Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "The South had a sense of grievance for many years after the Civil War, but they did not have a leadership (or neighbors) that urged them on to suicidal guerilla warfare instead of reconstructing their economy."
(1) The South was soundly defeated in a war that slaughtered my own Southern male inlaws (of military age of the time) to a degree that pales only in comparison to horrors like what the Nazis did to the Jews. My family history consists of lists of brothers and uncles who didn't come back from the war, or who only limped home years later missing various body parts. Some units returned from 4 years of war with only a few percent remaining active, the rest mostly dead, incapacitated or prisoner.
By the time the generation that had directly experienced the horror of fighting the yankees had died away, the yankees had treated the South so kindly that the wounds were mostly healed. But as a boy, I can recall the emotion of elders recounting the fighting, and discussing what had happened to the various uncles and cousins. That sort of feeling now seems to have decayed completely, which is sad in a way, in that the memory of the veterans decayed with it.
By contrast, the Israelis have hardly even touched the Palestinians, much less the Arabs. As I've mentioned repeatedly before, if you want to force a proud enemy into submission you have to kill a substantial percentage of his population. This is not a statement about the obstinacy nor of the glory of the human race, just a simple statement of observable, measurable fact.
(2) The North gave the South full rights, after a few years of occupation. This was always the objective of the North. In addition, the North and the South had a history of fighting together against foreign enemies. They were two sides with very little real differences, other than slavery and maybe a bit on the subject of import and export duties. The Civil War was a brief interlude in friendly relations between the North and the South.
This is in stark contrast to the Arab / Israeli situation. Those two opponents are (a) separated by religion, instead of united by it, (b) intend to set up forms of government that deprive the other of basic human rights (freedom of movement, "right of return", ownership of real estate, voting, etc.), (c) have zero history of being united, fighting a foreign enemy, and (d) have been fighting against each other for a long, long, long time.
Here's a useful reference:
VFW Thin Gray Line:
...
The South's losses in human wealth were pathetic. It was forced to skip almost a generation of young men, dead of disease, killed in battle, or wounded into economic incompetency...The wounded came back generally with the loss of an arm or leg. In some communities, at least a third of the veterans lacked a limb. Mississippi spent, in 1866, a fifth of her revenues on artificial arms and legs," wrote Coulter E. Merton in The South During Reconstruction.
Mobilizing for War
Yet the antebellum South entered into the Civil War (1861-65) a region confident of swift victory. Even many Union military leaders conceded the martial skills and efficiency of the Confederate Army, three-fourths of it infantry.
John W. Chambers, in To Raise An Army, concluded: "Through a combined system of voluntary enlistment and compelled service, the South obtained nearly a million soldiers, one-sixth of the white population of the region, and was able to keep a much larger percentage of veterans in the field [than the North] until the closing months of the war."
...
"Southern veterans returned singly or in pairs; they straggled into all parts of the South," wrote Paul H. Buck in The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900, meeting "the silence of exhaustion that better harmonized with their own despair. Few who underwent this experience ever erased the memory of the inglorious humiliation it engraved upon their hearts.
"The Southern veteran came back to no such scene of jubilation as brightened the return of his adversary. Wearied in body, exhausted in spirit, he passed through wasted countrysides until he found retreat in a home that had been saddened by loss and impoverished by sacrifice. His was a retreat of a wounded stag seeking nothing better than the peace of solitude where the hounds of his enemy could not follow and the taunting cries of the victorious chase could not penetrate."
What many of these gaunt veterans returned home to was most graphically described by a Northern minister who in 1866 passed through Virginia, which "looked like a desolated country graveyard, and the people not unlike the sad spectres passing among the tombs."
...
During the 1900s, reconciliation allowed for joint remembrances. The first Confederate Memorial Day service was held in the Confederate Section of Arlington National Cemetery in 1903. Three years later, Congress passed a law to care for Confederate graves in the North.
...
vfw.org
-- Carl |
