re: #95 teleskiguy

Not to mention the ideological disarray among Confederates. The Confederate Army started recruiting slaves and freed blacks into their ranks, especially after the sheer butchery at Petersburg. They were recruiting slaves to fight a war to keep them slaves.

And I don’t forget all the anti-Confederate insurrectionist activity up in the mountains up and down all of southern Appalachia, those mountain folk knew that the Confederacy wasn’t hip, where it’s at.

Andrew Exum (was Abu Muqawama) is from Chattanooga, TN:

@ExumAM: 150 years ago, Lee surrendered, allowing my East Tennessee brethren to begin a glorious four years of score-settling and reprisal killings.

@ExumAM: 1. I joke about the ugliness of reprisal killings that followed the South’s surrender, but in all seriousness, worth noting war didn’t end.

@ExumAM: 2. In Appalachia especially, the cycle of violence continued for another several years. t.co

@ExumAM: 3. And since Jim Crow didn’t end until the 1960s, it’s debatable as to whether or not the North really “won” the war in Clausewitzian terms.

@ExumAM: 4. The story of the American South over the 100 years that followed Appomattox is one of a defeat denied.

@HumphreyBohun: @ExumAM Not a pretty story for the South or the country.

@ExumAM: 5. But yes, the victory of the North at least ended the political and economic disenfranchisement of … the South’s white proletariat …

@ExumAM: 6. … who then spent the next 100 years violently resisting franchise for the South’s black proletariat. So much for class solidarity.

@emlybelz: @ExumAM have you read Confederates in the Attic? very interesting (pop history) book.

@ExumAM: @emlybelz No. I’ve had it for 15 years but have never read it. I need to.

@emlybelz: @ExumAM it’s a pretty fast read. One thing he captures is how Southerners talk about the war like it happened last week, which is dead on.