Karl Slinkard wrote:
> Mr. Mandel appears to see the US Civil War in as starkly moralistic terms
> as he does the Viet Nam War. Without denying in any part the horror of
> black slavery, I submit that the Civil War contained other elements as
> well.
The large bulk of the ordinary soldiers in all wars ought to be seen as more
victims than perpetrators. Moralism is usually ugly and always counter-
productive politically. What makes the pilot of the Enola Gray [sp?] a
war criminal is not dropping the bomb but continuing after the fact to
glory in his action. The criminals in any glorification of the Confederate
dead are not the Confederate Dead but those who continue that
glorification up to the present -- including those congressmen who voted
to posthumously return Robert E. Lee's citizenship. Why should we
honor a man who prostituted himself to the slavedrivers' insurrection?
The confederates executed black prisoners of war -- could anyone
provide a factoid linking Lee directly to one or more of those executions?
Karl Slinkard wrote:
> Mr. Mandel appears to see the US Civil War in as starkly moralistic terms
> as he does the Viet Nam War. Without denying in any part the horror of
> black slavery, I submit that the Civil War contained other elements as
> well.
Yes. But before focusing on those other elements (those elements not linked
to slavery) one should consider the extent to which the slaves themselves
contributed to making slavery the central issue. Slaves knew before Lincoln
did that the war meant the end of slavery. (See Barabara Jeanne Fields,
*Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the
Nineteenth Century*.) The war turned into a war for the abolition of
slavery more in spite of than because of the northern leadership.
> For instance, the Northeastern capitalists managed to split the
> slave owning South from the free soil midwest so that it could colonize and
> exploit both
This makes capitalism sound too much like a backroom conspiracy.
Carrol Cox
> . Most of my immediate relatives came from Tennessee. I have
> found their graves on both sides. I would remind us all, that history is
> written by the winners, and real life is a bit more complex than simple
> good and evil.
> Karl Slinkard, ex-hippie, ex-soldier, ex-good ole boy, ex-freedom marcher,
> ex-drunk, ex-doper, etc.
> kslinkar@library.berkeley.edu
>
> At 01:19 PM 6/17/00 PST, you wrote:
> >On memorials to the Confederate dead, Langston Hughes wrote me in
> >1951 with kind words about my "stirring poem" opening with a
> >stanza on that subject:
> > " The South alone,' my host had said
> > "remembers its dishonorable dead."
> > His arm swept round the ordered Square
> > to mock the statues frozen there
> > of generals whose armies bled
> > that white might eat the black man's bread.
> >Hughes card and the poem are reproduced in my Saying No To Power,
> >p. 314.
> > William Mandel
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