[Capriole]

Honey, I think he was kidding. Joe Queenan writes a lot of things like this.

As a Southerner who can laugh at herself, my favorite line of the piece is this one:

"Certainly we are taught as impressionable schoolchildren to believe the Civil War was a noble crusade to free the slaves. But by the time we reach adulthood, most of us either are white people or have been around enough white people to know that white people just don't do things like that - it isn't in their DNA."

[Fred22]

Just asking, do you consider Maryland a Southern state?

[smoothsailing]

SAVE YOUR CONFEDERATE DOLLARS CAUSE THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN!

They died of Southern fever, of Rebel shot and shell, those dirty theivin' yankees are better off in Hell!

Now that was fun.

[Podkayne]

History buffs like to repeat over and again that few realize how close the south came to winning the "War of Northern Agression".

In addition - the majority of confederate soldiers were not the rich, land-owning, chivalrous, slave-holding gentry who controlled all things and had started the secession. The typical confederate grew up on a farm, knew how to use a rifle and how to live off the land. This is in contrast with the yankee immigrant city dwellers who were drafted and who made up a large percentage of the union army.

In battle after the battle the south lost marginally and used their resources to much greater advantage.

They fought for their land much as Russians fight for mother Russia. There are still great cultural differences between yankees and those living south of the Mason Dixon line.

If, for some terrible reason, there were ever to be another polarization between north and south you can bet your bottom dollar that the next war would be won before it even started.

[CatoRenasci]

I find these many euphemisms for the civil war amusing. My completely unreconstructed grandmother, who grew up during Reconstruction (born 1871) in Tennessee, would use some of them (War of Northern Aggression; Late Unpleasantness) for fun, but when she was speaking seriously it was always just the War, or if she was speaking to someone born after WWII, the Civil War. When I went to college in Virginia in the 1960's at VMI, as unreconstructed a Southern institution as you can imagine in those days, it was 'War between the States' in the high school text books, but the course at VMI was "Civil War and Reconstruction" and we had the "Civil War Roundtable".