About your Confederate ancestors ...

I had ancestors on both sides of the recent Unpleasantness between the Dix and the Yanks. Union boy, for example, contracted TB in Andersonville and died of it walking back home to Pennsylvania after the war. Southern side of the family optimistically moved West around 1900 where they were extremely miserable for a several years until they actually learned to do the ordinary everyday work that ordinary people do: one of them said later it was good they'd left, cuz they didn't know how to do anything in Virginia, where they had servants who did it all

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMHyovwX7JM

:shrug:

and I didn't know until I started doing genealogical research that this large German population was adamantly opposed to slavery. There are lots of stories of these folks in Greene County, Tennessee evading the Confederate army. I've got one story of one of them getting hung by the confederates because he wouldn't tell them where he had hidden his horses that they wanted.

Sadly, I wonder if Greene County, Tennessee's Northern sympathies were what led Lincoln to choose that ass Andrew Johnson as his VP -- that's where he was from.

owned a couple of slaves in Ark, though he died long before the war.

Maternally, I don't think any of them did, though they did own a slave or two.

they paid for poor people to go in their stead, like any good Southern gentleman. :)

Of course, Maryland was part of the north technically, but the area around Baltimore, where my family came from, held deeply southern sentiments.

I don't know how he ended up in nebraska though.

My ancestors on my mother's side were still in Sweden.

Although I strongly, and in no uncertain terms, disagree
with the cause for which he fought, I admire his dedication
to it. I cannot judge him by my contemporary standards.

The only ancestor that I'm aware of hightailed it to Pennsylvania
and fought for the North. I suppose I completed THAT circle. :)

My great grandparents came to the US from Poland, Italy & Sicily some time around 1900. And, they all settled in Connecticut.

was my grandfather telling me "there was not a civil war, there was a second American revolution and we lost." He said worse things that than, and was pretty racist. When I was 14, we were in Savannah, GA and he was letting it all out. I finally told him that he was a bigot, and that while I couldn't change his out-dated, prejudiced opinions, he could at least respect me enough to not be a racist in front of me. I also realized that he was a product of his generation and geography, but that it was a lousy excuse to act like that and not grow up.

He called me a god damned liberal, and I had no idea what that meant. I deduced that it must have something to do with freedom and liberty based on the word roots, and told him as much. He chuckled.

For that among other things, we often did not get along, although we had a grudging respect for each other too despite being so opposite. About 10-20 years later, in the middle of a conversation he asked me if I was still a god damn liberal, and I told him that he could give me whatever label he wanted; that I had many viewpoints and ideals which he would call liberal, but that I did not necessarily define myself any certain way. He was quiet for a moment, then finally told me, "you know, I think you turned out smarter than the other two." He said it in front of my dad and brother, who tended to suck up to him and buy into the patriarch of the family thing, whereas I did not. It was kind of a shitty thing to say, but it also on some level made me feel better, than despite periods of him refusing to talk to me, or him being an ass, he still respected my opinion even if we differed. Maybe because we differed.

All his people were from Arkansas going way back. When he got to the off color parts of the family legends of Confederate veterans, or maybe I should say the on color parts, there was usually a shrug and a passing note that "that's the way people talked back then." I think he was a little embarrassed about how prejudiced his people had been, but he obviously also remembered his family with a lot of love and admiration for the lives they carved out for themselves with hard work in northern Arkansas. He'd say things like, "but things are different now."

Truth is, things weren't different then, but it's the people who are different. We grow and adapt and change, and we change our values and the parts of the family legends we tell change over time too. I've passed a couple family stories along and I don't mind saying I cleaned up the on-color language and ideas wherever I thought it was wrong. My people who were Confederates soldiers and supporters were wrong, but they did believe they were putting their lives on the line to protect their way of life, which is always at least a little bit noble.

I might feel a little different if there were any slaveholders in my line, but far as our family records go, we was too poor. That's one more family tradition I'm carrying on pretty good. PB was evolved enough to fight for desegregating public schools in Oklahoma in the 1950s. His son, my dad, is a serious liberal and never took to those family stories too much. I think he was of the generation that saw the full ugly of southern racism show up on TV. I still kinda like the stories cause they are very antiauthoritarian and involve my great great great granduncle getting pissed on by a Yankee soldier while he hid under a log trying to make it back home. A story that awesome, no matter how altered in its retellings, belongs to the ages.

I love family history.

Purely pragmatic, not very "proud" and borderline mercenary. Before the War, a good number of them managed "waystations" on the Freedom Trail - that is, so long as they themselves were living comfortably. If times got a bit tough, they just wouldn't take a chance.
Somehow, they never ended up drafted. GGGG-father started up a non-segregated country store and barber shop in NE Missouri after the war - his saying was "commerce knows no color..."


Haele

was about 12 at the outbreak of hostilities.
He ran away from home in Birmingham twice to join his older brothers.
Both times his daddy sent an old family 'retainer' (slave) off with a mule to bring him back.
Happily Charlie never saw combat or I guess I probably wouldn't be here.
I'm more than ready to bury it.

ironically, on the other side (Arkansas) there were Confederate veterans and slaves - who chose to stay with the family after the war. Things are NEVER simple.

One of them (the guy in the middle in this picture) got himself shot during the invasion of Atlanta.

He was a recent immigrant too.

As far as I know, there's no treason in my family. :woohoo:

The Rebels shelled the fort not the other way around.

They resorted to violence first.

That would make it the War of Southern Aggression.

All because they wanted to keep other people as property devoid of human rights.


Disclaimer: All of my ancestors here at the time fought for the Union (Illinois and Michigan). The rest were in Germany and Austria-Hungary.

:)

the war of southern treason.

The Hungarians oppressed the Slovak people.

at the time...so, no Confederates that I'm aware of.

Some may have been in New York, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, I guess...but none in the Confederate states.

a unit that saw more battles than any other in the Union Army.

all my ancestors were Yankees.

My great-grandfather was wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness, and survived. He also survived Gettysburg, where he died of a heart attack 50 years later at a reunion. Ken Burns actually had film of that reunion in his Civil War documentary.

He was a captain, from what I understand, and fought in the Army of the Potomac.

He must have been quite a loser who somehow ended up a winner.

He seems to have lived, which, accounts I would guess, for my existence.

The war, from what I can tell, is almost over, but nobody's really confident of that really happening.

Even my Kentucky ancestors were with the Union army.

One died from battle in a Union prison camp in Tennessee. One was injured, treated in a Union prison camp and became interested in medicine - while a prisoner, he learned enough medicine to get a medical license from the State of Alabama although he never attended college. One an arm but managed to be a successful farmer, even driving a team with one hand and his stump. One died of pneumonia, leaving his pregnant wife alone in the world. She had a boy, and struggled to raise him with help from her family until she remarried.

There was a doctor on the Union side - my parents have his medical license signed by Abraham Lincoln. That side of the family had fewer members of the right age to fight and therefore fewer deaths and injuries during the war and fewer stories passed down.

Neither side of the family 'bragged' about their Civil War experience, unlike the ancestors in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, or the wars of the twentieth century. The Southern side was very aware of the tragedy of the war and the later generations were not prone to consider it romantic or justified. Whatever the family members who fought or who lived through it thought, they did not pass down any bitterness or wish to continue the conflict to their children.

in WWI, too.

Don't know much about the civil war bunch, just that they had been well off generations before and were not so much by the 1860's...Mostly factory workers now.

Down hill all the way.
mark

I guess the closest is the "get over it" one, but that's nonsensical. No one is "over it," not in the South nor the rest of the country. People that claim not to care tend actually to care more than the average.

(And before anyone starts, I've been involved in ethnographic studies of this, so if one wants to argue the point, please bring something other than a sound bite.)

Anyway, I would simply say that I do not subscribe to the puritanical belief system that inspires this "pride" thing modern-day neo-Confederates fall into, nor am I particularly ashamed of them for my own sake. I wasn't alive. I can neither claim credit nor justifiably feel guilt for what they did or did not do. I choose to study it, which is the main reason I can't go with the "get over it" thing.

My ancestors were mostly Confederates, some fire-eaters, some reluctant, one *very* reluctant. The latter makes a great story I intend to write and publish eventually, once I finally track down all the records necessary to prove some of the more salacious details. He was one of my g-g-g-g-grandfathers. He joined both armies, never fought a single military battle, and lived an interesting few years that took him through Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Indian Territory where he finally had a town named after him. (Well, he bought it basically.) I'm not proud of him, but he sure is interesting.

I did have one rather notable Yankee ancestor on my Mom's side. Last name was Todd. Had a sister named Mary who married some tall, ugly guy.

Only they called it "conscripted."

I had 2 ancestors that I know of in the Confederate Army. Likely they were drafted; I don't know.

But remember, to many Confederate soldiers, they were fighting an army that invaded their homeland. Same as when GWB invaded Iraq.

Many of the Union soldiers were immigrants. On the Union side, men could get out of the draft by hiring a substitute to go in their place or else paying for exemption--paying to get out of the draft.

Many joined the Union Army.

Right now I am reading "Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864," which explains that Sherman's Army was able to gather enough recruits from "liberated" portions of Northern Alabama to for a Union Alabama Regiment.

Several Generals in Sherman's Army, including the great general George Thomas were Virginians. In fact West Virginia seceded from Virginia there were so many unionists there.

Probably Eastern Tennessee would have liked to have seceded from West Tennessee. There were several Union Tennessee regiments.

Conversely many Union Slave States had Confederate Regiments, including Missouri - which had its own private war - Kentucky, and Maryland.

The Confederate general who fought Grant at Vicksburg was a Southerner by marriage. John C. Pemberton was from Pennsylvania and fought hard for the Confederacy, albeit often without much trust from some in the Confederacy.

But you're right. Many confederates were drafted, often under a threat of execution if they refused to participate in the treason against the national government.

as Twain described in "The Campaign that Failed" -- skeedaddling. Conscription, necessary for both sides' war effort, nevertheless seems to have been widely unpopular on both sides. And the Confederacy, of course, allowed military exemptions based on large slave-holding

Here's an interesting contemporary letter denying that there was any Southern conscription:




<edit:> The letter was somewhat written after the first confederate conscription act passed in early 1862

and actually a lot people who have I come across with my last name are who aren't related to me are black (so it's likely some were slave owners) The ancestors that we traced back to the Civil War from my family tree fought for the North and were from Kentucky and Southern IL. My mom's side were all sipping wine in France at that time. It's shameful that slavery ever existed.

Wherever the wars were, they were not.

Things looking a little testy in Europe? Move to America. The North and South about to fight? Move to the Wild West.

In World War II neither one of my grandfathers carried a gun. One was armed with a welding torch, the other with a slide rule and a typewriter.

They were fierce and stubborn pacifists the entire lot of them. I suspect it's in my genes.