Craig--
I think this misses Paul's point. Of course there were atrocities--that is pretty much true of all sustained armed conflicts, warfare being what it is. But Paul was arguing that the South seceded and fought the Civil War in order to defend a particular kind of atrocity: slavery. And, as a corollary, he also argued that those reenactors who portray southern soldiers often deemphasize or omit that fact from their experience and from their interpretation of what they are doing as reenactors. At least, that is how I interpreted what he wrote.
Here is may be useful to draw a distinction between why soldiers fight and kill, on the one hand, and why nations go to war, on the other. They are not always the same thing. There is no necessary contradiction between the claim that southern soldiers fought to defend their homes, on the one hand, and the claim that the South, as a political society, acted to defend and perpetuate slavery, on the other. I think it is highly likely that many southern soldiers agreed with their political leadership and wanted to perpetuate slavery. I can easily enough point to a number of articulate, pro-slavery southern officers, but of course we don't know as much as we would like to about the motives of most southern soldiers, most of whom remain silent to history. Either way, it is also surely the case that they understood themselves to be defending hearth and home as well.
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Kevin R. Hardwick
Associate Professor
Department of History, MSC 8001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
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From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Craig Kilby [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2011 3:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Interesting food for thought about the Civil War 150th
Indeed it is. And there were plenty of atrocities on both sides. Since you mention Missouri, how about the shooting of unarmed civilians by Union troops in St. Louis and especially the infamous Palymra massacre in Marion County?
Craig Kilby
Missouri Native
On May 19, 2011, at 11:40 AM, Finkelman, Paul <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> But, it is important to see the re-enactors in the context of a larger picture.
>
> There is also a tendency stimulated by re-enactors to avoid the hard issues surrounding the Civil War. It would be interesting, for example, to see Confederate re-enactors at Gettysburg to travel around southern Pennsylvania trying to seize black people and drag them to slavery as Lee's troops did; would they re-enact the massacre and mutilation of black troops who surrendered at Fort Pillow? Or the shooting of unarmed wounded United States soldiers in Missouri?
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