Here of late I have written several posts arguing in favor of keeping the monuments from the Civil War that memorialize the rebels who fought for the Confederacy. However, I am not a native Southerner, just someone who likes Virginia and decided to stay. My parents were born in northern flyover country. They were descendants of immigrants who arrived after the Civil War.
Hence my interest in the Civil War is that it is part of the history that made my homeland, America, what it is. I read accounts of the Civil War, and I am awed. The monuments scattered about the state help to make it real.
There are other perspectives. The descendants of the men who fought the Civil War can each provide their own. When they look at the monuments, they can see a reminder of the massive conflict in which their forebears participated. Here is one such example.
Robert Holland, 2 SC Infantry – killed Battle of Seven Pines (just one of our family war dead) and his brother, my GG-Grandfather Daniel Webster Holland, 2 SC Infantry – surrendered April 1865. I admire them greatly. How demented to hate these men and the monuments to their courage, honor and fidelity – and leaders.
They Hate Our Dead
Memorial Day 2017
They want to tear down every Confederate statue and memorial. They hate so much that they hate our dead.
They demand the cultural cleansing of Virginia because:
- Confederate monuments honor slavery and racism. No. The monuments honor the soldiers and leaders. You choose to see slavery when you actually look at the statue of a soldier.
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But, they fought for slavery and racism. SMH. Bless your heart.
- Was our American Revolution about taxes or the right to tax? A key issue for some states in our War Between the…
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The cause of the South in the Civil War was to preserve the states’ right to have slavery. People in the South fought for things other than slavery, but the right of the states they fought for was the right to own people as slaves.
As William Tappan Thompson says in support of the second national flag for the CSA, ” “As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.”
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Over the years I have come to realize that each person is an individual. We do things for our own reasons.
If you ask me what the Civil War was about, I will readily concede that slavery was the cause of war. That is not the same, however, as saying each person in the South chose to fight because of slavery. Most Southern Whites did not own slaves.
Life does not come to us in a nice, neat, tidy package with explanatory labels and instructions. Nobody can put the Civil War in a box and hand it to you or me and honestly say this is why they fought the bloody thing with such determination. What we do know is when it was over the soldiers of the North, even after they had seen so many die, saluted the soldiers of the South.
Ideally, we do things the right way for the right reason. Sometimes we do things the right way for ill-considered reasons, and that is what the South seems to have done. That is not so good, but it is still better than maliciously doing something the wrong way for the wrong reason.
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I agree with your assessment; the war was not nearly as uncomplicated as we are led to understand by either side.
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Thank you for sharing that.
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