____________________________
Yes, Virginia, of course I remember you. You still believe there is an entity that lives and is known as Santa Clause among the American children, and others. Thank you for allowing me to post a bit of the letter you wrote to me.
"Dear Gringo Viejo,
There is much written about patriots, especially when we are studying about the Revolutionary War with England. Then my grandparents told me stories about the Civil War, and one pair said that the Northerners were patriots because they were defending the unity of all the States of America. I know I am only 12 years old, but like my mother says, 'I can get my brain around all of that'.
My great-grandfather says, (and my Grampa Lou and Granma Lannie agree) that the Northerners who fought were patriots, but the Southerners who fought for the Confederate cause were also patriots. In a way, I understand, but in another way....it becomes complicated. You can tell that both sets of grandparents believe their side was right still, but they are not angry, one to the other.
Also, I looked up the population of the United States at the time of the Civil War and found out that with the African American and the Native American population included, there were only 35,000,000 people. The Northern part had 23,000,000 and the Southern part 12,000,000.
The North, as best I can tell, had a lot more industry. The South had more "tradition". I think I know what "tradition" is, I have seen Fiddler on the Roof twice, but "Tradition" cannot win something stupid like a big War. So why did the South fight a war they could only lose, and for a cause that was not defendable, like slavery? Pardon the little girl in me, but a lot of good people in the South died for nothing....nothing at all.
Still, Gringo Viejo, it seems strange, maybe spooky, when monuments can be torn down when they honour local and regional heroes and notables....(these are my Social Studies teacher's words and they seem to make sense to me). She said, and her teacher's aide, a really cute boy just out of college said the same thing. And yet they say the Northerners did what they had to do.
Are these wars, wars like this, not avoidable? It looks like, to me, that both sides were right and both sides were wrong. Why aren't the Southern people going to the North and demanding that the Northern Civil War monuments be torn down?
Is Robert E. Lee a bad man? Is Stonewall Jackson a bad man, he was a Presbyterian pastor, after all? Is Jefferson Davis a bad man? Is James Ewell Brown Stuart a bad man?
Thank you for helping me with these matters, Gringo Viejo. How are things down at your little adobe place in Mexico. Be careful and please respond a soon as you can, because this will be my theme project for this new semester.
Virginia
Also, I looked up the population of the United States at the time of the Civil War and found out that with the African American and the Native American population included, there were only 35,000,000 people. The Northern part had 23,000,000 and the Southern part 12,000,000.
The North, as best I can tell, had a lot more industry. The South had more "tradition". I think I know what "tradition" is, I have seen Fiddler on the Roof twice, but "Tradition" cannot win something stupid like a big War. So why did the South fight a war they could only lose, and for a cause that was not defendable, like slavery? Pardon the little girl in me, but a lot of good people in the South died for nothing....nothing at all.
Still, Gringo Viejo, it seems strange, maybe spooky, when monuments can be torn down when they honour local and regional heroes and notables....(these are my Social Studies teacher's words and they seem to make sense to me). She said, and her teacher's aide, a really cute boy just out of college said the same thing. And yet they say the Northerners did what they had to do.
Are these wars, wars like this, not avoidable? It looks like, to me, that both sides were right and both sides were wrong. Why aren't the Southern people going to the North and demanding that the Northern Civil War monuments be torn down?
Is Robert E. Lee a bad man? Is Stonewall Jackson a bad man, he was a Presbyterian pastor, after all? Is Jefferson Davis a bad man? Is James Ewell Brown Stuart a bad man?
Thank you for helping me with these matters, Gringo Viejo. How are things down at your little adobe place in Mexico. Be careful and please respond a soon as you can, because this will be my theme project for this new semester.
Virginia
______________________________
El Gringo Viejo studied these words carefully. Virginia is a special person, and when she was much younger had the audacity to write to the New York Sun newspaper and ask if there were a Santa Clause. Her father had whimped out and told her, after she asked him, to instead, ask the Sun if there is a Santa. He told his daughter Virginia, "If you read it in the Sun, then it is true."
So, since I assured Virginia myself that there certainly is a Santa Clause, she came back to me to solve this other problem. We must address this matter to Virginia and not to the OROGs (Order of Readers of the Old Gringo). Her questions are all salient. My answers begin:
Dear Virginia,
It is complicated and yet there are answers that might make sense. Let me tell you, to further complicate the issue, that my mother was from the South....Tennessee...and she had 5 men in the generations one and two back from her birth who died in defence of the South and Tennessee. None of these men owned slaves of any origin (Those men had surnames of Neal, Limbaugh, and Grant). Three were officers of middling rank, and two were non-commissioned officers.
After the War, two of El Gringo Viejo's great uncles who had survived the War, approached an old Tennessee man who had prime property. My uncles had no money to speak of, since the War had just ended, but they had their youth and their innate willingness to work 18 hours a day.
The brothers entered into a contract of "slavery" of a sort, known as "bonded indenture", working for seven years on the condition that after those seven years, they would each be delivered of 300 acres each of prime "bottom land" for farming. This was (and still is) the most beautiful soil and setting one could imagine, with the Smokey Mountains in the very near distance.
They did other work to larder the cupboard, while keeping their eye on that trophy, land that would produce, with luck, bounteous crops of tobacco, corn, oats, and even cotton and tomatoes. Then, shortly after the end if the War and early into the process of reclaiming that beautiful property, two Old Negro Men came to the cabin to talk to my great-uncles. They identified themselves and platicated for a bit before finally declaring that they had been Slaves of the wife of one of the deceased Confederate Veterans. They had come to claim the rights they had as slaves of that woman to be buried in a Christian manner. They demanded this even though they had been manumitted (freed) before the War.
The boys checked out the story of the Old Negro Men and assured themselves that they were true and truthful persons. Several of the older Negro and Caucasian citizens who had lived in and about Winchester said that they were known persons of good repute. Our understanding is that they still sleep in the Neal Cemetery out north of Winchester, twixt that city and Estill Springs. Although they were old upon arrival, neither died in the 19th Century....each died in what is called in the old Southern language, "...the nineteen aughts", or the first decade of the 1900s. Both arrived at, or crossed 100 years of journey on this Planet. According to my Aunt Maggie and her friends, they conducted themselves as the gentlemen they were.
And now, Virginia, concerning attitudes at the time: My mother felt than the assassination of Lincoln brought something worse than what Lincoln intended in order to put an end to hatred and belligerence of the War Between the States. I well remember the oft-spoken old saying in the South, that being, "At the end of World War II, Germany received the Marshall Plan - At the end of the War Between the States the South received Reconstruction." Reconstruction was a bottomless pit of Hell and badgering and capricious enforcement of floating military judicial rules. In Texas, the Reconstruction lasted for a decade.
My father said that his father said that Lincoln was an egomaniac who wanted to bring on a war so as to assure his position. My father lost two uncles in the War Between the States fighting on the Union side, Regiment 96 of the Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. One was in northern Virginia (New Salem Church), a month before the engagement at Gettysburg and the other a month after Gettysburg at a place in southern Virginia. It indirectly killed my great-grandfather Hubbard (Banty) Newton at the age of 57 over the (what he considered) useless loss of his two sons.
So, there we have it. A father who had real live Yankee blood (Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania), and blood spilt by blue-clad boys fighting the Confederacy, and he said that his Father's father faulted Lincoln. And then we have a mother who declared that the South would have been better off had Lincoln remained in office after the War.
And then, considering the issue of the imbalance of power, we need to recognise certain realities. There were many causes to the War Between the States. One was that the South wanted absolute Free Trade and hard currency. This was because the South exported everything from high quality dried and salted fish, and tobacco, cotton, and a myriad of other things.
The Northern financial interests wanted high tariffs, low and punitive quotas of imported goods, and a flexible monetary system. The industrialists also a resolution of the problem created by the Southern railways. That problem was brought on because the South used the English 5 foot gauge, and the North used "standard" gauge (4feet 8inches). To wit:
Using historical freight traffic records, recent research has shown that the conversion to standard gauge instigated a large shift of North–South freight traffic away from coastal steamships to all-rail carriage.[12] These effects were especially strong on short routes, where breaks in gauge were more expensive relative to the total cost and duration of carriage. However, the data indicate that the gauge change had no effect on total shipments, likely as a result of anticompetitive conduct by Southern freight carriers which prevented the railroads' cost-savings from being passed through to their prices. This research suggests that had Southern carriers not been colluding, the gauge change would have generated a sharp reduction in freight rates and immediate growth in trade between the North and South.
This is an unknown fact, but it is published in the generally leftist Wikipedia, of all sources. But, we shall be contradicted, undoubtedly. It must be pointed out, in any regard, that many, many Ph.d dissertations have been written concerning this topic. Almost all agree that the Southerners wanted to obstaculate, as much as possible, the movement of people and freight via rail. In other words, more of a local service, and little concern for trans-continental transportation matters.
The Northern industrialists knew that unification by rail transportation of the powerhouse of a very strong Southern agricultural engine and the almost equal industrial ability in the North would mean that the World would quickly have to yield to the American Prosperity Engine.
The Southerners had a feudal concept of the organisation as life. They believed in Traditionalism over profit, and the The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer as the standard of life, and toleration of the Protestants and the Romans. Negroes were seen as almost all being inferior intellectually (watch it, because Lincoln and almost all Northerners believed this as well) and we (the Southern white person) must guide and protect them. Of course, laterally, we have to submit that about one-third of all Negroes in the South had been manumitted by the time the War Between the States broke out.
Margaret Mitchell, in her book Gone With the Wind, pointed out that frequently the number one Man and the number one Woman among the Slave and or Freeman group actually had considerable sway and latitude in terms of "running the show" of a household and / or a plantation. This was represented in the movie when "Mammy" was lacing Scarlett into her corset, all the while scolding her, even as Scarlett howled in pain, demanding that it be laced tighter.
After riding around the plantation of information, opinions, and beliefs several times myself, I have arrived at my point. Many people in the South thought that their first responsibility and loyalty was to their hearth and home and State. Robert Edward Lee was offered the command of the Union Armies at the period just before the War Between the States broke out. He advised his commander, General Winfield Scott and the Commander in Chief, Abraham Lincoln during a personal meeting between the three that he would have to wait for the wishes of Virginia, because should Virginia secede from the Union, he would be obliged to serve his State.
Even the construct of how people thought of Statehood could be discerned by the way they referred to the name of the Nation. Until fairly deep into the 20th Century, the United States Department of State would write or say, ".....and the United States of America are in agreement with the position of the United Kingdom concerning the issue at hand." The concept of a free-standing State and its sovereignty was commonly accepted. Southerners especially always assumed that each State in the Union had as much power as the central government in Washington, District of Columbia, and as much importance as any other State, large or small.
It is for these things and those reasons, Virginia, that the people who supported secession and the War of Between the States thought that they were patriots and not guilty of sedition and treason in any wise. It has been my personal belief that had the South been allowed to drift on away from the Union of States to the north, that the two nations would have still remained close and perhaps even friendly, due to their sharing considerable common heritage. In other words, being apart might have guaranteed their being closer together, especially on international matters.
To be sure, Robert E. Lee was referred to by Gen. Winfield Scott as 'America's greatest soldier" after the War with Mexico (1846 - 1848), and Jefferson Davis had a very successful political career, including cabinet positions as Secretary of War and other high missions. James Ewell Brown Stuart and Stonewall Jackson were, like Lee and Davis, good men defending their hearth and home. It was a bad war.
These are just a few of my observations, Virginia. Perhaps we can cover some more again soon.
El Gringo Viejo
So, since I assured Virginia myself that there certainly is a Santa Clause, she came back to me to solve this other problem. We must address this matter to Virginia and not to the OROGs (Order of Readers of the Old Gringo). Her questions are all salient. My answers begin:
Dear Virginia,
It is complicated and yet there are answers that might make sense. Let me tell you, to further complicate the issue, that my mother was from the South....Tennessee...and she had 5 men in the generations one and two back from her birth who died in defence of the South and Tennessee. None of these men owned slaves of any origin (Those men had surnames of Neal, Limbaugh, and Grant). Three were officers of middling rank, and two were non-commissioned officers.
After the War, two of El Gringo Viejo's great uncles who had survived the War, approached an old Tennessee man who had prime property. My uncles had no money to speak of, since the War had just ended, but they had their youth and their innate willingness to work 18 hours a day.
The brothers entered into a contract of "slavery" of a sort, known as "bonded indenture", working for seven years on the condition that after those seven years, they would each be delivered of 300 acres each of prime "bottom land" for farming. This was (and still is) the most beautiful soil and setting one could imagine, with the Smokey Mountains in the very near distance.
They did other work to larder the cupboard, while keeping their eye on that trophy, land that would produce, with luck, bounteous crops of tobacco, corn, oats, and even cotton and tomatoes. Then, shortly after the end if the War and early into the process of reclaiming that beautiful property, two Old Negro Men came to the cabin to talk to my great-uncles. They identified themselves and platicated for a bit before finally declaring that they had been Slaves of the wife of one of the deceased Confederate Veterans. They had come to claim the rights they had as slaves of that woman to be buried in a Christian manner. They demanded this even though they had been manumitted (freed) before the War.
The boys checked out the story of the Old Negro Men and assured themselves that they were true and truthful persons. Several of the older Negro and Caucasian citizens who had lived in and about Winchester said that they were known persons of good repute. Our understanding is that they still sleep in the Neal Cemetery out north of Winchester, twixt that city and Estill Springs. Although they were old upon arrival, neither died in the 19th Century....each died in what is called in the old Southern language, "...the nineteen aughts", or the first decade of the 1900s. Both arrived at, or crossed 100 years of journey on this Planet. According to my Aunt Maggie and her friends, they conducted themselves as the gentlemen they were.
And now, Virginia, concerning attitudes at the time: My mother felt than the assassination of Lincoln brought something worse than what Lincoln intended in order to put an end to hatred and belligerence of the War Between the States. I well remember the oft-spoken old saying in the South, that being, "At the end of World War II, Germany received the Marshall Plan - At the end of the War Between the States the South received Reconstruction." Reconstruction was a bottomless pit of Hell and badgering and capricious enforcement of floating military judicial rules. In Texas, the Reconstruction lasted for a decade.
My father said that his father said that Lincoln was an egomaniac who wanted to bring on a war so as to assure his position. My father lost two uncles in the War Between the States fighting on the Union side, Regiment 96 of the Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. One was in northern Virginia (New Salem Church), a month before the engagement at Gettysburg and the other a month after Gettysburg at a place in southern Virginia. It indirectly killed my great-grandfather Hubbard (Banty) Newton at the age of 57 over the (what he considered) useless loss of his two sons.
So, there we have it. A father who had real live Yankee blood (Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania), and blood spilt by blue-clad boys fighting the Confederacy, and he said that his Father's father faulted Lincoln. And then we have a mother who declared that the South would have been better off had Lincoln remained in office after the War.
And then, considering the issue of the imbalance of power, we need to recognise certain realities. There were many causes to the War Between the States. One was that the South wanted absolute Free Trade and hard currency. This was because the South exported everything from high quality dried and salted fish, and tobacco, cotton, and a myriad of other things.
The Northern financial interests wanted high tariffs, low and punitive quotas of imported goods, and a flexible monetary system. The industrialists also a resolution of the problem created by the Southern railways. That problem was brought on because the South used the English 5 foot gauge, and the North used "standard" gauge (4feet 8inches). To wit:
Using historical freight traffic records, recent research has shown that the conversion to standard gauge instigated a large shift of North–South freight traffic away from coastal steamships to all-rail carriage.[12] These effects were especially strong on short routes, where breaks in gauge were more expensive relative to the total cost and duration of carriage. However, the data indicate that the gauge change had no effect on total shipments, likely as a result of anticompetitive conduct by Southern freight carriers which prevented the railroads' cost-savings from being passed through to their prices. This research suggests that had Southern carriers not been colluding, the gauge change would have generated a sharp reduction in freight rates and immediate growth in trade between the North and South.
This is an unknown fact, but it is published in the generally leftist Wikipedia, of all sources. But, we shall be contradicted, undoubtedly. It must be pointed out, in any regard, that many, many Ph.d dissertations have been written concerning this topic. Almost all agree that the Southerners wanted to obstaculate, as much as possible, the movement of people and freight via rail. In other words, more of a local service, and little concern for trans-continental transportation matters.
The Northern industrialists knew that unification by rail transportation of the powerhouse of a very strong Southern agricultural engine and the almost equal industrial ability in the North would mean that the World would quickly have to yield to the American Prosperity Engine.
 |
| Hattie McDaniel and Vivien Leigh when "Mammy" breaks the news, "...you just had a baby; you're not going to have no 18 inch waist no more!" |
The Southerners had a feudal concept of the organisation as life. They believed in Traditionalism over profit, and the The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer as the standard of life, and toleration of the Protestants and the Romans. Negroes were seen as almost all being inferior intellectually (watch it, because Lincoln and almost all Northerners believed this as well) and we (the Southern white person) must guide and protect them. Of course, laterally, we have to submit that about one-third of all Negroes in the South had been manumitted by the time the War Between the States broke out.
Margaret Mitchell, in her book Gone With the Wind, pointed out that frequently the number one Man and the number one Woman among the Slave and or Freeman group actually had considerable sway and latitude in terms of "running the show" of a household and / or a plantation. This was represented in the movie when "Mammy" was lacing Scarlett into her corset, all the while scolding her, even as Scarlett howled in pain, demanding that it be laced tighter.
After riding around the plantation of information, opinions, and beliefs several times myself, I have arrived at my point. Many people in the South thought that their first responsibility and loyalty was to their hearth and home and State. Robert Edward Lee was offered the command of the Union Armies at the period just before the War Between the States broke out. He advised his commander, General Winfield Scott and the Commander in Chief, Abraham Lincoln during a personal meeting between the three that he would have to wait for the wishes of Virginia, because should Virginia secede from the Union, he would be obliged to serve his State.
Even the construct of how people thought of Statehood could be discerned by the way they referred to the name of the Nation. Until fairly deep into the 20th Century, the United States Department of State would write or say, ".....and the United States of America are in agreement with the position of the United Kingdom concerning the issue at hand." The concept of a free-standing State and its sovereignty was commonly accepted. Southerners especially always assumed that each State in the Union had as much power as the central government in Washington, District of Columbia, and as much importance as any other State, large or small.
It is for these things and those reasons, Virginia, that the people who supported secession and the War of Between the States thought that they were patriots and not guilty of sedition and treason in any wise. It has been my personal belief that had the South been allowed to drift on away from the Union of States to the north, that the two nations would have still remained close and perhaps even friendly, due to their sharing considerable common heritage. In other words, being apart might have guaranteed their being closer together, especially on international matters.
To be sure, Robert E. Lee was referred to by Gen. Winfield Scott as 'America's greatest soldier" after the War with Mexico (1846 - 1848), and Jefferson Davis had a very successful political career, including cabinet positions as Secretary of War and other high missions. James Ewell Brown Stuart and Stonewall Jackson were, like Lee and Davis, good men defending their hearth and home. It was a bad war.
These are just a few of my observations, Virginia. Perhaps we can cover some more again soon.
El Gringo Viejo
______________________
