Hats off to the the Union "Billy Yanks" and Honest Abe. nytimes/roomfordebate/2013/07/02/who-won-the-civil-war/?ref=opinion "I know the logic: The racism that emerged in the postwar U.S., especially but not only in the South, looked like slavery under a different name; the South won the war of history and memory, securing the honor of the cause and forcing reunion on Southern white supremacist terms. And indeed at a certain, meta-historical level, that is hard to dispute, especially the latter point. We still do battle to displace and discountenance ancestral Confederate histories. But this is a novelty idea, and it would be a mistake to make too much of it. As provocation it works fine; as history not so much. The U.S. won the Civil War. It mattered, really mattered, that the South lost. The Confederate States of America was defeated, definitively defeated, politically and militarily and its path forward -- the explicitly proslavery anti-democratic path for which Confederates seceded and fought -- was cut off from history. Various forms of coerced labor, hierarchical race relations and political disfranchisement would be reinvented. But the Confederacy fought under the flag of slavery, staked its claim to world power on it, and went down with it. Anything else would have been disastrous, not just for the roughly three million people of African descent in the C.S.A. but for those still enslaved in Cuba and Brazil and all those who in a different history would have continued to fill the slave ships and coffles that reproduced the institution of African slavery across time and space. History turned in a new direction with Confederate defeat
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 08:56:27 +0000