Best us civil war confederacy history books according to redditors
We found 114 Reddit comments discussing the best us civil war confederacy history books. We ranked the 53 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
Abraham Lincoln was a big-government liberal. Southern conservatives hate him:
https://www.amazon.com/South-Right-James-Ronald-Kennedy/dp/1565540247
You should pick up a copy of The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem. It's entirely focused on this debate and how/when the battle flag went from symbolizing a "heritage" to "hate," I'll add that the author is also very objective so it shouldn't offend too many people. To cut to the chase, it went from being a kitschy t-shirt you picked up on your vacation to the redneck rivera to symbolizing hate when racist organizations started adopting it as a part of their identity. Think of the swastika, what comes to mind? Nazis right? Well that really stinks for Buddhists and Native Americans who had been using that symbol for hundreds of years prior to Hitler but, for most people, it's Nazi ideology that is conjured up when seeing it - even though the Nazi symbol is sometimes a backwards version of many of it's other representations. It's the same thing, of course the image we conjure is not the confederate flag the but a battle flag meant to symbolize where confederate regiments were during a battle, lest they accidentally start firing on each other - which did happen. Most people don't realize that it was not the official flag, meaning it was never intended to be a symbol of the confederacy. It's also not "the stars and bars," that's a different flag altogether.
Anyway, the book I suggested was probably one of the better books required for a defeat and memory course I took a few years ago. If you're super gung-ho about the flag representing your heritage (which it seems that you are) then you should certainly pick it up. Born and raised in the South as well as my mom's family going all the way back to pre-Civil War it helped me understand my own heritage as well and perhaps made me a little more sympathetic to the view that some people take of the flag as a symbol heritage even though I believe that symbols must be read within a contemporary context, which, for the flag, is hate.
The difference is that these memorials were not just about remembering the past. If they were, then they would have gone up in the 1870's or 1880's when reconstruction ended. These statues went up during the next generation (2), why? As a celebration. These monuments were erected by the children and grandchildren of confederates who felt vindicated that their family's historic battle in defense of the social order was right. They felt that the North had instigated an unjust war, they felt that the North had tried to control the South during reconstruction and insult the South by forcing legal equality between the races upon them in spite of what they felt were clear mental and moral inequities between races (3, "The monument typifies the vindication of Mr. Davis and the cause of the Confederacy... the leading inscription being "Deo Vindice" (God will vindicate)."). And they felt that with the destruction of the reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow that they, the righteous and godly sons and daughters of the glorious but doomed confederacy, had finally won.
These statues were monuments not only to the honor of the dead, but also to the ideals that the CSA had fought for (4, "UDC [United Daughters of the Confederacy] members made the Lost Cause a movement about vindication as well as memorialization."). They were explicit endorsements of racism and have been a constant reminder to the black community of it's second-class status since they went up in the early 1900's. That's why this is different than a 9-11 memorial: memorials to 9-11 don't serve to dignify slavery and Jim Crow. These statues do, and that's why the blm wants them gone AND is why white nationalists get their jimmies knotted when they fall.
**EDIT Some Sauces:
1: A great response to a question about the history of these monuments by Mr. Zhukov himself from yesterday, outlining changing roles of these monuments thru the 1910's but not including the civil rights movement. I got a source or two from here.
2: SPLC monument timeline
3: Miller, James I.D. A Guide Into the South p 382
4: Cox, Karen. Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (New Perspectives on the History of the South)
> to actually kind of getting it.
Unfortunately the "it" you've gotten is the Neoconfederate whitewashing of history. I recommend you read:
The South was not genocidal, so no, they weren't literally Hitler. But they did secede over slavery. "No, they seceded over the right to own slaves" is the same thing. Be very careful accepting the Neo-Confederate whitewashing of American history. As their own words indicate, institutions and beliefs they fought for all boiled down to white supremacy and slavery. They were not advocates for states' rights, and the Confederacy itself did not give its states the right to decide slavery.
Here is a decent article on the subject. Here is another decent list of quotations from prominent Southerners on the centrality of slavery leading up to the Civil War.
Be careful falling for the "they fought for their beliefs" argument. No kidding, the Nazis and iSIS and everyone who isn't a straight mercenary is fighting for beliefs. That alone is not ennobling of the cause. We still have to look at the cause for which they fought. Moral neutrality is in practice just a fig-leaf covering what someone happens to admire, or at the very least they don't find it all that offensive.
Lot of people here still do. This book is sold in many local bookstores where I'm from.
Fun facts:
> Even more revealing was their attachment to slavery. Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally. This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. That contrasted starkly with the 24.9 percent, or one in every four households, that owned slaves in the South, based on the 1860 census. Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population.
> The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful. One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. Nor did the direct exposure stop there. Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation. The fact that their paper notes frequently depicted scenes of slaves demonstrated the institution's central role and symbolic value to the Confederacy.
> More than half the officers in 1861 owned slaves, and none of them lived with family members who were slaveholders. Their substantial median combined wealth ($5,600) and average combined wealth ($8,979) mirrored that high proportion of slave ownership. By comparison, only one in twelve enlisted men owned slaves, but when those who lived with family slave owners were included, the ratio exceeded one in three. That was 40 percent above the tally for all households in the Old South. With the inclusion of those who resided in nonfamily slaveholding households, the direct exposure to bondage among enlisted personnel was four of every nine. Enlisted men owned less wealth, with combined levels of $1,125 for the median and $7,079 for the average, but those numbers indicated a fairly comfortable standard of living. Proportionately, far more officers were likely to be professionals in civil life, and their age difference, about four years older than enlisted men, reflected their greater accumulated wealth.
Source
> I would love to see you source that number.
"Even more revealing was their attachment to slavery. Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally. This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. That contrasted starkly with the 24.9 percent, or one in every four households, that owned slaves in the South, based on the 1860 census. Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population.
The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful. One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. Nor did the direct exposure stop there. Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation. The fact that their paper notes frequently depicted scenes of slaves demonstrated the institution's central role and symbolic value to the Confederacy.
More than half the officers in 1861 owned slaves, and none of them lived with family members who were slaveholders. Their substantial median combined wealth ($5,600) and average combined wealth ($8,979) mirrored that high proportion of slave ownership. By comparison, only one in twelve enlisted men owned slaves, but when those who lived with family slave owners were included, the ratio exceeded one in three. That was 40 percent above the tally for all households in the Old South. With the inclusion of those who resided in nonfamily slaveholding households, the direct exposure to bondage among enlisted personnel was four of every nine. Enlisted men owned less wealth, with combined levels of $1,125 for the median and $7,079 for the average, but those numbers indicated a fairly comfortable standard of living. Proportionately, far more officers were likely to be professionals in civil life, and their age difference, about four years older than enlisted men, reflected their greater accumulated wealth."
https://www.amazon.com/General-Lees-Army-Victory-Collapse/dp/1416596976/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276825358&sr=1-1
Not at all. Confederates were so divided that I can not fathom how they were able to last so long. http://www.amazon.com/South-Divided-Portraits-Dissent-Confederacy/dp/B005FOH3K6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1331184410&sr=8-2
That is a really fascinating graphic.
It would also be interesting to compare this to uses of the Confederate flag. It's been a while since I read it, but The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem gives an interesting look at the the history of the flag and how it's been used over the years.
> John Coski reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War. He shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement. We gain unique insight into the fine line between the flag's use as a historical emblem and as an invocation of the Confederate nation and all it stood for.
I highly recommend reading "The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History"
> I've seen estimates indicating that around 10% of Confederate soldiers actually owned slaves.
Actual ownership of slaves is a poor metric. After all, slave renters, slave patrols, overseers, and the wives and children of slave-holders did not necessarily hold legal title to any slaves, either. Yet it would be foolish to suggest that they were not intimately involved in the institution.
I suppose that if you're trying to quantify the connection between Confederate soldiers and slavery, you could do worse than looking at the number of Confederate soldiers who came from slave-holding families. Glatthaar, in General Lee's Army, estimates that 25% of Confederate soldiers volunteering in 1861 (before the draft, and before the extension of enlistments for the duration of the war) came from such families, making them "42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population."
Of course, this quantification is all rather academic and irrelevant. As Christopher Graham at the American Civil War Museum explains, "[o]ne did not need to own slaves to commit to the broad Confederate national vision that was based on slavery, or to fear the outcome of slavery’s destruction." The Confederate South was, in its own mind, a Herrenvolk democracy in which every white man had an interest in the maintenance of a racial order defined by slavery and white supremacy, regardless of whether they owned slaves themselves.
> I tend to agree with Shelby Foote that the average Confederate soldier was fighting because the southern way of life, which clearly included an economy fueled by slave labor, was threatened, or, at least they perceived it to be under threat. So, there were a tapestry of reasons that can't just be distilled down to support for slavery or white supremacy (although, the vast majority clearly were both).
Sure. I agree.
> I think it's totally legitimate to discuss why the average Confederate soldier fought in the war because, without the formidable man power confronting the Union, there would have been no rebellion.
Of course it's legitimate. That's why prominent historians have been doing it for decades. But we have to draw a bright line of demarcation between talking about "the cause of the Civil War" and talking about "why the men fought." Those are two very different questions. Each has a distinct, if related, answer. Confusing the two is a common tactic of Lost Cause writers who either are not historians or are historians committing professional malpractice.
> Somehow, the cultural elites and the media were successful in mobilizing men to die for their individual states and /or the Confederacy itself.
This is exactly the sort of "incomplete picture" I talked about above. Seeing the Confederate story as one of common men mobilized by elites to fight a war removes moral and political agency from those common men. This is a dangerous oversimplification.
> Lee didn't own slaves, his family freed them years before.
In 1857, George Washington Parke Custis - the father of Mary Custis Lee (the wife of Robert E. Lee) died. In his will, he stipulated that all of the Arlington slaves should be freed upon his death if the estate was found to be in good financial standing or within five years otherwise (technically, this was a court ruling interpreting the relevant clause).
Robert E. Lee was the executor of his estate, and his wife inherited the Arlington estate (and slaves).
Robert E. Lee issued his Emancipation Proclamation freeing those slaves on January 2, 1863. The day after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Regarding slaves on the Arlington estate in Northern Virginia, which had been in the hands of the Union since secession, and which had been occupied by Union troops since May 24, 1861.
> This is repeated again and again for many people fighting. People fought in that war for a bunch of reasons.
"Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally. This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. That contrasted starkly with the 24.9 percent, or one in every four households, that owned slaves in the South, based on the 1860 census. Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population.
The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful. One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. Nor did the direct exposure stop there. Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation. The fact that their paper notes frequently depicted scenes of slaves demonstrated the institution’s central role and symbolic value to the Confederacy.
More than half the officers in 1861 owned slaves, and none of them lived with family members who were slaveholders." - historian Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse
They may have fought for many reasons... but an awfully large portion of those reasons involved slavery.
Colonel Fremantle recorded meeting a Captain Chubb who recruited a black crew for his ship in Boston, sailed to Galveston, and sold the goods and then the crew. He was imprisoned on his return to Boston, but escaped.
Lol. One reviewer is not happy about this book at all:
>VERY one-sided view of the War of Northern Aggression
>Sad to say, biased writers are still leaving out the facts. I was disappointed in this thick book with page after page of the same old revisionist history we've been fed since the North invaded the South and denied them their Constitutionally guaranteed State's Rights. The South had no desire to fight, they simply wanted to secede quietly, then live and let live. A better book to read that is succinct, completely factual and not nearly as drawn out is "Facts The Historians Leave Out" John S. Tilley : The author states his facts well and clearly. He acknowledges that both the North and the South were responsible for the Civil War. The book was thought-provoking, making me really consider what I believed.
Emphasis added for irony.
This was asked about a year ago: see here
I'll reccomend again the book I pushed there: The Cause of All Nations by Don Doyle
>Current historiography tries to make the civil war only about slavery.
That's because it's correct. Slavery was the single largest and most consistent political battle of the 50 years leading up to the civil war
>Older historiography emphasized the different tribes coming over from England and their interactions e.g. Albion's Seed. Later historiography still has how the actual civil war was an irrational act brought on by hatred between groups e.g. Madness Rules the Hour
Yes that's because historiography has advanced. Older historiography was also based on flawed ideas like Great Men theory and was by and large reductionist and not focused on empiricism. I'm not sure what argument you think you're making by saying "older historiography said thusly", yeah they did, and they were wrong.
Just like older anthropology was wrong in its usage of Tylor's view of primitive culture evolution
Just like older psychology was wrong in its focus on psychoanalysis.
These fields advance as time goes on and outdated ideas and unsophisticated methods of analysis are cast aside
You're not going to find any modern historical consensus in academia that the civil war was primarily caused by anything other than slavery.
Pick up General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse. Very good book on the Army of Northern Virginia.
Here's a link:
https://www.amazon.com/General-Lees-Army-Victory-Collapse/dp/1416596976
Actually I think he's just an idiot. It links to his facebook page, and this is listed as one of his favorite books. Violence and whiskey are his two top activities, and he seems to have a hard-on for Tyler Durden. I know his type, grade A twit with a high horse and a book of conspiracy theories.
Potentially not. The education system in the south is fraught with Lost Cause-ers, unfortunately. A lot of people take that as gospel and never look into it further.
For anybody hoping to slip free of that propaganda and return to reality, I recommend this book as a primer.
It’s actually a myth that slaveowning was confined to the confederate elite. Sure, the elite 1% were the big plantation owners with dozens to hundreds of slaves, but upwards 30% of white families in the Confederate states owned slavery per the 1860 census, with that number climbing toward 50% in the most pro-secessionist states like South Carolina and Mississippi. Another sizable chunk of the population supported the slave economy in other ways even if they didn’t win slaves themselves.
The whole 1% thing comes from a somewhat willful misreading of the statistics to convince people that slavery wasn’t that big a deal. 1% of the US population owned slaves. Which includes the northern free states. About 3% of the Southern population owned slaves. But “Southern population” includes the slaves themselves. About 5% of free Southerns owned slaves. But only one person in the household usually “owned” the slaves, so (usually) the wife and children are excluded from that number too.
Looking specifically at volunteers for the Army of Northern Virginia in 1861, about 1 in 10 soldiers personally owned slaves and another 25% or so lived with parents who owned slaves. Still another 10% lived in households where a non-family member owned slaves, which usually meant they lived as workers on a slave-based farm. Source That means somewhere between 40 and 50% of the Confederate Army had a personal stake in preserving slavery, even before you count those that had a role in it without living in a household that owned spaces.
I’m sure far fewer Union soldiers had such a personal stake in “Northern industry” or “high tariffs,” which is what the neoconfederates try to say the war was all about.
This is an excellent comment, I wish I could give you gold. I just downloaded a sample of the book, the first essay is supposed to be one of the better ones so maybe most of it will be in the sample for now, ha.
Here's a link if anyone is feeling lazy:
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Lost-Cause-Civil-History-ebook/dp/B00866HAI0
I can point you to sources but I know nothing of that area particularly.
Check out these: http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Conflict-Decisive-Guerrillas-American/dp/0807832774/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334960811&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/South-Divided-Portraits-Dissent-Confederacy/dp/B005FOH3K6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334960827&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Bitterly-Divided-Souths-Inner-Civil/dp/1595584757/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1
However, if you really want to know, the only way would be to go to Humphreys County and check out the local archives, courthouse records (see what people were being arrested for [Also a great way to put some real local historical events for added drama!]), check out the museums and see what their reading rooms have, etc..... That would be your best bet for finding information. Also check out local universities and see if their archives have any letters or newspapers.
The Appalachian area was rife with pro-unionist sentiment. It was like a Civil War within a Civil War.
Hope this helps some.
That was kind of a metaphorical throwaway phrase, but I did recently see multiple copies of The Real Lincoln in a little history sub-section that also held the Kennedy brothers and their South was Right nonsense.
Always one copy of the latter in the B&N I go to despite my many requests they recategorize that as horror. They don't think I'm very funny.
Oh I have a relevant study that absolutely demolishes this arguement
https://deadconfederates.com/2011/04/28/ninety-eight-percent-of-texas-confederate-soldiers-never-owned-a-slave/
The relevant part from the article which comes from this book
https://www.amazon.com/General-Lees-Army-Victory-Collapse/dp/1416596976/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276825358&sr=1-1
>Even more revealing was their attachment to slavery. Among the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally. This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves. Yet more than one in every four volunteers that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Combining those soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. That contrasted starkly with the 24.9 percent, or one in every four households, that owned slaves in the South, based on the 1860 census. Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population.
>The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful. One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in households headed by non family members who did. This figure, combined with the 36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. Nor did the direct exposure stop there. Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation. The fact that their paper notes frequently depicted scenes of slaves demonstrated the institution’s central role and symbolic value to the Confederacy
It is not narrow to say that those that joined to resist the north were doing so motivated heavily by slavery
>Historian Joseph Glatthaar’s statistical analysis of the 1861 volunteers in what would become the Army of Northern Virginia reveals that one in 10 owned a slave and that one in four lived with parents who were slave-owners. Both exceeded ratios in the general population, in which one in 20 owned a slave and one in five lived in a slaveholding household. “Thus,” Glatthaar notes, “volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population.” In short, Confederate volunteers actually owned more slaves than the general population.
>In fact, non-slaveholding soldiers from regions with fewer African Americans likely received greater exposure to slavery for having joined the army. The military regularly used slaves and implemented proslavery policies. The army conscripted slave labor on a massive scale for transportation, and in construction of military defenses. It also captured and returned to slavery thousands of escaped and free black men and women. Soldiers acted on fears of “servile insurrection” when they summarily murdered United States Colored Troops at Fort Pillow and the Battle of the Crater.
https://acwm.org/blog/myths-and-misunderstandings-slaveholding-and-confederate-soldier
There is an excellent book on this subject, Cry Havoc!: The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861.
It's kind of unfair to say Didn't the South start the war, though, AND fire the first shots....
If you wanted to say Didn't South Carolina start the war... then maybe yes. But the war was a product of crazies in both the North AND the South (abolitionists and secessionists), and not fully supported in either place.
Even just before the outbreak of the war there were meetings in the South over whether or not to secede.
Every state except South Carolina had at least one Union brigade. Most states sent several thousand men, tens of thousands even in the cases of North Carolina and Tennessee. But (if you'll read that book) the Ft. Sumter situation was as much a result of Lincoln's machinations as it was Southern ones. Many people wanted to evacuate the garrison and wait for cooler heads to prevail.
TLDR Both the North AND the South were dragged to war by small, but vocal and powerful, groups of people who played on nationalist sentiments to convince their countrymen to fight.
Ninja Edit Another of my favorite Civil War books, The Jewish Confederates. Kind of a sad read because the Jews were made to be sort of scapegoats for the loss of the Civil War in the same way blacks were. The South was much much more hateful after the loss.
Current historiography tries to make the civil war only about slavery. But it wasn't. Older historiography emphasized the different tribes coming over from England and their interactions e.g. Albion's Seed. Later historiography still has how the actual civil war was an irrational act brought on by hatred between groups e.g. Madness Rules the Hour
> I literally started a book about the Civil War
Which book? I'm looking to start to know more, too. I've started with "The Myth of the Lost Cause."
> I have the same cognitive struggle.
If you have the time read this book and itll clear it right up for you.
I'm not disagreeing with your argument, I think there are great points in there I would like to discuss.
However, I want to point out that your statistics on how many people owned slaves is wrong. Its factually inaccurate and has been repeatedly disproved.
Summarization here
Relevant reading
To sum up the largest point, you are taking census data after states independantly banned slavery (and additionally stopped recording illegal slave holdings). You're also taking individual slave holdings which ignores the most common form of slave holdings, family slave holdings.
The same census also points out;
> an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned slaves. [And in states where slavery was still lega] Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far less (20 percent in Arkansas).
And even if you factor in the entire individual slave holdings, inclusive of places where slavery was illegal, and exclusive of family slave holdings, the figure is 5% (4.9%) using the incomplete census data.
It makes me feel like I cannot trust your arguments - even the well made ones - when you start off the bat with a disproven and factually inaccurate representations. One that is commonly known to be wrong for more than a decade. Sorry, not biting on a post like that.
The beauty of /r/AskHistorians is that is an academic subreddit with sourcing built in. But, here are two things that I would read:
In general, I would very much agree with your proposed "midway view," which is a far cry from your original statement that South Carolina was not succeeding to protect slavery. This "midway view" recognizes that the fundamental reason for Southern secession was slavery and then there was a reaction to Lincoln's attempt to preserve the Union. There are very few reputable scholars who go so far to say that state's rights or anything else besides slavery were the dominant cause of secession (Donald Livingston comes to mind). Again, if you were to read any mainstream history, they would all focus on the centrality of slavery to the creation of the CSA.
So what you really have here is the Confederacy, a regime that stood for the preservation of slavery. Certainly, I cannot read the consciences of every person who waves a Confederate flag, nor did I ever claim to. But again with the question of monuments, I see little reason as a Catholic to defend a bygone regime that was created to protect a horrible sin. Honor fallen soldiers? Sure. Put up statues of Jefferson Davis in your town square? No.
IIRC Turner was still there and the Civil War](http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Lost-Cause-Civil-History-ebook/dp/B00866HAI0)*. This is a good way to make SS jokes.
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https://www.amazon.com/South-Right-James-Ronald-Kennedy/dp/1565540247
The best way for a British person to start learning about the Civil War, is to read what a British person learned when he visited the Civil War. The Fremantle Diary: A Journal of the Confederacy.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1580800858/ref=redir_mdp_mobile
http://www.amazon.com/ECHOES-OF-GLORY-VOLUME-Echoes/dp/0737031530
Every Reenactor should have a copy of the bible... "Echoes of Glory"...
You will LOVE this book if you want history without revisionism:
https://www.amazon.com/South-Right-James-Ronald-Kennedy/dp/1565540247
1 is actually necessary for understanding the division between northern and southern culture.
2 is useful for putting the civil war in its proper international context. The fact that a lot of Europeans fought in the American Civil War is something hardly anyone remembers today.
And the reason so many people are focusing on the Civil War is because the US before that point was really a different country than the one after.
I'm not one of those people who call northern people Yankees on a daily basis (just used it to try and get my point across in this post). I don't call the Civil war the "War of northern Aggression". I don't have a thick southern accent. I don't spit dip into a spittoon. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure you didn't think I was some stereotypical southerner.
Atlanta being small doesn't make it right to burn the whole place down. Sherman ordered his troops to burn down any public building that could be used to aid confederate troops. It may sound fine if you're thinking barracks, post offices, city halls, etc. but the fact is that his troops did a lot worse. They burned down houses, and killed civilians to make an example to the people. Sherman openly believed in Total Warfare, which means you demoralize the citizens so much that they no longer support the war, and the call the boys back home, which basically means the other side will surrender. So then you have to ask yourself, is destroying thousands of innocent people's lives worth not destroying the lives of thousands of soldiers? That is a real hard question to answer, and you can understand why the people who got the raw end of the deal become angry.
I'm very sorry people from Georgia called you a Yankee. I've never actually hated someone I don't know and blamed them for doing something they didn't do. Not everyone feels that way. My mom is from Atlanta and went to college in south Georgia, where she got called a Yankee, so no, people are not always reasonable.
> And wikipedia downplays Sherman's atrociousness because it is more concerned with fact than the stories that southerners tell to their kids.
If you are trying to say that Sherman didn't do wrong, then you probably shouldn't be in this argument.
Wikipedia downplays Sherman's role because people would rather believe that the world is black and white; that the good guys are always good, and the bad guys are always bad. Why do you think people don't like to accept that MLK or JFK had extramarital affairs? We think of them so highly that we forget that they are human beings, and are capable of making human errors. We'd rather ignore the facts, and romanticize fantasy. No one really wants to think that the Union troops were capable of anything bad when they were fighting slavery. No one wants to take a good look at an ambiguous situation and form an real opinion.
EDIT* Sorry, I don't own any complete detailed anthologies of the war, and am not anywhere near a professional historian, but google got me this. It's just people arguing about whether Sherman's acts were justifiable.
And by the way, don't even try to say that anyone saying Sherman acted inhumanely is just repeating stories that southerners tell their kids, because that a pretty silly way of saying you don't like to look at evidence. and I could always say that you are more interested in stories that northerners tell their kids, than you are in fact. It's a double edged sword, and you probably don't want to deal with it.
EDIT** Ok, here is a book written about Sherman's war crimes.
I'm sorry to tell you, but most Civil War historians will tell you that the north's atrocities get downplayed in history books, documentaries, etc. Here is the only thing I've found so far on Wiki (read the Total Warfare and Modern Assessment articles).
Yes, I made up the fact that rape and pillage occur in war. I wish.
here
here
here
It wasn't his sole property, it was the home of his family. They rendered his family homeless in retaliation for what he did. That was the sole purpose in their own words - retaliation and subjugation. So yeah, collective punishment.
No problem!
Yeah, I'm trying to think of books that he may not have read. There's a good chance he's already read Foote or McPherson. If you're going obscure those autobiographies might be a good start.
If you're willing to shell out a little more (though still under $100), there's the Echoes of Glory illustrated series, mainly about the arms & equipment used by both armies. More than fifteen years after I got my set, I still thumb through them.
Just thought of another: Confederates in the Attic is a great look at modern-day obsession with the War, especially in the South. His description of Civil War reenactors is dead on from what I'd experienced when I was part of the hobby.
Another good one he may not have read yet is Stonewall of the West, about Confederate General Pat Cleburne. Cleburne was a flamboyant and fascinating figure, easily one of the best division commanders on either side, but his career was hampered because of his controversial suggestion that the Confederacy should arm the slaves in exchange for their freedom.
The census data you cited does not contradict what the poster was saying. Just counting the number of slave owner does not show how rampant slavery is relative to family units.
Let's say you own a car. The car is in your name and that's the only car in your family of 5. All five in your family would benefit from having a car, but technically only 1/5 of the people were car owners. Furthermore, let's say your car is leased from a dealership. and the dealership owns 1000 cars that they lease out to families. Now 5000 people benefits from having cars, but only 1/5000 (the dealership owner) would be considered a car owner.
In a statistical study for a book by Joseph Glatthar, he found that even though only 4.9% of people owned slaves in slave owning states, 24.9% of people had slaves in their household. Over 44.4% of solders in Robert E Lee's army had slave in their household. source
You should check out Robert Siegler's four books on South Carolina units, it's very comprehensive (down to individual company commanders in many cases) and breaks SC down regionally. Here's a link to one of them. It might also do you some good to contact the Relic Room in Columbia.
If I can point out any more SC specific Civil War resources let me know.
> Here is a good video on this topic
No, it's not - it's by someone who has no idea what they're talking about, either.
Educating yourself via "Rebel Media" youtube videos isn't the wisest move: if you want to learn about the causes of the Civil War, why don't you read the actual words of the people who did the rebelling? You might start here with the 4 declarations regarding the causes of secession issued by seceding states, or with the Vice-President of the Confederacy's cornerstone speech. Or maybe you could just read what other Confederates were saying.
Or if the Confederates' own words aren't good enough, how about some basic reasoning: why do you think it is that all of the states which attempted to secede had more than 20% of their populations as slaves; that no state with more than 20% of the population enslaved attempted to secede; and that secession occurred directly in response to the election of the moderate Republican Abraham Lincoln?
Or if neither reasoning nor evidence helps you, how about math? According to the 1860 US census, among the states which attempted to secede, 30.8% of families owned slaves: according to the exhaustive study of the Army of Northern Virginia performed by historian Joseph Glatthaar, about 10% of the 1861 enlistees personally owned slaves (along with more than half of the officers), and very nearly half either owned slaves or lived in a slaveowning household. And that doesn't count the ones who merely had friends and neighbors who owned slaves; who ran businesses which rented slaves; who made their money by doing business with slaveowners; who aspired to own slaves; or who simply believed that slavery was morally right and liked having someone to feel superior to.
> Do you think with the recent wars the US has been involved in that the people fighting them were the bad guys?
I don't think there has to be only one set of 'bad guys'. And people who aren't particularly nice can still sometimes do the right thing.
https://www.amazon.com/South-Right-James-Ronald-Kennedy/dp/1565540247
This book was wrong.....on so so many levels.
History textbooks today are so beyond horrible. It's part of why I hated history classes in school. They ignore so many primary documents; it's quite sad.
I would suggest you check out this book...
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything-ebook/dp/B0041OT8EK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405829084&sr=8-1&keywords=lies+me+teacher+told+me
And this one if you want more of a only Civil War book...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Confederate-Neo-Confederate-Reader-Great/dp/1604732199/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405829118&sr=8-1&keywords=neoconfederate+reader