Spin, its what we as humans do .. from when Adam said to God "the woman you gave me did this .."
Half true, Adam never spoke when the serpent approached Adam and Eve, he remained quiet when he had the option to speak .. so he did not escape the consequences as neither did the woman.
So too when it comes to understanding things on a more macro level .. the victor writes the history it is said .. and true to form even the US history from colonial days up to 1861 was re-written post-war to spin it so that one would think the New Englanders won the American Revolution .. or even George Washington. But it is not so .. just half-truth that sounds good.
In the following article about
Mary Chesnut one can't possibly read her words and not be moved to understand even a fraction of what those in the South went through before, during and after this war,
Here are some clips to help you understand what happened before the war:
".. Mary may have been an old-fashioned Southern belle, but there was much more to her than hoop skirts, fans, and parasols. Mary was a highly educated and cultured lady, conversant on current events, literature, and history, and fluent in French and German. To keep abreast of the news, Mary regularly read Southern, Northern, and English newspapers. Most of all, however, Mary loved literature, often quoting authors and poets such as Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and Thackeray. William G. Simms, the leading Southern—and arguably American—author of the age, was a friend of her family...
.. Mary believed Southern secession was the consequence of the brewing political, economic, and cultural dissension between the North and South. “We are divorced, North from South, because we hated each other so.” Specifically, Mary attributed Southern secession to the treachery and tyranny of the North against the South. “I think incompatibility of temper began when it was made plain to us that we get all the opprobrium of slavery and they all the money there is in it—with their tariff.” Mary wrote that federal taxes had “milked” the South for the benefit of the North. “The tariff, in some inscrutable way, took all our money.” In discussing the grievances which culminated in Southern secession, Mary referenced the Nullification Crisis (South Carolina’s resistance to the “Tariff of Abominations”) and the Blufton Movement (South Carolina’s call for secession over the “Black Tariff”). Mary resented the duplicity and avarice of the North in condemning the South for slavery while perpetuating and profiting from it. “We bore the ban of slavery. They got the money. They grow rich, we grow poor.” ..
.. Although Mary was deeply rooted in the Southern planter aristocracy, she was a lifelong opponent of slavery. “God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system,” Mary seethed. “Slavery has to go, of course, and joy go with it.” Mary recalled an antislavery letter she wrote to her sympathetic husband when she was still a young lady. “It is the most fervid abolition document I have ever read…I kept it—as showing how we were not as much of heathens down here as our enlightened enemies think.” Mary later wrote of the same letter, “I anticipated Mrs. Stowe not in imagining facts but in abhorrence and loathing.” Indeed, despite her opposition to slavery, Mary despised Northern abolitionists like Stowe, Greeley, and Garrison even more, considering them as hateful hypocrites who relieved their guilty consciences by spewing lies and inciting violence. “They…look for from us—and execute us for the want of it—a degree of virtue they were never able to practice themselves.” Mary scorned Northern abolitionists profiting from their propaganda without ever living among slaves, as she and the other antislavery ladies of her family did. “Their philanthropy is cheap,” scoffed Mary. “There are as noble, pure lives here as there—and a great deal more self-sacrifice.” Unlike Northern abolitionists, Mary explained, Southern abolitionists “do not preach and teach hate as a gospel and the sacred duty of murder and insurrection, but they strive to ameliorate the conditions of these Africans in every particular.” To Mary, slavery was not only morally corrosive, but also economically inefficient. “The negroes would be a good riddance. A hired man is far cheaper than a man whose father, mother, wife, and children have to be fed, clothed, housed, nursed, taxes paid, and doctors’ bills—all for his slovenly, lazy work. So for years we have though negroes a nuisance which did not pay.” Mary shared her husband and her father-in-law’s conviction that without the Union to support slavery, the South would have to abolish it before the war was over. “Let the war end either way, and you will be free,” Mary reassured a frightened slave. “We will have to free you before we get out of this thing.” Mary did not take the Northern crusade against slavery seriously, claiming the Yankees “discovered” emancipation as an expedient pretext for the enslavement of the entire South. “If we had only freed the negroes first and put them in the army,” an idea which Mary noted grew in popularity as the war worsened, “that would have trumped their trick.”.."
One has to understand that the North did supply a majority of the slave ships AND all the finance necessary to the South to continue with slavery right up to the point where the seven southern states legally seceded PEACEFULLY. It was the North that saw a bleak future without the South to sell its manufactured goods to and especially, the lack of tariff revenue to pay for the government.
During the war Mary went on to share:
".. At the sound of cannons firing upon Fort Sumter—the first shots of the war—Mary knelt at her bedside and prayed as she had never prayed before. Nevertheless, she recognized the South’s right to fight for her freedom and defend herself against subjugation. “This war was undertaken by us to shake off the yoke of foreign invaders, so we consider our cause righteous,” Mary concluded after a spirited dinner conversation. Mary compared the Union to the Roman Empire and the war to the Pharaoh’s resistance of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. “A Union, let them call it— empire and kingdom. We in this Union would be an unwilling bride—a Union where one party is tied and dragged in.” Mary was frustrated that the North would not respect the South’s independence and let it go in peace. “We would only be too grateful to be left alone. Only let us alone, we ask no more of gods or men.” Mary often sarcastically commented on the North’s “love” and “compliment” of the South in starting a war to keep them united, by force of arms if no longer by consent of the governed. “We ought to have as good a conceit of ourselves as they have of us—and to be willing to do as much to save ourselves from a nauseous Union with them as they are willing to do by way of revengeful coercion in forcing us back.” Mary scoffed at the notion that Confederate soldiers were fighting and dying for slavery. “Can that be, when not one third of our volunteer army are slaveowners—and not one third of that third does not dislike slavery as much as Stowe or Greeley? And few have found their hatred or love of it as remunerative an investment.” In a discussion of why men who opposed slavery fought, a friend of Mary’s stated, “Southern rights…they do not want to be understrappers forever for those nasty Yankees.”..
.. Death cast a grim shadow over Mary’s life throughout the war, and she lived in constant terror of hearing the worst about her friends and family. “A telegram comes to you, and you leave it on your lap. You are pale with fright. You dread to touch it as you would a rattlesnake—worse, worse. A snake would only strike you. How many this scrap of paper may tell you have gone to their death.” Whenever her husband went away with the army, Mary agonized over his safety, hoping and praying for a letter to let her know that he was still alive. Mary mourned “the best and brightest of one generation…swept away” in a “tide of blood.” When Mary learned that a good friend of hers, Frank Hampton, had been killed, she reminisced with another of a time when they spent a week in the country with the newlywed Hamptons. “And now, it is only a few years, but nearly all that pleasant company are dead—and our world, the only world we cared for, literally kicked to pieces.” At times, the sheer enormity of the loss of life was too terrible for Mary to bear. “When I remember the truehearted, the lighthearted, the gay and gallant boys who have come laughing, singing, dancing in my way in the three years past, I have looked into their brave young eyes and helped them as I could every way and then seen them no more forever. They lie stark and cold, dead upon the battlefield or moldering away in hospitals or prisons. I think if I consider the long array of those bright youths and loyal men who have gone to their deaths almost before my very eyes, my heart might break.” Indeed, Mary was grief-stricken at the very thought of the men who had laid down their lives for liberty...
..
As attrition took its toll on the weakening Confederate armies, Mary hoped for men like Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter, guerrilla leaders of the American Revolution who drove the British out of South Carolina, to arise and organize a resistance..."
After the war:
".. As Mary and her husband traveled across the ravaged countryside — “a howling wilderness, land laid waste, dust and ashes”—to return home, she swore that even though the North had conquered all, she would never surrender her dignity. “If we are a crushed people, crushed by aught, I have vowed never to be a whimpering, pining slave.” When Mary and her husband arrived home, they discovered that their house had been looted and their mills and gins burned. “Nothing is left now but the bare lands and debts,” lamented Mary. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln shocked Mary. “The death of Lincoln—I call that a warning to tyrants,” cheered a friend. Mary took no delight in Lincoln’s death, however, afraid that it would only make the North more vengeful towards the South, as well as loathing the prospect of hearing about “Saint Abe for all time, saint and martyr.” As triumphant Northerners debated hanging “rebel generals” and destroying the “wealthy classes,” the uncertainty over the South’s fate in the Union hung over her like “Damocles’ sword.” Mary was skeptical of peace between the North and the South, and suspected that the North desired to dishonor the South and drain her of her wealth. “I have read of no magnanimous conquerors of fallen states,” mourned Mary. As Mary had maintained throughout the war, “The Yankees…also expect to make the war pay. Yankees do not undertake anything that does not pay.” .."
Pay they did .. up until the 1960s and now again there is effort to crush the spirit of rebellion ..
