, to make them submit to wholesale cultural change? Now *that* is different. In WWII, we did that to Germany and Japan. We beat them down and then reshaped them as we saw fit. But in Afghanistan and Iraq... we worked just hard enough to topple the governments, but we left the crappy local culture in place.
In any event, it's late. Y'all have fun argueing why anyone who claims that the Confederacy was an immoral idea deserves to be beaten to a pulp.
Not one person here threatened you. Your points are not supported by the facts, and people here are calling you on it.
Incidentally, it's not like you succeeded in changing Southern culture either. All the sins of the Jim Crow era and the responsibility for them all deserve to be layed at the feet of Yankee Reconstruction governments. The only thing the War of Northern Aggression accomplished was that you basically forced poor whites, who until then had owned land and were capable of supporting themselves, into the shackles of tenant farming and later on sharecropping.
At the same time, for the most part, blacks were also forced into sharecropping and tenant farming, except for those who had kissed ass to Union authorities during Reconstruction. They were provided with money by the Yanks, and given dominion over their less connected bretheren. Such wonderful Northern intervention, right?
"How about the black former slaves? If it was not shameful to enslave the blacks, why woudl it have been shameful to enslave the southern white aristocracy? "
Except that after the defeat of the confederacy, former slaves were citizens, too, remember? Gotta be consistent here.
You don't deserve to be beaten to a pulp, but you do not understand the constitutional argument......slavery existed under the constitution before the Civil War, the Union wanted to change it, the Confederacy didn't. That, among other things, and we had a Civil War.
Nobody argues the morality of slavery, something you refuse to concede, inexplicably.
It of course is arguable to state that Sherman's march was unnecessary for the defeat of the South. But there is no relevant comparison of Germany/Japan and the Confederacy. Sherman torched what he wanted to make part of the Union again.....made little sense. But the Generalship of Sherman lacked discipline and the strategy execution lacked honor.
Quaint Southern sensibilities - discipline and honor, I know, but somehow we've managed to survive and prosper to this day valuing them.
Funny thing though about Sherman. Not too many military people come from around the world to study his tactics. They still study Lee and Jackson to this day.....
Soldiers the world over aspire and study to be like Lee and Jackson, but not Sherman.