See, I understand where you are coming from there. My father is a Civil War history buff and has read practically every biography on Sherman. And I don’t think he was a monster or anything, but he DID effect people for generations. I mean my grandmother recalls her mother crying about watching her house burn as a little girl. That pain affected a person who I loved, you know?
It’s diluted as time goes on, but it’s still there. And history is written by the victors.
Unfortunately war does that too, not just people. I understand your feelings too, because afterall, if we forget the lessons of history, we are destined to repeat them.
I just finished watching a two-hour PBS program on Lincoln that I recorded the other night. It focused on the myths of Lincoln, and whether he had been made out to be more than he really was. The main historian was Henry Louis Gates Jr., an African-American. I had to laugh at several parts of the program. He interviewed several blacks who believed they had been misled to believe that Lincoln was their "saviour" and the Great Emancipator. My impression was that they were blaming whitey, and their school system for starting and perpetuating that myth. Yet no where in the program did they mention the possibility that a lot of that myth may have begun with their own people, having been passed from freed slaves, down through the generations. God forbid that their own folks would have played a role in creating the myth that is Lincoln.
Then there was the part where Gates, while attending a get-together of the Sons of Confederate Veterans seemed shocked over the fact that blacks had actually fought for the South. Here you have a well-known historian, who acted surprised to see a black family in attendance, honoring their ancestor's memory and the role he played in the Confederacy. It only stands to reason, if there were blacks who owned slaves in this country, (and they did), why is it so hard to believe or accept that blacks would have fought for the South? I've seen it time and time again where educated blacks refuse to accept these facts as truth, choosing instead to perpetuate their own myths about what their black ancestors did. The most interesting fact for me is that they refuse to admit that it was their own African ancestors who sold their people to the slavers.
Unfortunately, the practice by some blacks has been to try to eliminate any trace of history of the Confederacy. On one hand they push to promote their own racial history in this country, cherry-picking the truths they want told, yet they strive to eliminate someone else's because it doesn't fit their idea of what history or heritage is, or should be.