Quote - Wouldn't you say the Civil War was like the second war for independence? Had Washington lost wouldn't he have been branded a rebel? Of course being a slave owner himself along with most of those hot shots back then I don't think it would have been much of a big deal. No the real truth of the matter is George Washington would have fit in better in the south. 
 

 

Washington was a wealthy Virginia planter.  So -- looking at it in a certain way, he was a Southerner.  Although "North" and "South" weren't yet as sharply defined at that time as they became later.

Culturally, the South tended to follow the old European model of a social structure centered around a landed aristocracy.  And that was one reason why the European powers of the day largely tended to favor the Confederacy over the Union -- plus there was the fact that many Europeans of that era tended to not like America in a general sense: and they wanted to see the US "experiment" fail.  Sounds familiar..................:sneaky:

It's also largely forgotten in the current era that American Indians ("Native Americans" for you politically correct types) also largely regarded the Confederates to be their allies.  This was an attitude which likely derivied from the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle.

There's a scene in the Clint Eastwood movie The Outlaw Josie Wales where the Indian chief Ten Bears praises guerilla fighter Wales for being the honorable "Grey Rider" who "would not make peace with the Blue Coats".  No, the Indians had no reason to love the Great White Father in Washington -- so many of the the Indian tribes wanted the Confederacy to win the war.

It's another example of politics making for strange bedfellows and all that.  Even today, I've seen current-day American Indians praising the old Confederacy.  Which can be jarring to those who are unfamiliar with the history behind it.

History is rarely as simple as it's made out to be.  And that's one reason why a study of history is so crucial to understanding the current era -- and the types of things that humans do.

"The American Civil War was about slavery".  Well.......only in part.  It was also about culture, about power, about personal ambitions......it was about human nature.  The reason why we fight and kill each other is because of the war going on inside of ourselves.  And that's got nothing to do with skin color.........it's a disease that ALL mankind has.

The Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston -- who had commanded the defense in Georgia and the Carolinas against William Tecumseh Sherman's famous march, and who later surrendered to Sherman -- served as a pall-bearer at Sherman's funeral.

Here's a quote from Wikipedia:

General Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate officer who had commanded the resistance to Sherman's troops in Georgia and the Carolinas, served as a pallbearer*. It was a bitterly cold day and a friend of Johnston, fearing that the general might become ill, asked him to put on his hat. Johnston famously replied: "If I were in [Sherman's] place, and he were standing in mine, he would not put on his hat." Johnston did catch a serious cold and died one month later of pneumonia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman

The men of those days had a sense of duty and personal honor which is largely incomprehensible to the 21st century mind -- we've become far too self-absorbed to have the capacity to fit our imaginations around their example.  We have no concept of just how heroic many of them actually were.  On both sides.  Men of such character as they had would be strange and alien creatures: out of place and out of time in today's world.  We consider ourselves to be superior to our ancestors........while the reality is that they were superior to us.

There are still a few left.  Which is a part of the reason why we haven't been destroyed yet.  But -- nowadays -- the typical reaction to men of honor is to hold them up to contempt & to viciously ridicule them.  While the "heroes" are men who are just as self-absorbed and as utterly lacking in personal character as we are.....they are much more within our comfort zone.  They don't shine any lights: so they don't hurt our eyes.

shrug  It's all reflective of attitudes not too far off from the attitudes that prevailed during the last 100 years of the Roman Empire.  Shortly before Rome fell.

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