The Bad Guys? Part 1

 

The scene is one of the most iconic in film history. The Battle of Atlanta near the middle of Gone With The Wind depicts the carnage of war. As Scarlett O’Hara searches for Dr. Meade among several wounded and dying Confederate soldiers, the camera pulls back to reveal dozens more, then hundreds of bodies, 1,600 in all. It was at this point of watching the film when my daughter asked if Joshua Chamberlain (her namesake) was there.

“No,” I told her. “He was a Union officer. But remember earlier, when they were reading the dispatches from Gettysburg? He was in that battle.”

The nine-year-old absorbed this, then followed up her question. “So these are the bad guys?”

“It’s complex,” I said.

And it is.

The civil war was fought for many reasons by many different kinds of people. Poor and working-class white Southerners typically cared nothing for the slave-owning plantation class; they fought from other motivations. Several of the Confederacy’s best generals argued for emancipation on tactical grounds, and sometimes moral ones, too.

Were Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, or James Longstreet bad guys? Certainly not. Nonetheless, they fought to preserve the newly formed Confederate States of America, whose foundational purpose was to maintain a society based on slavery. None of them owned slaves, there’s no evidence they agreed with slavery, but they enabled it all the same.

I love history. I come at the Civil War from a Yankee perspective. One of my fondest childhood memories was of the morning my dad and uncle liberated me from my third-grade classroom to take a jaunt up to Gettysburg. I always got a souvenir plastic saber with which to make war on the shrubbery. I wore a Union cap.

But the Confederates weren’t my bad guys; Russians, stormtroopers, or Cobra Command held that distinction. The Confederate soldiers, I was raised to respect.

After the Confederates, the villain du jour was the American Indian. They were the bad guys for an entire genre of movies. But I was taught to respect them too, because their story is also complex. For a while, Germans were the bad guys, but there were plenty of good, honorable German soldiers serving frustrated under history’s most notorious madman, and of all the people American GI’s encountered as they liberated Europe, it was the Germans they most related with.

Again, we see, it’s complex.

There is a major difference between a plantation overseer and a Confederate soldier, or a Sioux raiding party and their entire nation, or an SS platoon and German regulars, or the Taliban and an Afghan. History teaches there are vast motivations. The good guys aren’t always evident, and there’s rarely a clear formula about who the bad guys are. Sometimes they’re within the same ranks.

A better question is this: What are they fighting for?

People fight for many reasons, but mostly out of a desire to preserve something: a way of life, their homes, lives. If they’re not fighting to preserve something, they’re probably fighting to attain something, like freedom, resources, or a personal right. All of these are good reasons to fight. The problem lies in the reality that any of these motivations can be rooted in evil. Slavery is evil; so is Sharia Law, segregation, and a variety of personal “rights” we’ve come to condemn over the centuries.

There are good people who fight for horrible things. I don’t automatically condemn them unless they know full well what they are supporting. I believe the majority of them usually don’t.

A peasant farmer may take up arms with an evil regime out of a desire to protect his village. A child may be conscripted into an army he knows nothing about. A person may take up a passionate defense of an abstract right they have no first-hand experience with, but sounds important.

It takes time to understand the complexities of certain issues. Who has time to carefully weigh both sides of a conflict to determine which is right, and which is wrong? I contend most people take their most immediate impression, and in the absence of firm moral principles, run with whatever seems right at the time.

And this leads us to the real problem when ascribing the moniker of bad guys. Many people defend evil practices because they don’t understand them. The true bad guys choose evil things because they embrace them. Discerning the difference takes moral clarity, which is hard to achieve if one doesn’t accept moral absolutes.

Some of us are slow learners, and some of us aren’t interested in learning at all. That’s fine, but if we’re going to take a stand on an issue, we’d better know it inside and out. History will not be kind to those who choose sides arbitrarily.

I love history, because history knows there is such a thing as right and wrong. And it isn’t shy about showing the difference.

And innocent lives are always on the line.

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  1. Vince Guerra Inactive
    Vince Guerra
    @VinceGuerra

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    Somehow the idea that a person could murder some people for the good of freeing others seems disturbing.

    This may have been John Brown’s rationale, but it hardly encapsulates the motivations behind the war for most Americans. There will always be madmen with skewed interpretations, but we don’t use them to represent the larger issues.

    • #61
  2. Instugator Thatcher
    Instugator
    @Instugator

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    Somehow the idea that a person could murder some people for the good of freeing others seems disturbing. Is taking someone else’s life not reprehensible?

    War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which they are willing to fight, nothing more important than their own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than themselves. – John Stuart Mill

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    And it is more than likely some 15 years down the road, slavery would have ended anyway

    Facts not in evidence.

    Besides, once the South seceded and then fired upon Federal installations, the war was on. Might as well go for total victory if you are going to have one.

    It is a terrible thing to begin a war and then lose.

     

    • #62
  3. Ansonia Member
    Ansonia
    @Ansonia

    Re:# 60

    Murder? No. I wouldn’t call people killing each other in battle murder. But did you mean people facing each other in battle or did you mean John Brown in Kansas and at Harper’s Ferry?

    If you meant  John Brown, that madman seems to have been subsidized by some seemingly sane, respectable, wealthy , cerebral and highly influential Northerners. I found out today (reading online instead of pulling old wall paper off of walls, which is what I was supposed to be doing) it was AFTER John Brown had played, at least, a Charles-Manson like role in the Kansas massacre that Julia Ward Howe’s husband, Dr. Howe, introduced Brown to prominent Bostonians as “‘a practical, not a talking abolitionist.'” Dr. Howe also gave Brown’s son the money Brown used to rent the Kennedy farm near Harper’s Ferry. And there’s more, and more interesting, connections mentioned between Brown and important New Englanders in chapter seven of “The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe”. (Ironically, the 5 people butchered by Brown’s thugs in Kansas, and the freed black man they shot at Harper’s Ferry, didn’t hold any slaves.)

    If killing people to free other people hardly encapsulated a rational acceptable to most of the Union Soldiers, why did they sing about John Brown’s body and soul ? (By the way, according to the author of “The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe”, it isn’t by luck her poem fits the tune. It was suggested to Howe, this author claims,  by a person whose name the author gives you (I just can’t remember it right now.) that she write verses for that particular tune. Once she had, the men, it seems, were encouraged to sing  Howe’s verses.)

    I think it could be argued that the reaction in the North to John Brown’s execution—after he, a fugitive for the brutal murders to terrorize in Kansas, had been repelled attacking a government arsenal, and captured after taking hostages and shooting at Lee’s men instead of surrendering— made it seem clear to the South that enough people, and influential people, in the North so much wanted to bring about a blood bath, of one kind or another, to end slavery that it was unlikely there wouldn’t be one.  The South decided they could deal with perpetual mobs of murdering slaves and abolitionists, armed and led by abolitionists, or they could secede and then probably have to fight soldiers.

    (By the way, does anyone know why Harper’s Ferry was so unprotected when Brown attempted the raid? That just does seem strange to me.)

    Vince Guerra, this is a really thought provoking, question raising, post.

    • #63
  4. Vince Guerra Inactive
    Vince Guerra
    @VinceGuerra

    Ansonia (View Comment):

    If killing people to free other people hardly encapsulated a rational acceptable to most of the Union Soldiers, why did they sing about John Brown’s body and soul ?

    You phrase it differently. Killing another nation’s  volunteer soldiers in war is far different than inciting a mob to murder civilians.

    • #64
  5. Ansonia Member
    Ansonia
    @Ansonia

    Re: # 64

    Yes, I think that might explain why Howe was encouraged to write, and the soldiers encouraged to sing, her more noble, biblical and poetic verses.

    • #65
  6. Vince Guerra Inactive
    Vince Guerra
    @VinceGuerra

    Ansonia (View Comment):

    Re: # 64

    Yes, I think that might explain why Howe was encouraged to write, and the soldiers encouraged to sing, her more noble, biblical and poetic verses.

    As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free

    As God is marching on…

    It’s a much grander motivation. 

    • #66
  7. Ansonia Member
    Ansonia
    @Ansonia

    Re:66

    Howe’s verses are a much more seemly way of expressing the commendable motivation of many to the rest of the country and world. (You get the feeling that the same members of the Northern elite who once unknowingly AND KNOWINGLY subsidized Brown’s murder and lawlessness, and then made a saint out of him, quickly grew to see it would be prudent to make his ghost fade away before more people looked too closely at it and at them. Maybe there was also a desire to have the words of the tune changed to words that would remind the soldiers to be soldiers and not an indiscriminately killing mob.) My only points are (1) proof many of the soldiers in the North weren’t just risking their lives, and willing to kill, to keep the Union together is that they once honored the edited, Abolitionist version of the memory of John Brown in the words they originally sang to that tune and (2) you get the uncomfortable feeling, from the “John Brown”  song, that there were plenty of men in the Union who weren’t entirely convinced  killing outside of war, to free people held in bondage, was still murder.) Abolitionist sentiment in the troops must have been a lot stronger than I would later be told in History class.

    I  never knew by heart any more of Howe’s verses for “Battle Hymn of the Republic” than the first verse, and had never heard or read any more of it than the first and last verse, until I heard the podcast on “A Fiery Gospel”. (We still sang the first verse at school in music class back in the early sixties when I was in the fourth grade. I was told about the last verse at home and, perhaps, heard it at somebody’s church.  I can’t get over the power and vividness of the verses I didn’t know at all, the 2   that carry the images of what Howe saw in wartime Washington.) The “John Brown” version of the same tune was never mentioned in school. I didn’t hear anything about it until my mother told me to read “John Brown’s Body”, by Stephen Vincent Benet.

    • #67
  8. CarolJoy, Above Top Secret Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret
    @CarolJoy

    Vince Guerra (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    Somehow the idea that a person could murder some people for the good of freeing others seems disturbing.

    This may have been John Brown’s rationale, but it hardly encapsulates the motivations behind the war for most Americans. There will always be madmen with skewed interpretations, but we don’t use them to represent the larger issues.

    War is legalized murder, and that is all it is, for the most part. It is not simply  John Brown’s rational; it was the rational behind what every single Northern Soldier did when he participated in Sherman’s March to The Sea.

    Sherman’s military tactic  was the first “civilized nation’s” assault on civilians who were in a non-military region that took place in the modern era. The Confederate Army was elsewhere – the strategy behind this military “maneuver” was to de-moralize the South’s fighting soldiers. How could they pay attention to winning over the the North when they needed to consider the plight of their loved ones in Atlanta or elsewhere? Two generations later,  Adolph Hitler would use this assault as a justification for how he promoted  his blitzkriegs.

    https://www.ducksters.com/history/shermans_march_to_the_sea.php

    Although the above lays out what happened in Georgia, Sherman’s Army did an equal amount of damage in the Carolinas.

    • #68
  9. Ansonia Member
    Ansonia
    @Ansonia

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):

    Vince Guerra (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    Somehow the idea that a person could murder some people for the good of freeing others seems disturbing.

    This may have been John Brown’s rationale, but it hardly encapsulates the motivations behind the war for most Americans. There will always be madmen with skewed interpretations, but we don’t use them to represent the larger issues.

    War is legalized murder, and that is all it is, for the most part. It is not simply John Brown’s rational; it was the rational behind what every single Northern Soldier did when he participated in Sherman’s March to The Sea.

    Sherman’s military tactic was the first “civilized nation’s” assault on civilians who were in a non-military region that took place in the modern era. The Confederate Army was elsewhere – the strategy behind this military “maneuver” was to de-moralize the South’s fighting soldiers. How could they pay attention to winning over the the North when they needed to consider the plight of their loved ones in Atlanta or elsewhere? Two generations later, Adolph Hitler would use this assault as a justification for how he promoted his blitzkriegs.

    https://www.ducksters.com/history/shermans_march_to_the_sea.php

    Although the above lays out what happened in Georgia, Sherman’s Army did an equal amount of damage in the Carolinas.

    A cleaned up version of the song “Marching Through Georgia” was mentioned in grade and high school when I was there. The march was covered as something horrible but necessary for the North to do to end the war.

    I’m being picayune, I know. But, if Fort Sumter was fired on April 12, 1861, they really should correct where they say, at the place to which you give us a link, that the Civil War began less than a year after Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. It would have been more like 16 months after he was executed that the war began, right?

     

    • #69
  10. philo Member
    philo
    @philo

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    Sherman’s military tactic was the first “civilized nation’s” assault on civilians who were in a non-military region that took place in the modern era. The Confederate Army was elsewhere – the strategy behind this military “maneuver” was to de-moralize the South’s fighting soldiers. How could they pay attention to winning over the the North when they needed to consider the plight of their loved ones in Atlanta or elsewhere? Two generations later, Adolph Hitler would use this assault as a justification for how he promoted his blitzkriegs.

    In a more appropriate (i.e. less disgusting) WW II comparison, I would suggest looking to Le May and his desire to similarly make Tokyo howl and be glad we have such leaders on our side.  In the bigger picture and the additional lives not lost by longer war and more battles, thank God for Uncle Billy.

    • #70
  11. Ansonia Member
    Ansonia
    @Ansonia

    Re:#70

    I want to read from page 123 to 260 in V.D.H.’s book “The Soul of Battle”, since it deals with Sherman and his march. But the print is so small. I wish the book was available on kindle. Have you read it or that part of it ?

    • #71
  12. philo Member
    philo
    @philo

    Ansonia (View Comment):

    Re:#70

    I want to read from page 123 to 260 in V.D.H.’s book “The Soul of Battle”, since it deals with Sherman and his march. But the print is so small. I wish the book was available on kindle. Have you read it or that part of it ?

    See also the first section of the prologue. (Have it and read it about a dozen years ago…when my eyes were much better than they are today.)

    • #72
  13. CarolJoy, Above Top Secret Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret
    @CarolJoy

    philo (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    Sherman’s military tactic was the first “civilized nation’s” assault on civilians who were in a non-military region that took place in the modern era. The Confederate Army was elsewhere – the strategy behind this military “maneuver” was to de-moralize the South’s fighting soldiers. How could they pay attention to winning over the the North when they needed to consider the plight of their loved ones in Atlanta or elsewhere? Two generations later, Adolph Hitler would use this assault as a justification for how he promoted his blitzkriegs.

    In a more appropriate (i.e. less disgusting) WW II comparison, I would suggest looking to Le May and his desire to similarly make Tokyo howl and be glad we have such leaders on our side. In the bigger picture and the additional lives not lost by longer war and more battles, thank God for Uncle Billy.

    Not sure I follow your logic. There should be a huge difference between killing people who are part of a foreign nation that waged war on us and killing civilians who are basically our cousins.

    The soldiers at Fort Sumpter were indicating their stance on their states’ rights. It was quite a different event than Pearl Harbor. It could easily be argued that the Fort Sumpter actions could have been handled with diplomacy. (And some fifty years later, so should diplomacy have been considered for the events at Sarajevo with the assassination of the Archduke.)

    No way could the Pearl Harbor attack result in diplomatic solutions.

    • #73
  14. Instugator Thatcher
    Instugator
    @Instugator

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):

    philo (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    Sherman’s military tactic was the first “civilized nation’s” assault on civilians who were in a non-military region that took place in the modern era. The Confederate Army was elsewhere – the strategy behind this military “maneuver” was to de-moralize the South’s fighting soldiers. How could they pay attention to winning over the the North when they needed to consider the plight of their loved ones in Atlanta or elsewhere? Two generations later, Adolph Hitler would use this assault as a justification for how he promoted his blitzkriegs.

    In a more appropriate (i.e. less disgusting) WW II comparison, I would suggest looking to Le May and his desire to similarly make Tokyo howl and be glad we have such leaders on our side. In the bigger picture and the additional lives not lost by longer war and more battles, thank God for Uncle Billy.

    Not sure I follow your logic. There should be a huge difference between killing people who are part of a foreign nation that waged war on us and killing civilians who are basically our cousins.

    The soldiers at Fort Sumpter were indicating their stance on their states’ rights. It was quite a different event than Pearl Harbor. It could easily be argued that the Fort Sumpter actions could have been handled with diplomacy. (And some fifty years later, so should diplomacy have been considered for the events at Sarajevo with the assassination of the Archduke.)

    No way could the Pearl Harbor attack result in diplomatic solutions.

    If secession and attacking Federal property aren’t a form of insurrection, I don’t know what is. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to use force against insurrections. (Article 1 Section 8)

    • #74
  15. philo Member
    philo
    @philo

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):

    philo (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    Sherman’s military tactic was the first “civilized nation’s” assault on civilians who were in a non-military region that took place in the modern era. The Confederate Army was elsewhere – the strategy behind this military “maneuver” was to de-moralize the South’s fighting soldiers. How could they pay attention to winning over the the North when they needed to consider the plight of their loved ones in Atlanta or elsewhere? Two generations later, Adolph Hitler would use this assault as a justification for how he promoted his blitzkriegs.

    In a more appropriate (i.e. less disgusting) WW II comparison, I would suggest looking to Le May and his desire to similarly make Tokyo howl and be glad we have such leaders on our side. In the bigger picture and the additional lives not lost by longer war and more battles, thank God for Uncle Billy.

    Not sure I follow your logic. There should be a huge difference between killing people who are part of a foreign nation that waged war on us and killing civilians who are basically our cousins.

    The soldiers at Fort Sumpter were indicating their stance on their states’ rights. It was quite a different event than Pearl Harbor. It could easily be argued that the Fort Sumpter actions could have been handled with diplomacy. (And some fifty years later, so should diplomacy have been considered for the events at Sarajevo with the assassination of the Archduke.)

    No way could the Pearl Harbor attack result in diplomatic solutions.

    How many civilians were killed on the march to Savannah? My point was that it is preposterous to compare this six week “maneuver” (your quotes) of destruction and demoralization of the “war machine” (my quotes) to anything Hitler did. It is more appropriate (and less offensive) to compare it to a maneuver by another democratic army of a season to destroy Tokyo (and other Japanese cities) that were similarly part of the war machine for that fighting force.

    Also, I’m sorry I missed the full Sherman quote: “War with a foreign nation is hell.”  That makes all the difference in the world. Seriously, just as it is a good thing that the American fighting men of WWII didn’t have to attempt to land on the Japanese main land, it is good that neither side of the Civil War had to endure another fighting season in 1865…or even more beyond that. Again, thank you Uncle Billy.

    • #75
  16. CarolJoy, Above Top Secret Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret
    @CarolJoy

    philo (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):

    philo (View Comment):

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    Sherman’s military tactic was the first “civilized nation’s” assault on civilians who were in a non-military region that took place in the modern era. The Confederate Army was elsewhere – the strategy behind this military “maneuver” was to de-moralize the South’s fighting soldiers. How could they pay attention to winning over the the North when they needed to consider the plight of their loved ones in Atlanta or elsewhere? Two generations later, Adolph Hitler would use this assault as a justification for how he promoted his blitzkriegs.

    In a more appropriate (i.e. less disgusting) WW II comparison, I would suggest looking to Le May and his desire to similarly make Tokyo howl and be glad we have such leaders on our side. In the bigger picture and the additional lives not lost by longer war and more battles, thank God for Uncle Billy.

    Not sure I follow your logic. There should be a huge difference between killing people who are part of a foreign nation that waged war on us and killing civilians who are basically our cousins.

    The soldiers at Fort Sumpter were indicating their stance on their states’ rights. It was quite a different event than Pearl Harbor. It could easily be argued that the Fort Sumpter actions could have been handled with diplomacy. (And some fifty years later, so should diplomacy have been considered for the events at Sarajevo with the assassination of the Archduke.)

    No way could the Pearl Harbor attack result in diplomatic solutions.

    How many civilians were killed on the march to Savannah? My point was that it is preposterous to compare this six week “maneuver” (your quotes) of destruction and demoralization of the “war machine” (my quotes) to anything Hitler did. It is more appropriate (and less offensive) to compare it to a maneuver by another democratic army of a season to destroy Tokyo (and other Japanese cities) that were similarly part of the war machine for that fighting force.

    Also, I’m sorry I missed the full Sherman quote: “War with a foreign nation is hell.” That makes all the difference in the world. Seriously, just as it is a good thing that the American fighting men of WWII didn’t have to attempt to land on the Japanese main land, it is good that neither side of the Civil War had to endure another fighting season in 1865…or even more beyond that. Again, thank you Uncle Billy.

    It was Hitler himself who made the comparison. I merely pointed that out that he did so.

    • #76
  17. Vince Guerra Inactive
    Vince Guerra
    @VinceGuerra

    CarolJoy, Above Top Secret (View Comment):
    War is legalized murder, and that is all it is, for the most part.

    I know quite a few veterans who would take exception with this. 

    • #77
  18. Lois Lane Coolidge
    Lois Lane
    @LoisLane

    In Georgia, “Uncle Billy” is still Sometimes called “Billy the Torch,” though I recognize his place in history as being laudable.  

    • #78
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