Tuesday, January 25, 2011

According to his book Confederates in the Attic, what does Horowitz discover on his travels throughout the South?

One theme that comes up over and over as Horowitz travels
through the Deep South is division; specifically, there is still a racial divide between
many whites and blacks over the cause of the war and the relevance of slavery in the
debates leading up to the firing of shots at Fort Sumter.  The apologist argument
generally focuses on political philosophies only as they affected the Southern way of
life; Confederate ancestors were fighting for states' rights, for their people first. 
Many people Horowitz interviewed discounted slavery as almost a non-issue in the
politics of the war.  Noted historian Shelby Foote mentioned in his visit with Horowitz
that most Southerners then and now operate from a philosophy of "One's people before
one's principles", saying the Southern code decreed that one must "be with my people,
right or wrong.  Even if I was against slavery, I'd still be with the South."  Students
of the antebellum South know that Southern allegiance was always to the state first,
rather than to the United States as a nation. General Robert E. Lee was first offered
command of the Union forces by Abraham Lincoln, but after an agonizing night of
contemplation determined that he didn't want to take up arms against his nation, but
that he absolutely could not do it against his home state of
Virginia. 

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