This week, I took my family to Virginia in pursuit of one of my favorite summertime activities, visiting Civil War battlefields. We traveled to the four great battlefields around Fredericksburg, where more than 100,000 soldiers died in the course of the war. I also fulfilled my lifelong dream of visiting Appomattox Courthouse where on April 9, 1865, Lee famously surrendered to Grant, in effect ending the war. What consistently baffles me in making these visits is the romanticism of the Confederacy that continues 140 years after the war’s end. Wherever you go in the South, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, and the other Confederate leaders are venerated as heroes. In the course of my travels, I have driven on Robert E. Lee Drive and Jefferson Davis Highway. I’ve seen myriad monuments to Stonewall Jackson, and I’ve seen the Confederate flag flying from cars and homes.
As an American who loves his country, I am appalled by the persistence of Confederate hero worship in the South 140 years after the Civil War’s end. After all, the South fought for a truly evil cause. While there were other factors that led to the Civil War, no serious, objective historian would deny that the principal cause of the war was the institution of slavery, and that the South fought to preserve its “peculiar institution.”
Whether or not the soldiers of the Confederacy personally believed in slavery, they still fought to preserve the hideous, reprehensible practice of buying and selling human beings–each and every one created in the image of G-d–like animals. Babies were torn away from their mothers’ breasts; men, women, and children were whipped like beasts. This was the essential, defining institution that the Confederacy struggled to keep.
Poster's comment: note that Judah Benjamin, a jew, became the CSA Attorney General, Secretary of War, and finally Secretary of State. No mention of Joseph Goldsmith, Jewish Chaplain of the CSA. More here: www.jewishmag.com/112mag/confederates/confederates.htm