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but the American victors tended to go a little light on the losing confederate army and perhaps a little too willing to magnify the "marble" general. Victors can be rather magnanimous in victory.
"I never could understand how our Confederate troops could have won every battle in the War so decisively and then have lost the war itself!" If that wasn't the history I was taught in school. That the Confederacy was unconquerable, until Appomattox. Suddenly there was Appomattox. Where did that town come from?
Of course, Margaret Mitchell said it best in her book, 'Gone With The Wind' about southern valor and honor and southern unpreparedness for war, as spoken by the character Rhett Butler.
If I hadn't seen that movie when young, I doubt I would have known there was a real war in the west, besides Virginia.
Even by Chancellorsville, the Confederate nation was nothing like what it thought it was, in 1861. Chancellorsville saved part of Virginia; kept the Confederacy in the war. But it did nothing to recover many of the states and Confederate counties already lost.
We sure can look differently at a war, where one side had far fewer soldiers, and some half its population of military age men are by skin color, banned from fighting for the country of their origin.
In reality, some of the real truth is a little too brutal to accept.
Oooof! Belly shot Whitworth!. Congradulations. Will have to think on that some before maybe replying.Wow! Good stuff!
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
Pulled this off another forum. An example of history forgotten, but not by the victors...
"The Great Hanging," long ignored, now memorialized. By Bud Kennedy Star-Telegram staff writer They called it the Great Hanging.
And for 145 years, Gainesville has tried to forget the largest mass lynching in American history.
Now, it is remembering those 14 deaths plus 28 other men executed amid the political tension of the Civil War.
A city park filled with 42 tiny crosses was dedicated Friday to remember the 1862 deaths. Most of the men were convicted and hanged as Union sympathizers. Fourteen were hunted dwon and lynched outright by a renegade mob angered by anti-war dissent.
"For the first time in nearly 150 years, we are remembering the sacrifice here," said Leon Russell, 78, of Keller, a Cooke County native opposing the "cult of secrecy" around the hangings.
The lynchings--and, depending on your political point of view, the trials--are considered among the most shameful abuses in the Confederate States. Yet they are rarely taught in local history lessons.
"People have kept this a well-guarded secret," said Russell, a retired Dallas insurance executive, talking by pone from Gainesville's Morton Museum before the park dedication. "Some people here wanted it to stay secret."
The Great Hanging has been no secret to historians. University of North Texas history professor Richard McCaslin wrote about it in a 1994 book, Tainted Breeze.
McCaslin emphasized Friday that the memorial does not take either the Confederate or Union side, or blame anyone. Some local families are descendants of the 40 widows and 120 children left fatherless. One leader who lobbied for the memorial was the granddaughter of a juror.
The 14 lynchings alone make it the largest vigilante-style mass killing in American history.
"The only message is that this event is worth remembering," McCaslin said.
Then he said something that might apply today.
"In wartime, when there is so much emphasis on national unity, the very idea of free speech can be seen as threatening and divisive," he said. "The reaction can have an impact on a nation and a region."
Cooke County and most of the counties north of Dallas and Fort Worth had voted against Texas joining the Confederacy. By 1862, Confederate leaders were criticized because wealthy landowners weren't getting drafted, and dissenters were organizing a Peace Party political faction.
"Southerners did not agree on the war," McCaslin said. "In particular, North Texas did not agree on the war. ... All we want is for Gainesville to have a window on the past, to see that it's OK to discuss these issues even though we don't always agree."
The Gainesville City Council approved the memorial Tuesday. The vote was unanimous.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a history and heritage organization, has a chapter in nearby Lindsay. The chapter is named in part for Confederate Col. James G. Bourland, who led the arrests of those convicted and hanged.
Kenneth Blair, the local SCV commander, said his group did not know about the memorial proposal. The Sons meet monthly and discuss history, but nobody has ever discussed the hangings, he said.
"The facts seem unclear," he said. "Were these lawful trials, or not? Were these people spies, or was this renegade Southerners going crazy? I don't know, and I've got dear friends whose ancestors were hanged. I don't necessarily condone what happened."
The idea of a memorial has been around since 1916, when a Massachusetts congressman proposed spending $100,000 for a federal monument. A Texas lawmaker opposed it, saying that some of the men were executed by a military tribunal.
Russell, the man behind the memorial, said he never learned about the lynchings and hangings growing up in Woodbine, east of Gainesville. He didn't even know about the incident until a few years ago, when an acquaintance from New York asked.
"I know it's not something for Gainesville to be proud of," he said. "But it's not something they should hide."
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
Last edited by unionblue : 04-17-2008 at 12:43 AM.
At one time, "the winner writes the history" might have been a valid observation. Today, I don't think that dog flies. In this conglomeration of CW groupies, we know that the "sides" have swung back and forth several times, but that we are now in a period where historians are in a desperate struggle to find fact and present their interpretations of those facts--going with the "publish or die" in some circles and with the desire to sell books in others, if not both.
It is has been a long time since "the winners write the history." Maybe in the first 40 years; certainly not now. Reminds me of bumper stickers.
ole
I agree with ole on this. At this point in time I think as far as historians go and authors we are far enough removed that we get a more balanced view. While this wasn't true when I was going to school, when revisionist history was the boon.( So as not to offend anyone and skewer the reasons and causes.)
As far as a Southern tilt.it's all on where you look. I've seen and own and read books on Grant, Sherman, Siegal, Hooker, Kilkenny, Wilder, J.C. Davis, and Sheridan to name a few. If you can only find books on CS Generals I'd opine your not looking very hard.
I understand, that most school history books and classes in Japan, barely mention WW II. The gist of what is taught is usually something about Japan being forced into a war they didn't want.
And 90 years from now, there'll aging Japanese morons fighting the war all over again. Would like to be around to see how that prophecy plays out. After all, they're only just now playing up the "Lost Cause" part.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
I must confess, I grow mighty weary at the cries that 'Southern' history is being suppressed and that only the 'Northern' version of the Civil War is being published or presented and has been the only such version ever put out by 'the victors.'
Before and at the start of the Civil War, the Southern leadership that led the region into rebellion had no problem saying what they meant. Jefferson Davis gives speeches out in plain sight in 1861 saying secession was justified because the election of Lincoln meant "property in slaves [would be] so insecure as to be comparatively worthless...thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars." Alexander H. Stephens gave his speech before God and the public and stated at Savannah on March 21, 1861, that slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution" causing the South to secede from the Union. Even later, Stephens went further on the reason for secession by saying the United States had been founded on the false idea that all men were created equal. Instead, he states the Confederacy in contrast was "founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
After the war, the song above gets a hasty make-over. The Confederacy is gone and slavery gone with it, everyone agreeing it was not a nice thing. How to tell the story that the Confederacy broke up the Union, started a war that killed 620,000 Americans in a thwarted attempt to keep four million black slaves in bondage without embarrassing your ancestors? You spin the cause of the war to something else, ANYTHING else.
Davis and Stephens (and others) decide to deny, hide, purge, etc., the idea that slavery had anything to do with slavery. Southern states seceded for states rights, over constitutional issues, tariffs, economics, cultural issues, etc., etc., ANYTHING but slavery. For instance, Davis states, postwar, that the South fought solely for "the inalienable right of a people to change their government...to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered." The "existence of African servitude," he maintained , "was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident." Stephens played the same tune. "Slavery, so called (I wonder what the heck else you would call it?), was but the question on which these antagonistic principles...of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other...were finally brought into...collision with each other on the field of battle." (Whatever helps you sleep at night, Alex.)
It is this amazing ability to separate 1861 through 1865 with postwar fantasy that has always amazed me. Plus the unbelievable idea that somehow the Southern viewpoints of the war have been 'suppressed,' 'buried,' 'ignored,' 'banned,' or that some huge PC conspiracy prevents the Southern version of civil war history from getting a 'fair' hearing or from being heard at all.
The fact of the matter is, during the first half of the 20th century the argument that slavery had little to do with the causes of the war between North and South had a great deal of support from professional historians. The "Progressive school" was at the top of the heap of American historiography from the early 1900s to the 1940s. The progressives maintained that differences between certain interest groups and classes brought about the war. Industrialists vs. farmers, capital vs. labor, railroads vs. farmers, manufacturers vs. consumers, etc. They go on to say instead of slavery the real issue of American politics was centered around the economic interest of these bickering groups: tariffs, taxes, banks and finance, land policies, susidies to business or agriculture and such. In the Progessive view, the war was not primarily a conflict between North and South. "Merely by the accidents of climate, soil, and geography," according to Charles Beard, one of the leading proponents of the progressive thought. In other words, it was accidental that slavery was in the South and free labor was in the North. To their view, slavery and free labor in the North was no better or no worse than the other. The real issues between North and South was the tariff, government subsidies to transportain and manufacturing, public land sales, financial policies and other types of economic issues.
The Progressive view of the Civil War and it's causes were considered a 'godsend' to a generation of mostly Southern-born historians who went with that flow and said this theory proved slavery had little or nothing to do with the war. And hence we get the version of history that says Lincoln was not elected over the issue of slavery and its expansion into the territories. Instead it's economics, tariffs, banks, and evil capitalist railroad barrons against the simple and unsuspecting, majority farmers and such of the South. Pretty nice.
There's also an offshoot of this thought which dominates the workings of historians during the 1940s. Its called revisionism. These folks claim that none of the sectional conflicts (i.e., slavery, tariffs, states rights, etc.) were genuinely divisive at all. They advance the theroy that political extremists, on both sides, whipped up such passions that things got out of hand and what could have/should have been solved by American politicians and compromise, boiled over into war. The problem is with this school of thought, while blaming the extemists of both sides, revisionists tend to really hammer on antislavery radicals, even an antislavery moderate Lincoln, much more than they do anyone else (such as fire-eaters, disunionists, etc.) Again, this hands those who wish to portray the South as a victim a pretty good platform. These antislavery fanatics force the South into a defensive posture, making it as though the South merely reacted to Northern attacks (verbal and otherwise) and hence we get the "War of Northern Aggression" line.
Again, these views of history, where slavery is not the cause of the war, etc., have been around for a LONG time, both in the North and in the South. I will concede the idea that the history taught in our nation's high schools can never go into such detail. Hence the Lincoln and slavery mantra. It's easy, it's quick, next chapter please. But the idea that it is not presented in a different format in southern schools cannot be questioned either. The simple fact of the matter is, no one suppressed southern views of the civil war. Heck, even I know that as soon as 1866, a southern version of the war was already in print and sold all over the country. Why wasn't it suppressed? Why wasn't the author hauled off to prison? Because he wasn't, that's why.
Through most of my own research and study I have found there has been a more concentrated effort to deny, suppress and outright change historical fact by those in the South immediately after the war than any other so-called PC effort in the North.
So enough of 'your version' or 'your historians.' Why is it when people talk about their 'Southern Heritage' they only focus on four, short years of the failed attempt at rebellion? Why not simply say 'Confederate Heritage?' Southern heritage stretches back to the very first settlement in this country to the present day and is much deeper and richer than that short span of four years. (Yes, I know, it is a part of your Southern heritage, just as it is mine, but it's not the WHOLE part of your southern heritage, is it?)
But don't try to sell me the idea that you are being somehow shortchanged by all the majority of present-day historians who are saying slavery brought on the war. Stop whining that you are being somehow cheated of the chance to present your view of that time. You haven't. If anything, you've had almost a century at center-stage. Historians who have been born, raised and taught in the South are some of the ones who are bringing slavery back to center stage, so enough with the Northern view of civil war history.
Just present your facts and see if they stand up to the historical light and quit yelling offsides when someone disagrees with you.
Prove it or move on.
Don't cry about how you never get the chance to do so or (shock upon shock) we don't agree with your view. That's all it is, a disagreement, not an attempt to stiffle or suppress or censor you.
Enough venting.
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
Last edited by unionblue : 10-26-2007 at 02:58 AM.
If you can only find books on CS Generals I'd opine you're not looking very hard.
And therein lies what appears to be much of the problem. We have some excellent proponents of the southern persuasion, and I've run across a couple three on several other boards; but I've yet to determine that they can name a "northern" book they've read. All the books we read are slanted to the northern version of the war. And it is quite useless to ask for the name of a "correct" book. That isn't forthcoming. Could it be because it is written by an uncertified "scholar" and is published privately?
But I rant. Until I get an example of a "northern" book written by a credentialled scholar who with contrary evidence can be shown to lie, and an example of a "southern" book by a credentialled scholar who can be shown with evidence to tell the truth, I'll just have to figure that it's so much smoke. And it ought to be sometime after 1960.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
If the victors are in charge of writing the history, they're falling down on the job, big time.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
Last edited by unionblue : 10-26-2007 at 05:39 AM.
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