I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.
Ulysses S. Grant, possibly with some sweetening from one Samuel Clemens
I think that’s about as “fair” a reading as you’re likely to get from a white elite of the era, but along with the many, many pre-war speeches and declarations of secession, it makes it very clear that the US Civil War had to boil down to, “Am I willing to kill and die to preserve a society built, not just on slavery, but on a particularly brutal and rigid and racist version of it.”
We don’t know what every individual knew or felt, and lord knows the mores of northern whites at the time would be abhorrent to us, but there was, in their own white society, a public debate about the right course of action, and the South took literally the most evil option available to them. I feel very comfortable stating that every single decision maker in the Confederacy deserves to be publicly ignored (at best, and I’d prefer they be called the traitors they were), and that no Confederate involved in anything but resistance to the CSA or public reconciliation with the freed population deserves to be celebrated. They are a scar on the American soul and the fact that we as a country picked their memory over a proper Reconstruction is part of what’s so toxic in this country’s political discourse to this very day.
I think that’s about as “fair” a reading as you’re likely to get from a white elite of the era, but along with the many, many pre-war speeches and declarations of secession, it makes it very clear that the US Civil War had to boil down to, “Am I willing to kill and die to preserve a society built, not just on slavery, but on a particularly brutal and rigid and racist version of it.”
We don’t know what every individual knew or felt, and lord knows the mores of northern whites at the time would be abhorrent to us, but there was, in their own white society, a public debate about the right course of action, and the South took literally the most evil option available to them. I feel very comfortable stating that every single decision maker in the Confederacy deserves to be publicly ignored (at best, and I’d prefer they be called the traitors they were), and that no Confederate involved in anything but resistance to the CSA or public reconciliation with the freed population deserves to be celebrated. They are a scar on the American soul and the fact that we as a country picked their memory over a proper Reconstruction is part of what’s so toxic in this country’s political discourse to this very day.