Oh yes. Here in St. Augustine, the annual Confederate Memorial Day is a big thing. All the local members of the SCV (Sons of Confederate Veterans) dress up in clothing that they imagine resemble Confederate officers' uniforms (so anachronistic that it is funny). Then they parade all around downtown, flying what they think was the Confederate flag (in fact, a flag that did not exist before 1876). And they march to a band playing what they think was the Confederate national anthem (in fact, it was an abolitionist-written song that was Lincoln's favorite). They are historically challenged, I fear. But it is best to look away (pun intended). They take themselves very seriously and you do not want them to think that you are laughing at them.
Three Questions for you:
1) What did Confederate officer uniforms really look like?
2) What did their flag look like?
3) What was the Confederate national anthem? (If their was one)
What did Confederate officer uniforms really look like?
Mort Kunstler (http://www.mortkunstler.com/civilwar/) is the most meticulously accurate military painter of the Civil War. He works mostly from photos, and from actual uniforms in musems. Check out his website for many examples. The most egregious errors made by SCV paraders (but not by re-enactors, who are fanatically accurate) are: wearing medals (not invented until the 1880s), creased trousers (not invented until the 1900s), and wearing mismatched trim colors on different parts of their clothes, as if they were merely ornamental. (In fact, blue denoted infantry, yellow-cavalry, red-artillery, green-medical corps, buff-staff, etc.)
cjohns48233305 wrote:
What did their flag look like?
The Confederacy had three different national flags.
The first flag that was considered for adoption as the Confederate national flag was the "Bonnie Blue." Everyone expected it to be a shoo-in, but it unexpectedly lost the voting by the constitutional convention in February 1861 Montgomery Alamaba, when the Confederacy was formed. It lost due to deeply symbolic reasons. (I will be happy to explain, if you are interested.)
The winning design, the first Confederate national flag, known as the "Stars and Bars" came in several versions, with added stars as each new state seceded. It began with 7 stars and ended with 11. It was retired late in 1862 because, when it hung limp it looked like the U.S. flag.
The second Confederate national flag, known as the "Stainless Banner" was retired in late 1864 because, when it hung limp, it looked like they were surrendering.
The third Confederate national flag, known as the "Bloodstained Banner" was introduced shortly before the war ended, but only a few were made or issued.
In addition, many individual regiments, brigades, corps, and armies had their own flags. The most famous was the battle flag of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia (known as "The Southern Cross"). It was perfectly square and had a two-inch white border all the way arround it (which you might not be able to see here because the border tends to blend into the background).
The flag that SCV members fly in the parade was invented by a resurgent south long after the war. Neo-confederates removed the white border and made it rectangular so that they would not be criticized for flying a flag of treason.
cjohns48233305 wrote:
What was the Confederate national anthem? (If their was one)
Their closest thing to a national anthem was a song in 6/8 time titled "The Bonnie Blue Flag." It was written during the Constitutional Covention by songwriter Harry McCarthy to the melody of an Irish folksong "The Irish Jaunting Car." He submitted it to the delegates to be considered along with the Bonnie Blue flag. They voted against the flag, but they accepted McCarthy's song by acclamation. So the Confederacy would up with a flag without a song, and a song for a flag that had been rejected. Go figure.
Last edited by fwsweet on Thu 28 May 2009 20:55; edited 4 times in total
Do they really celebrate a day for Robert Lee in Virginia?!
Oh yes. Here in St. Augustine, the annual Confederate Memorial Day is a big thing. All the local members of the SCV (Sons of Confederate Veterans) dress up in clothing that they imagine resemble Confederate officers' uniforms (so anachronistic that it is funny). Then they parade all around downtown, flying what they think was the Confederate flag (in fact, a flag that did not exist before 1876). And they march to a band playing what they think was the Confederate national anthem (in fact, it was an abolitionist-written song that was Lincoln's favorite). They are historically challenged, I fear. But it is best to look away (pun intended). They take themselves very seriously and you do not want them to think that you are laughing at them.
Confederate Memorial Day (April 26th) is a state holiday in Georgia....lol!
(I will be happy to explain, if you are interested.)
Oh, the flag thing. Well, the Bonnie Blue was popular because it symbolized a star that had torn itself loose from the blue canton of the U.S. flag and run off on its own. In other words, it symbolized states' rights and secession.
Although the public liked this symbolism, the delegates who designed the Confederate government did not. They were far more hostile to states' rights than any northerner. They were trying to create a unifed nation, after all. They also realized that they would probably soon be in a desperate war. The last thing they needed was a flag implying a Confederate state could bail out whenever it wanted.
They wanted a flag that symbolized an inseparable union of states, which is what they wanted the CSA to become. So they decided to use the U.S. flag. They reduced the number of stars to the number of states in the CSA (seven at first, eventually growing to eleven). And they reduced the stripes to from thirteen to three, just to make it look different enough to be noticeable on public buildings. Unfortunately, it was indistinguishable from the U.S. flag on the battlefield, so they dropped it after a year or so.
(The Confederacy had a real problem with planning ahead.) I remember on one occasion, the Tredegar foundry in Richmond was ordered to forge iron plating for a new ironclad being built in Norfolk. But they had no raw materials. So the Confederate Navy ordered the railroad tracks from Richmond to Norfolk to be torn up and melted down to be turned into armor plating for the new ironclad. When Tredegar finished the order, they could not ship the armor plates to Norfolk because someone had torn up the railroad tracks! The iron plates and the unfinished naked ironclad were still in situ when the war ended. You cannot make this stuff up.
Sure. I stll have a bunch of them on the shelf. I was a miniatures and board wargamer when I became interested in miltiary history (which is what my masters' is in).
It is amazing how much we are not taught about important epochs throughout history.
I have a question: Given a plausible scenario for having won the Civil War how do you think the CSA government would have proceeded? Do you think it was viable for any length of time? Do you think there would have been sustained civil war between the USA and CSA?
I have a question: Given a plausible scenario for having won the Civil War how do you think the CSA government would have proceeded? Do you think it was viable for any length of time? Do you think there would have been sustained civil war between the USA and CSA?
Man! You ask the toughest questions!
sagascend wrote:
Given a plausible scenario for having won the Civil War...
You must put this into the context that the CSA was hopelessly outclassed. New York State alone had almost as many military-age military-eligible young men as the entire Confederacy combined. The Union had virtually all of the nation's: banks, money, technology, industry, food agriculture, and raw materials.
The only thing the South had was cotton, which they could trade to Europe for weapons and supplies. But at war's outbreak the CSA self-imposed a blockade upon their own planters, preventing them from exporting cotton. By the time the CSA realized the utter stupidity of this, the Union Navy had sealed their ports anyway.
The only plausible way that the CSA could have become independent was to have kept on fighting and losing battles but killing Yankees until the northern public grew weary of war and bloodshed and said, "the hell with them. Let them go!"
Such a military strategy was well-known and highly effective. It was used successfully by Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (280 BC–203 BC) against Carthage, by George Washington (1732-1799) against England, by Mikhail Kutuzov (1745-1813) against Napoleon, by Vo Nguyen Giap (1911- ) against the United States, and it is currently being used against the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This "delay and lose battles until the powerful invader gives up" military strategy was well-understood by CSA General Joseph Johnston (1807-1891). It was working as of the early 1864 presidential election, when everyone expected Lincoln to lose as a consequence. But then Jeff Davis fired Johnston.
And so, the only plausible scenario is that Jeff Davis drops dead in January 1864, Johnston continues to lead the South in a Fabian strategy, the northern public gets fed up, Lincoln loses the reelection, and President McClellan signs a peace treaty, ending the war as he had promised in the campaign.
sagascend wrote:
how do you think the CSA government would have proceeded?
That is anyone's guess. MacKinlay Kantor wrote a novel on this premise and science fiction novelist Harry Turtledove has written a series of them.
My own feeling is this. Although the CSA Constitution explicitly mandated slavery forever, disallowing forever any law mitigating slavery or granting human rights to African Americans, the border with the U.S. was too long and too porous to stop mass flight. Recall that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 granted federal authority to southern slave-catchers to come into the north to kidnap Black northerners and take them south into slavery. Absent that co-operation, the incentive for slaves to flee would have skyrocketed, and it is hard to see how the hemorrhage of labor could have been stopped.
Nevertheless, a victorious south would have tried desperately to preserve its way of life. According to CSA Vice-President Alexander Stephens, the cornerstone of the Confederacy was:
Alexander Stephens wrote:
The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. ... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. ... Those at the North, who [argue for negro equality] still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. ... They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.
According to CSA Senator Louis Wigfall, they rejected the industrial revolution in its entirety:
Louis Wigfall wrote:
We are a peculiar people, sir! ... We are an agricultural people. ... We have no cities—we don’t want them.... We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes.... As long as we have our rice, or sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want.
And so, what would have been the result of a backward, deliberately anti-technology nation trying to survive by keeping slaves despite two thousand miles of porous border with a modern industrial giant? I suggest that they would have degenerated to abject poverty, famine, and disease within a generation.
sagascend wrote:
Do you think it was viable for any length of time?
No. A half-century, tops. More likely 25 years.
sagascend wrote:
Do you think there would have been sustained civil war between the USA and CSA?
No. Not unless you mean a renewed civil war. The only scenario I can imagine involving military action is where the U.S. finally takes pity on the starving plague-ridden descendants of the CSA and invades to drag them into the 20th century, like it or not.
Last edited by fwsweet on Sun 31 May 2009 12:12; edited 1 time in total
(The Confederacy had a real problem with planning ahead.) I remember on one occasion, the Tredegar foundry in Richmond was ordered to forge iron plating for a new ironclad being built in Norfolk. But they had no raw materials. So the Confederate Navy ordered the railroad tracks from Richmond to Norfolk to be torn up and melted down to be turned into armor plating for the new ironclad. When Tredegar finished the order, they could not ship the armor plates to Norfolk because someone had torn up the railroad tracks! The iron plates and the unfinished naked ironclad were still in situ when the war ended. You cannot make this stuff up.
That particular story was uncovered by Raimondo Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute, 1996).
Here is another example of weird lack of forethought. In the Union army (the U.S. Army), logistics were centrally managed. All supplies were purchased through central commisary and ordnance, and then distributed to the regiments by workers under the supervision of Army logistics officers. In the CSA Army, Jeff Davis personally vetoed such a system and ordered that every Confederate state would be responsible for supplying its own regiments.
So within months of the war's start, Louisiana and Tennessee were occupied by the Union, and their many dozens of regiments, who were off fighting in the Confederate Army, were thus left without any way of getting supplies. They had to beg, borrow, or steal from other states' regiments merely to survive.
Why would they be critized for treason? im confused.
After the CSA was defeated and under U.S. military occupation, there was a 10-year period of hard feelings. After all, the war for southern indepencence had taken the lives of 630,000 Americans (more than all of the nation's other wars combined, so far). The Constitution of the United States, Art. III, defines treason against the United States to consist of levying war against the United States, and the CSA had done that in spades. Occupying U.S. soldiers were less than tolerant of defeated but defiant White southerners flying flags of treason or singing songs of treason. And so, die-hard White southerners adopted the abolitionist-written song "I wish I was in Dixie's Land" and invented a flag that resembled the ANV flag, but not quite. The stars and bars flag and the "Bonnie Blue Flag" song were eventually forgotten.
Open fighting against the occupying forces would have been suicidal, of course, but the risk of generational guerilla warfare (like northen Ireland or Rwanda) was very real. Only a few hours after he surrendered, Robert E. Lee's staff had presented him with a proposal to continue hit-and-run guerilla warfare indefinitely. Instead, defeated White southerners turned their rage and bitterness against the A-A population of the south. As a White southern politician put it around 1878, "We may have lost the war against the Yankees, but we won the war against the niggers." The Hayes-Tilden crisis of 1876 showed that most White southerners would be willing to be loyal U.S. citizens as long as they were allowed to oppress, murder, and terrorize A-As.
The scapegoat strategy worked so well in the south that the north joined in around 1910, and the Jim Crow era became a nationwide phenomenon: segregation in the south, sundown towns in the north, and lynchings everywhere. The nation was reconciled, generational guerilla warfare was avoided, and everyone lived happily every after. (Everyone except A-As, that is.)
Last edited by fwsweet on Sun 31 May 2009 15:36; edited 3 times in total
Posted: Sun 31 May 2009 13:21 Post subject: Re: Civil War Songs
Powell wrote:
I have a question about two songs on Tennessee Ernie Ford's albumn, "Songs of the Civil War." I've never heard of these two songs. Have you? Marching Song (Of the First Arkansas Negro Regiment), Union Dixie
Sure. "John Brown's Body" was a popular marching song since before the war. There were countless verses, and every troop and regiment made up their own words. A popular pastime on the march was to make up new verses on the fly. Julia Ward Howe claimed that she set the words of her poem "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to that melody in 1862 when she heard soldiers marching past her window singing "John Brown's Body." I am not specifically familiar with the Arkansas regiment. If they were an official Black regiment, they would have been formed after January 1863, when such were authorized by Lincoln. If they were one of the many unofficial Black regiments, then they might have been formed in 1862.
"Union Dixie" is one of the many popular parodies of "I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land" that were made up by Union soldiers. The one sung by forces here in Florida starts, "Away down South in the land of traitors, Rattlesnakes and alligators, come away ... etc."
Posted: Sun 31 May 2009 16:14 Post subject: Civil War Songs
This is the "Union Dixie" version Ernie Ford sings:
Quote:
UNION DIXIE
Music: Daniel Decatur Emmett
Words: Anonymous
Away down South in the land of traitors,
Rattlesnakes and alligators,
Right away, come away, right away, come away.
Where cotton's king and men are chattels,
Union boys will win the battles,
Right away, come away, right away, come away.
CHORUS: Then we'll all go down to Dixie,
Away, away,
Each Dixie boy must understand
That he must mind his Uncle Sam,
Away, away,
And we'll all go down to Dixie.
Away, away,
And we'll all go down to Dixie.
I wish I was in Baltimore,
I'd make Secession traitors roar,
Right away, come away, right away, come away.
We'll put the traitors all to rout.
I'll bet my boots we'll whip them out,
Right away, come away, right away, come away.
CHORUS: Then they'll wish they were in Dixie,
Away, away,
Each Dixie boy must understand
That he must mind his Uncle Sam,
Away, away,
And we'll all go down to Dixie.
Away, away,
And we'll all go down to Dixie.
Oh, may our Stars and Stripes still wave
Forever o'er the free and brave,
Right away, come away, right away, come away.
And let our motto ever be --
"For Union and for Liberty!"
Right away, come away, right away, come away.
CHORUS: Then they'll wish they were in Dixie,
Away, away,
Each Dixie boy must understand
That he must mind his Uncle Sam,
Away, away,
And we'll all go down to Dixie.
Away, away,
And we'll all go down to Dixie.
1. Oh, we're the bully soldiers of the “First of Arkansas,”
We are fighting for the Union, we are fighting for the law,
We can hit a Rebel further than a white man ever saw,
As we go marching on.
Chorus:
Glory, glory hallelujah.
Glory, glory hallelujah.
Glory, glory hallelujah.
As we go marching on.
2. See, there above the center, where the flag is waving bright,
We are going out of slavery; we're bound for freedom's light;
We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans can fight,
As we go marching on! (Chorus)
3. We have done with hoeing cotton, we have done with hoeing corn,
We are colored Yankee soldiers, now, as sure as you are born;
When the masters hear us yelling, they'll think it's Gabriel's horn,
As we go marching on. (Chorus)
4. They will have to pay us wages, the wages of their sin,
They will have to bow their foreheads to their colored kith and kin,
They will have to give us house-room, or the roof shall tumble in!
As we go marching on. (Chorus)
5. We heard the Proclamation, master hush it as he will,
The bird he sing it to us, hoppin' on the cotton hill,
And the possum up the gum tree, he couldn't keep it still,
As he went climbing on. (Chorus)
6. They said, “Now colored brethren, you shall be forever free,
From the first of January, Eighteen hundred sixty-three.”
We heard it in the river going rushing to the sea,
As it went sounding on. (Chorus)
7. Father Abraham has spoken and the message has been sent,
The prison doors he opened, and out the pris'ners went,
To join the sable army of “African descent,”
As we go marching on. (Chorus)
8. Then fall in, colored brethren, you'd better do it soon,
Don't you hear the drum a-beating the Yankee Doodle tune?
We are with you now this morning, we'll be far away at noon,
As we go marching on. (Chorus)
The CD is composed of songs from two LP albumns released by Capitol Records in 1961 at the start of the Civil War Centennial. What amazed me was Ford's decision to include the two songs above, especially considering the fanaticism of the neo-Confederates who ruled the South at that time. After all, it was only a few years earlier that a Southern congressman denounced a children's book about a "wedding" of a white rabbit and a black one as propaganda designed to promote "miscegenation."
Another thing that most people are unaware of is that it was not a war between 11 southern states and the rest of the nation. It was a war between secessionists and loyalists.
In every southern state, with one exception, entire regiments of White men formed and joined the Union army, willing to fight and die to preserve the United States against the maniacs and fools who had taken over their states. Sherman's crack reconnaissance cavalry units, for example, were White men from Alabama.
The scapegoat strategy worked so well in the south that the north joined in around 1910, and the Jim Crow era became a nationwide phenomenon: segregation in the south, sundown towns in the north, and lynchings everywhere. The nation was reconciled, generational guerilla warfare was avoided, and everyone lived happily every after. (Everyone except A-As, that is.)
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