Random American Civil War Question

[Stravo]

I was a history major in College and still pick up history books to read fairly regularly but my interests usually lie in Ancient or Medieval history. The one period I can't seem to muster any interest in is the American Civil War. The Napoleonic era in Europe only ranks lower in terms of interest. But enough of the preamble.

I have been doing some casual reading on Wiki and other sources every now and then trying to muster interest during down time at work and one thing that struck me now as it did then back in school was the sheer incompetence of the Union commanders. It was revolving door generals for the armies of the Potomac and the South had steady names throughout including some legendary ones.

Here's the question for you CW scholars. What was the reason for this disparity? Why did the South have steady and particularly good commanders and in the more abstract fight so well while the North floundered all the way to Antietem and didn't really turn things around until Gettysburg?

Fire away with theories and conjecture, it's a rainy quiet day at the office and I'm feeling historical.

[Darth Wong]

Is that necessarily true, or is it a fiction invented by American historians desperate to find something positive to say about the American Slavocrats?

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no historian, particularly not for the American Civil War. But upon a cursory glance, a few problems with the classical "Southern generals good, Northern generals stupid" premise come up right off the bat:

Problem #1: We rarely hear about how the Union did much better in the west than they did in the east. This odd omission stinks to me of a deliberate bias.

Problem #2: The Union was fighting an offensive war most of the time, and there is a well-known advantage to the defender. The one time that the South tried to carry out offensive operations in the North, they got soundly spanked and their greatest general humiliated.

So I personally tend to wonder if the whole "Southern generals smart, Northern generals stupid" thing has been seriously overstated by American historians.

[Surlethe]

Were the northern generals stupid so much as overcautious? They had enormous manpower and equipment advantages -- the Army of the Potomac had 50-100% more men than the Army of Northern Virginia early in the war, IIRC -- but failed to use them aggressively. In the west, Grant was willing to wear down his southern counterparts with his superior manpower, which was why he was successful. So the northern generals seemed to never take the iniative, and to lose it when they tried.

[Dark Flame]

Southern generals may have had a slight advantage due to the "martial traditions" of the South, but that's pretty minor. I think, like Surlethe said, Union generals were generally very cautious.

Take McClellan for example. He typically had at least 20,000 more men then the Army of Northern Virginia (IIRC) and he never once acted on his advantage. He was very hesitant to force a fight and he let Lee work according to Lee's plan, instead of forcing the issue and taking some initiative.

Burnside, however, was different. He wasn't a very good general at all, and he knew it. He was a political appointee, a "yes man". When Lincoln said "Attack," that's what Burnside did, without regard to the tactical or strategic situation at all. He felt pressured into charging blindly ahead, and Fredericksburg showed how stupid a policy that it.

Grant knew what he wanted to do, knew what his advantages were, and he used them. He was brutal in the extreme, but he got the job done by pushing and pushing and pushing. He kept the Rebels always on the defensive and continually replaced his losses, and it worked. Sherman was very similar to this.

[CmdrWilkens]

Mike really started getting to the real poin which is that the disparity in commadners is not really there so much and reflects the difference in objectives and fighting means. Certainly if one were to compile a list of first rate Union and Confederate generals the list would be relatively equal. Certainly in terms of artillery the north tended to produce better (the South relying on a few West Point graduates and some luck) while the south teded to have better Cavalry officers (though Sheridan knew his stuff as did Buford).

Stll when it comes to terms of army command things are almost always dispoportionate based on Robert Lee who was a brilliantly agressive defender and a piss poor offensive specialist. Longstreet was well suited to his tasks and so tends to be regarded as quality while Jackson was great for a short run yet was constantly saved by subordinates who responded well to his energy rather than any paticular brilliance on his part. Hill and Ewell were both mdiocre, Hood out west led his army to disaster, Bragg was good on some days horrible on others, Johnston was fine early in the war but never really could mount an offensive to save his life. That's just a brief rundown.

Conversely Sherman and Grant were obviously first class, Meade for all his failings was an excellent pairing with Grant and essentially can be seen as the Norhtern counterpart to Longstreet; Thomas, Buell and Rosencrans were all solid ocmmanders with occasional flashes of brilliance; Halleck for all his shortcomings was a damn fine technician and served in his role well.

Essentially it falls to the peerception that no one could beat Lee. Some of it stems from First Mannassas whch mcdowell very nearly broke the Confederates. Simply put had he placed his reserves into action a bit sooner he may have brokent he confederate line and scattered their troops in a way not too dissimilair to what happend to the Union. By the barest of margins McDowell became a "poor" general rather than the man who won the conflict in six months. Afterwards you have McClellan and Hooker (and Burnside) all of whom were excellent planners but poor field commanders. McClellan's organizaitonal skills were unmatched period and his plan of assault up the James was actually a brilliant bit of execution all the way up until he lost his nerve. Burnside's plan for assualt was also brilliantly executed until the pontoons didn't arrive in time and he decided to attack anway, Hooker also perfeclty outfoxed Lee and was moving to flank his main body when he lost his nerve as well. Simply put for three successive commanders the Army of the Potomac had all the ingredients for victory except resolve. Meade may not have had much but he held his ground and manuevered with good purpose, his pursuit may have been lacking but he also kept his army in good order and boxed Lee in until grant took the helm.

Really what we have is four truly abject northern commadners who all successively faced off against the best of the South (I forgot to mention Pope but meh). other than that there contest of Generalship honestly favored the Union otherwise they would never have suceeded in the offensive.

[Coyote]

I have a unsupported theory about it-- I think that one aspect may be an odd psychological reaction to the losers of a major war. Once they're rendered "harmless", then it's okay to laud attention and kudos on them for "fighting well", some wierd sense of fairness or something.

I notice a great deal of almost-sympathy or almost fetishist fascination with the German Wehrmacht which, IMO, is similar. It is also very touchy-- people are very touchy about trying to seperate their fasciantion with the Nazi war machine while simultaneously decrying what they fought fore. Only on a purely military-academic level, dissecting individual battles, can this really be done. If you look at the overall strageic picture, you can no longer seperate their racist goals with their combat objectives & performance in seeking those objectives.

Same with the South. The South fought a hard war, vastly outnumbered, with dashing and romaticized figures at the head, stod up against "the Man" (ie, the Union) which had vast resources, money, etc. There's a desire to strip away or bury the slavery issue to assuage people's consciences for being swept off their feet by the image while overlooking what it was the South fought for.

One of the ways of doing this is praising the Generals of the South for their "performance" and "tenacity" and "resourcefulness & daring", and getting so wrapped up in the tactical details the whole socio-political strategic aims can be safely ignored. You can deflect the notion of "but what about the slaves?" by saying, "That was a political issue. I'm focusing only on what a great tactical leader General X was when he outflanked the bluecoats and Billygoat Ridge".

[General Soontir Fel]

It's about the "Lost Cause" school of thought. That the North barely won with sheer numbers and luck, and a little more effort from the South would secure the Confederacy's survival.

Of course, in reality, the North won overwhelmingly, and fully occupied the South.

A lot of what we see as stupidity is due to the attempts by commanders to use Napoleonic tactics with mid-19th century weapons. This was done on both sides, but it was more visible on the North because the Union was fighting an offensive war. And two biggest tactical blunders of the war were both made by the South: Pickett's charge at Gettysburg and Hood's attack at Nashville.

And there's also something else people rarely mention: the Southern "marital tradition" got commanders killed. Many more Southern general officers fell in combat than northern, because they tended to lead from the front. The most prominent of these was Albert Sydney Johnston.

As others said, Northern generals were more than a match for the best of the South, and they tended to be better when it came to strategy, if not in tactics. I think the only general who was truly unmatched in what he did was Nathan Bedford Forrest.

[Coyote]

And there's also something else people rarely mention: the Southern "marital tradition" got commanders killed.

So it may be true that married men don't live longer? Or they do, but they are also more willing to die?


Martial tradition. Sorry, couldn't let it go.

[Stormbringer]

Were the northern generals stupid so much as overcautious?

That plays a lot into the perception. A good number of the Union's senior officers were afraid of casualties and were deterred by the heavy cost that was being paid. A good deal of that was because like WW1 later, the technology had advanced beyond what they comfortably understood.

However, once the Union found commanders that were willing to press on, Grant especially, they quickly began sustaining offensives and pressing home the attack.

* * *

I believe there is also one other factor which often goes unappreciated, the South had an extensive network of para-military organizations and militias existing to put down potential slave revolts. The North had militias but nothing close to what the South had. They also had enough generals leave Federal service to join in the rebellion when it formed. So when the time came to expand the Union Army, there were a whole lot of inexperienced men and officers compared to the South (which was also smaller making experience men proportionately more effective).

If you look at the meteoric rise of some Union commanders, you can see how there rapid promotion was often a bit too quick. That played something of a role in all of it as well. By the time more experienced officers got into the field, the Union (as usual) started beating the rebels quite soundly.

[General Soontir Fel]

Oops.

I have a unsupported theory about it-- I think that one aspect may be an odd psychological reaction to the losers of a major war. Once they're rendered "harmless", then it's okay to laud attention and kudos on them for "fighting well", some wierd sense of fairness or something.

I notice a great deal of almost-sympathy or almost fetishist fascination with the German Wehrmacht which, IMO, is similar. It is also very touchy-- people are very touchy about trying to seperate their fasciantion with the Nazi war machine while simultaneously decrying what they fought fore. Only on a purely military-academic level, dissecting individual battles, can this really be done. If you look at the overall strageic picture, you can no longer seperate their racist goals with their combat objectives & performance in seeking those objectives.

Same with the South. The South fought a hard war, vastly outnumbered, with dashing and romaticized figures at the head, stod up against "the Man" (ie, the Union) which had vast resources, money, etc. There's a desire to strip away or bury the slavery issue to assuage people's consciences for being swept off their feet by the image while overlooking what it was the South fought for.

One of the ways of doing this is praising the Generals of the South for their "performance" and "tenacity" and "resourcefulness & daring", and getting so wrapped up in the tactical details the whole socio-political strategic aims can be safely ignored. You can deflect the notion of "but what about the slaves?" by saying, "That was a political issue. I'm focusing only on what a great tactical leader General X was when he outflanked the bluecoats and Billygoat Ridge".

True. This comes from the romanticized idea of the aristocracy, and decring their defeat by boorish peasants and the modern industrial machine.

It might be wishful thinking: If I'd been back there, I could have done things differently, and won the war by myself... If this was a modern phenomenon, I'd assume RTS games had something to do with it, but it's probably the other way around, actually.

You'll see this crop up in works of alternate history, too. Most of those novels are unviable, even if enjoyable to read, because they presume something was hanging in the balance when it wasn't. The North was in a much better position strategically, and there was no way the British would enter the war to support slavery (that theory also exaggerates the importance of Southern cotton to the world's economy).

I believe there is also one other factor which often goes unappreciated, the South had an extensive network of para-military organizations and militias existing to put down potential slave revolts. The North had militias but nothing close to what the South had. They also had enough generals leave Federal service to join in the rebellion when it formed. So when the time came to expand the Union Army, there were a whole lot of inexperienced men and officers compared to the South (which was also smaller making experience men proportionately more effective).

If you look at the meteoric rise of some Union commanders, you can see how there rapid promotion was often a bit too quick. That played something of a role in all of it as well. By the time more experienced officers got into the field, the Union (as usual) started beating the rebels quite soundly.

Two more points:
West Point, at the time, was the prime engineering school in the country. It's pure speculation, of course, but many more northeners probably went there to become engineers rather than military officers, and they left the Army as soon as they could to work as engineers in the civilian sector. McLellan was among these, I believe.

That "network of militias" began to play against the South once the Union went on the offensive. The whole Confederate government was based on the "state's rights" theory, so state governors would refuse to release troops to President Davis, which dispersed the South's already inferior manpower even further.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I was a history major in College and still pick up history books to read fairly regularly but my interests usually lie in Ancient or Medieval history. The one period I can't seem to muster any interest in is the American Civil War. The Napoleonic era in Europe only ranks lower in terms of interest. But enough of the preamble.

I have been doing some casual reading on Wiki and other sources every now and then trying to muster interest during down time at work and one thing that struck me now as it did then back in school was the sheer incompetence of the Union commanders. It was revolving door generals for the armies of the Potomac and the South had steady names throughout including some legendary ones.

Here's the question for you CW scholars. What was the reason for this disparity? Why did the South have steady and particularly good commanders and in the more abstract fight so well while the North floundered all the way to Antietem and didn't really turn things around until Gettysburg?

Fire away with theories and conjecture, it's a rainy quiet day at the office and I'm feeling historical.

It's a false stereotype, for one. Meade (who is one of the most underrated Great Commanders in history), Thomas (the bravest man, certainly--he was a native Virginian) whose exploits at Chickamauga and Chattanooga were so crucial, let alone later victories, and of course Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, were all superb operational commanders.

Let's not forget that most of the time the Union's so-called incompetent commanders were simply in over their heads. The size of the Union Army before the war had been VERY small; most of these men simply did not have experience issuing orders to bodies of 70 - 80,000 or even more than a hundred thousand men, and in the early stages of the war that certainly affected their operational ability: Lincoln was seriously considering offering a generalship to the Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi of the famed "The Thousand" campaign in Sicily and the wars of Italian unification to take command of the Union Armies at one point, because he had experience.

The Confederates did well because, 1., their generals were by and large the most experienced of the Army veterans of the war because soldiering was a more popular profession in the south; and, 2. they also tended to hold the advantage in the quality of their troops. The raw militiamen of the north were not initially so drilled or capable. Look at what happens by the time of Chickamauga and Third Chattanooga or by the battles even immediately before Gettysburg; at the least the Union Army is now trained and ready to fight, and fights hard, even when outmaneouvred and out-generaled.

Gradually as both generals and men gained more experience these advantages vanished, and even the heavy casualties of the Army of the Potomac in later stages of the war didn't make up for it. Sherman and Grant were arguably able to conceive of strategic operations of a scope the Confederates had simply not thought of, and because of that they carried home the victory in the end.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

As an additional point of fact, even some commanders like Joseph Hooker who seemed to be handily beaten by Lee later proved themselves quite capable in other, lesser assignments. He was sent to command one wing of Grant's forces out west (the other commanders under Grant were Thomas and Sherman) and it was his troops who had a magnificent victory in "the battle above the clouds" taking Lookout Mountain at Third Chattanooga.

[Pablo Sanchez]

I believe there is also one other factor which often goes unappreciated, the South had an extensive network of para-military organizations and militias existing to put down potential slave revolts. The North had militias but nothing close to what the South had. They also had enough generals leave Federal service to join in the rebellion when it formed. So when the time came to expand the Union Army, there were a whole lot of inexperienced men and officers compared to the South (which was also smaller making experience men proportionately more effective).

There's also the fact that the Confederate manpower reserves were so small that they necessitated keeping every healthy man in the service for the duration of the war, and most of these units served continuously at the most critical points, without being rotated to other fronts. Whereas Union troops in any given battle might be fairly green, the Confederate army became veteran and stayed that way.

[DrMckay]

Most of the factors were already mentioned by you smart people, *flattery*

Here are my thoughts:

The American Civil War required the largest mobilization of men and material in the history of the American continent up to that time.

The logistcs alone were mind-boggling, a major initial problem (even for the Union) was the acquisition of sufficient rifles to arm all of its troops.

add that to the fact that the last time that any large military of volunteers was formed (as the draft had not yet begun,) was the Mexican War of the 1840's.

Although many of the leaders "won their spurs" in that conflict, the state-of-the-art technology had advanced in even twenty years, with Percussion-cap ignition rifle-mskets being the order of the day, accurate out to three hundred yards, with Napoleonic Linear tactics still in use.

Regimental and brigade officers not only had to contend with a large influx of green troops, (on both sides,) but had to find new ways to organise and communicate between so many men, not to mention keeping them in beans and bullets.

When two equally (initially) skilled units of men do battle using rifled firearms, the advantage will rest with the defender, (usually the South,)

in many cases, because all they had to do was hold their ground and shoot the enemy as they advanced.

It's a bit difficult to reload a Springfield or Enfield Muzzle-loading rifle musket while you are constantly advancing, try doing it While advancing under fire!

[Sea Skimmer]

The Confederates certainly did have better leadership on land, or rather they gave the right men the right commands without much delays. However at sea it seems to me the Federals at sea had equal or in many cases clearly superior leadership. The federal fleet had some of the boldest and yet most reasoned commanders of the war. This of course makes since, as the Navy was mostly built and based in the North and only about 20% of its serving officers joined the Rebels.

I really do wonder what Franklin Buchanan was thinking when he took CSS Tennessee against an entire Federal fleet at Mobile Bay, without even trying to fight with the support of his shore batteries. His stupidity cost the Confederacy the ram and the port, leaving only Wilmington for the blockade runners. This, yet Buchanan was thought to be the top Confederate naval officer and an expert at ironclad tactics (despite having only ever fought Monitor). I suppose the Union material superiority makes it hard to come to many conclusions though.

Let's not forget that most of the time the Union's so-called incompetent commanders were simply in over their heads. The size of the Union Army before the war had been VERY small; most of these men simply did not have experience issuing orders to bodies of 70 - 80,000 or even more than a hundred thousand men, and in the early stages of the war that certainly affected their operational ability

13,000 men in the US Army in 1861, organized into 13 regiments of various types, several of them highly dispersed, and with no higher level of tactical formation existing even on paper. Neither side had the equivalent of a corps formation until 1862 and even divisions took some time to organize.

The Federal Army at Bull Run had 35,000 men, small by the later standards of the war, and it was by far the largest gunpowder military force ever fielded on the continent. Even the combined French-American Army at Yorktown, the previous record, had only 16,000 men. McDowell desperately wanted more time to train the force, but Lincoln repeatedly ordered him into battle, and Bull Run was the result of him finally giving in.

[Sea Skimmer]

Two more points:
West Point, at the time, was the prime engineering school in the country. It's pure speculation, of course, but many more northeners probably went there to become engineers rather than military officers, and they left the Army as soon as they could to work as engineers in the civilian sector. McLellan was among these, I believe.

McClellan was an engineering officer, but he only worked for a civilian railroad after basically having a reached a dead end in his military career, which had included surveying several railroad routes for the government. Between the Mexican War and US Civil War the US Army was tiny, and so it was very hard to be promoted past the rank of Captain, which he had reached. It was logical to retire and go into civil life, not an act of deliberate exploitation.

McClellan got the rank of general the volunteers as an appointment by the governor of Ohio, to command the state’s militia. In the space of less then two weeks after this he became commander of the Ohio department (all the forces in several surrounding states) and a general in the regular army. Less then three months after that, he was commander of the Army of the Potomac, after having won several small but vital victories in western Virginia.

Quite the rapid promotion, it’s amazing that he did was well as he did, having never commanded more then a company of men previously.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Actually, Santa Ana had 20,000 men at Buena Vista, Skimmer.

[Patrick Degan]

George Brinton McClellan was very good at organising, training, and preparing an army for battle. He turned the Army of the Potomoc into a professional force and as historian Shelby Foote observed, everything that army eventually accomplished had its roots in McClellan's training programme.

Where McClellan fell down was his reluctance to actually risk that army in battle. In the movie Gettysburg, there is an exchange between Lee and Longstreet on the morning of the Second Day in which Lee says that "in order to be a good soldier, you must love the army. And to be a good commander you must be prepared to order the death of the thing you love." I don't believe McClellan was ready to take that step. He could never have ordered his men into a Spotsylvania or Cold Harbour the way U.S. Grant could, and not because Grant loved his army less but because McClellan was so concerned with not losing a battle and getting too many of his men needlessly killed that he could not bring himself to take the risks necessary to achieve victory. Which is why he blew his chance to end the war with Antietam.

[Civil War Man]

Here's the question for you CW scholars.

Yo.

What was the reason for this disparity? Why did the South have steady and particularly good commanders and in the more abstract fight so well while the North floundered all the way to Antietem and didn't really turn things around until Gettysburg?

Fire away with theories and conjecture, it's a rainy quiet day at the office and I'm feeling historical.

As others have pointed out, the quality of Union leaders are highly underrated. The Western Union generals pretty consistently curbstomped the Confederates. The lack of quality of the Eastern Theater generals are a result of a few factors.

Big ones include
1. Proximity to DC prompted more political generals.
2. Proximity to DC also generated less tolerance of failure, especially considering that the city very nearly ended up a Union island in a Confederate sea.
3. Many otherwise competent generals who were not good at leading an entire army were put in charge of the Army of the Potomac, which could number up to 110,000 people.

McClellan was an example of the third point, being an excellent organizer but a timid battle leader.
Burnside, as others have mentioned, was aware that he was also not a good battle leader. One of the interesting things, though, is that he came up with ingenious plans. The Crater? Poor execution, but an absolutely brilliant idea. Burnside's largest problem is that he couldn't improvise when things went wrong (in this case, Meade informed Burnside at the last minute that the division that had been training to lead the charge for weeks couldn't lead the charge because they were black).

When the Western Union generals (Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, etc) started getting brought east (since the Western Confederacy basically didn't exist anymore), the Eastern war turned around quickly.

One thing true even today is that the South and Midwest produce a lot of soldiers. That was true back then, as well. The reason the South has the reputation for generals (even including Southern generals who stayed Union like George Thomas) is that the martial culture combined with the wealthy plantation families resulted in the money and the political connections to get the potential soldiers into West Point.

And, as DW mentioned, there is a definite bias. The Civil War is largely only studied by people pissed that the South lost. I'm one of the few who is more interest in the North, and I have not published anything as opposed to the Footes or the Shaaras.

[Falkenhayn]

And, as DW mentioned, there is a definite bias. The Civil War is largely only studied by people pissed that the South lost. I'm one of the few who is more interest in the North, and I have not published anything as opposed to the Footes or the Shaaras.

How tight is Footes' scholarship? I've been watching Ken Burn's The Civil War, while exercising, and he's not sparse with his praise of Union soldiers and officers, at least in the interview segements that appear.

[Civil War Man]

And, as DW mentioned, there is a definite bias. The Civil War is largely only studied by people pissed that the South lost. I'm one of the few who is more interest in the North, and I have not published anything as opposed to the Footes or the Shaaras.

How tight is Footes' scholarship? I've been watching Ken Burn's The Civil War, while exercising, and he's not sparse with his praise of Union soldiers and officers, at least in the interview segements that appear.

I didn't mean to imply that he hated on the Union. However, like just about every prominent scholar on the subject you'll find, the competence of Confederate officers is a bit embellished. The way many tell the story, one would think that the Confederacy didn't suffer from incompetent political generals.

[Patrick Degan]

And, as DW mentioned, there is a definite bias. The Civil War is largely only studied by people pissed that the South lost. I'm one of the few who is more interest in the North, and I have not published anything as opposed to the Footes or the Shaaras.

How tight is Footes' scholarship? I've been watching Ken Burn's The Civil War, while exercising, and he's not sparse with his praise of Union soldiers and officers, at least in the interview segements that appear.

Foote spent twenty years writing his Civil War trilogy and drew from the battle records and reports from both armies among a plethora of sources. He ended up gaining a rather intimate understanding of both sides of the war.

[Sea Skimmer]

Actually, Santa Ana had 20,000 men at Buena Vista, Skimmer.

By the time it came to the actual battle he had no more then 14,000, the original assembled force might have numbered well over 20,000, though it was not fully armed. I did mean fielded in battle, if that wasn’t clear.

[Vaporous]

The myth of superior Southern generalship is not just a result of Lost Cause mythology. It's also part a long tradition of ignoring the Western Theater that started during the war itself. The north won the war by fighting (arguably), the biggest screw up the entire conflict produced: Braxton Bragg. Easily a match for McClellan or Pope, this timid, arrogant sod inspired hatred in every single officer that served under him, and probably did more to insure the reunification of America than any man not in a blue uniform.

Union generalship in the west was superb, once you got past the competent, if dull, Rosecrans. You had Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan of course, and then my favorite: George C. Thomas, the Rock of Chickimaugua.

I've always thought he got a bad shake of the press because he was a Virginian. It's not much of a stretch.

[Steve]

Everyone else has pretty much said what I'd say, so I'll recommend you listen to them and consider that much of the rest of the embellishment comes from Southerners who still think that the antebellum South, destroyed by the tyrant Lincoln, the drunken Grant, and the demonic sadist Sherman, was God's Kingdom on Earth with happy laboring slaves and genteel refined republican plantation owners, er, agriculturalists (some were rather aristocratic, but a number of them - such as John Calhoun - were staunch republicans and Jeffersonians, ignoring that until his dotage Jefferson himself was ambivalent toward slavery and occasionally hostile toward it). They don't want to remember the slave girls who were raped, the slaves whipped to death or subjected to cruel tortures as punishment, the divided families, and the poor white farming families ekeing out an existance on less-arable land while the rich and middle-class planters hogged all of the good soil for their cotton and tobacco cash crops (which, of course, was later shown as destroying the soil....). Even less do they want to remember the call for censorship of and terrorism against abolitionists and the attempt for legally forbid slavery-related debates and petitions in Congress, including censuring (with the aid of appeasing Northern congressmen) any who dared circumvent their gags too strongly.

So let's laugh at the southern apologists and the Lost Cause mythologists, recognize the truth that the South deserved to lose, and be happy that the North won the War of Southern Aggression, er, the American Civil War (musn't hurt the poor Southerners' feelings now....).