The South Did give thousands of troops to the North.
The South Did have unending internecine strife.

The North argued from the beginning about whether they should fight at all or just let the South go and had Tens of thousands of deserters and tens of thousands more draft dodgers, from the very beginning.
The North Stifled the very same internecine strife the South experienced by enacting very restrictive laws and policies, like suspending Habeas Corpus, censoring news, imprisoning protesters and imposing Martial Law.

They both had the same internal problems, for the most part, with the North just having an extra problem of “We don’t really Want to keep the Southern States…” The only real difference was what each side did about those internal problems.

I will definitely never stay at a Wingate Inn in Concord NC.

I was jess sayin’ ya know?

LOL

I do agree that conscription rules angered people even more in the south, but it simply was not the main cause. The main problem was a complete lack of national purpose.

Thank you.

In The North, enlistments were for six months or a year and once the enlistment expired the man was not liable for service again. US conscription did not begin until July 1863. One of Lee’s stated reasons for advancing into Pennsylvania in June/July ’63 is that so many US enlistments were expiring that US manpower would be at a lower level and morale among men about to leave the service would be low.

Conscription was met with riots in The North, most notably in New York, where the riots had to be put down with troops fresh from Gettysburg. The US Conscription system was riddled with exemptions and was patently unfair. First, a man’s duty to serve could be commuted for a payment of $50, a sum unobtainable to a working man but easily met by the better off. It was very common for the economic leaders of a county to simply pay the commutation fee to satisfy the entire requisition of men from a county. Money obtained from commutation and other sources was then used to pay recruiting bouties and men were recruited off the immigrant ships and in the immigrant communities as well as being actively recruited in Europe and Great Britain, particularly in Ireland and Germany. By ’64, the easter Army of the Potomac was so heavily immigrant that the Confederates referred to it as The Hessians. Also, regiments, which were county based in both the North and South, that recruited “contraband” slaves to the US Colored Troops could use those recruitments to offset the requisition from their home county. The Official Record is replete with formal written complaints from officers regarding the abuses in recruiting to the USCT. Sherman and Thomas’ western armies did not use the USCT, but the always short of manpower AOTP made heavy use of the USCT, where they were happy to have them as cannon fodder, see, e.g., the attack on The Crater. Likewise, the movie “Glory” notwithstanding, the USCT attack on Batter Wagner though crazy brave on the part of the troops was simple murder on the part of inexperienced, ideological officers.

In any event, after the second year of The War, relatively few native-born Northern men served in the AOTP, which army endured the staggering casualties of the Overland Campaign. Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee, was almost exclusively native-born but mostly from the rural areas of the Old Northwest which had relatively little political influence.

In any event, even though a relatively small proportion of Northern men were serving in the Union armies, morale in the eastern army was desperately bad by ’64 and civilian will was so low that Lincoln fully expected electoral defeat in Nov. ’64. The Democrats nominated McClellan and ran on a peace platform. It is impossible to speculate what might have happened with a Democrat victory, but suffice it to say it would have been different from what transpired with a Lincoln victory. It is fair to say that only Sherman’s victories in Georgia in the fall of ’64 saved the Lincoln Presidency.

Nonetheless, I do agree that there never was a notion of Confederate nationhood during the life of the Confederacy. The Southern “nationhood” that still exists today, is the product of Reconstruction and a century of Northern repression and economic exploitation. But, The North was by no means united and it was not the Confederate States that suspended habeas corpus, censored news, imposed martial law, and imprisoned or exiled protestors in order to maintain control of its territory.

Texas had major internal troubles, Georgia had large areas that the South couldn’t control, No. Carolina did, Tennessee did… heck Virginia lost half a state over its internally divided loyalties.

On the other hand, the North had some lukewarm Copperheads in sympathy with the South and little else of note.

So, it is not odd at all to have family that all lived in the South but still fought over which side to support.

The same bunch that hijacked the civil rights movement for fun and (large,very large), profit have redefined the meaning of the old south.
The textbooks spend chapters on slavery and a paragraph on states rights and a sentence on the Tariff Act.

They are not rewriting history, it is already rewritten.

No wonder your neighbor of color or some northerner gets offended by the symbols of the Old South. They have no idea what they really mean.

They have no family stories or interest in southern history to offset their “formal” education.

They are programmed, (I have taught out of the textbooks like I mention,) that the war was entirely to preserve slavery, implying that the guy with the flag must hate black people and want to bring back slavery, none of which is true.

Political correctness has triumphed again.

Regards

Other Armies of the Provisional Army of the Confederate States used different flags and there was no universal regimental flag in the Army of Tennessee or the Department of the Trans-Mississippi. The most common regimental flag in the “western” armies was a derivitive of the “Bonny Blue Flag,” an early symbol of the Confederate States. The Bonny Blue Flag had a blue field and a single white star. Many western units used what was called the Hardee Flag which had a blue field and a white oval, frequently with the unit name in the oval. Other units used state flags or variations thereof or privately designed and made flags.

The Department of Georgia and South Carolina used a 3:5 rectangular version of the ANV Battle Flag over Military facilities and headquarters. The Naval Ensign of the CS Navy used the square St. Andrews Cross flag in the canton with a white field. The Naval Ensign was adopted as the Third National Flag of the Confederate States after Gen. Jackson’s death and was commonly referred to as “The Stainless Banner.”

As to the Swastika, many countries won’t even allow models of WWII German aircraft or vehicles to have swastika decals; they either don’t have them at all or give you a bunch of pieces from which you can assemble a swastika. The swastika was not the national insigna of German military aircraft and vehicles. The insignia was the German (or Iron) Cross commonly displayed on the wings of aircraft and the sides of vehicles. Luftwaffe aircraft usually but not always displayed a swastika on the vertical tail. Vehicles rarely displayed the swastika except that swastika flags were sometimes used on horizontal surfaces for identification by aircraft.

I presume being the SCV that what was actually hung was the Battle Flag of the CSA (The one with the thirteen stars in a Saltire “the X”).

I had a friend who hung the flag under which Jefferson Davis was inaugurated (the 13 star “Stars and Bars”) and got something like half a dozen people who recognized it during his time in college.

The Battle Flag has become the one that raises emotions on both sides now, not the actual legal flag of the CSA…

Though if you want to see people *really* bent out of shape over a flag, take a look at some of the regulations in Germany in regards to the Swastikas.

Proud member of Sons of Confederate Veterans, Gen. John Bell Hood Camp 1208. Lineally descended from:
John M. Chance, Pvt. 51st Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Semmes Brigade, I Corps (Longstreet), Army of Northern Virginia
Joseph L. Sherrod, Sgt., Co. H, 48th GVIR, KIA, July 30, 1864, Petersburg, Virginia, Wrights’s Brigade, Anderson’s Division, III (Hill’s) Corps, ANV
Amos Riner, Pvt., Co. F, 48th GVIR, Wright’s Brigade, Anderson’s Division, Hill’s Corps, ANV
Robert Curl, Pvt. 49th GVIR, (I) Longstreet’s Corps, ANV

(I’m failing my Southern upbringing since I can’t remember all thecompanies, brigades, and divisions at 4:30 AM and I’m too lazy/sleepy to go look it up.)