Replies

<>Yankees do not understand....

Mostly you're right, but where we live in New England, you can also go to the old church graveyards and find many graves from the Civil War and, in many cases, more from the Revolution. And, you'd be amazed how many towns still have their monuments to Union veterans, whether a particular local unit or the Grand Army of the Republic, in the town square or somewhere at what was a major intersection. I think the reason most yankees don't understand is that they're not really yankees, except by attitudinal assimilation: they feel no connection to The War because they have no connection to The War, their ancestors (or they themselves) having arrived anywhere from 25 to 140-odd years later. Remember, of the great ethnic immigrations to the US, only the Irish and the Germans arrived before The War. Both groups fought, often valiantly, for a cause they little understood, but associated with their own struggles in the Old Countries.

Of course, Cato, you are quite right about the presence of graves and monuments in the Northeast. But they are really the only striking reminders of the War up there. In the North no lasting economic damage was done, no buildings (except a few in Gettysburg and Chambersburg) are associated with battles, and there are no daily reminders. In the South the reminders are still there, to be seen daily. Here are all but one of the battlefields; here are vast tracts of land that have never recovered economically from the War; here there are reenactments often played out at the scene of Civil War battles; here are the Civil War Trails programs, thousands of crossroads and houses associated with the War; here are continual fights over presevation of War-related sites.

And here, too, are people who can still see the results of the War in their own lives. When you can drive past the wreckage of a great house that once belonged to your family and know that it would have belonged to your children but for the War--this realization brings the War close, too. In some cases the house is a burned wreck (I have a few bricks from one of my family's burned wrecks, and thank you General Sheridan) while others have been preserved to show us the beauties of the past.

Now, in the North you have a lot of these things, too. The North also has thousands of historic structures, sites, battlefields, museums,and reenactments. But the orientation is not toward the Civil War at all, since it wasn't fought in Connecticut. The concentration of the North is, as you remark, on the Revolution. People in the North lost sons and brothers, but they didn't lose a lot of real estate so there are no ongoing reminders of the Civil War for people to obsess over.

Remember, I used to live quite near you, in Westchester, and my village wsa the site of a Revulationary War battle. While I lived there I was a passionate student of the Revolution, because that was what was available to study.