Whistling Dixie

Scott Hardie | April 10, 2013
A number of people wrote yesterday about the 148th anniversary of Appomattox, when General Lee surrendered to General Grant and the Confederate States of America laid down for good. It's been a century and a half, and the memory of the Confederacy is still strong and still popular in the south, along with a rejection of federal powers and northern interests. The south has long balked at the idea that "until Vietnam, the U.S. never lost a war," because of course they did: They struggled for many years with the mindset of losing and being conquered, instead of living truly free.

Two questions spring to my mind from this:

1) If the Civil War had lasted only a few months, such as if General McClellan had used his overwhelming numbers to nip the new rebellion in the bud instead of giving them much too long to grow and dig in, would the Confederacy still be remembered as fondly today? Or was the idea of it so strong at its inception that any length of time it had lasted would have been enough to cement its legacy in the minds of southerners?

2) If slavery had never existed in North America, for whatever reason, but early America was still a mix of rich industrial northern states and poor agricultural southern states, would the Civil War have still happened? And if it had not happened, how would America be different today?

Of course, I can't think about any of this without "Ashokan Farewell" playing in my head. Thank you Ken Burns.

Samir Mehta | April 10, 2013
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Tony Peters | April 10, 2013
Samir I think of all you conclusions "c" it the one that is most striking because in my mind there are many similarities between the pre civil war south and post Tsarist Russia, the only real differences are the color of the field workers and the terminology used plantation vs commune, peasant vs slave etc but the functional reality was very similar...though anyone who wrote a book comparing the two would probably be lynched.