re: #292 Chrysicat

Get INTO the Confederate States, and it’s even more likely they were taught that said Confederacy were the real inheritors of America’s founding principles.

Time to trot out my favorite quote from Virginia-born Union General George Henry “The Rock of Chickamauga” Thomas on this very topic:

“[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them.”
Report to General Ulysses S. Grant (17 November 1868)