This continuing attempt to deify those who would have destroyed this country in order to save slavery is on of this country's greatest shames. These were not men intent on preserving a noble society. These were men intent on destroying a noble expermient so that they could hold humans as chattel, and be able to point to the feilds and say "Lo! I am clearly better than that beast there." Fie. To hell with them, all.

Sherman put it best.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

Alan Barra also implies that the U.S. has healed the wounds of the American Civil War. I have to agree with Patrick that I'm not sure which Civil War he's talking about, because there's plenty of open wounds around--witness the controversy over the placement of a statue to Lincoln in Richmond, Virginia recently. As one resident of Virginia was quoted (my paraphrase), "There should never be a statue of Lincoln in Virginia after what he did to us." Ahem. I think a large segment of the Virginia population is quite happy with what Lincoln did to Virginia, as on that day when he stepped off the boat and toured Richmond he was greeted by them with song and cheers.

Hear, hear.

For a book length case against Mr. Lee, see "Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History", by Alan T. Nolan. Some of that book's charges are questionable: it's not reasonable to have expected Lee to give up after Gettysburg, although pointing out that it wasn't just Grant's armies who suffered high casualty rates is fair game. (The "failure to give up" charge earns a demerit from James McPherson, who gives the book what I'd call a B+ review in "Drawn by the Sword.") The "Lee as traitor" and "Lee as post-war revanchist" sections were new ground to me.

The Amazon 2.5-star rating is a badge of honor. The reader reviews are interesting in their own right; at least one reviewer suggests that Thomas Connelly's "The Marble Man" may be a better historical re-evaluation.

If the Civil War wasn't the worst period in this country's history, I'd like to know what was.

I'd argue that Barra is dead wrong about most of the
rest of the war. I remember going to Antietam and
seeing photos of all the bodies all over the road
near the fence. Completely appalling. War should
never be romanticized.

In the West also (Texas, bleeding Kansas) the Civil war was brutal, with the civilian massacres, etc., characteristic of civil wars elsewhere.

A friend of mine who went to college in the middle 60's says that the Southern-revisionist story of the Civil War was orthodox almost everywhere. Immediately after the war the abolitionists were blamed for it by many, including many Yankees. ("The Philosopher's Club" talks about this). With the end of Reconstruction the anti-Abolitionist point of view became stronger, and as the Southern voting bloc in Congress became more important it became part of the political consensus. The Civil Rights movement shook the consensus, but since Reagan it's started to reestablish itself.

It's very odd that the solid RepublicanSouth should have such a hatred of Lincoln, but if you look at voting maps of 1870 or so and 2000, a very high proportion of states have switched parties in one direction or the other.

Barra sounds like a Sobran/Buchanan derivative on the Civil War. Sad to day, this junk is not unfamiliar on the right in journalism....

> If the Civil War wasn't the worst period in
> this country's history, I'd like to know what was.

Well, once there was this thing called "disco"...

No, Christopher of Incoming Signals. Disco claimed a few drug overdoses, and two baseball games. The Civil War was about the right of one man to enslave the other. There is no useful comparison between.

Thousands died to ensure that the federal government could continue, that government of the people, by the people, for the people, would not perish, and that every human being would be one of those people, not merely those with less than a certain percentage of melanin in thier skin.

Disco was merely a boring pop version of funk, not a tragedy -- and those wanting to bring back disco or deify those who created it are merely afflicted with poor taste.

Those wanting to deify the leaders of the Confederate rebellion, or wanting to bring back the Confederacy, are actively persuing a course of evil.

If the Civil War wasn't the worst period in this country's history, I'd like to know what was.

Ummmm... the eighty-odd years immediately preceding it?

Um ... may I stick in a few contrary notes without being accused of defending slavery?

Barra didn't say the US Civil War was "a gentlemanly affair" in comparison with peaceful civilized society, he said it was so -by contrast- to other countries' civil wars. And even including CSA execution of black POWs, it quite probably was. This policy eventually stopped under Union threats to cease prisoner exchanges altogether, and bad as it was, it's not quite systematic genocide of blacks as a group as there was, say, of Muslims in Bosnia.

Which is not to say that the things done to blacks in the US Civil War, and before and after, were not very bad. But as far as the Civil War goes, even Patrick's corrected version isn't accurate either. Insofar as blacks didn't have a gentlemanly affair (above & beyond the fact that they had been slaves -already-), whites didn't either.

To my eye, the most glaring error in Barra's comment is his claim that the Civil War wasn't a "scorched-earth affair." That's ironic, as modern scorched-earth warfare was pioneered by Gen. W.T. Sherman in his march through Georgia. Call it justified, or denounce it; either way Sherman's deliberate policy was to wreak such complete destruction on the South's capacity to supply itself that it would wipe out their desire and capacity to continue fighting. It seems pretty much to have worked.

I'd also query Barra's bit about "wounds that didn't heal for centuries." The specifically party political echoes of the English Civil War took about a century to die down to background noise; with the U.S. Civil War it was about the same. (And that's leaving out other echoes which continue, but, insofar as race relations are concerned, pre-date the Civil War and were not caused by it.)

Erik, I think COIS was trying to make a joke. Not in great taste, maybe, except as comic relief, but I hardly think he was attempting a serious comparison of the Disco era to the Civil War.

Eric's inability to recognize a joke, even if it's a bad joke, is rather alarming, as is some of the vehemence of his attitude.

Lee's motivation was not defense of slavery, for which he had no special beef (any more than Jefferson did, though they were both slave-holders themselves), but his decision that patriotism towards his state trumped patriotism towards his country. That sounds quaint today, but it was the nationalism forged by the Civil War that made it quaint.

Yes, Lee's decision made him a defender of an evil system, and he did evil things in its name, as Patrick observed, and he should be criticized for that.

But it's the blanket "go to perdition, go directly to perdition" card issued to anyone who'd say the slightest ameliorating word about a slave-holding system ("Those wanting to deify the leaders of the Confederate rebellion" - deify? is Barra doing that, really?) that's disturbing.

Eric, would you apply that blanket denouncement to the entire American Revolution as well? Dr. Johnson asked at the time, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" It was a good question.

Yes, and thanks for coming to my defense. The only reaction I was expecting from that comment was a mild chuckle.

If you really want to find 20th-century pop music that's Civil War-scale bad, you have to go to Pat Boone's metal album.

Alan Bostick quotes me saying "If the Civil War wasn't the worst period in this country's history, I'd like to know what was," and replies:

"Ummmm... the eighty-odd years immediately preceding it?"

However you slice it, you have a long period of slavery, then four years of slavery plus bloody civil war. It's hard to argue that the latter is "better", although good things can and do happen as the result of wars.

Simon asks, in an aside:

("Those wanting to deify the leaders of the Confederate rebellion" - deify? is Barra doing that, really?)

I have no idea if Barra is doing that or not, but there is ample evidence of the glorification, if not deification, of Southern War leaders. I've been reading quite a bit of James Branch Cabell recently. Cabell was born in Richmond in 1879 and pretty much spent his formative years there. In one essay, he relates how he listened to his parents, grandparents, and their friends talk about Robert E. Lee as if he were King Arthur, who would return one day to restore the South to her glory (Jefferson Davis became Merlin, while the other generals became knights of the round table). Part of this is Cabell's young romantic imagination, but it doesn't take very long on a visit to the south to see how much of it is quite close to the truth.

Glen, remember Mark Twain's observation that the entire Civil War might have been averted if the United States had had the foresight to ban the works of Sir Walter Scott.

Simon, I think Erik (note spelling) has simply had it with the unending efforts to make excuses for slavery and its enthusiasts. You can sniff at "the vehemence of his attitude" if you like. Personally, it seems to me that if there's a political proposition worth being "vehement" about, it's the idea that there's no excuse for slavery, and certainly no excuse for taking up arms in its defense. Then again, according to Thomas Cahill, my saintly namesake was the first guy to articulate the idea that slavery is flat-out wrong. Not "it's wrong to enslave those people" or "we should treat our slaves better," but "slavery is wrong." Maybe that's an "alarming" level of "vehemence."

You're right about this, though:

"Insofar as blacks didn't have a gentlemanly affair (above & beyond the fact that they had been slaves -already-), whites didn't either."

True. Teresa this morning remarked on a semi-ancestor (the second of a polygamous great-to-the-nth grandparent) whose family home in Tennessee was raided and destroyed multiple times by both sides. There was a lot of that, particularly in border states. One need only read the history of Missouri to dispense with the fraudulent notion of our Civil War as a somehow nicer event than the wars of those Europeans and South Americans.

The fact is that civil wars everywhere, wars fought among the members of a semi-homogenous population, are defined both by intermittent outbreaks of humanity (both sides, after all, come from the same or similar stock, and combatants may well be socially acquainted or even related) -- and, similarly, by episodes of breathtaking brutality (for the same reasons). This is true of those South American and European wars to which Barra alludes and it was true of the American Civil War. Aside from being a rehash of one of the classic cliches about 1861-1865 (and an inadvertant demonstration of just how nicely those cliches serve to whitewash the slave power), Barra's remark is an exercise in American exceptionalism, the (usually unexamined) belief that we're nicer and better because, why, because we just are, that's all.

"Dr. Johnson asked at the time [the American Revolution], 'How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?' It was a good question."

It was indeed. The basic American attitude, and you will find it everywhere you look, is that all 280 million of us get to be proud of the parts of our historical heritage that we enjoy thinking about -- the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the defeat of the Axis powers, the landing on the moon, make your own list. But perish forbid we should be asked to feel discomfort about the parts that are less enjoyable. I didn't enslave black people! I didn't wipe out entire populations of American Indians! You liberals just want people to feel guilty for stuff they didn't do. Yeah, well, you probably didn't write the Bill of Rights or land on the moon either, buster. (Okay, so I have at least one author for whom that argument doesn't actually work.)

So Franklin pulled off that trick with the brandy barrel?

(Actually, I know who you mean.)

Those wanting to deify the leaders of the Confederate rebellion, or wanting to bring back the Confederacy, are actively persuing a course of evil.

Umm...I have a southern cookbook, and in it there's a recipe for "Jefferson Davis Pie." If I bake it, am I actively pursuing a course of evil?

I think at a certain point, some romanticizing is useful.

Simon, Erik is being earnest. He has a sense of humor. And I don't find his emphatic remarks at all disturbing.

There's a difference between mistakes made at the time of the Civil War, and making those same mistakes now.

And by the way: No man ever died for states' rights.

Kevin, that depends. Is it Jefferson Davis's own recipe, or was it named in honor of him, or does it use Jefferson Davis in the filling?

Alternately, is it a recipe for hash, only you announce at the end that if everyone at the table indomitably wills that it's a pie, it'll be one?

Glen: Sure, absolutely, there is real deification of the CSA leaders, and I'm just as skeptical as you are of what they're being deified for. But Erik [sorry about misspelling; memory doesn't always hold long enough to scroll down to the comments block] brought up the topic of deification unprompted by anything except Barra's remarks and Patrick's criticism of them. Either that's over-reaction or it's a response to people a lot worse than Barra; and if the latter, he should have said so.

Patrick: Whatever we may think about people like Trent Lott going around today, the vehemence that I'm sniffing at is the one that seems to be saying, "This person in the past condoned slavery, and is therefore utterly evil and should not be praised or excused for in any way." I don't believe that's justified, and I'll continue sniffing at it.

As you seem to be saying, if St. Patrick was the first person in human history to condemn slavery outright, it'd be a big stretch to say that everybody before him was evil.

Even Lincoln was not an abolitionist; even the Emancipation Proclamation was a political tactic that didn't free slaves in any Union-controlled territories.

L.P. Hartley said, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Morality evolves; it's a messy thing. Every time we say, with our hindsight, that the abolitionists were entirely Right and everyone else was entirely Wrong, I hear echoes from 300 years from now, when perhaps it will be said of us, "Some of these people actually -condoned the eating of animal flesh-! And even wrote praises of its delectability!" And they might say, "It seems to me that if there's a moral proposition worth being 'vehement' about, it's the idea that there's no excuse for carnivorism."

I am no vegetarian, and don't intend to become one. But I can easily imagine a future in which theirs becomes the moral standard as abolition is today. So I'm willing to cut the slave-holders of the past a little moral slack. Because while some of them were evil (animal-torturers of today are evil), others were merely conflicted, imperfect human beings, creatures of their time like you and me. That includes Robert E. Lee. Condemn what they did, but don't condemn them in their entirety. Or, judge not lest ye be judged, as somebody once said.

Teresa wrote,

"Erik is being earnest. He has a sense of humor."

Was he joking in his response to Christopher? It sure didn't read like it. And if not, whatever sense of humor he had elsewhere went right out the window on this topic. Which is a sign of what's disturbing about it.

"There's a difference between mistakes made at the time of the Civil War, and making those same mistakes now."

Oh, indeed. But trying to understand and explain the past, and failing to condemn it with sufficient vigor, is not that mistake.

"And by the way: No man ever died for states' rights."

If Robert E. Lee had died in battle, he would have died for states' rights. That's what -he- was fighting for, even if nobody else was, poor deluded bastard.

(What did the US and UK troops who died in Iraq die for, do you think? If your answer is, "For the lies of George W. Bush," they're just as culpable as he is. But I don't think you'd say that.)

It appears only to have been named in honor of him, though the note says that if you leave out the nuts and spices, it's Kentucky Pie.

Of course, mumia was used as a spice occasionally in 19th century recipes, and Jefferson Davis should be the right age now that I suppose I could make Jefferson Davis pie with some real Jefferson Davis.

Where is his tomb anyway? All over SF we have these signs that say "Free Mumia!" but there's never anyone handing out samples or even directions on where you can get it.

To all of you who think that my blanket condemnation is a little over the top, let me sum up the very basic and salient facts here.

1) The southern states attempted to break the union in order to continue a practice that is morally undefensible, by activly waged war against the legal civil authority. There is *exactly* one word to describe this conduct. Treason.

2) Each and every southern officer who was a former US Officer, including Mr. Robert E. Lee, not only committed treason, but violated thier oath taken as a officer to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. They are traitors and oath breakers.

They should not be declared "romantic heros." They should be shunned and hated. What Mr. Lee did was a thousand times worse that what John Walker Lindh did. JWL might have taken arms against the US. Lee *lead* arms against the United States, causing the death of tens of thousands citizen and soldiers of the United States.

Lee, Early, Jackson, Davis -- all of them -- are traitors, by the very definition of the term. Any man professing admiration is admiring a traitor. Any man flying a Confederate flag is flying the flag of a traitor. Any man defending them is defending treason.

The harm they caused resonates still -- indeed, is once again insurgent in the land. Lincoln's first mistake was letting these officers renounce thier commissions to fight for the confederacy, they should have been ordered to stand for the US, if they refused, they should have been tried for failure to follow lawful orders. Johnson's big mistake was not hanging them after they were defeated, provided they lived that long.

The gentleness that Grant and Sherman showed when the rebellion collapses shows the favorable nature of thier souls, and reflects well on them, personally. But they should not have treated the leaders of the rebellion so. The final act of the Civil War should not have been Jefferson Davis dying in bed of old age, with his memoirs spreading the lie of "States Rights," while the KKK rages through the south, and Jim Crow becomes king. It should have ended with him swinging at the end of his rope -- the last casuality of the rebellion, and the end of a traitor, and those who professed pride in those actions called to task for admiring a traitor.

"Judge not lest ye be judged"

Good advice, generally. Except that, well, we are human beings and we judge. I hear what you're saying. But I don't think our collective understanding of the Civil War really suffers from an excess of condemnation of the slave power. Quite the opposite; since before the ink was dry at Appamattox, defenders of the indefensible have been striving, with impressive success, to muddy the issue.

Simon, slavery was evil. Robert E. Lee was not the worst of its defenders, but he was fighting to preserve slavery. Erik's opinions are more complicated than you acknowledge, and far more intelligent than your summarized version of them would suggest.

Suggesting that Patrick thinks everyone who lived prior to St. Patrick was evil is also an inadequate reading.

Lincoln was a politician first, a Unionist second, and an abolitionist third, but Southerners at the time never doubted he was an abolitionist. He abolished as much slavery as he could, as early as he could, without throwing the political system into even more chaos than it was already in, and without causing further damage to the Union.

L. P. Hartley's quote cautions us that the past is different, but that doesn't mean we can't understand or judge it. Our understanding of morality changes (some say evolves), but that doesn't mean morality is arbitrary. And if you go on insisting that you're arguing with people who've said the abolitionists were entirely right in all things and everyone else entirely wrong, I'm going to at minimum cast doubts on your reading comprehension, because that's not at all what's being said here.

Then again, in response to Erik, there's this:

"On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war97seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.9

"One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

If Robert E. Lee had died in battle, he would have died for states' rights. That's what -he- was fighting for, even if nobody else was, poor deluded bastard.

This is a complete, unmitigated lie. Lee knew exactly what he fought for -- the preservation of slavery. It is very clear from his letters, his actions, and his orders. Lee fought hard against the CSA recruiting blacks into the army, giving in only when all hope for his actions was already lost.

The entire concept of "State's Rights" and "The Noble Cause" are lies promugalted by Jefferson Davis, after the war, primarily through his memoirs, but also from his tireless efforts and travels.

Read the documents of secession of the various states. Read the coorepsondence between the confederate military leaders and their government. Look at the legislation these same men promuglated before the war, and tell me how much concern they had for states rights.

"State's Rights" is a lie, pure and simple, trying to disguise what the Civil War was about. It was about one thing, plain and simple -- the continance of slavery. The southern states were willing to help form the Union only when it was agreed that slavery would not be barred in the new land. The southern states committed treason against the Union when the Union was on the verge of deciding that evil comprimise, made in order to secure a good, was no longer justifiable.

It's that simple. The ample evidence of such is available in the public archives of the land.

Erik, Simon's opinion of what Lee was fighting for clearly differs from yours, as it does from mine. That doesn't make it a "lie".

By gad, Kevin, you're right. I'll add that to my list of advertised disappointments.

(You are certainly right, though, that "states' rights" is largely bunkum, and that the public statements of most of the Confederate leadership amply demonstrate that they had no doubt what the war was about.)

Lee would have died fighting for states' rights? No. A man who felt that strongly about the abstract principle of states' rights would have been fighting long before the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter. He'd have been denouncing the fugitive slave laws, at the very least.

I always end up being split in these kinds of arguments. I grew up in the South (family from LA,TX,OK) and the main involvement of my ancestors in That Late Unpleasantness was running Confederate cotton across the border into Mexico to evade the Union blockade. At the same time, I lived through the civil rights movement while in the South, including attending jr. high in Montgomery during the march from Selma. Unlike many of my classmates, I could just not see what the problem was with what the protestors were asking for (which caused problems until I learned just when to shut up and when speaking out worked).

Figures like Robert Lee are a real problem for historians. He is a wonderfully attractive person, while remaining a mystery in many ways. (It isn't unusual for that time, but it still amazes modern readers like me that someone dould write so much, be so quoted, and leave so little evidence about his own feelings, his internal life.) An exemplary husband and father, personally admired throughout the prewar army, an admiration that continued during and after the war on both sides. His behavior after the war in rejecting bitterness and promoting reconciliation while retaining his own dignity set a standard that few others could match. Calling Lee noble is not a stretch -- calling the war he fought noble, however, means that you are not paying attention.

The problem is that some confuse Lee's qualities with the war he fought -- a problem common to a certain kind of historiography, or more properly, historio-hagiography. Some of the leaders on both sides of the war may have been truly admirable men (and of course, very similar, as many had been members in common of the US Army and fought together in Mexico), but what they oversaw was the conversion of war from the Napoleonic maneuver art (which is how they were trained, it was the language they spoke) to logistics driven attrition warfare. The defensive strategy at Petersburg (where Longstreet deserves as much credit as Lee) at the end of the was a prediction of the Western Front. Almost everything that we hate most about wars, especially in the 20th century (outside of WMD's -- and lying about WMD's) was a part of the Civil War. The particular qualities of the leaders of either side, be they hateful or admirable, are irrelevant to the central issue -- the horrors of war arise from the pathology of warfare itself, enabled by available technology. They may have started the war leading a noble crusade, but they lead it to a charnel house. One may admire the qualities of the two leaders who met at Appomattox Court House, but those qualities seem less relevant when reading about Andersonville, or of the treatment that black Union soldiers recieved as prisoners of war.

Slavery is another difficult one. Opposing slavery was more sucessful as a unifying force in the Union, especially as the war went on, than supporting slavery was in the Confederacy. It's a subtle point, but the South's moral failing was not supporting slavery, but, not opposing it. Many southerners did not like slavery, but they tolerated it, they argued for the amelioration of its worst features, they might even free their own personal servants in their wills. Both sides had a problem seeing African-Americans as fully human (see Lincoln's own views on African repatriation), but the North strugged with it and made a few halting steps upwsard. The South refused to recognize it as a problem. The sacrifices made by the North in the war demanded that some great moral purpose be found for it -- and eradicating slavery fit the bill. Without the war, I'm not sure what would have brought eradication in the South.

The real problem, the real creator of confusion on these issuses, has nothing directly to do with the Civil War at all. It is the effort by those with a particular economic and political program, largely in the South, throughout the 20th century to oppose true human rights for poor whites as well as poor blacks. These groups used and twisted the languages and themes of the Civil War to promote their own ends, ripping symbols and phrases from their historic attachments, such as the Confederate Navy Jack (what is usually seen as the "Stars and Bars") or "states rights". These were used to divide, to make sure that there would be no threat to things as they were, no matter what the damage to Southern society as a whole. The painful memory of the Civil War lived on in the South well into the 20th century, but it gradually died out, with time and new challenges. (I have always marked the real end of the shadow of the Civil War as the first celebration of the 4th of July in Vicksburg - in 1941.) What we are dealing with now, the renewed celebration of some figures, the supposed Confederate Flag, "Dixie", is a new thing, growing out of the reaction to the changes brought to the South by the Second World War and its aftermath. Don't worry about Robert Lee -- it's Tom DeLay that should be worrying you.

No, Robert Lee would not have died for state's rights. What he would have died for is his own honor, and for Virginia.

That does not mean that he would have been right . . .

What Teresa said about Robert E. Lee and "states' rights."

Amazing how using the power of the Federal government to force the citizens of free states to enforce slavery isn't, as it turns out, a violation of "states' rights."

Just as amazing as the way that, today, Attorneys General who give interviews to Post-Confederate Gravy Eater Magazine have no problem trampling all over the rights of states, if what those states want to do is, for instance, decriminalize medical marijuana.

Excellent post from Claude Muncey.

Incidentally, as I've remarked in previous discussions like this, my only ancestor that I know of who fought in the Civil War, fought on the Confederate side.

Hmm, as I remember from my history lessons--and this in liberal California--there was also something to do with tariffs, and how southern plantation owners would rather send their cotton to England than to mills in the north, so the north wanted tariffs to keep it in the country, and....

Ye gods, doesn't that mean that mills in the abolitionist North were wanting cotton picked by brutally exploited slaves in the South? What were they thinking?

Weren't there children working in those mills too, come to think of it?

So far as I learned, the Civil War was about economics. States rights and slavery on one side and "the Union" and abolition on the other, both as convenient rallying points for what boiled down to dollars and cents. It made good economic sense for the South to leave. It made good economic sense for the North to force them to stay.

At the end of the day, slavery was gone, which was a good thing. But it wasn't the North's main objective, which was preservation of the Union and thereby the country's economic viability as a developing nation.

Patrick: However you slice it, you have a long period of slavery, then four years of slavery plus bloody civil war. It's hard to argue that the latter is "better", although good things can and do happen as the result of wars.

Well, this depends on your position on the Pacifism/Militancy scale, really. There are those who would say that a period of slavery without any chance to defend yourself or your family, fight for freedom, or have any hope, really, is worse than a period where slavery continues, but you know someone, even if it's not you, is fighting against it; where you have hope that it will end - even if the second period is filled with death and bloody conflict.

I'm not sure I'm one of them; I'm not sure you're not right. But it does seem to me that there's a case to be made that 250 years of suffering without hope are worse than 4 years of suffering and bloodshed WITH hope.

War is evil. Slavery is appalling and horrific. Our Civil War destroyed lives on a catastrophic level.

Having said that, there are always better or worse choices that can be made.

I saw a documentary on the History Channel a month or so ago about the week after Lincoln was assassinated, and one of things that struck me was how, when there was a choice between diving even deeper into retribution and bloodshed, or stepping back, surrendering on one side and allowing the loser to save face on the other, there were a few men (including RELee) who chose the side of healing, quite likely preserving the fragile US from years of further destruction.

In an anecdote which may or may not be apocryphal (I don't have enough info to say), RELee was said to have helped break the color barrier at a newly integrated church when an African-American man knelt for communion, and no one would kneel beside him until RELee came forward and joined him.

For what it's worth.

Simon -
Merely making a joke does not excuse one's statements from criticism; a joke can itself be unwise, ill-chosen, or ill to speak.

Erik is expressing views which, to my way of thinking, tremble on the brink of being unconscienably wishy-washy; I think Thomas Jefferson was a contemptible hypocrite, and that every slave owner in the South should have hanged at the conclusion of the American Civil War, along with every Confederate officer, every elected offical of the Confederacy and its component states, and every appointed offical of the Confederacy itself, that their archives, books, and papers should have burned, and that the right to own more land than a person themselves dwealt upon or farmed by their own labour or had there their place of business been forbidden throughout that territory until the last Confederate veteran was dead.

It is a great and culpable folly to pour out blood and treasure, to fight a great and ghastly war, to rend the fabric of the nation, and to then throw all such blood and sacrifice away by permitting the defeated to write such history as pleases them.

The United States has done this; you have the harsh and entirely unenviable task before you to do it again, or to go down into servitude, one based not on race, but on wealth, a transfer of moral justification from the dark man to the poor man, that he serve by the will of God made manifest in his state of servitude, a justification which forbids regard of what labour has been done to create for Almighty God this state of affairs, one which had the Almighty, maker and creator of all things, but sufficient time to devote from His judging of the nations surely have made Himself.

I would pray to whatever powers might hear me that you are this time more thorough and more wise in victory than your fathers before you proved.

hurrah Rachel.

Kevin Andrew Murphy: "Ye gods, doesn't that mean that mills in the abolitionist North were wanting cotton picked by brutally exploited slaves in the South? What were they thinking?"

Slavery was a system that benefitted the privileged and powerful in all parts of the country, as many a firebreathing pre-war Abolitionist would have been the first to tell you. It's no revelation that many New England business interests benefitted immensely from slavery; this was indeed the focus of much agitation.

Xopher: "It does seem to me that there's a case to be made that 250 years of suffering without hope are worse than 4 years of suffering and bloodshed WITH hope." Good point.

Rachel Heslin: "...men (including RELee) who chose the side of healing, quite likely preserving the fragile US from years of further destruction."

Maybe. Then again, there are those ninety postwar years of the sharecropping system, lynching, legally-enforced segretation, and all the rest of the apparatus of Jim Crow. Hard to see the "healing" in all the lives eaten up by this.

Graydon, on the other hand, you are getting carried away. Burning their libraries? Hanging all the officers? Jeez. Take a deep breath.

'All over SF we have these signs that say "Free Mumia!" but there's never anyone handing out samples or even directions on where you can get it.'

I was similarly disappointed to discover that the George Foreman Grill wasn't large enough to grill a decent sized cat, much less George Foreman.

Here is a quote on the fundamental motivations of the Confederacy, provided in Scalzi's essay on why the CSA was evil. From the CSA's vice president:

"...Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition.

"This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics...

"One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics; their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just -- but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails...

Keven Andrew Murphy asks where Jefferson Davis is buried. I was just there two weeks ago: Hollywood Cemetary, Richmond, Virginia. Given the direction of this conversation, people might be surprised at what's inscribed on one monument:

JEFFERSON DAVIS.
AT REST
AN AMERICAN SOLDIER.
AND DEFENDER OF THE CONSTITUTION
BORN IN CHRISTIAN CO. KENTUCKY JUNE 3.1808.
DIED AT NEW ORLEANS LOUISIANA DEC. 6.1889.
WEST POINT CLASS 1828.
MEMBER OF HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
FROM MISSISSIPPI.1845-1846
COL.1ST MISSI.RIFFLES MEXICAN WAR 1846-1847
BRIGADIER GENL.U.S.ARMY MAY 17.1847.
U.S. SENATE 1847-1851
SECRETARY OF WAR 1853-1857
U.S. SENATE 1857-1861.

A different monument reads:

PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES
OF AMERICA. 1861-1865.
FAITHFUL TO ALL TRUSTS, A MARTYR
TO PRINCIPLE. HE LIVED AND DIED THE
MOST CONSISTENT OF AMERICAN
SOLDIERS AND STATESMEN.
---
BLESSED ARE THEY WHICH ARE PERSECUTED FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS SAKE FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.
---
ERECTED BY HIS WIFE
VARINA HOWELL DAVIS,
AND HIS DAUGHTER
MARGARET HOWELL DAVIS HAYES.
NOV. 9, 1889.

(I was there to visit the grave of James Branch Cabell.)

Kevin, as usual, there were almost as many reasons to go to ware as there were people to posess them.

For some, it was truly an geopolitical/economic war -- not a global conflict as we would see 70 or so years later (communications tech wasn't good enough). But "manifest destiny" was a given idea no matter which side you were on. We tend to see the Confederacy as the states stretching from Virginia to Texas, but many saw the New Mexico Territory, southern California (where there were large groups of organized Southern sympathizers -- a fascinating little corner of history in itself), Mexico and various parts of the Cariibean as natural extensions of it. (One reason a number of ex-Confederates formed colonies in a variety of Latin American countries.) At the same time, the northeast had becone a little image of the British industrial system (with our own twists) that saw the Brits as competitors and the rest of North America as a natural market, for the same reasons that the Brits built a colonial empire. The two visions of the future of what we call the US today were not compatible, and would have come into some kind of conflict at some point. Even if you had no problems with being part of the US, you could object to being a colony of Massachusets or Pennsylvania.

(And, BTW, if there is one part of the US that it is easy to see in almost classicly Marxist terms, it is the South, starting with the late Colonial period and stretching through to WWII.)

But the ambiguity over the essential nature of American government, over just what was an American nation-state, caused its own problems. The original Articles of Confederation did not work, but they were probably close to what a lot of people, especially in the South, wanted. A central resource for a navy and such, that would not threaten the sovereignity of their own homelands. The issue was not "states rights" (a 1950's bugaboo) -- it was over the nature of original sovereignity in the American polity. As has been so widely quoted, before the war, one said "the United States are" while afterward one said "the United States is". We find the idea that Robert Lee would fight first for Virginia quaint (for whatever reason) -- a Southerner at the time would have found it so natural as to not be worth comment.

Graydon, Jefferson was a very conflicted man, whose ideals far outstripped both his understanding and his will to put them into practice--as indeed they might have outstripped anyone's; in my view he'd have done better with less power and no right to own people. Kevin, for heaven's sake. Yes, sometimes Northerners profited from slavery. It remains true that it was the issue of the unCivil War (what Muncey said)--the only issue on which North and South could not find a political compromise. Less obviously, the contortions the Framers had to make to write a constitution which could incorporate both slave and free states remain a problem to this day.

I think this discussion points up the common conflict between the beliefs that a society uses to structure itself and the reality of particpation in that society. I rather suspect that, however little idealists like me like it, such a conflict is inevitable. The old South was full of would-be nobility--people who truly believed they were living out a revived feudalism with themselves as the benevolent ruling class. Their ideas about themselves remain part of US culture to this day. As Cervantes found, and as Tolkien's critics have found, the ideal of the nobility that is truly noble (the second meaning postdates the first) has more lives than a truckful of cats--hence the fascination with the honor of people who, really and truly, believed the good lay in fighting to preserve the rigid, cruel social order of the antebellum South.

Erik: I believe your vehemence is perfectly on display here; thank you for sharing it. Your position on what should have happened after the war is identical to that of the most extreme of the Radical Republicans. I urge you to read the words of Abraham Lincoln, kindly supplied by Patrick. I believe most historians today would agree that Lincoln was not only morally more generous, but politically wiser. He said on another occasion,

"Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. ... Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you."

Even if the Union won the war decisively, as it did, the two sides were going to have to live together. How best to accomplish this? It was this, not revenge, which concerned Lincoln, and that was the fount of his wisdom. If you believe that the failure to execute more Southern leaders was responsible for the rise of Jim Crow, you are quite mistaken. Northern unwillingness to enforce civil rights laws, generated in part by the desire to avoid another civil war after the stolen election of 1876, caused that. Had we executed Davis and Lee, it would have generated nothing except to intensify the sense of grievance on the South's part. You sound like Israelis and Palestinians determined that this time, by gum, they're really going to teach the other side a lesson. Do you not realize not only how morally vacant, but how politically futile, that is?

Your notion that Lee was clearly a traitor is only clear in retrospect. At the time, seccession rights and the question of whether higher loyalty lay to state or nation were still very much open questions in US constitutional law. It was the war which settled them.

But if Lee was a traitor, consider this: the Signers of the Declaration of Independence were even more clearly traitors to the British nation to which they owed allegiance. Would you have had them hanged? Or did military success make them retrospectively correct?

The people who ran the Underground Railroad in the 1850s were in direct and conscious violation of the Fugitive Slave Law, the duly authorized law of the land. Some of them were government officials. Were they acting in violation of their oaths? Would you have had them punished in the same way?

Patrick wrote,

"I don't think our collective understanding of the Civil War really suffers from an excess of condemnation of the slave power."

In general, no. Within this conversation, I think it does. Not from you, though, but from Erik.

Teresa wrote,

"Erik's opinions are more complicated than you acknowledge, and far more intelligent than your summarized version of them would suggest."

I note this opinion, and I also note Erik's thirst for bloody revenge against men 130 years dead, and I will form my own opinion of the complexity and intelligence of his beliefs.

"Suggesting that Patrick thinks everyone who lived prior to St. Patrick was evil is also an inadequate reading."

That is indeed an inadequate reading, as I was suggesting exactly the opposite.

"Lincoln was a politician first, a Unionist second, and an abolitionist third, but Southerners at the time never doubted he was an abolitionist."

The opinions of one's most vehement political opponents are rarely an adequate guide as to one's aims and motives, as any liberal today could tell you.

"He abolished as much slavery as he could, as early as he could."

It was not good enough for the extreme abolitionists, who condemned him for not doing enough; and it was not his motive. Lincoln wrote,

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union."

Teresa further wrote,

"And if you go on insisting that you're arguing with people who've said the abolitionists were entirely right in all things and everyone else entirely wrong, I'm going to at minimum cast doubts on your reading comprehension, because that's not at all what's being said here."

In all things? I said nothing about all things. This was a discussion of slavery. May I cast doubts on your reading comprehension? What is being said - by Erik - is that slavery is so entirely wrong that all attempts to "deify" (his word) those who -even incidentally- supported it "are actively persuing a course of evil."

Those who held Erik's position at the time were called "abolitionists." Erik believes they were right, and he believes this with sufficient moral fervor (cf his posts, passim) that I do not believe it is a misreading to say that he believes all other positions were wrong. That is what is being said here, I believe. And if not here, it is certainly being said elsewhere. I doubted that Erik was referring to Barra when he wrote of deification; if he has the privilege of making reference to the outside world, so do I.

Teresa and Claude are correct that Lee would not have died for "states' rights" in the abstract; he would have died for Virginia's rights in particular. I accept the correction, but I don't think that changes the point. Erik's post on the subject is over-vehement again. State's rights was not a lie, not to Lee. It was a truth employed by Southern leaders to further false purposes, just as "Saddam Hussein was a bad man" was a truth employed to further false purposes. Eventually states' rights was employed so consistently and universally for that false purpose as to undermine any value it might once have had. Erik's comments about the motives of the South in general are quite correct, but they do not apply to Lee. Lee did know what causes his fighting would promote, and I condemn him for that - but it was not -why- he fought. My statement was not a lie; neither was it an untruth. Erik, by writing things like "Look at the legislation these same men promuglated before the war, and tell me how much concern they had for states rights," seems to think I was discussing the South in general. About "these same men" I am in full agreement with Erik, but I was not discussing them, I was discussing Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870).

Claude wrote,

"Calling Lee noble is not a stretch -- calling the war he fought noble, however, means that you are not paying attention."

A nice distinction, and generally a fine post. I hope you do not think I called the war noble, or even that Barra did.

As for Graydon, there is not one human being living who could pass the fine moral grain that his standards imply. Unless he's writing a parody, which for about half his post I thought he was.

Whoops - hit post instead of preview . . .

But we cannot eliminate a more idealistic reason, which appears to have been an important motive for Lincoln and others. We seem to have forgotten how deeply these people believed in political philosophy, and how well read they were in it. They took their Montesquieu, Locke and Hobbes straight, no chaser, thank you very much. For all his image as the rough frontiersman, we know Lincoln had no problems dropping legal maxims into a discussion, in Latin -- as any experienced lawyer would at the time.

To many, the issue was "can a stable democracy exist?" To them, any government that allowed the losing side of an election to just leave, to not be bound by that election, would soon not have elections at all. And that is what the South did. For all the discussions of slavery and state's rights, they did not like the election of Lincoln, so they decided to leave. Yes, the conflicts involved had been brewing for years, and discussions of "secessh" had been popular in the South for some time. But the ideals presented in the Gettysburg Address didn't just occur to Lincoln on a train -- they appear to have been on his mind the entire time.

Taking the original review on its face, I suggest it might be possible to disagree with the facts. The Swiss had some internal arguments which can be laid to religious differences or to economic differences or to population pressure (I'd like to read Juan Rico's writings on war) where the underlying difference in the local economy is emphasized by the need to share when they broke for lunch - one side had the grazing lands to contribute cheese, the other the growing lands to contribute wheat so they famously did.

Given that he has his facts wrong, the credit to Lee simply doesn't follow (leaving aside a possible reframing to allow absolutely anything to be logically implied by a falsehood).

On the notion of the fate of traitors I can hardly agree that being traitors made the fates of the White Rose or the Red Orchestra appropriate or justice or whatever loaded word you choose.

On Lee's postwar actions, I for one hold to the belief that nothing "may or may not be apocraphal" - to introduce the possiblity is to assert the fact - something apocraphal may or may not be true - like the death of Schrodinger's cat neither true nor false pending more evidence. In this case I believe the incident happened but not that it broke any color barriers, nor integrated any churches for the duration.

Losing my vowels won't bother me, this post is too long already - so I'll dare to say "you all" can argue why the North fought and why the South fought - I only know the family version of why my ancestors fought - some fought to end slavery (Quaker influenced), to save the South, some fought for glory, some because everybody else was doing it, some because it's what soldiers do and most of these might apply to the same person or from time to time - we still have a chest with a bullet from Quantrill's raid on Lawrence - I don't remember draft riots on the frontier, just desertions like Sam Clemens - does that make Bierce the better man or does Huck Finn count as fighting the good fight?

Alternately, is it a recipe for hash, only you announce at the end that if everyone at the table indomitably wills that it's a pie, it'll be one?

Now _that's_ funny. I laughed out loud at work.

I don't see how anyone could really make the case that this was about "states rights" - Virginia didn't attack Fort Sumter, and the Confederacy had a president and money, didn't they? I very much doubt that if Alabama had decided to drop out of the war after a few years the rest of "the glorious south" - not "the loosely associated temporary alliance of southern states" - would have shed a regretful tear and let it go.

For that matter, it doesn't seem to me that I recall territories being asked to make up their own minds on becoming slave or free states when they entered the Union in the years before the war.

I'm working on a project that has to get finished. I can't dive into this discussion. But lord, I'd love to; and I'm enjoying it tremendously.

Bravo, Claude.

Graydon, the archives should be preserved. I'm not sure about hanging all the officers, either. The Confederate Congress definitely got off much too lightly.

Stefan: The error-correcting modem. The stud finder. The universal remote control. (I really do keep a list.)

I forget whether it was Effinger or Dozois who, upon seeing a sign that said "FREE SOVIET JEWS", threw the car he was driving into a violent swerve while shouting "Let's pick up a six-pack!"

Simon wrote: I hope you do not think I called the war noble, or even that Barra did.

Not at all Simon. But I think that Barra is starting to slide in that direction. There is so much to admire in Lee, and in the military enterprise that was the Army of Northern Virginia. There is no doubt that some of the greatest human talents are proufoundly exercised by the military arts and sciences, and our finest virtues are often revealed on the battlefield in unique ways. I am the son of a professional officer, with all that entails. My reaction on the occasion that I met a person wearing a single blue ribbon with stars was nearly religious (no kidding). The profession of arms is an honorable one.

While war can often be necessary, It is never desirable. To me, there is not one capability or virtue produced or revealed by battle that in itself justifies going to war. Sometimes it seems that admiration for military talent or personal honor can blur that.

Catherine, nice quote. However, you and Scalzi would be better served with a quote from someone else. Stephens was no doubt a racist -- so were many others including the eventual Union VP and President Andrew Johnson. But Stephens was possibly the most irrelevant political figure in the Confederate government and took little part in it. In fact, he spent more time, with more effect, as a US Congressman both before and (ironically) after the war.

Teresa -
Hope the project goes well.

The reason for hanging all the officers is that the objective in this sort of war is to destroy the culture of the losing side.

(I happen to think that the antebellum South culture should be destroyed, but that's distinct from the question of competence in the prosecution of such a war. Also note that the Southern side seems to have had a much clearer awareness of this, and to have successfully defended their culture to a considerably greater extent than the Northern side has.)

Destroying the culture means getting rid of the sources of moral authority and historical continuity; that means getting rid of the leadership classes.

Compare and contrast the results of Bloody Cromwell and the American Civil War; the former did a much, much better job of producing cultural change than the ACW did.

Claude,
Is the Stephens quote an accurate representation of the philosophy behind the foundation of the CSA? Stephens may have been irrelevant politically. Dan Quayle seems to have been, too. However, if Quayle were to have lectured on "The Republican Party and the 3rd Ammendment" during his tenure, one could certainly assume it was a fair take on the GOP and the 3rd Ammendment.

I don't quite have time to search the plain of infinite monkeys for a better quote, and I think the main points of Scalzi's essay (and his earlier one, Southern Heritage is a Crock) stand unless one can show that Stephens' long lecture was not representative of the CSA. I imagine it will be hard to find evidence of this.

Other interesting points from the essay:
"Yes, the United States had slavery ... However, the United States did not codify evil into its Constitution by enshrining the practice of slavery; as Stephens proudly notes, it took the CSA, among all other countries in the world, to do that. The United States has done evil, but is not fundamentally evil in its formulation, as is the CSA.

"It comes to this: When someone tells you the Confederacy was about something other than people owning people, they're either being intentionally disingenuous or (more charitably) are ignorant about the deep and abiding role slavery had in the formation of the CSA...

"...as to whether a memorial for American soldiers who died in combat should include names of Confederate soldiers ... My response is that it shouldn't, for the reason that either the CSA was its own country, in which case its soldiers weren't "American" soldiers ("American" understood to refer to citizens of the US), or it wasn't its own country and the Confederate soldiers were in open and treasonous rebellion, and as a general rule one does not commemorate traitors, particularly ones whose rebellious actions ultimately caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands...

"...Now, look: I understand that for a lot of Confederacy fans, it really isn't about race or anything else other than pride for the South. My response to that is: Groovy. Go for it. Love the South. What y'all need to do, however, is get some new symbols, some that don't harken back to the Dixie Days, when you went to war for the right to keep owning people. The Confederacy was evil, and now it's dead, and its being dead is front and center the best thing that there ever was about it.

Graydon wrote:

"...every slave owner in the South should have hanged at the conclusion of the American Civil War, along with every Confederate officer, every elected offical of the Confederacy and its component states, and every appointed offical of the Confederacy itself."

Which presumes, of course, that the friends and relatives of the tens of thousands of men that would have been swinging from trees and gibbets *wouldn't* have written such history as pleased them. Talk about wild optimism!

Vehement disdain for the pathetic lie of "Noble Lost Cause vs. The War of Northern Agrression" is well and good, but haven't we learned how impossible it is to burn or murder a viewpoint into nonexistence? The Nazi Holocaust, the Great Cultural Revolution, Stalin's purges and mass murders... none of them (despite their genuine horrors) succeeded in eradicating their intended targets, even with more malice and more resources than the Union ever could have had.

The admittedly tempting possibility of direct vengenace against the perpetrators and servants of the CSA had to be weighed (and still must be weighed) against the poisonous hatred it would have sown in the already bitter South, and against the burning shame it would have wrought in the North for generations thereafter, and against the cumulative, compounded misery these factors would have heaped upon everyone, including all of us spitting electrons into Patrick's blog, born in the nearly fourteen decades since the war.

You think the pro-CSA folks are bitter, vengeful, and deluded now? Imagine how pleasant they'd be if a nontrivial percentage of their great-great grandfathers had danced on the end of a rope after a war they'd already resoundingly lost. Would such an act have spontaneously convinced the South's survivors that the Negroes were a-ok, and that the Yankees were swell folks? Or would it have offered ironclad proof that the Unionists *were* the callous devils that Southern delusion and propaganda had made them out to be?

One of the drawbacks of living in a free and civil society is that you sometimes have to put up with the willful historical ignorance of the completely fucking deluded. They'd still be here if all of their great-great-grandfathers and uncles had swung. In fact, I'd argue they might even be worse off, and so would we all.

Teresa,

For your list then:

A couple years ago, I was at a con, and Alison Lonsdale said, "Oh, I can't stand the Gorian bondage scene down here," which I heard as 'Gorey-an,' asking, "You mean, as in 'Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a sauce-pan'?"

Then again, that may just be me. For years I couldn't hear people talking about 'Riff-Raff' without thinking about the Mafioso wolf from Underdog instead of Dr. Frankenfurter's faithful handyman. It's also embarrassing when talking of 'The Misfits' to confuse the punk act with the evil girls band from 'Gem.'

On the subject of this thread, however, part of my point with the northern mills taking southern cotton is that boiling the whole conflict down into slave vs. free has the unfortunate consequence of making both sides look like nothing but glassy-eyed zealots. Not everyone in the north was an abolitionist, the same as not everyone in the south owned slaves or even gave a damn about owning them. Sherman burning your house, on the other hand....

"Compare and contrast the results of Bloody Cromwell and the American Civil War; the former did a much, much better job of producing cultural change than the ACW did."

He also did it in a totally different country, at a totally different time, against a totally different social backdrop. I politely pooh-pooh this comparison as not even a case of "apples vs. oranges," but "apples vs. breadfruit."

I certainly sympathize with you, Graydon. I'm just not at all convinced that the actions you advocate would have served the greater historical good rather than a "sperm urge" of limited utility.

Um, what Scott Lynch said. I like Graydon, but on this issue I think his bloodymindedness and determination -- good character traits in the right circumstances -- have the better of his judgement.

Kevin, of course "not everyone in the South owned slaves." Indeed, the history of Union sympathizers in the South, even in the middle of states like Alabama and Mississippi, is an interesting one. Some people were quite clear on the idea that the interests of the planter aristocracy were not theirs.

The impolite term used by CSA supporters for the white Union sympathizers in their midst was "scalawags" - this term has been adopted, without impolite intent, by historians, and some interesting things about them may be read by googling it.

I92m continually amazed at the ability of the USCW to cause raised voices, despite the fact that the shooting stopped almost 140 years ago.

For years, I held so tightly to the image of the CSA as the embodiment of evil, that my ears were effectively closed to any opinions to the contrary. I92m still convinced that the CSA, and the institution that it was founded to preserve, were evil. There is a place for apologists and moral relativism, but this is not one of them.

That said, I can now listen to people who think otherwise without getting angry. Why? Perhaps because I have traveled more in the South and understand that the story, and it92s retelling is pretty complicated. Or, it might be because I can see the potential for (and history of) acts of evil by the USA. No government, organization, society, or individual is completely evil, or innocent of evil.

It92s perfectly understandable that people would want to put a varnish of respectability or at least of justification over the actions of their ancestors. I92m willing to ignore most of it, just as I can ignore monuments to Robt. E. Lee in front of Southern courthouses. That said, what I cannot ignore is failure to learn the lessons of history, and condoning the contemporary evils that still haunt us as a legacy of the Civil War.

Evils such as using Southern anti-black sentiment to drive electoral strategy. Or deliberately disenfranchising African-Americans in ways that would be tolerated nowhere else. Or redlining. Or basing school funding on the property tax base. Or a host of other things that black Americans routinely deal with that spring from slavery and from the backlash against Reconstruction.

A little bit of romanticizing of R.E. Lee or the Confederacy pales in comparison, except when it ties into an oppressive agenda.

So, back to the original point 96 if Alan Barra wants to think that Lee was a better person than he probably was, or that the most terrible war in American history was something other than a bloody horror 96 it just discredits him. It92s disappointing, particularly in a publication like Salon, but not the end of the world. And it92s probably more of a reflection on the increased militarization of American culture, not an aggravating factor.

"You think the pro-CSA folks are bitter, vengeful, and deluded now?"

Thanks to Scott for writing this response, which is better than anything I could come up with.

Slavery and aristocratic societies aren't the result of some rare toxic meme; they wouldn't go away by burning some books and hanging ideologues. These ancient and odious institutions are the result of a _lack_ of a meme . . . the Proposition Lincoln describes in the Gettysburg Address.

Anyway . . . can you imagine the twisted Our Lost Golden Age fantasies that the survivors, refugees, and exiles of a humiliated South would come up with if the official records had been erased?

Hmm. There's the seeds of a very interesting Alternate History story there. There actually was a colony of exiled Southerners in South America, dreaming of a triumphant return and living out their dippy aristocratic dreams. A critical mass of them, claiming the authority of an exiled government, could cause real trouble.

Just reminding those of you hanging on the free mumia subplot of the Kliban cartoon playing off a mid-20th c. slogan: "Save Soviet Jewry! Collect them all, trade them with your friends!"

Myself, I hear red-meat commentary like Graydon's, and the logophile, pacifist, and 'Bama boy inside of me find themselves in utter agreement. Not often that happens. --I'm perversely proud to count as ancestors folks from Winston County, Alabama--the only county to secede from the Confederacy, so far as I know. It wasn't all that principled a stand--my father likes to say it was because they were all poor, owned no slaves, and just wanted to be left alone with their moonshine. Still: I think I like them best of all my family tree's branches, better than the Wiggin who rode with Sherman, whose cavalry saber is in a closet somewhere in my folks' home, and who then carpet-bagged his way into the remnants of a branch of the Middletons; and I like them better than those Middletons, who made a fortune growing rice along the South Carolina coast with techniques picked up from their West African slaves, and who add signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Ordinance of Secession to the ancestral pool; and I like them a damn sight better than Robert E. Lee. Or Ulysses S. Grant. (To neither of whom am I related. Though the Spouse is descended from a relative of Lee's, now I think of it.)

Of course, seceding from the secession didn't do Winston County a damn bit of good. And it didn't make the world one whit of a better place. Being left alone is all too often an unsupportable luxury. And I think they mostly appeal to the cantakerous streak of libertarianism in me that my good liberal guilt usually keeps in check.

But I still like those Winston County folks a lot.

To bring it back to an ostensible point: Barra's an idiot. This comments thread is in its own civil way proof enough (along with the hundreds of others more and far, far less, from every conceivable perspective on the Late Great Unpleasantness, that you can find day or night on the Stateside web) of just how scorched the earth still is, from those courtly gentlemen and their chivalrous affair.

You know the tune they play for the groom to come in, at a wedding, rather often? I have no idea how often, where you might happen to be, but at least hereabouts, it's rather often.

Hail the Conquering Hero Comes.

It was written for the Duke of Cumberland, in comemoration of the successful conclusion of his genocidal policies towards the Scots after 1745.

Those policies most certainly did work; that culture is as dead as Ancient Egypt.

All the Scots are not dead; there are people clean around the world who sing Jacobite songs in pubs and make a point of Burns Night and have no clue that what they're celebrating is a Victorian romantic construct, a myth of nation blessedly free of the contamination of history.

There were any number of cultures, tribes, what have you, that Stalin quite successfully erased; it's not impossible to argue that he got all of them and that post-Soviet Russia is precisely that, a collection of fragments struggling to recreate itself in the form of a nation.

There isn't a surviving Miteleuropan Jewish culture; it's gone, Yiddish is headed toward dead language status at great speed, its cultural position destroyed, its people scattered.

You could look long and hard before you found a First Nation -- what is the American polite term? -- with a continuous cultural tradition.

The point is not to kill everybody; the point is to break the chain of cultural transmission and authority. This is not in concept difficult nor in logistics excessively demanding, there are successful examples from before Sargon of Akad. It's highly unpalatable in its particulars, and it perhaps says good things about the persons prosecuting that war from the Union side that they -- unlike their grandfathers, burning out loyalists -- were reluctant to resort to such measures.

My own view of the matter is that there was such a disproportionate slaughter of the Northern Abolistionist idealists that even 'free but not equal' became a political impossibility to implement, and that the New England civilizing culture never recovered.

And, Graydon, you know what they call the people who did those things, erased those cultures?

The United States would have been monstrous to have done what you asked. The war would have been worse than lost if the peace had been waged the way you suggest.

All the Scots are not dead; there are people clean around the world who sing Jacobite songs in pubs and make a point of Burns Night and have no clue that what they're celebrating is a Victorian romantic construct, a myth of nation blessedly free of the contamination of history.

I thought Burns Night was an excuse to read Burns poetry, drink scotch and make jokes about haggis.

Celebrated it for the first time this last one. Grand fun, and after compositing a recipe for vegan haggis, using banana leaves in place of sheep stomach, had something likely rare for a Burns Night: Requests for seconds and thirds of the haggis and no leftovers.

Meat was salmon.

Catherine, concerning your quotes from Mr. Scalzi:

It comes to this: When someone tells you the Confederacy was about something other than people owning people, they're either being intentionally disingenuous or (more charitably) are ignorant about the deep and abiding role slavery had in the formation of the CSA...

...as to whether a memorial for American soldiers who died in combat should include names of Confederate soldiers ... My response is that it shouldn't, for the reason that either the CSA was its own country, in which case its soldiers weren't "American" soldiers ("American" understood to refer to citizens of the US), or it wasn't its own country and the Confederate soldiers were in open and treasonous rebellion, and as a general rule one does not commemorate traitors, particularly ones whose rebellious actions ultimately caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands...

Fine, but you might be surprised by who would disagree with you both -- like Abraham Lincoln, and many of those who fought for the Union. Lincoln, as the good lawyer he was, was out to establish more than that the Southern armies had been defeated and the Confederate goverment put to flight. He did not accept that these states had ever effectively seceeded, and denied that their governments ever had the power to -- which was the whole legal point of the war. His interpretation, was that specific persons had comitted treason and usurped control of state governments. Lincoln combined this with a wise policy of promoting postwar reconciliation -- he knew that whether we liked it or not, the South and North had to live together somehow. So he (by proclamation in 1863) pardoned "persons heretofore engaged in said rebellion to resume their allegiance to the United States" as long as they took and maintained an oath of renewed allegiance to the US Constitution and to support the legal emancipation of slaves. (BTW, senior CSA government and military officials, as well as anyone who had not properly treated black soldiers or their officers as prisoners of war were excluded.) Lincoln's entire reasoning was that the South could not cease being American for a moment -- but individuals could screw up state governments and foment rebellion. The answer was to concentrate on them, but allow everyone else to resume their lives as citizens, and reconstitute local governments.

As far as cemetaries and memorials and such, that is an issue that was settled many years ago. In the couple of decades after the Civil War, the veterans of the two sides tended to exclude each other. For example, Union dead at Gettysburg were interred in the national Soldiers Cemetary there, while Confderate dead were gathered up some years later, and returned to their home states, or to well known cemetaries in the South as Hollywood in Richmond. But as the years went by, the two sets of veterans felt a closer bond with each other than with those who did not know the War. Today, memorials for both Confederate and Union units dot the battlefield at Gettysburg -- and often had representatives from both sides at their dedications. Union and Confederate veterans often met separately, (especially with groups like the GAR having political power) but often cooperated on major anniversaries and encampments. By the early 20th Century, each had largely accepted the presence of the other and their memorials at historic sites. (BTW I'm not a big fan of the use of the "Stars and Bars" by some at these sites, as it is often unhistorical and has come to represent too many other things.)

...Now, look: I understand that for a lot of Confederacy fans, it really isn't about race or anything else other than pride for the South. My response to that is: Groovy. Go for it. Love the South. What y'all need to do, however, is get some new symbols, some that don't harken back to the Dixie Days, when you went to war for the right to keep owning people. The Confederacy was evil, and now it's dead, and its being dead is front and center the best thing that there ever was about it.

I can agree with you that the the Confederacy is as dead as Julius Ceasar -- but that is not the issue anyway. Those who have promoted the the use of these symbols are not promoting the CSA or slavery -- they are promoting a much more recent political, social and economic agenda. Go ahead and argue about statues and memorials all you want -- a good historical argument is hard to find. But don't confuse a worthwhile historical argument with the issue of flying the supposed Confederate flag and such.

That said, I can now listen to people who think otherwise without getting angry. Why? Perhaps because I have traveled more in the South and understand that the story, and it92s retelling is pretty complicated. Or, it might be because I can see the potential for (and history of) acts of evil by the USA. No government, organization, society, or individual is completely evil, or innocent of evil.

I lived in the south for over 10 years. I watched the promising political career of a black man, the Mayor of Charlotte, Harvey Gant, destroyed in one night by a well placed ad by Jesse Helms, that played one card and only one card -- the race card. It worked. Gant went from a 5 point lead to a loss. In one day.

The idea that "A little bit of romanticizing of R.E. Lee or the Confederacy pales in comparison, except when it ties into an oppressive agenda" is missing the point. The whole fucking reason for romaticizing Lee is to hide the evil that he and the others in the confederacy did, and allow that evil to fester in the dark. This evil is simple.

They killed thousands in a futile bid to keep a group of people enslaved.

Period.

Lee was no gentleman, nor humble. To his "equals" -- fellow Virginian Aristocrats and the like, he might have been. But to anyone not of his percieved social status -- such as *any* member of the US Military -- he was anything but. Indeed, his own hubris cause the travails that beset him from Gettysburg onwards -- he assumed that he could give Grant and Meade one thrashing and send them on the run. He never thought, until the bitter end, that the Union would ever send anyone to fight him -- since, of course, the Union didn't have any fighters -- all the fighters were Confederates.

And so forth.

I will not tolerate the romaticization or deification of these monsters. Oh, and Simon, who can't figure out the difference between the American Revolution and the Civil War? One was fought to secure freedom from tyranny for a people, and the other was fought to secure enduring bondage for a people. I'll leave it to you to figure out which was which, since you are such a *good* judge of character. I'm glad I've earned your disgust and emnity -- if I were to earn your praise, I could find little stronger proof on how wrong I was.

Kevin -
You will note that I didn't say that the Union should have emulated the Duke of Cumberland; I said that it should hanged a list of people who were all -- by the Union's legal theories -- unquestioned traitors, who had either taken up arms against the Constitution or given very substantial aid and comfort to those enemies by collecting taxes to support the war effort of the first group and otherwise gone about lending their names to such appearance of legitimacy as the rebellion was able to maintain.

That would have fit very squarely into the scope of the rule of law, as many of the things the Union had already done in the prosecution of that war did not.

It is a great pity to have Sherman's March, and the campaigns of movement in the West, and the comprehensive slaughters of the long Eastern stalemate, and then not act to secure the victory thus brought so near to achievement.

The idea that "A little bit of romanticizing of R.E. Lee or the Confederacy pales in comparison, except when it ties into an oppressive agenda" is missing the point. The whole fucking reason for romaticizing Lee is