When news of the surrender first reached our lines our men commenced firing a salute of a hundred guns in honor of the victory. I at once sent word, however, to have it stopped. The Confederates were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their downfall.
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
Dale Price at Dyspeptic Mutterings takes a look at the latter day heroes, who have never heard a shot fired in anger, condemning mention of everything Confederate:
Now, there is no question that some of the memorials can be shown to be upraised middle fingers to Reconstruction. Some were indeed erected with bad intent, part of a celebration of the racist caste system which triumphed in the wake of the Union no longer having the energy to insist upon the principles of Reconstruction after Grant left the Presidency.
But.
The over-looked reality of the “TRAITORS!” howling from people whose disdain for Johnny Reb also clearly embraces Billy Yank involves two important factors:
First, none of the victorious Union leaders wanted treason trials. The men who had bled and watched comrades die in windrows across five Aprils tried not a single Confederate for treason. Ultimately, not even for Jeff Davis, and it took decades for him to encourage Southerners to be good Americans in the reunited republic–but even he did, however long it took him. The wisdom of the men whose determination broke the Confederacy into flinders and burned large parts of it to literal ash chose to spurn the gallows as justice.
Which moves me quickly to point two:
With a tiny number of exceptions barely worth consideration (google “Confederates in Brazil”), the defeated Confederates overwhelmingly accepted the verdict of the battlefield and embraced reconciliation.
And that was no small matter. Most civil wars feature post-credits scenes of vicious guerilla warfare and/or firing squads that that take years to shut down.
Yes, in the American South, while there was a bloody spasm of Klan violence, such episodes were either smashed to bits or even caused disgust among white southerners, causing its founder to renounce it and preach racial amity himself. All in all, ex-Confederates mourned their defeat and then pieced together lives as part of the re-United States.
Was it perfect? Of course not. Freed men and women were gradually bonded to a second-class citizenship that frequently involved terror and forced labor indistinguishable from slavery, and always denied their full dignity as citizens and human beings. Even white Southern Unionists watched as the Lost Cause erased them from history and turned every state south of the Ohio into Noble States’ Rights Dixie.
The Union–which deserves the bulk of the blame for the state of affairs that evolved– essentially accepted this state because it left the nation a Union. And the Spanish-American War and later the First World War saw that pay dividends as the sons of southern white men rallied to the flag their fathers had once fought against.
And now, a graduate of Washington and Lee University brings the reconciliation dimension to the discussion:
But with the Union victory, Lee submitted to federal authority and set an example of reconciliation for a defeated South. Lee’s post-war leadership of Washington College led the faculty to ask that his name be added to the school’s masthead. One hundred and fifty years later, Washington and Lee University’s faculty want to remove Lee’s name. This would be a mistake.
By accepting the invitation to be president of Washington College, Lee showed white southerners how to accept their defeat and resume their loyalty to the United States. Lee signed the amnesty oath on the same day he was inaugurated as president of Washington College.
As he wrote to the trustees, “It is particularly incumbent on those charged with the instruction of the young to set them an example of submission to authority.” The Confederacy’s greatest hope chose unity over division.
Lee raised money, attracted students from the North and South, reinvigorated the Honor Code, built a chapel, and enforced a policy against student misconduct that applied both off and on campus. He restored a ravaged college to financial solvency, annexed a law school, instituted new majors in journalism and business, and began instruction in modern languages.
In doing so, Lee set the course for the institution’s current status as a world-class university. Simply put, my school’s identity does not celebrate the Confederacy but champions an elite, liberal arts education that teaches students of diverse backgrounds and perspectives to think, do good and equip others to do the same.
By leading Washington College for the last five years of his life, Lee followed in George Washington’s footsteps by working toward national unity and “the healing of all dissensions.” To be sure, he achieved notoriety by turning down Lincoln’s offer to defend the nation established by Washington.
Lee instead chose to lead rebel forces in an effort to dissolve the American union. But in the final act of his life, he sought to heal, not divide. “I think it the duty of every citizen,” Lee told the trustees, “in the present condition of the Country, to do all in his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony.”
We have to figure out what kind of nation we want to shape in these tumultuous times.
Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who, along with his boys of the 20th Maine, held Little Round Top for the Union at Gettysburg, was an ardent foe of both slavery and secession, but he had great respect for the valor of the Confederates he fought. He was chosen to oversee the Confederates as they marched out to surrender at Appomattox. As the Confederates passed by, Chamberlain ordered a salute to them by the Union troops. He explained why he did this:
“I resolved to mark it by some token of recognition, which could be no other than a salute of arms. Well aware of the responsibility assumed, and of the criticisms that would follow, as the sequel proved, nothing of that kind could move me in the least. The act could be defended, if needful, by the suggestion that such a salute was not to the cause for which the flag of the Confederacy stood, but to its going down before the flag of the Union. My main reason, however, was one for which I sought no authority nor asked forgiveness. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;–was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?”
The great lesson of the Civil War is that we are one people, North and South, black and white, and we are in danger of forgetting that today.
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I was born in New York but lived in the South for 15 years. This iconoclasm of Confederate statues is a Marxist driven movement. I have seen statues of Confederate monuments in small towns and large cities and most not do not celebrate slavery but rather commemorate the men from these areas who died in battle and whose bodies were never recovered. The numbers were staggering considering the population of the South and every family was affected by death and sever injuries of loved ones. The Confederate dead in these battles were buried in huge pits (eg. Gettysburg). The sons of these dead soldiers went on to fight for the USA in all wars and today are ardent patriots as any area of the country today. We must resist the soft glove Marxism of the Left in this country as exemplified by the so called Catholic AOC who thinks Catholic Saints, such as St. Junipero Serra and St. Damien of Molokai are examples of the oppressive white patriarchy. Their ultimate aim is the first dispose of monuments and statues and eventually to eliminate the patriots.
T. Shaw
Tuesday, August 4, AD 2020 1:52pm
We are living a study on how civilizations and nations collapse.
In the Historical record you can read numerous documents that state a general pardon was granted to Confederate soldiers after the war ended. Later, legislation provided that Confederate graves were equal to US veterans’ graves.
In addition to Col. Chambers’ noble acts, other such instances occurred during the War. At Vicksburg, MS in July 1863, General Grant (the preeminent soldier of his age) wrote in his demand for unconditional surrender (it’s why they called him US Grant) to General Pemberton, CSA, “Men who have shown so much endurance and courage as those in Vicksburg will always challenge the respect of an adversary . . .” Additionally, Grant forbade cheering, firing of salutes, expressions of exultation on Independence Day 1863: the day Vicksburg capitulated because “the victory was over our countrymen and the object was to establish a permanent union.”
The fell objectives of statue vandals are precisely opposed to a peaceful, permanent union.
Re: rehabilitated Confederate soldiers. A General Joseph Wheeler (effectively – I think the official CO was 600 lbs.) commanded the Cavalry, including TR and the Rough Riders in Cuba during the Spanish American War. Wheeler had been a cavalry commander in the Confederate States Army/Tennessee, and later served as a Congressman from Alabama.
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I was born in New York but lived in the South for 15 years. This iconoclasm of Confederate statues is a Marxist driven movement. I have seen statues of Confederate monuments in small towns and large cities and most not do not celebrate slavery but rather commemorate the men from these areas who died in battle and whose bodies were never recovered. The numbers were staggering considering the population of the South and every family was affected by death and sever injuries of loved ones. The Confederate dead in these battles were buried in huge pits (eg. Gettysburg). The sons of these dead soldiers went on to fight for the USA in all wars and today are ardent patriots as any area of the country today. We must resist the soft glove Marxism of the Left in this country as exemplified by the so called Catholic AOC who thinks Catholic Saints, such as St. Junipero Serra and St. Damien of Molokai are examples of the oppressive white patriarchy. Their ultimate aim is the first dispose of monuments and statues and eventually to eliminate the patriots.
We are living a study on how civilizations and nations collapse.
In the Historical record you can read numerous documents that state a general pardon was granted to Confederate soldiers after the war ended. Later, legislation provided that Confederate graves were equal to US veterans’ graves.
In addition to Col. Chambers’ noble acts, other such instances occurred during the War. At Vicksburg, MS in July 1863, General Grant (the preeminent soldier of his age) wrote in his demand for unconditional surrender (it’s why they called him US Grant) to General Pemberton, CSA, “Men who have shown so much endurance and courage as those in Vicksburg will always challenge the respect of an adversary . . .” Additionally, Grant forbade cheering, firing of salutes, expressions of exultation on Independence Day 1863: the day Vicksburg capitulated because “the victory was over our countrymen and the object was to establish a permanent union.”
The fell objectives of statue vandals are precisely opposed to a peaceful, permanent union.
Comment of the week T. Shaw! Take ‘er away Sam!
Thank you, Mr. McClarey.
Re: rehabilitated Confederate soldiers. A General Joseph Wheeler (effectively – I think the official CO was 600 lbs.) commanded the Cavalry, including TR and the Rough Riders in Cuba during the Spanish American War. Wheeler had been a cavalry commander in the Confederate States Army/Tennessee, and later served as a Congressman from Alabama.