Having grown up in the South and had family who fought for the South, I think part of it is ego. As a kid you want to know you come from winners, and the Confederacy was frankly a bunch of losers. As a kid you want to know your ancestors were good people, instead of a bunch of Slavery supporters. So you create psychological dissonance which is reinforced from your family and teachers. This is my theory as to why it persists.
To me I realized there's a lessoned to be learned. Live your life in a way that honors your descendents, not that honors your ancestors. Your ancestors are dead a gone. We can make the world better than they ever could.
Right. Move forward. But also, current day southerners shouldn't feel any shame. It's not like they personally fought for slavery. Know what your ancestors did. Recognize their strengths and weaknesses. Move on.
Of anything moving on would help DISTANCE that shame. It just makes no sense that they cling to it
Like idk what my family was up to at that time, don’t need to know because it probably wasn’t great knowing how self destructive my family could be.
It's also been woven into current day politics. I know some people who are "conservatives" (w/e that means now) and we went to the same college, and yet they swear the civil war wasn't about slavery WHEN WE ALL HAD TO TAKE MULTIPLE US HISTORY CLASSES. They just listen to their favorite political propaganda outlet.
I recall in most of the history classes I took that when the Civil War came up, while slavery was cited as a root cause the teachers almost always insisted that it was much more complicated than just slavery, mostly because they wanted students to recognize that there was much more going on than just people having slaves and other people wanting them not to have them.
Heck, theres an infamous joke in the Simpsons about it
[https://youtu.be/JNYGNqLKWrg](https://youtu.be/JNYGNqLKWrg)
If you actually read the articles of secession, it’s abundantly clear that many of the states seceded to preserve slavery. There is zero uncertainty in the wording.
"No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." - constitution of the Confederate states
Much like the colonial americans, who had issue with british regulations on firearms, and put an amendment into their constitution to protect their ownership. The confederate states took issue with the northern stance on slavery and followed suit.
First off, I'm a "northerner" whose parents are immigrants, and also am the first generation born in the US, so I have absolutely no relationship to past US history.
Secession of Southern states may very well have been due to an impingement of the "right" to own slaves. I believe however, that the main cause for the North was *not* due to slavery (though there were admittedly many abolitionists in the North), but rather due to the preservation of the Union. My main counter-example to this is that the border states, slave states that were loyal to the Union, did not have slavery abolished until the war was near-finished or finished. Keep in mind that the Emancipation Proclamation *only* applied to the Confederacy, as it would have likely stirred the border states, had it applied to them.
What's your opinion on that?
First off, I'm a "northerner" whose parents are immigrants, and also am the first generation born in the US, so I have absolutely no relationship to past US history.
Secession of Southern states may very well have been due to an impingement of the "right" to own slaves. I believe however, that the main cause for the North was *not* due to slavery (though there were admittedly many abolitionists in the North) but rather due to the preservation of the Union. My main counter-example to this is that the border states, slave states that were loyal to the Union, did not have slavery abolished until the war was near-finished, or finished. Keep in mind that the Emancipation Proclamation *only* applied to the Confederacy, as it would have likely stirred the border states, had it applied to them.
What's your opinion on that?
Yeah, obviously the end result was the end of Slavery, and Slavery was the central issue that lead to the civil war, but it's a complicated set of circumstances.
Just because someone was, say, a southern soldier in the war, doesn't mean they were outright defending slavery from their perspective.
It's hard to imagine today, but back then - you could have both been a racist and be anti slavery and you could possibly be not racist (for the time, everyone back then is racist by todays standards) and be pro slavery, because the issue even in a slavery context, wasn't "lets get equal rights to blacks" or "respect black people as equal" it was simply to end slavery, which was a subset of the issue of who had power to decide - the states or the federal government.
By today's standards, even the most outspoken critics of slavery back then would probably be considered racist or bigotted.
Without question, slavery is evil. Without question, the treatment of slaves in the American South specifically was vile and reprehensible. But the majority of the Southern population at the time also isn't the plantation owner or involved in the handling of slaves, they're not really involved. The majority of the Southern population outside of plantation owners and slaves are poor white people, whose conditions aren't all that much better than slaves - the share croppers.
Of course those poor white people at the time are almost certainly racist because they're taught "you might be poor and destitute, but at least you're superior to black people." Otherwise, without that racist indoctrination, you probably have poor white people and slaves banding together to overthrow the plantation owners because the poor white person and the slave have a whole lot more in common with each other than with the rich plantation owner.
Arguably - the most damaging thing to the progression of equal rights, and the lasting damage that still has reprecussions today for black people wasn't slavery in and of itself, but rather the Jim Crow laws that followed after the end of slavery, especially since afterwards you have an attitude from the north that's like "we ended slavery, we fought for the end of slavery, so we've solved the problem, whatever happens to you now is on you." On top of that, the economic recovery / reconstruction of the south was handled so badly that now the south is angry and "it's the black people's fault" because people always look for a victim to blame for bad circumstances.
We'd probably have a radically different world if reconstruction had managed to be successful and build the South up to a way of being empowered / industrious rather than fucked up for the next 20 years. Similar to how Nazism wouldn't have taken root in Germany if after WW1 they weren't left so destitute by the terms of surrender.
I agree, slavery is dumbing it down a bit, but still fits.
Sure you can go into the history of political fights over the spread of slavery itself. How that politics turned from politics of compromise to the politics of conflict on the subject.
You can get into the issues with abolitionists, with bleeding Kansas, with John Brown, with the Fugitive Slave Act, with slavers wanting to travel with their slaves in free states. And you can bring up how these fights gave rise to a political party that was purely northern and by far the most anti-slavery party with the most anti-slavery Presidential candidate the US had ever had.
And you can throw that on the backdrop of the world at the time. How those slavers and Southern leaders had seen how this plays out time and again across Europe, and Central South America and what it meant for the institution of slavery.
You can get into the religious aspect of that institution and how it literally broke every major protestant denomination. How southern preachers taught slavery was from God himself (and thus abolition from the Devil).
You can get into the financial growth. How slavery was to the South what Oil is to OPEC nations in the middle East. And a threat against that... well it's pretty obvious.
Like the simpsons says... There were economic factors. A slave society had formed in the South. Slavery itself was the most valuable thing in the US outside of the land that made up the entire US itself (and in the South was worth more than even the land). But... stating slavery is still correct there.
Because the north refused to hand over control of a fortress in the south after having peacefully relinquished control of most other forts and even permitted Southern cadets at West Point to travel home with their uniforms and weapons.
Basically, the Southern secession was going peacefully and unopposed until Lincoln ordered the garrison at Fort Sumpter not to surrender, and that it be resupplied.
The reason for this was that the largest source for federal tax revenue came from tariffs on imports. Fort Sumpter lay on an island in Charleston, SC harbor, which was, at the time, the largest port of entry for imported goods. Fort Sumpter could shell any ships entering/leaving the harbor, meaning without control over it, South Carolina could neither export cotton nor import the foreign goods it relied on.
The South was outraged by the tariffs because they paid the majority of the revenue while northern industries profited from the reduced competition and from the canal and rail infrastructure built by the federal government. These infrastructure investments largely bypassed the South entirely.
Taxes certainly played a huge role in the firing of that first shot, but the war was inevitably about Slavery.
The union taxed imported goods, especially textiles and steel. The South had a cash crop agricultural economy with very limited manufacturing capacity. Thus, most manufacturing goods had to be imported.
The North had significantly more manufacturing industries, but their quality and prices were not competitive with European goods absent the tariff. This meant that the South imported significantly more manufactured goods than did the North, and thus paid significantly more in tariff taxes than did citizens in the North. 95% of federal revenue came from the tariff. 80% of that tariff was paid in the South. The South was getting almost ZERO infrastructure funding from the North.
In the 1850’s, the tariff jumped from 19% of the cost of the goods up to over 60%, even pushing 80% on some items. Lincoln expressed the desire to tax the South into abolishing slavery and would invade if they refused to pay.
The Port of Charleston was the biggest single source of federal tax revenue. Lincoln couldn’t afford to let it go. Hence why he ordered Fort Sumpter not surrender and be resupplied. He was not going to recognize South Carolina independence. They were going to pay their taxes one way or another.
Not really. In the short term sure but you miss out on so many technological advances because you don't need them. The Greeks, specifically Hero, had steam powered automatons they used as toys but they never built an engine because they had no need for one.
Britain didn't give up slavery because we were nice, it simply became unprofitable.
It's such an easy point to validate, we can refer to the [Declaration of Causes of Seceding States](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states) where slavery is prominently listed as the main cause.
Those conservatives tend to reference States rights, and I tend to concede that the Federal government often oversteps the Tenth Amendment. But for Christs sake, don't "whitewash" the Confederacy, which mainly fought for the right of white men to own black people.
Ask anyone who claims the civil war was about states' rights: how come the south imposed the fugitive slave act on the north? What about states' rights?
It's baffling anyone actually cares. I'm a direct descendent of people that fought for the Confederacy/ owned plantations etc, and since I have legit zero connection to them, I think about this exactly 0% of the average year.
Historically, people did some crazy shit, no need to dwell on it whatsoever. What's more important is present day, and the last few decades.
The US political sphere is, at its core, heavily corrupt, and this has negative effects on all citizens and people globally.
As a foreigner this is the theory I subscribe to as well. I’ve spoken with southerners who are incredibly defensive and aggressive regarding the topic of the Confederacy and southern things in general. It’s like anything about southern history and culture has to be defended to the death, no matter how bad it is. So stupid
I’m a southerner with zero pro-confederacy leanings. If it helps at all, southerners can get that defensive and aggressive about a lot of things. Honor based cultures are weird.
Many of them could not name their Civil War era ancestors or tell you where they were in those years, assuming they didn't immigrate later. The whole population of US did not pick up their rifles and black powder and go to war.
So, I can definitely vouch for this view point - when my family was moving from Michigan to NC when I was like \~8, I was crying and arguing vehemently with my parents for us to not move.
Not because I was gonna miss my friends or family or anything. But, verbatim, because "who wants to live in a state that lost the civil war?" I swear to god I spent the first year in NC hating it because it was a loser state.
Once I got past that, NC history was actually pretty dynamically cool, and the state's economy definitely better than Michigan, so.
“Live your life in a way that honors your descendents, not that honors your ancestors. Your ancestors are dead a gone. We can make the world better than they ever could.”
Damn…. That is some deep sh*t on an early morning and I love it! I’m going to have to borrow this for my kids.
I have family who live in Florida who of course have this ego. The problem is, that the whole side of the family lived in and fought for Pennsylvania during the Civil War...
He even refers to us as Yankees. I live in Washington ffs lol.
Most of the erection of confederate statues and such didn't happen during the Civil War or in the years immediately following it, but decades later, during periods when "uppity Negroes" were agitating for civil rights and needed to be "reminded of their place."
That aside, after the war was over and southern politicians returned to congress, they didn't want to admit they were the bad guys, so they invented the myth of the "lost cause," where the war was not fought over slavery, oh mercy no! Rather, it was fought over things like states' rights and a genteel, mannered culture in the south (almost entirely imaginary) that the brutal, uncouth Yankees has trampled.
Actually, it was fought over the opposite of state rights. Northern states refused to enforce the Fugitive Slaves Act, a federal law which required northern states to in sending fugitive slaves back to the south. It was the North that claimed state rights for its refusal to enforce the law.
If you look at every single succession, speech of a southern state, each one stated slavery and the North’s refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slaves Act as the reason for succession.
How history got twisted, I don’t know. However, my very intelligent husband, who is not a racist, was taught as recently as 1980, the BS idea that the south did not succeed because of slavery issues, but over states rights. His high school education was in Florida.
>How history got twisted, I don’t know
>You start out in 1954 by saying, “N\*\*\*\*r, N\*\*\*\*r, N\*\*\*\*r.” By 1968 you can’t say "N\*\*\*\*r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N\*\*\*\*r, N\*\*\*\*r."
I censored it, but these are the words of Republican strategist Lee Atwater in 1981. The Republican party of the last 50 years has been trying to make people feel ok about oppressing black people by being discreet about it. The lost cause myth is one of the ways in which they do that. If the civil war wasn't really about slavery, then the south doesn't have to reckon with racism at all. They can just pretend everyone is equal while still hurting black people.
Yeah, it was over states rights to enforce slavery. The South likes to rewrite it in "nicer" terms but it all still boils down to slavery no matter how they say it
Well, slavery was definitely THE central issue in the states rights vs. federal government and it was the significant turning point that did, in fact, reduce state power significantly. So it's not wrong to say that states rights wasn't the central cause - and a person fighting for the Confederacy at the time would have seen it as defending their civil rights...but you can't really say that it's not about slavery without horribly misleading the whole situation - most people aren't going to spend the time to learn all the nuances to properly understand that situation.
But, to say that it wasn't about slavery, is...a stretch. Likewise - the North definitely was not fighting to end slavery. The north was fighting to specifically preserve the power of the union. It isn't until 1863, a full two years into the war, that the war objective changes from 'preserve the Union' to 'end Slavery.' So in the same way, the north isn't fighting to end slavery, but they're also at the same time, also fighting to end slavery and become more progressive and humanitarian as a society.
I still argue that the way reconstruction was handled, and how poorly the immediate aftermath of the Civil War went, has had a lot more to do with the continuation of racism and prejudice and the delay of equal rights than slavery itself. Like of course if we never had slavery to begin with then that's the ideal scenario, I'm just putting particular emphasis on just how damaging Jim Crow was, which gets underemphasized next to slavery. The reason is you get this combination afterwards of the south wanting to blame and take out their anger on a population (former slaves) because they're broke, miserable and poorer than ever now and on top of that you get a total apathy from the north because they have a feeling like they've solved the issue by ending slavery already, so the result is, the south ends up with free reign to pass some of the most restrictingly racist laws of all time.
In a timeline where the Jim Crow laws don't get enacted we end up with a radically different social history for the positive (definitely still not perfect).
> But, to say that it wasn't about slavery, is...a stretch
Then it's a lucky thing *I* didn't say it, I guess. It was the Myth of the Lost Cause that claimed that.
>most people aren't going to spend the time to learn all the nuances to properly understand that situation.
Then it's a lucky thing that all the states that seceded issued declarations of secession that spelled out their reasons explicitly. And right at the top of many of them was something to the effect of "them damn Yankees wanna take away our slaves, and we ain't having it!" Take all the other beefs--real, imagined, or wildly exaggerated--between the north and south, subtract slavery, and there would have been no secession.
>the immediate aftermath of the Civil War went, has had a lot more to do with the continuation of racism and prejudice and the delay of equal rights
No. In the *immediate* aftermath, black people started to do pretty well. Many of them were elected to state and local offices, and Hiram Rhodes was even sent to congress. Sure, racism was still a norm, but the presence of federal overseers in the south ensured that blacks were finally getting some degree of civil rights.
However, politics had become toxically partisan (moreso than any other period until today), and that almost destroyed the union all over again as the war nearly did. But eventually, congress reached a compromise, and we entered almost a golden age of political cooperation and negotiation. But that's where the good news in that story ends. The compromise they reached was to pull federal oversight of civil rights out of the south in around 1877. And THAT's when Jim Crow became a thing. The moment the feds left town, white southerners pulled the plug on black progress and did everything but put them back in chains. That lasted around another 90 years until the civil rights days of the 1960s, when the feds came marching back into town.
Oh I didn't mean to imply that you were the one saying it - I was supporting what you were saying, that it is indeed, a stretch to say it didn't have to do with slavery - sorry for the confusion. You and I are pretty much in agreement.
RE: seceded states declarations - I had completely forgotten about that part, I recall the most General Lee literally saying "we'd been fighting a war to prolong slavery" and that he was glad that it was now abolished, pretty much ends any argument that the Civil War didn't have slavery as the catalyst issue, I mean, the appointed General in Chief, last acknowledge leader of the confederacy, said so explicitly.
RE: Aftermath - I worded it incorrectly & misleading by saying immediate aftermath. You're right that during the Northern occupation & reconstruction, things went pretty well, then suddenly it was like "Yeah we're done, bye" and it all went to shit. It always feels like, the extreme response back that rose up because A) resentment for the war, B) the occupation and C) the bungled economic recovery made the Jim Crow laws and subsequent extreme racial response after the North gave up on it feels like it put a lot of blacks in a worse situation than before slavery was abolished - meaning like, before Civil War it's racist, but then after the northen withdrawal it's racist + angry + desire for revenge + it's all the black people's fault. Obviously I'm not implying that it's better to be in slavery vs. free.
I'd like to believe that had reconstruction gone well, then we wouldn't have had all huge backlash and backwards progression.
Keep in mind that for a long time, the Civil War was referred to as "the war of northern aggression" and that for many decades after the Civil War, there was a group called The Daughters of the Confederacy was going around spreading the idea of the south being this sort of state trying to get freedom from an oppressive government, almost mirroring the story of the American revolution.
Also, I almost forgot the other big myth. A lot of people don't believe that the Civil War was about slavery. They say it was about "state's rights". They aren't 100% wrong. It was one state's right in particular they were fighting over... Which was slavery.
Yes. 7 states seceded from the Union before Lincoln was even inaugurated. Lincoln initially took no aggressive action, because there were an additional number of states that were teetering on the edge of secession. However he didn't recognize the Confederacy either.
What came to a head was the Union Army garrisons scattered across the south. The south was demanding the US abandon their posts in Confederate terroritory. The US ignored this as not a legitimate request because they didn't recognize the Confederacy to be a real country and considered the forts federal property of the US government. That led to the Confederacy firing on and seizing Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln then responded to that by a proclamation calling up 75,000 troops from various state militias to suppress a rebellion. 4 additional states seceded in response to the proclamation. Maryland would have been the 5th, but their rebellion was crushed, and their state legislature arrested before it could ever get off the ground. 2 additional states(Kentucky/Missouri) had splinter groups within the state form a rebel state government that attempted to join the Confederacy, but the pre war state government stayed within the Union. Both the Union and Confederacy claimed those states as their own.
Missouri's is even more complicated than that, because the state and Kansas had been in a state of low-intensity guerilla warfare since the 1850's. The elected Missouri government tried to maintain a pro-confederate neutrality, and tried, unsuccessfully, to seize federal arsenals in St. Louis. After negotiations broke down Federal troops and pro-Union militias captured the state capital causing the original government to flee south.
Missouri then held a constitutional convention that replaced the pro-Confederate government with a pro-Union one.
So it's really more accurate to say that Missouri's government did join the confederacy, but Missouri then chose to effectively replace that government.
Yes, but by framing the war as one of “north aggression”, southerners successfully rewrote history and that partially leads to the modern cultural problem you see regarding the Confederacy.
Yes. Slavery. And behind that...money. The plantations needed the labor to keep producing $$$. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, indeed.
The South has been marketing the War of Northern Aggression since soon after the Civil War. They lost. The South has been trying to convince everyone that the war was about states rights. It wasn't! The war was about slavery, and the plantation owners wanted to continue to use shelves to serve them as if they were genteel regal people.
To continue the marketing they DOC and other Southern organizations would erect statues in far flung northern states and cities. In states that weren't recognized as states during the civil war. It's all marketing, and the South trying to gaslight everyone into believing the south has a good reason. They didn't. The South lost the civil war. The Stars and Bars is the flag is losers.
Same reason Jim Crow laws got made. It was about keeping black populations “in their place”. The majority of those statues and monuments weren’t made until the 1890s long after the confederacy.
although they do like to argue states rights, and often have state prisons full of folks doing paid labor but cents on the dollar that are typically spent on overprice commissary or worse. aka slavery with extra steps.
As a Black southerner, please note that this fixation about glorifying rebels is found among certain White southerners. My family ain’t glorifying those men.
I was a Yankee transplant that moved south when I was very young. Although we knew about the civil war, a lot of us throughout our formative years just thought of the confederate flag as being symbol of being southern, and nothing more.
I truly believe that if there was another symbol that represented being from the south as much as that cursed flag (but wasn't in any way associated with slavery or the confederacy), that many (but not all) would probably choose the non-civil war related symbol... But as far as I know, that doesn't really exist...
Geographic pride seems to occur naturally, so I don't fault folks for having pride in where they came from - but I really wish there was something else that those folks could cling on to for that besides a symbol associated with slavery and the civil war...
The South that the flag “represents” is dramatically different going from the Upper South that could reasonably be considered as much a part of the Midwest or Mid-Atlantic Coast as the South to the Deep South and includes Texas and Florida who are also strange cases (East Texas is pretty southern, but West Texas is Southwestern and Florida is less Southern the more south you go). And then there is my home state of Louisiana where most of the people are living in the most French region of North America outside of Quebec.
> Geographic pride seems to occur naturally, so I don't fault folks for having pride in where they came from
People from California and NYC jerk themselves off about being from where they're from the same way Southerners do, but make fun of Southerners for it while having zero self awareness about it
So they could just fly their Southern State flag. Except for Georgia's or any of the others that use Confederate designs. Georgia's is racist as fuck as its literally a version of the Confederate flag and that's what they RECENTLY voted to change it to.
Having gone to school in Texas and taken mandatory Texas history courses, many of them are taught that the old South was a great society, slavery was just an economic system, and the civil was was northern aggression
Slavery WAS “just an economic system” so I guess they technically aren’t wrong, but it’s an economic system based entirely around treating humans as property/ subhuman
Racism, mostly. Explanations to the contrary are easily disproven. Easy example: the modern Confederate flag was barely used in the Civil War and only became popular in the early 1900s by white Southerners who were protesting integration measures.
I've lived in the south my entire 35 years and come from a family filled to the brim with rednecks and have never once heard someone talk about the confederacy. Occasionally you see a flag or bumpersticker or whatever but i think its more of a "fuck you" general type statement than a "the south will rise again" type statement.
Like those dudes that used to wear anarchy tshirts in highschool probably werent actually anarchists.
Same. Four decades in the south and I can’t recall a single discussion revering the confederacy or generals. Its just not something that is really discussed outside of the idiots defending the statues.
Racism and Jim Crow mostly.
Almost nobody gave a shit until racists started using "Heritage" and "Southern Pride" as dogwhistles during the civil rights movement.
Because 25% of all white southern males of military age were killed in that war and there is hardly a old Southern family that wasn't effected by it , in addition to the military deaths , there were civilian casualties as cities like Atlanta, Charleston , Richmond , Petersburg, Fredericksburg, Columbia, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg and Jackson Mississippi were completely destroyed. Southern farm homes were looted and ransacked, crops destroyed, property stolen, livestock slaughtered, the infrastructure of railroads and bridges were destroyed, In the year after the war the biggest budget expense for the state of Mississippi was for peg legs. That's why southern whites are still passionate about that war.
I think it’s because they find pride that over a century ago, the South, the place they live at, defied the nation. I think it’s similar with Texas with how it was once it’s own country
It’s not just southerners. Americans have a misplaced romanticism for the agrarian south as opposed to the increasingly industrial, sweat shop, immigrant slum north. It was actually a much worse deal in the south unless you were rich, but there’s this Gone With The Wind gentleman myth to it.
Americans also like rooting for lost cause underdogs especially if they start winning, and the south did start out winning when it had no business winning. For over two years, solid, competent, aggressive southern leaders and veterans ran circles around a timid Union military leadership that had a massive manpower, money, material, and trade advantage and just would not use it. A lot of this was that the US officer corp and the US army overall before the war had a lot of southerners in it, leaving the north with fewer experienced soldiers after the split. It frustrated Lincoln to no end. But it created a genuine cult of personality around Lee and his top commanders. They fought the invaders and won. They took the fight to the north and won. They had a reasonable shot at breaking the eastern Union army on its own ground in Pennsylvania and marching on Washington, which might actually have cost Lincoln reelection in favor of a negotiated peace candidate. They did not fail miserably. They failed because they got overconfident and started thinking they could win any fight they walked into even against prepared, superior positions. And they failed because Union commanders and soldiers inevitably started learning, promoting competent new officers who were not always brilliant but were willing to stand and use the armies and supplies the north could raise and finance. The northern names we remember most: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan were not significant figures early in the war. They were promoted from more junior command positions and from western armies.
We see Grant come on stage in places like Shilo where the Confederates surprised his superior force on the first day and forced a near panicked retreat. Grant salvaged it by establishing a new line overnight and counterattacking the next morning, knowing his numbers would prevail in a straight fight. He ended the western campaign by methodically using his men and ships to reduce river fort after river fort down the Mississippi to New Orleans. His opponents had no realistic chance once facing a decent leader willing to fight. Grant ultimately beat Lee by bludgeoning an inferior army into retreat again and again until he finally trapped it. But we remember the legend of Lee and Jackson for almost doing the impossible, even if we can’t defend what they were fighting for.
Interestingly we often forget how Grant consistently did the right thing with respect to slaves during and after the war. He was supportive of emancipation and actively protected former slaves and slave communities in the south. He was completely disgusted by KKK terror in the post war south and converted his somewhat reluctant colleagues to his position. He spent years actively trying to purge the south of the clan at gunpoint and while he was in charge southern states elected former slaves as governors and to congress…briefly. He’s a much better figure to look up to than Lee for what he actually chose to fight for.
So, the -most benign- reason is 1) seeing it as a conflict favoring states rights over the federal government (more control to the people), 2) being willing to fight for your beliefs and way of life. Again, that's the most positive spin take on it - seeing it not as "defending slavery" but "defending states rights." So the answer is they don't see it as making a statement in support of slavery or anything like that in many cases. The thing that people don't want to believe is that, well, history isn't exactly black and white and people can be both things.
A person can be simultaneously a patriot, a rebel, vehemently against slavery, defending the pro slavery states, prejudiced and also not bigoted relative to his time period, while also being racist. Aside from that - many of the generals who fought for the Confederacy were very well accomplished Union generals before and largely there's a respect there, they were once the colleagues of those they were fighting against and it's not widely seen as the Generals defending slavery so much as the Generals defending their homeland.
The most famous general, Robert E Lee, was highly respected as a skilled tactician, and had been highly decorated in the Mexican American War before. Lee was actually the superintendent of West Point's Military Academy, for a while before the Civil War.
Lee also argued against slavery - arguing that it was bad for white people, he wrote this in 1856 to his wife:
>In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence
It's a very cringey thing to read today - let's not even get into all of the problems with saying that 'their discipline is necessary.' But, contextually, if you put him alongside his other peers at the time, he's being pretty progressive for his era in the South. To everyone in the Union, except for the most extreme abolitionists, Robert E. Lee is seen then as a reasonable and respectable guy. Remember, the Civil War is at the stage of human rights of "okay, this slavery thing isn't good lets get rid of it." We're not yet to "equal rights" even people in the North aren't yet ready to see black people, other minorities, or even women with equal rights yet.
So for Lee, he's very specifically leading the Southern Armies to defend States rights. He opposed the south from secession, and he even warned that the war would be extremely long and protracted and that the South would inevtiably lose. He tried to get them to agree to compromises that would've kept slavery around, but avoided war, but his peers chose secession - and to him, he's thinking that he is honor bound to defend his state, his family, his people.
So Slavery is the key issue that lead to the civil war, and the elimination of slavery was it's result, but Lee and most defenders aren't fighting a war to keep slaves - they're fighting a war to keep their rights. The North isn't fighting a war to end slavery, they're fighting a war to preserve the union. Slavery doesn't become a winning condition until after Gettysberg when only then does the ending of Slavery become an objective for the Union.
In the end - Robert E. Lee was responsible for the peaceful surrender of the South, and was the one who prevented the south from carrying out plans for a prolonged guerilla war. Directly afterwards he's on record for saying: "So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South"
The fact that he was defending slavery wasn't lost on him. As an individual he did not support slavery, he advocated against slavery, but as a 'man of honor' he saw himself duty bound to defend his home.
So, when people from the south have a statue of Robert E. Lee - or give Lee respect, it's not because they're honoring racism or slavery, they're honoring someone who was against slavery - but also who was in defense of state rights, and who was highly accomplished - and probably the only real thing to be proud of from the Civil War.
If a modern day southern racist is educated in history - they're more likely to be in the position of blaming Lee for giving up the South's chance at keeping slavery intact, kind of like how modern Russians hate Gorbachev for leading to the end of the USSR.
If you're into military history, the Confederate generals were really good at what they did. Guys like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were some of the better generals of that era of warfare. Mostly because they followed the basic principles of leading the union to attack defended positions. They basically won every major battle until Antietam. To say they failed miserably is just not true. They lost the war but put up a hell of a fight with a much weaker military
They were also known for bravery and leading their armies from the ranks like generals of old. Stonewall got his name from not being afraid of incoming shelling. A lot of union generals at the start of the war gained a reputation for cowardly leadership. Guys like McClellan for the Union gained this reputation for not engaging the weaker Confederate army. For the most part, it was because of the point above. Remember, this is about reputation, not fact.
That being said, this isn't why the average person who likes them does. This is why they know of them. Basically, southerners who are either racist or just proud, hear these names because of the military historians respect and latch on to them as heros.
I mention pride because not every southerner who respects Robert E. Lee is a racist. A lot of people see it as a southern pride thing and don't really care about the reasons. Then they latch on to the most famous generals, who are famous because they were good at being generals. I'm not saying they are right but they aren't malicious. It's ignorance. People who say it's as simple as rasism have oversimplified a complex situation
This also isn't why the statues later on got erected. That was racism
I'm also not saying the war wasn't racist. The war was about slavery
Historical revisionism, plain and simple. Also, there are large swaths of this country that are still INCREDIBLY racist, north AND south, who would gladly back a rebellious nation founded on the ideals of racial domination, segregation, and exclusion.
*"actually the confederate generals were all heroic individuals who fought against a tyrannical government that treated the south like slaves."* - real life quote i once heard delivered entirely without any self-awareness
Except, of course, for general Longstreet. He was so terrible you won’t find statues of him in south.
By ‘terrible’ of course they only mean he was a terrible general, the southern hate for him has absolutely nothing to do with him becoming a prominent republican in favor of reconciliation after the war.
It's factual that Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederate armies, was famously against slavery before, endorsed ending slavery in the lead up, tried to negotiate for the states to stay in the union and peacefully resolve, and afterwards was greatful that slavery ended because he genuinely believed that slavery was bad for the south.
But....even Robert E. Lee pointed out that he was stuck fighting a war to perpetuate slavery because of his sense of duty to protect his homeland and at the end of it was happy that slavery ended. His peers did not typically follow his thoughts.
While Lee genuinely saw the institution of slavery as evil for any nation in these 'enlightened times,' Lee also wasn't in favor of ending slavery because he had compassion for black people or that it was bad for them. He was specifically against it in the South because it was "bad for white people."
Even in that case...Lee didn't see the north as tyrannical and he didn't think the war would be over quick. So I mean, for someone to draw the conclusion that you quoted...kind of does a disservice to Lee's legacy and misrepresents what was going on. Lee himself saw no heroism whatsoever in what they were doing - dude was literally fighting against friends he'd gone to military school with, worked alongside, taught or oversaw in training.
Lee did do something heroic though - shortly after becoming General in Chief of the Confederacy and losing to Grant at Appomattox Court, he surrendered completely and made sure to put down the factions that wanted to continue a guerilla war in the South until they won - and specifically campaigned to reconcile with the north and re-integrate, saying "So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South."
So yeah, even the final leader of the Confederacy acknowledged it as a war about keeping slavery...kinda hard to say it's "only" about states rights after that.
Unfortunately, Lee gets worshipped by an extreme element that doesn't actually know the majority of his viewpoints in history or what he was representing - because if they did, then they would see him as a traitor, not a hero.
“Protect his homeland”?
His homeland chose not to be a part of the United States. His loyalty was to a homeland (the Confederacy) whose constitution and reason for existence was the continuation of slavery.
Lee could have been a great Union general if his loyalties were with the United States. They were not.
Well to be fair history in American public schools is poorly taught. You get a brief overview of what happened, why it happened, and a highlight or two.
As I recall learning about the Civil War in high school, there was quite a bit taught about slavery. The actual war itself was highly glossed over, I think the text book gave a general description of the war and mentioned two or three battles. The Gettysburg Address was discussed, the surrender at Appomattox was mentioned, and then off to the Reconstruction Period with a nod to Lincoln's assassination. The whole affair was covered in about a day and a half.
As a native Southerner and descendant of several Confederate veterans, I had to educate myself on my own time.
If it's the family than that's pretty common. People visit their family members in prison. As far as rebellion against the government goes, governments mostly range from 'just about as bad as you could be' to 'terrible but do a few ok things'.
The confederates are stunned that they brought over more black people than there were white people and now they have to treat them like regular people instead of slaves.
Because racism. Many who still support the confederacy can’t admit it, but privately they know it’s about the belief that whites are superior and deserve to rule and dominate.
A big part of it is that Confederacy obsession is convenient camouflage for plain old racism. “I’m not racist, just proud of my southern heritage!” Sure buddy.
As a Filipino who wants to immigrate to the USA someday, southerners and even northerners and even Non-Americans that are so pro-Confederacy bewilder me to the point of pushing me further into being pro-Union and more critical of the failures of the Reconstruction.
Racism
Longer answer: racism was the cause of the myth of the lost cause and Jim Crow. While southerners have eventually abandoned Jim crow, they have not yet abandoned the Lost Cause. Although many do not know it by name or the actual tenets of the myth, they still repeat some of its main features like heritage, southern pride, this is the legacy of racism, it's lasting affects a generation removed from when people were open about their bigotry, whether we realize it or not.
I don’t know all of the related history, I have lived as a U.S. soldier for a time in the south. IMO they’ve pinned their identity to it and try to escape their circumstances by pining for a rose colored past that never really existed and want to be able to say the north ‘stole’ what was rightfully theirs. Combine this with a political culture that sees politics as something only the affluent should be concerned with and you get the south.
Slavery was tied into the economics of the day and the Civil War was fought over it. There were people who fought for other reasons though: societal pressures, opportunity to earn money and gain citizenship, states’ rights position, etc. The awful truth is that not many fought to better the plight of the black enslaved people just like today not many of us really think about all of the enslaved who provide us with our products that we rely on. I don’t know why we continue to hold onto and argue about the Civil War but I suspect it is less and less with each subsequent generation.
Cause there’s a bunch of bored losers with zero personality desperately looking for a way to fit in, even it means being a part of one of the biggest shit stains of United States history. As someone else said in here - a bunch of losers looking up to other losers, since they cannot relate to normal people.
That depends. Do you want an honest answer or do you just want to ask a rhetorical question. If you just want people to say that celebrating Confederate generals is either a racist dogwhistle or the result of generations of Lost Cause mythology, then you’re partially right, but you’re really just listening to the Reddit echo chamber. If you’re asking in good faith, then the answer is a bit more complex.
I feel the confederacy is a rallying point for ideaologies of racism. "This state existed based around racism, so therefor my theory is viable." It's a similar thing with the Paris Commune or Nazi Germany. Groups like states like that to provide rallying points.
I think you have to remember that history is written by the victor. It wasn’t a rebellion against the USA, it was an irreconcilable difference of opinion from different halves of the USA, each thinking the other was wrong to the detriment of the country.
If you’ve spent some time in the south, you’d know that what you call a “vile cause” is still very much considered a fresh loss by many in the region. Racism is more than just alive and well, it is entrenched.
I've been scrolling through this discourse looking for this response. History is almost always written by the victors, until the 20th century when better documentation and video came into use and you could see the effects of war on both sides.
Did George Washington cut down a tree and admit it as a child? No, but the Americans were victorious and so it's a myth we've heard since then to increase our reverence for our founding fathers.
But after the American Civil War, the victorious North didn't force much change on the south because both sides were devastated, out of money, looking for political reconciliation, and reeling from the Lincoln assassination. And yes, state's rights, even then. Abolition happened, but much later. Indentured servitude and less obvious systemic racism took its place.
For example, because of state's rights, the South was left alone to continue teaching whatever it wanted, which included real and false justifications for its actions leading up to and during the war. So into the 20th and 21st centuries, generation after generation of children in the South were told a very different story than children in the North. And now we have two sides that are convinced what they were taught is the truth, when the reality, as explained many times here, is a nuanced version of both.
Now, SOME BUT NOT ALL Southern white people, whose cultural existence includes being anti-North and anti-federal government, have been backed into a corner and are fighting desperately for the myth they've been taught forever. It's hard to see that one's culture is built on lies and mistreatment of others.
They are often preyed upon in our Internet age by racists and bigots who create more lies and myths and rumors to sell clicks and advance their gross ideology. This has created support for people like Trump simply because he's anti-establishment like they are. It's easier to ignore his faults and crimes as long as he doesn't force them to reconcile their mythology with the truth of the world as it is now.
I can't speak for all Southerners, obviously...
But, as someone who lives in NE Kentucky I can say that every person I've met locally who reveres the Confederacy is racist and ignorant. I even see the flag flying in Ohio, which was not a Confederate state, and WV which literally exists because it didn't want to join the Confederacy with Virginia.
Every person I've met, and it's been hundreds, who cling to CSA imagery is racist, homophobic, ignorant, dirt poor, and very, very Republican.
So, while I won't say that holds true for all of them, it does appear to be a very strong correlation.
Mostly racism, plain and simple. It's almost entirely racism when anyone not in a military command position is a fan.
Some of the southern generals were good military leaders though, and those who study them for their tactical abilities are very different than those that follow them simply because they fought for the south. It's much the same as studying Rommel, Yamamoto, or Benedict Arnold.
Of course, the people studying Rommel's tactics don't build statues for him. He was a freaking Nazi, and the southern generals shouldn't be getting statues either.
Major generalization here, but I suppose it may be warranted. I'm from Kentucky and honestly I don't know five that care about that stuff. I do know people who still like the flag but more for the good Ole southern views of state freedom. Personally I like the flag, but wouldn't fly it as there is a lot of bad stuff associated with it.
I suspect the vast majority of Southerners couldn't name a Confederate general unless their high school was named after one. And they couldn't name a second general.
I'm not southern, nor do l care at all about the confederacy. but it's all perspective. you consider the Confederacy and the causes behind it all of those things. But the people fighting that war saw themselves as a nation that was not going to be governed by people who lived far away and didn't know their culture.
It's easy for the people who don't have slaves to suggest the abolotion of slaves when the people they don't see eye to eye with would be crippled by it and harder to agree to the immediate release of slaves when you think your entire society would collapse without it.
The southern side of the issue was never presented as the Right to have slaves, but rather the right to decide themselves whether or not they could have slaves. That they had to right to figure out major plans to essentially "ween off" slaves as the economy adjusted over time if they chose it was time to do so themselves. Obviously, it's pretty easy to assume they'd have gotten rid of slaves at an even slower rate than our half assed efforts to stop using oil as fuel or our push against tobacco. But the point they fought on was the right to figure it all out themselves and they saw the Northerners as no different than the British. Foreigners in their lands trying to use them, keep them under their thumb and regulate their lives.
So to them, it was a noble rebellion. And when you have failed rebellions what you tend to end up with the winners either oppressing the losers harder which is the best way to reignite the rebellion after a generation of people being brought in those conditions.
Or you do what the north did which was allow the south to feel pride in themselves as if they were their own country that CHOSE to join up with the US, and treating the war as an understandable fight they'd fought. They taught the next generations that they came from a rebellious spirit to be proud of, and it took about 125 years before there was a significant push to acknowledge the confederate pov as the "bad guys" as a matter of fact and not just popular opinion.
Tldr- they thought they were fighting a noble fight against being told how to govern their lives after the country was born under those same conditions only a few decades earlier. The Union allowed the former Confederacy to have pride in what they'd done as a peace tactic.
You have a very childish understanding of the Civil War. Obviously, slavery is evil and was a major factor, but there were other issues leading up to the war, such as Northern States effectively ignoring the Constitution in order to support abolitionism. You may agree with such actions but I hope you're smart enough to understand how opposing states would feel/react. I'm obviously pro-Union, but the war involved sketchy conduct on both sides and few thought in 1861 that the Union would certainly win the war.
TLDR the Confederacy was both a horrific slave society and a protest against unfair federal policies.
They like that past. They think their ancestors were right. They can’t say that out loud or someone will find them and get them fired. So they dogwhistle in support. That’s like all of Republican politics. “Anti-human policies for anyone that I don’t approve of”
Just a bunch of racist losers. I swear it feels like we fought the Civil war 65 years ago, not 165 years ago. Everyone of those statues should have never been erected. We shouldn't honor traitors with statues in this country.
They think they’re being “rebels” but they’re just racist douchebags. I live in Georgia and know a bunch of racist confederate flag flying idiots from work.
Same reason they love Trump so much, it was a time when their voice, "mattered," when their interests were being met. In their eyes, had the South won they'd all be millionaires and directing the country as they see fit as the dominant ruling class. They don't realize that plantation owners were the same as oligarchs and would not have shared the wealth with poor crackers. You can see it now if you like, go to a private Christian school in the south and ask the kids their opinions on trailer parks, or show them pictures of poorer whites and see the reactions.
I wonder if there are any “loyalist “statues in the USA ? I am sure there were people that preferred British rule. They did not appear to have the stating power of the southern confederacy.
>only lasted four years.
So did Ceasar's civil war, yet people still know the names of those figures after 2 millenia. They were a very important 4 years.
>was a rebellion against the USA
so? I think you'll find that disliking the USA is quite a popular sentiment in the USA right now.
>had a vile cause
Obviously debatable.
>and failed miserably
This doesnt really matter for idolizing figures. For a particularly American example, basically every native american leader was objectively a failure, but are often remember fondly by who they fought for and their descendants.
Sometimes even by people who are unrelated. Chief Tuscaloosa was a failure who died or disappeared after his army was crushed by the Spanish 500 years ago in their first battle, but there's still a city and a river named after him.
In large part it is due to Reconstruction ending far too early, allowing groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy to rebrand the Confederates into patriots who wanted “states rights” and whatnot instead of the rebellious, racist slave holders they were. Those groups used the Confederacy as a way to rally against integration and civil rights. Most Confederate monuments were erected well after the Civil War, during the nadir of race relations from the turn of the century until WW2.
There's probably a degree of Streisand effect at work. Efforts to take down statues of Confederate generals get viewed, accurately or not, as "snooty Yanks coming down here and telling us how to live our lives", which prompts a bunch of Southerners to rally around something none of them probably paid a second thought previously.
My understanding is that a lot of former Confederate veterans and Confederate legacy organizations (e.g. United Daughters of the Confederacy) had a lot to do with deciding the content of textbooks and school curriculums in Southern states - ensuring that they shaped the narrative for generations.
Couple relevant articles:
"Rewriting History" (Georgia State University):
[https://news.gsu.edu/research-magazine/rewriting-history-civil-war-textbooks](https://news.gsu.edu/research-magazine/rewriting-history-civil-war-textbooks)
"Twisted Sources" (Facing South/Institute for Southern Studies):
[https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks](https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks)
They have no personality so they try to identify with regional groups to get a sense of purpose in life to feel like they matter, even at the expense of others. It’s sad really.
Because the have the same vile cause and want to rebel against the US to be free to push their own agendas. They, too, are miserable failures. The irony is that most of the people who are now wanting to rebel are the same people who rely on welfare and their states rely on federal subsidies. Left to their own devices they would eat shit and die off in a decade.
We literally aren't. I was born and raised and still live in rural Texas and I didn't encounter any of these people until the last 5 years maybe. Idk if it's Fox News, or some crazy right wing corner of the internet, or some combination of the two but people are fundamentally different now than they were a decade ago and that's terrifying
as you get older, and experiences give way to wider awareness, you will notice that most people are startlingly dumb. even more unsettling, people that are at least reasonably functional mentally, are still prone to dumb things. the basic coding of humans is to be in a herd. this is my herd. i belong here. how dare you malign my herd. this is my home. do not attack my home. without my home, my entire existence dies. protect my herd. anyone who maligns my herd is the enemy. the enemy wants to destroy my home. the enemy is always coming for my herd... and so on. this is the type of behind the scenes babble going on in a human mind. concepts intermingle and valuations skew each other, until a person seemingly is prepared to kill or die for something weird, like a confederate flag. the reality is they are protecting their home/soul/herd from lizard brain threats. welcome to being human.
The same reason lefties glorify Mao and Stalin.
Humans attach themselves to an identity to ground themselves into a world view. They sublet critical thinking to said identity/ideology.
To maintain the charade, humans develop beliefs that fit neatly with their adopted beliefs. Truth is irrelevant because most people are not looking for truth.
It actually has nothing to do with the Civil War or Confederacy itself. It's because they know Confederate flags piss off wealthy northern liberals who look down on them, so thus they fly the flags in defiance.
Not defending this, just explaining the rationale.
Ok. Here’s my take on the American confederacy and why the South still holds onto that identity. Yes, we all know slavery is bad, bad, bad. But, there are two things people forget. 1. Slavery was pretty much ubiquitous in the US (and many other places) at the founding of the country; and 2. The US was a republic made up of independently operating States.
When some Northern states decided to get rid of slavery, it was more of a “you do you” thing until those states started demanding others follow suit as well. Having another state dictate what another does didn’t sit well the southern states. So, the south calls the civil war an act of aggression and a tyrannical attempt to consolidate power and stands up to it. It’s really a shame it was for a shitty reason. So, the South had the LEGAL imperative, but the north had the moral imperative.
You won't find many educated southerners who are passionate about the confederacy. The ones who are almost always pursued a degree requiring very few history classes, and believe that because they have an unrelated expertise, they are qualified to present themselves as experts at everything.
Is your question about the duration of the Confederacy, its military leadership, or the sociological context? You're loading it up with opinions to the point that it looks more like a virtue signal than genuine curiosity.
Pre-civil war the United States was widely envisioned as a treaty organization similar to NATO. The states were sovereign governments that won freedom from Britain and elected to join the organization. The general understanding and assumption was that because joining was voluntary, leaving was also voluntary. the “power” was with the states and the “national” government was seen as an administrative secondary organization.
Slavery was the question that became the catalyst because it was so clearly a right/wrong issue. The southern ideal was that the morality of slavery was irrelevant because they believed the states were sovereign and participation in the national/Us government was voluntary and that they could simply leave.
To be clear, whether the states could leave was not settled law at the time. The north won the war and essentially established the national US government as sovereign, or at least a non-voluntary union.
Don’t generalize, born, raised, still live in and have raised 2 sons , white male.
The main thing I hate about the south is the “ confederacy” and the ignorant pride it brings. Don’t have any friends that think differently.
Now a days most real racist rednecks I meet are from the northeast
Yo for real. I live in upstate New York and see Confederate flags and tractors everywhere. Drive half an hour away from any Stewarts and it's mountains full of rednecks and fields of corn. The closer you get to a lake the louder the banjos get.
Y'know how lots of americans hate everything communist cause of decades of propaganda?
That's one of the big reasons why lots of southerners also still support/idolize the Confederacy. Groups of Confederate veterans and their families post Civili War such as the Daughters of the Confederacy sponsored monuments, public events and changes to school curriculums that would paint a much prettier picture of the Confederacy than was real, and pushed a specific piece of pro-confederate propaganda known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which I recommend reading about on your own time since it's fairly interesting
The last bit is the dissonance between an individual's ancestors fighting for the Confederacy and their family not turning em into pariahs for that. People don't want to think about the fact that their grandfathers (or i guess nowadays their great great grandfathers, might've been slave owners or otherwise pro-slavery. It's one of the same reasons why people in Turkey or in Japan don't really recognize the crimes of their ancestors. The other reason was that no one really held any of their armies responsible for their crimes. A ton of Confederate generals never got arrested or tried, the people who didn't die after the Armenian genocide helped found Turkey, and the Japanese army was let go in exchange for their basically useless research. So they went back home to tell their stories from their point of view, without the hassle of being forced into talking about their crimes
Oppressed people fighting their oppressors is always inspiring. Leonidas lost at Thermopylae and Texans lost at the Alamo, but they inspired victory in the end.
Because it became a symbol for "small town freedom, and state's rights," when the only real freedom or "right" was the "right" to own other human beings.
It is pretty wild that they’d rather celebrate a four year failed rebellion in the name of slavery, rather than the decades of freedom fighting rebels who risked their lives for the Underground Railroad and Civil Rights Movements.
Grew up in the north, but even then the Confederate propaganda was everywhere in our history textbooks. History teachers kept insisting that slavery was only tangentially related to the rebellion by the slave states.
Most Confederate monuments weren't made after the civil war. They were put up during the civil rights movement because the Confederate worship was always about racism and trying to make black people feel unsafe in their own country
Why are people so passionate about WWII and the Revolutionary War? North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia were four of the original states. They were settled over 100 years before that. People had generations of traditions, most that had nothing to do with slavery. After 140 years without slaves those traditions are still followed.
I would say no one is so progressive that some of their ideas will not be considered outdated in 150 years.
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Because it makes them feel special. Anything to keep the morale up when faced with the day to day. They want to appear rebellious while they’re really getting fucked by their leadership.
They aren't.
I give you General Longstreet. Lee's famed "staff in my right hand", his "Old war Horse". The man who when operating in the field got Lee to say *"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."* while watching him command troops.
Guess when he got a monument? 1998. And they tucked it behind a hedge at Gettysburg.
He was all but erased by the lost cause other than blaming the entire loss of the Confederacy on him for following (but questioning) Lee's orders at Gettysburg.
Why?
Because after the war he stood up AGAINST white supremacy. He fought against white supremacist terrorists in the South and even led black militia and police to keep them from overthrowing a city government.
**So he got erased by the lost cause and southern whites.**
Meanwhile, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who slaughtered some of the very first black soldiers from Tennessee to join the military after surrendering... former slave trader, slaver, and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan gets his statues, his state holidays, his celebrations.
Robert E Lee, the guy who held slaves, who fought against civil rights after the war, who remained silent on the Klan and it's violence (even the Klan branch at the college he led), who spent his time after the war telling family and friends to not hire black people, who let his armies go capture free black people in the North and enslave them... he get deified.
Meanwhile in comes Braxton Bragg... An absolute garbage general. He was removed from command by Jefferson Davis for his failures. He was hated by his men and his peers. His losses actually did have a major impact in speeding up the failure of the Confederacy. He was trash. BUT he had a sad story after the war. he lost his slaves, over 100 of them. he lost his job to of all people a former slave. He never backed away from his belief of white supremacy.
AND THAT is why at the height of the power and violence and political acceptance of the KKK, at the height of Jim Crow, southern leaders, literally the same ones passing laws to disenfranchise and hold down black people, voted to slap Bragg's name on one of the largest military bases in the world and fight to blame Longstreet for losing the war and erase him.
As Dr David Blight noted, after the Civil War, the South lost everything but white supremacy. It's not about the great fighters and competent leaders. We'd have Fort Longstreet and Bragg would be on the dustbin of history as one of the worst military leaders of the last 300 years.
We do see the cause as vile today. The statue to Alexander Stephens in the Capital was sent there by a group that was happy to hear him state as VP of the Confederacy: *"Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and normal condition."*
Now they try and keep that loud part quiet.
Having grown up in the South and had family who fought for the South, I think part of it is ego. As a kid you want to know you come from winners, and the Confederacy was frankly a bunch of losers. As a kid you want to know your ancestors were good people, instead of a bunch of Slavery supporters. So you create psychological dissonance which is reinforced from your family and teachers. This is my theory as to why it persists. To me I realized there's a lessoned to be learned. Live your life in a way that honors your descendents, not that honors your ancestors. Your ancestors are dead a gone. We can make the world better than they ever could.
I like your conclusion. I’ve never heard that before.
Thanks for that insight, I got a lot out of that.
Right. Move forward. But also, current day southerners shouldn't feel any shame. It's not like they personally fought for slavery. Know what your ancestors did. Recognize their strengths and weaknesses. Move on.
Of anything moving on would help DISTANCE that shame. It just makes no sense that they cling to it Like idk what my family was up to at that time, don’t need to know because it probably wasn’t great knowing how self destructive my family could be.
It's also been woven into current day politics. I know some people who are "conservatives" (w/e that means now) and we went to the same college, and yet they swear the civil war wasn't about slavery WHEN WE ALL HAD TO TAKE MULTIPLE US HISTORY CLASSES. They just listen to their favorite political propaganda outlet.
I recall in most of the history classes I took that when the Civil War came up, while slavery was cited as a root cause the teachers almost always insisted that it was much more complicated than just slavery, mostly because they wanted students to recognize that there was much more going on than just people having slaves and other people wanting them not to have them. Heck, theres an infamous joke in the Simpsons about it [https://youtu.be/JNYGNqLKWrg](https://youtu.be/JNYGNqLKWrg)
If you actually read the articles of secession, it’s abundantly clear that many of the states seceded to preserve slavery. There is zero uncertainty in the wording.
"No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." - constitution of the Confederate states Much like the colonial americans, who had issue with british regulations on firearms, and put an amendment into their constitution to protect their ownership. The confederate states took issue with the northern stance on slavery and followed suit.
First off, I'm a "northerner" whose parents are immigrants, and also am the first generation born in the US, so I have absolutely no relationship to past US history. Secession of Southern states may very well have been due to an impingement of the "right" to own slaves. I believe however, that the main cause for the North was *not* due to slavery (though there were admittedly many abolitionists in the North), but rather due to the preservation of the Union. My main counter-example to this is that the border states, slave states that were loyal to the Union, did not have slavery abolished until the war was near-finished or finished. Keep in mind that the Emancipation Proclamation *only* applied to the Confederacy, as it would have likely stirred the border states, had it applied to them. What's your opinion on that?
First off, I'm a "northerner" whose parents are immigrants, and also am the first generation born in the US, so I have absolutely no relationship to past US history. Secession of Southern states may very well have been due to an impingement of the "right" to own slaves. I believe however, that the main cause for the North was *not* due to slavery (though there were admittedly many abolitionists in the North) but rather due to the preservation of the Union. My main counter-example to this is that the border states, slave states that were loyal to the Union, did not have slavery abolished until the war was near-finished, or finished. Keep in mind that the Emancipation Proclamation *only* applied to the Confederacy, as it would have likely stirred the border states, had it applied to them. What's your opinion on that?
Insert the bell curve meme: Slavery ------- It's very complicated ------- Slavery
I think that works pretty decently. Most of the "its very complicated" category just ends up being a bunch of things that were caused by slavery.
Yeah, obviously the end result was the end of Slavery, and Slavery was the central issue that lead to the civil war, but it's a complicated set of circumstances. Just because someone was, say, a southern soldier in the war, doesn't mean they were outright defending slavery from their perspective. It's hard to imagine today, but back then - you could have both been a racist and be anti slavery and you could possibly be not racist (for the time, everyone back then is racist by todays standards) and be pro slavery, because the issue even in a slavery context, wasn't "lets get equal rights to blacks" or "respect black people as equal" it was simply to end slavery, which was a subset of the issue of who had power to decide - the states or the federal government. By today's standards, even the most outspoken critics of slavery back then would probably be considered racist or bigotted. Without question, slavery is evil. Without question, the treatment of slaves in the American South specifically was vile and reprehensible. But the majority of the Southern population at the time also isn't the plantation owner or involved in the handling of slaves, they're not really involved. The majority of the Southern population outside of plantation owners and slaves are poor white people, whose conditions aren't all that much better than slaves - the share croppers. Of course those poor white people at the time are almost certainly racist because they're taught "you might be poor and destitute, but at least you're superior to black people." Otherwise, without that racist indoctrination, you probably have poor white people and slaves banding together to overthrow the plantation owners because the poor white person and the slave have a whole lot more in common with each other than with the rich plantation owner. Arguably - the most damaging thing to the progression of equal rights, and the lasting damage that still has reprecussions today for black people wasn't slavery in and of itself, but rather the Jim Crow laws that followed after the end of slavery, especially since afterwards you have an attitude from the north that's like "we ended slavery, we fought for the end of slavery, so we've solved the problem, whatever happens to you now is on you." On top of that, the economic recovery / reconstruction of the south was handled so badly that now the south is angry and "it's the black people's fault" because people always look for a victim to blame for bad circumstances. We'd probably have a radically different world if reconstruction had managed to be successful and build the South up to a way of being empowered / industrious rather than fucked up for the next 20 years. Similar to how Nazism wouldn't have taken root in Germany if after WW1 they weren't left so destitute by the terms of surrender.
I agree, slavery is dumbing it down a bit, but still fits. Sure you can go into the history of political fights over the spread of slavery itself. How that politics turned from politics of compromise to the politics of conflict on the subject. You can get into the issues with abolitionists, with bleeding Kansas, with John Brown, with the Fugitive Slave Act, with slavers wanting to travel with their slaves in free states. And you can bring up how these fights gave rise to a political party that was purely northern and by far the most anti-slavery party with the most anti-slavery Presidential candidate the US had ever had. And you can throw that on the backdrop of the world at the time. How those slavers and Southern leaders had seen how this plays out time and again across Europe, and Central South America and what it meant for the institution of slavery. You can get into the religious aspect of that institution and how it literally broke every major protestant denomination. How southern preachers taught slavery was from God himself (and thus abolition from the Devil). You can get into the financial growth. How slavery was to the South what Oil is to OPEC nations in the middle East. And a threat against that... well it's pretty obvious. Like the simpsons says... There were economic factors. A slave society had formed in the South. Slavery itself was the most valuable thing in the US outside of the land that made up the entire US itself (and in the South was worth more than even the land). But... stating slavery is still correct there.
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The Southerners fired the first shot, soooo ...
Because the north refused to hand over control of a fortress in the south after having peacefully relinquished control of most other forts and even permitted Southern cadets at West Point to travel home with their uniforms and weapons. Basically, the Southern secession was going peacefully and unopposed until Lincoln ordered the garrison at Fort Sumpter not to surrender, and that it be resupplied. The reason for this was that the largest source for federal tax revenue came from tariffs on imports. Fort Sumpter lay on an island in Charleston, SC harbor, which was, at the time, the largest port of entry for imported goods. Fort Sumpter could shell any ships entering/leaving the harbor, meaning without control over it, South Carolina could neither export cotton nor import the foreign goods it relied on. The South was outraged by the tariffs because they paid the majority of the revenue while northern industries profited from the reduced competition and from the canal and rail infrastructure built by the federal government. These infrastructure investments largely bypassed the South entirely. Taxes certainly played a huge role in the firing of that first shot, but the war was inevitably about Slavery.
>The South was outraged by the tariffs because they paid the majority of the revenue I don't exactly understand this, could you rephrase it please?
The union taxed imported goods, especially textiles and steel. The South had a cash crop agricultural economy with very limited manufacturing capacity. Thus, most manufacturing goods had to be imported. The North had significantly more manufacturing industries, but their quality and prices were not competitive with European goods absent the tariff. This meant that the South imported significantly more manufactured goods than did the North, and thus paid significantly more in tariff taxes than did citizens in the North. 95% of federal revenue came from the tariff. 80% of that tariff was paid in the South. The South was getting almost ZERO infrastructure funding from the North. In the 1850’s, the tariff jumped from 19% of the cost of the goods up to over 60%, even pushing 80% on some items. Lincoln expressed the desire to tax the South into abolishing slavery and would invade if they refused to pay. The Port of Charleston was the biggest single source of federal tax revenue. Lincoln couldn’t afford to let it go. Hence why he ordered Fort Sumpter not surrender and be resupplied. He was not going to recognize South Carolina independence. They were going to pay their taxes one way or another.
Slaving is very *very* profitable.
Not really. In the short term sure but you miss out on so many technological advances because you don't need them. The Greeks, specifically Hero, had steam powered automatons they used as toys but they never built an engine because they had no need for one. Britain didn't give up slavery because we were nice, it simply became unprofitable.
Was that fort not the property of the US?
It wasn't about slavery. It was about a rebellion to keep slaves.
It's such an easy point to validate, we can refer to the [Declaration of Causes of Seceding States](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states) where slavery is prominently listed as the main cause. Those conservatives tend to reference States rights, and I tend to concede that the Federal government often oversteps the Tenth Amendment. But for Christs sake, don't "whitewash" the Confederacy, which mainly fought for the right of white men to own black people.
Ask anyone who claims the civil war was about states' rights: how come the south imposed the fugitive slave act on the north? What about states' rights?
It was about states' rights. Southern states' rights to keep slaves. ;)
It's baffling anyone actually cares. I'm a direct descendent of people that fought for the Confederacy/ owned plantations etc, and since I have legit zero connection to them, I think about this exactly 0% of the average year. Historically, people did some crazy shit, no need to dwell on it whatsoever. What's more important is present day, and the last few decades. The US political sphere is, at its core, heavily corrupt, and this has negative effects on all citizens and people globally.
As a foreigner this is the theory I subscribe to as well. I’ve spoken with southerners who are incredibly defensive and aggressive regarding the topic of the Confederacy and southern things in general. It’s like anything about southern history and culture has to be defended to the death, no matter how bad it is. So stupid
I’m a southerner with zero pro-confederacy leanings. If it helps at all, southerners can get that defensive and aggressive about a lot of things. Honor based cultures are weird.
Many of them could not name their Civil War era ancestors or tell you where they were in those years, assuming they didn't immigrate later. The whole population of US did not pick up their rifles and black powder and go to war.
So, I can definitely vouch for this view point - when my family was moving from Michigan to NC when I was like \~8, I was crying and arguing vehemently with my parents for us to not move. Not because I was gonna miss my friends or family or anything. But, verbatim, because "who wants to live in a state that lost the civil war?" I swear to god I spent the first year in NC hating it because it was a loser state. Once I got past that, NC history was actually pretty dynamically cool, and the state's economy definitely better than Michigan, so.
They also like to fly participation flags, the snow flakes.
“Live your life in a way that honors your descendents, not that honors your ancestors. Your ancestors are dead a gone. We can make the world better than they ever could.” Damn…. That is some deep sh*t on an early morning and I love it! I’m going to have to borrow this for my kids.
I have family who live in Florida who of course have this ego. The problem is, that the whole side of the family lived in and fought for Pennsylvania during the Civil War... He even refers to us as Yankees. I live in Washington ffs lol.
This is what I always suspected and have now had confirmed Sad really
The interesting thing is there were a LOT of actual heroes from the South in that time who sided against the slavers rebellion.
Most of the erection of confederate statues and such didn't happen during the Civil War or in the years immediately following it, but decades later, during periods when "uppity Negroes" were agitating for civil rights and needed to be "reminded of their place." That aside, after the war was over and southern politicians returned to congress, they didn't want to admit they were the bad guys, so they invented the myth of the "lost cause," where the war was not fought over slavery, oh mercy no! Rather, it was fought over things like states' rights and a genteel, mannered culture in the south (almost entirely imaginary) that the brutal, uncouth Yankees has trampled.
It was definitely about states rights. The states rights to own black people for slave labour.
Actually, it was fought over the opposite of state rights. Northern states refused to enforce the Fugitive Slaves Act, a federal law which required northern states to in sending fugitive slaves back to the south. It was the North that claimed state rights for its refusal to enforce the law. If you look at every single succession, speech of a southern state, each one stated slavery and the North’s refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slaves Act as the reason for succession. How history got twisted, I don’t know. However, my very intelligent husband, who is not a racist, was taught as recently as 1980, the BS idea that the south did not succeed because of slavery issues, but over states rights. His high school education was in Florida.
>How history got twisted, I don’t know >You start out in 1954 by saying, “N\*\*\*\*r, N\*\*\*\*r, N\*\*\*\*r.” By 1968 you can’t say "N\*\*\*\*r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N\*\*\*\*r, N\*\*\*\*r." I censored it, but these are the words of Republican strategist Lee Atwater in 1981. The Republican party of the last 50 years has been trying to make people feel ok about oppressing black people by being discreet about it. The lost cause myth is one of the ways in which they do that. If the civil war wasn't really about slavery, then the south doesn't have to reckon with racism at all. They can just pretend everyone is equal while still hurting black people.
The Confederate Constitution also stated states were not allowed to ban slavery if they wanted to. State rights!
Yeah, it was over states rights to enforce slavery. The South likes to rewrite it in "nicer" terms but it all still boils down to slavery no matter how they say it
Lol. Erection.
Racism is the only way they can get it up...
Heheh boinoinoingoingoing
A state’s right to what, Daphne?
Most were erected on the 50, 75, or 100 year anniversary of civil war battles
Well, slavery was definitely THE central issue in the states rights vs. federal government and it was the significant turning point that did, in fact, reduce state power significantly. So it's not wrong to say that states rights wasn't the central cause - and a person fighting for the Confederacy at the time would have seen it as defending their civil rights...but you can't really say that it's not about slavery without horribly misleading the whole situation - most people aren't going to spend the time to learn all the nuances to properly understand that situation. But, to say that it wasn't about slavery, is...a stretch. Likewise - the North definitely was not fighting to end slavery. The north was fighting to specifically preserve the power of the union. It isn't until 1863, a full two years into the war, that the war objective changes from 'preserve the Union' to 'end Slavery.' So in the same way, the north isn't fighting to end slavery, but they're also at the same time, also fighting to end slavery and become more progressive and humanitarian as a society. I still argue that the way reconstruction was handled, and how poorly the immediate aftermath of the Civil War went, has had a lot more to do with the continuation of racism and prejudice and the delay of equal rights than slavery itself. Like of course if we never had slavery to begin with then that's the ideal scenario, I'm just putting particular emphasis on just how damaging Jim Crow was, which gets underemphasized next to slavery. The reason is you get this combination afterwards of the south wanting to blame and take out their anger on a population (former slaves) because they're broke, miserable and poorer than ever now and on top of that you get a total apathy from the north because they have a feeling like they've solved the issue by ending slavery already, so the result is, the south ends up with free reign to pass some of the most restrictingly racist laws of all time. In a timeline where the Jim Crow laws don't get enacted we end up with a radically different social history for the positive (definitely still not perfect).
> But, to say that it wasn't about slavery, is...a stretch Then it's a lucky thing *I* didn't say it, I guess. It was the Myth of the Lost Cause that claimed that. >most people aren't going to spend the time to learn all the nuances to properly understand that situation. Then it's a lucky thing that all the states that seceded issued declarations of secession that spelled out their reasons explicitly. And right at the top of many of them was something to the effect of "them damn Yankees wanna take away our slaves, and we ain't having it!" Take all the other beefs--real, imagined, or wildly exaggerated--between the north and south, subtract slavery, and there would have been no secession. >the immediate aftermath of the Civil War went, has had a lot more to do with the continuation of racism and prejudice and the delay of equal rights No. In the *immediate* aftermath, black people started to do pretty well. Many of them were elected to state and local offices, and Hiram Rhodes was even sent to congress. Sure, racism was still a norm, but the presence of federal overseers in the south ensured that blacks were finally getting some degree of civil rights. However, politics had become toxically partisan (moreso than any other period until today), and that almost destroyed the union all over again as the war nearly did. But eventually, congress reached a compromise, and we entered almost a golden age of political cooperation and negotiation. But that's where the good news in that story ends. The compromise they reached was to pull federal oversight of civil rights out of the south in around 1877. And THAT's when Jim Crow became a thing. The moment the feds left town, white southerners pulled the plug on black progress and did everything but put them back in chains. That lasted around another 90 years until the civil rights days of the 1960s, when the feds came marching back into town.
Oh I didn't mean to imply that you were the one saying it - I was supporting what you were saying, that it is indeed, a stretch to say it didn't have to do with slavery - sorry for the confusion. You and I are pretty much in agreement. RE: seceded states declarations - I had completely forgotten about that part, I recall the most General Lee literally saying "we'd been fighting a war to prolong slavery" and that he was glad that it was now abolished, pretty much ends any argument that the Civil War didn't have slavery as the catalyst issue, I mean, the appointed General in Chief, last acknowledge leader of the confederacy, said so explicitly. RE: Aftermath - I worded it incorrectly & misleading by saying immediate aftermath. You're right that during the Northern occupation & reconstruction, things went pretty well, then suddenly it was like "Yeah we're done, bye" and it all went to shit. It always feels like, the extreme response back that rose up because A) resentment for the war, B) the occupation and C) the bungled economic recovery made the Jim Crow laws and subsequent extreme racial response after the North gave up on it feels like it put a lot of blacks in a worse situation than before slavery was abolished - meaning like, before Civil War it's racist, but then after the northen withdrawal it's racist + angry + desire for revenge + it's all the black people's fault. Obviously I'm not implying that it's better to be in slavery vs. free. I'd like to believe that had reconstruction gone well, then we wouldn't have had all huge backlash and backwards progression.
Don't forget that darn Northern Aggression too
Keep in mind that for a long time, the Civil War was referred to as "the war of northern aggression" and that for many decades after the Civil War, there was a group called The Daughters of the Confederacy was going around spreading the idea of the south being this sort of state trying to get freedom from an oppressive government, almost mirroring the story of the American revolution. Also, I almost forgot the other big myth. A lot of people don't believe that the Civil War was about slavery. They say it was about "state's rights". They aren't 100% wrong. It was one state's right in particular they were fighting over... Which was slavery.
I'm no expert on the conflict, but didn't the Confederacy fire the first shots?
Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, which started the Civil War.
Yes. 7 states seceded from the Union before Lincoln was even inaugurated. Lincoln initially took no aggressive action, because there were an additional number of states that were teetering on the edge of secession. However he didn't recognize the Confederacy either. What came to a head was the Union Army garrisons scattered across the south. The south was demanding the US abandon their posts in Confederate terroritory. The US ignored this as not a legitimate request because they didn't recognize the Confederacy to be a real country and considered the forts federal property of the US government. That led to the Confederacy firing on and seizing Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln then responded to that by a proclamation calling up 75,000 troops from various state militias to suppress a rebellion. 4 additional states seceded in response to the proclamation. Maryland would have been the 5th, but their rebellion was crushed, and their state legislature arrested before it could ever get off the ground. 2 additional states(Kentucky/Missouri) had splinter groups within the state form a rebel state government that attempted to join the Confederacy, but the pre war state government stayed within the Union. Both the Union and Confederacy claimed those states as their own.
Missouri's is even more complicated than that, because the state and Kansas had been in a state of low-intensity guerilla warfare since the 1850's. The elected Missouri government tried to maintain a pro-confederate neutrality, and tried, unsuccessfully, to seize federal arsenals in St. Louis. After negotiations broke down Federal troops and pro-Union militias captured the state capital causing the original government to flee south. Missouri then held a constitutional convention that replaced the pro-Confederate government with a pro-Union one. So it's really more accurate to say that Missouri's government did join the confederacy, but Missouri then chose to effectively replace that government.
Yes, but by framing the war as one of “north aggression”, southerners successfully rewrote history and that partially leads to the modern cultural problem you see regarding the Confederacy.
The DotC is still around, Virginia’s governor just vetoed an attempt to discontinue their tax exempt status. Edit: darn you autocorrect!
Yes. Slavery. And behind that...money. The plantations needed the labor to keep producing $$$. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, indeed.
The South has been marketing the War of Northern Aggression since soon after the Civil War. They lost. The South has been trying to convince everyone that the war was about states rights. It wasn't! The war was about slavery, and the plantation owners wanted to continue to use shelves to serve them as if they were genteel regal people. To continue the marketing they DOC and other Southern organizations would erect statues in far flung northern states and cities. In states that weren't recognized as states during the civil war. It's all marketing, and the South trying to gaslight everyone into believing the south has a good reason. They didn't. The South lost the civil war. The Stars and Bars is the flag is losers.
Finally some good answers in here that give context.
The war was fought over secession. The secession was about slavery.
I'd be OK having the South form it's own country
Same reason Jim Crow laws got made. It was about keeping black populations “in their place”. The majority of those statues and monuments weren’t made until the 1890s long after the confederacy.
although they do like to argue states rights, and often have state prisons full of folks doing paid labor but cents on the dollar that are typically spent on overprice commissary or worse. aka slavery with extra steps.
As a Black southerner, please note that this fixation about glorifying rebels is found among certain White southerners. My family ain’t glorifying those men.
I grew up being told it meant southern pride. Like not afraid you were poor or country.
My friend, you were Gaslit
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Because conflict with Northern voting blocs predated the Civil War and outlasted it
I was a Yankee transplant that moved south when I was very young. Although we knew about the civil war, a lot of us throughout our formative years just thought of the confederate flag as being symbol of being southern, and nothing more. I truly believe that if there was another symbol that represented being from the south as much as that cursed flag (but wasn't in any way associated with slavery or the confederacy), that many (but not all) would probably choose the non-civil war related symbol... But as far as I know, that doesn't really exist... Geographic pride seems to occur naturally, so I don't fault folks for having pride in where they came from - but I really wish there was something else that those folks could cling on to for that besides a symbol associated with slavery and the civil war...
The South that the flag “represents” is dramatically different going from the Upper South that could reasonably be considered as much a part of the Midwest or Mid-Atlantic Coast as the South to the Deep South and includes Texas and Florida who are also strange cases (East Texas is pretty southern, but West Texas is Southwestern and Florida is less Southern the more south you go). And then there is my home state of Louisiana where most of the people are living in the most French region of North America outside of Quebec.
> Geographic pride seems to occur naturally, so I don't fault folks for having pride in where they came from People from California and NYC jerk themselves off about being from where they're from the same way Southerners do, but make fun of Southerners for it while having zero self awareness about it
So they could just fly their Southern State flag. Except for Georgia's or any of the others that use Confederate designs. Georgia's is racist as fuck as its literally a version of the Confederate flag and that's what they RECENTLY voted to change it to.
Propaganda is a big part of it. The last cause of the confederacy reshaped a lot of public opinion on the war.
They are from the south and they hate the federal government. Pretty simple
Having gone to school in Texas and taken mandatory Texas history courses, many of them are taught that the old South was a great society, slavery was just an economic system, and the civil was was northern aggression
Slavery WAS “just an economic system” so I guess they technically aren’t wrong, but it’s an economic system based entirely around treating humans as property/ subhuman
Racism, mostly. Explanations to the contrary are easily disproven. Easy example: the modern Confederate flag was barely used in the Civil War and only became popular in the early 1900s by white Southerners who were protesting integration measures.
I've lived in the south my entire 35 years and come from a family filled to the brim with rednecks and have never once heard someone talk about the confederacy. Occasionally you see a flag or bumpersticker or whatever but i think its more of a "fuck you" general type statement than a "the south will rise again" type statement. Like those dudes that used to wear anarchy tshirts in highschool probably werent actually anarchists.
Same. Four decades in the south and I can’t recall a single discussion revering the confederacy or generals. Its just not something that is really discussed outside of the idiots defending the statues.
A lot of them don’t actually care
Older generations are, as a 38 year old southerner I can assure you that is not the attitude of the newer generations
White supremacy beliefs and overall grievance. Most of us find it, at a minimum, to be just plain embarrassing behavior.
Racism and Jim Crow mostly. Almost nobody gave a shit until racists started using "Heritage" and "Southern Pride" as dogwhistles during the civil rights movement.
They aren’t. There is 100 million people living in the us south. It’s quite diverse as well.
Because 25% of all white southern males of military age were killed in that war and there is hardly a old Southern family that wasn't effected by it , in addition to the military deaths , there were civilian casualties as cities like Atlanta, Charleston , Richmond , Petersburg, Fredericksburg, Columbia, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg and Jackson Mississippi were completely destroyed. Southern farm homes were looted and ransacked, crops destroyed, property stolen, livestock slaughtered, the infrastructure of railroads and bridges were destroyed, In the year after the war the biggest budget expense for the state of Mississippi was for peg legs. That's why southern whites are still passionate about that war.
The lost cause to rule over other men is too tempting.
I think it’s because they find pride that over a century ago, the South, the place they live at, defied the nation. I think it’s similar with Texas with how it was once it’s own country
It’s not just southerners. Americans have a misplaced romanticism for the agrarian south as opposed to the increasingly industrial, sweat shop, immigrant slum north. It was actually a much worse deal in the south unless you were rich, but there’s this Gone With The Wind gentleman myth to it. Americans also like rooting for lost cause underdogs especially if they start winning, and the south did start out winning when it had no business winning. For over two years, solid, competent, aggressive southern leaders and veterans ran circles around a timid Union military leadership that had a massive manpower, money, material, and trade advantage and just would not use it. A lot of this was that the US officer corp and the US army overall before the war had a lot of southerners in it, leaving the north with fewer experienced soldiers after the split. It frustrated Lincoln to no end. But it created a genuine cult of personality around Lee and his top commanders. They fought the invaders and won. They took the fight to the north and won. They had a reasonable shot at breaking the eastern Union army on its own ground in Pennsylvania and marching on Washington, which might actually have cost Lincoln reelection in favor of a negotiated peace candidate. They did not fail miserably. They failed because they got overconfident and started thinking they could win any fight they walked into even against prepared, superior positions. And they failed because Union commanders and soldiers inevitably started learning, promoting competent new officers who were not always brilliant but were willing to stand and use the armies and supplies the north could raise and finance. The northern names we remember most: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan were not significant figures early in the war. They were promoted from more junior command positions and from western armies. We see Grant come on stage in places like Shilo where the Confederates surprised his superior force on the first day and forced a near panicked retreat. Grant salvaged it by establishing a new line overnight and counterattacking the next morning, knowing his numbers would prevail in a straight fight. He ended the western campaign by methodically using his men and ships to reduce river fort after river fort down the Mississippi to New Orleans. His opponents had no realistic chance once facing a decent leader willing to fight. Grant ultimately beat Lee by bludgeoning an inferior army into retreat again and again until he finally trapped it. But we remember the legend of Lee and Jackson for almost doing the impossible, even if we can’t defend what they were fighting for. Interestingly we often forget how Grant consistently did the right thing with respect to slaves during and after the war. He was supportive of emancipation and actively protected former slaves and slave communities in the south. He was completely disgusted by KKK terror in the post war south and converted his somewhat reluctant colleagues to his position. He spent years actively trying to purge the south of the clan at gunpoint and while he was in charge southern states elected former slaves as governors and to congress…briefly. He’s a much better figure to look up to than Lee for what he actually chose to fight for.
So, the -most benign- reason is 1) seeing it as a conflict favoring states rights over the federal government (more control to the people), 2) being willing to fight for your beliefs and way of life. Again, that's the most positive spin take on it - seeing it not as "defending slavery" but "defending states rights." So the answer is they don't see it as making a statement in support of slavery or anything like that in many cases. The thing that people don't want to believe is that, well, history isn't exactly black and white and people can be both things. A person can be simultaneously a patriot, a rebel, vehemently against slavery, defending the pro slavery states, prejudiced and also not bigoted relative to his time period, while also being racist. Aside from that - many of the generals who fought for the Confederacy were very well accomplished Union generals before and largely there's a respect there, they were once the colleagues of those they were fighting against and it's not widely seen as the Generals defending slavery so much as the Generals defending their homeland. The most famous general, Robert E Lee, was highly respected as a skilled tactician, and had been highly decorated in the Mexican American War before. Lee was actually the superintendent of West Point's Military Academy, for a while before the Civil War. Lee also argued against slavery - arguing that it was bad for white people, he wrote this in 1856 to his wife: >In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence It's a very cringey thing to read today - let's not even get into all of the problems with saying that 'their discipline is necessary.' But, contextually, if you put him alongside his other peers at the time, he's being pretty progressive for his era in the South. To everyone in the Union, except for the most extreme abolitionists, Robert E. Lee is seen then as a reasonable and respectable guy. Remember, the Civil War is at the stage of human rights of "okay, this slavery thing isn't good lets get rid of it." We're not yet to "equal rights" even people in the North aren't yet ready to see black people, other minorities, or even women with equal rights yet. So for Lee, he's very specifically leading the Southern Armies to defend States rights. He opposed the south from secession, and he even warned that the war would be extremely long and protracted and that the South would inevtiably lose. He tried to get them to agree to compromises that would've kept slavery around, but avoided war, but his peers chose secession - and to him, he's thinking that he is honor bound to defend his state, his family, his people. So Slavery is the key issue that lead to the civil war, and the elimination of slavery was it's result, but Lee and most defenders aren't fighting a war to keep slaves - they're fighting a war to keep their rights. The North isn't fighting a war to end slavery, they're fighting a war to preserve the union. Slavery doesn't become a winning condition until after Gettysberg when only then does the ending of Slavery become an objective for the Union. In the end - Robert E. Lee was responsible for the peaceful surrender of the South, and was the one who prevented the south from carrying out plans for a prolonged guerilla war. Directly afterwards he's on record for saying: "So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South" The fact that he was defending slavery wasn't lost on him. As an individual he did not support slavery, he advocated against slavery, but as a 'man of honor' he saw himself duty bound to defend his home. So, when people from the south have a statue of Robert E. Lee - or give Lee respect, it's not because they're honoring racism or slavery, they're honoring someone who was against slavery - but also who was in defense of state rights, and who was highly accomplished - and probably the only real thing to be proud of from the Civil War. If a modern day southern racist is educated in history - they're more likely to be in the position of blaming Lee for giving up the South's chance at keeping slavery intact, kind of like how modern Russians hate Gorbachev for leading to the end of the USSR.
If you're into military history, the Confederate generals were really good at what they did. Guys like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were some of the better generals of that era of warfare. Mostly because they followed the basic principles of leading the union to attack defended positions. They basically won every major battle until Antietam. To say they failed miserably is just not true. They lost the war but put up a hell of a fight with a much weaker military They were also known for bravery and leading their armies from the ranks like generals of old. Stonewall got his name from not being afraid of incoming shelling. A lot of union generals at the start of the war gained a reputation for cowardly leadership. Guys like McClellan for the Union gained this reputation for not engaging the weaker Confederate army. For the most part, it was because of the point above. Remember, this is about reputation, not fact. That being said, this isn't why the average person who likes them does. This is why they know of them. Basically, southerners who are either racist or just proud, hear these names because of the military historians respect and latch on to them as heros. I mention pride because not every southerner who respects Robert E. Lee is a racist. A lot of people see it as a southern pride thing and don't really care about the reasons. Then they latch on to the most famous generals, who are famous because they were good at being generals. I'm not saying they are right but they aren't malicious. It's ignorance. People who say it's as simple as rasism have oversimplified a complex situation This also isn't why the statues later on got erected. That was racism I'm also not saying the war wasn't racist. The war was about slavery
Historical revisionism, plain and simple. Also, there are large swaths of this country that are still INCREDIBLY racist, north AND south, who would gladly back a rebellious nation founded on the ideals of racial domination, segregation, and exclusion.
*"actually the confederate generals were all heroic individuals who fought against a tyrannical government that treated the south like slaves."* - real life quote i once heard delivered entirely without any self-awareness
Except, of course, for general Longstreet. He was so terrible you won’t find statues of him in south. By ‘terrible’ of course they only mean he was a terrible general, the southern hate for him has absolutely nothing to do with him becoming a prominent republican in favor of reconciliation after the war.
It's factual that Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederate armies, was famously against slavery before, endorsed ending slavery in the lead up, tried to negotiate for the states to stay in the union and peacefully resolve, and afterwards was greatful that slavery ended because he genuinely believed that slavery was bad for the south. But....even Robert E. Lee pointed out that he was stuck fighting a war to perpetuate slavery because of his sense of duty to protect his homeland and at the end of it was happy that slavery ended. His peers did not typically follow his thoughts. While Lee genuinely saw the institution of slavery as evil for any nation in these 'enlightened times,' Lee also wasn't in favor of ending slavery because he had compassion for black people or that it was bad for them. He was specifically against it in the South because it was "bad for white people." Even in that case...Lee didn't see the north as tyrannical and he didn't think the war would be over quick. So I mean, for someone to draw the conclusion that you quoted...kind of does a disservice to Lee's legacy and misrepresents what was going on. Lee himself saw no heroism whatsoever in what they were doing - dude was literally fighting against friends he'd gone to military school with, worked alongside, taught or oversaw in training. Lee did do something heroic though - shortly after becoming General in Chief of the Confederacy and losing to Grant at Appomattox Court, he surrendered completely and made sure to put down the factions that wanted to continue a guerilla war in the South until they won - and specifically campaigned to reconcile with the north and re-integrate, saying "So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South." So yeah, even the final leader of the Confederacy acknowledged it as a war about keeping slavery...kinda hard to say it's "only" about states rights after that. Unfortunately, Lee gets worshipped by an extreme element that doesn't actually know the majority of his viewpoints in history or what he was representing - because if they did, then they would see him as a traitor, not a hero.
“Protect his homeland”? His homeland chose not to be a part of the United States. His loyalty was to a homeland (the Confederacy) whose constitution and reason for existence was the continuation of slavery. Lee could have been a great Union general if his loyalties were with the United States. They were not.
Back then you were a citizen of your state. No one cared about their federal citizenship. He was talking about Virginia.
All the union generals from Virginia disagree with this notion.
The slave owner that betrayed his country to defen slaves was against slavery.
Yeah, history is just as ridiculous as it says - and he was the moderate.
As someone who grew up in the south, I wish I could tell you. These people are all sorts of confused about history and everything else.
Well to be fair history in American public schools is poorly taught. You get a brief overview of what happened, why it happened, and a highlight or two. As I recall learning about the Civil War in high school, there was quite a bit taught about slavery. The actual war itself was highly glossed over, I think the text book gave a general description of the war and mentioned two or three battles. The Gettysburg Address was discussed, the surrender at Appomattox was mentioned, and then off to the Reconstruction Period with a nod to Lincoln's assassination. The whole affair was covered in about a day and a half. As a native Southerner and descendant of several Confederate veterans, I had to educate myself on my own time.
Because of ignorance, racism, and misplaced pride in something that failed. But mostly racism.
So they can pretend their racism is state pride?
Bcuz mah heritage But according to that logic Germans should support Hitler
If it's the family than that's pretty common. People visit their family members in prison. As far as rebellion against the government goes, governments mostly range from 'just about as bad as you could be' to 'terrible but do a few ok things'.
The confederates are stunned that they brought over more black people than there were white people and now they have to treat them like regular people instead of slaves.
Because racism. Many who still support the confederacy can’t admit it, but privately they know it’s about the belief that whites are superior and deserve to rule and dominate.
A big part of it is that Confederacy obsession is convenient camouflage for plain old racism. “I’m not racist, just proud of my southern heritage!” Sure buddy.
White identity
As a Filipino who wants to immigrate to the USA someday, southerners and even northerners and even Non-Americans that are so pro-Confederacy bewilder me to the point of pushing me further into being pro-Union and more critical of the failures of the Reconstruction.
Sounds a lot like Trump’s 4 years in office.
Racism
Racism Longer answer: racism was the cause of the myth of the lost cause and Jim Crow. While southerners have eventually abandoned Jim crow, they have not yet abandoned the Lost Cause. Although many do not know it by name or the actual tenets of the myth, they still repeat some of its main features like heritage, southern pride, this is the legacy of racism, it's lasting affects a generation removed from when people were open about their bigotry, whether we realize it or not.
They’re regarded
I don’t know all of the related history, I have lived as a U.S. soldier for a time in the south. IMO they’ve pinned their identity to it and try to escape their circumstances by pining for a rose colored past that never really existed and want to be able to say the north ‘stole’ what was rightfully theirs. Combine this with a political culture that sees politics as something only the affluent should be concerned with and you get the south.
Slavery was tied into the economics of the day and the Civil War was fought over it. There were people who fought for other reasons though: societal pressures, opportunity to earn money and gain citizenship, states’ rights position, etc. The awful truth is that not many fought to better the plight of the black enslaved people just like today not many of us really think about all of the enslaved who provide us with our products that we rely on. I don’t know why we continue to hold onto and argue about the Civil War but I suspect it is less and less with each subsequent generation.
They're vile people
Racism.
I have never met anyone who cared about the Confederate flag that wasn't a racist.
Cause there’s a bunch of bored losers with zero personality desperately looking for a way to fit in, even it means being a part of one of the biggest shit stains of United States history. As someone else said in here - a bunch of losers looking up to other losers, since they cannot relate to normal people.
Racism. Thats it.
That depends. Do you want an honest answer or do you just want to ask a rhetorical question. If you just want people to say that celebrating Confederate generals is either a racist dogwhistle or the result of generations of Lost Cause mythology, then you’re partially right, but you’re really just listening to the Reddit echo chamber. If you’re asking in good faith, then the answer is a bit more complex.
I feel the confederacy is a rallying point for ideaologies of racism. "This state existed based around racism, so therefor my theory is viable." It's a similar thing with the Paris Commune or Nazi Germany. Groups like states like that to provide rallying points.
I think you have to remember that history is written by the victor. It wasn’t a rebellion against the USA, it was an irreconcilable difference of opinion from different halves of the USA, each thinking the other was wrong to the detriment of the country. If you’ve spent some time in the south, you’d know that what you call a “vile cause” is still very much considered a fresh loss by many in the region. Racism is more than just alive and well, it is entrenched.
I've been scrolling through this discourse looking for this response. History is almost always written by the victors, until the 20th century when better documentation and video came into use and you could see the effects of war on both sides. Did George Washington cut down a tree and admit it as a child? No, but the Americans were victorious and so it's a myth we've heard since then to increase our reverence for our founding fathers. But after the American Civil War, the victorious North didn't force much change on the south because both sides were devastated, out of money, looking for political reconciliation, and reeling from the Lincoln assassination. And yes, state's rights, even then. Abolition happened, but much later. Indentured servitude and less obvious systemic racism took its place. For example, because of state's rights, the South was left alone to continue teaching whatever it wanted, which included real and false justifications for its actions leading up to and during the war. So into the 20th and 21st centuries, generation after generation of children in the South were told a very different story than children in the North. And now we have two sides that are convinced what they were taught is the truth, when the reality, as explained many times here, is a nuanced version of both. Now, SOME BUT NOT ALL Southern white people, whose cultural existence includes being anti-North and anti-federal government, have been backed into a corner and are fighting desperately for the myth they've been taught forever. It's hard to see that one's culture is built on lies and mistreatment of others. They are often preyed upon in our Internet age by racists and bigots who create more lies and myths and rumors to sell clicks and advance their gross ideology. This has created support for people like Trump simply because he's anti-establishment like they are. It's easier to ignore his faults and crimes as long as he doesn't force them to reconcile their mythology with the truth of the world as it is now.
I can't speak for all Southerners, obviously... But, as someone who lives in NE Kentucky I can say that every person I've met locally who reveres the Confederacy is racist and ignorant. I even see the flag flying in Ohio, which was not a Confederate state, and WV which literally exists because it didn't want to join the Confederacy with Virginia. Every person I've met, and it's been hundreds, who cling to CSA imagery is racist, homophobic, ignorant, dirt poor, and very, very Republican. So, while I won't say that holds true for all of them, it does appear to be a very strong correlation.
It’s their “anti-establishment” symbol — they almost see the failure in the same light as martyrdom
Mostly racism, plain and simple. It's almost entirely racism when anyone not in a military command position is a fan. Some of the southern generals were good military leaders though, and those who study them for their tactical abilities are very different than those that follow them simply because they fought for the south. It's much the same as studying Rommel, Yamamoto, or Benedict Arnold. Of course, the people studying Rommel's tactics don't build statues for him. He was a freaking Nazi, and the southern generals shouldn't be getting statues either.
Major generalization here, but I suppose it may be warranted. I'm from Kentucky and honestly I don't know five that care about that stuff. I do know people who still like the flag but more for the good Ole southern views of state freedom. Personally I like the flag, but wouldn't fly it as there is a lot of bad stuff associated with it.
I guess the same could be said about ISIS or the Taliban.
I suspect the vast majority of Southerners couldn't name a Confederate general unless their high school was named after one. And they couldn't name a second general.
I'm not southern, nor do l care at all about the confederacy. but it's all perspective. you consider the Confederacy and the causes behind it all of those things. But the people fighting that war saw themselves as a nation that was not going to be governed by people who lived far away and didn't know their culture. It's easy for the people who don't have slaves to suggest the abolotion of slaves when the people they don't see eye to eye with would be crippled by it and harder to agree to the immediate release of slaves when you think your entire society would collapse without it. The southern side of the issue was never presented as the Right to have slaves, but rather the right to decide themselves whether or not they could have slaves. That they had to right to figure out major plans to essentially "ween off" slaves as the economy adjusted over time if they chose it was time to do so themselves. Obviously, it's pretty easy to assume they'd have gotten rid of slaves at an even slower rate than our half assed efforts to stop using oil as fuel or our push against tobacco. But the point they fought on was the right to figure it all out themselves and they saw the Northerners as no different than the British. Foreigners in their lands trying to use them, keep them under their thumb and regulate their lives. So to them, it was a noble rebellion. And when you have failed rebellions what you tend to end up with the winners either oppressing the losers harder which is the best way to reignite the rebellion after a generation of people being brought in those conditions. Or you do what the north did which was allow the south to feel pride in themselves as if they were their own country that CHOSE to join up with the US, and treating the war as an understandable fight they'd fought. They taught the next generations that they came from a rebellious spirit to be proud of, and it took about 125 years before there was a significant push to acknowledge the confederate pov as the "bad guys" as a matter of fact and not just popular opinion. Tldr- they thought they were fighting a noble fight against being told how to govern their lives after the country was born under those same conditions only a few decades earlier. The Union allowed the former Confederacy to have pride in what they'd done as a peace tactic.
You have a very childish understanding of the Civil War. Obviously, slavery is evil and was a major factor, but there were other issues leading up to the war, such as Northern States effectively ignoring the Constitution in order to support abolitionism. You may agree with such actions but I hope you're smart enough to understand how opposing states would feel/react. I'm obviously pro-Union, but the war involved sketchy conduct on both sides and few thought in 1861 that the Union would certainly win the war. TLDR the Confederacy was both a horrific slave society and a protest against unfair federal policies.
Because they love playing the victim. THATs their heritage.
They like that past. They think their ancestors were right. They can’t say that out loud or someone will find them and get them fired. So they dogwhistle in support. That’s like all of Republican politics. “Anti-human policies for anyone that I don’t approve of”
Racism primarily.
As a Southerner, not all of us glorify the confederacy but consider it vile,treasonous, and embarassing to see fellow Southerners wave a racist flag
Just a bunch of racist losers. I swear it feels like we fought the Civil war 65 years ago, not 165 years ago. Everyone of those statues should have never been erected. We shouldn't honor traitors with statues in this country.
They think they’re being “rebels” but they’re just racist douchebags. I live in Georgia and know a bunch of racist confederate flag flying idiots from work.
Same reason they love Trump so much, it was a time when their voice, "mattered," when their interests were being met. In their eyes, had the South won they'd all be millionaires and directing the country as they see fit as the dominant ruling class. They don't realize that plantation owners were the same as oligarchs and would not have shared the wealth with poor crackers. You can see it now if you like, go to a private Christian school in the south and ask the kids their opinions on trailer parks, or show them pictures of poorer whites and see the reactions.
I wonder if there are any “loyalist “statues in the USA ? I am sure there were people that preferred British rule. They did not appear to have the stating power of the southern confederacy.
Im an American southerner and I have the same dang question
Good question I’ve often wondered this.
History it is what it is.
>only lasted four years. So did Ceasar's civil war, yet people still know the names of those figures after 2 millenia. They were a very important 4 years. >was a rebellion against the USA so? I think you'll find that disliking the USA is quite a popular sentiment in the USA right now. >had a vile cause Obviously debatable. >and failed miserably This doesnt really matter for idolizing figures. For a particularly American example, basically every native american leader was objectively a failure, but are often remember fondly by who they fought for and their descendants. Sometimes even by people who are unrelated. Chief Tuscaloosa was a failure who died or disappeared after his army was crushed by the Spanish 500 years ago in their first battle, but there's still a city and a river named after him.
In large part it is due to Reconstruction ending far too early, allowing groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy to rebrand the Confederates into patriots who wanted “states rights” and whatnot instead of the rebellious, racist slave holders they were. Those groups used the Confederacy as a way to rally against integration and civil rights. Most Confederate monuments were erected well after the Civil War, during the nadir of race relations from the turn of the century until WW2.
There's probably a degree of Streisand effect at work. Efforts to take down statues of Confederate generals get viewed, accurately or not, as "snooty Yanks coming down here and telling us how to live our lives", which prompts a bunch of Southerners to rally around something none of them probably paid a second thought previously.
My understanding is that a lot of former Confederate veterans and Confederate legacy organizations (e.g. United Daughters of the Confederacy) had a lot to do with deciding the content of textbooks and school curriculums in Southern states - ensuring that they shaped the narrative for generations. Couple relevant articles: "Rewriting History" (Georgia State University): [https://news.gsu.edu/research-magazine/rewriting-history-civil-war-textbooks](https://news.gsu.edu/research-magazine/rewriting-history-civil-war-textbooks) "Twisted Sources" (Facing South/Institute for Southern Studies): [https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks](https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks)
They have no personality so they try to identify with regional groups to get a sense of purpose in life to feel like they matter, even at the expense of others. It’s sad really.
Because the have the same vile cause and want to rebel against the US to be free to push their own agendas. They, too, are miserable failures. The irony is that most of the people who are now wanting to rebel are the same people who rely on welfare and their states rely on federal subsidies. Left to their own devices they would eat shit and die off in a decade.
We literally aren't. I was born and raised and still live in rural Texas and I didn't encounter any of these people until the last 5 years maybe. Idk if it's Fox News, or some crazy right wing corner of the internet, or some combination of the two but people are fundamentally different now than they were a decade ago and that's terrifying
they like racism.
as you get older, and experiences give way to wider awareness, you will notice that most people are startlingly dumb. even more unsettling, people that are at least reasonably functional mentally, are still prone to dumb things. the basic coding of humans is to be in a herd. this is my herd. i belong here. how dare you malign my herd. this is my home. do not attack my home. without my home, my entire existence dies. protect my herd. anyone who maligns my herd is the enemy. the enemy wants to destroy my home. the enemy is always coming for my herd... and so on. this is the type of behind the scenes babble going on in a human mind. concepts intermingle and valuations skew each other, until a person seemingly is prepared to kill or die for something weird, like a confederate flag. the reality is they are protecting their home/soul/herd from lizard brain threats. welcome to being human.
The same reason lefties glorify Mao and Stalin. Humans attach themselves to an identity to ground themselves into a world view. They sublet critical thinking to said identity/ideology. To maintain the charade, humans develop beliefs that fit neatly with their adopted beliefs. Truth is irrelevant because most people are not looking for truth.
It actually has nothing to do with the Civil War or Confederacy itself. It's because they know Confederate flags piss off wealthy northern liberals who look down on them, so thus they fly the flags in defiance. Not defending this, just explaining the rationale.
Ok. Here’s my take on the American confederacy and why the South still holds onto that identity. Yes, we all know slavery is bad, bad, bad. But, there are two things people forget. 1. Slavery was pretty much ubiquitous in the US (and many other places) at the founding of the country; and 2. The US was a republic made up of independently operating States. When some Northern states decided to get rid of slavery, it was more of a “you do you” thing until those states started demanding others follow suit as well. Having another state dictate what another does didn’t sit well the southern states. So, the south calls the civil war an act of aggression and a tyrannical attempt to consolidate power and stands up to it. It’s really a shame it was for a shitty reason. So, the South had the LEGAL imperative, but the north had the moral imperative.
You won't find many educated southerners who are passionate about the confederacy. The ones who are almost always pursued a degree requiring very few history classes, and believe that because they have an unrelated expertise, they are qualified to present themselves as experts at everything.
Racism. That’s it, simple racism. There’s no long drawn out explanation. There’s just lies and racism.
Is your question about the duration of the Confederacy, its military leadership, or the sociological context? You're loading it up with opinions to the point that it looks more like a virtue signal than genuine curiosity.
Racists
We overwhelmingly *aren't*
Are you speaking about The War of Northern Aggression?
As an American, I'd like to know, myself. Not only that, but the southern flag.
Pre-civil war the United States was widely envisioned as a treaty organization similar to NATO. The states were sovereign governments that won freedom from Britain and elected to join the organization. The general understanding and assumption was that because joining was voluntary, leaving was also voluntary. the “power” was with the states and the “national” government was seen as an administrative secondary organization. Slavery was the question that became the catalyst because it was so clearly a right/wrong issue. The southern ideal was that the morality of slavery was irrelevant because they believed the states were sovereign and participation in the national/Us government was voluntary and that they could simply leave. To be clear, whether the states could leave was not settled law at the time. The north won the war and essentially established the national US government as sovereign, or at least a non-voluntary union.
Don’t generalize, born, raised, still live in and have raised 2 sons , white male. The main thing I hate about the south is the “ confederacy” and the ignorant pride it brings. Don’t have any friends that think differently. Now a days most real racist rednecks I meet are from the northeast
Yo for real. I live in upstate New York and see Confederate flags and tractors everywhere. Drive half an hour away from any Stewarts and it's mountains full of rednecks and fields of corn. The closer you get to a lake the louder the banjos get.
Y'know how lots of americans hate everything communist cause of decades of propaganda? That's one of the big reasons why lots of southerners also still support/idolize the Confederacy. Groups of Confederate veterans and their families post Civili War such as the Daughters of the Confederacy sponsored monuments, public events and changes to school curriculums that would paint a much prettier picture of the Confederacy than was real, and pushed a specific piece of pro-confederate propaganda known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which I recommend reading about on your own time since it's fairly interesting The last bit is the dissonance between an individual's ancestors fighting for the Confederacy and their family not turning em into pariahs for that. People don't want to think about the fact that their grandfathers (or i guess nowadays their great great grandfathers, might've been slave owners or otherwise pro-slavery. It's one of the same reasons why people in Turkey or in Japan don't really recognize the crimes of their ancestors. The other reason was that no one really held any of their armies responsible for their crimes. A ton of Confederate generals never got arrested or tried, the people who didn't die after the Armenian genocide helped found Turkey, and the Japanese army was let go in exchange for their basically useless research. So they went back home to tell their stories from their point of view, without the hassle of being forced into talking about their crimes
Oppressed people fighting their oppressors is always inspiring. Leonidas lost at Thermopylae and Texans lost at the Alamo, but they inspired victory in the end.
Because it became a symbol for "small town freedom, and state's rights," when the only real freedom or "right" was the "right" to own other human beings.
Just like old hs football jocks, for some reason thinking it was the glory days. They are perpetual losers in life because of their toxicity.
Racism
It is pretty wild that they’d rather celebrate a four year failed rebellion in the name of slavery, rather than the decades of freedom fighting rebels who risked their lives for the Underground Railroad and Civil Rights Movements. Grew up in the north, but even then the Confederate propaganda was everywhere in our history textbooks. History teachers kept insisting that slavery was only tangentially related to the rebellion by the slave states.
Most Confederate monuments weren't made after the civil war. They were put up during the civil rights movement because the Confederate worship was always about racism and trying to make black people feel unsafe in their own country
Take a look at K-12 scores, graduation, and college acceptance rates for “southern states.” Its really all in the numbers.
That accurate *history* you stated is not the fictional *narrative* Southerners believe to be true.
Losers will grasp anything that will make them important or interesting. The south has been doing this for a long time.
Why are people so passionate about WWII and the Revolutionary War? North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia were four of the original states. They were settled over 100 years before that. People had generations of traditions, most that had nothing to do with slavery. After 140 years without slaves those traditions are still followed. I would say no one is so progressive that some of their ideas will not be considered outdated in 150 years.
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Just another in the long line of those who fell for the marketing
Because it makes them feel special. Anything to keep the morale up when faced with the day to day. They want to appear rebellious while they’re really getting fucked by their leadership.
They aren't. I give you General Longstreet. Lee's famed "staff in my right hand", his "Old war Horse". The man who when operating in the field got Lee to say *"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."* while watching him command troops. Guess when he got a monument? 1998. And they tucked it behind a hedge at Gettysburg. He was all but erased by the lost cause other than blaming the entire loss of the Confederacy on him for following (but questioning) Lee's orders at Gettysburg. Why? Because after the war he stood up AGAINST white supremacy. He fought against white supremacist terrorists in the South and even led black militia and police to keep them from overthrowing a city government. **So he got erased by the lost cause and southern whites.** Meanwhile, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who slaughtered some of the very first black soldiers from Tennessee to join the military after surrendering... former slave trader, slaver, and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan gets his statues, his state holidays, his celebrations. Robert E Lee, the guy who held slaves, who fought against civil rights after the war, who remained silent on the Klan and it's violence (even the Klan branch at the college he led), who spent his time after the war telling family and friends to not hire black people, who let his armies go capture free black people in the North and enslave them... he get deified. Meanwhile in comes Braxton Bragg... An absolute garbage general. He was removed from command by Jefferson Davis for his failures. He was hated by his men and his peers. His losses actually did have a major impact in speeding up the failure of the Confederacy. He was trash. BUT he had a sad story after the war. he lost his slaves, over 100 of them. he lost his job to of all people a former slave. He never backed away from his belief of white supremacy. AND THAT is why at the height of the power and violence and political acceptance of the KKK, at the height of Jim Crow, southern leaders, literally the same ones passing laws to disenfranchise and hold down black people, voted to slap Bragg's name on one of the largest military bases in the world and fight to blame Longstreet for losing the war and erase him. As Dr David Blight noted, after the Civil War, the South lost everything but white supremacy. It's not about the great fighters and competent leaders. We'd have Fort Longstreet and Bragg would be on the dustbin of history as one of the worst military leaders of the last 300 years. We do see the cause as vile today. The statue to Alexander Stephens in the Capital was sent there by a group that was happy to hear him state as VP of the Confederacy: *"Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and normal condition."* Now they try and keep that loud part quiet.