Just yesterday I saw a truck with four different stickers advocating the Stars and Bars ( or Slaves and Graves as a friend calls it ). Since the battle flag was only added to the Georgia flag in the Civil Rights era isn’t this only dog whistle rascism?

But in the Deep North, the Civil War is sometimes referred to as “The Slavers’ Revolt”.

I had a teacher back in the 1970s who was fired from Emory back during the civil rights controversy for espousing integration, named Don West.

He was from the north Georgia mountains, and was fond of telling us that there were many in the south who were loyal to the United States all through the war, and named a county in N Ga (sorry, I can’t remember its name now) which flew the stars and stripes throughout the war.

He went on the tell his students that the reason that Tennessee is called the Volunteer State was that more volunteers from TN joined the US army than would have been drafted had TN remained in the Union.

Don hated segregation, and wanted those of us in the border states and the North to understand that there were many, many people in the deep South who hated everything the CSA stood for.

Don’s poetry was (for poetry) best seller stuff, he was a pacifist Christian minister, and he was against war for any reason. Shame we don’t have a few million more like him!

JR in WV

Tedd: False premise, so Sherman’s comments don’t enter into it.

Of course, both sides claim to be fighting for liberty and justice, as usual. Yet you knew right away which side I meant.

That’s not surprising because, behind whatever public face one might put forward, we all know that if the U.S. prevails in Iraq the country will have more liberty and justice than it had before. One of the great attributes of liberal democracy is that, notwithstanding any argument-by-motive that might be put forth, no one person or institution has enough power to realize its own vision to the exclusion of others.

You’re right that the Boyd retelling of Sherman’s opinions on war is supported by other primary sources. Flood cites one prewar letter of his, saying, “All here [in Louisiana] talk as if a dissolution of the Union were not only a possibility but a probability of easy execution. If attempted we will have Civil War of the most horrible kind.”

Ex-Confederates did claim that the South was doomed to failure from the start, but that it was still a glorious “Lost Cause.” For one thing, it was a nice way for Southern generals writing their memoirs to justify their defeat. From this point of view, Southerners weren’t lunatics to start the war, they didn’t start it at all! It was the War of Northern Aggression, with the South resisting the North’s depredations on their liberty.

MattF,

I happened across a copy of Bruce Catton’s excellent “Grant Heads South” – a history focusing on Grant from his appointment as a Colonel of Volunteers to his appointment as General in Chief of the Army.

Surprisingly, to me, Colonel Grant thought it would be a short war. Drive south, knock some sense into the Rebels, they’d see the futility of it all and that would be that.

Grant – and Sherman, his junior – displayed adaptability when they found out this was not so.

Or perhaps because they wanted something to eat.

Have neoconfederates so poisoned the argument that the Left thinks it must in reaction make a saint of any Northerner?

In point of fact—or, considerably less confidently, from my memory—Sherman’s recommended solution to the problem of the Southern Aristocracy was final, down to the last child, I think he wrote to Grant. Of course slavery was morally abominable, and I believe in the old (when he was a socialist) Genovese verdict that the Southern system was never going to change no matter how inefficient it was. But is it enough to excuse Sherman’s genocidal sentiments? And even if you can, because the Southerners deserved it, can you then excuse Sherman for applying the same formula to the Sioux? Surely they didn’t deserve it; surely they were victims of a man (and his pal, Sheridan) who had honed his wrath to a fine point somewhere.

Could everyone please believe in the moral cause of the North without canonizing wicked historical figures who happened to fight for the North?

To take the obvious parallel, the view that the Iraq war failed because of incompetent leadership is held by lots of people who supported the war. The Shermanesque position, that invading a foreign country whose inhabitants have no particular reason to love you is a recipe for disaster, however noble your own view of your intentions, is pretty much confined to those who opposed the war from the start.

That said, I’m perfectly happy to believe that the quote isn’t entirely accurate. Still, I think it’s clear that Sherman, unlike nearly everyone else, predicted a long and bloody war in which all parties would end up worse off than if the South had accepted the outcome of the 1860 election. That view is consistent with everything he did and said subsequently.

In reality, the North won the Civil War because of superior leadership and because its people were more committed to the fight. The North’s material superiority didn’t guarantee victory any more than US material superiority guarantees a happy outcome in Iraq.