re: #150 HappyWarrior

Hah no worries. I’m probably nothing but a Yankee to them anyhow though. My only Civil War veteran ancestor was a German immigrant living in Pennsylvania. I’m proud of that.

My ancestors were southern Unionists on both sides of the family; my father’s in Tennessee; my mother’s in north Texas. The Appalachian hill folk in particular did not take well to the Confederacy. There were armed rebellions against the Confederacy in North Carolina and Tennessee, successful in some cases, ruthlessly suppressed in others. Of course, western Virginia split completely and created a new state. The hill people had always resented aristocratic lowlanders and had few slaves, meaning they just did not have a dog in the fight with the north.

In the rush for national reconciliation late in the 19th century, the role of the Unionists was continuously minimized and later vilified. This process and its execrable “Lost Cause” mythology peaked in the 1930s, with Unionists caricatured as scalawags and traitors in such works as Gone With the Wind. It has taken most of a century to even begin the work of righting this history, though ample documentation exists and has always been available.