Quote:
Originally Posted by bellhead
The issue is the union states don't glamorize the war or anything like that. Southern states have used the war to divide their communities on racism.
I grew up in the midwest & nobody ever talks about it. Living in the south, someone will bring it up 2 to 3X a week.
The only memorial I ever saw in a prominent place was in Cleveland where they have a statue honoring the dead.
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One reason that the legends of the Lost Cause live on in the South is because most of the battles of the Civil War were fought there - Gettysburg being the obvious exception. And Southerners being Southerners - people noted for their storytelling and pride in family lore - stories of g-g-granddaddy's valour live on.
In my own family, which has roots in Virginia and Arkansas, stories of this kind persist. I have long generations in one particular branch, plus ancestors who wrote things down.
So our family knows about the bushwhackers who invaded our ancestors' rural home, the skirmish which was fought a mile away, our g-grandmother's nursing of the wounded after that battle, two young g-uncles, who had helped bury the dead and evacuate the wounded from that same battle, later having to hunt small game to put food on their family's table after commissaries from both sides had taken their corn, wheat, livestock and the contents of the smokehouse.
We know that this same branch of our family, along with other families from their area, eventually were forced to refugee to safer (Union) territory several states away, during the last winter of the war (1864-65), and that they returned home only to learn later that an enlisted son had died of disease the same day Lincoln had been assassinated. He was nineteen, and had worn the blue. His brother, in his mid-twenties, survived the war - he had worn the gray.
My family lost two other children during the war - a daughter in her early twenties died during a measles epidemic around 1862, and a baby boy died in 1864 - probably of summer complaint complicated by malnutrition due to food shortages- before he was a year old. He was the only baby this large family lost, and had it not been for the war, it's likely he would have survived.
Am I to term one great uncle a hero, while calling his brother a traitor?
Both fought for what they believed.
This branch of my family were not slaveholders. But they were Southerners.
On the other side of my family, a g-g-grandfather was in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. When my father was a young boy, he asked the Major what it was like: "It was all a big mistake", was the only answer. Yet the Major served his state legislature after the war, was instrumental in raising funds for the huge Virginia Monument at Gettysburg, and also attended the big fiftieth reunion at Gettysburg, from which film still exists of the old Johnny Rebs and Yankees laughing together and firmly shaking hands across the stone wall which was the High Water Mark of the Confederacy (no sign of my ancestor in that film, unfortunately, but I know he was there or nearby). But he never wavered in saying "It was all a big mistake"...
So many stories...it wasn't so long ago, after all, if you count the generations rather than the years. And because of that enduring immediacy, Civil War monuments may be viewed quite differently in the South than in other areas of the country where such stories do not resonate.
So tell those stories. Remind people that those who fought, and those who survived at home during the tragic war years were mainly just people doing the best they could, trying to follow their consciences, and survive. Of course, part of that tragedy is that firm belief in a cause that was so clearly wrong drove this country to such an extreme as to create scenarios such as happened in my own family...
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