Confederate Apologism...

[Lonestar]

As I've mentioned before, I've met Confederate Apologists at work. And it drives me up the wall. Ironically, my History professor at Texas A&M really beat the whole "CSA=pro slavery" thing into the class, which isn't what you would expect from the traditional "Blue collar" University of the state of Texas(University of Texas being "White Collar").

What pisses me off is when someone points out that there were some blacks that served in the CSA military, as if that somehow absolves the slavery issue. Especially as huge numbers of freed slaves joined the Federal army, compared to the 2 dozen or so blacks in the Confederate army.

When I point this out, absolute numbers apparently are not indicative to most people of trends to the apologists, so I mention that Jews served in Nazi Germany's military, and no one doubts that Germany was a racist state.

After which, rather than admitting the possibility that his "2 dozen blacks=STATES RIGHTS" is wrong(you can see the gears turning in his eyes) he settles on "Maybe Nazi Germany wasn't that racist either!"

[Big Orange]

I have always been kind of flummoxed by the popularity of and virtual reverence toward Gone With the Wind. From a historic perspective I recognize its landmark status with regard to technical film making, and from an artistic standpoint I can see some merit to the execution, but basically it's about a vicious self-centered spoiled brat produced by an oppressive decadent slaver society whose destruction is all I have to root for, while watching the film. By presenting a story centered around characters representative of all that was worst about the Old South, they've lost me coming out of the gate.

I can watch Gone With the Wind in the same way I can watch Rome, Der Untergang and House of Saddam, but even then it seems so obnoxious, not self aware enough and patronizing. I can say you'd get individually decent men among the Confederates who fought bravely, were defending their homes and did not personally own slaves, but the Confederates still deserved to lose overall and I dread to think what America would be like if the Confederates won (however I wonder how their archaic slave economy would weather the then comparatively more modern economies of the British Empire and Western Europe).

[Elfdart]

When I visited the hospital a couple of days ago to get my leg plaster changed, I struck up a conversation with the male nurse who was looking at my mending ankle and putting on the new caste. He told me he was a war reenactor as a US Army paratrooper and turned up in Band of Brothers and various history documentary reconstructions as an extra.

And of course he is a Civil War reenactor playing (you guessed it) a Confederate. Despite being British and Jewish, he dislikes the Union and made a feeble excuse about the Deep South's slavery by mentioning that Abraham Lincoln had slave holding relatives, while the Union allowed indentured servants (which sounds more like a harsher form of community service instead of owning humans as livestock for an indefinite amount of time in most cases).

He seemed a nice guy and was a NHS employer that helped people, but his opinions seemed at odds with his actions (but he hates the Wonder Chimp, who will be booted out any month now, so he's not completely out of it).

It's the kewl uniform, nothing more.

I have friends who were into Civil War re-enacting, Confederate artillery in Southern California.

It's pretty simple; some people like the romanticizable bits of the Confederacy (Southern Honor, mint juleps, colonial architecture, gingham dresses) and so as to not feel bad about wearing gray, they dimly arm's-length rationalize away the unromanticizable stuff (Southern Honor, racism, mosquitoes, slavery, the Klan).

While I don't have much patience for it, I can understand why many southerners would want to paint their ancestors in a more favorable light. Why on earth people with no family ties whatsoever to the CSA would jerk off over the Confederacy is beyond me.

By "Southern honor," are you referring to the racists' tendency to lynch any and all black men who even look at a white woman in a "suggestive" way?

It's more than that. Many upper-class rebels fancied themselves as the descendants of the Cavaliers from the English Civil War, complete with dueling, plumes in their hats, and all that other horseshit. In a way they were right: Like the Cavaliers, they got their asses kicked by an enemy who were more interested in modern, practical uses of force than trying to recreate fictional heroics described by bad novelists like Walter Scott. The difference is, Cromwell had the good sense to chop Charles I's head off, while Jefferson Davis only did a little jail time.

I think that this is usually the bit that gets ignored.

I refer you to people who claim warfare was more honorable in the distant past than now. Because, ya know - knights!

Knight = chivalry = honor = cool. The bits with peasants being forcibly drafted into armies and ground beneath the hooves or charging knights, and burning villages and town and mass rapes don't matter.

My ancestors must have been among the "peasants" since they were enlisted men, and everyone else in the Confederate Army was at least a major, to hear it from CSA fanwhores.

[Steve]

What's really fun is if you examine the generals who undid the aristocratic South. Grant and Sherman were both from middle-class, at best, backgrounds, life-long workers and practical men.


Of course, you get fun irony like how Sherman might have gone to London on a two year contract as a financial agent in 1860 - thus meaning he would likely have not returned to the States until 1862 and would have not been in a position to lead his famous march or play the roles he had in any of the major battles before the March to the Sea - if not for the fact that a number of Southerners, including P.T. Beauregard and Braxton Bragg, wrote emphatic letters to the Governor of Louisiana urging him to pay extra to keep Sherman's services as Superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy. The result? Sherman got better pay, he gave up on the idea of going to London..... and then South Carolina seceded, resulting in his resignation from the Seminary and his return to Ohio to rejoin the Army. And the rest... is history.


Also, I really like what Sherman told his friend Professor Boyd (whom, IIRC, was later taken prisoner by Sherman's troops during the campaigning along the Mississippi) after South Carolina rolled the dice and sounded the call to war:

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

[Kanastrous]

I have friends who were into Civil War re-enacting, Confederate artillery in Southern California.

It's pretty simple; some people like the romanticizable bits of the Confederacy (Southern Honor, mint juleps, colonial architecture, gingham dresses) and so as to not feel bad about wearing gray, they dimly arm's-length rationalize away the unromanticizable stuff (Southern Honor, racism, mosquitoes, slavery, the Klan).

While I don't have much patience for it, I can understand why many southerners would want to paint their ancestors in a more favorable light. Why on earth people with no family ties whatsoever to the CSA would jerk off over the Confederacy is beyond me.

The romance of a lost cause, perhaps.

[Sidewinder]

To hear the CSA apologists and their libertarian supporters speak, it seems that if a woman defended herself by stabbing a would-be rapist in the thigh and severing the femoral arteries, they'd condemn the would-be rape victim for not "seeing things from [the rapists'] point of view" and using "excessive force."

Yes, I know that most libertarians support the right to bear arms, but I also know the white supremists support THEIR right to bear arms and are totally against letting members of other races bear arms.

<snip>
While I don't have much patience for it, I can understand why many southerners would want to paint their ancestors in a more favorable light. Why on earth people with no family ties whatsoever to the CSA would jerk off over the Confederacy is beyond me.

The romance of a lost cause, perhaps.

I really have to wonder why people find lost causes so appealing. Yeah, they cheer when David defeats Goliath, but David WON. A lot of these lost causes lost for good reasons (yes, that includes the CSA's view on "states' rights," i.e., to tell the Federal government, "Go fuck yourself!" when it tries to outlaw slavery, end racial discrimination, and punish hate crimes).

[Big Orange]

It's the kewl uniform, nothing more.

I didn't know the Confederates had a standardised set of uniforms (since they had a marketly inferior logistics train and industry base behind them, unlike the relatively more modern and mechanized Union).

But the Nazis had some of the best uniforms, even though the SS uniforms had 'BAD GUY' written all over them, with their occult and skull insignia.

[Elfdart]

The officers did, as did the early state militias.

Face it, grey goes with just about anything.

[Big Orange]

The officers did, as did the early state militias.

I had the impression the officers and elite units had decent uniforms and gear, but not the wider rank and file (who likely didn't even have proper boots).

[Sea Skimmer]

The state of North Carolina had half the textile mills of the entire Confederacy… and for most of the war the state governor refused to release textile supplies to anyone but his own states troops, leaving much of the confederate army in rags. The depths to which the southern states refused to cooperate with each other even when the war was clearly being lost are staggering. One prime example was a vital 40 mile gap in the railway system between Greensboro North Carolina and Danville Virginia. The Confederate Congress allocated a million dollars to close the gap very early in the war, but states protested that only they could build railways and the six month project ended up taking over two years.

[TC Pilot]

I really have to wonder why people find lost causes so appealing. Yeah, they cheer when David defeats Goliath, but David WON.

Underdog stories are not the same as lost causes, but that's part of it. Often, there's a sense of "What could have been," the glorification of a sense of martyrdom, or it could be just simply that the losing side had more "appealing" characters. The South had the inspirational Lee, oddball Jackson, cavaliers like Stuart, etc. that the North didn't really come close to having.

A lot of these lost causes lost for good reasons (yes, that includes the CSA's view on "states' rights," i.e., to tell the Federal government, "Go fuck yourself!" when it tries to outlaw slavery, end racial discrimination, and punish hate crimes).

When did the federal government do any of that? The government largely bent over backwards for the South; the Fugitive Slave Law and Dred Scott Case virtually gave Southerners the right to kidnap any black person they saw fit and take slaves anywhere in the country, while John Brown was tried and hanged by the state of Virginia for his raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry.

Until the 1850s, most Northerners were content with the Missouri Compromise and abolishionists were a tiny, often maligned group of fringe radicals, and Lincoln almost constantly insisted he would take no action to abolish slavery before becoming president. Even if the North had the overall will to abolish slavery for good, there were enough slave states and Southern Supreme Court Justices to block that from happening legally anytime soon.

[Pelranius]

I think a large part had to do with the South panicking, in that they realized that the gravy train which had the entire country set up for them wasn't going to continue, as the North was now outweighing them economically and demographically, and Lincoln's election showed that most Americans weren't going to put up with their little temper tantrums anymore. It's sort of like the reaction Miss Scarlett would have if her daddy sent her off to a convent to make her behave.

Scarlett O'Hara going on a shooting spree at the local annual ball for beaus and belles, now that's a movie I would have paid to see.

[TC Pilot]

I think a large part had to do with the South panicking, in that they realized that the gravy train which had the entire country set up for them wasn't going to continue, as the North was now outweighing them economically and demographically, and Lincoln's election showed that most Americans weren't going to put up with their little temper tantrums anymore.

Hardly. As of 1860, 15 of the 33 states were slave, a number that even today would have been enough to block any amendment to the Constitution.

Lincoln, too, only won the election with 40% of the popular vote, with the combined southern and northern Democratic candidates earning 47% The rest went to the Constitutional-Unionists, who wanted to simply ignore the slavery issue. It was all more than enough to defeat Lincoln, had the Democratic party not been so badly disunited during the election.

Certainly, the South panicked once Lincoln got elected, but virtually all their fears were nothing but misguided idiocy, a knee-jerk reaction, even.

[Elfdart]

What a lot of people forget (or didn't know to begin with) is that the slave states and their servants in Washington were always looking to expand slave-holding territory (one of the main reasons for the Mexican War, Seminole Wars and War of 1812). Before Lincoln was elected, the slave power crowd had its eyes set on Cuba, which they wanted to annex. Lincoln pulled the plug because not only was he against the spread of slavery, but invading Cuba would mean a war with Spain and likely other European countries (oddly enough, in order to stop the looming Civil War, Lincoln offered to do just that if the traitor states would re-join the Union and/ or not secede).

[Sidewinder]

What a lot of people forget (or didn't know to begin with) is that the slave states and their servants in Washington were always looking to expand slave-holding territory (one of the main reasons for the Mexican War, Seminole Wars and War of 1812). Before Lincoln was elected, the slave power crowd had its eyes set on Cuba, which they wanted to annex.

I wonder if the British and French government leaders who were sympathetic to the CSA (I believe the Brits were concerned over the cotton supply for their textiles industry, while the French wanted recognition of their puppet state under Maximilian and guarantees that the Americans won't invade the Mexican Empire) were aware how fucked they'd be if they had provided the support the slavers were begging for.

Just out of curiousity, what were the chances of the 1860s US military defeating the Spanish one and conquering Cuba, assuming the American Civil War is averted?

[Elfdart]

The CSA overestimated the value of their cotton. They didn't realize that the British could get all they wanted from Egypt, Palestine and India. The French also had a lot of it in North Africa. It's as though a rebel faction in Nigeria thought they could blackmail other countries into supporting them by threatening to cut off Nigeria's oil.

France and Britain did aid the Confederacy ever so slightly, and mostly by private firms for cash. As it turned out, one of the reasons Lincoln ended up giving support to Juarez (including several cross-border raids by U.S. cavalry) is because the French had shipped weapons to the CSA and because the French puppet regime in Mexico recognized the Confederacy.

As far as grabbing Cuba is concerned, beating Spain out of there would have been about as tough as it was 37 years later, when more American troops were killed in traffic accidents mustering in Florida than in battle in Cuba. The difference is, France and Britain couldn't have cared less in 1898, but might have done something about it in 1861. The U.S. Navy was rather puny at the time.

[Pelranius]

To add insult to the injury, didn't the British and French after the war decide to continue using African cotton and stopped buying southern cotton more or less?

[Elfdart]

They didn't have much choice. IIRC, it took a few years after the war to start producing cotton at pre-war levels, since food took priority over exports. Britain and France would've had to import cotton from India, the Middle East and N. Africa anyway.

[Sea Skimmer]

The CSA overestimated the value of their cotton. They didn't realize that the British could get all they wanted from Egypt, Palestine and India. The French also had a lot of it in North Africa. It's as though a rebel faction in Nigeria thought they could blackmail other countries into supporting them by threatening to cut off Nigeria's oil.

Southern cotton was superior to the Egyptian and Indian cotton because it had much longer fibers. The South was aware of the alternative sources, but thought the British would not be easily able to adapt their machinery to use the shorter fibers. As it was the adoption was difficult, but the British had more then enough stockpiled southern cotton to tide themselves over until it was done.

France and Britain did aid the Confederacy ever so slightly, and mostly by private firms for cash. As it turned out, one of the reasons Lincoln ended up giving support to Juarez (including several cross-border raids by U.S. cavalry) is because the French had shipped weapons to the CSA and because the French puppet regime in Mexico recognized the Confederacy.

Well, the aid was significant at times, and the British government ultimately ended up paying American shipping lines several millions dollars because of the illegal construction and arming of Confederate raiders like Alabama.

[Big Orange]

It is very easy to abhor the Confederates for treating humans literally like cattle in most cases, but how about the victorious Union displacing Native Americans and misusing Chinese laborers in the two to four decades following the conclusion of the Civil War? Also I wonder what held the Union back from stringing up the Confederate leaders for high treason and crimes against humanity.

[Gandalf]

Also I wonder what held the Union back from stringing up the Confederate leaders for high treason

I think it was to facilitate reunifying the nation. Hanging the leaders might have made reconstruction harder by angering the kind of people who might have started an insurgency.

and crimes against humanity.

Also, there wasn't a lot in the South that was too far beyond the action of the North. Slavery doesn't look to bad compared to what's basically genocide against the natives.

It wasn't until we saw what the Nazis had done that someone conceived of a "crime against humanity".

[Elfdart]

Also I wonder what held the Union back from stringing up the Confederate leaders for high treason

I think it was to facilitate reunifying the nation. Hanging the leaders might have made reconstruction harder by angering the kind of people who might have started an insurgency.

They miscalculated. Grant had to keep the army in the South to keep order because the traitors were let off, and their many imitators construed this mercy (rightly) as weakness. For a hundred years we had Redshirts and the KKK.

Also, there wasn't a lot in the South that was too far beyond the action of the North. Slavery doesn't look to bad compared to what's basically genocide against the natives.

It wasn't until we saw what the Nazis had done that someone conceived of a "crime against humanity".

The main difference is that while the Confederate leaders were hated as traitors and murderers, they were still considered human beings. The Sioux tried an armed insurrection of their own during the Civil War, and their leaders were given a mass hanging (along with dozens of people who had nothing to do with it).

[PeZook]

After which, rather than admitting the possibility that his "2 dozen blacks=STATES RIGHTS" is wrong(you can see the gears turning in his eyes) he settles on "Maybe Nazi Germany wasn't that racist either!"

Gentlemen, denial at its finest.

So I guess trying to pretty much murder all Slavs and Jews you find doesn't make you all that racist, eh?

[Sea Skimmer]

The main difference is that while the Confederate leaders were hated as traitors and murderers, they were still considered human beings. The Sioux tried an armed insurrection of their own during the Civil War, and their leaders were given a mass hanging (along with dozens of people who had nothing to do with it).

General Pope actually wanted to hang over 300 Sioux warriors for the 1862 rebellion, but Lincoln ordered it scaled back to 38 supposed leaders to spare his record the mark of such a massive execution.

[Thanas]

Just out of curiousity, what were the chances of the 1860s US military defeating the Spanish one and conquering Cuba, assuming the American Civil War is averted?

If the French and English intercede, it would be game over, since both Navies could stop an invasion of Cuba simply by having a superior fleet.

As for the Spanish, they too have a superior fleet at the start of the 60s, including several ironclads, among them the beautiful french built Ironclad Numancia. Able to reach speeds up to 12 knots and mounting 34 200mm guns, she alone would outclass every ship in the USN. (Fun fact - she was also the first ironclad to circumnavigate the world). One has to remember that spanish naval expenditure was raised very much during Isabels reign. The USN on the other hand didn't built any ocean-going ironclads during the 1860s except the coastal monitors. Also, the spanish did not seem to consider the USN much of a threat, considering the famour "España prefiere honra sin barcos a barcos sin honra" replay made by Casto Méndez Núñez is any indication.

Of course, the question would be whether the USA has the knowledge and shipyards necessary to build ironclad warships. Even so, that would take years of preparation and build time, wich might well trigger an arms race that would see Spain being supported by other European powers like Britain and France.