cspear opened this issue on Sep 13, 2007 · 58 posts
XENOPHONZ posted Fri, 14 September 2007 at 12:33 AM
Quote - @Xenophonz - hurrah, hurrah for the Bonnie Blue flag that wears a single star...;) ironically, although you want the South to rise again, you have a pic of one of the most famous Southern subs that sank...3 times...;) (Pakled lives hard by the South, stuck somewhere in rural NC...;)
Yes, I know.......and that relates to my (joking) comments about "fighting nobly for lost causes". 
And remember -- the Hunley sank her target before disappearing -- leaving a mystery wrapped in an enigma for well over a century -- until the sub was found recently. They still don't know for certain what sank her, although they've got some working theories. The most plausible one that I've heard being that small-arms fire coming from the men onboard the Housatonic popped a small hole into the Hunley's foward conning tower: causing water to leak in rapidly, and sinking the boat.
And, yes -- three crews died. Which speaks a lot to the valor of the last crew who went on with the mission in spite of the two crews lost in testing before them. BTW - the designers of the Hunley actually experimented with steam & electromagnetic propulsion.
The Hunley's third crew achieved the first successful submarine attack in history. But by that point in the war, it was all too little, too late. However: that fact doesn't take away from what those men did.
No -- when I'm being serious -- the South won't rise again in that fashion, other than in the imaginations of some. That was a completely different era, with totally different attitudes than today's. But they deserve their memorials. In reality: it was American valor on both sides.
More Americans died in the Civil War than have died in all of the other wars that we've fought added up together. Approx. 650,000 total -- but many of those deaths were due to sickness and poor medical field conditions rather than to actual combat losses.
Plus the battle tactics of that time -- consisting of massed lines of men marching directly at each other under heavy fire -- lead to absolutely horrendous casualities on both sides.
BTW - in combat, the Union lost many more men than the Confederacy did. Which has been one of the historical criticisms directed against Grant -- i.e. -- that his winning tactics consisted of using his advantages in men and material by simply throwing his men, pell-mell, into a hellish meatgrinder: thereby overwhelming the less-well-supplied enemy. He was able to win battles that way.......but at a horrible cost in blood.
After the war, he turned out to be one of the worst presidents that the US ever had.
It's an interesting study to read up on what the leaders on both sides did after the war. Lee went on to personal hero worship & adulation from both sides for his sterling character and for his strict attention to duty. People today have no concept of just how popular and how highly thought of Lee was in his own time.
Sherman -- who so famously marched to the sea and took Atlanta -- went on to a far less successful career fighting against the Indians in the American West. Among other things, he deliberately decimated the buffalo in order to starve out the Indians.
Nathan Bedford Forrest -- about whom it's claimed (but not proven) that he helped to found the KKK, did an about-face and ordered the KKK to disband itself in 1869 (an order which the KKK did not follow) -- not liking the organization's increasing violence.
Such things aren't unusual in history -- humans are full of internal contradictions that way.