The idea that there are still parks and places named after Civil War Generals from the South

[Xithras]

74. Because most honestly didn't look at it that way.

You've got to remember that there was no U.S. Army in 1861. Each state had its own military units, and those units answered to their governor. In the case of national war, the individual states would place their armies under a central command (our current national Army wasn't created until 1917).

That's why you get guys like Robert E Lee, who freed the slaves he inherited, opposed the dissolution of the Union, and was married to a woman who advocated emancipation for all slaves (she was also George Washington's great-granddaughter), fighting for the South. Not because they were evil or defending slavery, but because they were military officers within the existing military command structure who were simply following the command structure they'd always followed.

Lincoln and Johnson both recognized this, which is why full amnesties were extended to the soldiers and officers who fought for the South, and why those soldiers were granted Veterans statuses equal to those of the soldiers who fought for the Union.


Or, look at it this way: Why do we glorify and respect soldiers who fight for America today, when they're largely just fighting for control of oil, to keep brown people under control, and to preserve the economic interests of the powers that be? They are, after all, just occupiers who are killing people in their own homelands, right? Shouldn't we look at them with disdain too?

NO. We don't hold it against the soldiers because we understand that they are simply doing the duty for the country they swore to protect, and following the orders handed down from the politicians above. I think that GWB is an evil man for what he did to Iraq. I don't think that the American soldiers who served in Iraq share any of that blame. I think that the Vietnam war was despicable and evil, and yet I don't hold it against the men who were drafted and sent over there to shoot people who were simply trying to drive foreign powers out of their homeland.

The Confederate soldiers are no different. The blame for the war lays with the politicians who started it an the Confederate leaders who chose war over peace. It belongs to the major slaveholders who demanded it, and the greedy capitalists who believed that the value of some humans was limited to what they could fetch at auction. The rank and file soldiers and officers who fought and died 150 years ago were no different than the rank and file soldiers and officers who fight and die today. Their government drafted them, it ordered them to do something, and they did it.