When my ancestors fought the Yankees during the War Between the States, they proved themselves to be some of the toughest people on Earth. Twenty-five percent of all military-age Southerners died or were crippled in the war. For Americans, that’s an astounding figure. If the Yankees had suffered those kinds of casualties, they would have been burning their cities. Of course, that’s opinion—there’s no way to really know—but I also have no reason to be ashamed of my ancestors. They weren’t traitors, and for the most part, they were good people doing the best they could in the world as they understood it. One reason they may have fought so desperately was because of the outcome they feared if they lost.
At the same time in Kansas, Jayhawkers were killing Southerners just for living in Missouri. There had also been numerous slave revolts in which enslaved people killed men, women, and children. In Haiti in 1804, the Black government exterminated most of the remaining French after the independence war. They spared some of the women who agreed to marry Black men. What can you call a forced marriage other than slavery? So, I have no reason to be ashamed. It seems that the left tries to make whites ashamed of being who they are, especially if they’re Southerners. I’m not ashamed, and I’m not fragile. If they want to talk about race, I’m willing to do it as honestly as I can.
Liberals also emphasize the reaction of whites after the war, but all the occupation did was reaffirm their beliefs. What would have happened if they didn’t resist? Union soldiers, even though it was not government policy, robbed, raped, and murdered Southerners, and their commanders did virtually nothing about it. On top of that, the army had a strict censorship program that prevented this information from being disseminated. If it had been published, it might have come to light that these were not large-scale abuses but rather infrequent actions by a minority of Black Union soldiers. Without reliable information, Southerners saw it as a large-scale attempt to humiliate and crush them. In my opinion, that is what led to resistance movements such as the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow later on. I still remember the old people talking about the need to keep the Blacks down or they’d murder us all.
^^^
