Were Confederate soldiers terrorists?

[my2sense]

By Roland S. Martin, CNN Political Analyst

(CNN) -- Based on the hundreds of e-mails, Facebook comments and Tweets I've read in response to my denunciation of Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's decision to honor Confederates for their involvement in the Civil War -- which was based on the desire to continue slavery -- the one consistent thing that supporters of the proclamation offer up as a defense is that these individuals were fighting for what they believed in and defending their homeland.

In criticizing me for saying that celebrating the Confederates was akin to honoring Nazi soldiers for killing of Jews during the Holocaust, Rob Wagner said, "I am simply defending the honor and dignity of men who were given no choice other than to fight, some as young as thirteen."

Sherry Callahan said that supporting the Confederacy is "our history. Not hate; it's about heritage and history."

Javier Ramirez called slavery evil, but prefaced his remarks by saying that "Confederate soldiers were never seen as terrorists by Lincoln or U.S. generals on the battlefield. They were accorded POW status, they were never tried for war crimes. Not once did Confederate soldiers do any damage to civilians or their property in their invasion of the north. The same is not true of Union soldiers."

Realskirkland sent me a Tweet saying, "Slavery is appalling, but was not the only reason for the CW . Those men, while misguided on some fronts stood up for what they felt was right. They embodied that American ideal that the states have a right to govern themselves. THAT is what a confederate soldier stood for."

If you take all of these comments, don't they sound eerily similar to what we hear today from Muslim extremists who have pledged their lives to defend the honor of Allah and to defeat the infidels in the West?

When you make the argument that the South was angry with the North for "invading" its "homeland," Osama bin Laden has said the same about U.S. soldiers being on Arab soil. He has objected to our bases in Saudi Arabia, and that's one of the reasons he has launched his jihad against us. Is there really that much of a difference between him and the Confederates? Same language; same cause; same effect.

If a Confederate soldier was merely doing his job in defending his homeland, honor and heritage, what are we to say about young Muslim radicals who say the exact same thing as their rationale for strapping bombs on their bodies and blowing up cafes and buildings?

If the Sons of Confederate Veterans use as a talking point the vicious manner in which people in the South were treated by the North, doesn't that sound exactly like the Taliban saying they want to kill Americans for the slaughter of innocent people in Afghanistan?

Defenders of the Confederacy say that innocent people were killed in the Civil War; hasn't the same argument been presented by Muslim radicals in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places where the U.S. has tangled with terrorists?

We can't on the one hand justify the actions of Confederates as being their duty as valiant men of the South, and then condemn the Muslim extremists who want to see Americans die a brutal death. These men are held up as honorable by their brethren, so why do Americans see them as different from our homegrown terrorists?

The fundamental problem with extremism is that when you're on the side that is fanatical, all of your actions make sense to you, and you are fluent in trying to justify every action. Every position of those you oppose is a personal affront that calls for you to do what you think is necessary to protect yourself and your family.

Just as radical Muslims have a warped sense of religion, Confederate supporters have a delusional view of what is honorable. The terrorists are willing to kill their own to prove their point, and the Confederates were just as willing in the Civil War to take up arms against their fellow Americans to justify their point.

Even if you're a relative of one of the 9/11 hijackers, that man was an out-and-out terrorist, and nothing you can say will change that. And if your great-great-great-granddaddy was a Confederate who stood up for Southern ideals, he too was a terrorist.

They are the same.

As a matter of conscience, I will not justify, understand or accept the atrocious view of Muslim terrorists that their actions represent a just war. They are reprehensible, and their actions a sin against humanity.

And I will never, under any circumstances, cast Confederates as heroic figures who should be honored and revered. No -- they were, and forever will be, domestic terrorists.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/11/martin.confederate.extremist/index.html

[villager]

1. Wow -- the Sons of Confederacy were already here to unrec this?

It takes all types... to lurk. ;-)

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Wow! That's some stretch there. Comparing secessionists with assholes...

who fly planes into buildings and behead journalists. The only thing they have in common is that they're all assholes, although I'd say the Confederates were a bit less irrational and bloodthirsty.

And they mostly fought upfront battles, army against army, and didn't take the coward's way out killing civilians to make a point or setting booby traps. (Quantrill and a few others strayed a bit from this idea, but they were the exception.)

I've no love lost for the Confederacy and that bloody period in our history, but as ill-advised as they might have been, they were not a small band of fanatics hiding in the hills.

[Chulanowa]

13. Ever heard of the Klan?

That's what happened after the confederates lost the big war - they went guerrilla and started massacring civilians to prove a point.

Sorta like how the men and women out in the middle east who are unable to field an army do.

It's perfectly comparable. The cause and rationale are the same, the only difference is that, for four years, the Confederates managed to field a military.

Apparently putting on a uniform makes you "not a terrorist" even as you massacre civilians, burn towns, enslave people, and rape.

[provis99]

3. Javier Ramirez is a damned liar.

Confederate soldiers were notorious for looting wherever they went. Maryland was somewhat sympathetic to the Confederates during the war, until Lee's troops marched through it for the Antietam campaign, looting and burning as they went. Confederate armies were notorious for looting from citizens in their own states, to the point where governors like North Carolina's Vance thought the Confederate armies to be a blight on the fields of North Carolina.

As for being terrorists, Quantrill's Raiders definitely were. They were notorious for slaughtering over 100 citizens in Lawrence Kansas; most of their members became criminals after the war, including the James gang.

And America's most notorious terrorist was John Wilkes Booth; if Gavrilo Princip was a terrorist for shooting the Austrian Archduke, then Booth is a terrorist for shooting Lincoln.

[Sinistrous]

5. Javier Ramirez is certainly dead wrong ---

I live in a Pennsylvania town that was burned to the ground by Confederate soldiers.

Rampaging through the town, Confederate soldiers broke into houses and evicted residents, smashed furniture, heaped the pieces into piles, and then set them on fire. By eight a. m. the city was in flames. As the city burned, renegade soldiers robbed citizens, looted stores, and drank whatever liquor they could find. Some demanded ransom money to spare a home, then torched it anyway after the ransom was paid. Not all Confederates participated in the sacking of Chambersburg. The Masonic Temple was spared when an officer who was also a Mason posted guards to prevent its burning. When the colonel of the 21st Virginia Cavalry refused to obey the burning order, he was arrested and his entire unit sent out of town. Other Confederates tried to help frantic citizens retrieve household goods before their homes were burned. In the end, perhaps 550 buildings went up in flames. In spite of the widespread arson and looting, the Rebels killed only one civilian, an elderly African American. Angry citizens killed at least five Confederates by the time the raiders had withdrawn.

Source: http://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=730

[aquart]

9. HOLD ON.

Yes, Quantrill's Raiders were terrorists. That was their mission. But to say that proof they were terrorists is what they became after the war is sheer bloody ignorance of history.

[ixion]

15. Union soldiers looted, pillaged and burned as well

but that was okay, right?

[roguevalley]

4. isn't it amazing that the rebs never broke an egg when they came

into the north to maraud? How about Lawrence, kansas and other places? I do declare they were at Gettysburg and did a butt load of damage. That wasn't in the south. It was in Pennsylvania. The number of things they blew up and people they killed would take a calculator. This was a war against treason. You can't candy coat it.

My mother's family were Southerns and my dad's family were yankees. My mother hated the southern war against the union and her cousin (on the davis side) was Jefferson Davis. She didn't brook the crap they are spewing and felt that the civil war was a stain on the south. there is no honor, they weren't defending their homes against the aggressors and they got lucky that the government didn't scorch the earth in retribution.

[mojowork_n]

11. One of the other southern raiders was

Thomas Hunt Morgan. He led a couple of thousand cavalry troops into Indiana and Ohio.

Almost 4,400 Ohioans filed claims for compensation with the federal government for items that they lost to the Confederates during the raid. The claims amounted to 678,915 dollars, with the government authorizing compensation in the amount of 576,225 dollars.

http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=519

But at the same time, "...Morgan ...failed to destroy any railroad tracks, bridges, or supply depots. The raid caused no significant harm to the transportation and communication infrastructure of the North." Ohioans weren't the only ones to file claims. Intra-confederate raiding/logistical supply was a sore point in some southern states.

That's pretty interesting about your mom's cousin. So you must be, what, 126 or 142 years old? Or does it just feel that way some mornings?

[Ozymanithrax]

6. The concept of terrorist did not exist. Southern soldiers were treasonous pigs with no shred...

of decency. Whether some nameless 13 year old, or Stonewall fucking Jackson, they were treasonous pigs with no shred of decency.

IF that 13 year old wasn't fighting for what he believed in, then the best you can say about him is that he was fighting because the officers would hang his ass from a tree if he didn't fight. If it wasn't a simple act of survival, then he was fighting to ensure the right of every white man to own as many slaves as they could afford so they could work the men to death and rape the women, then sell their own children for profit.

[struggle4progress]

7. The usual story: the poor grunts got suckered or steamrolled into it

It's part stupidity, part mob mentality: no doubt racism played a role for some, though the bigtime slaveholders got to bow out and watch from the sidelines. Idiot slogans played a role

If you can raise the dead out of their graves, ask them what they thought they died for

[Kablooie]

8. No. Both sides perpetrated atrocities. It was a terrible war but it was not terrorism.

[Chulanowa]

12. 'Course not. They were white and Christian

You can be a "separatist" or a "rebel" with those credentials, but you can't be a terrorist. everyone knows that only those people can be "terrorists", but white anglos? Why, they're disaffected military, they're aggrieved militia, they're lone nutcases, but htye are never, ever, EVER terrorists.

[Recursion]

10. By most current usage, having uniforms and an order of battle means they weren't terrorists

Maybe "insurgents".

[ixion]

14. Not according to Ulysses S. Grant, who was actually there at the time

who called them brothers and sent them home.

If he had called them "terrorists" the civil war probably wouldn't have ended when it did. Way to stir the pot, though, Mr. Martin. :eyes:

We need to drop the word "terrorist" from our lexicon. There are actually very few REAL "terrorists" in the world, and the term (as expected) is now being applied by one group to another group the former simply doesn't like.

[zbdent]

16. Red Dawn could have been "Grey Dawn" ...

remember? In Red Dawn, the terrorists were "patriotic American teenagers", fighting against an invading and occupying force ...

[stray cat]

17. Terrorists don't typically announce their allegiance by uniform and attack civilians

Sherman on his march to Atlanta - was more of a terrorist. Many northern carpetbaggers were like slave masters

The North was actually an army of occupation - and there is a reason some call it the war of northern aggression.

Very little peace and love during the civil war....

[mgc1961]

18. The nature of war is terror.

In Tennessee, the heritage-not-hate crowd worships Nathan Bedford Forrest for his military exploits i.e. winning battles against the Federals. Most of 'em probably have no clue about what else he's responsible for as the commander of an impoverished, angry, and desperate cavalry brigade on the wrong side of history. Or they do know and choose to look away.

[Syntheto]

19. Look, during the war....

...There were clear sides, with uniforms and all that, as well as a very recognizable front in the form of the Mason-Dixon line. How does that make a typical Confederate soldier a terrorist?

What should the average white southern farmer, who couldn't afford the expense of a slave, have done with the threat of Union military units confiscating their livestock and property, as well as maybe feeling up the girls (or worse)? Just roll over and accept it, or fight? Do you see the Union Army as some sort of highly professional outfit, with spotless uniforms, gleaming weapons and a 'rules of engagement' protocol? They were state militia units aggregated into something bigger; there was nobility, but there was venality, too... how many Southern homes were looted and ransacked by rampaging Union troops, sometimes not much better than a mob?

Look what happened in Missouri... the Union Army terrorized the countryside, depopulating whole stretches of farmland because the Confederate sympathizers would melt back into the general population after ambushing pro Union settlers. Should the locals have turned in brothers, cousins, uncles and fathers to the hated and ham-fisted Union authorities?

What about Sherman's March? It was promulgated with the intent to terrorize the population; to starve them into submission and show that nobody could save them from whatever the Union Army wanted to inflict on them.

What would any of us do if Chinese troops marched from Vancouver to St. Paul, burning, looting, raping and summarily executing whomever they wished? What if the Chinese authorities said they were doing it because Americans were dangerously overarmed and a threat to the civilized world (you know, crap that some people here say all the time). Would you hold up a welcome sign (in Chinese) and turn in your brother-in-law, because he had blown up a railroad bridge and a couple of Chinese soldiers were killed?

If you can honestly say you would, then you would have to accept the fact that there would be some people willing to kill you for that.

People were scared and then, just as now, they were whipped up into a frenzy by the demagogues of that time, both secessionist and Unionist.

It's bullshit to keep casting the war in terms of freeing black slaves. The majority of white people, both North and South, could not have given a fuck less about slavery. Look at the Draft Riots in New York that erupted in 1863, after Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation. Nobody wanted to fight and die or get maimed freeing black slaves; and I don't care if it was folks from Vermont or Wisconsin, places that were so far away from the fighting as to be on another planet. In Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee, for example, the situation was more immediate and less of a thought exercise.

Lincoln was lucky that the Irish kept coming over, so the Union Army would have fresh meat for the grinder.

Of course, we're talking nuance here; as well as deeper study. What we've got here is the simplistic mindset of: All Confederates were virulent racists who all owned at least one black person as a slave, not for any other reason than they were racists, and that's why they fought the Civil War, because the wonderful, liberal folks up North wanted to take their slaves from them. Of course, the wonderful, liberal folks up North didn't actually want any of these freed, poverty-stricken and uneducated people up North, but hey, freeing them and setting them loose into the countryside was a start, right?